‘Let’s not quit,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’ll agree the psychoanalyst would have charged Perky Pat twenty dollars. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ both the Morrisons said together, and they settled back down once more to resume the game.
Tod Morrison had picked up their Perky Pat; he held it, stroking its blonde hair - theirs was blonde, whereas the Scheins’ was a brunette - and fiddling with the snaps of its skirt.
‘Whatever are you doing?’ his wife inquired.
‘Nice skirt she has,’ Tod said. ‘You did a good job sewing it.’
Norm said, ‘Ever know a girl, back in the ol-days, that looked like Perky Pat?’
‘No,’ Tod Morrison said somberly. ‘Wish I had, though. I saw girls like Perky Pat, especially when I was living in Los Angeles during the Korean War. But I just could never manage to know them personally. And of course there were really terrific girl singers, like Peggy Lee and Julie London … they looked a lot like Perky Pat.’
‘Play,’ Fran said vigorously. And Norm, whose turn it was, picked up the spinner and spun.
‘Eleven,’ he said. ‘That gets my Leonard out of the sports car repair garage and on his way to the race track.’ He moved the Leonard doll ahead.
Thoughtfully, Tod Morrison said, ‘You know, I was out the other day hauling in perishables which the careboys had dropped … Bill Ferner was there, and he told me something interesting. He met a fluker from a fluke-pit down where Oakland used to be. And at that fluke-pit you know what they play? Not Perky Pat. They never have heard of Perky Pat.’
‘Well, what do they play, then?’ Helen asked.
‘They have another doll entirely.’ Frowning, Tod continued, ‘Bill says the Oakland fluker called it a Connie Companion doll. Ever hear of that?’
‘A “Connie Companion” doll,’ Fran said thoughtfully. ‘How strange. I wonder what she’s like. Does she have a boy friend?’
‘Oh sure,’ Tod said. ‘His name is Paul. Connie and Paul. You know, we ought to hike down there to that Oakland Fluke-pit one of these days and see what Connie and Paul look like and how they live. Maybe we could learn a few things to add to our own layouts.’
Norm said, ‘Maybe we could play them.’
Puzzled, Fran said, ‘Could a Perky Pat play a Connie Companion? Is that possible? I wonder what would happen?’
There was no answer from any of the others. Because none of them knew.
As they skinned the rabbit, Fred said to Timothy, ‘Where did the name “fluker” come from? It’s sure an ugly word; why do they use it?’
‘A fluker is a person who lived through the hydrogen war,’ Timothy explained. ‘You know, by a fluke. A fluke of fate? See? Because almost everyone was killed; there used to be thousands of people.’
‘But what’s a “fluke”, then? When you say a “fluke of fate—” ‘
‘A fluke is when fate has decided to spare you,’ Timothy said, and that was all he had to say on the subject. That was all he knew.
Fred said thoughtfully, ‘But you and I, we’re not flukers because we weren’t alive when the war broke out. We were born after.’
‘Right,’ Timothy said.
‘So anybody who calls me a fluker,’ Fred said, ‘is going to get hit in the eye with my bull-roarer.’
‘And “careboy”,’ Timothy said, ‘that’s a made-up word, too. It’s from when stuff was dumped from jet planes and ships to people in a disaster area. They were called “care parcels” because they came from people who cared.’
‘I know that,’ Fred said. ‘I didn’t ask that.’
‘Well, I told you anyhow,’ Timothy said.
The two boys continued skinning the rabbit.
Jean Regan said to her husband, ‘Have you heard about the Connie Companion doll?’ She glanced down the long rough-board table to make sure none of the other families was listening. ‘Sam,’ she said, ‘I heard it from Helen Morrison; she heard it from Tod and he heard it from Bill Ferner, I think. So it’s probably true.’
‘What’s true?’ Sam said.
‘That in the Oakland Fluke-pit they don’t have Perky Pat; they have Connie Companion … and it occurred to me that maybe some of this - you know, this sort of emptiness, this boredom we feel now and then - maybe if we saw the Connie Companion doll and how she lives, maybe we could add enough to our own layout to—’ She paused, reflecting. ‘To make it more complete.’
