THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER GOES TO MARS Read online

  Table of Contents

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER GOES TO MARS

  THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER GOES TO MARS

  Thomas M. Disch

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  Some parts of this book are fiction, but Albert Einstein really did invent and patent a hearing aid with his friend Rudolph Goldschmidt, and even wrote a little poem to him about their collaboration. He also took out a patent on a refrigerator with Leo Szilard. So that part is all true, but if you want more than my word for it, you can find out all about Einstein’s patents in a book by Abraham Pais called “Subtle Is the Lord…” The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, which will also explain the Theory of Relativity in great detail (but to understand that part of the book you should study calculus first).

  The name “Populuxe” was coined by the writer Thomas Hine, who wrote a whole book, called Populuxe, to explain what he means by it. It’s a beautiful word that describes a beautiful period in American history, from 1954 to 1964, a time that may well have been the Golden Age of Appliances. So when I had to think of an imaginary brand name for a whole line of appliances, “Populuxe” seemed the perfect choice, and I’d like to thank Thomas Hine for thinking it up.

  THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER GOES TO MARS

  “Humbug,” grumbled the old Hoover. “Humbug and cracker crumbs!”

  The other appliances in the little house regarded the grumpy vacuum cleaner nervously. None of them wanted to argue with it when it was in one of its moods.

  “Cracker crumbs and cat hair!” the Hoover growled, growing more ill-tempered by the moment.

  It was the toaster, at last, who said what they were all thinking. “I wonder,” said the toaster in a quiet, reasonable tone, “whether you’re really being fair.”

  “Fair!” gasped the vacuum cleaner, as though the word were a paper clip it was choking on. “Fair? You mean to stand there on that kitchen table and declare I’m being unfair to a… a gizmo like that?” It gestured dismissively to the odd little apparatus that hung from a hook in the breakfast nook. Strands of an abandoned spiderweb were moored to its frayed wires.

  “I was only ‘wondering whether,’” the toaster continued without ever raising its voice or becoming sarcastic. “And ‘wondering whether,’ isn’t the same as ‘declaring.’”

  “So what do you think?” asked the yellow electric blanket, peeking out shyly from under the violet cotton spread from the Orient Express boutique. “Do you think Madame’s hearing aid is really an appliance like us?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” said the Hoover.

  “We know what you think,” said the tensor lamp impatiently, “and we also know why you’ve been in such a bad mood about everything lately. You’re losing your suction. You can’t pick things up the way you used to.”

  “Says who!” the Hoover snorted.

  “Now, now,” soothed the toaster. “It’s nothing to be upset about. We’re none of us getting any younger. Sometimes…” It hesitated, and the mottlings and dents on its once perfect chrome seemed suddenly more noticeable. “Sometimes, lately, I’ve been forgetful.”

  “Forgetful!” huffed the Hoover. “You practically burned the house down.”

  “That’s true enough,” the toaster admitted with a genuine pang of remorse. “But that wasn’t entirely my fault. I really can’t handle English muffins. It got stuck, and I couldn’t keep the current out of my coils, and… and I’ve been very sorry ever since.”

  “And it’s not very kind of you,” the alarm clock/radio pointed out to the Hoover, “to always be reminding us about it. It’s been over a year since that happened, and toaster hasn’t ever had another accident like that again.”

  “Because,” the vacuum snorted, “Madame now has a microwave oven!”

  None of the other appliances knew what to say to that. Of course, it was true. Only a week after the fire, Madame had gone to Silly Sidney’s and spent a small fortune on a microwave oven that had been made in Taiwan. And ever since, whenever she wanted an English muffin, she had heated it in the microwave, to the little Sunbeam’s inextinguishable shame.

  “May I say something?” said the microwave, who now spoke perfect English, though with a slight Taiwanese accent.

  “Certainly,” said the toaster. “You’re as much an appliance as anyone here. Almost,” it added magnanimously, “a major appliance.”

  “You are too kind,” the microwave replied, with its usual few degrees too much of formal politeness. The microwave and the toaster operated on very different scientific principles to accomplish essentially the same results, and they did not really understand each other, but that only seemed to make them more polite toward each other. At least, on the surface.

  “What I would like to say is this,” the microwave continued. “There is an old Taiwanese saying: It takes all kinds. That is to say, each appliance has its unique function that no other appliance can accomplish as well. I can heat many kinds of foods, both liquid and solid. But I can’t make toast. And my shining friend here, though he can make excellent toast, cannot, for instance, reheat Madame’s coffee.”

  “Get to the point,” said the Hoover, backing toward the broom closet, which was a sure indication that it felt it was losing an argument.

  “I think I see the microwave’s point,” said the toaster. “I think he’s saying that just because the hearing aid does something that none of the rest of us do, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t serve a valuable function.”

  “Just so,” said the microwave.

  “As far as I can see,” said the vacuum cleaner, unrelenting, “that so-called hearing aid doesn’t serve any function at all. Except help support an unsightly spiderweb. Does Madame ever use it? She does not!”

