Doomsday Warrior 18 - American Dream Machine (16 page)

Rockson had a bad dream again that night, the worst yet. He dreamed that some strange clone of Dovine’s by the name of Zhabnov buried Rockson alive.

Nineteen

O
ne month later:

A man in a gray lab smock got up and addressed the twelve-man Esmereldan council. “Rockson has seen the mines, and refused work there. He has been studied for a month,” said Dr. Kreister, the philo-scientist, as he directed his piercing black eyes toward Panxux in particular. “Four months approximately are left until Rockson leaves us. Four months during which he will continue to be totally useless, taking up needed air and space and eating precious tiblets. Tiblets that only
workers
deserve. No work, no air! And he affects women in a bad way. Makes them rebellious.”

Panxux’s lips were briefly pursed. “So you suggest—?”

“That he be put to death,” the scientist said. “I see no other alternative. The rulebook allows for exceptions under emergency situations. Rockson is an emergency.”

Rock, who had been summoned to attend the meeting, was not happy with its first pronouncements. He stood up from his place in the back of the large meeting room and shouted, “Dammit, you can’t change the rules! Listen to me too!”

Panxux frowned. “No time. Sorry! I’ve allotted twenty-two minutes for a deposition of this matter. We can’t hear you.” Panxux’s eyes were back on the scientist. “You may continue, noble Doctor Kreister.”

The gray-bearded man smiled and spoke on crisply. Rock was held at riflepoint by a guard, and with his pain-bracelet “heating up,” couldn’t speak, couldn’t disagree with anything. All human feelings were left out of what the doctor was saying. Facts were slanted against him. The conclusion was that Rockson should be sent to the “Bureau of Corrections.” The council agreed.

He was brought by compu-car to the looming, blue, glass building and deposited in a room that was comfortable without being an inch larger than what was needed to contain eight chairs, a small room off the largest corridor. After five hours, he met Ezlin and half a dozen other Esmereldans concerned with “correction.” Twenty minutes into the long examination of his papers, Ezlin called for a decision.

“What do you think of Rockson?” Ezlin asked. “According to Dr. Kreister, the Earthman doesn’t use his eyes for work or study, just for pleasures. His hands and shoulders and arms are developed oddly—as in somebody who has sex, not somebody who works. I’d agree and say that Rockson isn’t ever likely to be a worker. He must be corrected surgically.”

Rockson didn’t like
that
statement one bit! He would have dived out the window, but the bracelet sent a paralyzing drug into his veins, and a warning pain.

Broomak, the liberal among the red-tunicked men, suggested, “We can perhaps do without surgery. We must show him how different types of work are done and by whom, and try to change his mind. Give him a great choice.”

“You won’t succeed,” Ezlin said, “but you may try.”

Much relieved, a tired Rockson was taken to the home of a contented factory worker, a man supposedly at ease with his women and their children. Rock was startled at the tiny room in an apartment complex that the three women, three children, and one husband lived in.

“Do all of you live here?” Rock asked, Broomak looking on.

“Of course,” the husband said. “This unit is twelve by fourteen. The roof is made of soft warm glassov and the floor is polywood. The toilet is under the bed—it pops out, as do six bunks from the wall. We have to conserve space, do what’s best for the community. We manage, as long as we can work.”

Rock was still muttering when Broomak took him on to a portahouse, a complex with a dozen so-called detach-homes put down one on top of another. The units could be, he said, dismantled, unstacked at will, and taken somewhere else by crane. They used a key to go in an empty ground-floor unit.

“How big is each of these units?” Rock asked.

“Seventeen by sixteen, on average. Bigger than the one you saw, but the family units are larger.”

“That’s what I’d have guessed.”

They went into a small utility bathroom, equipped with a jet-shower. Broomak was proud of the feature, a new one.

“But what about the ordinary comforts of living?” Rock asked. “A sink for instance.”

“The sink is unnecessary as there is a shower.”

“I don’t notice a compu-range for cooking.”

“The range and freezall and visi-screen are part of the same unit, stored under the bed. This unit will service three one-man, two-women units with nine children.”

