Palm Sunday, Welcome to the Monkey House Page 19

  "Marion lied? I don't believe it."

  "She tried to tell me everybody wandered out of the market with her—clerks and all."

  "Fred," I said, "I've got news for you. Can I drive out right after supper?"

  When I arrived at Fred Bockman's farm, he was staring, dumbfounded, at the evening paper.

  "The whole town went nuts!" Fred said. "For no reason at all, all the cars pulled up to the curb like there was a hook and ladder going by. Says here people shut up in the middle of sentences and stayed that way for five minutes. Hundreds wandered around in the cold in their shirt-sleeves, grinning like toothpaste ads." He rattled the paper. "This is what you wanted to talk to me about?"

  I nodded. "It all happened when that noise was being broadcast, and I thought maybe—"

  "The odds are about one in a million that there's any maybe about it," said Fred. "The time checks to the second."

  "But most people weren't listening to the program."

  "They didn't have to listen, if my theory's right. We took those faint signals from space, amplified them about a thousand times, and rebroadcast them. Anybody within reach of the transmitter would get a good dose of the stepped-up radiations, whether he wanted to or not." He shrugged. "Apparently that's like walking past a field of burning marijuana."

  "How come you never felt the effect at work?"

  "Because I never amplified and rebroadcast the signals. The radio station's transmitter is what really put the sock into them."

  "So what're you going to do next?"

  Fred looked surprised. "Do? What is there to do but report it in some suitable journal?"

  Without a preliminary knock, the front door burst open and Lew Harrison, florid and panting, swept into the room and removed his great polo coat with a bullfighter-like flourish. "You're cutting him in on it, too?" he demanded, pointing at me. Fred blinked at him. "In on what?"

  "The millions," Lew said. "The billions."

  "Wonderful," Fred said. "What are you talking about?"

  "The noise from the stars!" Lew said "They love it. It drives 'em nuts. Didja see the papers?" He sobered for an instant. "It was the noise that did it, wasn't it, Doc?"

  "We think so," Fred said. He looked worried. "How, exactly, do you propose we get our hands on these millions or billions?"

  "Real estate!" Lew said raptly. " 'Lew,' I said to myself, 'Lew, how can you cash in on this gimmick if you can't get a monopoly on the universe? And, Lew,' I asked myself "how can you sell the stuff when anybody can get it free while you're broadcasting it?'"

  "Maybe it's the kind of thing that shouldn't be cashed in on," I suggested. "I mean, we don't know a great deal about—"

  "Is happiness bad?" Lew interrupted. "No," I admitted.

  "Okay, and what we'd do with this stuff from the stars is make people happy. Now I suppose you're going to tell me that's bad?"

  "People ought to be happy," Fred said.

  "Okay, okay," Lew said loftily. "That's what we're going to do for the people. And the way the people can show their gratitude is in real estate." He looked out the window. "Good—a barn. We can start right there. We set up a transmitter in the barn, run a line out to your antenna, Doc, and we've got a real-estate development."

  "Sorry," Fred said. "I don't follow you. This place wouldn't do for a development. The roads are poor, no bus service or shopping center, the view is lousy and the ground is full of rocks."

  Lew nudged Fred several times with his elbow. "Doc, Doc, Doc—sure it's got drawbacks, but with that transmitter in the barn, you can give them the most precious thing in all creation-happiness."

  "Euphoria Heights," I said.

  "That's great!" said Lew. "I'd get the prospects, Doc, and you'd sit up there in the barn with your hand on the switch. Once a prospect set foot on Euphoria Heights, and you shot the happiness to him, there's nothing he wouldn't pay for a lot."

  "Every house a home, as long as the power doesn't fail," I said.

  "Then," Lew said, his eyes shining, "when we sell all the lots here, we move the transmitter and start another development. Maybe we'd get a fleet of transmitters going." He snapped his fingers. "Sure! Mount 'em on wheels."

  "I somehow don't think the police would think highly of us," Fred said.

  "Okay, so when they come to investigate, you throw the old switch and give them a jolt of happiness." He shrugged. "Hell, I might even get bighearted and let them have a corner lot."

  "No," Fred said quietly. "If I ever joined a church, I couldn't face the minister."