‘I don’t care for the name,’ Sam Regan said. ‘Connie Companion; it sounds cheap.’ He spooned up some of the plain, utilitarian grain-mash which the careboys had been dropping, of late. And, as he ate a mouthful, he thought, I’ll bet Connie Companion doesn’t eat slop like this; I’ll bet she eats cheeseburgers with all the trimmings, at a high-type drive-in.
‘Could we make a trek down there?’ Jean asked.
‘To Oakland Fluke-pit?’ Sam stared at her. ‘It’s fifteen miles, all the way on the other side of the Berkeley Flukepit!’
‘But this is important,’ Jean said stubbornly. ‘And Bill says that a fluker from Oakland came all the way up here, in search of electronic parts or something … so if he can do it, we can. We’ve got the dust suits they dropped us. I know we could do it.’
Little Timothy Schein, sitting with his family, had overheard her; now he spoke up. ‘Mrs Regan, Fred Chamberlain and I, we could trek down that far, if you pay us. What do you say?’ He nudged Fred, who sat beside him. ‘Couldn’t we? For maybe five dollars.’
Fred, his face serious, turned to Mrs Regan and said, ‘We could get you a Connie Companion doll. For five dollars for each of us.’
‘Good grief,’ Jean Regan said, outraged. And dropped the subject.
But later, after dinner, she brought it up again when she and Sam were alone in their quarters.
‘Sam, I’ve got to see it,’ she burst out. Sam, in a galvanized tub, was taking his weekly bath, so he had to listen to her. ‘Now that we know it exists we have to play against someone in the Oakland Fluke-pit; at least we can do that. Can’t we? Please.’ She paced back and forth in the small room, her hands clasped tensely. ‘Connie Companion may have a Standard Station and an airport terminal with jet landing strip and color TV and a French restaurant where they serve escargot, like the one you and I went to when we were first married … I just have to see her layout.’
‘I don’t know,’ Sam said hesitantly. ‘There’s something about Connie Companion doll that - makes me uneasy.’
‘What could it possibly be?’
‘I don’t know.’
Jean said bitterly, ‘It’s because you know her layout is so much better than ours and she’s so much more than Perky Pat.’
‘Maybe that’s it,’ Sam murmured.
‘If you don’t go, if you don’t try to make contact with them down at the Oakland Fluke-pit, someone else will - someone with more ambition will get ahead of you. Like Norman Schein. He’s not afraid the way you are.’
Sam said nothing; he continued with his bath. But his hands shook.
A careboy had recently dropped complicated pieces of machinery which were, evidently, a form of mechanical computer. For several weeks the computers - if that was what they were - had sat about the pit in their cartons, unused, but now Norman Schein was finding something to do with one. At the moment he was busy adapting some of its gears, the smallest ones, to form a garbage disposal unit for his Perky Pat’s kitchen.
Using the tiny special tools - designed and built by inhabitants of the fluke-pit - which were necessary in fashioning environmental items for Perky Pat, he was busy at his hobby bench. Thoroughly engrossed in what he was doing, he all at once realized that Fran was standing directly behind him, watching.
‘I get nervous when I’m watched,’ Norm said, holding a tiny gear with a pair of tweezers.
‘Listen,’ Fran said, ‘I’ve thought of something. Does this suggest anything to you?’ She placed before him one of the transistor radios which had been dropped the day before.
‘It su
ggests that garage-door opener already thought of,’ Norm said irritably. He continued with his work, expertly fitting the miniature pieces together in the sink drain of Pat’s kitchen; such delicate work demanded maximum concentration.
Fran said, ‘It suggests that there must be radio transmitters on Earth somewhere, or the careboys wouldn’t have dropped these.’
‘So?’ Norm said, uninterested.
‘Maybe our Mayor has one,’ Fran said. ‘Maybe there’s one right here in our own pit, and we could use it to call the Oakland Fluke-pit. Representatives from there could meet us halfway … say at the Berkeley Flukepit. And we could play there. So we wouldn’t have that long fifteen-mile trip.’
Norman hesitated in his work; he set the tweezers down and said slowly, ‘I think possibly you’re right.’ But if their Mayor Hooker Glebe had a radio transmitter, would he let them use it? And if he did—
‘We can try,’ Fran urged. ‘It wouldn’t hurt to try.’
‘Okay,’ Norm said, rising from his hobby bench.
