None the less, Vince felt, it was best to do all that was possible with the old man while he remained in office, and so he put down his razor and went into the living room to fiddle with the knobs of the TV set. He adjusted the n, the r and b knobs, and hopefully anticipated a turn for the better in the dire droning on of the speech … however, no change took place. Too many other viewers had their own ideas as to what the old man ought to be saying, Vince realized. In fact there were probably enough other people in this one apartment building alone to offset any pressures he might try to exert on the old man through his particular set. But anyhow that was democracy. Vince sighed. This was what they had wanted: a government receptive to what the people said. He returned to the bathroom and continued shaving.
‘Hey Julie!’ he called to his wife. ‘Is breakfast about ready?’ He heard no sound of her stirring about in the kitchen of the apartment. And come to think of it, he hadn’t noticed her beside him in bed as he had groggily got up this morning.
All at once he remembered. Last night after All Souls he and Julie, after a particularly bitter fight, had got divorced, had gone down to the building’s M & D Commissioner and filled out the D papers. Julie had packed her things then and there; he was alone in the apartment — no one was fixing his breakfast and unless he got busy he would miss it entirely.
It was a shock, because this particular marriage had endured for six entire months and he had become thoroughly used to seeing her in the mornings. She knew just how he liked his eggs (cooked with a small amount of Mild Munster cheese). Damn the new permissive divorce legislation that old President Kalbfleisch had ushered in! Damn Kalbfleisch in general; why didn’t the old man turn over and die some afternoon during his famous two o’clock nap? But then of course another der Alte would simply take his place. And even the old man’s death wouldn’t bring Julie back; that lay outside the area of USEA bureaucracy, vast as it was.
Savagely, he went to the TV set and pressed the s knob; if enough citizens pushed it, the old man would stop entirely the stop knob meant total cessation of the mumbling speech.
Vince waited, but the speech went on.
And then it struck him as odd that there should be a speech so early in the morning; after all, it was only eight a.m. Perhaps the entire lunar colony had gone up in a single titanic explosion of its fuel depot. The old man would be telling them that more belt-tightening was required, in order to restock the space programme; these and other quaint calamities had to be expected. Or perhaps at last some authentic remains of a sentient race had been unearthed — or was the term unmarsed? — on the fourth planet, hopefully not in the French area but in, as der Alte liked to phrase it, ‘one’s own’. You Prussian bastards, Vince thought. We never should have admitted you into what I like to phrase as ‘our tent’, our federal union, which should have been confined to the Western Hemisphere. But the world has shrunk. When you are founding a colony millions of miles away on another moon or planet, the three thousand miles separating New York from Berlin did not seem meaningful. And god knew the Germans in Berlin were willing.
Picking up the telephone, Vince called the manager of the apartment building. ‘My wife Julie — I mean my ex-wife did she take another apartment last night?’ If he could locate her he could perhaps have breakfast with her and that would be cheering. He listened hopefully.
‘No, Mr Strikerock.’ A pause. ‘Not according to our records.’
Aw hell, Vince thought, and hung up.
What was marriage, anyhow? An arrangement of sharing things, such as right now being able to discuss the meaning of der Alte giving an eight a.m. speech and getting someone else — his wife — to fix breakfast while he prepared to go to his job at Karp u. Sohnen Werke’s Detroit branch. Yes, it meant an arrangement in which one could get another person to do certain things one didn’t like to do, such as cooking meals; he hated having to eat food which he had prepared himself. Single, he would eat at the building’s cafeteria; he foresaw that, based on past experience. Mary, Jean, Laura, now Julie; four marriages and the last the shortest.
He was going downhill. Maybe, god forbid, he was a latent queer.
On the TV, der Alte uttered, ‘ … and paramilitary activity recalls the Days of Barbarism and hence is doubly to be renounced.’
Days of Barbarism — that was the sweet-talk for the Nazi Period of the middle part of the previous century, now gone nearly a century but still vividly, if distortedly, recalled. So der Alte had taken to the airwaves to denounce the Sons of Job, the latest nut organization of a quasi-religious nature flapping about in the streets, proclaiming a purification of national ethnic life, etc., or whatever it was they proclaimed.
In other words, stiff legislation to bar persons from public life who were odd — those born specially, due to the years of radiation fall-out from bomb testing, in particular from the vicious People’s China blasts.
That would mean Julie, Vince conjectured, since she’s sterile. Because she could not bear children she would not be permitted to vote … a rather neurotic connective, logically possible only in the minds of a Central European people such as the Germans. The tail that wags the dog, he said to himself as he dried his face. We in Nord Amerika are the dog; the Reich is the tail. What a life. Maybe I ought to emigrate to colonial reality, live under a faint, fitful, pale-yellow sun where even things with eight legs and a stinger get to vote … no Sons of Job, there. Not that all the special people were that special, but a good many of them had seen fit — and for good reason — to emigrate. As had quite a number of quite unspecial folk who were simply tired of the overpopulated, bureaucratically-controlled life on Terra these days, whether in the USEA, in the French Empire, or in People’s Asia, or Free — that is, black — Africa.
In the kitchen he fixed himself bacon and eggs. And, while the bacon cooked, he fed the sole pet allowed him in the apartment building: George III, his small green turtle.
George III ate dried flies (twenty-five per cent protein, more nourishing than human food), hamburger, and ant eggs, a breakfast which caused Vince Strikerock to ponder on the axiom de gustibus non disputandum est there’s no accounting for other people’s tastes, especially at eight in the morning.
Even as recently as five years ago he could have possessed a pet bird in The Abraham Lincoln, but that was now ruled out. Too noisy, really. Building Rule s205; thou shalt not whistle, sing, tweet or chirp. A turtle was mute — as was a giraffe, but giraffes were verboten, too, along with the quondam friends of man, the dog and cat, the companions which had vanished back in the days of der Alte Frederich Hempel, whom Vince barely remembered. So it could not have been the quality of muteness, and he was left, as so often before, merely to guess at the reasoning of the Party bureaucracy. He could not genuinely fathom its motives, and in a sense for that he was glad. It proved that he was not spiritually a part of it.
On the TV the withered, elongated, near-senile face had vanished and a moment of music, a purely audible event, had replaced it. Percy Grainger, a tune called ‘Handel in the Strand’, as banal as could be … just the appropriate postscript to what had come before, Vince reflected. He clicked his heels abruptly, came to attention, in a parody of Germanic military stiffness, chin up, arms rigid, as the melody tinkled from the speaker of the TV set; Vince Strikerock at attention to this child’s music which the authorities, the so-called Ges, saw fit to play. Heil, Vince said to himself, and raised his arm in the ancient Nazi salute.
The music tinkled on.
Vince turned to another channel.
And there, on the screen, a hounded-looking man fleetingly appeared in the midst of a crowd which seemed to be cheering him; the man, with what were obviously police on both sides of him, disappeared into a parked vehicle. At the same time the newscaster declared, ‘ … and, just as in hundreds of other cities across the USEA, Dr Jack Dowling, leading psychiatrist of the Vienna School here in Bonn, is taken into custody as he protests the newly-signed-into-law bill, the McPhearson Act … ‘