The Electrocution of Block 38383939383 Read online

  “Now wait a minute, you can’t tell District President that any kind of indelicacy has been involved. My dear man, let us take an instance, District Seventyfour, right next door, three million people and more, have had to put up with as many as eight Zone Block eliminations in the past 150 years, this means twenty thousand District Seventyfours have had to be Eliminated, Security bless their souls…

  “No, if the world is to keep up its Security Calm, and panic and dissolution and restlessness are to be dispelled, it’s going to have to be a new inner movement in the Master Center Love, radiating NEW vigor via Multivision to the Multitude, NEW ideals of Love, a NEW DEAL in Master Center Love, then your fumes‘ll fade, then your prophets of doom will say ‘We should have known better, this old steelplate that only looks like an old marl spike in the universe, is built on solider ground than the ground of Activation spooks with their head-in-the-clouds attitude towards realities of life.’ Overpopulation has always given the people what it wants. There may come a day when Depopulation may come to be necessary at last... this is the day when Master Center Love shall have to disappear from the cup of this universe... this will be the day for the invasion and the rape of cityCityClTY by Activators from Outside... and centuries of human effort, mechanical genius and Love shall have turned to dust of failure… Overpopulation, now a Legislation 86 Centuries old, stands behind You, and You, and You, and You, and You, and You, and You, and You, and You, and You, and YOU YOU YOU! Let not Depopulation come to Master Center Love!”

  The Computer of Infinite Merit worked out supermathematically not only the amount of hours put in by everybody in the world listening to Multivision Love Broadcasts, but because of its contact with the various multibillion disks upon the breastbones of mankind, by a method of such high mechanical mystery, almost mystical in its farreaching significance and political depth, it computed the intensity of the communicant’s attention to Love. These complicated figures were broken down by Data Divisions of the General Computer Command, and it was the sum of these figures that had to do with the Merit accumulated by both the individual of a Zone Block and the whole Zone Block together in common merit. When a Zone Block was chosen for Electrocution, Elimination from life, it was because of the low Merit Average of the whole 2500-odd community. Home Computers of Merit were in use, by which people could keep track of their own average; but some people just didn’t care. The Loveless Brothers didn’t care. The Loveless Brothers didn’t even bother to tune in their Multivision and would have nothing to do with either general Drugs or L the Love Drug. These were the bums of the community, and usually were seen in the streets, sitting, talking. They had homes, they had their cells like everyone else. They contributed dismal scores to the general average of a Zone Block, and of course they were resented and even persecuted. So shiftless were they, sitting there all day with no place to go because Deactivated at birth, and yet not oriented to life in their Zone Block due to their refusal to imbibe the proper drugs, they became motionless and dreamy. Kids never paid attention to Loveless Brothers, brushed them aside sometimes.

  It was dusk. The air was filled as always with the vague, dull odor of burning atomic rubber from the continually flying myriads of guided freight missiles bringing uncounted goods from the Drugway and the “Nutrish” (the Nutrition Commissariat). Shoving a Food Pill down his throat, swigging it down with a dash of synthetic dry water, little M-80 ran out to wait for his father, T-3, hoping for news about the official reaction to the pool of water. M-80 stood there, wrinkling his nostrils because he’d never liked that smell of dry rubber of the Synoids flying around up there, tho after a lifetime of smelling it he couldn’t quite detect it either. No one else seemed to mind. “M-80 has got too many ideas in his head.” – “He certainly complains a lot.” – But M-80, standing there, his hair motionless in the dusk, eyes lowered, wondered if he ever would escape. If there was such a thing.