The short, sly-faced man in Army uniform, the Mayor of the Pinole Fluke-pit, listened in silence as Norm Schein spoke. Then he smiled a wise, cunning smile. ‘Sure, I have a radio transmitter. Had it all the time. Fifty watt output. But why would you want to get in touch with the Oakland Fluke-pit?’
Guardedly, Norm said, ‘That’s my business.’
Hooker Glebe said thoughtfully, ‘I’ll let you use it for fifteen dollars.’
It was a nasty shock, and Norm recoiled. Good Lord; all the money he and his wife had - they needed every bill of it for use in playing Perky Pat. Money was the tender in the game; there was no other criterion by which one could tell if he had won or lost. ‘That’s too much,’ he said aloud.
‘Well, say ten,’ the Mayor said, shrugging.
In the end they settled for six dollars and a fifty-cent piece.
‘I’ll make the radio contact for you,’ Hooker Glebe said. ‘Because you don’t know how. It will take time.’ He began turning a crank at the side of the generator of the transmitter. ‘I’ll notify you when I’ve made contact with them. But give me the money now.’ He held out his hand for it, and, with great reluctance, Norm paid him.
It was not until late that evening that Hooker managed to establish contact with Oakland. Pleased with himself, beaming in self-satisfaction, he appeared at the Scheins’ quarters during their dinner hour. ‘All set,’ he announced. ‘Say, you know there are actually nine fluke-pits in Oakland? I didn’t know that. Which you want? I’ve got one with the radio code of Red Vanilla.’ He chuckled. ‘They’re tough and suspicious down there; it was hard to get any of them to answer.’
Leaving his evening meal, Norman hurried to the Mayor’s quarters, Hooker puffing along after him.
The transmitter, sure enough, was on, and static wheezed from the speaker of its monitoring unit. Awkwardly, Norm seated himself at the microphone. ‘Do I just talk?’ he asked Hooker Glebe.
‘Just say, This is Pinole Fluke-pit calling. Repeat that a couple of times and then when they acknowledge, you say what you want to say.’ The Mayor fiddled with controls of the transmitter, fussing in an important fashion.
‘This is Pinole Fluke-pit,’ Norm said loudly into the microphone.
Almost at once a clear voice from the monitor said, ‘This is Red Vanilla Three answering.’ The voice was cold and harsh; it struck him forcefully as distinctly alien. Hooker was right. ‘Do you have Connie Companion down there where you are?’
‘Yes we do,’ the Oakland fluker answered.
‘Well, I challenge you,’ Norman said, feeling the veins in his throat pulse with the tension of what he was saying. ‘We’re Perky Pat in this area; we’ll play Perky Pat against your Connie Companion. Where can we meet?’
‘Perky Pat,’ the Oakland fluker echoed. ‘Yeah, I know about her. What would the stakes be, in your mind?’
‘Up here we play for paper money mostly,’ Norman said, feeling that his response was somehow lame.
‘We’ve got lots of paper money,’ the Oakland fluker said cuttingly. ‘That wouldn’t interest any of us. What else?’
‘I don’t know.’ He felt hampered, talking to someone he could not see; he was not used to that. People should, he thought, be face to face, then you can see the other person’s expression. This was not natural. ‘Let’s meet halfway,’ he said, ‘and discuss it. Maybe we could meet at the Berkeley Fluke-it; how about that?’
The Oakland fluker said, ‘That’s too far. You mean lug our Connie Companion layout all that way? It’s too heavy and something might happen to it.’
‘No, just to discuss rules and stakes,’ Norman said.
Dubiously, the Oakland fluker said, ‘Well, I guess we could do that. But you better understand - we take Connie Companion doll pretty damn seriously; you better be prepared to talk terms.’
‘We will,’ Norm assured him.
All this time Mayor Hooker Glebe had been cranking the handle of the generator; perspiring, his face bloated with exertion, he motioned angrily for Norm to conclude his palaver.
‘At the Berkeley Flukepit,’ Norm finished. ‘In three days. And send your best player, the one who has the biggest and most authentic layout. Our Perky Pat layouts are works of art, you understand.’
The Oakland fluker said, ‘We’ll believe that when we see them. After all, we’ve got carpenters and electricians and plasterers here, building our layouts; I’ll bet you’re all unskilled.’
