Acting Out the Future
by Mike Rogers
part 1
“There are so many stories about it,” Ellen said.
“About what?” asked Harry, chinking the ice-cubes in his half-full glass of rye.
“About what just happened to me,” she said, looking at the bubbles in her glass of Schlitz beer as she lifted it into the thin ray of sunshine that came through the fence and cut across the table like a laser-beam if lasers had been invented yet.
“You were asleep,” said Karen, tugging at her own over-tight dark curls. Next time, if she could spring the extra dollars, if Vernon got lucky with an editor, she’d have the permanent done professionally.
“How d’ya know?”
“It’s the breathing. I roomed with you on the field-course, remember?”
“That was just the vermouth,” said Ellen, “which depresses the metabolism unduly because of the herbs.”
“There’s plenty of other things depress me more than vermouth,” said Vernon, who was flipping a beer-mat and catching it, skilfully, obsessively. His glass was empty.
“What’s with him?” asked Harry.
“Campbell said his last story wasn’t quite right, but he’d definitely take his next one, only he don’t got no next one,” Karen explained, still tugging at her curls.
“What are there so many stories about?” asked Vernon.
“People who fall asleep,” said Ellen, “and when they wake up, years and years have gone by.”
“Uh-huh,” said Vernon, and “Damn!” as he bent down to pick up the beer-mat. “Three hundred fifty-three. Time to start again.”
“And you’re doing it for why?” asked Harry.
“He says it occupies his conscious mind and lets the ideas seep upwards,” explained Karen.
Harry snorted.
“Could be worse,” said Ellen. “He could be listening to the ball game on the radio.”
“Could be worse than that,” said Karen, “he could be listening to find out who’s un-American today.”
“Yeah,” said Ellen, picking at the label on her now-empty bottle of Schlitz. “It ain’t only good things come out of Wisconsin.”
“In the future,” said Harry, and stopped.
“Does he do that all the time?” whispered Karen to Ellen.
“You don’t wanna know, honey,” Ellen whispered back, and they both laughed.
“In the future,” said Harry, “they’ll know more.”
“And understand less,” said Vernon.
“How so?” asked Ellen, fishing another beer out of the bucket under the table.
“Too much information to process,” said Karen, “like I put enough Toni on my hair for both of the twins in the advertisement, and now I can’t do a thing with it.”
“I’m gonna go consult my best advisers,” said Vernon, scraping back his chair on the rough concrete patio.
“Who they?” asked Harry, reaching for the discarded beer-mat.
“The insides of my eye-lids,” Vernon called back over his shoulder.
“Got any more of that rye, Harry?” asked Karen.
“Sure,” said Harry, getting the bottle out of the bucket under the table and letting the drips fall on his bare thighs to cool them. “Waddya want it for?”
“Vernon’s gonna have his normal sleep now, so tonight he’ll snore double, and rye’s healthier than veronal if you have to room with him, which I do, on account of I’m married to him. Secondly, I wanna see into the future, and rye is a great spectacle-cleaner.”
“Whaddaya mean?” asked Harry, the successfully caught beer-mat held between forefinger and thumb, the rest of the fingers raised, like someone doing a shadow-version of a cockatoo’s crested head.
“The future,” said Ellen, “is there for us to see, if we only look.” She held up her full glass of beer. “These bubbles, Harry, indicate the passage of cosmic rays. They always have done, whether we knew it or not. Even when all we saw in a glass of beer was our dreams rising and bursting, we was still being peppered with cosmic buckshot.”
“But why d’ya wanna see inta the future?” asked Harry, interested enough to have put the beer-mat flat on the table.
The women looked at one another.
“Because,” said Karen, and stopped.
“She’s picked up on my idea,” Ellen completed the sentence.
“And found a practical application for it,” added Karen.
“Vernon’s gone to sleep—”
“And when he wakes up—”
“We’ll persuade him that years and years have gone by.”
“But to do that—”
“We have to have a vision of the future.”
“No,” said Harry, picking up his cardboard thought-aid and flipping it, “you need a version of the future that you can sell him, one we can counterfeit between us. Flavour of the month is post-apocalyptic. Where ya gonna get a nuclear wasteland round here?”
Ellen looked at the cracked concrete, the rusting patio-set with ripped and skeletal sun-shade, the dying pot-plants and said, “Well...” She hesitated to mention radiation effects, because she knew Harry was sensitive about his hair loss, but he was there before her.
“We can’t do mutants, either. Giant ants, giant termites, giant cockroaches...”
“You been in our larder?” muttered Karen.
“Guys in suits. We ain’t got the guys, we ain’t got the suits, and Vernon don’t wear glasses we could fix. How about robot servants?”