  Even when he saw his father stepping out of the Ministry Van. The Van was made of steel and was operated by two armed guards who came each morning, flying in silently (but always leaving a faint odor of wet ashes in the still air, smouldering, all-pervasive, nauseating to M-80 when he stepped out for afterbreakfast play). The guards opened the Dezoning door, the most secretly guarded door of the realm unless you name the door of Master Center Love the inner bedroom of the Love Exec. The minister of Zone Block Number So and So stepped in as ordered, with briefcase, as contact was made with his breast-disk by the diskfinder in the guards’ hands. Two guards were used to point this diskfinder, to offset the possibility of one guard, without being resisted, turning the diskfinder on the wrong subject in some attempt, as there had been many in older times, to effect an escape from Deactivation into the inner Sanctums of Master Love from which this one heavily guarded carrier was limitedly sent to fetch the ministers of the realm, duly elected. When the Minister, partially and temporarily Activated and saved from belly strain by the soothing counter-action of the diskfinder in the rocket room that takes him there, is ordered to step out into the steelplate of Master Center Love, their occurs a reverse process, the diskfinder’s taken away. Deactivation takes on full force again but now a marvelous new sensation takes place, like walking into heaven. Master Center Love is neither Deactivated nor Activated, there is no such arbitrary conception there; as a result, Deactivation immediately ceases, and the Minister is free to get on with the day’s business with the other Ministers and Districters, all from a variety of different Zone Blocks and all similarly brought to work. The formula for the arbitrary conceptionlessness of neither Deactivation nor Activation had been developed in the machine known as the Brain Halo, which divined equations, proof of equations, disproofs of equations, balancing them all together, so skillfully, so complicated, a thousand wires running into a million larger ones that grew and snaked and vined their way in the tangled Wire Room of the Brain. This formula was put to use in Deactivation Headquarters of Master Center Love and sent through. But everyone remained with his Deactivation disk, immune, till the return to the No-Zone of the general Zone Block world of cityCityClTY. Who in Master Center Love was not Deactivated? It was the highest known sacrilege to say that anyone on earth could ever be Activated; that anyone had not been born Deactivated was absurd, ridiculous, lies. “If there’s someone there in that Woman Room that ain’t Deactivated, and goes around traveling to the other universe, and’s running OUR universe, then I hang up my tube and lay back and become a Loveless Brother cause brother, that means we’re all being played a wood – and I don’t mean chemical wood.”

  You’d hear sometimes on murmurous afternoons speeches among the people emanating from noisy sIeepSleepSLEEP Halls, where you went to sleep up the Love, or to talk. “I dont give a gerl dang toot; if Master Sinner Love sends me out to that blue horizone with a shot of electrical ouih in my arse, I’m damn sure I ain’t gonna believe in em on the way out.” etc. “Yesh, call me a Loveless Brother if I don’t feel the same damn glassed way, gas me.”

  “What did they say Pa?” yelled M-80 rushing up as his father stepped from the Ministry Van onto the good old steelplate of 38383939383-338373... (that happened to be the queer number of this particular block, and was noted for its strangeness, and commented upon by old citizens, and looked on as a bad sign: “We’ll get it soon for sure!”) – His father looked worried: lines showed under his eyes. “I’ve had a strange day, Em child. Wait, let me gather my thoughts, before we talk, let those guards go. I’ve never felt so oppressed before... it’s been a strange day.”

  “– the water –”

  “Precisely, the water, the water has got everyone worried… I don’t understand… it’s something about something about something I just didn’t hear when the door closed… And tomorrow I’ll know what it’s all about but they just left me in the dark today... Something about a similar incident at such and such a time, water leaking into a Zone Block, something about Activation activities, always that of course,” (aside) “they’ll find a reason in t
heir black gowns to give a name to everything, hell and heaven and both the east and west of themselves, and have funerals on the sly when the winds don’t bring honor” – “they’ll find a god damn name for our death in this block.” – He went in to his wife, and to supper, and a quick tune-in on Multivision to see if there was any talk yet, any hints from the more casual commentators, any mad gloved hand maybe he could find in the program tonight, always so dull and the same – “Love is Patience, what is my rush to call it dull!” he reprimanded himself, and worried... He was a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but held himself together physically and sometimes physically he’d feel the straining of his components, about to fall, break down too; he did 32 pushups every morning; once he’d wanted to do as many pushups as his age, but now he was a good old healthy taped-together Drugfed cityCityClTYite of 198 and that was out of the question. Nothing on Multivision that he could see; tho for a half hour he lay dreamily listening to some own thought of his suspicions of some point in a sly remark he imagined he heard during a commercial, “but a commercial, what’s the matter with me, looking for news in the commercial?... but that’s where it is,” he couldn’t help having the eerie afterthought, full of sinister self-assurance. His hair stood on end. Burn, burn... this was the secret thought of all cityCityClTY... not, as in ancient times, Death, Death, I’ll grow old and die, but now old age and death had been checked, so much so that there was a better chance of death by Block Electrocution than by death from really old age in the 300’s (which no one, curiously, wanted, it apparently being too long a time for life of any mentally conscious kind). One eminent Mechanic had said: “The quotient of care-to-live decreases in ratio to age; past the 250 mark the quotient is near nil; at 300 there is no substantiality to the quotient warranting the continuance of a living organism.” Famous pessimists had reached very old age and left messages of horror to their Block before, senile and most-asleep in the torpor of 400 and 500’s, they went up in smoke with the others on the Shock Day.

