John D. MacDonald

By the Stars Forgot

SPUN.

Say it soft. Aspirant, vowel that is almost negative, the N with the tongue held down from the back of the throat.

SPUN!

Now do it this way. Start it as low as you can pitch your voice, and slow. Slow. Gas is a reminder of anaesthesia. Two words. SPUN! GAS! Equal weight, equal emphasis. Ready now. Spun — gas — spun — gas — spun — gas. Bring it up slowly, slowly, higher, higher, louder, louder. Slide it toward the falsetto, one half note at a time.

spun — gas — Spun — Gas — Spun — Gas — Spun — Gas — SPUN — GAS — SPUN — GAS.

Are you losing anything to try it?

Are you alone?

You are coming out of blackness. How long has it lasted? Is this the tonsils? Uh-uh! Long time ago — tonsils. Eight, weren’t you?

How stupid! This is the automobile accident!

Wait!

Can’t be that.

Over a hell-and-gone long time ago. That was when Marty was killed. Best tram since the tail-gate days of the N’Orleans street parades. You got through that okay. Later than that. Later. After you started making the big dough. Think! Just like they say on the wall at IBM. Think!

How was it? You’re coming out of it. Coming out of ether. Out from under the knife.

What happened? Take an A. Godfrey approach. Wha’ hoppen?

Wait! Grand Central. Of course! Boo was coming in on the Empire. It was all set for the K Club. You were standing by the information counter, you fool, you. Part of the routine. You fool, you. The train was late.

Blackness. Blacker than the inside of an agent’s heart. Steve might be able to use that in the column. Save it. Black. What makes black? Could the roof of Grand Central fall down? Poor building codes, maybe.

Now it’s set, and still this dizzy spun-gas-spun-gas routine is going on.

It comes out of the back of the throat. Scream with the throat half closed. You’ve got it! A giant gets you by the ankle and throws you toward the roof. As you whirl up the roof breaks open as the sun drops through. You’re being hurled into the middle of the sun...

Silence.

Silence.

Whatever it is, you’re out of it. Alive. Cogent. Perceptive.

The hands can move. The flesh crawls with a thin finger of breeze from some unknown place. The light above you is odd. A soft globe resting on nothing, suspended from nothing. Just... there.

Did Boo come in on the Empire? Ten thousand years ago? Why did you think that? Ten thousand years!

He sat up. The bed under him felt like taut skin stretched over yielding flesh. He worked his fingers and his wrists and hunched his shoulders. He felt... rusty. He felt as though he could hear the grate and grind of bone in sockets.

“Hey!” he said. His own voice echoed around and around inside his skull.

Identity was important. “Look!” he said to the walls. “I am Harry Harris. Look, I got a six-piece Dixieland combo. I play what they call a gutty horn. Yesterday we cut the Rampart Street March. Boo was coming in on the Empire. Hey!”

There was a funny pain in the back of his neck. Sharp. He couldn’t turn his head without increasing it. He was propped up, holding himself in a sitting position, one hand against the bed. He took the hand away and the pain stopped. He grabbed a rope of hair as big around as a ball bat. It was fastened to his head. It spilled off the edge of the bed onto the floor. He fingered his face. The beard was silky-long, spilling off down his chest, across his thigh, off the edge of the bed.

“Okay!” he said. “I can go along with a gag. Who’s the funny man? Barney? Red? Scanse?”

Silence.

“What has happened to me?” he screamed.

They came in. Two of them. Quick and busy. Hands pushed him back down onto the bed. “Doc,” he said. “Doc, what happened?”

“Please!” Impatient. A funny accent.

A hand held a bulb with a nozzle. The spray had a tart smell. He shut his eyes against it. Then there was an odd slippery roughness against his face and head. A tingling nakedness. He opened his eyes and touched his chin. The beard was gone.

He touched his head. The hair was gone.

“Look!” he said. “Twenny dollars a crack for them treatments to keep my hair! Whassamatta with you guys? I’ll sue you to hell and gone!”

“Please!”

He stared at them. Both bald. Young faces. The one on his left had a little vibrating thing in his left hand, the spray thing in his right hand, and with his other two hands he was...

Harry arched his back and yelled again and again and again.

“Please! Please!”

They took him off the bed and his legs and feet didn’t work very well. They took him out and folded his right hand around a rubbery cable. The cable was moving slowly down the center of a corridor. Once he had hold of it he couldn’t let go. He could stand still and then it would slowly pull him off balance and he had to take a step. The two men were gone. He tried sitting down. It dragged him along. He stood up again. Way ahead of him somebody else held onto the cable. Somebody or something. It screamed too, from time to time, but as though its heart wasn’t in it. Harry looked around. Back in the gloom, equally spaced, was another one.

The cable pulled him through an arched doorway. On either side of him was a long narrow desk.

“Good morning,” a revoltingly cheery voice said.

“Get me offa this rope, hey.”

They clamped metal loops around his arm, put a sucking, buzzing thing that felt like a big hungry bug on the back of his neck. He writhed. The loops prevented him from reaching it. A girl sat at a machine like an oversized adding machine. He stared at her hand. It was a foot and a half wide. The fingers tromped up and down the keys like the legs on ten guys finishing a race in a dead heat.

