The waiting room’s walls were the color of congealed pea soup and speckled with little spots of brown grease, as if the body oils of hundreds of human beings had condensed in the tiny, stifling chamber. The floor was soiled grey linoleum, the ceiling crusty white tile marred by slowly spreading brown stains, each marked with its own nipple of dripping water. Each of several yellow plastic stools possessed two round polished white spots on its seat, created by the squirming buttocks of countless uncomfortable people.
This chamber was occupied at the moment by Appelina Karp alone. She sat stiffly straight, her enormous rear end sticking out behind her and overflowing the surface of the stool, her pendulous belly sagging down onto her bulging thighs. Her eyes, the color and clarity of shaly mud, flicked worriedly around the room. In spite of her extreme tension regarding the impending decision for which she waited, however, she was distracted and delighted at the novelty of finding herself alone.
She longed to get up and walk around the small room, to examine her body, to talk to herself. But she couldn’t shake off the feeling that it would be impolitic to do so – the decision of the Committee was too important to her. She couldn’t detect any monitoring devices in the room, but she could not comprehend the notion of being totally out of the sight of other human beings. Also, the stools were there for a purpose, to be sat upon. If they had intended her to stand they would not have placed the stools in the chamber. Furthermore, Abednigo Glutch, the Committee Chairman, had instructed her “to be seated and await the decision” of the Committee. Appelina Karp was scrupulous about following directions.
So she sat with her flabby arms crossed over her narrow chest and attempted to do nothing that would move the Committee to decide against her should they be watching her.
And that involved doing nothing at all. Even her eyes eventually stopped flicking around, for such exhibition of curiosity, after all, might be construed as prying behavior. Appelina Karp would rather have died than pried.
After more than an hour had passed, the door to the chamber opened, and the Committee Door Opener, an elderly, toothless female in a red uniform, announced, “You may enter the Committee Chamber, Dr. Karp.”
Rising stiffly, Appelina Karp approached the Committee Chamber with stomach-clenching anxiety. Embarrassed at the sweat glistening on her forehead, she yet felt too constrained to reach up and wipe it away. An official Committee Seating Aide pulled out a chair for her. The chair actually had a back. Appelina had never seen anything so luxurious. Her admittance to the Committee Chamber suddenly filled her with hope. Never had her applications resulted in this kind of response.
The Colony Committee, of whom Appelina Karp had previously met only two, one of whom was the Chairman, consisted of ten members who sat in a serious row on the opposite side of the long table from her. Chairman Abednigo Glutch was a dark man with patchy skin and an enormous head the size, shape and color of a basketball, and just as hairy.
He cleared his throat with a sound like heavy cardboard boxes being dragged over gravel.
“Dr. Karp,” said he, “we have made our decision and it was not an easy one. There are a great many reasons for deciding against your application, and very few in support of it. First of all: your age. You are forty, and whereas in theory we can accept people up to the end of their fortieth year, we seldom send off anyone over the age of twenty-five. Secondly, your family. It is very much against our policy to split up families, and your husband is absolutely not colony material, aside from the fact that he has not applied. This is the reason your applications have always been turned down in the past. Even worse is separating a mother from her children, although yours are married adults. Thirdly: the incident seven years ago in which you physically attacked your co-worker, Dr. Herman Mulch, because he overflowed his area of the lab table and encroached onto your area. Ordinarily, any one of these three factors would disqualify you.
“However, we have accepted you, and for one reason only. Colony Planet Hibbs Hole is in desperate need of a biochemical ecologist specializing in mycology and you are by far the most competent specialist in that field that has applied for emigration.”
Appelina Karp drew in a deep breath, and her jowls fluttered with awe, disbelief and rapture. She listened with difficulty to the remainder of what Chairman Glutch had to say concerning living conditions on Hibbs Hole (primitive), and the amount and type of work she would need to do in preparation for departure (abundant and arduous), and the number of forms she would be required to fill out (myriads), and the number of space shuttles travelling to Hibbs Hole from Earth during the coming year (one). An official Committee Form Server began serving her with forms, all of which she signed without reading them. When she had departed the Committee Chamber, she had an armload of reading material to study. As she left, she overheard someone remark in a tone of wonder, “Well, at least she’s fat enough to survive the frequent famines they have out there.” Fat people were rare. She shrugged. She was simply blessed with a slow metabolism.