“Think that’s any different from now?” asked Karen, with an edge to her voice that Harry either failed to notice or chose to ignore.
“You could try giving him less lip, honey,” suggested Ellen, with a wink that Harry couldn’t see, “or maybe come on stronger to him.”
“Sex with a machine,” mused Harry, “that’s an angle...” He stopped, because he could see how the two women were looking at him. “Okay, okay, but there are editors out there who’d pay for that kind of stuff.”
“Maybe we could fake a newspaper... Not a whole one, a corner ripped off with a date and a headline,” suggested Ellen, who brought in regular money as secretary and gopher at a printer’s.
“A president’s name would be good,” suggested Karen, “and some crazy scheme...”
“Whichever one of the current crop of no-goodniks we choose, he’d guess it was a scam,” said Harry. “We have to think big. We have to think ahead. We have to think improbable.”
“So,” said Ellen, “he’s Irish, he’s a Catholic, he’s a serial womaniser.”
“Goes together,” said Karen, “he confesses, gets absolved, and does it again.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Harry, beginning to shred the beer-mat.
“So,” said Karen, swirling the rye noisily in her mouth like a dentist’s rinse-and-spit but without the climax, “what’s the scandal, what’s the folly? Overseas war of some kind?”
“Now that we’ve fixed Korea? You kidding?” said Harry.
“There’ll be other places,” said Ellen.
“Especially if the Frenchies find they can’t handle things in Indo-China and run away,” added Karen.
“And then there’s the Monroe Doctrine,” said Ellen.
“What’s that?” asked Harry. “Every bombshell has to be blonde?”
“Because it’s well known that gentlemen prefer them?” said Karen, shaking her own over-tightened brunette curls, as if she wanted to suggest they were really snakes and that a look from her could petrify.
“The U.S. wanted an excuse to steal Cuba and Puerto Rico and keep Europe out. but suppose one of the South American states, all on its own, didn’t want to be run by a tin-pot dictator who lost most of his tax receipts in Las Vegas casinos. Suppose there was actually a place where the people rose up, the peons, like they did in Mexico, and elected, really elected, somebody left-wing? Wouldn’t the CIA want to intervene and claim they had a right to, because Monroe said so back in 1823? And he didn’t look like somebody who wasn’t white or a woman?”
“Ellen,” said Karen, putting a hand on her friend’s arm, “I know you had a bit-part in an Odets play back when you were in high school, but there’s a difference between drama and reality. Besides, there’s a telephone over there, and if we can hear other people’s voices coming down the wires to us, then they can hear ours coming down the wires to them, if they choose to listen.”
“You’re paranoid,” said Harry, shredding the beer-mat faster and smaller.
The two women laughed.
“And you’re making a mess, Harry, which we’ll have to clear up,” said Ellen.
“Pick up the phone,” said Karen, “see if you can’t hear the junior senator from Wisconsin, Mr McCarthy, breathing heavy at the other end.”
“Democratic American Institutions do not go around sneaking into places—”
“Only Republican ones, Harry?”
“You know what I mean!” He drank off his rye in a temper, regretting it at once, which made him even angrier. “Someone would notice and tell the press!”
The women laughed again.
“Harry,” said Ellen, “don’t you even readever catches the aliens, because they’re the editors and the reporters and the police. The only people who aren’t aliens are poor saps like you and me, because we don’t have any power.”
“Okay, okay,” said Harry, “let’s get back to the President. What’s the folly? Or the scandal?”
“Apart from the actual policies, you mean?” asked Karen, holding on to the bottle of rye for a moment as Harry gripped it.
“Suppose he recorded everything?” speculated Ellen. “Including all the plotting and planning, breaking into the opposition headquarters?”
“He’d never be so stupid,” said Harry.
“Depends who he is,” said Karen.
“And that depends on who voted him in,” said Ellen.
“They’re not getting any cleverer, you know,” said Karen.
“I know,” said Harry, “I read about Kornbluth’s marching morons in Galaxy a coupla years ago.”
“So who they gonna vote for?” asked Ellen.
“Somebody famous,” said Karen.
“Somebody popular,” said Ellen.
“Somebody loved all over the world,” said Karen.
“Somebody instantly recognisable,” said Ellen. She’d gone to the bridge-set; they always started with the best intentions and an agreement on Blackwood, but usually finished playing four-way snap. She got out the score-pad and was drawing on the back with a little pencil. She showed Karen what she’d sketched, and they both giggled. Harry tried to take a peek, but she covered it with her hand.
There was a rumbling and tumbling from the bedroom, whose shuttered window gave on to the patio.
Copyright © 2026 by Mike Rogers
