Read Online Alien Accounts by John Sladek - Free Book Online

him with a little natural soya meal. Harold gulped it down until Karl, alarmed at the way the expensive stuff was disappearing, grabbed the canister away. ‘Easy does it, now,’ he said. ‘Not good to take too much at once.’
    Willard made tables to replace all desks, but more tables wererequired. The volume of business, as Karl explained it, was steadily increasing. Consulting a table of Willard’s table-making progress, he was not satisfied. ‘Why don’t you make tables out of the doors? It might be faster.’
    ‘Or make coffins,’ whispered Ed.
    Willard converted all the doors into tables. When still more were needed, he unputtied window-panes and began using them for table-tops. The windows were grimy, and nearly everyone appreciated the increase in light.
    Clark’s sight was failing. Eddie Futch now read Law to him. Clark’s sedentary life had made him gouty, and he began to walk about with a stick. From time to time, he would take a turn about the room, flicking with his stick at the dead forms that lay everywhere like leaves, like history. He would mutter legal phrases to himself through gritted teeth.
    It was spring again, and a chill, dirty wind whipped through the office, whirling drawings and forms in a constant flux. To keep some of them in place, Henry borrowed weights from Mr. Masterson’s office.
    The boss was rarely there these days. He worked out at a gym most of the week, and only bounced in occasionally to assure them that the company was recouping its losses at a truly fantastic rate. The litter of dirty forms was now ankle deep.
     
M EMO :
Dreams
    I dreamed of finding pieces of hate.
    I dreamed an obscure dream: part of it was talking with a psychiatrist who looked something like Hemingway and something like Jung, and showing him my written-down dreams. It seems that I had never remembered the important parts. I forget the rest.
    I dreamed of loving the princess of the glass house, Geopatra, full of mirrors and swimming pools.
    – Masterson
     
    No one talked, except Eddie Futch, droning periods of Law. Whenever the youngster stumbled, Clark caned him across the back, screaming epithets. Once the non-lawyer grew so excited that he had to take a turn around the room, limping and muttering, ‘… ergo sum … ignoratio elenchi … petitio principii … non compos mentis … mons veneris …’
    ‘Ed’ nudged Henry, pointed to the ponderous figure and laughed. ‘They’re fattening him up for the kill,’ he said.
    ‘Who is?’ Henry’s ass felt a chill.
    ‘Who knows? Maybe no one. Maybe “they” is just a figure of speech … but then maybe, you know, maybe
we’re
just figures of speech, eh?’
     
M EMO :
Park conditions today
    Thick pink balloons were drifting over the park from some unknown source. They reminded the boy and the girl of giantdrops of rosy sperm. Flowers seemed to be exploding at their feet as the boy took out his gold-filled ballpoint pen and wrote, in an unpretentious, sturdy, masculine hand, a love poem.
    The poem spoke of fire-trucks and other excitements, of televisable passions, of a love nest made of food, wherein they settle:
    No car honks madly;
    The mayor gives the death penalty for honking tonight;
    And cars have nightingales in place of horns.
    The girl placed a drop of perfume on the pulse of her throat, and began to curve the soft inner part of her arm about the boy’s writing hand. Inside every pink balloon was a hundred-dollar bill. A passing policeman thrust his nightstick at the polka-dot sky and laughed out of pure joy. The flowers made a noise like distant target practice. The boy leaped and the girl laughed. The policeman’s gun belt shook with laughter, while overhead the opalescences bumped one another silently.
    – Masterson
     
    ‘You want to know why I was declared officially dead?’ Ed asked. Henry shook his head and pointed to a sign affixed to his table: ‘No Personal Conversations. This Means You.’
    ‘I was declared officially