  "So we give him a jolt," Lew said brightly.

  "No," Fred said. "Sony."

  "Okay," Lew said, rising and pacing the floor. "I was prepared for that. I've got an alternative, and this one's strictly legitimate. We'll make a little amplifier with a transmitter and an aerial on it. Shouldn't cost over fifty bucks to make, so we'd price it in the range of the common man—five hundred bucks, say. We make arrangements with the phone company to pipe signals from your antenna right into the homes of people with these sets. The sets take the signal from the phone line, amplify it, and broadcast it through the houses to make everybody in them happy. See? Instead of turning on the radio or television, everybody's going to want to turn on the happiness. No casts, no stage sets, no expensive cameras—no nothing but that hiss."

  "We could call it the euphoriaphone," I suggested, "or 'euphio' for short."

  'That's great, that's great!" Lew said. "What do you say, Doc?"

  "I don't know." Fred looked worried. "This sort of thing is out of my line."

  "We all have to recognize our limitations, Doc," Lew said expansively. "I'll handle the business end, and you handle the technical end." He made a motion as though to put on his coat. "Or maybe you don't want to be a millionaire?"

  "Oh, yes, yes indeed I do," Fred said quickly. "Yes indeed."

  "All righty," Lew said, dusting his palms, "the first thing we've gotta do is build one of the sets and test her."

  This part of it was down Fred's alley, and I could see the problem interested him. "It's really a pretty simple gadget," he said. "I suppose we could throw one together and run a test out here next week."

  The first test of the euphoriaphone, or euphio, took place in Fred Bockman's living room on a Saturday afternoon, five days after Fred's and Lew's sensational radio broadcast.

  There were six guinea pigs—Lew, Fred and his wife Marion, myself, my wife Susan, and my son Eddie. The Bockmans had arranged chairs in a circle around a card table, on which rested a gray steel box.

  Protruding from the box was a long buggy whip aerial that scraped the ceiling. While Fred fussed with the box, the rest of us made nervous small talk over sandwiches and beer. Eddie, of course, wasn't drinking beer, though he was badly in need of a sedative. He was annoyed at having been brought out to the farm instead of to a ball game, and was threatening to take it out on the Bockmans' Early American furnishings. He was playing a spirited game of flies and grounders with himself near the French doors, using a dead tennis ball and a poker. "Eddie," Susan said for the tenth time, "please stop."

  "It's under control, under control," Eddie said disdainfully, playing the ball off four walls and catching it with one hand.

  Marion, who vents her maternal instincts on her immaculate furnishings, couldn't hide her distress at Eddie's turning the place into a gymnasium. Lew, in his way, was trying to calm her. "Let him wreck the dump," Lew said. "You'll be moving into a palace one of these days."

  "It's ready," Fred said softly.

  We looked at him with queasy bravery. Fred plugged two jacks from the phone line into the gray box. This was the direct line to his antenna on the campus, and clockwork would keep the antenna fixed on one of the mysterious voids in the sky —the most potent of Bockman's Euphoria. He plugged a cord from the box into an electrical outlet in the baseboard, and rested his hand on a switch. "Ready?"

  "Don't, Fred!" I said. I was scared stiff.

  "Turn it on, turn it on,"
Lew said. "We wouldn't have the telephone today if Bell hadn't had the guts to call somebody up."

  "I’ll stand right here by the switch, ready to flick her off if something goes sour," Fred said reassuringly. There was a click, a hum, and the euphio was on.

  A deep, unanimous sigh filled the room. The poker slipped from Eddie's hands. He moved across the room in a stately sort of waltz, knelt by his mother, and laid his head in her lap. Fred drifted away from his post, humming, his eyes half closed.

  Lew Harrison was the first to speak, continuing his conversation with Marion. "But who cares for material wealth?" he asked earnestly. He turned to Susan for confirmation.

  "Uh-uh," said Susan, shaking her head dreamily. She put her arms around Lew, and kissed him for about five minutes.

  "Say," I said, patting Susan on the back, "you kids get along swell, don't you? Isn't that nice, Fred?"

  "Eddie," Marion said solicitously, "I think there's a real baseball in the hall closet. A hard ball. Wouldn't that be more fun than that old tennis ball?" Eddie didn't stir.

