The Fracas Factor (6 page)

Her face lit up on the small screen of the portable tellyphone and she said, “Darling! I thought that you were out of town.”

“I was,” he told her. “We just got back. I’ve got quite a report to make.”

She said, “FH is up in New York but PH is due at my house this evening. You could meet him there.”

“Good. I don’t like to go to either of their offices too often. Might begin to raise comment.”

She said, “Look darling. You caught me driving along in a hovercab. I’m quite near your place. Why don’t you go downstairs to the curb and wait for me and we’ll go to lunch together at the Swank Room? We’ll work up an appetite walking over. It’s a lovely day.”

“My arm has been twisted. I’m always forgetting that now that I’m an Upper, I’m eligible to enter the Swank Room. However, I’m a little on the grimy side. Wait for me in the lobby. I’ll take a quick shower and get a change of clothes and be right down.”

“Wizard. See you, darling.” Her face faded.

Max was scowling into his glass. He grumbled, “This isn’t as good as the stuff the doc bought us in Mexico City.”

Joe Mauser went into his bedroom and cleaned up in record time.

Back in the living room he said to Max, “I’m going to lunch with Nadine. Why don’t you take the balance of the day off?”

“Sure, Boss.”

In the lobby, Joe came up on Nadine Haer while she was watching a broadcast of the news. It came to him, all over again, how unbelievably pretty she was. In the past, he had thought that her features were more delicate than those to whom he was usually attracted and that her lips were less full. But he had changed that opinion after falling in love with her. She was dressed beautifully, which was understandable in view of the fact that she held a sizeable chunk of the stock of Vacuum Tube Transport, currently one of the hottest transport corporations in the country. Not to speak of her dividends from Inalienable Basic issued to a Mid-Upper.

He grinned at her and said, “Watching a fracas?”

She came quickly to her feet and smiled. “That’ll be the day. I just picked up a news flash from Mexico. They’ve found a bombed-out sports hovercar and, noticing a lot of vultures in the vicinity, found in turn five dead men, at least some of whom had been shot. Wasn’t your assignment in Mexico, Joe?”

“Oh, oh,” he said. “Already? Just a moment, Nadine.” He brought forth his transceiver and dialed the police. When a sergeant’s face faded in, Joe said crisply, “I’m Joseph Mauser. Formerly Category Military, Rank Major. Low-Upper.” He gave his identity number. “I wish to report a stolen sports hovercar.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said respectfully. “Do you remember the license plate number, sir?”

Joe Mauser gave it to him.

The sergeant said, “Yes, sir. We’ll get in touch with you as soon as we get a report on it, sir. It shouldn’t be too difficult. The traffic computers will get a cross on your car. How longs it been gone?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said. “I haven’t used it for several days. It was parked in the garage of my apartment house. It might have disappeared three or four days ago, or possibly as late as this morning. It just came to my attention a few minutes ago.” He gave the officer the address of his building, though the other could have easily checked that on Joe’s dossier.

“Thank you, sir,” the other said and his face faded.

Joe put his transceiver back into his pocket and turned to face Nadine again. She had her lower lip in her teeth and was looking at him questioningly.

She said, as a doctor ever in rebellion against violence, “Joe! You didn’t kill those five men, did you? Five?”

“It was their lives or those of Max and me.”

“Oh, Joe, why are these things always happening to you?”

He looked at her in exasperated despair. “I obviously don’t want them to,” he told her, keeping irritation from his voice. “Let’s go, dear.”

She had been right. It was a lovely day for a stroll in Greater Washington. They both felt exhilarated in each other’s company. It was a new romance, but already they were engaged.

As they were passing through a park and passing an iron bench, a voice said, “Hi, Captain.”

Joe frowned momentarily, but then came to a halt and said, “Why, it’s Ferd Dalton. Sergeant Ferd Dalton.”

The man grinned. “As ever was.”

The other had mechanical limbs where his right arm and right leg had once been, but he was obviously a double-amputee. The lines in his otherwise fairly youthful face indicated that he had been through a great deal of pain.

Joe turned to Nadine and said, “Darling, this is Sergeant Ferd Dalton, an old comrade in arms. Ferd, this is my fiancée, Doctor Nadine Haer.”

Dalton grinned again and said, “You don’t look like a doctor.”

And Nadine smiled back and said, “What does a doctor look like?”

