The Merchant's War (11 page)

On the other hand, other things had changed a lot, too. When I finally got to work the next morning—after only an hour of coffee/doughnut runs for the secretaries and the model pool—I realized that the state of the art I had left behind when I boarded the shuttle for Venus was like flintlocks and mainframe computers compared to what was going on now. That was demonstrated to me the first time I sat down at my copy console and reached to turn on the grid-resolution interlock. There wasn’t any.

It took me all the rest of the morning to learn how to operate the console, and at that I had to get help from the office girl.

But you don’t get to be a star-class copysmith for nothing, and I hadn’t lost all my skills while I was on Venus. I made a quick search of the files and discovered, as I thought, that there were areas the Department of Intangibles hadn’t explored. I couldn’t compete right away in the latest technology. What I could do was go back to some tried and true procedures of the past—always good, sometimes overlooked by the new people—and by four that afternoon I had completed my rough. I pulled the spool out of the console and charged into Haseldyne’s office. “Take a look, Des,” I ordered, plugging it into his reader. “Of course this is only preliminary. It isn’t fully interactive yet, so don’t ask it any hard questions, and maybe the model I used isn’t the best for the purpose—”

“Tarb,” he rumbled dangerously, “what the hell are you talking about?”

“Door to door!” I cried. “The oldest advertising technique there is! A whole new campaign, based on the soundest, best-tested procedures there are!”

I hit the switch, and immediately the three-dimensional image sprang up, a grave, gaunt figure in a cowl, face shadowed but benign, gazing directly into Haseldyne’s eyes. Unfortunately it was only about two feet tall, and there was a halo of blue sparks around its edges.

“I guess I didn’t get the size match right,” I apologized, “and there’s interference to be cleaned up—”

“Tarb,” he growled, “shut up, will you?” But he was interested as the figure advanced toward him and began to speak:

“Religion, sir! Yes, that’s what I have to offer! Salvation! Peace of mind! The washing away of sins, or simply the acceptance of the will of a Supreme Being. I carry a complete line, Roman Catholic, C. of E., twenty-two kinds of Baptist, Unification, Scientology, Methodist—”

“Everybody has those already,” snapped Haseldyne, glancing irritably at me. I gloated; it was the reaction I had programmed for. The little image glanced over its shoulder as though making sure no one could hear, and then leaned forward confidentially.

“Right you are, sir! I should have seen you weren’t the kind of person to adopt what everybody else has. So how about a genuine antique? I’m not talking your Buddha or your Confucius. I’m talking Zoroaster! Ahura Mazda and Ahriman! The forces of light and darkness! Why, half the religions you get these days are just sleazy plagiarisms of Zoroaster— and, listen, there’s no fasting, there’s no dietary laws, no don’t-do-this or don’t-do-that. Zoroaster is a religion for persons of
quality.
And—you won’t believe this—I can let you have the whole thing, conversion included, for less than the price of an ordinary retreat or bar mitzvah …”

I could see that he was really hooked. He watched the figure run through to the close. As it faded away in another shower of those blue sparks—these automatic grid-resolution devices weren’t all they were cracked up to be— he nodded slowly. “Might work,” he said.

“It’s bound to work, Haseldyne! I admit it’s still rough. I need to talk to Legal about the contract signing at the close, of course, and I’m not sure about the cowl—maybe a sort of Indian dancing-girl outfit with a female vendor instead?”

“Tarb,” he said heavily, “don’t knock your own work. It’s good. Clean up the size and the interference, and tomorrow we’ll call a staff meeting and get it started.” And I tool the spool out of his machine and left him staring into space. It struck me as funny that he didn’t seem pleased—after all, he’d admitted it was good! But when I got back to my console there was a message on it that drove such worries out of my mind:

I’ve been called out of the office, so why don’t you come right to my place? Expect you about eight.

When I went back to my place to clean up, Nelson Rockwell was waiting for me. “Tenny,” he coaxed, “if you could just let me have a few bucks till payday—”

“No way, Nelson! You’re just going to have to work it out one way or another with the San Jacinto Mint.”

“Mint? Who said anything about the mint?” he demanded. “This is something brand new —take a look!” And he pulled out of his pocket a little scrap of a picture in a cheap plastic frame. “It’s the Frameable Treasury Secretary Lithographed Portrait Series on Banknote-Quality Paper!” he declared proudly. “They’re pure gold, and all I need’s a hundred to get my subscription started. Make it two hundred and I can get in on the charter subscriptions for Cabinet-Sized All-Metal Renderings of Famous American Suspension Bridges—” I left him still talking while I headed for the bathroom to spruce up. Tikli-Talc on my chin, LuvMe in my armpits—it had been a long time between dates. I figured I ought to bring something, so on the way I stopped to pick up a couple of six-packs of Moke. Naturally the supermarket was crowded. Naturally the checkout lines were interminable. I took the shortest one I could find, but it just didn’t move. I craned past the stout lady with the full cart in front of me and saw that the checkout person was deeply involved in endless computations of discount coupons, special offers, rainchecks, scratch-a-line lottery tickets and the like, and, worse than that, the matron before me had at least twice as many clutched in her plump little fist. I groaned, and she turned to me with sympathy. “Don’t you just
hate
standing in these lines? Gosh, me too! That’s why I never go to Ultimaximarts any more.” She waved proudly at the holosigns:
Speedy Service! Ultrafast Checkouts! We do everything to make shopping with us a joy!

“The thing is,” I said, “I’ve got a date.”