  Fred was still prowling around the room, smiling, his eyes now closed all the way. His heel caught in a lamp cord, and he went sprawling on the hearth, his head in the ashes. "Hi-ho, everybody," he said, his eyes still closed. "Bunged my head on an andiron." He stayed there, giggling occasionally.

  "The doorbell's been ringing for a while," Susan said. "I don't suppose it means anything."

  "Come in, come in," I shouted. This somehow struck everyone as terribly funny. We all laughed uproariously, including Fred, whose guffaws blew up little gray clouds from the ashpit.

  * * *

  A small, very serious old man in white had let himself in, and was now standing in the vestibule, looking at us with alarm. "Milkman," he said uncertainly. He held out a slip of paper to Marion. "I can't read the last line in your note," he said. "What's that say about cottage cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese…" His voice trailed off as he settled, tailor-fashion, to the floor beside Marion. After he'd been silent for perhaps three quarters of an hour, a look of concern crossed his face. "Well," he said apathetically, "I can only stay for a minute. My truck's parked out on the shoulder, kind of blocking things." He started to stand. Lew gave the volume knob on the euphio a twist. The milkman wilted to the floor. "Aaaaaaaaaaah," said everybody.

  "Good day to be indoors," the milkman said. "Radio says we'll catch the tail end of the Atlantic hurricane."

  "Let 'er come," I said. "I've got my car parked under a big, dead tree." It seemed to make sense. Nobody took exception to it. I lapsed back into a warm fog of silence and thought of nothing whatsoever. These lapses seemed to last for a matter of seconds before they were interrupted by conversation of newcomers. Looking back, I see now that the lapses were rarely less than six hours.

  I was snapped out of one, I recall, by a repetition of the doorbell's ringing. "I said come in," I mumbled. "And I did," the milkman mumbled.

  The door swung open, and a state trooper glared in at us. "Who the hell's got his milk truck out there blocking the road?" he demanded. He spotted the milkman. "Aha! Don't you know somebody could get killed, coming around a blind curve into that thing?" He yawned, and his ferocious expression gave way to an affectionate smile. "It's so damn' unlikely," he said, "I don't know why I ever brought it up." He sat down by Eddie. "Hey, kid—like guns?" He took his revolver from its holster. "Look—just like Hoppy's."

  Eddie took the gun, aimed it at Marion's bottle collection and fired. A large blue bottle popped to dust and the window behind the collection splintered. Cold air roared in through the opening.

  "He'll make a cop yet," Marion chortled.

  "God, I'm happy," I said, feeling a little like crying. "I got the swellest little kid and the swellest bunch of friends and the swellest old wife in the world." I heard the gun go off twice more, and then dropped into heavenly oblivion.

  Again the doorbell roused me. "How many times do I have to tell you—for Heaven's sake, come in," I said, without opening my eyes.

  "I did," the milkman said.

  I heard the tramping of many feet, but had no curiosity about them. A little later, I noticed that I was having difficulty breathing. Investigation revealed that I had slipped to the floor, and that several Boy Scouts had bivouacked on my chest and abdomen.

  "You want something?" I asked the tenderfoot whose hot, measured breathing was in my face.

  "Beaver Patrol wanted old newspapers, but forget it," he said. "We'd just have to carry 'em somewhere."

  "And do your parents know where you are?"

  "Oh, sure. They got worried and came after us." He jerked his thumb at several couples lined up against the baseboard, smiling into the teeth of the wind and rain lashing in at them through the broken window.

  "Mom, I'm kinda hungry," Eddie said.

  "Oh, Eddie—you're not going to make your mother cook just when we're having such a wonderful time," Susan said.

  Lew Harrison gave the euphio's volume knob another twist. "There, kid, how's that?"

  "Aaaaaaaaaaah," said everybody.

  When awareness intruded on oblivion again, I felt around for the Beaver Patrol, and found them missing. I opened my eyes to see that they and Eddie and the milkman and Lew and the trooper were standing by a picture window, cheering. The wind outside was roaring and slashing savagely and driving raindrops through the broken window as though they'd been fired from air rifles. I shook Susan gently, and together we went to the window to see what might be so entertaining.

  "She's going, she's going, she's going," the milkman cried ecstatically.

