Alien Accounts by John Sladek Read Free Book Online Page B

behind him.
     
M EMO :
Is there life on other planets?
    This question is of the utmost importance to all of us, whether or not we are actually located in the aerospace industries, for it is a restatement of another, all-inclusive question:
Are we alone in the universe?
And if not,
who else is there?
These questions pose problems as yet unanswered; we can only wonder and hope and pray. But whether or not we ever find life on other planets, I feel confident that each and every one of us will want to give this question our full and careful consideration.
    – Masterson
     
    The first real crisis was paper. Masterson decided that ordinary tracing vellum was too expensive, and substituted newsprint. This rough, absorbent stuff made spiderwebs of ink lines and spiders of lettering. Masterson began to scream at the draughtsmen, sometimes with eloquence, sometimes wordlessly.
    ‘Why can’t you make neat, black lines and letters?’ he demanded, and held up a newspaper. Pointing to a story about Hurricane Patty Sue, he said: ‘Take a look at this.
They
don’t have any trouble making neat lines and letters. Just look at this neat work.’
    They tried again, again complaining of the paper, until Masterson, with a martyred smile, said, ‘All right, all right. I’ll get you some fancy, expensive paper. But
then
–’
    He left, and returned an hour later with what appeared to be a roll of wide, slick toilet paper. Along one border ran the tiny green words: ‘Deutsches Bundesbahn’.
    In Austria, a fat Mercedes-Benz rolled on fat tyres into a filling station. The attendant saluted and began to fill the tank, while from behind the wheel a fat man rolled out, hitched up his belt and moved towards the toilet like a file of elephants going to the river. The sunlight gleamed on him, on his damp hair and his white shirt of miracle fibres. In one pocket of it was a leather liner containing a matching ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil and a steel scale, marked off both in centimetres and inches. In the other pocket was a package of Roth Handel cigarettes and a roll of hard candy liqueurs. The man stood a moment in the sun, gazing at four brown cows in the field nearby; in this town lived the engineer who designed the ovens at Dachau; the traveller thought of all this and then went in to shit. He, too, was an engineer. Once he had written to an American magazine, asking for the names of engineering firms, of the particular type which included the Masterson EngineeringCompany. Due to an oversight, however, the engineer did not receive that name.
    The draughtsmen tried again and again, but still their work did not satisfy Masterson. Finally, the eyes swelling behind his huge lenses, he screamed, ‘Stop! I want you to stop. Erase everything. I want you to erase everything.’
    For an hour, the only sound was the hum of electric erasers. One or two people erased holes in the fragile paper; they were given pink slips at once. Finally Masterson collected the twenty blank sheets, touched them up with an artgum eraser, wrapped them carefully and sent them out.
    ‘We’ve got the contract sewed up,’ he joyfully confided to the clerks. ‘No one else could turn out work as neat as that, ever. Not one single mistake!’
    Yet the next day, even while Rod and Bob were collecting money to buy flowers for the departed package, it came back. His thick hands fumbled at the bale of tattered tissue; Masterson read the accompanying letter aloud, and sobs hung quivering from his voice like drops of water from a tap.
    ‘Dear Sirs:
    Re yours of the thirteenth inst., we have no specific need for railroad station toilet tissue at present.
    Thank you for keeping us in mind.’
    Section XIII: All’s Well in the End
     
    Masterson removed his glasses and began cleaning them on a scrap of the tissue. He turned his back modestly so that no one could glimpse his naked eyes. As he settled the frames once more on his cheeks, he cleared his throat with an oddly