“Quiet! We leave you commuters pretty much alone. It’s your lives and we try not to meddle. But there are certain regulations we have to keep enforced or the entire system will break down.
“You knew you weren’t to grow any native plants out there. We warned you enough times so that it should have made an impression. Then to boot, you became a recluse out there. We ask you to make certain advances to your neighbors, strictly for purposes of keeping things on a level But you wouldn’t even go shopping!”
Da Campo started to protest, but the Head Auditor snapped his fingers sharply, causing the man to fall silent. “We checked your supply requisitions through Food Central, and we were going to drop you a memo on it, but we didn’t get to it in time.”
The pale-faced man tapped his fingers on the desk. “Now if we have any more trouble out of you, Helgorth, we’re going to yank your Suburb Ticket and get you and your wife back into one of the Community Towers. Is that clear?”
Da Campo, suitably cowed, merely nodded.
I thought of the fantastic system they had devised. All Earth turned into a suburban development. Lord! It was fantastic, yet so simple and so obvious when I thought about it, my opinion of these people went up more and more. This explained all sorts of things I’d wondered about: hermits, bus lines that went nowhere, people disappearing.
“All right, you can go,” I heard the Head Auditor say.
Da Campo got up to leave, and I turned to watch him. “So long, Da Campo, see you at home tonight, “ I said.
He looked at me strangely. The message hadn’t altered. “So long, Weiler. I hope so.” he said, and was gone. I half-knew what he meant.
They weren’t going to let me go back. That would be foolish. I knew too much. Strangely. I felt no fear. “You see our predicament, don’t you?” asked the Head Auditor, and I swung back to look at him. I must have looked at him in amazement, because he added, “I couldn’t help knowing w»at you were thinking.” I nodded, reaching for a way to say what I wanted to say.
“We can’t let you go back.”
“Fine,” I smiled a bit too eagerly. “Let me stay. I’d like to stay here. You can’t imagine how fascinated I am by your planet.”
And it was then, right in that instant, that I recognized the truth in what I’d said. I hated Earth.
I hated the nine-to-five drudgery of the closed office and the boring men and women with whom I did business.
I despised my wife, who wanted More. And Better. And More Expensive. I realized bow I’d been fooled by her flippant and sometimes affectionate attitude. I was a faceless thing to her. A goddam man in a grey flannel suit. I despised the trains and the vacuum cleaners and the routine. I despised the lousy treadmill!
I loathed, detested, despised, abhorred, abominated and in all hated the miserable system. I didn’t want to go back.
“I don’t want to go back! I want to stay. Let me stay here!”
The Head Auditor was shaking his auditing head. “Why not?” I asked, confused.
“Look, we’re overpopulated now! Why do you think we use the Suburbs out there? There isn’t room here for anyone like you. We have enough non-working bums on our hands without you. Just because you stumbled into one of our Depots, don’t assume we owe you anything. Because we don’t.
“No, I’m afraid we’ll have to—er—dispense with you, Mr. Weiler. We’re not unpleasant people, but there is a point where we must stand and say. ‘No morel’ I’m sorry.’. He started to push a button.
I went white. I could feel myself going white. Oh no, I thought! I’ve got to talk!
So I talked. I talked him away from that button, because I suppose he had a wife and children and didn’t really like killing people. And I talked him away from the killing angle entirely. And I talked and talked and talked till my throat was dry and he threw up his hand and said…
“All right, all right, stop! A trial, then. If you can find work here, if you can fit in, if you can match up, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay. But don’t ever expect to go back!”
Expect to go back? Not on your life!
Then he shooed me out of the office, and I set about making a place for myself in this world I’d never made. Well, I’ve done pretty decently. I’m happy, I have my own apartment, and I have a good job. They’ve said I can stay.
I didn’t realize it, an those years, how much I hated the rush, rush, rush, the getting to the office and poring over those lousy briefs, the quiet nagging of Charlotte about things like the ashtrays, the constant bill collectors, the keeping up with the Joneses.
I didn’t realize how badly I wanted out.
Well, now I’m out, and I’m happy. No more of that stuff for me.
Thanks for listening. Thought I’d get it straight, as long as you needed the story to open my charge account. I’m here and I like it, and I’m out of the suburbanite climbing-executive rush-rush class. At last I’m off that infernal treadmill.
Thanks again for listening. Well, I’ve got to go.
Got to get to work, you know.
