The Old Reactor Page 2

  On the next Sunday, a chilly, blustery day, Moldenke’s aunt’s obituary finally appeared in the paper. He hurried into his clothes, ate a stale bear claw, hid the shoebox with the remainder of the ten mill under a paint-spattered drop cloth in the attic, and rushed to the car stop. It would all have to be brought off quickly, the ceremony and the burial. He would be leaving for Altobello in three days.

  When it comes to the recent spate of impulse suicides among Bunkerville jellyheads, explanations vary. Some blame it on a localized effect of the “Voice of Bunkerville” radio broadcasts over station KUNK, which often make serious demands on listeners. Take Eliard Mozarti, a metals fabricator, who said friends bought him a wind-up radio last Coward’s Day and each night since then he dialed in the Voice of Bunkerville from five to nine and when the order went out to kill himself he tried. Fortunately for him the hot bullet sizzled through his optic nerve, leaving him half blind but otherwise uninjured. He was up and about that very afternoon, chatting with close friends. KUNK put the idea in his head, so he claims.

  The question is, can this kind of radio go on killing the weak of will for a lark? Can it take all jellyhead life from earth, one tortured soul at a time? Bunkervillians seem helpless under its spell, unable even to take their radios by the knobs and turn them off. Why couldn’t they jerk the plug and silence the thing for good? Why do they let the broadcasts play on in their heads until they feel the heat of the bullet themselves?

  Moldenke had to lean forward at a striking angle when he got off the streetcar to make headway in the blasts of polar wind and the wild whirls of dry snow in the streets. He was looking for the cold-storage unit, a shabby gray adjunct of the Charnel itself where the aunt’s body was being kept under refrigeration. The building had once been a gymnasium and dormitory for young Christian men.

  Moldenke stood outside in the cold, looking impatiently through the glass doors until someone saw him and opened one of them a crack. “Yes?”

  “I’m here to pick up that older lady who was in the paper this morning. She died in the Charnel. Name of Moldenke.”

  The attendant opened the door fully. “Come in. You’d be…?”

  “She’s my aunt, a wonderful old gal. I loved her a lot.”

  “There is a storage fee to pay. Twenty-six hours. That’s a half mil.”

  Moldenke peeled off two twenty-fives and gave it to the attendant. “That’s a damned steep charge. I hope you pay your people well.”

  “Did you want her to rot?”

  “Never mind. I’ll take the body.”

  “How did you get here?”

  Moldenke hadn’t given a moment’s thought to how he would move his aunt from Charnel Storage to wherever he would eventually bury her. There was no sense wasting money on a costly plot at Eternity Meadows. But he could afford a shovel and there were empty lots all over town. Would the ground be frozen and the digging impossible? He would have to think of an alternative.

  “I came by streetcar.”

  “What will you do then, carry her?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “She is very light, practically a skeleton. What you can do is let us cremate her. I’ll make you a special offer. I’ll do it myself on my lunch hour.”

  “How much?”

  “Another quarter mil.”

  “No, I’ll take her.”

  “She’ll be cold and stiff for a while, you know.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “Come into the back, then. We’ll get her.”

  The attendant led Moldenke down a cinder-block hallway into the “cool room,” where the dead were stacked five or six high with I.D. tags wired to their toes. Snow drifted through the wide open windows, settling into little hills atop the frozen bodies. The males were stored on one side of the aisle, females on the other. Some of the protruding feet were blue and bruised, others as white as the snow itself.

  “Where are the children?” Moldenke asked. “There must be dead children somewhere.”

  “We keep them separately. If we threw them on the pile, they’d slide off and we’d have a big mess. We keep them in bins, standing up, little shoulder to little shoulder.”

  “I understand,” Moldenke said.

  “This weather arrived just in time,” the attendant said. “The lines at the ice distributing stations were growing rapidly longer morning to morning until the cold came. These bodies would smell to holy hell if they thawed.”