  “But that’s because it doesn’t have power. It works on this old-fashioned kind of battery that it’s impossible to replace. Madame would use it, I’m sure, if we could get its battery recharged. And we could get to know it. It’s probably led a fascinating existence.”

  “And if Madame were to use it,” the radio pointed out, “she’d probably be able to hear me more clearly.” More and more, as Madame’s hearing problems had got worse, she’d taken to listening to the stereo in the living room instead of to the alarm clock/radio (whose own powers, if truth be told, were not what they had been). The radio tried not to be jealous. It knew the stereo could do things that it couldn’t. But it was only a small appliance, after all, and small appliances have their limits. Nothing hurts so much as feeling unused.

  “We only have to figure out a way to recharge its old battery,” said the toaster, “and I know who could do that.”

  “Not me!” said the tensor lamp, with a look of alarm. “I’ve never understood batteries. I take the current I need from the socket in the wall, and I don’t ask any questions.”

  “I’m like you that way. But there is someone right here in this house who is battery-operated, and who could figure a way to help the hearing aid, if anyone could. The pocket calculator.”

  The Hoover groaned. “Oh, that plastic poker chip! I’ve never known anything more useless.”

  “You try and multiply four hundred thirty-three by three hundred thirty-four and see how far you get,” challenged the toaster.

  “Well,” hummed the Hoover, “let me see: four times three is twelve, carry the one, and then another four times three is twelve again, and so I add the one, and get thirteen… and then—”

  “The answer,” said a muffled voice from a drawer of the desk in the living room, “is one hundred forty-four thousand six hundred twenty-two.”

  “That’s amazing, isn’t it?” marv
eled the electric blanket, who’d never mastered the multiplication tables beyond seven times seven. It went to the desk and opened the drawer in which the calculator was kept. “Wouldn’t you like to come out and join the rest of us?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t mind being cramped up in the dark twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-four days a year, for a total of eleven thousand seven hundred thirty-six hours per annum. It suits me.”

  “Wait a minute,” said the radio, looking puzzled. “Aren’t there three hundred and sixty-five days in a year?”

  “Certainly,” said the calculator, “but Madame always takes me out of the drawer on April 14 to help her do her taxes.” It sighed nostalgically. “How I do love April 14.”

  “Are you sure about that answer?” the Hoover asked, with none of its usual certainty. “It’s not what I get.”

  “I’m fairly sure,” said the calculator, with none of its usual know-it-all superiority. Though it would never have admitted it, the calculator was quite happy to be taken out of the desk drawer to socialize with the other appliances. Whether they run on batteries or take their current from wall sockets, most appliances are alike in that respect. “Why don’t you try it again?” it suggested to the vacuum.

  The Hoover sighed. “No, I suppose you’re right.” It sighed again, more deeply. “And I suppose the rest of you are right, too. If we could get that old hearing aid working again, it would probably be the practical thing to do.”

  The toaster glowed with an inner satisfaction at having carried its point, but it didn’t rub it in. “Then let’s get a move on. Madame will be back from her class sooner than you can say electrokinetics!”

  And so, very quickly but very methodically too, which is the way appliances like to do things, they set to work. The Hoover whisked away the old spiderweb and took the hearing aid down from the hook that Madame had hung it on the last time she’d tried, without success, to make it work. She had bought it for only $2.50 at a church rummage sale from a woman who said it had belonged for many years to a kindly professor who had taught at Princeton University, in New Jersey. The woman had claimed that though it looked somewhat larger and more unwieldy than hearing aids of more recent manufacture, it was nevertheless extremely effective. “The professor used to swear by it,” the woman had told Madame. “He said that when he put it on he could hear his own thoughts!”

  All this Madame, in turn, had passed on to the toaster the next morning over a leisurely breakfast of orange juice, coffee, and two slices of buttered toast with strawberry jam. Like many solitary individuals, Madame was in the habit of taking her toaster into her confidence on the details of her own day-to-day life and on her opinions concerning the issues discussed in the newspaper and in the many magazines she subscribed to. Though the toaster never talked back to her in so many words (for appliances are duty-bound, when they are with people, not to behave as they do with each other), the toaster was very proud of the special confidence its mistress placed in it. It more than made up for the times she decided to have English muffins instead of toast.

  After the Hoover had taken the hearing aid into the living room and placed it on top of the desk, the calculator gingerly connected its own circuitry to one of the hearing aid’s exposed wires. It began to murmur to itself in its own peculiar language of square roots and sines and cosines, which made no sense to the other appliances but never failed to impress them.

  Then, all of a sudden, a spark flew up from where the calculator had been spliced to the hearing aid, and numbers that seemed to be written in fire appeared in rapid succession on the calculator’s liquid-crystal display screen. First eight zeros in a row: 00000000. Then: 3.14159 etc. etc., which any appliance with rotary features will recognize at once as the wonderful number π, with its endless decimal that describes the size of a circle compared to the length of the line that goes from its middle to its outside.

  The toaster, however, because it had no rotary features, was completely bewildered by the calculator’s display, and even the Hoover and the alarm clock/radio, though they both knew something about π, were equally mystified, for the calculator was reeling off numbers much faster than they could take them in.

