Lovemaking

As the end of the month approached, Katzenherr began to be sharp with his maintenance crews and to press his office girls to complete their progress reports for the main office. It was like that every month. The stresses accumulated. Katzenherr, who was a poet as opportunity offered, took pride in his work because it was socially useful, and pleasure because the House was so vast, so beautifully landscaped and so handsomely decorated. But he could not like his customers.

For them he had a sort of fatherly contempt, as for a child who writes a letter to Santa Claus. The child is deceived and foolish, although he does get his gifts, because his father reads the letter. So deceived and foolish were Katzenherr's customers...and so rewarded.

Katzenherr's title was Project Chief. On the last of the month he abandoned his green steel office and roamed the House, interfering and supplanting. A boss should be able to do the work of any of his subordinates, he thought, and indeed he could. Sometimes he took over the reception room, seeing that the lyserge dispensers were kept filled, making change for the customers, conducting their tranced steps from the waiting room to the cubicles that, to them, were motels or sylvan nooks, as their hallucinated desires dictated. Sometimes he ran the window washer. Sometimes he took a turn in Maintenance, inspecting and replacing the tapes that went into the featureless plastic mannequins they called Chatty Hedy and Chatty Chuck. Sometimes he kept the books, or checked them, and sometimes he took the place of the customer-relations man who sampled reactions from the customers as, sated, fuzzy-smiling and relaxed, they were about to leave the House. Katzenherr was very expert with the customers and did not ever give them any reason to believe that the Venus or Adonis with whom they had just performed the delicate farce of love was only a blob of clay. He did, however, laugh to himself at their joy.

In other moods, at the end of the month or when a failure of scansion made him scowl and snap his thumbs, he detested the patrons of the House. Why should the P.C.A. make him pander to their clumsy animal lust? He could not disguise from himself, in those moments when he faced the truth that (concluded on page 278)Lovemaking(continued from page 221) he was not an Eliot or a Ciardi, the other truth, that he was a sort of transistorized pimp, keeper of an electronic bawdy-house. At such times he returned to basic-basic. Major premise: The human animal has a compelling sex drive. Minor premise: The world has too many people to feed. But there was a complicating factor, an intrusion of unruly human drives into the syllogism. Granting the logic, the world's people coupled joyously and forgot the pill, were too impatient for the old-fashioned pessary, or--in transports of romantic attachment--actually wanted unplanned (and hence unauthorized) children; and all the bedrooms burst and blossomed. Conclusion: Forget about the dangers of the sex drive. Find a better way to sate it. Find a something that, as part of the artificial controlling of the total environment, would make each human's sex life a thing of instant perfection.

And the something better was the House where each man created his own subjective perfection. Splendid, thought Katzenherr at this point in his musing. Then, reassured that the work he did was as important in its way as any number of sonnet sequences, he was able to go on with his duties.

Yet he thought the proceedings were ludicrously comic. He could not help it. It was the poet in him, and at month's end it made him irritable as he stalked the hall with the faint sounds of oscillator squeals and ragged breathing from beyond the cubicle doors.

He was not a very good poet, for he was able to intuit more than his talents would allow him to express, but he did have perception, and he could see the grotesque comedy in the House. The patrons came up the winding path through the trees and flower beds and, lulled in part by their surroundings but even more by their own internal wish, allowed themselves to be soothed and deceived still more by the cup of lyserge and the Muzak drone in the waiting room. Split from the real world, they manufactured a world of their own. He let himself into the waiting room and looked at their faces. That slim boy in blue walking shorts swallowing his cup of instant schizophrenia. The round-eyed man, already bemused, who fed coins into the dispenser and received the plastic coded key that would activate his Chatty Hedy. He tried to guess from the play of expression on their blurred faces what remembered bedroom they would think themselves entering, what imagined love words the mannequin would hum into their ears. The tapes had only four sounds--a "white" hiss as they entered, a five-minute 420-cycle whine for conversation, an ecstatic eep! eep! and an infrasonic drone diminishing at the end. It was the mind of the patron that put meaning into the electronic squeal, just as it was his mind that painted features on the caricature of a face and saw landscapes in the abstract play of light on the walls. Love, thought Katzenherr wryly, like beauty, is in the mind of the observer, but he could not help wondering what sorts of love their minds had made, and on impulse he went through the service passage to the exit lounge and waited for the round-eyed man to come out.

It was a failure, as all his previous experiments had been failures. He administered the antidotes for the lyserge and questioned the man closely, but he was disappointed. What the man had had was as meaningless to Katzenherr as intercourse with a Japanese doll. So he returned to his office and fretted. But not for long, because it was the end of the month, and his leave papers and tickets were waiting on his desk. At this time, Katzenherr appreciated his success most of all. As a Project Chief for the Population Control Administration, he possessed the privilege of real love. Not often. Not easily. But once a month he turned his affairs over to his deputy, packed a bag, caught the southbound jet and spent the weekend that made up for all the rest.

An hour after the end of his working day he was airborne. Strain was gone. He sipped a cocktail and stretched, yawned, smiled to himself with an anticipation of delight. At journey's end, his Helen was waiting, beautiful, bright, loving Helen, and he would be with her that night. There, among the pleasant gardens where she lived, bringing her his gift of violets from the dispenser outside her door, Katzenherr would expend his budget of rapture. He was too contented to despise, but he could not help feeling a gentle contempt for the patrons of his House, who would live out their lives gulled by an electronic sham and never know true delights of love.

Any more than would he.