  The attendant stopped and held one of the tags close to his eyes. “Here we go. This is her.” Being a recent death, she was very near the top, one layer deep. “You lift that top body up and I’ll slide her out.”

  The attendant had no difficulty in pulling the aunt’s body out from the stack and standing her on her feet in the aisle and holding her up by the neck. “See,” he said. “It’s easy when they’re frozen, hardly any friction.”

  Moldenke was unsure just how to carry her. In his arms, like a stiffened child? She was no heavier or larger than a golf bag. He tried to pick her up, but he couldn’t get a good grip. She slipped and fell to the floor. The attendant kept standing her up. “Why don’t we strap her to your back?” he said. “I’ll get some rope.”

  The attendant went off to a supply room, leaving Moldenke alone in the icy quiet with his frozen, naked aunt and the hundreds of bodies. He looked for the gold eye appliances that had kept her eyelids open. They might have had some value at a pawn. They were gone. He would ask the attendant about that.

  He put his gloved hands around her frozen throat to keep her upright and closed his eyes in thought. How will I dig a hole in the hard ground? Where will I get a shovel? Will they even let me on the streetcar with a frozen corpse strapped to my back?

  The attendant returned with a length of strong twine. “This will have to do.”

  “I don’t think it will,” Moldenke said. Still, attempts were made. When a number of them failed, it was decided to quit the effort and think of another way.

  “I could set her up on my shoulder like a pole.”

  “Good idea. I have an old rug in the office I don’t want anymore. We’ll wrap her in it and off you go.”

  “Wait, one thing. She had a pair of lid lifters in her eyes. They were gold. Do you have them? They may have been on the floor. They had fallen off.”

  “Lid lifters?”

  “She was born with no muscles in her eyelids. They wouldn’t open. She had these appliances made by a jeweler so she could see where she was going and what she was doing. Where are they?”

  “There were no accessories when they brought her here, I can tell you that. If she spent any time in the waiting ward, the staff are a bunch of thieves. By the time we get them here anything worth anything is gone. They’ve been stripped. Sorry. Any effort you make to get them back will be futile.”

  “All right, I’ll take your word for it.”

  The business of getting Moldenke’s aunt rolled into the dirty, worn rug and tied off with twine went well enough and was over in a few minutes. The attendant hefted her to Moldenke’s shoulder, making sure the weight was balanced. “There, that’s the ticket. Should be smooth sailing. What will you do with her? You should’ve had her cremated.”

  “She always said she wanted to be planted in the earth like a flower bulb. I’ll see she gets a decent burial.”

  When Moldenke was satisfied he had a good grip and that his aunt wouldn’t tip too far down in front or back, the attendant opened the door to let him out. “Take care, Moldenke. The weather is changing badly. A storm’s coming.” Moldenke stepped onto the broken sidewalk and looked up at a dark sky. A rising, cold wind nipped at his face.

  He thought better of taking the body to the house on Esplanade and digging a hole in the back yard. How could he dig deeply enough in frozen ground? If he buried her at all, it would be in a shallow grave and loose dogs in the neighborhood would dig her up. He was in a quandary until he thought of a place at the end of the streetcar line where the ground
would be warmer.

  Near Altobello, a suspicious red cloud dumped an extra-heavy dose of radio poison on the Black Hole Motel, occupied by five free people and ten jellyheads. “Had they continued to live there,” Scientist Zanzetti said, “they could have contracted radio fever.” The motel has since been deserted and Altobelloans are up in arms over the needless downwind danger. “Will the deadly clouds ever stop?” a druggist asked Zanzetti. “Not in our lifetimes,” he replied.

  When the streetcar stopped, Moldenke boarded with the rug-wrapped body. Though he tried his best to be careful, when he reached into his pocket for carfare one of his aunt’s cold feet struck the driver in the face.

  “For Christ’s sake, man, what are you trying to do here? This is a streetcar, not a hearse.”

  Moldenke handed the driver three folded fifties. “I want to go all the way to the end of the line. I’ll pay triple fare. Look, the car is half empty. None of them care at all about

  anything.”

