Read Online Alien Accounts by John Sladek - Free Book Online Page B

Swiss face to the American face of Dot, his wife, out in the back yard eating a piece of fruit that has been picked the day before yesterday in the Orient. Will miracles – or anything – ever cease? The digital clock reports a new minute.
    ‘I met you,’ Al said into a portable tape recorder no larger than a packet of cigarettes, ‘a year, three days, seven hours and forty-three minutes ago, through that computer dating service. You had brushed your teeth electrically, using stannous fluoride toothpaste to prevent decay. I had just had dacron veins put in.
    ‘Times change. You now have someone else’s liver and kidney: I have ridden on an atomic submarine.’
    On the atomic ship, Al will notice an interesting article about LSD, a drug commonly supposed to cause visions and insights. He would reproduce this article by xerography, a fast electrostatic process making use of powdered ink.
    Al called Bertha, his ex-wife, on the hall video phone.
    ‘I just took a stay-awake pill,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so sleepy ever since the sauna I took, on the airbus from –’
    ‘What’s new?’
    ‘I’m pregnant again, due to the fertility drug I’m taking. Ah, and I have a new non-stick milk saucepan. See?’ On the screen she cuts open a tetrahedral carton of milk which was sealed for almost a year, then pours some into a special pan. The pan has previously been coated with a compound to prevent sticking and burning. So Bertha, wife of Ernest, was pregnant!
    She and Al soon fell into their old argument about riot control. She favoured tanks with aluminium armour, while Al defended the judicious use of Mace, a gas which irritates the mucous membranes.
    ‘What’s new with you and Dot?’ she asks.
    ‘Oh, I’ve been sterilized. Dot has this detached retina, but luckily they can now weld it back on with lasers.’
    They spoke of Dot’s trip to the Orient on a ballistic, supersonic plane. There Dot makes the acquaintance of an amateur biologist named Frank, who’s all keyed up about the isolation of the gene. His real business is the manufacture of cosmetics for men, in factories he claimed were 97%automated.
    LIFE AFTER DEATH – AL WONDERS.
    Ernest took a tranquillizer before he called Dot on the teletypewriter. They were lovers, not to Al’s knowledge. This was a conveniently private mode of communication, not often used by spirit mediums, though.
    As they ‘spoke’, Ernest drank coffee that had been percolated, frozen, vacuum dried and packed in jars. A spoonful of this substance to a cup of boiling water, while Dot watched the five-inch screen of her portable television set: there is a baseball game in far-off Texas, played on nylon grass beneath a geodesic dome, and she is part of it. When they have said the private things lovers must, Dot took a sleeping pill and slept.
    Clement, or Clem, was Al’s son by a previous marriage. Next day he fuelled his car at a coin gas station, dry-cleaned his clothes in a similar manner, and fell foul of a peculiar police arrangement: At one end of a bridge police read the licence numbers of all passing cars into their radios. The computer at headquarters checks these for old violations.
    Clem lived avoiding the army in a module apartment house, which has been made up at a factory in complete, decorated rooms, then bolted together at the building site. When he gets home he tries to call Bertha, his former stepmother, by means of a telephone message relayed through a communications satellite many thousands of miles, but she is at the hospital, having her third child.
    Bertha’s first child was now a bright little five-year-old, using an unusual teaching machine to learn to type and spell at the same time. This machine would give an instruction, then lock all but the necessary keys. If only life could be like that, Al thought, with no chance to err! In a programmed novel, the reader determines the ending.
    Her second child was very intelligent, possibly because Bertha wore a suit