The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ in his speech.

      ‘The miraculous does occur,’ he said. ‘Nor need we go in search of it. Sometimes it comes in search of us. As an example which springs readily to mind, I have just seen a You-Foe over Ermalpa.’

      The Frenchmen laughed heartily. One said, ‘I do not think that Sir Winston Churchill would commend himself to such miracles.’

      Ajdini was also laughing, perhaps merely at the unexpectedness of his remark. ‘You must say we are officially in search here of the miraculous. What we want is a sign, like the early Christians. And it has been – what is that biblical word? – vouchsafed to you.’

      Again subtle flattery, not unmixed with subtle mockery? He said, ‘Perhaps we can discuss the religious implications when we meet tonight for dinner, if you still remember our arrangement. I’d prefer the miraculous in some other guise.’

      In his room, he opened up the slats of his jalousie, allowing a little light to stripe the gloom. He intended to do some yoga, but the beer in the café had made him drowsy. Stripping down to his underpants, he sat on the side of the bed and began to make a few notes. Presently, he lay back and fell asleep.

      The afternoon session began only five minutes behind time. Gianni Frenza introduced Krawstadt briefly and Krawstadt rose, looking nervous. The female voice of the interpreter on Channel Three delivered her version of his paper, which was entitled ‘Pinball Machines: Sublimated Coin Warfare’.

      ‘So far at this date, the SPA organization and also Intergraphic Studies magazine have shown severe neglect of a glaring and coloured example of a commercial form of machine-and-art in a combination. It is a pinball table, familiar to all of us. A cult of functionality. Its object is to transfix with emotion a person who will then surrender money for no reward at all. Thus the pintable makes an epitome of capitalist economy in its late stage and will be valued to future students when they come to study this aspect of Americanized and so-called cosmopolitan culture from the early angers of the twentieth century.’

      Here Krawstadt cleared his throat and looked furtively about at the audience, as if to check that it had not disappeared. From a distance, he resembled a healthy young man, his slender figure lending strength to the illusion. Closer inspection revealed that his slenderness was the gauntness of ageing. There was a strong frosting of grey among the yellow hairs of his beard, a bald pate gave his head an eroded appearance; even the red of his cheeks was no sign of health but the pitting and inflammation of a long-term psoriasis.

      ‘… I am a professor in residence of popular culture. I have some various degrees. Thus I am curator of the newly established Pinball Research Museum at Gottingzell University in Western Germany. There we have an investiture of over five hundred machines – which are being got in working arrangement by mechanics – representing battery-operated and presolenoid models even as far back as 1930 to the present day. Here we see a principle often operative, where an artifact purely of commerce becomes through such market factors as scarcity into a realm of connoisseurship, that is the province of the art historian and exponent of the lives of the people.

      ‘Only during the slump, which is a feature of capitalist economy in gearing the society towards mass-military enterprises, can this little gaudy trap developed from the French bagatelle be born.

      ‘One way of saying it is that this pinball table is an article of commercial exploitation which nowadays contains two elements in bright colours, namely the what we call the Playfield and the Backflash. Usually, the Backflash will have on it a moving score where often vast figures without meaning are available – obtainable to the participant. The Playfield may have such devices as Thumper Bumpers, Roll-About Buttons, Flippers, etc., all brought into action by a plunger which will propel balls precipitated by the insertion of a coin.’

      This could go on for ever. Perhaps there is a law about rubbish going on for ever.

      It’s up to me to behave myself. It was stupid to speak to Camaion as I did at breakfast. Everyone’s perfectly friendly and agreeable.

      Old Fittich producing that photograph of Tess as he did has upset me. When he took the shot, I must have been in retreat in the Travellers’ Club. Matilda Rowlinson was looking after the house. What was Tess doing there that day? And with that little bugger Jarvis. I could kill him.

      When I get back to London next week, I’ll have to do something decisive; everything is going downhill fast. In the old days I’d have taken up my gun and settled the problems that way.

      Churchill … Do they think they’re flattering me? At least the old man had plenty of guts and the ability to take decisions. They weren’t always the wrong decisions, either.

      ‘Backflash and Playfield are united in a theme. Like a bright-coloured flower seeking to attract insects, the manufacturers create many scenes of pop art, drawing for subject-matter upon all types of the decadence of their culture. Most manufacturers are Jewish and based in Chicago. Such scenes may be of rock and roll music, negro musicians, hillbillies, teenage sexuality, railroads, space antics, or many science-fantasy scenes such as time-travel, robots, and future warfare. Also gambling, the turf, pool, baseball, or film stars and of course the exploitation of female figures (as in Gottlieb’s Majorettes), and funny animals, children of a Walt Disney style, and all other races, in heavy ethnic humour of a Judaic kind.

      ‘Whatever degrades, it will do.

      ‘Also some mythology of an auto-mechanistic kind, designed to attract perhaps those sectors of the populace believing in astrology. An example is from the firm of Bally, called Fireball, where a demonic figure in red encourages extravagance, and such imaginary old gods as Wotan and Odin may be released to flash up giant scores via mushroom bumpers, which signify a mushroom nuclear attack of favourite militaristic thinking. This table has a big reputation, and may once be regarded as a classic masterpiece of the 1970s comparable with, say, a landscape by Maxfield Parrish.

      ‘Internally, these machines are elaborate. Its circuits and subassemblies are very elaborate, resembling the kind of thing in a Saturn rocket. This technology is a different sort of war game, aimed at nothing less than enslavement of the masses when they escape from their work of the day. We appreciate their beauty as of that of the deadly pitcher plant or rafflesia. They are worthy of a serious study as metafiction or socio-economic artform.’

      Krawstadt continued. Manufacturers’ names punctuated his talk like a roll call of the illustrious dead. Burrows Automatics, Hardings, Rock-Ola, Gottlieb, Genco, Bally, Williams, Chicago Coin. The Hall was silent, the delegates slumped back in their chairs or sprawled forward over the green baize. Some smoked cigarettes, taking a long while over the gestures of flipping the box, tamping the tobacco, flicking the lighter into action, performing the first inhalation; others doodled with frowning concentration. Some stared at the speaker, some at the ceiling, some into a mysterious beyond.

      The paper concluded with Krawstadt pointing out that growing political awareness would perceive that pinball machines were analogues of the capitalist system in decline. Beneath a bright veneer of religion or mythology or sex was merely a cold solenoid-operated system set up by cosmopolitan forces against which no one could win, designed to keep the working classes enslaved.

      When Frenza called for questions, Albert Russell Cantania stood up. This representative of the USA was still in his twenties; his book Form Behind Formula had already made him powerful in academic circles. He was compactly built, with a lock of hair that drooped over his tanned face. He brushed the hair from his forehead as he started to speak.

      ‘I guess our colleague Krawstadt who has just spoken knows his subject pretty well. Maybe he even has a connoisseur’s love of pinball. But I wondered СКАЧАТЬ