  “Four, you cheap son of a bitch.”

  Moldenke gave him four. “There, I hope you’re happy—now I’m completely penniless.”

  “Sit in the far back, you stupid idiot.”

  Moldenke shifted his aunt from one shoulder to the other.

  It was two hours or more before the streetcar reached the end of the line. By then, Moldenke was the only passenger. Not only had he soiled himself again, but the aunt had begun to thaw, dripping from both ends and wetting the rug.

  The driver stood up and stretched. “This is it. City Dump. End of the line. Leave out the back with that stiff.”

  “Can you wait? It won’t take long, just a small ceremony.”

  “You got another four? For that I’ll wait maybe a half hour.”

  “I’m busted. Show some mercy. I can’t walk all that way.”

  “Is that shit I smell on you?”

  “I have a condition. It can’t be helped.”

  “Get off.”

  Moldenke’s shoulder, already sagging under the half-frozen aunt, sagged further. Not getting back to the Tunney would mean a night spent either trying to sleep on the frozen ground above the steaming pit or climbing down the slope to one of the ridges below where it was a few degrees warmer and provided enough room to lie down and sleep.

  He knelt at the edge of the pit, bowed his head and said the only rhyming thing he knew. “Roses were red, violets were blue. You were a good aunt, and I loved you. Thanks for the money and the house. Bye-bye.”

  He untied the twine and unfurled the rug. There was little light other than a new moon. He could see only a hazy dark form rolling and bouncing down into the pit. The rug slipped from his grasp and followed her down, rising now and then on the pit’s heat like a magic carpet.

  In news from Altobello, the famous golfing jellyhead, Brainerd Franklin, received the heart of a free woman, Edith Farr, who was killed in a fall while visiting the Old Reactor ruins. Scientist Dr. Zanzetti performed the surgery. “Studies confirm the efficacy of human-jellyhead exchanges,” he said. “Economically significant jellies like Franklin tend to reject the hearts of other jellies, but not of human females.”

  At age forty, Franklin was quite old for a jellyhead and too weak to walk the links and fire off those legendary drives. A donor was sought Bunkerville-wide, though none was found. It was thought that all hope for Franklin was lost, until a compatible donor became available. Now that the Farr heart has been transplanted, golfing enthusiasts are full of glee.

  Just a day before his departure, for the little offense at Eternity Meadows, an officer of the court informed Moldenke that his stay in Altobello would be indeterminate. There would be no set date for his release.

  Before going he would have to either board up or rent the house on Esplanade. Boarding it would be on the strenuous side if he tried to do it himself. There were a few tools in the shed, but he had no skills at measuring, cutting, or nailing. Hiring someone to do it would be expensive, take too long, and still, persistent thieves would eventually break in and help themselves. He asked around among his pro-labor friends if anyone needed a place to stay Someone suggested Ozzie, Moldenke’s old high-strung associate. Moldenke found him in an alleyway on the poorer side of town. sleeping on the ground, quilted over with burlap sacks and newsprint.

  “Ozzie?” Moldenke kicked him lightly. “Wake up. I have a place you can live.”

  “I won’t pay the going rate. It’s way too high. Landlords are nothing but blood suckers. I will not pay it.”

  “I’m talking about my aunt’s house on Esplanade. I’m being sent to Altobello for a while. I guess they need people there. I won’t charge you any rent at all. Just watch over the place until I get back.”

  “There’s a sweet deal, brother. I can’t pass on that.”

  “Do you still have that pistol?”

  “I had to sell it.”

  “All right. I’m leaving tomorrow. I’ll put a key under the flower pot on the gallery. She’s left a fund for fixing things when they break.”

  “Where is it, this fund?”

  “Don’t worry. Arrangements will be made. Send me a letter once and a while, general delivery, Altobello, and let me know what’s what. That’s all I ask. No rent will be charged.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. It’s indeterminate. A week, a year, the rest of my life.”