She departed the Colony Block and entered the steamy pedestrian tunnels with difficulty. It was rush hour, and the tunnels were packed with hordes of sweating grey pedestrians pushing home to their cubicles. The pile of books and papers she embraced made it difficult for Appelina to look down at the legs of the passersby, and, of course, to look at a stranger above waist level without addressing him would have been a terrible breach of courtesy. Meanwhile, people were piling up in the corridor behind her, grumbling at her slowness in merging with the stream of traffic.
Once she finally got into the crowd, the load on her arms was relieved somewhat, as the press of bodies around her tended to support her like a surrounding wall.
However, as so often happened at rush hour, she was unable to struggle out of the traffic when she reached her home corridor and she was borne along to the next corridor before she was able to make her escape. She found herself in the familiar Services Block. In order to escape the crush of people that carried her ever deeper into the block, she backed into an entrance that turned out to be that of a Revengineer’s office.
At the sight of the Revengineer’s office, familiar a neighbor though it was, Appelina Karp abruptly felt weak and unsteady. Moving inside rapidly, she dumped her pile of materials on the floor and sat on it, leaning heavily against the wall. Her breath came in shallow gasps. A tight feeling of ecstacy, originating in the core of her gut and spreading outward like a nova within her, overwhelmed her and left her shaking and silently crying. At the sight of the Revengineer’s office, the realization had finally reached her that she had at last achieved her life-long goal: escape. And the Revengineer would play a role in that escape. She had examined that role in her imagination so often and in so many forms that the daydreams had merged into a shapeless mass the details of which she was no longer able to distinguish clearly.
The interior of the Revengineer’s office was as dark as a room was permitted to be by law, which stipulated that the minimum light be available necessary for the A.H. (Average Human) to read print one cm high and of one mm thickness. Appelina could make out an assemblage of desks and stools, and a population of milling, murmuring people. These were the Revengineers, the Apprentice Revengineers, the Revengineer’s Assistants, their Assistants, and the customers.
Appelina Karp approached a desk, and raised her eyes to examine the desk’s occupants. Two people were busy talking to each other, and the third was looking at her expectantly. This one had a round face that glowed palely in the dim light like some sort of phosphorescent bladder. His sunken eyes were in shadow and not discernable, but the large nostrils on his upturned nose seemed to stare forth from the puffy face in place of the concealed eyes.
Fixing her gaze on the nostrils, Appelina Karp said, “I want to buy a Revenge. On my husband.”
The nostrils disappeared from view as the head lowered. The stringy hair on top of the Revengineer’s head gleamed greasily in the dim light, and his hands flickered like white eels as he set up forms and tablets and pens.
“I will need your signature, of course,” he said in a viscous voice. “And some information.” Appelina signed the series of forms.
“My name is Mordred Kruger,” the Revengineer said, his thick voice affable. “And now, Mrs. Karp, do you have any particular type of Revenge in mind?”
“I have a great many in mind,” replied Appelina, “and none of them seems bad enough. And I suspect that most of them aren’t legal. For example, I would dearly love to castrate him and force him to eat his own…”
Mordred Kruger raised his hand in a silencing gesture. “We aren’t permitted to mutilate our subjects,” he informed her. “But…”
“Well, whatever,” Appelina interrupted eagerly. “Whatever it is, I’d like to have a role in it. I would have preferred to have done the Revenge myself, but I don’t have a license and I pride myself on being a law-abiding citizen, although it has taken unbelievable restraint on my part all these years not to…and of course, I still would have had to live with the monster. Other than that I would have been here long ago, but now…”
Mordred Kruger held up his hand again. “As you are obviously aware, it is unlawful for a person unlicensed as a Revengineer to engineer a Revenge of to take an active part in a Revenge. So if you do have a role, it will have to be an indirect one at best, I’m afraid.”
Appelina nodded.
“Now, I shall need some information,” continued the Revengineer. “For example, I need to know who and what your husband despises, what his pet peeves are, and so on. What, in your opinion, does he hate above all else?”
“Me,” said Appelina with satisfaction.
“Anything or anyone else?”