  Susan and I arrived just in time to join in the cheering as a big elm crashed down on our sedan.

  "Kee-runch!" said Susan, and I laughed until my stomach hurt. "Get Fred," Lew said urgently. "He's gonna miss seeing the barn go!"

  "H'mm?" Fred said from the fireplace. "Aw, Fred, you missed it," Marion said. "Now we're really gonna see something," Eddie yelled. "The power line's going to get it this time. Look at that poplar lean!" The poplar leaned closer, closer, closer to the power line; and then a gust brought it down in a hail of sparks and a tangle of wires. The lights in the house went off.

  Now there was only the sound of the wind. "How come nobody cheered?" Lew said faintly. "The euphio—it's off!"

  A horrible groan came from the fireplace. "God, I think I've got a concussion."

  Marion knelt by her husband and wailed. "Darling, my poor darling—what happened to you?"

  I looked at the woman I had my arms around—a dreadful, dirty old hag, with red eyes sunk deep in her head, and hair like Medusa's. "Ugh," I said, and turned away in disgust. "Honey," wept the witch, "it's me—Susan." Moans filled the air, and pitiful cries for food and water. Suddenly the room had become terribly cold. Only a moment before I had imagined I was in the tropics. "Who's got my damn' pistol?" the trooper said bleakly. A Western Union boy I hadn't noticed before was sitting in a corner, miserably leafing through a pile of telegrams and making clucking noises.

  I shuddered. "I'll bet it's Sunday morning," I said. "We've been here twelve hours!" It was Monday morning.

  The Western Union boy was thunderstruck. "Sunday morning? I walked in here on a Sunday night." He stared around the room. "Looks like them newsreels of Buchenwald, don't it?"

  The chief of the Beaver Patrol, with the incredible stamina of the young, was the hero of the day. He fell in his men in two ranks, haranguing them like an old Army top-kick. While the rest of us lay draped around the room, whimpering about hunger, cold, and thirst, the patrol started the furnace again, brought blankets, applied compresses to Fred's head and countless barked shins, blocked off the broken window, and made buckets of cocoa and coffee.

  Within two hours of the time that the power and the euphio went off, the house was warm and we had eaten. The serious respiratory cases—the parents who had sat near the broken window for twenty-four hours—had been pumped full of penicillin and hauled off to the hospital. The milkma
n, the Western Union boy, and the trooper had refused treatment and gone home. The Beaver Patrol had saluted smartly and left. Outside, repairmen were working on the power line. Only the original group remained—Lew, Fred, and Marion, Susan and myself, and Eddie. Fred, it turned out, had some pretty important-looking contusions and abrasions, but no concussion.

  Susan had fallen asleep right after eating. Now she stirred. "What happened?"

  "Happiness," I told her. "Incomparable, continuous happiness —happiness by the kilowatt."

  Lew Harrison, who looked like an anarchist with his red eyes and fierce black beard, had been writing furiously in one corner of the room. "That's good—happiness by the kilowatt," he said. "Buy your happiness the way you buy light."

  "Contract happiness the way you contract influenza," Fred said. He sneezed.

  Lew ignored him. "It's a campaign, see? The first ad is for the long-hairs: 'The price of one book, which may be a disappointment, will buy you sixty hours of euphio. Euphio never disappoints.' Then we'd hit the middle class with the next one—"

  "In the groin?" Fred said.

  "What's the matter with you people?" Lew said. "You act as though the experiment had failed."

  "Pneumonia and malnutrition are what we'd hoped for?" Marion said.

  "We had a cross section of America in this room, and we made every last person happy," Lew said. "Not for just an hour, not for just a day, but for two days without a break." He arose reverently from his chair. "So what we do to keep it from killing the euphio fans is to have the thing turned on and off with clockwork, see? The owner sets it so it'll go on just as he comes home from work, then it'll go off again while he eats supper; then it goes on after supper, off again when it's bedtime; on again after breakfast, off when it's time to go to work, then on again for the wife and kids."

  He ran his hands through his hair and rolled his eyes. "And the selling points—my God, the selling points! No expensive toys for the kids. For the price of a trip to the movies, people can buy thirty hours of euphio. For the price of a fifth of whisky, they can buy sixty hours of euphio!"