And All the Earth a Grave - C C MacApp

Listen Ad Free https://www.solgoodmedia.com - Listen to hundreds of audiobooks, thousands of short stories, and ambient sounds all ad free!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And all the earth the Grave by C. C. Mcap.
There's nothing wrong with dying, it just hasn't ever had
the proper sales pitch. It all began when the new
bookkeeping machine of a large Midwestern coffin manufacturer slipped a
cog or blew a transistor or something. It was fantastic

(00:20):
that the error one of two decimal places should enjoy
a straight run of oquays human and mechanical clear down
the line. But when the figures clacked out at the
last clacking out station, there it was. The figures were
now sacred, immutable, and it is doubtful whether the president
of the concern or the chairman of the board would

(00:41):
have dared question them, even if either of those two
gentlemen had been in town. As for the advertising manager,
the last thing he wanted to do was question them.
He carried them they were the budget for the coming
fiscal year into his office, staggering a little on the way,
and dropped day into his chair. They showed the budget

(01:02):
for his own department as exactly one hundred times what
he'd been expecting, that is to say, fifty times what
he'd put in for. When the initial shock began to
wear off, his face assumed an expression of intense thought.
In about five minutes, he leaped from his chair, dashed
out of the office with a shouted syllable or two
for a secretary, and got his car out of the

(01:24):
parking lot. At home, he tossed clothes into a traveling
bag and barged toward the door, giving his wife a
quick kiss and an equally quick explanation. He didn't bother
to call the airport. He meant to be on the
next plane east, and no nonsense about it. With one
thing in another, The economy hadn't been exactly an overdrive

(01:46):
that year, and predictions for the Christmas season were gloomy.
Early retail figures bore them out. Gift buying dribbled along
feebly until Thanksgiving, despite brave speeches by the administration, holiday
passed more in self pity than in thankfulness among odors
of gift oriented businesses. Then, on Friday following Thanksgiving, the

(02:08):
coffin ads struck. Struck maybe too mild a word. People
on the streets saw feverishly working crews at holiday rates
slapping up posters on billboards. The first poster was a
dilly a to thee and Toothsome young woman leaned over
a coffin she'd been unwrapping. She smiled as if she
just received overtures of matrimony from an eighty year old billionaire.

(02:32):
There was a Christmas tree in the background, and the
coffin was appropriately wrapped, so was she. She looked as
if she had just gotten out of bed or were
ready to get into it. For aminous young men and
some not so young, the message was plain. The motto
the gift that will last more than a lifetime seemed
hardly to the point. Those at home were assailed on

(02:55):
TV with a variety of bright and clever skits of
the same import Them hinted that if the young lady's
gratitude were really precipitous in the bedroom too far away,
the coffin might be comfy. Of course, the more settled
elements of the population were not neglected. For the older
married man, there was a blow directly between the eyes,

(03:17):
do you want your widow to be half safe? And
for the spinster without immediate hopes, I dreamt I was
caught dead without my virgin formed casket. Newspapers, magazines and
every other medium added to the assault, never letting it cool.
It was the most horrendous campaign for sheer concentration that

(03:37):
it ever battered the public mind. The public reeled, blinked,
shook its head to clear it, gawked, and rushed out
to buy. Christmas was not going to be a failure,
after all. Department store retailers, who had grudgingly and under
strong sales pressure made space for a single coffin somewhere

(03:57):
at the rear of the store, now rushed the telephones,
liked touts with a direct pronouncement from a horse. The
Association of Pharmaceutical Retailers, who felt that they had some
claim to priority, tried to get court injunctions to keep
caskets out of service stations, but were unsuccessful because the
judges were all out buying caskets. Beauty parlors showed real

(04:19):
ingenuity in merchandising. Roads and streets clogged with delivery trucks,
rented trailers, and whatever else could haul a coffin the
stock market went completely mad. Strikes were declared and settled
within hours. Congress was called into session early. The President
got authority to ration lumber and other materials. Suddenly in
starvation short supply. State laws were passed against cremation. Under

