The Merchant's War (10 page)

That’s the other funny thing about depression. When you’re sunk in the middle of it everything looks so hard and there are so many things to worry about that it’s pretty nearly impossible to make a move. But as soon as you take the first step, the second gets easier, and the third—in fact, that very day I decided I would have to do something about the Mokes I was swigging. Not quit cold turkey. Not even cut down right away. The first thing to do was to analyze the problem. So I began noting the time of every Moke. I kept it up for a week and, my God, do you know, I was averaging
forty
of the damn things a day! And not enjoying them all that much, either.

I decided to deal with it. I didn’t want to kick the habit, because actually each Mokie-Koke in itself was a pretty good thing. They’re actually rather a taste-tingling blend of really good chocolate-type flavoring, along with synthetic coffee extract and some of those cocaine analogues to give it zip. Makes a nice drink. The thing was not to
stop,
but only to
cut down.
Put that way, it was a simple problem in schedule making and logistics, like when you schedule an optimal mix of consumer impacts for your advertising spots. Forty Mokes a day was ridiculous. About eight, I reckoned, would be just enough. I’d keep that little lift you get every time, but I wouldn’t jade my taste buds.

A Moke every two hours, I calculated, would do it just right. So I drew up a little chart:

6:00
A.M.

8:00
A.M.

10:00
A.M.

—and so on through the day until ten at night, when I could turn Nelson Rockwell out of our bed box, take the last one for a nightcap and so off to sleep.

When I counted them up, it turned out that a Moke every two hours for the sixteen waking hours of every day added up to nine instead of eight—unless I wanted to give up either the one to wake up or the one to go to sleep. I didn’t want to do that. Anyway, what the hell, nine wasn’t too many. I was very pleased about my little chart. It was such a powerful and effective scheme that I couldn’t understand why no one seemed to have thought of it before me.

And, by gosh, I stuck to it. For very nearly a whole day.

It took a little willpower to wait out that first two hours until eight
A.M.
, but I dawdled over breakfast and hung in the shower until the other tenants began banging on the door. Then ten
A.M.
was a long way off, but I took my time walking to the Agency building, and then I worked out a little supplementary scheme. They sent me out on deliveries right away. I didn’t even look at my watch while I was pedaling from one place to another—well, mostly I didn’t—what I did was wait till I got to a stop, then look at the watch and calculate how many more stops it would be before the next Moke was due. So I’d say to myself, “Not at the graphics studio, not at the bank, not at the box office for Audrey Wixon’s tickets—when I get to the restaurant to pick up Mr. Xen’s glasses that he forgot there last night, that’s about when the next one will be due.” It worked all right. Well—pretty nearly all right. There was a little mishap right after lunch, when I read my watch wrong and had the two o’clock Mok-ie-Koke at one by mistake. That wasn’t really serious. I just decided to stick to the odd hours instead of the even for the rest of that day. It was bad for a while in the afternoon, when they kept me waiting around the reception desk until 3:14 for a package that was slow in coming, but I got through the day all right.

The night, not so all right. The Moke at five was to celebrate the end of the working day; that was fine. Seven was harder to wait for, but I dragged out eating dinner as long as I could. And then back to the room, and then, dear heaven, nine o’clock was such a long time coming! About a quarter past eight I took a Moke out of the six-pack and held it in my hands. I had the Omni-V on, and it was showing one of those grand old historical epics about the early days of mail-order advertising, but I wasn’t really following it very well. The place my eyes clung to was the clock. Eight eighteen. Eight twenty. Eight twenty-two … by eight fifty my eyes were glazing over, but I made it all the way to the tick of nine before I popped the tab.

I drank it down, enjoying it, and proud of the fact that I’d held out.

And then I faced the fact that it would be six
A.M.
—nine long hours!—before I could have another.

It was more than I could handle. By the time Charlie Bergholm scratched and yawned his way out of the bed box to make room for me I had killed a whole new six-pack.

Courses began. I made attempts now and then to cut down on the Mokes, but I decided that the important thing was to deal with the rest of my life. And one part of my life was taking on more importance than I had anticipated.

It’s funny. It’s as though a person has just so much love and tenderness to spend. I told myself that the Moke addiction wasn’t that bad, really; didn’t interfere with my work really; certainly didn’t make me worth, really, any less … I didn’t believe it. The lower I fell in my own eyes, the more esteem I had left over, without a good place to invest it. Any more.

