Read Online The Müller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek - Free Book Online Page A

mind.’
    ‘Then why am I here? You don’t mean that. You’re only disagreeing to please me…’
    ‘No I’m not!’
    ‘…as you feel you never pleased your dad. Yet on a deeper level, you’d like to kill me.’
    ‘Wrong again, you officious bastard!’
    ‘Not at all.’ Feinwelt lit a cigarette with Glen’s table lighter, a jade mermaid that contained a tiny, glassed-in roulette wheel. ‘Not at all. I can see you’ve been squeezing blackheads in your nose just now, both to make yourself “presentable” to me and to inflict upon yourself a mild punishment for not killing me. A punishment you feel you’d really like to direct at your father.’
    ‘SHUT UP! SHUT UP ! I’m warning you.’
    ‘Exactly. Since your father is dead, there is no one else to warn. Since your mother is too ill to stand as a father-surrogate…’
    ‘YOU LEAVE MY MOTHER OUT OF THIS!’
    ‘But that’s exactly what
you’re
trying to do—leave her out of things. To punish her for, as you imagine, trying to take the place of your father. You think her cancer is a sibling-substitute, a possible baby brother…’
    ‘SHUT UP!’
    ‘Tut. A little respect, Glen boy. Or I’ll take away—this!’ He seized the jade mermaid and made a theatrical gesture of pocketing it. Glen jumped him and the two men fell over the coffee table, releasing a stack of
Stagmans
which flopped and sprawled around their struggling feet.
    ‘Take my lighter, you son of a bitch?’
    ‘Is it so important?’
    ‘It’s mine!’
    The machine began coming to pieces in their hands. Feinwelt, holding the biggest piece, cracked the raging editor behind the neck with it.
    ‘Don’t apologize,’ he said when Glen came to. ‘It was all part of your therapy. Well, I see our fifty minutes are up. Same time tomorrow, okay?’
    ‘Nnnnhnm.’
    Marge held up a package of frozen peas.
    ‘Here’s great news for housewives!’ she cried.
    ‘Here’s GREAT news for housewives!’
    ‘Here IS great news for housewives!’
    ‘HERE’S great news for housewives!’
    ‘Here’s great news for HOUSEwives!’
    There were six syllables to the announcement. Each might be said in one of three pitches; with low, ordinary or high volume; drawled out, chopped short or said normally; said with or without a smile and with or without a gesture. That made, they told her, a total of over one and a half trillion ways of saying it, and Marge feared somehow they might make her try them all.
    Mr Bradd explained that a few hundred would suffice. ‘We need enough good takes to get a fix on you with our computer editor,’ he said. ‘That does all the pit work. We just get a few sets of good visual and a few of good sound. Then the computer chops and blends it all, to come up with what the fans think they want. Or what the computer thinks they think.’
    ‘I don’t understand.’
    Mr Bradd drove an imaginary golf ball and watched his follow-through. ‘An ad used to be made up, shipped out and that was that. We keep a finger on ratings and sales, and we do polls. If we find out that, say, a smile just on the word “fabulous” pulls sales in Oregon, then we plug that into the computer and it makes up a special video tape for just Oregon. Whatever we learn, we ask for, and the old computer comes up with it. Of course we still have to shoot the stuff, and have some idea of what we want in the first place. And we do need you. You can never really get along without the human element.’ That was Bradd’s favorite line, from an old company training film he’d written years ago.
    ‘Hey!’ He looked at his watch. ‘You’d better get some shuteye, teammate. Tomorrow’s a big one. See you in the makeup section at eight.’
    ‘Good night, Mr Bradd.’
    “Night, pal.’ He patted her buttocks in a comradely fashion.
    Marge went home to study her lines for the following day. No letter from Spot again. An unhappy mask looked back at her from the mirror. It moved, intoning again and again,