Assignment in Tomorrow Read online

  “If we just had a car, like the folks used to in the old days,” said Em, “we could go for a drive and get away from people for a little while. Gee—if those weren’t the days!”

  “Yeah,” said Lou, “before they’d used up all the metal.”

  “We’d hop in, and Pop’d drive up to a filling station and say, ‘Fillerup!’ ”

  “That was the nuts, wasn’t it—before they’d used up all the gasoline?”

  “And we’d go for a carefree ride in the country.”

  “Yeah—all seems wonderful. Hard to believe there really used to be all that space between cities.”

  “And when we got hungry,” said Em, “we’d find ourselves a restaurant and walk in, big as you please, and say, ‘I’ll have a steak and french-fries, I believe,’ or ‘How are the pork chops today?’ ” She licked her lips, and her eyes glistened.

  “Yeah man!” growled Lou. “How’d you like a hamburger with the works, Em?”

  “Mmmmmmmm.”

  “If anybody’d offered us processed seaweed in those days, we would have spit right in his eye, huh, Em?”

  “Or processed sawdust,” said Em.

  Doggedly Lou tried to find the cheery side of the situation. “Well, anyway, they’ve got the stuff so it tastes a lot less like seaweed and sawdust than it did at first; and they say it’s actually better for us than what we used to eat.”

  “I felt fine!” said Em fiercely.

  Lou shrugged. “Well, you’ve got to realize, the world wouldn’t be able to support twelve billion people if it wasn’t for processed seaweed and sawdust. I mean, it’s a wonderful thing, really. I guess. That’s what they say.”

  “They say the first thing that pops into their heads,” said Em. She closed her eyes. “Golly—remember shopping, Lou? Remember how the stores used to fight to get our folks to buy something? You didn’t have to wait for somebody to die to get a bed or chairs or a stove or anything like that. Just went in—bing!—and bought whatever you wanted. Gee whiz, that was nice, before they used up all the raw materials. I was just a little kid then, but I can remember so plain.”

  Depressed, Lou walked listlessly to the balcony’s edge and looked up at the clean, cold, bright stars against infinity. “Remember when we used to be bugs on science fiction, Em? Flight seventeen, leaving for Mars, launching ramp twelve. ’Board! All non-technical personnel kindly remain in bunkers. Ten seconds . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one! Main stage! Barrrrrroooom!”

  “Why worry about what was going on on Earth?” said Em, looking up at the stars with him. “In another few years we’d all be shooting through space to start life all over again on a new planet.”

  Lou sighed. “Only it turns out you need something about twice the size of the Empire State Building to get one lousy colonist to Mars. And for another couple of trillion bucks he could take his wife and dog. That’s the way to lick overpopulation—emigrate!”

  “Lou—?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “When’s the five-hundred-mile Speedway Race?”

  “Uh—Memorial Day, May thirtieth.”

  She bit her lip. “Was that awful of me to ask?”

  “Not very, I guess. Everybody in the apartment’s looked it up to make sure.”

  “I don’t want to be awful,” said Em, “but you’ve just got to talk over these things now and then and get them out of your system.”

  “Sure you do. Feel better?”

  “Yes—and I’m not going to lose my temper any more, and I’m going to be just as nice to him as I know how.”

  “That’s my Em.”

  They squared their shoulders, smiled bravely, and went back inside.

  Gramps Schwartz, his chin resting on his hands, his hands on the crook of his cane, was staring irascibly at the five-foot television screen that dominated the room. On the screen a news commentator was summarizing the day’s happenings. Every thirty seconds or so Gramps would jab the floor with his cane tip and shout, “Hell! We did that a hundred years ago!”

  Emerald and Lou, coming in from the balcony, were obliged to take seats in the back row, behind Lou’s father and mother, brother and sister-in-law, son and daughter-in-law, grandson and wife, granddaughter and husband, great-grandson and wife, nephew and wife, grandnephew and wife, great-grandniece and husband, great-grandnephew and wife, and, of course, Gramps, who was in front of everybody. All, save Gramps, who was somewhat withered and bent, seemed, by pre-anti-gerasone standards, to be about the same age—to be somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties.