The life of a diplomat is full of complicated taboos and vacancies. There we were on Venus, surrounded by eight hundred thousand irreconcilable enemies. There were only a hundred and eight of us diplomats. In such circumstances, what do you do for friendship? More than that, what do you do about—well— love? You have a universe of perhaps fifty op-posite-gender candidates to choose from. Probably a dozen are married—I mean faithfully married—and a dozen or more are too old, and about the same are too young. If you’re lucky there may be as many as ten really eligible lovers in the pool, and what are the odds that even one of those will turn you on, and be turned on in return? Not good. Dips are as inbred as the
Bounty
survivors on Pitcairn Island. When Mitzi Ku came along I lucked in. We liked each other. We had the same feelings about sex. She was an immense convenience for me and I for her—not just for the physical act of sex, but for all the pair-bonding things that go along with it, like pillow gossip and remembering each other’s birthdays. It was nice having Mitzi there for such things. She was maybe the most valued accessory the Embassy furnished me. I appreciated the convenience. We were most candid and outspoken with each other, but there was a four-letter word neither of us ever spoke to the other. The word was “love.”

And now there wasn’t any good way for me to say it to her. Mitzi had risen as fast as I had fallen. I didn’t even see her from one week to another, except fleeting glimpses. I hadn’t forgotten that she promised to get me on as a copy trainee in Intangibles. But I thought she had —until I brought Val Dambois’s lunch up to him and discovered Mitzi in his office. Not just there. Head to head with him; and when I opened the door they sprang apart. “Damn it, Tarb,” yelled Dambois, “don’t you know enough to knock?”

“Sorry,” I shrugged. I dropped his soyaburger on the desk and turned to go. I had no desire to break up their little cozy time … or, if I did, I certainly didn’t want to show it. Mitzi put out a hand to stop me. She looked at me with that special, birdlike interest in her bright eyes, and then nodded.

“Val,” she said, “we can finish this up later. Tenny? I think they might be ready to do something for you in Intangibles. Come on, I’ll go down there with you and see what we can get going.”

It was lunchtime and so we had to wait for the elevator. I was feeling nervous—wondering, not very happily, why she hadn’t called me if the job had opened up; whether she ever would have remembered it again if I hadn’t turned up just then. They were not ego-inflating thoughts. I tried to make conversation. “So what were you two conspiring about?” I asked jokingly. The way she looked at me made me think my tone had been a touch too sharp. I tried to smooth it over: “I guess I’m a little strung out,” I apologized, assuming she would take that as natural from a Mokie-head. But it wasn’t that at all. It might even have been jealousy. “It seems a long time since you were running your spy ring on Venus,” I said wistfully. What I meant by that was that my perceptions of Mitzi had changed a lot since then. She seemed—I don’t know. Soberer? Kinder? Of course, it couldn’t be that
she
had changed. What was different was that, having lost her, I valued her more highly.

And, having lost her, I stood open-mouthed, gaping at her when, having stepped off the descending elevator and waiting for me, she called up, “If you’re not busy tonight, Tenny, how about dinner at my place?”

I don’t know what expression was on my face, but whatever it was it made her laugh. “I’ll pick you up after work,” she said. “Now, the man I want you to meet is Desmond Haseldyne, and that’s his office right down there. Come along!”

If Mitzi had surprised me with unexpected warmth, Haseldyne was a shock in the other direction. While Mitzi was introducing us he was glaring at me, and the only reading I could give his expression was loathing.

Why? I couldn’t guess. I’d seen the man around the Agency from time to time, of course. But I certainly couldn’t think of anything I’d done to offend him. And Desmond Haseldyne was not a man you would specially wish to have dislike you. He was
huge.
He was six feet six inches at least, shoulders like a stallion, fists that swallowed my hand up without a trace when he deigned to shake it.

Haseldyne was one of those freaky talents that Advertising fits into odd places in its great machine—a mathematician, they said; also a poet; also he had, curiously, had a very successful career in the import-export business before giving it up to turn to advertising. I got my first glimpse of a reason for his expression when he growled, “Hell, Mitzi! He’s the geek that’s always looking at his watch!”

