Stained-Glass World by Bulmer Kenneth

Author:Bulmer, Kenneth [Bulmer, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780575122123
Publisher: Gateway
Published: 2012-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

8

Diogenes rapped on his barrel to call Smith’s attention.

‘You would like some more sausage?’

‘No thank you.’ The man whose name was Diogenes but who liked to be called Gray silently indicated a pile of toothpicks on the counter. Smith handed a packet across. Gray went to work with needling thoroughness.

‘Not many dentists like to take time out to visit me in my barrel,’ he said, without rancour.

‘What’s the situation – outside?’ Smith made of the question a tentative proposal.

‘Oh, I can tell you all about that sort of thing,’ Good humour beamed as the toothpick notched in and out in time to the words spoken. I keep in touch.’

‘Yes.’

‘It the Pill, you know.’

‘Oh?’

‘Making people re-think their obligations and priorities.’

‘Priorities?’

‘Favourite word. Fave word, I suppose I should say. Get your priorities right. That means having a statutory two and a half children per family and not asking for a wage increase before the other fellow.’

‘But – the Pill – ?’ Smith was enjoying this.

‘Guilt, old man. Absolutely spiffing guilt, you know. Why, the Bomb had nothing on this. The Bomb was dropped by some poor guys thinking they were helping to win the War. Thousands of miles away. Best you could do was get into a march about it. But the Pill – ! Oh, ho!’

‘Oh, ho?’

‘You tell the missis to use it, she says, “I wanna babee!” You suggest you would like a child, the girl friend says: ‘You slob – I’m taking the Pill.” Gives you a personal sense of power, does the Pill. Up to you if you want a new life or not. Better than a hundred thousand incinerated and irradiated corpses any day.’

‘You were talking about horror –’

‘Horror conventions, atrocity exhibitions, strip shows, they’re all in it together. Why do you think the poor slobs of the mid-twentieth century got so hot under the collar about atrocity – bomb victims, torture victims in Africa, concentration camp victims, napalm victims in Vietnam? Why? I’ll tell you. They wanted victims. They hadn’t seen any horror, any atrocities for too long. The sight of a radiation victim should have made them squeal – it did – the sight of twiggy arms and legs in Buchenwald made them squeal – they should. How many cared to dwell on the pictures that came out of the Great War, out of Spain, out of China before the second coming of the Beast? So few they could not prepare these kids around for real horror.’

‘You do go on,’ said Smith politely.

‘And with reason. Atrocity exhibitions became fashionable because people had forgotten what life is really like, what it is about. Ehrlich’s silver bullet or magic bullet cleaned up a lot of venereal disease. Very few mid-twentieth-century men and women had seen the atrocity of a woman’s face suffering from pustular syphiloderma.’

‘I have seen wax models –’ Smith said with dignity.

‘Sure. But not many ordinary men and women knew what disease was really like – medicine had accomplished much. Concentration camps and radiation and napalm damage came through mass media as bolts from a sunny sky.

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