  “Meanwhile,” said the commentator, “two hundred rescue workers in Council Bluffs, Iowa, continued to dig in an effort to save Elbert Haggedorn, 183, who has been trapped for two days in a . . .”

  “I wish he’d get something more cheerful,” Emerald whispered to Lou.

  “Silence!” cried Gramps. “Next one shoots off his big bazoo while the TV’s on is gonna find hisself cut off without a dollar”—and here his voice suddenly softened and sweetened—“when they wave that checkered flag at the Indianapolis Speedway, and old Gramps gets ready for the Big Trip up Yonder.” He sniffed sentimentally, while his heirs concentrated desperately on not making the slightest sound. For them, the poignancy of the prospective Big Trip had been dulled somewhat by its having been mentioned by Gramps about once a day for fifty years.

  “Dr. Brainard Keyes Bullard,” said the commentator, “President of Wyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the world’s ills can be traced to the fact that man’s knowledge of himself has not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical world.”

  “Hell!” said Gramps. “We said that a hundred years ago!”

  “In Chicago tonight,” said the commentator, “a special celebration is taking place in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The guest of honor is Lowell W. Hitz, age zero. Hitz, born this morning, is the twenty-five millionth child to be born in the hospital.” The commentator faded and was replaced on the screen by young Hitz, who squalled furiously.

  “Hell,” whispered Lou to Emerald, “we said that a hundred years ago.”

  “I heard that!” shouted Gramps. He snapped off the television set, and his petrified descendants stared silently at the screen. “You, there, boy——”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it, sir,” said Lou.

  “Get me my will. You know where it is. You kids all know where it is. Fetch, boy!”

  Lou nodded dully and found himself going down the hall, picking his way over bedding to Gramps’ room, the only private room in the Schwartz apartment. The other rooms were the bathroom, the living room, and the wide, windowless hallway, which was originally intended to serve as a dining area, and which had a kitchenette in one end. Six mattresses and four sleeping bags were dispersed in the hallway and dining room, and the day bed, in the living room, accommodated the eleventh couple, the favorites of the moment.

  On Gramps’ bureau was his will, smeared, dog-eared, perforated, and blotched with hundreds of additions, deletions, accusations, conditions, warnings, advice, and homely philosophy. The document was, Lou reflected, a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets—a garbled, illegible log of day after day of strife. This day, Lou would be disinherited for the eleventh time, and it would take him perhaps six months of impeccable behavior to regain the promise of a share in the estate.

  “Boy!” called Gramps.

  “Coming, sir.” Lou hurried back into the living room and handed Gramps the will.

  “Pen!” said Gramps.

  He was instantly offered ten pens, one from each couple.

  “Not that leaky thing,” he said, brushing Lou’s pen aside. “Ah, there’s a nice one. Good boy, Willy.” He accepted Willy’s pen. That was the tip they’d all been waiting for. Willy, then, Lou’s father, was the new favorite.

  Willy, who looked almost as young as Lou, though 142, did a poor job of concealing his pleasure. He glanced shyly at
the day bed, which would become his, and from which Lou and Emerald would have to move back into the hall, back to the worst spot of all by the bathroom door.

  Gramps missed none of the high drama he’d authored, and he gave his own familiar role everything he had. Frowning and running his finger along each line, as though he were seeing the will for the first time, he read aloud in a deep, portentous monotone, like a base tone on a cathedral organ:

  “ ‘I, Harold D. Schwartz, residing in Building 257 of Alden Village, New York City, do hereby make, publish, and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, hereby revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.’ ” He blew his nose importantly and went on, not missing a word, and repeating many for emphasis—repeating in particular his ever-more-elaborate specifications for a funeral.

  At the end of these specifications, Gramps was so choked with emotion that Lou thought he might forget why he’d gotten out the will in the first place. But Gramps heroically brought his powerful emotions under control, and, after erasing for a full minute, he began to write and speak at the same time. Lou could have spoken his lines for him, he’d heard them so often.