Rock nodded. He had been reading about the multi-partner Esmereldan family units. The work in the mines was dangerous, and families that lost husbands or wives were by law absorbed by other families, according to some sort of lottery. “How can living beings live like this, after working as hard as these people do?” Rock asked. He felt suffocated, boxed in.

“Like all of us,” Broomak said, “they have to conserve space and energy. Each person here is a work unit, no more. Except the children under five years old.” Broomak raised a bushy black eyebrow. “Your responses are intensely interesting from an academic point of view, but you have not a very practical mind. I would hate to lose such a fine specimen as you!”

“What next?”

“I’ll continue showing you the importance that we Esmereldans attach to work, Rockson. I have faith that all men, even you, will see that work is its own reward.”

A compu-car took them through a stretch of flat land with artificial trees and metallic birds imitating life in the artificial air. At a robotoid factory, producing, as part of a trade agreement, spare parts for androids on Venus and Alpha Centauri Four, the thin-lipped officer in charge escorted them along the noisy work floor. A lot of arc-welding was going on.

“After my time here,” he told Rockson, “I go home for an hour with my women and boy-child, then have a meal, and go out to my other job—I am a miner in pit 397-691.”

“You’ve got
two
jobs?”

“I used to have three, but found myself falling asleep at odd times and had to give up one of them.”

“Do you need credits so much?”

“I work for the pleasure of occupying additional waking time. What’s there in life except work—and the arena-games, of course?”

Rock wanted to say that he’d never understand such a point of view. The man was staring at a point down the line of parts makers, where there was a jam-up. The lapse was handled by somebody, and he relaxed.

“What was your other job?” Rock asked. “The third one?”

“Oh, I worked at the human factory.”

“The
what?”

“The place where—oh, dammit!” The small man wheeled and ran down the line of parts makers, shouting. Broomak took Rock from there as soon as it dawned on him that the wait for the worker to return was likely to be a long one.

“I should think a man like that one would have a breakdown,” Rock said as they got in their car.

“Breakdown? Here?” Broomak tapped his shiny forehead. “The possibility is handled nicely on this asteroid. I’ll show you, if you think you’d be interested. Maybe . . . yes, maybe you’ll be interested to work in
that
section:
mind-preservation.”

“I’d like to
look
at what you do about mental health,” Rock said evasively.

Broomak made some computations in the computer under the car’s steering wheel. The compu-car diverted, took them through a silent stand of artificial trees and under a waterfall with liquid shooting down in color sprays. Not real—a hologram.

Shortly, Broomak eased the car down into a slot by a small, white-painted shingle building. Inside, twenty men and women were sitting stiffly on chairs; the nearest woman had a pained look on her shiny features. Rock’s smile wasn’t returned. He looked for some possible cause besides bad manners, and saw that the woman’s hands had been tied to the plastex arms of the chair, her waist to the chair back.

“What’s wrong with her? With all of these people?”

Broomak said, “Mental instability. But that will be fixed.” He pressed a button labeled Therapy. Voltage shot into devices in the seats. The strapped-in victims started jerking and they repeated, “I feel well, I feel
perfectly
well. I want to go back to work, to both of my jobs, very soon, very soon.” They kept repeating it.

Rock whirled on Broomak. “Is
this
what you do to anybody who says he’s had enough? You tie them down and shoot them full of electricity so they do nothing except recite bullcrap? Is that it?”

“Look, Rockson,” said his guide, “this is nothing compared to the next room. That’s reserved for prisoners like you, people who don’t accept jobs, don’t accept limits on freedom. You’ve got friends in high places, but once the council gives up on you—you’ll be
corrected,
I warn you!”

For a second Rock had some sort of weird déjà vu. He pictured himself in the same sort of contraption—only with a headset—and needles, hot needles going into his brain. A mind-fucker machine? Something like that! And he was, in this vision, in another place, another reality entirely. There in the other world’s coffin machine was
himself,
but he wasn’t a playboy-prisoner. He was a hero, known as the DOOMSDAY WARRIOR! A man in deep, deep shit trouble!

