"Crime Machine" by Robert Bloch
Like everybody I was a fan of The Brady Bunch, and one of the more powerful shows that I saw as a kid, one of the few that made me think a little instead of just laugh, was an episode of the BB in which one of the male brats became enamored with Jesse James, ludicrously thinking this dangerous outlaw was a hero until he learned different via a dream. I bring this up because the plot of "Crime Machine" is very much along the same lines as that 1970s sitcom episode, and because Bloch in this story satirizes TV addiction. (If you have been reading my blog posts about Bloch over the years you know there is a strong vein of social satire in his work, and that Bloch is one of those guys who got rich crafting printed and cinematic entertainment the attraction of which is its depiction of sex and violence but who also thinks sex and violence in the media is bad for society. I can't really criticize his hypocrisy in good conscience because I'm the type of guy who calls himself a right-wing libertarian and bitches about the government every day but who also has collected many paychecks while working in government offices or for clients who are in government or who have lots of government contracts.)
Thirteen-year-old Stephen's father and uncle are great inventors in the near future. Stephen watches lots of television shows (they call them "viddies") about gangsters and other dangerous criminals and these shows have given him the idea that the mobsters are the heroes and the police are the villains. Then one day he stumbles upon one of his genius uncle's discarded inventions, the "subjectivity reactor." If you stand inside this thing and think hard about something, it will materialize. Apparently the machine has been put into deep storage because Stephen's aunt got angry when Uncle kept materializing sexalicious babes. Stephen is always thinking about organized crime, so an automatic pistol materializes.
We realize that Bloch isn't even trying to make his wacky joke story credible when he tells us that the subjectivity reactor can act as a time machine if you think hard about some event in the past. So Stephen ends up at the site of the Valentine's Day Massacre and witnesses the carnage. This cures Stephen of his adoration of criminals. The men who perpetrated the mass murder spot Stephen and when they realize Stephen is in possession of a time machine they try to hijack it. Luckily Stephen has that pistol--he gets the jump on the killers, shooting them down and getting back to his native time and place safely.
The surprise at the ending of "Crime Machine" is that Stephen's dad had a similar adventure as a youth, going back in time to see firsthand some kind of gunfight in which Wyatt Earp was involved. (I'd assume a kid would go back to witness the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but Bloch references the year 1870--maybe this is some kind of typo?)
I feel like objectively this story is bad, but it is bad in a risible way, and laughing at it made it entertaining. Bloch in "Crime Machine" also takes a little time out to satirize the gullibility and profligacy of women, who will buy any sort of goop or device said to improve their looks or health, even though such products are always a scam, which I appreciate. And I have read so much Bloch at this point that seeing him do his typical thing, no matter how goofy, is like seeing an old friend. (I have the same attitude about A. E. van Vogt and Barry Malzberg.) So I guess I'm calling "Crime Machine" acceptable.
"Crime Machine" materialized in 1982 in the Asimov, Greenberg and Waugh anthology Tomorrow's TV, in 1975 in the Bloch collection Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow, and in 1964 in The Seventh Galaxy Reader, edited by Fred Pohl.
"The Abominable Earthman" by Frederik Pohl
"The Abominable Earthman" is a longish story; with its many twists and turns and multiple characters each following his own trajectory it has something of the structure of a novel. Pohl's story comes to us as a memoir of a soldier of the United States Army who played a prominent role in the war against the invading insectoids from Sirius; these aliens have forcefields and biological advantages that render them resistant to most Earth weapons. Though written in the first person, there are many scenes which the narrator cannot have witnessed; he must be basing his accounts on the testimony of others.
The narrator himself is a dutiful fighting man, but equally important to the narrative is a dimwit, shirker, thief and traitor, Pinky Postal. The narrator encounters PP again and again through his service life. Postal is largely a comic relief character, getting into all sorts of trouble as he goes AWOL and steals government supplies to sell on the black market and that sort of thing. The aliens place their forcefield domes over important pieces of real estate all over the northern hemisphere and Australia (they don't seem to think Africa or Latin America worth conquering) and when it becomes clear the E.T.s are breeding humans in order to augment their supplies of slaves, Postal deserts to the enemy, stupidly thinking he'll be employed by the bugmen as a stud and have the job of banging chicks by the score. The joke is that the aliens just milk him and artificially inseminate the hundreds of human women they have captured.
Our narrator participates in various commando operations during the course of the story. At one point he is captured and renews his acquaintance with Postal while in captivity (our narrator eventually manages to escape.) The narrator is on the scene when the American forces are lucky enough to seize their first dead alien, and when they first capture a living Sirian bugman. The captured alien is in fact a baby, and the narrator raises it to young adulthood, so it identifies with the natives of Earth, not its own race--this alien ally is crucial to winning the war. Also essential to victory is the despicable Pinky Postal--this is the central joke of "The Abominable Earthman." Near the end of the story, Postal and we readers discover that the insect people from Sirius are affected by carbon dioxide the way humans are affected by alcohol--breathing CO² inebriates them and they quickly become addicted to the experience. The captive Postal, who is being held in loose confinement right in the alien headquarters, becomes what amounts to a drug dealer among the insectoids--in exchange for breathing on them, Sirians provide him the best food, tobacco, etc. The entire leadership of the alien invasion force is drunk when the narrator and his comrades launch an attack on the Sirian HQ--the aliens are defeated and Earth saved.