Joe said to him, “Let’s see, your wife’s name was Molly, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, Molly.” The other’s face went rueful. “Well, we kind of drifted apart after I copped this last one. Mortar shell.”

Joe inwardly winched. Ferd and Molly Dalton had been more than usually close. He suspected that when Ferd had taken the mortar hit, more than his arm and leg had been affected. He suspected that the other could no longer perform as a man.

Joe said, “Otherwise, how’s it been going, Ferd?”

The sergeant shrugged it off. “Oh, so, so. The only income I’ve got is my Inalienable Basic. Once I was discharged from the hospital I was on my own. From time to time extra medical bills come up and I’ve got to meet them. Those Category Military bastards, don’t give a damn about a disabled veteran.”

Joe said, “We’ve got to hurry along, Ferd. But, listen, give me your I.D. number and one of these days I’ll phone you on your transceiver and well get together.”

“Sure, Captain,” the former sergeant said and rattled it off.

Joe copied it down and he and Nadine said their goodbyes and walked on, Joe looking thoughtful.

When they were out of sight of Ferd Dalton, Joe brought his transceiver from his pocket and dialed the Banking Data Banks. He gave the pertinent information and then said, “I wish to transfer one share of Variable Basic Common stock from my account to this one.” He read off Ferd Dalton’s I.D. number.

The phone screen said, “Transaction completed.”

Nadine looked at him from the side of her eyes. “Zen!” she said. “If you did that with every man you were in combat with, you’d be stripped.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, his voice empty. “If I donated a share of Variable to every lad who saved my life in my time, I’d be stripped. Trouble is, I don’t know how to locate most of them-those who are still alive.”

“And Ferd Dalton saved your life?”

“We were in the swamps, in the Louisiana Military Reservation. Pinned down by a Maxim gun. I’d taken two hits. I was a captain then. The rest of my lads managed to sneak off but Ferd stuck with me. We were about half in and half out of swamp water and that queer grass they have down there. The second day, I became delirious and he had to keep my head up out of the water. We were three days in the swamp.”

Her face was pale. “Don’t tell me any more about it, Joe.”

He said, “It has a happy ending. Here I am.”

In spite of the fact that she had just asked to drop the subject, she couldn’t help saying, “How often did you get into spots like that?”

“I can’t remember,” he said quite truthfully “Ah, here’s the Swank Room.”

The Swank Room was quite the swankest restaurant in Greater Washington and for the Upper caste alone, of course. Joe Mauser had been in it exactly once before, as a guest of Nadine Haer. Even then, the management might have frowned had it not been for the fact that Joe Mauser at the time was a fracas celebrity. It boasted not only live waiters in livery, but a small orchestra.

As they followed the waiter captain to their table, they passed fairly near the bandstand. The orchestra leader winked at Joe and the dance tune they were playing was dropped. The orchestra swung into the lilting “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

…I knew her heart was breaking,

And to my heart in anguish pressed

The girl I left behind me.

It was the old Civil War marching song. Custer’s Seventh Cavalry had rode out to it on their way to their rendezvous with Sitting Bull’s Sioux at the Little Big Horn.

Joe chuckled inwardly. It was part of the fling that telly cameraman Freddy Soligen had sold him on some time ago. Freddy, as ambitious to accumulate bounces in caste as was Joe, was of the opinion that heroes were made, not born. The fracas buffs wanted glamorous heroes; they didn’t have the ability to recognize a good soldier when they saw one, a man capable of conducting a retreat or officering a holding action. They wanted gore and they wanted glamor. Freddy had pointed out that such big names as Colonel Ted Sohl and Captain Jerry Sturgeon had never copped one in their lives. The dashing Ted Sohl had two western type pistols belted to his waist, and a romantic limp and a craggy face. A specially built pair of boots gave him the limp, Freddy told Joe. So Freddy Soligen had designed a special uniform resembling that of an Austrian hussar, and provided Joe with a theme song, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” He then bribed orchestra leaders to play it every time Joe entered a nightclub or restaurant. He also bribed fracas buff magazines to run laudatory articles about Joe, and telly show reporters to interview him. All this paid for by Joe Mauser, of course, from his life savings. The theory was that he would eventually be bounced up to Upper caste and then he, in turn, would help Freddy Soligen. It had all gone well, until he had pulled his spectacular, which was to make him the hero of them all. The glider thing had fizzled, and he’d wound up with his court-martial.

