pretty bride.
Shocked, Lou didn't know what to do. He couldn't let Gramps take themousetrapped anti-gerasone--but, if he warned Gramps about it, Grampswould certainly make life in the apartment, which was merelyinsufferable now, harrowing.
Lou glanced into the living room and saw that the Fords, Emerald amongthem, were momentarily at rest, relishing the botches that the McGarveyshad made of _their_ lives. Stealthily, he went into the bathroom, lockedthe door as well as he could and began to pour the contents of Gramps'bottle down the drain. He was going to refill it with full-strengthanti-gerasone from the 22 smaller bottles on the shelf.
The bottle contained a half-gallon, and its neck was small, so it seemedto Lou that the emptying would take forever. And the almostimperceptible smell of anti-gerasone, like Worcestershire sauce, nowseemed to Lou, in his nervousness, to be pouring out into the rest ofthe apartment, through the keyhole and under the door.
* * * * *
The bottle gurgled monotonously. Suddenly, up came the sound of musicfrom the living room and there were murmurs and the scraping ofchair-legs on the floor. "Thus ends," said the television announcer,"the 29,121st chapter in the life of your neighbors and mine, theMcGarveys." Footsteps were coming down the hall. There was a knock onthe bathroom door.
"Just a sec," Lou cheerily called out. Desperately, he shook the bigbottle, trying to speed up the flow. His palms slipped on the wet glass,and the heavy bottle smashed on the tile floor.
The door was pushed open, and Gramps, dumbfounded, stared at theincriminating mess.
Lou felt a hideous prickling sensation on his scalp and the back of hisneck. He grinned engagingly through his nausea and, for want of anythingremotely resembling a thought, waited for Gramps to speak.
"Well, boy," said Gramps at last, "looks like you've got a littletidying up to do."
And that was all he said. He turned around, elbowed his way through thecrowd and locked himself in his bedroom.
The Fords contemplated Lou in incredulous silence a moment longer, andthen hurried back to the living room, as though some of his horribleguilt would taint them, too, if they looked too long. Morty stayedbehind long enough to give Lou a quizzical, annoyed glance. Then he alsowent into the living room, leaving only Emerald standing in the doorway.
Tears streamed over her cheeks. "Oh, you poor lamb--_please_ don't lookso awful! It was my fault. I put you up to this with my nagging aboutGramps."
"No," said Lou, finding his voice, "really you didn't. Honest, Em, I wasjust--"
"You don't have to explain anything to me, hon. I'm on your side, nomatter what." She kissed him on one cheek and whispered in his ear, "Itwouldn't have been murder, hon. It wouldn't have killed him. It wasn'tsuch a terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he'd beable to go any time God decided He wanted him."
"What's going to happen next, Em?" said Lou hollowly. "What's he goingto do?"
* * * * *
Lou and Emerald stayed fearfully awake almost all night, waiting to seewhat Gramps was going to do. But not a sound came from the sacredbedroom. Two hours before dawn, they finally dropped off to sleep.
At six o'clock, they arose again, for it was time for their generationto eat breakfast in the kitchenette. No one spoke to them. They hadtwenty minutes in which to eat, but their reflexes were so dulled by thebad night that they had hardly swallowed two mouthfuls of egg-typeprocessed seaweed before it was time to surrender their places to theirson's generation.
Then, as was the custom for whoever had been most recently disinherited,they began preparing Gramps' breakfast, which would presently be servedto him in bed, on a tray. They tried to be cheerful about it. Thetoughest part of the job was having to handle the honest-to-God eggs andbacon and oleomargarine, on which Gramps spent so much of the incomefrom his fortune.
"Well," said Emerald, "I'm not going to get all panicky until I'm surethere's something to be panicky about."
"Maybe he doesn't know what it was I busted," Lou said hopefully.
"Probably thinks it was your watch crystal," offered Eddie, their son,who was toying apathetically with his buckwheat-type processed sawdustcakes.
"Don't get sarcastic with your father," said Em, "and don't talk withyour mouth full, either."
"I'd like to see anybody take a mouthful of this stuff and _not_ saysomething," complained Eddie, who was 73. He glanced at the clock. "It'stime to take Gramps his breakfast, you know."
"Yeah, it is, isn't it?" said Lou weakly. He shrugged. "Let's have thetray, Em."
"We'll both go."
Walking slowly, smiling bravely, they found a large semi-circle oflong-faced Fords standing around the bedroom door.
Em knocked. "Gramps," she called brightly, "_break_-fast is _rea_-dy."
There was no reply and she knocked again, harder.
The door swung open before her fist. In the middle of the room, thesoft, deep, wide, canopied bed, the symbol of the sweet by-and-by toevery Ford, was empty.
A sense of death, as unfamiliar to the Fords as Zoroastrianism or thecauses of the Sepoy Mutiny, stilled every voice, slowed every heart.Awed, the heirs began to search gingerly, under the furniture and behindthe drapes, for all that was mortal of Gramps, father of the clan.
* * * * *
But Gramps had left not his Earthly husk but a note, which Lou finallyfound on the dresser, under a paperweight which was a treasured souvenirfrom the World's Fair of 2000. Unsteadily, Lou read it aloud:
"'Somebody who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I knowhow all these years last night turned on me like a mad dog and dilutedmy anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can nolonger bear the crushing burden of life as I once could. So, after lastnight's bitter experience, I say good-by. The cares of this world willsoon drop away like a cloak of thorns and I shall know peace. By thetime you find this, I will be gone.'"