(04:43):
heavy lobby pressure, a new racket called box jacking blossomed
over night. The advertising manager who had put the thing
over had been fighting with all the formidable weapons of
his breed to make his plant managers build up a stockpile.
They had, but it went like a two pain in
a wind tunnel. Competitive coffin manufacturers were caught napping, but

(05:04):
by Wednesday after Thanksgiving, they, along with the original one,
were on a twenty four hour seven day basis. Still
only a fraction of the demand could be met. Jet
passenger planes were stripped of their seats, supplied with the
Yankee gold, and sent to plunder the world of its coffins.
It might be supposed that Christmas goods other than caskets

(05:24):
would take a bad dumping. That was not so. Such
was the upsurge of prosperity, and such was the shortage
of coffins that nearly everything, with a few exceptions, enjoyed
the biggest season on record. On Christmas Eve, the frenzy
slumped to a crawl, though on Christmas Morning there were
still optimists out prowling the empty stores. The nations sat

(05:46):
down to breathe. Mostly it sat on coffins because there
wasn't space in the living room for any other furniture.
There was hardly an individual in the United States who
didn't have, in case of sudden sharp pains in the chest,
several blocks to choose from. As for the rest of
the world, it had better not die just now, or
it would literally be a case of dust to dust.

(06:09):
Of course, everyone expected a doozy of a slump after Christmas.
But our advertising manager, who by now was of course
sales manager and first vice president, also wasn't settling for
any boom and bust. He'd been a frustrated victim of
his choice of industries for so many years that now
with his teeth in something, he was going to give
it the old bite. He gave people a short breathing

(06:31):
spell to arrange their coffin payments and move the presents
out of the front rooms. Then in late January, his
new campaign came down like a hundred megatunter. Within a week,
everyone saw quite clearly that his Christmas models were now obsolete.
The coffin became the new status symbol. The auto industry was,
of course demolished. Even people who had enough money to

(06:52):
buy a new car weren't going to trade in the
old one and let the new ones stand out in
the rain. The garages were full of coffins. Trollium went
along with autos, though there were those who whispered knowingly
that the same people merely moved over into the new industry.
It was noticeable that the center of it became Detroit.
A few trucks and buses were still being built, but

(07:13):
that was all. Some of the new caskets were true
works of art. Others well, there was variety. Compact models
appeared in which the occupant's feet were to be doubled
up alongside his ears. One manufacturer pushed a circular model,
claiming that by all the laws of nature, the fetal
position was the only right one. That the other extreme

(07:34):
were virtual houses, ornate and lavishly equipped. Possibly the largest
of all was the Togetherness model, triangular, with graduated recesses
for father, mother, eight children plus two playmates, and in
the far corner, beyond the baby, the cat. The slump
was over. Still, economists swore that the new boom couldn't

(07:55):
last either. They reckoned without the advertising manager, whose eyes
gleamed brighter all the time, People already had coffins, which
they polished and kept on display, sometimes in the new
coffin ports being added to houses. The advertising manager's reasoning
was direct and to the point. He must get people
to use the coffins, and now he had all the

(08:16):
money to work with that he could use. The new
note was woven in so gradually that it is not
easy to point a finger on any one day and
say it began here. One of the first was surely
the widely printed ad showing a tattooed, smiling young man
with his chin thrust out, manfully lying in a coffin.
He was rugged looking and likable, not too rugged for

(08:39):
the spindly limb to identify with, and he oosed, even
though obviously dead, ferrility at every pore. He was probably
the finest looking corpse since Richard the Lion Hearted. Neither
must one overlook the singing commercials, possibly the catchiest of these,
A really cute little thing was achieved by jazzing up
the funeral march. It started gradually, and it was also

(09:02):
unviolent that few saw it as suicide. Teenagers began having
popping off parties. Some of their elders protested a little,
but adults were taking it up too. The tired, the unappreciated,
the ill, and the heavy laden lay down in growing
numbers and expired. A black market and poisons operated for
a little while, but soon pinched out. Such was the

(09:23):
pressure of persuasion. The few needed artificial aids. The boxes
were very comfortable. People just closed their eyes and exited smiling.
The Beatniks, who had their own models of coffin moldy,
stroungy and without lids. Since the Beatniks insisted on being seen,
placed their boxes on the Grant Avenue in San Francisco.

