When Life Hands You a Lemming...
by Tom Easton.
_a.n.a.log,_ May 1989
The image boys in executive row weren"t too pleased when I drove my antique Escort to work. Within an hour the Vice-President in Charge of Making Grown Men Feel Like Little Boys had me on her carpet, and if she wasn"t shaking her finger at me, she might as well have been. My uncle Brian would have called her a motherly old cow.
She looked the part, too, as she said: "You know the company policy, Cal. Machines scare the beasts, they look out of place next to the haybins and hitching posts, and we"re selling Roachsters to replace cars. We expect our employees to drive them, _not_ automobiles, antique or not."
I nodded. General Bodies was a genetic engineering shop, and the Roachster was its biggest product. I knew the policy.
"You usually do drive a Roachster, Cal. Why didn"t you today?"
"Archie ran away," I said. Archie was my Roachster. I had named him because I liked him better than I had ever liked an automobile--even the Escort--though he _was_ an ugly thing. He was cheap, safe, and--until now--reliable. And he had personality.
A Roachster was a cross between a lobster and a c.o.c.kroach. Its c.o.c.kroach ancestry gave it speed. Its lobster ancestry gave it enough size so a little gene-tinkering had made it grow to about twenty feet long. Bulges in the sh.e.l.l were pa.s.senger and luggage compartments once GB cut door and window holes. The controls plugged directly into its nervous system. Its wheels were more bulges; they spun on built-in hubs and were powered by the creature"s legs, running on top of them. It ate garbage and hay, which were a lot cheaper than gasoline. And when two of them got too close on the highway, they would stop to stroke each other with their feelers. Collisions were impossible.
"Oh, G.o.d," she said. Her censuring mood evaporated. Now she was the worried business executive. "You think it went into the sea too?"
I shrugged. That was where too many of the things had been going ever since we had put them on the market six years before, though only in the last year or so had the problem gotten bad. We had failed to remove some basic urge from the Roachster"s lobster genes, and on dark nights they would chew through their tethers and the walls of their stables and leave. They had been seen cruising the highways until they caught the scent of the ocean. Then they left the road and rolled cross-country to dive into the foaming brine. None had ever been seen again. And sales were down.
"We need to drop everything else," she said quietly, as if she were thinking aloud. "And find an answer to this. I"m sure the Committee will agree." She looked me in the eye and raised her voice. "I"ll take it up with them later today. For now, Cal, that"s your new a.s.signment. Focus on this, this "lemming effect." And solve it." She gave me a big grin, proud of having named the problem, as if that was half the solution. She didn"t know that we had been using the same term in the shop for the past six months.
In my office-lab a few minutes later, I cut up a potato and dropped the chunks down the sink drain. There was an aggressive crunch, a gurgle or two, and a bubbling noise. I told myself that we needed to make the pig a little quieter, though the old mechanical models had never been famous for silence.
I opened the cabinet under the sink and peered at the barrel-like body covered with short bristles. Small hooves jutted from top and bottom, the limbs themselves reduced to vestigial stumps. It had no neck, its head arising from the shoulders, the mouth and throat aimed permanently upward to meet the sink"s drainpipe, its snout whuffling against the underside of the metal basin. It rested on broad haunches, plugged into a second pipe in the floor of the cabinet, fulfilling its intended function as an intermediate link in the plumbing.
The garbage disposal"s odor suggested animal warmth, with only a faint pungency. There was no problem there. But yes, we definitely needed to make it prettier. Until this morning, that had been my job. Now... "Sorry, Freddy," I said. "I"ve got to figure out how to make Archie stay home."
It was too late for Archie, of course. It was also wasted effort. My mind was blank. And as soon as the Directive From On High came down, telling all us lowly technical types to get cracking on the "lemming effect," I did what I always do when I draw a blank.
I took a field trip. I packed up my wife and daughters and headed for the coast of Maine. We drove the Escort. On the way, I noted that there were a lot fewer Roachsters on the road. Civilian models, anyway. There were plenty of police models, cruising with their giant claws at the ready. I had never been surprised that putting Roachsters on the market had cut speeding drastically. Crime was down, too, ever since a Brooklyn cop had used his Roachster to tear through the wall of a third-story apartment and grab a suspected dope dealer. On the other hand, most people now called cops "roaches."
It was an easy trip to justify, since the "lemming effect" definitely involved the coast, and since lobsters equally definitely were a Down East thing. I didn"t go to Florida or New York because I don"t like unengineered roaches. And besides, I had grown up in Maine, the town I was going to was full of old friends and family, it was summer, we owned a cottage near the sh.o.r.e, and I had high hopes for the fishing. I figured a week or two would vent enough of the Cambridge and General Bodies pressure to let me think clearly again.
And it wasn"t a long trip, either. From Cambridge to the Maine border was only an hour. But still, our spirits lifted when the high arch of the Kittery bridge hove into view. As we crossed the line, like every other expatriate Mainer I had ever talked to, we burst into song. Ours was "We"re home because we"re home because we"re...."
