Free Alien Accounts by John Sladek

pressurized with oxygen during the brain-growing months of pregnancy. Her present delivery is difficult. The child has worked down too far for a Caesarean yet not far enough for forceps. What is the obstetrician to do?
    He used a new suction device to grip the child’s head and draw him from the womb. Soon it cried, and before long, Bertha knew, it would be joining its siblings in immunity to polio, once a dread crippler and killer of children. She only hoped it would grow up to be a president like the one she now watches on colour TV, announcing the landing of men on the moon (this president had not yet been assassinated). O Frank, Frank! Where are you?
    Frank had given up smoking, drinking and excessive eating since his heart-lung transplant. Yet here he is, enjoying a cigar, a martini, and what looks like boeuf Stroganoff! What can possibly be the explanation of this?
    It was a photograph of Frank made many years before, to demonstrate a process that made colour prints, right in the camera, seconds after the photo was snapped. Dot became a secretary. As she rode the helicopter to the Pan Am building, she typed on her personal portable plastic typewriter. The ride compared favourably with her former trip on the 125mph train from Tokyo to Osaka, where she met Frank. Unforgettable Japan! She revisited in memory that factory where thousands of workers began the day with the company song, followed by ‘Zen jerks’ to limber up mind and body for the assembly of portable record players.
    Such as the one Clem now listened to as he avoided the draft. He did not want to die in Vietnam, but stay here, taking LSD. He saw God, was God, felt God, left God.
    Frank was at this moment crossing the English Channel on a hovercraft. He liked unusual means of motion. In Paris he had stood upon a moving sidewalk. In London, he meant to ride on one of the famous ‘driverless’ Underground trains. Back in the US, he tries sitting on the beetle-like back of his robot lawnmower, as it moves its random pattern. Travel was his vice. Like Ernest’s drinking.
    Ernest had thank God been cured of his drinking by aversion therapy. One by one, all the pleasant stimulus-response mechanisms linking him with alcohol were broken down. In real time, Al ponders life after death.
    He had engaged a firm to freeze him soon after death and thus maintain him until such time as science should come across a way of reversing whatever killed him. Ernest would live longer than otherwise on account of his ‘pacemaker’, an electronic device to regulate the heartbeat of Ernest. In a programmed novel, he might or might not have this pacemaker; it all depends on the reader.
    Al dialled Ernest’s number in another city. ‘Dialled’ is not strictly accurate, for the clumsy dial on Al’s phone had been replaced by pushbuttons and musical tones. They get into a heated discussion of missile defence systems. Ernest certainly presents his case fairly, but Al wouldn’t listen to reason. Dot counted her contraceptive pills, 20 of which must be taken each month. She also changed her paper panties. Clem receives a picture of Frank by almost magical means!
    Bertha puts the picture into a machine and places the receiver of her phone upon it. Far way, Clem copies this motion, then finds the picture in his duplicate machine. Eagerly he gazes on the familiar lineaments of his real father.
    Dot notices how much plastic there is around. Her plastic necklace, her boss’s plastic tie, Al’s plastic credit cards, which he claimed were displacing money in the realtime world – could there be any connection with that island where they issued bright plastic coins? Dot saw what she must do, later. Now –
    She maintains that the ‘golfball’ typewriter, a highspeed machine using interchangeable spherical type fonts, is a pain in the ass. The reader, Al, may choose …
    Bertha took a new antibiotic tablet, while Ernest explained again the difference between ‘Quasars’ and