Seated, they ordered their meals, and when the waiter was gone, Joe looked around at their expensively-garbed neighbors and said, with a shake of the head, “You know, I still cant get used to associating with Uppers.”

Nadine said, “They’re no different than anyone else. As a matter of fact, they probably average in intelligence and ability less than the Middles. An hereditary aristocracy invariably deteriorates. They have no motivation. Why bother to take your studies seriously when play is more fun? Why bother to work at a serious job, when you don’t need money?”

“Well, that doesn’t apply to all of them,” Joe said, just to be saying something.

“Damn near all,” she muttered. “Those that do anything at all take jobs such as political ones, or as heads of corporations, or as diplomats, or bishops of the Temple in Category Religion. Or, when they join the Category’ Military, they immediately become at least colonels and precious seldom do they get—-what do you call it?—into the dill. They hold down positions far behind the lines.”

Joe had to laugh. It was all too true, especially the Category Military bit. It was uncanny the way Upper officers managed to stay out of the line of fire when the situation had pickled.

He said, “I wonder how it all got started, this dividing our people into nine castes, ranging from Upper-Upper down to Low-Lower. We started off with a free and equal people.”

“Joe, Joe, you innocent,” Nadine said. “We used to pride ourselves on the lack of classes in the history of the United States, but we’ve been, among the most class-ridden societies of modern times, right from the beginning. I assume that you don’t labor under the illusion that the men who froze and starved under Washington at Valley Forge were later allowed to vote for or against him when he ran for President. Only the equivalent of Uppers in that day were allowed to vote. Only one out of five adults in the United States were eligibile to vote in Washington’s election.”

“Oh, come on now,” Joe said in protest.

“All right, let’s start from the beginning. First of all, all women were eliminated. Betsy Ross might have been great sewing the first flag. Molly Pitcher might have fought side by side with her husband at the battle of Monmouth and might, as the heroic story goes, have taken over his gun when he fell. And Dolly Madison might have been the most charming hostess and the most witty woman ever to grace the White House. Or do you know the story of Margaret Corbin? Upon the death of her husband at the attack on Fort Washington in 1776, she commanded his cannon until she was seriously wounded; she later became the first woman in American history to be pensioned by the government. In 1916 her remains were moved to West Point, where a monument was erected in her honor. But neither she nor any of the others I named were ever allowed to vote.”

“The last of the women-libbers,” Joe smiled at her.

Two waiters came up with their food, and they held their peace until served.

When the waiters were gone, Joe said, “Admittedly, women didn’t get the vote until after the first World War, but that doesn’t add up to only one out of five adults being able to vote.”

She went on, slightly flushed in the heat of argument. On her, Joe decided, it looked fine.

“Very well,” she said. “Then there were the Negroes of the time. Slaves. Obviously they didn’t have the vote. But besides women and Blacks, there were men who didn’t have property qualifications, such as workers in the cities, merchant seamen, privates and noncoms in the military, and farmers whose farms were too small. Property requirements existed in all thirteen of the United Colonies. In short, the poor didn’t vote. Nor, in some, if not all, of the States, did those who were undereducated. Educational requirements prevailed in many of the States until well into the 20th Century. Oh, we had our equivalent of Lowers from the very beginnings of the Republic.”

She took a decisive bite of her food.

“I surrender,” Joe said. “But what I was really wondering about was the origin of our present castes. You’ll admit we didn’t have them in the old days.”

“It took place over a period of time,” she said, after taking another bite. “According to one of the old polls, back in the mid-20th century, eighty-five percent of the American people thought of themselves as Middle-Class, even many of those perpetually on relief. However, with the coming of wholesale relief and the point where more than half of the population was on relief, the term Lower Class came in. Those who still worked began to be called Middle Class, no matter what kind of work they did. And the wealthy began being called Upper Class. In time, as People’s Capitalism came in, you became more or less frozen into the class in which you were born. It was diffucult to bounce yourself up, particularly when the lower classes couldn’t afford higher education and education had become a must to get a job in modern industry, or one of the professions. Finally, each class was split into three levels. The Upper-Middles were largely doctors, university level professors, scientists and so forth. The Middle-Middles were largely technicians, engineers, teachers in lower education. The Low-Middles were largely skilled workers and junior technicians. The Upper-Lowers were the unemployables and soon became the majority of the population, the scum of society.”