  “I have had many heartbreaks ere leaving this vale of tears for a better land,” Gramps said and wrote. “But the deepest hurt of all has been dealt me by—” He looked around the group, trying to remember who the malefactor was.

  Everyone looked helpfully at Lou, who held up his hand resignedly.

  Gramps nodded, remembering, and completed the sentence: “—my great-grandson, Louis J. Schwartz.”

  “Grandson, sir,” said Lou.

  “Don’t quibble. You’re in deep enough now, young man,” said Gramps, but he changed the trifle. And from there he went without a misstep through the phrasing of the disinheritance, causes for which were disrespectfulness and quibbling.

  In the paragraph following, the paragraph that had belonged to everyone in the room at one time or another, Lou’s name was scratched out and Willy’s substituted as heir to the apartment and, the biggest plum of all, the double bed in the private bedroom. “So!” said Gramps, beaming. He erased the date at the foot of the will, and substituted a new one, including the time of day. “Well—time to watch the McGarvey Family. The McGarvey Family was a television serial that Gramps had been following since he was sixty, or for 112 years. “I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next,” he said.

  Lou detached himself from the group and lay down on his bed of pain by the bathroom door. He wished Em would join him, and he wondered where she was.

  He dozed for a few moments, until he was disturbed by someone’s stepping over him to get into the bathroom. A moment later he heard a faint gurgling sound, as though something were being poured down the washbasin drain. Suddenly it entered his mind that Em had cracked up and that she was in there doing something drastic about Gramps.

  “Em——?” he whispered through the panel. There was no reply, and Lou pressed against the door. The worn lock, whose bolt barely engaged its socket, held for a second, then let the door swing inward.

  “Morty!” gasped Lou.

  Lou’s great-grandnephew, Mortimer, who had just married and brought his wife home to the Schwartz ménage, looked at Lou with consternation and surprise. Morty kicked the door shut, but not before Lou had glimpsed what was in his hand—Gramps’ enormous economy-size bottle of anti-gerasone, which had been half emptied and which Morty had been refilling to the top with tap water.

  A moment later Morty came out, glared defiantly at Lou, and brushed past him wordlessly to rejoin his pretty bride.

  Shocked, Lou didn’t know what on earth to do. He couldn’t let Gramps take the booby-trapped anti-gerasone; but if he warned Gramps about it, Gramps would certainly make life in the apartment, which was merely insufferable now, harrowing.

  Lou glanced into the living room and saw that the Schwartzes, Emerald among them, were momentarily at rest, relishing the botches that the McGarveys had made of their lives. Stealthily he went into the bathroom, locked the 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-strength anti-gerasone from the twenty-two smaller bottles on the shelf. The bottle contained a half gallon, and its neck was small, so it seemed to Lou that the emptying would take forever. And the almost imperceptible smell of anti-gerasone, like Worcestershire sauce, now seemed to Lou, in his nervousness, to be pouring out into the rest of the apartment through the keyhole and under the door.

  “Gloog-gloog-gloog-gloog,” went the bottle monotonously. Suddenly, up came the sound of music from the living room, and there were murmurs and the scraping of chair legs on the floor. “Thus ends,” said the television announcer, “the 29,121st chapter in the life of your neighbors and mine, the McGarveys.” Footsteps were coming down the hall. There was a knock on the bathroom door.

  “Just a sec,” called Lou cheerily. Desperately he shook the big bottle, trying to speed up the flow. His palms slipped on the wet glass, and the heavy bottle smashed to splinters on the tile floor.

  The door sprung open, and Gramps, dumfounded, stared at the incriminating mess.

  Lou felt a hideous prickling sensation on his scalp and the back of his neck. He grinned engagingly through his nausea, and, for want of anything remotely resembling a thought, he waited for Gramps to speak.

  “Well, boy,” said Gramps at last, “looks like you’ve got a little tidying up to do.”