Broomak, who’d been watching Rock’s face with a look of anxious curiosity, asked, “What else would you suggest? It gets them back to work. They don’t remember this anyway.”

“What about—er—vacations for them?” Rock’s head was swimming.

“There’s too much work to be done,” Broomak bristled. “Everybody who wakes up with a headache or nosebleed would soon be demanding a vacation.”

“Once a year, at least. It could be a big help,” Rock said.

“Do you know what happens to men and women on a vacation? They spend all the time hating each other and their families. They play too much and then become ill. Many a man or woman has become deathly ill in the course of a vacation, as you call it, and many have died as a result.”

“Many people
don’t
die as a result, but are able to do better work when they come back.”

“People are bitterly unhappy during the vacation periods, I’m telling you; it hurts production. On Esmerelda there’s hardly enough of anything to go around. We live on a frontier of the galaxy. This is a hard life, and every possible area of productivity must be pushed forward.”

Rock nodded slowly. “I think I can understand that, but I can’t understand this sort of therapy. Maybe production could be better if people were allowed freedom.”

“I take it,” the official said, “you don’t want to work here? All you have to do is feed them and turn the therapy on and off—and some paperwork.”

“I’d rather not!”

“We ought to leave then. Next, Rockson, you’ll see the—”

“I’m too tired. I’ve been up for thirty-six hours at least. I need rest. I feel—strange.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“The place where I’m living. The room in the first arena, I suppose.”

Broomak allowed him to do so.

He ate dinner by himself, a primitive meal not remotely like what he’d been fed when he was expected to go up against the monster. And no prosti-women knocked on the door. He sat up thinking: to have any value placed on a human life here would require a revolution. Maybe he’d start one!

After he’d been asleep a short while there was a knock on the door.

The spectacularly built strawberry blond girl who walked into his room wore a mask. She smiled coolly and said to him, “Kimetta sent me. I’m Ronette, her twin sister.”

“You look a
lot
like her.”

“We are to have sex,” she said. “Now.” She stripped off all her outer clothes, then her bra, and her panties. “I prefer to do all the work in the sex act—OK?”

Twenty

“D
on’t you want to talk a little bit first?” But Rockson felt his manhood erupting, despite his tiredness.

“There’s no reason for it,” she said, ripping his blanket away.

He smiled and nodded, then, “I don’t suppose that’s a no.” He lay back and enjoyed it, suspecting strangely that this was not a twin, but the
real
Kimetta, Kimetta playing games.

Within an hour, he had to take another tiblet. He was out of breath.

“Excuse me,” he complained, “but I’m not a machine intended for pleasure. I—have to think. Alone. Something
wrong.”

Only a sharp look from “Ronette” proved that she had retained some human sensibilities. “If you’ve got any new ideas for sex, we’ll do it. If you’ve never thought of it before, think of it now. And don’t be shy. Kimetta said to give it
all
to you.”

He did think of something new, and she complied. Even in the “Venusian Arc-Monster position,” her body fitted very snugly against his.

The next few minutes passed in almost a dreamlike state as far as he was concerned. She was ready for what he wanted, her body fine-tuned to please, left leg raised, lowered, raised. He had only to indicate, to gesture, and it was done for him as he craved. She was better than Kimetta (or if she was Kimetta, she’d been practicing).
Or the dream was getting better.
Crazy thought!

They slept in one another’s arms. When he awoke before the masked girl, he started to kiss her, to touch her lightly until the shiny skin tingled in his hands and against the tips of his fingers. He wasn’t impatient, but took his time and explored the hollows and curves, the breasts and the flat stomach. She moaned, half-awake. He drew a deep breath to smell the warmth of her skin so close to him.

The girl’s big blue eyes opened. Even with the Lone Ranger-type mask on, she looked amazed. Then she reached out, embracing him as if for dear life. Slowly, her hands and lips and tongue began to respond, to join him in avid exploration, in the giving and receiving of mutual pleasure. This time it was different than last night. It was tender.

“Now,” she called in a different voice, “now,
now!”

He rose above her and they moved back and forth together in the fullness of mutual pleasure, until she cried out in release.