(09:44):
They died with highly intellectual expressions and eventually were washed
with the gentle rain. Of course, there were voices shouting
calamity when aren't there, But in the long run, and
not a very long one at that, they availed not
It isn't hard to imagine the reactions of the rest
of the world, so let us imagine a few. The

(10:06):
Communist Block immediately gave its stamp of disapproval, denouncing the
movement as a filthy, capitalist, imperialist pig plot. Red China,
which had been squabbling with Russia for some time about
a matter of method, screamed for immediate war. Russia exposed
this as patent stupidity, saying that if the capitalists wanted
to die, warring upon them would only help them. China

(10:29):
surreptitiously tried out the thing as an answer to Ex's
population and found it good. It also appealed to the
well known melancholy facet of Russian nature. Besides, after pondering
for several days, the Red Block decided it could not
afford to fall behind in anything, so it started its
own program, explaining with much logic how it differed. An

(10:51):
elderly British philosopher endorsed the movement on the grounds that
a temporary set back in evolution was preferable to facing
up to anything. The Free Block, the Red Block, the
Neutral Block, and such scraps as had been too obtuse
to find themselves a block were drawn into the whirlpool
in an amazingly short time, if in a variety of ways.

(11:13):
In less than two years, the world was rid of
most of what had been bedeviling it. Oddly enough, the
country where the movement began was the last to succumb completely.
Or perhaps it is not so odd. Coffin maker to
the world, the American casket industry had by now almost
completely automated box making and grave digging, with some interesting
assembly lines and packaging arrangements, there still remade the jobs

(11:36):
of management and distribution. An a bulliant fellow affectionately called
sarcophagus Sam put it well, as long as I have
a single perspective customer and a single stockholder, he said,
mangling as stogy and beetling his brows at the one
reporter who shone up for the press conference, I try
to put him in a coffin so I can claim
a dividend. Finally, though, a man who thought he must

(12:00):
be the last living human wandered contentedly about the city
of Denver, looking for the coffin he liked best. He
settled at last upon a rich mahogany number with platinum trimmings,
an automatic self adjusting cadaver contour inner spring, wherever plastic
covered mattress with a built in bar. He climbed in,
drew himself a generous slug of fine scotch, giggled as

(12:23):
the mattress prodded him exploringly, closed his eyes and sighed
in solid comfort. Soft music played as the lid closed
itself from a nearby building. A turkey buzzard swooped down,
cawing in raucous anger. Because it had let its attention
water for a moment, it was too late. A clod
screaming at the solid cover, hissed in frustration, and finally

(12:45):
gave up. It flapped into the air again, still grumbling.
It was tired of living on dead small rodents and coyotes.
It thought it would take a swing over to Los Angeles,
where the pickings were pretty good. As it moved westward
over parched hills, it is by had two black dots
a few miles to its left. It circled over for
a closer look, then grunted and went on its way.

(13:07):
It had seen them before. The old prospector and his
burrow had been in the mountains for so long the
buzzard had concluded that they didn't know how to die.
The prospector, whose name was Adams, trudged behind his burrow
toward the buildings that shimmered in the heat, humming to
himself now and then were addressing some remark to the beast.
When he reached the outskirts of Denver, he realized something

(13:30):
was amiss. He stood and gazed at the quiet scene.
Nothing moved except some skinny pack rats and a few
sparrows foraging for grain among the unburied coffins. Tarnation, he
said to the borough, mushing. A half buried piece of
newspaper fluttered in the breeze. He walked forward slowly and

(13:50):
picked it up. It told him enough so that he understood. Now, yo, neebe,
he said to the borough. All gone. He put his
arm affection around her neck. He reckon, it's up to
me and you again. We gotta start all over. He
stood back and gazed at her with mild reproach. I
shall hope they don't favor your side of the house

(14:11):
so much. It's time end of and all the earth
of grave by C. C mc cap