Plenitude by Will Mohler (F&SF, November 1959, as by Will Worthington) starts with a four-year-old boy called Mike asking his narrator father various questions while they garden. As a result of these—why don’t they live in the “Old House in the Valley” anymore, are the “funny men” broken (explained by the narrator as a reference to derelict robots in the city), etc.—the story soon establishes itself as a post-collapse one.1
Then, when the narrator and son Mike return to their house for supper, he learns from his wife that his other son, a twelve-year-old called Chris, has gone hunting. It later becomes apparent that there has been a falling out between the two (and possibly an estrangement with a neighbouring family) as a result of a trip to the city where the narrator killed someone.
The rest of the story then flashbacks to a previous day of gardening, but this time with the elder son Chris, who is also questioning the father about why they live as they do and how society ended up in its present state. The narrator tries to answer these more involved and challenging questions but eventually becomes exasperated with his son and says he will take him into the city so he can see things for himself.
The climactic section (spoiler) sees the pair moving through a mostly derelict urban landscape until they come to a fence surrounding a group of large fluid-filled bubbles. Inside these people float seemingly unaware, connected up to various leads and hoses. The narrator cuts the perimeter fence and the pair go inside for a closer look:
I do not know the purpose of all the tubes and wires myself. I do know that some are connected with veins in their arms and legs, others are nutrient enemata and for collection of body wastes, still others are only mechanical tentacles which support and endlessly fondle and caress. I know that the wires leading to the metal caps on their heads are part of an invention more voracious and terrible than the ancient television—direct stimulation of certain areas of the brain, a constant running up and down the diapason of pleasurable sensation, controlled by a sort of electronic kaleidoscope.
My imagination stops about here. It would be the ultimate artificiality, with nothing of reality about it save endless variation. Of senselessness I will not think. I do not know if they see constantly shifting masses or motes of color, or smell exotic perfumes, or hear unending and constantly swelling music. I think not. I doubt that they even experience anything so immediate and yet so amorphous as the surge and recession of orgasm or the gratification of thirst being quenched. It would be stimulation without real stimulus; ultimate removal from reality. I decide not to speak of this to Chris. He has had enough. He has seen the wires and the tubes. pp. 253-254 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
Then one of the occupants opens his eyes and sees the pair, and a guard robot quickly arrives. The narrator destroys it and then, in his rage, goes on to slash open the bubbles:
The corn-knife was not very sharp, but the skin of the sphere parted with disgusting ease. I heard Chris scream, “No! Dad! No!” . . . but I kept hacking. We were nearly engulfed in the pinkish, albuminous nutritive which gushed from the ruptured sac. I can still smell it.
The creatures inside were more terrible to see in the open air than they had been behind their protective layers of plastic material. They were dead white and they looked to be soft, although they must have had normal human skeletons. Their struggles were blind, pointless and feeble, like those of some kind of larvae found under dead wood, and the largest made a barely audible mewing sound as it groped about in search of what I cannot imagine.
I heard Chris retching violently, but could not tear my attention away from the spectacle. The sphere now looked like some huge coelenterate which had been halved for study in the laboratory, and the hoselike tentacles still moved like groping cilia.
The agony of the creatures in the “grape” (I cannot think of them as People) when they were first exposed to unfiltered, unprocessed air and sunlight, when the wires and tubes were torn from them, and especially when the metal caps on their heads fell off in their panicky struggles and the whole universe of chilly external reality rushed in upon them at once, is beyond my imagining; and perhaps this is merciful. This, and the fact that they lay in the stillness of death after only a very few minutes in the open air.
Memory is merciful too in its imperfection. All I remember of our homeward journey is the silence of it. pp. 255-256 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)
The remainder of the story returns to the present day, and sees a returned Mike and a neighouring family joining the narrator, wife and youngest son for supper. Mike appears reconciled, even unconcerned, about what happened.
This isn’t a perfect piece by any means (the conflict set up between the father and son fades away rather than being resolved in any meaningful or cathartic way) but it has some superior qualities. Not only is the story well written, with some good characterisation and vivid description, but the narrator’s reflective commentary also puts the reader right inside his head. This rich mixture transcends the slightness of the plot.
I’ll be tracking down more of Mohler’s work.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 5,100 words. Story link.
1. This story reminded me a little, in places, of the novel Earth Abides by George Stewart.