  Shock Day... the name was written as by great dark clouds on the blue horizon, some calendars depicted the imagined scene of Shock Day with the homily in large letters, “Trust in Love to take you there.” Or, “Be polite to the forces of your Love.” And some Alexandrinisms like “Love, You’ll Burn it” were featured as jokes in the salons of intellectuals around MCL Hexagon. The Hexagon housed over 20 million government employees and provided Deactivation free while they were there; when fired, they were thrown back into the humdrum ZoneBlock life. In the Hexagon, L Pumps to facilitate the intake of L from Center via L Drug were also provided for government workers. Everyone had L drug free at birth, by law. It was contained in a steel amulet riveted to the outside of the breast-disk just below the place where the Merit Numbers showed counting like the counters on a speedometer. For instance, T-3’s disk had a large T-338383939383-338373 engraved and fretted, and right under that, the merit counters, and the amulet containing the life-supply of Love Drug. But with an L pump there was no need to pump in the Love Drug yourself; that was for the working people of the world, the “Pumpers,” while, for the more for tunate the L pump just worked it in for you. The general theory that you can’t have a world completely populated with unoccupied masses here prevailed, of course, for tho it would have been easy to relieve Pumpers of their all-day duties as self L-pumpers of Love Drug, authorities in Master Center Love, perhaps unrightly influenced by some ancient traditions still adhered to in the heat of change and progress, still held that somewhere in the world there must be some physical motion and effort, besides the mechanical motion of the machine, for reasons of courtesy to the forces of “nature,” perhaps for reasons of unconscious psychological imitation of the machine now that motion was no longer really necessary – The highest cityCityCITY Love Official could be motionless the livelong day receiving her (the highest officials were woman) L and her Multivision in a quiet room, stay like that for months, years, a whole lifetime, it wasn’t necessary to move any more. So the “Pumpers” complained of their bitter lot. You saw their darkened faces snarling in the windless air. Nothing moved but a few slow futile sinister gestures of speakers, generally you’d lie there pumping in your Love looking out the window at the empty afternoon steelplate. Sometimes a Loveless Brother shuffled by, cupping his hands together to catch some Action... The air however swarmed with freight missiles gayly rushing to their destinations. The Machine was doing the moving for man and still man wanted less and less to move. “Blimey crackerjacks, but if them rich sonsaguns can sit there all day their lard tail on the couch of foam from midnight to midnight and all the kicks in the book, why can’t we?”

  “It’s because you cant have all the people in the world rich!”

  “Some’s got it and some ain’t.”

  “Some crap thru burlap and some fart thru silk I say.”

  “Here I am pumpin and pumpin all day wasting myself to the bone while these lazy pale tat cottonpickin mother activators go around getting themselves free-rided thru ecstasy. Why do I have to struggle through and them just loaf!”

  “Pumpers and Mumpers aint got no jemumpers!” sang the kids in a favorite street song. Streets had no sidewalks or curbs. “Galumpers and galumpers…“ “And if the rich got curbs, I got blurbs, in Love Magazine,” sang the popular W70, the Sleepsinger at the Hall.

  In the morning Ministers went to work, flying in the Ministry Van with the two unfriendly diskfinder guards. It was the rule never to speak to them, only to answer when spoken to. This was a precaution taken in Master Center Love, among many others, to establish a gulf of personality between Minister and guards, to obviate any chance of friendship, favor, preference stepping into the picture of impersonal daily flight to work in the mornings and back to the home Zone-block at night. No Minister had ever been able to escape his block, or escape the Ministry Van enroute to MCL or find his way out of MCL once delivered there to that marvelous wave of neither Activation or Deactivation that equalled everything out and made you free – but the walls were thick. The walls of the Kremlin had never been so thick, the walls of Jugurtha lesser guarded.