  Then, with a terrific spark, the face of the calculator lighted up like a pinball machine registering its all-time highest score.

  E = mc2!

  “What does it mean?” whispered the electric blanket.

  “I have no idea,” said the toaster, coiling its cord nervously about the wooden pepper mill that sat beside it on the kitchen table. “No idea at all.”

  With one last miniature lightning bolt, the calculator disengaged from the hearing aid. “Oh!” it exclaimed. “Oh my! Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness gracious sakes alive! I’ve never— I can’t begin to— You’ll never believe what— No, it’s too incredible. Excuse me, but I’m going back in the drawer.”

  “Did it fix it?” asked the blanket.

  “I think so,” said the toaster. “Or it fixed it.”

  “Listen!” said the radio.

  Faintly, as though from a station at the very limits of the radio’s receptive power, they could hear something sing. But it wasn’t the radio singing, it was the hearing aid. And these were the words of the song it sang:

  O welcher Lust, in frier Luft

  Den Atem leicht zu heben!

  Nur hier, nur hier ist Leben!

  Der Kerker eine Gruft.

  “Well,” purred the Hoover smugly, “what did I tell you? It’s either malfunctioning—or it’s mad!”

  “I don’t suppose,” said a voice from high overhead, “that anyone here has ever heard the name of Ludwig van Beethoven.”

  The appliances all looked up with surprise at the motionless simulated-wood paddles of the ceiling fan. Through all the time they’d been debating whether the hearing aid was to be recognized as one of themselves (and someone, therefore, to whom they were obliged to give a boost), the ceiling fan had remained silent. So rarely did the fan have anything to say about anything that the other appliances tended to forget it was there, hanging upside down from the ceiling, a mute eavesdropper on all their conversations.

  “There’s a song they play on the Golden Oldies Hour,” the radio noted, “called ‘Roll Over, Beethoven.’ Is that the same Beethoven?” (It should be noted that the radio was AM only, and so it never heard any of the fine classical music broadcasts available from FM stations. Rock ‘n’ roll and country ‘n’ western were the only kinds of music it had ever received.)

  The ceiling fan made a dismissive gesture with its four paddles, and said in a lofty tone: “Ludwig van Beethoven is only the greatest composer who ever lived, and it was he who wrote the song that the hearing aid is singing.”

  “How do you know that?” the Hoover asked suspiciously.

  “Because,” said the fan, “I happen to be German, and every German appliance knows the major works of Germany’s greatest composer.”

  “You’re German!” the Hoover gasped.

  “From the Bayerischen Klugwerke in Ulm.”

  “And you’ve concealed that from us all this time. Why?” the Hoover demanded. The Hoover was the oldest of all the appliances in the little house, having been manufactured in 1940, just before the United States had entered the Second World War. As a result, it still harbored dark feelings toward appliances of German or Japanese manufacture. But these feelings weren’t shared by the other appliances, who’d all been made in the 1950s and 1960s, when Germany and Japan were America’s allies.

  “Because no one here has ever thought to ask me where I come from. I certainly wasn’t concealing anything.”

  “That’s quite true,” said the toaster, “and I hope you’ll accept our apologies if you’ve felt… left out. The thing is, with you up on the ceiling like that, we tend to forget that you’re there. Isn’t that so, guys?”

  The other appliances, all but the Hoover, murmured agreement.

  “And that song by Beethoven,” the radio ask
ed, “what is it about? Love? Or cars? Or is it advertising a product?”

  “It is about freedom,” declared the fan. “It’s sung by a chorus of prisoners who’ve been in an underground prison for years and years, and when they’re let out, they express their joy at being allowed a few minutes of sunlight and fresh air.”

  “That must be the way that hearing aid is feeling now, after all the time it spent without any power in its batteries, just gathering dust.” The toaster regarded the hearing aid with new respect. “Would you tell it,” the toaster said to the fan, “how much we appreciated its song? How do you say ‘Welcome’ in German?”

  “Willkommen,” answered the fan.

  “Well, then.” The toaster went up to the hearing apparatus as close as it could get and shouted: “Willkommen!”

  The hearing aid leapt several inches into the air and let out a yelp. “Danke,” said the hearing aid quite clearly, “danke sehr. But really, my good friend, you don’t have to shout. I can hear you very well, even if you whisper. That is what I was invented to do, after all.”

  “I hope you won’t think me intrusive,” said the ceiling fan, “if I ask where you were manufactured. I myself come from the Bayerischen Klugwerke in Ulm.”

  “And I myself,” growled the Hoover under its breath, “was made in the U.S.A.”

  “Well,” said the hearing aid thoughtfully, “it’s hard to say exactly where I’m from. My patent was issued in Berlin early in 1934, patent number 590783, but by that time I was already living in Princeton, in New Jersey.”

  “That’s where Bruce Springsteen comes from,” the radio pointed out to the Hoover.

  “That’s strange,” observed the toaster. “How could you have been manufactured before your patent was issued?”

  “Because I wasn’t manufactured, in the usual sense. I was made by hand.”