Harry’s stomach revolved slowly. The rope yanked him along another step. They detached the gadgets. The girl read the dials. A tag slid out of the side of the machine. It was grabbed and stapled to his bare shoulder. The staples didn’t hurt. With his hand freed he tried to pull the tag off. That did hurt. He left it there. He could read it. It was in a funny shorthand. English. On the top it said “Stores — Inv. 1950. Skll indx — fing & lp dextrs. Recom disp— Parts.”

The rubber cable continued to drag him along. There was another arched doorway. The cable disappeared into a hole in the wall. Suddenly his hand was free. He moved sideways away from the cable and glared at it.

“Right in here,” a voice said. One of the smooth-faced baldies sat behind a desk that had the curious and revolting look of a piece of raw meat, chopped square.

Harry stepped into the small room. He glared. — “I want my clothes and I want some fast answers, bub!”

“Irritation expected. Answers provided. Ask.”

“I was in Grand Central Terminal waiting to meet somebody. What happened?”

“Agent commissioned find good physical types intercepted, anaesthetized, led you to crypt.”

“What agent?”

“Bureau Enlistments. Time Span Section. You earmarked for us.”

“Who is us?”

“Bureau Surgical Engineering.”

“Where’s the girl I was going to meet?”

“Dead. Dead two thousand years.”

Basic resilience fought against horror. Harry rocked on his feet, brought himself back under control. “You know, guy, I believe you. I don’t know why, but I do. What are you going to do with me?”

“Spare parts. Brain useless. Lips and fingers good. They go special storage. Legs go general storage. Remainder goes chemical recovery.”

Harry’s mouth worked a few times. He brought the words out. “You zanies are going to kill me?”

“Emotional response. No. Use you. Painless, utterly.”

Harry, out of a lifetime’s experience in dealing with booking agents and night club managers, began talking. “Look, it’s the brain controls the fingers and the lips. By themselves they aren’t any good.”

“Fallacy. Muscles have memory independent of nerve impulse. Proven.”

Harry worked his right hand in the movements of fingering the valves on a trumpet. “I don’t get it, friend.”

The man said, “Look.”

He reached out a surplus hand that Harry hadn’t noticed. Harry swallowed hard. The hand pressed a key pattern on the edge of the meat-colored desk. The wall behind the man came to life. Harry had seen pictures of the Indian goddess, Vishna or something, the one with all the arms. The thing was probably a woman. She sat behind an enormous U-shaped instrument board. Six arms flickered across the board, pulling plugs, depressing switches, replacing plugs.

“Surgical engineering coordinates with industrial engineering for peak efficiency. Engineered woman handles work of four normals in smaller space. Space important.”

“Now wait.”

The voice went on. Clipped, imperturbable. “Earth mechanistic center. Since establishment surgical engineering efficiency doubled. Earth supplies small electrical, mechanical devices all planets. Too small mechanize assembly.”

“You’d fasten my arms on one of those... those...”

“Natch.”

Two thousand years before, Harry Harris was known to the trade as a man who could land on his feet.

He said, with an air of confidence, “What you guys need is somebody to interview the sleepers you’ve got in those crypts you told me about and find out what they can do good.”

“No need. Mechanical analysis faster, better.”

Harry absently reached for nonexistent cigarettes in an absent pocket.

“Now time detach parts.”

“Not so fast, friend. I’ve got an ability your fancy machine didn’t find out about.”

“Impossible.”

“That shows how much you know. Ever hear of the Harry Harris Industrial Efficiency Program? I didn’t think so.”

“Past ages uninformed on industrial efficiency. Used normals. Waste of space.”

“They knew one thing. They knew, friend, that music in a good fast tempo makes people work better, turn out more.”

“Music? Rhythmic noise? Why?”

Harry took a deep breath. “It takes the frannis quotient of the brain waves, instarates the fatigue acids and guarantees a better slattis relationship to product.”

“Hmmm.”

“Okay, wise guy. Go ahead and turn me into parts.”

“Many ancient procedures lost.” Harry jumped on the faint tone of doubt. “Sure they were lost. You people can’t keep up with everything. Now with a little cooperation I could reely make a contribution...”

Harry Harris, months later, sat on a raised dais. He swallowed nervously. Got to give them one thing, they could sure follow orders when it came to turning out musical instruments they’d never heard of.

The big lenses and mikes were ready to pick it up and flash it to four hundred thousand fabrication and assembly points.

He gave himself the beat on the piano, picked it up on the string bass, brought the drums into play, stroking gently with the wire brushes, lifted the trumpet to his lips and blasted, lifted the tram to the second set of lips, lifted the clarinet to the third set, and, with a solid rhythm background, stamping the extra foot he had insisted on, he started to give Muskrat Ramble a high, wild, hard ride.

In four hundred thousand fabrication and assembly points the tempo of work quickened.

He gave the trumpet the lead, then switched it to the clarinet. He played with most of his eyes half shut, grinning inside as he wondered just what the hell Petrillo would have made of this.

Content

John D. MacDonald
By the Stars Forgot