“Well, I would say that his hatred extends to my entire family, including our own children, and to his colleagues at work. And there’s one writer in particular that he particularly detests. This guy’s name is Fergus Cobbledick. Seymour loathes him. And he’s paranoid about plagerism. As if anyone would want to claim his inane ideas! I’ve often wished that someone actually would steal and publish some of his work.”
“Now, that is more along the line of what we can arrange,” said Mordred Kruger.
***
Appelina Karp sat on a bench, picking apart a biscuit and slowly eating the tiny pieces. She sat stiffly so as not to jostle the stranger sitting to her left, and talked to her best friend, Hephzibah Gibbels, who was sitting on her right, sipping water from a thin paper cup. Her friend’s pale eyes, which looked like two overcooked pearl onions floating in a bowl of cream of potato soup, were wide with awe and wonder at Appelina’s phenomenal good fortune.
“The only thing that bothers me,” Appelina was saying, “is that Seymour is happy that I’m going, which is natural enough, but I wouldn’t want to make him happy for anything.” She smirked. “I wonder if I shall have a chance to see what the Revengineer will do to him.”
“Why wouldn’t you?” asked Hephzibah.
“Well, he’ll have to perform the Revenge after I leave or just before; otherwise, Seymour might figure out he’s been Revenged and take out a Revenge on me before I go. And God knows I wouldn’t want that; simply living with that monster for all these years has been punishment enough.”
Hephzibeh sipped her water thoughtfully. “Just the same,” she said, “if I lived in a one-family cubicle like you do, I wouldn’t leave Earth for anything. You don’t know how lucky you are! At least you can look up in your cubicle without having to worry about violating some stranger’s privacy.”
“I don’t know. I’d rather live with strangers than with Seymour and his parents and my parents and Seymour’s dog of a sister and her husband and our two brats and their two brats, and…”
“Yeah, but imagine living with all of them and two other families.”
“I don’t have to imagine. We lived like that until ten years ago, when I got my job and we were able to afford…But, you know the best thing? Sharing the floor bathroom with only ten other families rather than thirty.”
Hephzibah sighed enviously.
“But that’s nothing like compared to where I’m going,” Appelina continued. “I’ll have a whole building to myself! Me, alone, with a bathroom and a cubicle and a place to cook…”
“I don’t believe all that,” Hephzibah said flatly. “And if it is true, I’d be scared to death if I were you. Don’t you know that they used to torture people by putting them in a room by themselves? It’s supposed to make people insane.”
“Well, I spent a whole hour alone in a room at the Colony Block yesterday.”
“You’re putting me on! I don’t…”
“Excuse me,” someone said. A tall, muscular waiter hovered over them. “Your fifteen minutes are up. Can’t renew, I’m afraid, because we have a long line-up for the benches today. Here’s your bill for one biscuit and one cup of water.”
“My treat,” Appelina said, paying the waiter. “Too bad we couldn’t afford to eat out more often during the past few years. I’m not sure there’ll be any restaurants on Hibb’s Hole.”
“Or any friends to go to them with,” added Hephzibah.
***
The cubicle’s walls were constructed of dank gray cinderblocks which over the hundreds of years of their existence had absorbed the physical and emotional miasmas of generations of human beings. Millions of cockroaches continued to flourish in the crevices and joints of the moldy walls, and at one time these walls had also sheltered hordes of patter-footed brown rats. But the rat population had long ago succumbed to the predations of the human inhabitants; the last rat had squealed out its death agony and disappeared past the smacking lips of a well-to-do elderly gentleman two hundred years ago.
The atmosphere in the cubicle was soggy with malice. The miasma of malice reacted with the pore fluids of the ancient walls to produce a sticky, yellow, sweet-and-sour odor that even the walls could not contain. The yellow smell permeated the bodies of the human inhabitants, tainting them, so that even strangers in the tunnels could detect the sickly perfume and would move away from their vicinity whenever possible.
Appelina Karp crouched on the rough, stained floor in her corner of the cubicle behind the tiers of bunks, surrounded by stacks of books and papers. She was trying to study, and hungrily tore off and ate the dead skin around her thumbnails. Before she could receive her final approval for emigration, Appelina would have to pass both a written and oral examination on the materials she had been given to study, and a medical examination. She had already failed an initial physical exam on account of obesity, and had been told that in order to get onto the space shuttle when it departed for Hibbs Hole within the month, she would have to lose fifteen kilos.