‘Not as much as you think,’ Norm said hotly, and laid down the microphone. To Hooker Glebe - who had immediately stopped cranking - he said, ‘We’ll beat them. Wait’ll they see the garbage disposal unit I’m making for my Perky Pat; did you know there were people back in the ol-days, I mean real alive human beings, who didn’t have garbage disposal units?’
‘I remember,’ Hooker said peevishly. ‘Say, you got a lot of cranking for your money; I think you gypped me, talking so long.’ He eyed Norm with such hostility that Norm began to feel uneasy. After all, the Mayor of the pit had the authority to evict any fluker he wished; that was their law.
‘I’ll give you the fire alarm box I just finished the other day,’ Norm said. ‘In my layout it goes at the corner of the block where Perky Pat’s boy friend Leonard lives.’
‘Good enough,’ Hooker agreed, and his hostility faded. It was replaced, at once, by desire. ‘Let’s see it, Norm. I bet it’ll go good in my layout; a fire alarm box is just what I need to complete my first block where I have the mailbox. Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Norm sighed, philosophically.
When he returned from the two-day trek to the Berkeley Flukepit his face was so grim that his wife knew at once that the parley with the Oakland people had not gone well.
That morning a careboy had dropped cartons of a synthetic tea-like drink; she fixed a cup of it for Norman, waiting to hear what had taken place eight miles to the south.
‘We haggled,’ Norm said, seated wearily on the bed which he and his wife and child all shared. ‘They don’t want money; they don’t want goods - naturally not goods, because the darn careboys are dropping regularly down there, too.’
‘What will they accept, then?’
Norm said, ‘Perky Pat herself.’ He was silent, then.
‘Oh good Lord,’ she said, appalled.
‘But if we win,’ Norm pointed out, ‘we win Connie Companion.’
‘And the layouts? What about them?’
‘We keep our own. It’s just Perky Pat herself, not Leonard, not anything else.’
‘But,’ she protested, ‘what’ll we do if we lose Perky Pat?’
‘I can make another one,’ Norm said. ‘Given time. There’s still a big supply of thermoplastics and artificial hair, here in the pit. And I have plenty of different paints; it would take at least a month, but I could do it. I don’t look forward to the job, I admit. But—’ His eyes glinted. ‘Don’t look on the dark side; imagine what it would be like to win Connie Co
mpanion doll. I think we may well win; their delegate seemed smart and, as Hooker said, tough … but the one I talked to didn’t strike me as being very flukey. You know, on good terms with luck.’
And, after all, the element of luck, of chance, entered into each stage of the game through the agency of the spinner.
‘It seems wrong,’ Fran said, ‘to put up Perky Pat herself. But if you say so—’ She managed to smile a little. ‘I’ll go along with it. And if you won Connie Companion - who knows? You might be elected Mayor when Hooker dies. Imagine, to have won somebody else’s doll - not just the game, the money, but the doll itself.’
‘I can win,’ Norm said soberly. ‘Because I’m very flukey.’ He could feel it in him, the same flukeyness that had got him through the hydrogen war alive, that had kept him alive ever since. You either have it or you don’t, he realized. And I do.
His wife said, ‘Shouldn’t we ask Hooker to call a meeting of everyone in the pit, and send the best player out of our entire group. So as to be the surest of winning.’
‘Listen,’ Norm Schein said emphatically. ‘I’m the best player. I’m going. And so are you; we made a good team, and we don’t want to break it up. Anyhow, we’ll need at least two people to carry Perky Pat’s layout.’ All in all, he judged, their layout weighed sixty pounds.
His plan seemed to him to be satisfactory. But when he mentioned it to the others living in the Pinole Fluke-pit he found himself facing sharp disagreement. The whole next day was filled with argument.
‘You can’t lug your layout all that way yourselves,’ Sam Regan said. ‘Either take more people with you or carry your layout in a vehicle of some sort. Such as a cart.’ He scowled at Norm.
‘Where’d I get a cart?’ Norm demanded.
‘Maybe something could be adapted,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll give you every bit of help I can. Personally, I’d go along but as I told my wife this whole idea worries me.’ He thumped Norm on the back. ‘I admire your courage, you and Fran, setting off this way. I wish I had what it takes.’ He looked unhappy.
In the end, Norm settled on a wheelbarrow. He and Fran would take turns pushing it. That way neither of them would have to carry any load above and beyond their food and water, and of course knives by which to protect them from the do-cats.