I'll call "The Abominable Earthman" acceptable--it feels like a competent filler piece. The story's pervasively jokey tone undermines any thrills or chills the reader might experience during the action scenes and horror scenes and short circuits any dread the plot, which after all concerns alien slavers gradually taking over the civilized world and turning our friends and neighbors into breeding machines, might inspire. But the story isn't boring or annoying.
The title of Pohl's story is misleading. The plot of "The Abominable Earthman" doesn't seem to rely on the stereotype of "the ugly American" or be a SF riff on the novel of that name, unless leftist Pohl means his drunken alien invaders to be a metaphor for United States intervention in South East Asia in response to communist uprisings and invasions; maybe he does? Neither do any of the characters bear resemblance to a yeti, a monster who leads a secretive existence in the hinterlands.
It feels minor to me, but "The Abominable Earthman" is the title story of a Pohl collection first printed in 1963 with a Richard Powers cover and then reprinted in 1969 with one of those fun Robert Foster covers that looks like a collage of images of nudes and gears and other mechanical paraphernalia (cf. Sexmax, New Writings in SF 4, The Burning and Over the Edge.) In 2015 the saga of Pinky Postal was included in what looks like an anthology of humorous SF war stories edited by Hank Davis.
"The Spy in the Elevator" by Donald E. Westlake
It turns out that all three of today's stories are meant to be funny. If memory serves, two of the three stories we read last time were obviously meant to be funny, and the third was probably supposed to be funny. It would be great to read some earnest sincere stories next time. Maybe I need to get back to Weird Tales.
"The Spy in the Elevator" depicts a future the nature of which stems from SF commonplaces overpopulation and atomic war. In the late 20th century, due to population pressure, everybody started living in 200-story-high skyscrapers. These skyscrapers became increasingly self-sufficient, with their own shops and factories within their own walls. They even developed forcefields which kept out dangerous radiation, which was good because an atomic war broke out. With everybody too scared to venture outside into the radioactive landscape, each skyscraper became an independent polity, totally self-sufficient and suspicious of every other skyscraper. Raw materials are collected by robots who venture out into the countryside. Of course the government strictly controls who can bear children and carefully rations food and other goods.
Our hero wants to marry a young woman who works in the department that manages those robots that venture out to collect raw materials. This chick is obsessively punctual--like the robots--and expects others to be equally punctilious. So when our guy makes a date with her to ask her to marry him (a two-year hitch, this being one of the many SF societies in which temporary marriages are the norm) and the elevator doesn't answer the call button he knows he's in trouble because he is bound to be late.
Talking to a transit staff member (a hot girl) on the videophone, he learns than a spy from another skyscraper is trapped in the elevator. So he decides to take the stairs. But in the stairwell he encounters the spy as he emerges through a maintenance door. The spy takes him captive and tries to explain to him that he is not actually a spy. In truth, he is an atomic engineer who figured out that the radiation outside has subsided to a safe level--people can leave the skyscrapers and live the ordinary lives of their ancestors! Of course the government of his skyscraper didn't want to hear this--if people left the skyscraper the rulers would lose their power. So he was exiled. The engineer has lived outside for months, and has sneaked into this skyscraper in hopes of covertly spreading the good news and spurring people to leave the skyscrapers and put behind them this static civilization and build an adventurous civilization that will conquer the solar system and then the stars.
Our guy doesn't believe any of this. He figures the intruder really is a spy and is also insane. He gets the jump on the engineer, and being taller, and a professional gymnast trained in judo and karate besides, kills the intruder with his bare hands. Our protagonist is hailed as a hero, and when the punctual girl in the robot dept. refuses his offer of marriage the sexy woman from the transit dept. is very willing to step into her shoes.
I thought maybe we were going to get a paradigm shift/sense of wonder ending with the protagonist joining the engineer outside and maybe convincing a woman to come along, but I guess the blundering cynical ending is what makes sense for a joke story. Either way, this story isn't bad; at the very least it is less absurd than Bloch's and more economical than Pohl's. I can give "The Spy in the Elevator" a mild recommendation.
Besides foreign editions of Galaxy and a German anthology, you can find "The Spy in the Elevator" in the 1989 Westlake collection Tomorrow's Crimes--dig that embarrassing cover.
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I could complain that I encounter too many joke stories, but I kind of did that already, so in the spirit of the season let's be thankful that I didn't actually have a bad experience reading any of these stories.
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