Read Online The Steam-Driven Boy by John Sladek - Free Book Online

lower our shocking death toll. You will cooperate, won’t you? Thank you.’ The screen went dark, and the set dispensed a pamphlet. It was a complete account of his accident, and a warning about unpasteurized milk. He would be in bed for a week, it said, and urged him to make use of his telephone and FRIENDS.
    Professor David Wattleigh sat in the tepid water of his swimming pool in Southern California and longed to swim. But it was forbidden. The gadgets had some way of knowing what he was doing, he supposed, for every time he immersed himself deeper than his chest, the motor of the resuscitator clattered a warning from poolside. It sounded like the snarl of a sheep-dog. Or perhaps, he reflected, a Hound of Heaven, an anti-Mephistopheles, come to tempt him into virtue.
    Wattleigh sat perfectly still for a moment, then reluctantly he heaved his plump pink body out of the water. Ah, it was no better than a bath. As he passed into the house, he cast a glance of contempt and loathing at thesquat machine.
    It seemed as if anything he wished to do were forbidden. Since the day he’d been forced to abandon Nineteenth-Century English Literature, the constraints of
mechanica
had tightened about Wattleigh, closing him off from his old pleasures one by one. Gone were his pipe and port, his lavish luncheons, his morning swim. In place of his library, there now existed a kind of vending machine that each day ‘vended’ him two pages of thoroughly bowdlerized Dickens. Gay, colourful, witty passages they were, too, set in large Schoolbook type. They depressed him thoroughly.
    Yet he had not given up entirely. He pronounced anathema upon the Machines in every letter he wrote to Delphinia. an imaginary lady of his acquaintance, and he feuded with the dining-room about his luncheons.
    If the dining-room did not actually withhold food from him, it did its best to take away his appetite. At various times, it had painted itself bilious yellow, played loud and raucous music and flashed portraits of naked fat people upon its walls. Each day it had some new trick to play, and each day, Wattleigh outwitted it.
    Now he girded on his academic gown and entered the dining-room, prepared for baffle. Today, he saw, the room was upholstered in green velvet and lit by a gold chandelier. The dining table was heavy, solid oak, unfinished. There was not a particle of food upon it.
    Instead there was a blonde, comely woman.
    ‘Hello,’ she said, jumping down from the table. ‘Are you Professor David Wattleigh? I’m Helena Hershee, from New York. I got your name through FRIENDS , and I just had to look you up.’
    ‘I – how do you do?’ he stammered. By way of answer, she unzipped her dress.
    MED 19 approved what followed as tending to weaken that harmful delusion, ‘Delphinia’. MED 8 projected a year of treatment, and found the resultant weight loss could add as much as 12 years to patient Wattleigh’s life.
    After Helena had gone to sleep, the Professor played a few games with the Ideal Chessplayer. Wattleigh had once belonged to a chess club, and he did not want to lose touch with the game entirely. And one did get rusty. He was amazed at how many times the Ideal Chessplayer had to actually cheat to let him win.
    But win he did, game after game, and the Ideal Chessplayer each time would wag its plastic head from side to side and chuckle, ‘Well, you really got me that time, Wattleigh. Care for another?’
    ‘No,’ said Wattleigh, finally disgusted. Obediently the machine folded its board into its chest and rolled off somewhere.
    Wattleigh sat at his desk and started a letter to Delphinia.
    ‘My Darling Delphinia,’ scratched his old steel pen on the fine, laid paper. ‘Today a thought occurred to me while I was bathing at Brighton. I have often told you, and as often complained of the behaviour of myservant, M –. It, for I cannot bring myself to call it “him” or “she”, has been most distressing about my writing to you, even to