And All The World A Grave - C.C. MacApp

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And all the Earth a Grave by C. C. Mccap.
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

(00:22):
cog or blew a transistor or something. It was fantastic
that the air one or two decimal places should enjoy
a straight run of Okay's 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

(00:43):
now sacred, immutable, and it is doubtful whether the president
of the concern or the chairman of the board would
have dared question them, even if either of those two
gentlemen had been in town. As for the advertising man,
the last thing he wanted to do was question them.

(01:04):
He carried them they were the budget for the coming
fiscal year into his office, staggering a little on the way,
and dropped dazedly into his chair. They showed the budget
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

(01:28):
wear off, his face assumed an expression of intense thought.
In about five minutes, he leaped up from his chair,
dashed out of the office with a shouted syllable or
two for his secretary, and got his car out of
the parking lot. At home, he tossed clothes into a
traveling bag and barged toward the door, giving his wife

(01:52):
a quick kiss and an equally quick explanation. He didn't
bother to call the airport. He meant to be on
the next plain east, and no nonsense about it. With
one thing or another. The economy hadn't been exactly in
overdrive that year, and predictions for the Christmas season were gloomy.

(02:15):
Early retail figures bore them out. Gift buying dribbled along
feebly until Thanksgiving. Despite bravest speeches by the administration, the
holiday passed more in self pity than in thankfulness among
owners of gift oriented businesses. Then, on Friday following Thanksgiving,

(02:37):
the Coffin adds 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 toothy and Toothsome young woman leaned over

(02:58):
a coffin she'd been unwrapped. She smiled as if she
just received overtures of matrimony from an eighty year old billionaire.
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

(03:19):
ready to get into it. For amorous 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
TV by a variety of bright and clever skits of

(03:40):
the same import Some of them hinted that if the
young lady's gratitude were really precipitous, and 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 bla directly between

(04:01):
the eyes, 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 form casket. Newspapers, magazines
and every other medium added to the assault, never letting
it cool. It was the most horrendous campaign for sheer

(04:25):
concentration that had ever battered at the public mind. The
public reeled, blinked, shook its head to clear it, gacked,
and rushed out to buy. Christmas was not going to
be a failure, after all. Department store managers, who had
grudgingly and under strong sales pressure made space for a

(04:49):
single coffin somewhere at the rear of the store now
rushed to the telephones like touts with a direct pronouncement
from a horse. Everyone who possibly could got into the act.
Grocery supermarkets put in casket departments. The Association of Pharmaceutical Retailers,

(05:10):
who felt 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 ingenuity in merchandising. Roads and streets
were clogged with delivery trucks, rented trailers, and whatever else

(05:35):
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

(05:55):
were passed against cremation. Under 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

(06:17):
went like a toupet in a wind tunnel. Competitive coffin
manufacturers were caught napping, but 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,

(06:40):
supplied with Yankee gold, and sent to plunder the world
of its coffins. It might be supposed that Christmas goods
other than caskets 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

(07:02):
few exceptions, enjoyed the biggest season on record. On Christmas Eve,
the frenzy slumped to a crawl, though on Christmas morning,
there was still Optimists out prowling the empty stores. The
nation sat down to breathe. Mostly it sat on coffins
because there wasn't space in the living rooms for any

(07:23):
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 boxes to choose from. As for
the rest of the world, it had better not die
just now, or it would be literally a case of
dust to dust. Of course, everyone expected a doozy of

(07:48):
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

(08:10):
was going to give it the old bite. He gave
people a short breathing spell to arrange their coffin payments
and move the presents out of the front rooms. Then
late in January, his new campaign came down like a
hundred megatunner. Within a week, everyone saw quite clearly that

(08:30):
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 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. Petroleum went along with autos,

(08:55):
though there were those who whispered knowingly that the same
people merely moved up over into this new industry. It
was noticeable that the center of it became Detroit. A
few trucks and buses were still being built, but that
was all. Some of the new caskets were true works

(09:15):
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. At the other extreme were

(09:39):
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,

(10:05):
economists swore that the new boom couldn't 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

(10:27):
to the point. He must get people to use the coffins,
and now he had all the money to work with
that he could use. The new note was woven in
so gradually that it is not easy to put a
finger on anyone ad and say it began here. One
of the first was surely the widely printed one, showing

(10:48):
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 the spindley limb to identify with,
and he oozed, even though obviously dead virility at every pore.
He was probably the finest looking corpse since Richard the

(11:11):
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 all so unviolent that few saw it

(11:32):
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 in poisons operated for a little while, but

(11:54):
soon pinched out. Such was the pressure of persuasion that
few needed artificial aid. The boxes were very comfortable. People
just closed their eyes and exited smiling. The Beatniks, who
had their own models of coffin moldy scroungey and without lids.

(12:16):
Since the Beatniks insisted on being seen, placed their boxes
on the Grant Avenue in San Francisco. They died with
highly intellectual expressions and eventually were washed by the gentle rain.
Of course, there were voices shouting calamity when art there,

(12:37):
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 Communist Block immediately gave
its stamp of disapproval, denouncing the movement as a filthy, capitalist,

(12:58):
imperialist pig 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 surreptitiously tried out the thing as

(13:23):
an answer to excess 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.

(13:46):
An elderly British philosopher endorsed the movement on the grounds
that a temporary setback 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

(14:08):
in an amazingly short time, if in a variety of ways,
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 a last to succumb completely,
or perhaps it is not so odd coffin maker to

(14:30):
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 remained the jobs
of management and distribution. The president of General Mortuary, An
a buliant fellow affectionately called Sarcophagus Sam, put it well,

(14:56):
as long as I have a single prospective customer and
a single stock, he said, mangling a stogy and beetling
his brows at the one reporter who showed up for
the press conference, I'll try to put him in a
coffin so I can pay him a dividend. Finally, though,
a man who thought he must be the last living

(15:16):
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

(15:40):
generous lug of fine scotch, giggled as the mattress prodded
him exploringly, closed his eyes and sighed in solid comfort.
Soft music played as the lid closed itself. From a
building nearby, a turkey buzzard swooped down, cawing in raucous anger.

(16:00):
Because it had let its attention wander for a moment,
it was too late. A cloud screaming at the solid cover,
hissed in frustration and finally 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

(16:20):
take a swing over to Los Angeles, where the pickings
were pretty good. As it moved westward over parched hills,
it spied two black dots a few miles to its left.
It circled over for a closer look, then grunted and
went on its way. It had seen them before. The

(16:40):
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 or addressing

(17:01):
some remark to the beast. When he reached the outskirts
of Denver, he realized something was amiss. He stood and
gazed at the quiet scene. Nothing moved except for some
skinny pack rats and a few sparrows foraging for grain
among the unburied coffins. Tar Nation, he said to the

(17:21):
borough Martians. A half buried piece of newspaper fluttered in
the breeze. He walked forward slowly and picked it up.
He told him enough so that he understood. They are gone. Evie,
he said to the borough all gone. He put his
arm affectionately around her neck. I reckon, it's up to

(17:44):
me and you again. We got to start all over.
He stood back and gazed at her with mild reproach.
I sure hope they don't favor your side of the
house so much this time. End of and all the
Earth a Grave by C. C. Macap aka Carrol M.

(18:10):
Capps