  Ozzie sat up and threw off the sacks. “I’ll go on over there tomorrow. We’re still picketing the Meadows today. You want to come with us?”

  “I can’t, really. My bowel is angry as hell. I’m afraid it’ll happen again.”

  “Well, brother, I can’t thank you enough. It’s hard out here on the streets when it gets cold.”

  “Don’t forget the letters. I’ll be living in the house when I get back. So I want it to be kept up. Please let me know if anything goes wrong.”

  “Nothing to worry about, I guarantee it. I’m a clever person when I want to be. You know what I mean? I make friends easily, even with jellyheads.”

  “I do. I know.”

  “Good luck over there. I hear all that freedom can be pretty scary.”

  “I’ll get by. I’ll make the best of it.”

  As he waited in line to board the freighter Pipistrelle for the voyage to Altobello, Moldenke read the brochures made available to him. They covered the history of the liberation, gave general directions for getting around, lists of accommodations and streetcar schedules and the like. His plan was to settle down and make the most of his months or years of freedom. Maybe he would get a wild hair and sign on as a net mender on one of the big mud fish trawlers that went in and out of Point Blast Harbor or work on the docks unloading supplies from Bunkerville.

  Zanzetti has completed a round of experiments that suggest jellyhead gel sacks contain living microscopic organisms and that these organisms may be communicating with similar life forms far beyond the moon.

  He took a gel sack from his lab, set it on a stone in the sun outside, then attached wires to it and ran them into a simple galvanic device nearby. There he waited, sometimes as long as eight hours, for the signals to come in. He sipped tea and when the needles jumped and the green-faced scopes danced with lifehe rushed into action, jotting down figures and doing calculations. He said he doesn’t understand the meaning of the signals but he is sure they come from somewhere beyond all the twinkles we see in the night sky. He said there was a general chatter going on between distant animated life and the organisms in the gel sacks.

  Zanzetti tried for six months to break the code. When it is finally broken, he warned, the vision of our species may change entirely. “We may no longer view ourselves as the paradigm of all living creatures on this globe but as perhaps the lowest form of all, which is suggested by the newest evidence coming in through these sacks.”

  And why would minute life forms want to communicate with jellyheads? Zanzetti offered this explanation: “They’re not communicating with jellyheads. They’re communicati
ng with gel sacks. The jellies are unaware of what is happening to them. They get impulses from the sacks and they act, for example, when they cut off the heads of their loved ones. That instruction comes from the gel sacks, which have a limited lifespan. Older jellies sometimes die of sack rot.”

  When asked how far off he thought the source of the signals was, he said, “This chatter is coming from at least ten thousand miles distance, a little shy of where we think the moon is. It defies belief that any kind of signal could travel that far. Our own devices are primitive by comparison.”

  On arriving at the Point Blast wharf, where newly freed people disembarked, Moldenke filled out all the forms necessary to get his pass card. He was issued light khaki pants and an equally light khaki waist-jacket. In another room he was fitted with underwear, linen shirts, a tie, sturdy boots, and several pairs of wool socks.

  “Will I get a heavy coat? I hear the cold snaps here can be brutal.”

  “No coats. Wool shortage. Maybe in a few months.”

  “What do I do now? How do I get into Altobello proper?”

  “Have some breakfast at Saposcat’s. The Altobello car comes at noon. Catch it right in front. Show your card—it’s free.”

  Moldenke headed down Wharf Street toward Saposcat’s. Most of the residents of Point Blast were net menders or deck hands, often out to sea on one of the trawlers. But there were always free people coming there from Altobello to get commodities and mail sent over from Bunkerville. Their patronage allowed the Point to maintain a small Saposcat’s with a limited menu.

  Moldenke shifted his weight from heel to toe to keep blood flowing to his cold feet, waiting for the place to open. Along the sidewalk came a man and a girl of fourteen or fifteen, perhaps older. “I’m Udo. This is my daughter, Salmonella.”