And All the Earth a Grave - C C MacApp

0:00and all the Earth of Grave by CC 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 that the error, one of two decimal places, should enjoy a straight run of OKs, human and mechanical, cleared 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 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 dayzidly into his chair. They showed the budget for

1:02his own department as exactly 100 times what he'd been expecting. That is to say, 50 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 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 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 owners of gift-oriented

2:04businesses. Then, on Friday following Thanksgiving, the coffin adds struck. Struck may be to mile the word. People on the street saw feverishly working crews at holiday rates, slapping up posters on billboards. The first poster was a dilly. A two-the and toad some young woman leaned over a coffin she'd been unwrapping. She smiled as if she just received overtures of matrimony from an 80-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 anirous 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 a sailed 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 far away, the coffin might be comfy.

3:09Of 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 was cut 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 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 at the rear of the store, now rushed to the telephones like 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.

4:12But were unsuccessful because the judges were all out buying caskets. Beauty parlors showed real ingenuity in merchandising. Roads and streets clogged with delivery trucks, rented trailers, and whatever else could hall 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 heavy lobby pressure. A new racket called box-jacking blossomed overnight. The advertising manager who would 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-pay in a wind tunnel. Competitive coffin manufacturers were caught napping. But by Wednesday after Thanksgiving, they, along with the original one, were on a 24-hour seven-day basis. Still only a fraction of the demand could be met.

5:14Jet passenger planes were stripped of their seats, supplied with the Yankee-yold, 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 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 nation sat down to breathe, mostly at 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 boxes 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. 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

6:19any 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 spell to arrange their coffin payments and move the presence out of the front looms. Then, in late 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 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. Some of the new caskets were true works of art. Others, well, there was variety. Compact models appeared in which the

7:23occupants' 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 were virtual houses, or Nate, 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 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 into 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 point a finger on any one day and say,

8:24it 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 likeable, not too rugged for the spindly 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 Lionhearted. 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 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 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

9:30eyes and exited smiling. The beatnicks, who had their own models of coffin, moldy, scroungy and without lids since the beatnicks insisted on being seen, placed their boxes on the Grand Avenue in San Francisco. 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 Communist bloc 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 surreptitiously tried out the thing as an answer to X's population, and found it good.

10:35It also appealed to the well-known melancholy facet of Russian nature. Besides, after pondering for several days, the red bloc decided it could not afford to fall behind in anything. So it started its own program, explaining with much logic how it differed. An elderly British philosopher endorsed the movement, on the grounds that a temporary setback and evolution was preferable to facing up to anything. The free block, the red block, the neutral block, and such scraps as had been two obtuse to find themselves a block, or drawn into the world pool 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 bedevelling 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 gravedicking, with some interesting assembly lines and packaging arrangements. Their store remained the jobs of management and distribution.

11:38An abulliant fellow affectionately called sarcophagus Sam put it well. As long as I have a single perspective customer and a single stockholder, he said, mangling a stogie and beadling his brows at the one reporter who chown up for the press conference. I 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 contendently about the city of Denver, looking for the coffin he liked best. He settled it 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, giggle as the mattress prodded him exploringly, closed his eyes and sighed in solid comfort. Soft music played as the lid closed itself. From an nearby building a turkey buzzard swooped down, calling in raucous anger because it had led its attention wander for a moment. It was too late.

12:40A quad 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 us wing over to Los Angeles, where the pickings were pretty good. As it moved westward over parched hills, it aspired to black dots a few miles to its left. It circled over for a closer look, then granted and went on its way, yet it seemed 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, or addressing some remark to the beast. When he reached the outskirts of Denver, he realized something was a miss. He stood engaged at the quiet scene. Nothing moved except some skinny pack rats and a few sparrows foraging for grain among the unburied coffins.

13:41Caination! He said to the burrow, Moushings! A half-buried piece of newspaper flattered in the breeze. He walked forward slowly and picked it up. It told him enough so that he understood. Now go, Nevy! He said to the burrow, Oh, gone! He put his arm affectionately around her neck. The wrecking itch up to me knew again. We gotta 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 An All-Theorthagrave by C. C. McApp