The landscape wasn"t really any different from that of New Hampshire behind us. We could see motels, stores, restaurants, and houses thronging on nearby land, though the Interstate was mercifully clean. On the other hand, the summer traffic was as thick as in the Boston suburbs. But the land felt different. We relaxed, and I said to Betsy, as I did every time we entered Maine, "Someday, honey. Someday we"ll chuck it all and move up here for good."
"Amen," was her reply. Sadie, our older girl, had another opinion: "We can"t! I wouldn"t have any friends! And Jeff...." Amy, two years younger, said nothing, though I knew that she too would hate to leave her school and friends.
Once we had unpacked the car, I let my wife handle the obligatory visits to great aunts and second cousins. She took Sadie with her. Amy preferred fishing, and I took her with me to the town dock.
At the bait shack, I didn"t see Old Ben Harms, who usually ran the shack. It was his boy, Young Ben, who stood behind the counter. We had known each other in high school, but our ways had parted at graduation. When I asked him where his dad was, he told me, "Had to go down to Bangor for a treatment. Got cancer, y"know."
I hadn"t known, and I said so.
"Ayuh." He had used to smile almost all the time. Now he looked like he didn"t know how. He reminded me strongly of his father. I wished we genetic engineers had been able to come up with a real cure for cancer.
Uncomfortable, I said, "I"d like some bait."
"Mackerel ain"t runnin"," he told me. "Bluefish neither. Ain"t seen either of "em for a year."
"How about flounder?"
He looked over his counter at Amy. She, only eight, smiled up at him. One hand held her fishing rod at attention beside her.
"Might be a few," he said. "Try that float." He pointed to the farthest one in the chain. A two-masted sailboat was tied up to it. "That windjammer dumped a load of garbage this morning." He shook his head, and then he sold us a plastic cup full of mussel meat. I also bought a bag of Potster Chips for Amy to munch on.
I gave the bait to Amy and sent her down the line of floats to try her luck. I stayed on the dock to survey the familiar scene. The waterfront was quiet in its senescence, old paint-peeling buildings as decrepit now as they had been for years, though once they had been a chicken processor, a cannery, a shoe plant, a .... The town had been dying for decades, though it managed to show surprising signs of life from time to time. The old boat shop to the left was actually busy, with the girderwork of what seemed to be an addition to the shop under construction. On the other hand, the two men sitting on a bench not far from me seemed far more typical. I knew them, and eventually I found a seat nearby, where I could both see my daughter and watch them work.
They were repairing ancient lobster traps for the tourist trade. I watched as they braced the traps between their legs to remove punky, broken slats and install new ones, carefully weathered but still sound. They were also installing new twine funnels and bait bags. I wondered in what field these traps had been mouldering. Wire traps had replaced wooden ones before I was born.
I knew them both. Clem, the one in faded overalls, had been a farmer the last I heard; I supposed he still was, though the grey bristles on his cheeks made me wonder whether he had sold the farm and retired. Alf, just as bristly, wore a yellow slicker and high rubber boots. He had hung around the dock in that costume every summer, all summer, rain or shine, for as many years as I could remember. I had once heard him say that it was just in case some tourist wanted to take a picture of a gen-yoo-ine Down-Easter.
Clem looked at me when I sat down. "Hiyah, Cal," he said. "Ain"t seen you for awhile."
"Been workin" up to Boston." I dropped into the speech rhythms of my childhood without thinking.
Alf laughed. "Turned into an out-a-stater yet?"
I smiled back at him. "Feel like one sometimes."
"Your girl won"t catch much." Clem pointed at Amy with his hammer.
"Ayuh," said Alf. "Ain"t nuthin" out there a"tall."
I glanced toward the bait shack. "Young Ben said maybe flounder."
"Nah," said Clem. "No mackerel. No blues. No cod. No flounder."
"Nuthin"," said Alf. His cheek bulged as he worked whatever he was chewing out of the way. His lips pursed, and he spat a stream of something brown over the side of the wharf.
"d.a.m.n good thing," said Clem. "d.a.m.n good thing them genetic engineers invented potsters." I looked for Amy. She had her hook baited and was paying the line over the side of the float. The bag of Potster Chips lay beside her, colorful in the distance. Potsters were a very successful hybrid of lobster and Maine potato.
"Saved the potato farmer, they did," said Alf.
"Saved me too."
"I heard about that," said Alf.
"I haven"t," I said.
"Well." Clem drove a nail into a slat for the trap he was holding between his knees. "Couple years ago. I put in a field of peterkins. Seed company swore they"d grow to six-room size, even in Maine. Then I could slip foundations under "em and have me a housing development."
I knew about peterkins. They were giant, genetically engineered pumpkins. Once they reached their full growth, they could be hollowed out, dried, treated with sealants and preservatives, and fitted with doors and windows. They had made the first real dent in the world-wide need for low-cost housing. General Bodies, even though it specialized in designer animals, had long envied Burpee for its success.
"But we got an early frost that year. They didn"t make much more"n closets."