And All the Earth a Grave - C. C. MacApp

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
cog or blew a transistor or something. It was fantastic

(00:21):
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

(00:42):
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 dazedly into his chair. They showed the budget

(01:03):
for his own department as exactly one hundred times what
he'd been expecting, that is to say, fifty times what
he 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 sybable or two

(01:24):
for his secretary, and got his car out of the
parking lot. At home, he tossed clothes into a traveling
bag and barged towards 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 plain east, and no nonsense about it. With one

(01:46):
thing and another, the economy hadn't been exactly an overdrive
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, the
holiday passed more in self pity than in thankfulness among

(02:06):
owners of gift doraded businesses. Then, on Friday following Thanksgiving,
the coffin ads struck. Struck may be 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

(02:30):
a coffin she'd been unwrapping. She smiled as if she'd
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
ready to get into it. For amorous young men and

(02:51):
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 with a variety of bright and clever skits of
the same import Some of them hinted that if the
young lady's gratitude were really precipitous, and the bedroom too

(03:12):
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, do you want your widow to be half safe?
And for the spinster without immediate hopes, I dreamt I

(03:33):
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
concentration that had ever battered at the public mind. The
public reeled, blinked, shook its head to clear it, gawked,

(03:54):
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
single coffin somewhere at the rear of the store now
rushed to the telephones like toots. With a direct pronouncement
from a horse. Every one who possibly could got into

(04:17):
the act. Grocery supermarkets putting casket departments. The Association of
Pharmaceutical Retailers, 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.

(04:39):
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 in decession. Early the President got authority to
ration lumber and other materials. Suddenly in starvation, shorts of

(05:00):
apply state laws 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,

(05:20):
but it went like a twopey and a wind tunnel.
Competitive coffin manufacturers were caught napping, but by Wednesday after Thanksgiving, they,
along with the original one, were on twenty four hour,
seven day basis. Still only a fraction of the demand
could be met. Jet passenger planes were stripped of their seats,

(05:41):
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, of the
few exceptions, enjoyed the biggest season on record. On Christmas Eve,

(06:05):
the frenzy slumped to a crawl, though on Christmas morning,
there were 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
other furniture. There was hardly an individual in the United
States who didn't have, in case of sudden sharp pains

(06:27):
in the chest, several boxes to choose from. As for
the rest of the world, it had better not die
just now or it will be literally a case of
dust to dust. 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,

(06:50):
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 tea in something, he
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

(07:10):
late in January, his new campaign came down like a
hundred megatonner. 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 buy a new
car weren't going to trade in the old one and

(07:33):
let the new ones stand out in the rain. The
garages were full of coffins. Petroleum 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 that was all.

(07:55):
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. At the other extreme were virtual houses, ornate

(08:19):
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

(08:40):
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 their houses.
The advertising manager's reasoning was direct and to the point.

(09:01):
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 was 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 a tattooed,
smiling young man with his chin thrust out, manfully lying

(09:25):
in a coffin. He was rugged looking and likable, not
too rugged for the spindly limb to identify with, and
he used, even though obviously dead, virility, at every pore.
He was probably the finest looking corpse since Richard the Lionhearted.
Neither must one overlook the singing commercials, Possibly the catchiest

(09:49):
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 as suicide.
Teenagers began having popping off parties. Some of their elders
protested a little, but adults were taking it up too.

(10:10):
The tired, the unappreciated, the ill, and the heavy laden
laid down in growing numbers and expired. A black market
in poisons operated for a little while, but soon pinched out.
Such was the pressure of persuasion that few needed artificial aids.
The boxes were very comfortable. People just closed their eyes

(10:31):
and exited smiling. The Beatniks, who had their own models
of coffin moldy, scroungy and without lids. 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,

(10:54):
there were many voices shouting calamity when aren't there, But
in the long run, and not a very long one
at that, they availed naught. 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

(11:18):
imperialist pig plot. Red China, who 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. Chinas surreptitiously tried out the thing

(11:39):
as 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

(12:00):
how it differed. An 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

(12:20):
drawn into the whirlpool 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 the last to succumb completely. Or perhaps it is
not so odd coffin maker to the world. The American

(12:41):
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 brilliant fellow exfectionately called
circle Coffagus Sam put it, well, as long as I

(13:03):
have a single prospective customer and a single stockholder, 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 human, wandered contentedly about the

(13:26):
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 build in bar. He
climbed in, drew himself a generous slug of fine scotch

(13:48):
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 near by, a turkey
buzzard swooped down, cawing in raucous anger. Because it had
led its attention wander for a moment, it was too late.

(14:08):
It clawed, 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 take a swing
over to Los Angeles, where the pickings were pretty good.
As it moved westward over parched hills, it espied two

(14:31):
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 old prospector
and his burrow had been in the mountains for so
long the buzzard had concluded they didn't know how to die.
The prospector, whose name was Adams, trudged behind his burrow

(14:53):
towards the buildings that shimmered in the heat. Humming to
himself now and then, or addressing some remark to the
When he reached the outskirts of Denver, he realized something
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

(15:18):
said to the borough martians. A half buried piece of
newspaper fluttered in the breeze. He walked forward slowly and
picked it up. It told him enough so that he
understood they're gone. Ebe, he said to the burrow all gone.
He put his arm affectionately around her neck. I reckon,

(15:39):
it's up to me an you again. We got to
start all over. He stood back and gazed at her
with a mild reproach. I sure hope they don't favor
your side of the house so much this time. End
of story. This recording is in the public domain.