“He’s also my friend,” she said firmly, “and a star-class copysmith who suffered from an accident that was not his fault. I want you to give him a chance. You can’t blame a person for being a victim of unethical advertising, can you?”

He relented. “I guess not,” he admitted—and didn’t even cover himself by adding,
and thank heaven we at this Agency don’t stoop to such practices,
as anyone else would have had the sense to do. You never know who’s bugging you. He stood up and lumbered around the desk to get a better look at me. “I guess,” he conceded, “that we can give him a try. You can run along, Mitzi. See you tonight?”

“No, I’ve got a date. Another time, Des,” she said, and winked at me as she closed the door.

Haseldyne sighed and passed a hand over his face. Then he returned to his chair. “Sit down, Tarb,” he boomed. “You know why you’re here?”

“I think so—Mr. Ha—Des,” I said firmly. I’d made up my mind that I was going to be treated like what I was, not just another trainee. It caused him to look at me sharply, but all he said was:

“This is the Department of Intangible Accounts. We’ve got about thirty main areas of exploitation, but there are two lines that far outweigh all the others. One is politics. The other is religion. Do you know anything about either one of them?”

I shrugged. “What I studied in college,” I said. “Personally, I was always a commodity man. I sold
goods,
not airy-fairy
ideas. “

He looked at me in a way that made me think it wouldn’t be so bad, really, to go back to delivering packages, but he had made up his mind to give me a job, and give me a job he would. “If you don’t care which,” he said, “I guess the place we need help right now is religion. Maybe you don’t realize what a valuable account religion is?” Well, I didn’t, but I didn’t say anything. “You talk about commodities. Goods. All right, Tarb, figure it out. If you sell somebody a jar of Coffiest they pay maybe a dollar for it. Forty cents of that goes to the retailer and the jobber. The label and the jar cost a nickel, and you have to spend maybe three cents for the contents.”

“Nice margin of profit,” I said approvingly. “That’s where you’re wrong! Add it up. Nearly half your money goes to the damn
product.
It’s the same with appliances, the same with clothes, the same with all those tangible things. But religion! Ah,
religion, “
he said softly, his face beaming with a reverential glow. “In religion the product doesn’t cost a damn
cent.
Maybe we spend a few bucks on land and construction—it looks really good if you can show some cathedral or temple or something, though mostly we just use miniatures and process shots. Maybe we print a few pamphlets. Sometimes a couple of books. But you just look at the P&L statements, Tenny, and you’ll see that the bottom line is
sixty per cent
profit! And most of the rest is promotion cost which, don’t forget, is our money too.”

I shook my head wonderingly. “I had no idea,” I said.

“Of course you had no idea! You product people are all the same. And that’s just religion. Politics, the same—even a bigger cash spin-off because we don’t have to build any churches … Although,” he said, his expression suddenly wistful, “it’s hard to get people to take an interest in politics these days. I used to think that could be the biggest of all, but—” He shook his head. “Well,” he said, “that’s the picture. Want to give it a try?”

Well, you bet I did. I charged into the copy console room with my adrenalin flowing, ready to meet the challenge—I’d forgotten that I was still a trainee. That meant that when they needed me to deliver a package they could still draft me, and Mr. Dambois’s suits needed to be picked up at the cleaners, and there was a sample of a new package for Kelpos, the Krispy Snack, that had to get to Production … it was closing time when I got back to my console. And I didn’t get to see Mitzi that night after all. Instead of my date there was a message on my machine:
Something came up. Sorry. Reschedule tomorrow?

It was a jolt. I’d been prepping myself for a happy evening, and now it was taken away from me.

On the way home I hit the Mokes pretty hard, and when I finally got my turn in the bed box and fell asleep my thoughts were not cheerful, in spite of the new job. Things had changed a lot! Back on Venus, Mitzi Ku had been happy enough to date a section head. Even flattered! Now the world for the two of us had turned upside down. I could whistle, but unless she happened to feel like it she wouldn’t come. Worse than that, somebody else might have a louder and more compelling whistle. The hardest thing for me to reconcile myself to was that there were two other toms preening their plumage in her direction. Evidently what I was supposed to do was take a number and wait until called. And I didn’t care much for the contest. Competition from Val Dambois I could understand—I didn’t say
like.
Haseldyne was another matter. Who was this sumo blimp with all the muscles who had suddenly turned up in Mitzi’s life?