  MP’s stood around with diskfinders, ready to pull an errant Minister into a Van with the force of the magneto... M-80’s Pop, popularly known as Tee, stepped out of the van and felt the arbitrary conception fade from his disk and from his brain. “Here you are, Tee. Heard the latest on your pool of water?”

  “No, what...”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “No” –

  Someone was nudging the speaker, he clammed up, grimly his lips came together. People were whispering. Ministers and Districters standing all over the steelpiate plazas, smoking Jex, rifling thru their briefcases, arguing, waving… it was the customary half hour recess before opening of the day’s Session. A ripple of attention seemed to be focusing on Tee this morning, but you couldn’t always tell, it seemed to be going in other directions too. At least one of the gathered 9,000 Ministers of the “G” area of cityCityCiTY daily received notification of the decision to electrocute his block and himself; you heard sometimes lamentable moans rising from the dignified halls of Congress. “When an electrocution takes place brother you gets flown back by the dim guards now and grim they are by now, and you’re stepped out on the steelplate of your block and told to stay there, via diskfinder, and the warning is immediately sounded by the guard, setting off the 10 second panic switch all set to go in the Computer works you see people running out of the apartments, you see upset pumps of L and Comps of Merit spilled and people crawling on the steel begging for mercy but it lasts only a few seconds, and your last glimpse is of the Minister himself standing there in the airless void smelling of dim burnt rubbery ashes with one hand in his coat lapel, like Napoleon, eyes to heaven, boom, up goes the block in sizzles and crackles of hot smoke, as the guards fly away… everyday routine with them… to them it’s known as Hot Dog Day –

  “Ah well, such is Overpopulation,” was the popular saying.


  Taps, some called it.

  And this is what happened to our Minister T-3. He was informed and notified that day. Confirmation. Look out, he ran back to the toilet and threw up and they put the diskfinders on him and dragged him back to the Van, tho he would have willingly walked, straight and unafraid of death, tho inwardly trembling. But once he’d been sick and straightened up in the toilet and even combed his hair and adjusted clothing for a grand finale to his life in front of his cohorts they dragged him, like a hoodlum who hasn’t done anything, like a saint who’s suddenly afraid to die.

  It all began at 9 AM. In the committee room Districter G92 (Goldie) who’d never liked Tee because Tee had voted against his idea in ‘754 – O, where had the love of the people wandered? – Goldie’s bill was to centralize Love further into MCL and not concentrate so much on spreading it among the people, who only wasted it. It was a reactionary move by a reactionary thick-headed usurper of other people’s natural rights, plainly. Tee had organized a group of Ministers and even two Districters to prepare opposition to this measure… For just a Minister Tee had shown remarkable strength. Goldie was the kind of Districter who should never have been promoted from Minister nor elected among the people of his block in the first place. But with some front he’d put on, carefully cultivated for years, to advertise himself as a tireless champion of some kind, for some Cause, whatever Cause they wanted (tho they never caught him taking his secret nap in the afternoon chair... tireless, indeed) , he’d worked his way up high in MCL and was even highly regarded by Women in the high Courts... (“shows how much real love they must have up there, not pumped in”) –

  Is there such a thing as real love? was a popular question.

  So now Goldie had a look of triumph on his face, and since Districters were always notified before Ministers at Special Sessions, Tee now divined “My block’s getting it this morning (I got ten minutes or less to live) and he knows it” – But a motion was started up by Tee’s friends, to pass a vote around on an Anti-No Zone Pushing bill, aimed to curb the juvenile delinquents and put a stop to the practice altogether by anyone, punishable by individual electrocution. Tee’s friends wanted poor Tee to live at least an extra hou... to gather his soul up. “Soul” was a popular superstition. Tee saw clearly the reason for the move and the measure. He saw despicable Goldie, showing his teeth, looking oddly like ancient pictures of the Devil with his long sinuous ears and the curve of his arched brows and the particular demonism in the glitter of his eyes or of the glasses before his eyes or of both in conjunction, something hellish Tee prickled all over to see it.