Seymour Karp sat on the opposite side of the cubicle, watching her. He was a hideously skeletal man with pale, warty skin. His wedge-shaped face, as tiny and narrow as a kitten’s, darted back and forth as he looked from his wife to her parents and back again. His small, delicate fingers were in constant motion, probing the irregularities of his face, fondling the greasy tendrils of his hair.
He smiled, and his curved, filed teeth gleamed green in the dim light. Deliberately cracking his knuckles, he watched for his wife’s response, his close-set eyes, the color of coffee that has dried up and decayed at the bottom of a cup, narrow with hatred. Appelina’s hands clenched convulsively, but she did not look up.
“My God, when you go,” he croaked, “I’m going to buy enough water to scrub the stinking corruption of your existence out of that corner. I’m going to scrub and clean this place until there’s not a molecule left in here that once belonged to you, until there’s nothing left but the taint of your goddamn memory, which unfortunately cannot be eradicated by any cleanser at my disposal. I’m going to ship that bloated hag that spawned you and that filthy, incontinent old sod that sired you to that monstrosity in Block 8548662 that passes for your sister…”
“You can’t do that, Dad; we’ll lose this cubicle,” objected Morbida Cess, her fat, puffy cheeks quivering with anxiety.
“No, we won’t, you acned horror,” replied Seymour, “because I’m bringing in someone else to take their places.” In spite of herself, Appelina glaced up at him. She was curious.
Seymour licked his narrow, dry lips. “For years,” he said, “I have been admiring the slender, firm body of that younger woman, Sciatica Hammerflat, in the next cubicle. I am fascinated by the form of her, the shape of her. The color of her. The face of her.”
His father stared at him reprovingly. “You have studied the face of a stranger, my son? Have you talked to her, then?”
“I have talked to her. I have touched her. I want her. I will have her.”
“I know she is. I detest her,” Appelina said flatly. “Twice..twice!…I caught her staring at me! She didn’t even seem embarrassed.”
“I know you detest her,” said Seymour. “You have said so often enough. That is what attracted me to her in the first place. When you leave, I will have her here, in your place. Her parents will make up the rest of the quota.”
“She is a social deviant,” Appelina said. “You two deserve each other.” She shrugged. But she was disturbed. The attainment of this cubicle had been one of the major accomplishments of her life, and her corner in it, with all the books piled around her, one of her few joys. The thought of its going to that unpleasant, scrawny, young female with her prissy little feet and her bowlegs bothered her profoundly.
***
Appelina Karp had never been above-ground in her life, and was rather disappointed to see that the surface looked exactly like the underground. “You can’t really tell the difference until you get to the highest level,” explained her Colony Guide, Rodentine Asp. “There you can actually see the atmosphere of Earth,”
Appelina nodded eagerly, and trotted along beside the Guide, her hungry, lean body moving easily. She had lost seventeen kilos.
“This is as far as I am authorized to go,” said Rodentine Asp, stopping beside a large metal door. “Take this elevator to the summit, then go to the end of the long corridor up there. You can’t get lost; there’s only the one way to go. You’ll be boarding the shuttle at the end of the corridor. Don’t worry. There will be people up there to help you.”
The elevator door opened, and Appelina squeezed herself in among the crowd of young men and women that occupied the tiny chamber. Several times during the ascent, the elevator stopped and took on still more people. It felt like the old, familiar traffic jams in the pedestrian tunnels back home, and Appelina was able to relax a little.
The elevator reached the summit at last, and spilled forth its human cargo before returning to the nether regions. The people began trotting down the corridor. Appelina had never seen such a wide corridor in all her life. She also began to trot, with the peculiar and exhilarating sensation that she could do so without danger of bumping into another person. At first the people had spread out throughout the width of the corridor, but as they began to tire and slow down, they all gravitated into a tight, comfortable crowd in the center of the corridor. They arrived at the enormous room at the corridor’s end in a huddled mass, where they were greeted by a group of Colony Guides in blue uniforms.