  And that was all he said. He turned around, elbowed his way through the crowd, and locked himself in his bedroom.

  The Schwartzes contemplated Lou in incredulous silence for a moment longer and then hurried back to the living room, as though some of his horrible guilt would taint them, too, if they looked too long. Morty stayed behind long enough to give Lou a quizzical, annoyed glance. Then he, too, went into the living room, leaving only Emerald standing in the doorway.

  Tears streamed over her cheeks. “Oh, you poor lamb—please don’t look so awful. It was my fault. I put you up to this.”

  “No,” said Lou, finding his voice, “really you didn’t. Honest, Em, I was just——”

  “You don’t have to explain anything to me, hon. I’m on your side no matter what.” She kissed him on his cheek and whispered in his ear. “It wouldn’t have been murder, hon. It wouldn’t have killed him. It wasn’t such a terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he’d be able to go any time God decided he wanted him.”

  “What’s gonna happen next, Em?” said Lou hollowly. “What’s he gonna do?”

  Lou and Emerald stayed fearfully awake almost all night, waiting to see what Gramps was going to do. But not a sound came from the sacred bedroom. At two hours before dawn the pair dropped off to sleep.

  At six o’clock they arose again, for it was time for their generation to eat breakfast in the kitchenette. No one spoke to them. They had twenty minutes in which to eat, but their reflexes were so dulled by the bad night that they had hardly swallowed two mouthfuls of egg-type processed seaweed before it was time to surrender their places to their son’s generation.

  Then, as was the custom for whoever had been most recently disinherited, they began preparing Gramps’ breakfast, which would presently be served to him in bed, on a tray. They tried to be cheerful about it. The toughest part of the job was having to handle the honest-to-God eggs and bacon and oleomargarine on which Gramps spent almost all of the income from his fortune.

  “Well,” said Emerald, “I’m not going to get all panicky until I’m sure there’s something to be panicky about.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know what it was I busted,” said Lou hopefully.

  “Probably thinks it was your watch crystal,” said Eddie, their son, who was toying apathetically with his buckwheat-type processed sawdust cakes.

  “Don’t get sarcastic with your father,” said Em, “and don’t talk with your mouth full, either.”

  “I’d like to see anyb
ody take a mouthful of this stuff and not say something,” said Eddie, who was seventy-three. He glanced at the clock. “It’s time to take Gramps his breakfast, you know.”

  “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” said Lou bleakly. He shrugged. “Let’s have the tray, Em.”

  “We’ll both go.”

  Walking slowly, smiling bravely, they found a large semicircle of long-faced Schwartzes standing around the bedroom door.

  Em knocked. “Gramps,” she said 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, the soft, deep, wide, canopied bed, the symbol of the sweet by-and-by to every Schwartz, was empty.

  A sense of death, as unfamiliar to the Schwartzes as Zoroastrianism or the causes of the Sepoy Mutiny, stilled every voice and slowed every heart. Awed, the heirs began to search gingerly under the furniture and behind the drapes for all that was mortal of Gramps, father of the race.

  But Gramps had left not his earthly husk but a note, which Lou finally found on the dresser, under a paperweight which was a treasured souvenir from the 2000 World’s Fair. Unsteadily Lou read it aloud:

  “ ‘Somebody who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I know how all these years last night turned on me like a mad dog and diluted my anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can no longer bear the crushing burden of life as I once could. So, after last night’s bitter experience, I say good-by. The cares of the world will soon drop away like a cloak of thorns, and I shall know peace. By the time you find this, I will be gone.”

  “Gosh,” said Willy brokenly, “he didn’t even get to see how the five-hundred-mile Speedway Race was going to come out.”

  “Or the World’s Series,” said Eddie.

  “Or whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back,” said Morty.

  “There’s more,” said Lou, and he began reading aloud again: “ ‘I, Harold D. Schwartz . . . do hereby make, publish, and declare this to be my last Will and Testament, hereby revoking any and all former wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made.’ ”