Flanneclass="underline" (howling) Hooo—wow! What you wanna hafta do that for? Ya little—
Horowitz: Cut it out, you two. Cut it out! That’s better. We don’t have room for that in here. Leave him alone, Kearsarge. His time will come. Heaven help me, Iris, it’s been in front of my nose right from the start, and I didn’t see it. I even told you once that I was so close because I could synthesize a virus which would actually cause the disease—but it wouldn’t maintain it. I had this idée fixe that it was an extraterrestrial disease. Why? Because it acted like a synthetic and no natural terran virus does. Serum from those kids always acted that way—it would cause a form of iapetitis which would fade out in three months or less. All you have to do to cure the damn thing is to stop injecting it!
Iris: Oh, the man, the lovely clever man and his family all over the world, the little darlings, the prettiest ones he could find, whom he never, never failed to visit regularly. . . . (Suddenly, she is crying) I was so s-sorry for him! Remember the night he . . . tore himself open to tell us he c-couldn’t have k-kids of his own?
Kearsarge: Who you talking about—Heri Gonza? For Pete’s sake, he got an ex-wife and three kids he pays money to keep ‘em in Spain, and another ex-wife in Paris, France with five kids, three his, and that one in Pittsburgh—man, that comedian’s always in trouble. He hates kids—I mean really hates ‘em.
Iris begins to laugh. Probably hysteria.
Dissolve to black, then to starry space. To black again, bring up pool of light, resolve it into:
Burcke, sitting at desk. He closes log book.
Burcke: This is, I regret to say, a true story. The Fafnir 203 came in at night six days ago at a small field some distance from here, and Dr. Horowitz phoned me. After considerable discussion it was decided to present this unhappy story to you in the form written up by the four people who actually experienced it. They are here with me now. And here is a much maligned man, surely one of the greatest medical researchers alive—Dr. Horowitz.
Horowitz: Thank you. First, I wish to assure everyone within reach of my voice that what has been said here about iapetitis is true: it is a synthetic disorder which is, by its very nature, harmless, and which, if contracted, will pass away spontaneously in from two to twelve weeks. Not a single child has died of it, and those who have been its victims the longest—some up to two years—have unquestionably been lavishly treated. A multiple murder was attempted upon my three companions and myself, of course, but it is our greatest desire to see to it that that charge is not pressed.
Burcke: I wish to express the most heartfelt apologies from myself and all my colleagues for whatever measure of distress this network and its affiliates may have unwittingly brought you, the public. It is as an earnest of this that we suffer, along with you, through the following film clip, taken just two days ago in the I.F. clinic in Montreal. What you see in my hand here is a thin rubber glove, almost invisible on the hand. Fixed to its fingertips is a microscopic forest of tiny sharp steel points, only a few thousandths of an inch long. And this metal box, just large enough to fit unobtrusively in a side pocket, contains a jellied preparation of the synthetic virus.
Fade to:
Wild hilarity in a hospital ward. Children in various stages of iapetitis, laughing hilariously at the capering, growling, gurgling, belching funny man as he moves from bed to bed, Peep! at you, peep-peep at you, and one by one ruffling the little heads at the nape, dipping the fingertips in the side jacket pocket between each bed.
Dissolve, and bring up Burcke.
Burcke: Good night, ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls . . . and . . . I’m sorry.
The lights came up in the projection room. There was nobody there with Heri Gonza but Burcke: all the others had quietly moved and watched the last few scenes from the doorway, and slipped away.
“You did air it?” asked the comedian, making absolutely sure.
“Yes.”
Heri Gonza looked at him without expression and walked toward the stage door. It opened as he approached and four people came in. Flannel, Kearsarge, Horowitz, Iris Barran.
Without a word Flannel stepped up to the comedian and hit him in the stomach. Heri Gonza sank slowly to the floor, gasping.
Horowitz said, “We’ve spent a lot of time deciding what to do about you, Heri Gonza. Flannel wanted just one poke at you and wouldn’t settle for anything else. The rest of us felt that killing was too good for you, but we wanted you dead. So we wrote you that script. Now you’re dead.”
Heri Gonza rose after a moment and walked through the stage door and out to the middle of acres and acres of stage. He stood there alone all night, and in the morning was gone.
SHORT-SHORT STORY OF MANKIND
by John Steinbeck
Maybe you go for Hemingway. Faulkner? Thomas Wolfe? (With me it’s Dos Passos.) But no matter whom you pick for first place, Steinbeck is probably high up on your list; and for many people he is indisputably the realistic modern novelist.
What’s he doing here?
I may as well say right off that this piece is not science fiction—or science fantasy, or “fantasy-fable” either, I’m afraid (though “fable” and “allegory” are what Playboy called it when they printed it).
But it stops just short of “future history” which would make it legit s-f. And it’s pretty realistic, too. . . .
You could call it historically fantastic realism . . .
Or realty historical fantasy . . .
Or fantastically realistic history . . .
Anyhow, it’s speculative; also it’s satire. And it’s Steinbeck in an unexpected and delightful vein. So here it sits, behind the fiction, and before the fact. . . .
It was pretty draughty in the cave in the middle of the afternoon. There wasn’t any fire - the last spark had gone out six months ago and the family wouldn’t have any more fire until lightning struck another tree.
Joe came into the cave all scratched up and some hunks of hair torn out and he flopped down on the wet ground and bled - Old William was arguing away with Old Bert who was his brother and also his son, if you look at it one way. They were quarrelling mildly over a spoiled chunk of mammoth meat.
Old William said, ‘Why don’t you give some to your mother?’
‘Why?’ asked Old Bert. ‘She’s my wife, isn’t she?’
And that finished that, so they both took after Joe.
‘Where’s Al?’ one of them asked and the other said, ‘You forgot to roll the rock in front of the door.’
Joe didn’t even look up and the two old men agreed that kids were going to the devil. ‘I tell you it was different in my day,’ Old William said. ‘They had some respect for their elders or they got what for.’
After a while Joe stopped bleeding and he caked some mud on his cuts. ‘Al’s gone,’ he said.
Old Bert asked brightly, ‘Sabre tooth?’
‘No, it’s that new bunch that moved into the copse down the gully. They ate Al.’
‘Savages,’ said Old William. ‘Still live in trees. They aren’t civilized. We don’t hardly ever eat people.’