The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) by John Sladek Read Free Book Online Page B

The excess of his fortune was always distributed to charities, among which he never scanted the Animal Protection League. Phineas was known to all as a kindly and temperate man—no less to his own children than to strangers. He never chastised his son and daughter by more than a reproving frown, and more was never required.
    Perhaps the only fault his neighbours might have found with him was in his choice of servants. Phineas had taken into his employ in the great house in Altoona people from the Nevada Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
    ‘Criminals, pish !’ he would exclaim. ‘They are merely poor unfortunates, languishing for want of a kind word.’ For over twenty years he had no other servants, and a gentler, more trustworthy set could scarce be found.
    One day in 1913 Phineas sat looking out the window of his private car at the sagebrush, state flower of Nevada. ‘I feel old, today,’ he remarked to his secretary, who afterwards remembered it as the first time he had ever heard his master complain. ‘I feel I’m getting near the end of the line.’
    The secretary handed him a telegram from his butler, back in Altoona. Phineas Smilax read it and fell from his chair, dead.
    The telegram read, ‘ DAUGHTER ENCEINTE REPEAT PREGGERS STOP HAVE BEATEN HER WITH HORSEWHIP AND DRIVEN HER FROM THE TOWN ALTHOUGH I AM FATHER OF THE CHILD STOP PLEASE ADVISE DISPOSITION HER CLOTHING PORTRAIT ETCETERA STOP SIGNED CRAGELL ’.
    The daughter was never found. Cragell, having admitted to raping Lotte and frightening her into silence for several months, was returned to the Asylum. Phineas Jr. took over his father’s debts and began his own family, sired on a feeble-minded maidservant. By his own daughter he had an indeterminate number of children also, and hanged himself in 1930, when the last of the railroad had gone to pay his bootleggers. Three generations of illiterate Smilaxes still lived in the grey house, gardening in its yard. They never spoke of their banished relative, Lotte.
    Rusty rails now stretched away from Altoona in three directions. Only the Nevada Southern continued to operate one train a week between Altoona and Las Vegas. Mary Junes Beele had circled on her calendar the day on which that train would leave. Tomorrow was the circled day.
    The Beeles had now been here two weeks, and each had made a certain reputation. No one liked Mary. The women did not like the deliberating way she looked over their menfolk. Their menfolk did not like the insolent way she deliberated and rejected them. No one liked the way she treated her husband.
    Barthemo, on the other hand, was sought out to about the same degree that Mary was snubbed. He was, after all, the finest gossip the town had ever seen, having already aired one new scandal and dug up a dozen old ones in his first week on the job. As a result of the very first issue of the
Altoona Truth
, two families were not speaking, and there was talk of a divorce, a spite fence, a duel. He reported
everything
, with scrupulous
    objectivity and in delicious detail. It was said that one day Beele would describe his own cuckolding fairly.
    Filled with sweet loathing for her husband, Mary entered the press room, where he was reading a proof.
    ‘Your coperation is appreciated,’ he read, then paused to add an ‘o’. He did not greet his wife or acknowledge her existence in any way. ‘… how long will these goings-on continue?’ he read, then amended it to ‘… how long will these goings-on go on?’
    ‘Yaddadda yaddadda go on?’ she mocked.
    He continued reading.
    ‘No one ever comes to this damned town,’ she said.
    ‘Nothing ever happens in this damned town,’ she added.
    ‘The only time we see a fresh face in this damned town,’ she concluded, ‘is when someone strays off the road to Vegas.’
    ‘What about that hitchhiker? He isn’t on the way to Las Vegas, but to the US Navy Ammunition Depot.’
    ‘Oh, the sailor. He doesn’t count. I’m bored with him