“Excuse me, you. Yes, you. Old woman.”
Startled, Appelina looked up and saw that a pink-faced young man in Guide uniform was addressing her.
“Let me see your Official Boarding Form,” he demanded. He held out his hand, the stubby pink fingers wiggling impatiently.
“I wasn’t given any such form!” protested Appelina. I was placed on that elevator by a Colony Guide. She didn’t say anything about a boarding form. My name is Dr. Appelina Karp. I have been approved for this shuttle trip to Hibbs Hole.”
“No Official Boarding Form? Come with me.” She followed him to a small office crowded with desks and sweating, uniformed Colony workers. The Guide took out his phone and muttered into it. Appelina waited impatiently. The shuttle was due to leave shortly, in less than an hour, and she did not know how much farther she had to go to get onto it.
Finally, the Guide turned to her and said, “We have no record of you on our boarding list. But we’d like to know how you got in here. We’ll have to investigate before we let you go.
“How long will that take?” cried Appelina.
The Guide shrugged. “Probably several hours.”
“But the shuttle leaves in less than an hour, and it’s the only one going to Hibbs Hole this year!”
“So, if you miss it, go next year,” shrugged the Guide.
“I can’t!” screamed Appelina. “I’m forty this year; it’s my last chance!”
“Sorry,” said the Guide.
“But all my luggage, my books, my possessions are on that shuttle!”
The Guide only shrugged once more.
Forty-five minutes later, Appelina Karp felt the building shudder as the shuttle left without her.
***
On the floor in the corner of the cubicle that had once been hers, Appelina saw a small, brown, threadbare rug. Where her husband had obtained this unheard-of luxury, she did not know. On top of this rug, on her back, writhed the scrawny form of Sciatica Hammerflat. On top of Sciatica Hammerflat, face down, humped the even scrawnier form of her husband, Seymour Karp. It took a few moments for Appelina Karp, a broken woman, to realized that she was committing the almost unpardonable social indiscretion of watching a couple in the act of copulation. Before she looked away, however, she saw something that sent a feeble ray of light into the thick, brown fog of her hopeless and absolute desolation. That something was the look of unspeakable horror on her husband’s face at the sight of her standing in the doorway of the cubicle.
***
Mordrid Klunk barely recognized the woman. She had lost a tremendous amount of weight, her eyes were sunken, and her once-full jowls hung in loose folds on either side of her beak-like nose like wattles on a chicken.
“Yes, Mrs. Karp, and what can I do for you?” he inquired politely.
He was barely able to hear the dull voice.
“I am not going to be leaving Earth after all,” she said, “so I wish to cancel my Revenge and get my money refunded.”
“I’m afraid that’s quite impossible,” he replied. “You see, the Revenge has already been committed.”
“It has? But what did you do?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? No? Didn’t you tell me that your husband hated you above all else? Well, now he’s stuck with you for the rest of his life.”
The woman screamed and seemed to expand. Several large, brawny Revengineers’ Assistants moved to hold on to her bony arms. “You did that! You!” she screamed, struggling furiously. Mordrid Klunk could see her baleful eyes gleaming yellow in the dim light, and felt a twinge of discomfort. “The Revenge is supposed to damage the subject, not the client, you blundering idiot!”
“I am told that he was devastated by your return,” Mordrid replied calmly. “Or so my Watchers have informed me. Do you deny this?”
“No, but you hurt me worse than you hurt him, and a Revenge is not supposed to come back on a client. I’m going to sue you for malpractice, you incompetent…”
“Before you sue,” Mordrid said in a loud voice, drowning her out, silencing her. “Before you sue,” he began again, “you should be aware that your husband, Mr. Seymour Karp, came to me two days after you did, and took out a Revenge policy on you. Do you understand now?”
Dully, deflated, she nodded.
When she had left, Mordrid Klunk turned to his Apprentice, and said with satisfaction, “That was the best-engineered Revenge I have ever conducted. I am sure to get a commendation for that one from the President of the Revengineering Society.”
“Don’t look now, but here comes the other half!” laughed the Apprentice, as Seymour Karp approached the desk.
Note: This story was written in the style of and in homage to the stories from my childhood that I adored, by writers like Gerald Kersh and Charles Beaumont.