"Gosh," said Willy brokenly, "he didn't even get to see how the5000-mile Speedway Race was going to come out."
"Or the Solar Series," Eddie said, with large mournful eyes.
"Or whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back," added Morty.
"There's more," said Lou, and he began reading aloud again: "'I, HaroldD. Ford, etc., do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my lastWill and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by meat any time heretofore made.'"
"No!" cried Willy. "Not another one!"
"'I do stipulate,'" read Lou, "'that all of my property, of whatsoeverkind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to beheld in common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally,share and share alike.'"
"Issue?" said Emerald.
Lou included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. "It means we all ownthe whole damn shootin' match."
Each eye turned instantly to the bed.
"Share and share alike?" asked Morty.
"Actually," said Willy, who was the oldest one present, "it's just likethe old system, where the oldest people head up things with theirheadquarters in here and--"
"I like _that_!" exclaimed Em. "Lou owns as much of it as you do, and Isay it ought to be for the oldest one who's still working. You cansnooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, while poorLou stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and--"
"How about letting somebody who's never had _any_ privacy get a littlecrack at it?" Eddie demanded hotly. "Hell, you old people had plenty ofprivacy back when you were kids. I was born and raised in the middle ofthat goddamn barracks in the hall! How about--"
"Yeah?" challenged Morty. "Sure, you've all had it pretty tough, and myheart bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick."
"_Silence!_" shouted Willy imperiously. "The next person who opens hismouth spends the next sixth months by the bathroom. Now clear out of myroom. I want to think."
A vase shattered against the wall, in
ches above his head.
* * * * *
In the next moment, a free-for-all was under way, with each couplebattling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitionsformed and dissolved with the lightning changes of the tacticalsituation. Em and Lou were thrown into the hall, where they organizedothers in the same situation, and stormed back into the room.
After two hours of struggle, with nothing like a decision in sight, thecops broke in, followed by television cameramen from mobile units.
For the next half-hour, patrol wagons and ambulances hauled away Fords,and then the apartment was still and spacious.
An hour later, films of the last stages of the riot were being televisedto 500,000,000 delighted viewers on the Eastern Seaboard.
In the stillness of the three-room Ford apartment on the 76th floor ofBuilding 257, the television set had been left on. Once more the air wasfilled with the cries and grunts and crashes of the fray, comingharmlessly now from the loudspeaker.
The battle also appeared on the screen of the television set in thepolice station, where the Fords and their captors watched withprofessional interest.
Em and Lou, in adjacent four-by-eight cells, were stretched outpeacefully on their cots.
"Em," called Lou through the partition, "you got a washbasin all yourown, too?"
"Sure. Washbasin, bed, light--the works. And we thought _Gramps'_ roomwas something. How long has this been going on?" She held out her hand."For the first time in forty years, hon, I haven't got the shakes--lookat me!"
"Cross your fingers," said Lou. "The lawyer's going to try to get us ayear."
"Gee!" Em said dreamily. "I wonder what kind of wires you'd have to pullto get put away in solitary?"
"All right, pipe down," said the turnkey, "or I'll toss the whole kitand caboodle of you right out. And first one who lets on to anybodyoutside how good jail is ain't never getting back in!"
The prisoners instantly fell silent.
* * * * *
The living room of the apartment darkened for a moment as the riotscenes faded on the television screen, and then the face of theannouncer appeared, like the Sun coming from behind a cloud. "And now,friends," he said, "I have a special message from the makers ofanti-gerasone, a message for all you folks over 150. Are you hamperedsocially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration or lossof hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone wasdeveloped? Well, if you are, you need no longer suffer, need no longerfeel different and out of things.
"After years of research, medical science has now developed_Super_-anti-gerasone! In weeks--yes, weeks--you can look, feel and actas young as your great-great-grandchildren! Wouldn't you pay $5,000 tobe indistinguishable from everybody else? Well, you don't have to. Safe,tested _Super_-anti-gerasone costs you only a few dollars a day.
"Write now for your free trial carton. Just put your name and address ona dollar postcard, and mail it to '_Super_,' Box 500,000, Schenectady,N. Y. Have you got that? I'll repeat it. '_Super_,' Box 500,000 ..."
Underlining the announcer's words was the scratching of Gramps' pen, theone Willy had given him the night before. He had come in, a few minutesearlier, from the Idle Hour Tavern, which commanded a view of Building257 from across the square of asphalt known as the Alden Village Green.He had called a cleaning woman to come straighten the place up, then hadhired the best lawyer in town to get his descendants a conviction, agenius who had never gotten a client less than a year and a day. Grampshad then moved the daybed before the television screen, so that he couldwatch from a reclining position. It was something he'd dreamed of doingfor years.
"Schen-_ec_-ta-dy," murmured Gramps. "Got it!" His face had changedremarkably. His facial muscles seemed to have relaxed, revealingkindness and equanimity under what had been taut lines of bad temper. Itwas almost as though his trial package of _Super_-anti-gerasone hadalready arrived. When something amused him on television, he smiledeasily, rather than barely managing to lengthen the thin line of hismouth a millimeter.
Life was good. He could hardly wait to see what was going to happennext.
--KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _Galaxy Science Fiction_ January 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
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