The Müller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek Read Free Book Online Page A

country with all its rulers, rules, ruled…then B many centuries later finds the old manuscripts of these works, misses their metaphors and sets the event in the country, which is in the land.
    ‘The Iructu’, he writes seriously, ‘have no word for death.
    They refer to it indirectly as “potatoes”. Death is “eating your potatoes”, burial is “planting the potatoes”, a stillborn child is “new potatoes”, etc. The potato, they explain, like death, has many eyes…’
    Critic B' believes the story and adds embellishments of his own. So do other scholars, until by the time of B''''' men are actually planning to set out on a great sea voyage to visit the fabled land.
    We set sail in the year of our Lord——. Each new problem encloses but does not answer the last. ‘Let’s sail till we come to the edge’ * indeed, but over the edge is just another face of the old world-cube. I don’t even know what the problem is any more, but I go on calculating, reasoning, drifting off course…
    And in the water around the ship the plankton have lofty thoughts as they top each wave, and see the nest wave on…

Four
     
    Feinwelt rode up in the elevator, thinking psychiatrist thoughts and shareholder thoughts.
The split is there, all right, Feinwelt, you crazy shrink. It isn’t enough to be den mother to a bunch of ex-transvestites. It isn’t enough to be the biggest shareholder in Stagman Enterprises next to Glen Dale himself. No, you’ve got to wangle
—
watch that!—your way in to become Glen’s personal Big Shrink. What are you doing here, in this, this mind of a building? In this accidental empire?
    Glen Dale’s empire
was
accidental, like a famous pearl. It had begun with a small, quite ordinary grain of irritation—when, in youth, Glen had discovered that he could not, no matter what, get laid.
    It was improved and rounded by a few coats of what Glen called ‘sophisticated seduction techniques’. A better bottle of wine, a few more jazz tapes, four-star brandy, tickets to shows, dinner for two, oh yes, and smoking jackets, cocktail shakers…layer upon layer did this poor oyster of a man apply to his misery. Cars, a yacht, the magazine, money, clothes, more of everything, better of each, a glossier magazine, the Stagman Club…until the accident seemed deliberate and fine.
I wonder whether the pearl ever chokes the oyster to death?
    Eleven million
Stagman
readers opened their center folds each month to enjoy the twenty-two million well-photographed nipples of Miss Monthly. Then there were the dozens of Stagman Clubs, the thousands of bare-chested girls in buckskin (‘Does’), the hundreds of thousands of moist men who, being strictly forbidden to touch the Does, except in the palm with crisp money, came to play. The grandest club of all was here in the Stagman Tower, in the scrotal end. The shank was devoted to magazine offices; the tip, a penthouse for the chief.
    The elevator bore psychiatrist Feinwelt up the tube, chief-ward, as he worried that Glen might be a difficult case. Nearly forty, after all, and apparently a virgin.
    Shareholder Feinwelt worried on the other side. What if Glen did get cured? And what if that meant the collapse of the driving force behind
Stagman
? It was sublimation, no doubt of it. And who, confronted with a pearl of this quality, could want to open it to get the grain of sand? Who but a head doctor?
But drop it
,
think of something else, think of how many spermatazoa are jerked off over Miss Monthly, let’s see…
    And spermatazoan Feinwelt, homunculus Feinwelt, crawled upward (eleven million times two million, but not all do it, say six million, that makes, urn…)
    Twelve trillion. Twelve trillion unfulfilled humans, condemned to death over the tits of one stenographer.
    Glen sucked a coke and reread proofs of a picture feature for
Stagman
on the Good Life (as lived by Glen Dale).
    Above, the urbane editor-publisher of
Stagman
at work in his luxurious penthouse pad atop