Current crazes fascinate me. Though I couldn’t operate one to save my life, the hula hoop was an entrancing little path to dislocation of the spine and ultimate madness, and I watched with not too much lasciviousness as the pre-adult vixens of my acquaintance shimmied and swirled in the use of same. The telephone-booth-stuffing trend seemed to me abortive, and I was not at all surprised when it faded in lieu of the “limbo” acrobatics at voodoo calypso parties. Mah-jongg, Scrabble, ouija boards, Lotto, TV quiz shows, pennies in kids’ loafers, bongo boards, snake dances, panty raids, rumble seats, trampoline classes, croquet, Empire-line dresses, day-glo shirts, stuffed tigers in car back windows, Billy Graham and Fabian (no relation)—all of them awed and bemused me, as I watched the world swallow them whole, digest them and infuse them into the daily scene. Trends knock me out, frankly: Whether it be painting by the numbers or making your own full-scale skeleton of a tyrannosaurus, I think the most imaginative, and auctorially-useful fad of recent years has been the one aptly called
Madge retina-printed her identity on the receipt, fished in her apron for a coin, and came up with a thirty- center. It was a bit too much to give the boy, but she already had it in her hand, and there were appearances to keep up, in spite of everything. She handed it across, and took the carton.
A migrant tremor of pleasure swept her as she was closing the door; the messenger boy was assaying her figure. It had been years, oh longer than that, since a young man had done that. Perhaps it was the new wash; she closed the door firmly and blanked it, patting her hair. Yes, it was the blonde rinse, that was it. Abruptly, she realized she had been standing there, staring at the box in her hands, for some time. With mild terror.
Madge Rubichek, she chided herself, you contracted for this, and now it’s here, and it’s paid for, so whatare you making faces like that for? Go in and sit down and open it, you silly goose!
She followed her silent instructions. In the kitchen, with the late afternoon operock program from Philly weirdly jangling the background—they were doing the new two-beat La Forza del Destino with alto sax accompaniment—she took a paring knife—my, how infectious that sort of teen-ager’s music was!—to the thick, white scotchseal of the carton.
The box was secured around the edges, and she inserted the paring knife as she would have with a carton of soda crackers. She slit it open down one side, up the next. Except this was not a carton of soda crackers.
This was—oh, how odd—a do-it-yourself kit. A modern marvel like all the new do-it-yourself marvels. Do-it- yourself house painting setups, and do-it-yourself baked Alaska mix, and do-it-yourself this and that and the other thing. There were even advertisements for do-it-yourself brain surgery kits and swamp digging kits, for chassis aligning kits and pruning kits. But this was no longer something offered in an advertisement; once it had been, but now it was a reality, and she held it in her hands. As much of that advertised breed as any do-it-yourself bookcase- construction kit, outfitted to the last set screw.
This was a particular kind of kit Madge had purchased: To be precise, a do-it-yourself murder kit. Idly, as though without conscious direction, her eyes strayed to the magazine spindle where DO-IT- YOURSELF MONTHLY was canned up against Carl’s FLIKPIX and her own mundane BEST HOUSEKEEPING.
Her eyes lingered for an instant, drank in through the impeding plastic of the container and the other spools the classified advertisement near the end of the mag-reel… and passed on around the room.
It was a nice room. A solid room, furnished in tasteful period furniture without too many curlicues and just enough modem angles. But it was mediocrity, and what else was there to say of it but that it typified her life with Carl. Mediocrity disturbed Madge Rubichek, as did the slovenly day-to-day existence of her husband.
For Madge Rubichek was a methodical woman.
She sighed resignedly, and busied herself lifting the top from the carton. It was a long, moderately-thin package, of typical brown box-plastboard. Her name had been neatly stated on the address label, and there was no return address.
“Well, impractical, but necessary,” she mused, aloud, “but what a lot of merchandise they must lose,” she added. Then it dawned on her that she had signed a return receipt, and that meant the boy who had come to the door must have gotten the carton from a central delivery robotic miller, or else…
Oh, it was too deep for her to worry about. They must have some way of insuring delivery. She set the box top beside her chair, and pulled away the tissue paper double-folded over the carton’s contents.
What odd-looking mechanisms. Even for 1977, which Madge had always called—in the sanctum of her mind, where profanity was permitted—”too damned machiney for its own good!” these were strange.
There was a long, thin, coiled sticky-looking tube of grey something-or-other with a valve at one end, and a blow-nozzle attached. Was it one of those dragon balloons that you blew up so big? But what did that have to do with—
She would not think of what this kit had been invented to do. She would look at it as though it were some laborsaving household appliance, like her Dinner Dialer (that did not dial at all, but was punched, instead) or her Dustomat. Well, and she giggled, wasn’t it?
Do-it-by-golly-yourself!