“Aw,” she said sympathetically, “so you’re in a hurry, of course. Tell you what. You help me sort out these coupons, and it’ll go a lot faster when I get to the desk. The thing is, see, I’ve got this thirty cents off on Kelpy Krisps, but the coupon’s only valid if I buy a ten-ounce tube of Glow-Tooth Double-Duty Dentifricial Analgesics, but they only had the fourteen-ounce size. Do you think they’ll accept that?” They wouldn’t, of course. That was a T., G. & S. promotion, and I knew we would never have issued those coupons except when the ten-ounce size was being discontinued. I was spared having to tell her that, though. A red light flashed, a klaxon sounded to chase her out of the way, the barrier slammed shut in her face and a display lit up to say:

We regret this Speedy Service Ultrafast Checkout Line is now closed. Please take your purchases to another of our counters for prompt attention from our friendly cashiers.

“Oh,
hell, “
I groaned, staring unbelievingly at the sign. That was a mistake. It wrecked my timing.

One of the slogans I’d come across on the Religion account was “the last shall be first.” In this case, my hesitation made it true enough. The whole long line behind me broke and scattered and I was caught staring. That’s when the finely honed consuming skills that you’ve developed over a lifetime meet their test. The split-second decisions come on you without warning: which line to jump to? You’ve got a dozen independent variables to weigh, and not just the obvious ones. There are things like the number of persons in line, the number of items for each, the factor for number of coupons per item—that’s what you learn while you’re still hanging on the end of Mom’s cart with your thumb in your mouth and the can of Sweetees you’ve bawled your lungs out for clutched in your grubby little fist. Then you’ve got to learn to read the individual consumer. You look for the nervous twitching of the fingers that suggests this one may be close to a credit overdraft, so the whole line will crash shut while the Wackerhuts come to take him away. Or that other one sneaked a magnetic pen through the detectors to try to change a bonus offer. You’ve got to assign a value to each and integrate them, and then there’s the physical stuff you’ve practiced, feinting to the wrong line, pretending not to notice a shopping cart left to save a place, use of elbows—all that is standard survival stuff, but my skills were rusty from the years on Venus. I wound up at the tail end of a line longer than ever, and even Miss Fourteen-Ounce had squeezed in ahead of me.

Something had to be done.

I peered over her shoulder to study the baskets in the line ahead and worked out my tactics. “Oh,
darn, “
I said as though to myself— but loud enough for all to hear, “I forgot the Vita-Smax.” Nobody had any. They couldn’t have. The line had been discontinued even before I left for Venus—some trouble about heavy-metal poisoning. Three steps ahead of me, an old man with a full double-decker cart glanced at me, nibbling at the bait.

I grinned at him and called, “Remember those grand old Vita-Smax commercials? ‘The All-American Cheese, Bran and Honey Breakfast Treat’?”

Miss Fourteen-Ounce looked up from her frantic inventorying of coupons. ” ‘Keeps You Regular—Tantalizes Your Tongue—Builds Health, Health, Health in Every Bite!’ ” she quoted. “Gee! I haven’t had Vita-Smax in a long time! We used to call it the milk and honey cereal.” Besides the heavy metals, the simulated milk solids had caused liver damage and the synthetic sucrose syrup rotted the teeth, but naturally no one would remember a thing like that.

“Mom used to make them every morning,” said another woman dreamily.

I had them on the tip. I chuckled ruefully. “Mine too. I could kick myself for not picking up a box or two from the stack in Gourmet Foods.”

Heads turned. “I didn’t see any Vita-Smax there,” the old man argued querulously.

“Really? The big stack under the sign that said, ‘Buy 1 Get 1 Free’?” The line quivered. “With the special double-allowance coupon reintroductory offer?” I added, and that was what did it. They broke. Every one of them pulled carts out of line, racing for Gourmet Foods. Suddenly I was face to face with the checker. She’d been listening too, and I had to beg her to take my money before she ran after them.

All the same I was late. I almost trotted the last couple of blocks to Mitzi’s place. The smog and exertion had me gasping and sweating by the time I got there—good-by LuvMe.

When I got past the doorthing I was startled to see what kind of a pad Mitzi lived in. I don’t mean that it was fancy—I would have expected that, considering her current credit rating. On the contrary, what hit me in the eye when Mitzi let me in was its starkness.

It certainly was not poverty that made it so peculiarly bare. You don’t get a four-hundred-square-foot flat in a building with twenty-four-hour reflex-conditioned attack guards without paying through the nose for it—I would have known that even if I hadn’t known about all that Veenie damage money. The surprising thing was that splurging had stopped with the pad itself. No RotaBath. No tanks of tropical fish. No—well, no anything at all to show her status. She didn’t even have Nelson Rockwell’s pathetic busts or commemorative medallions. A few pieces of furniture, a small Omni-V set in a corner—that was about it. And the decor was peculiar. It was all hot reds and yellows, and on one wall there was a huge static mural—not even liquid crystal—which I puzzled over for a moment before I recognized it. Sure enough, it was a rendering of that famous scene in Venusian history when they put the first big Hilsch tube on top of the tallest mountain in the Freysa range, to blow the noxious gases out into orbit as they began reducing the atmosphere to something people could stand.

“Sorry I’m late,” I apologized, staring at the mural, “but there was a long line at the super
market.” I held up the Mokie-Kokes as explanation.

“Aw, Tenny, we don’t need that swill.” Then she bit her lip. “Come on in the kitchen while I finish dinner, and you can tell me how things are going for you.”

To my surprise, she put me to work While I talked. To a surprise bigger still, the work was peeling potatoes! I mean, raw
vegetable
potatoes—some of them still had dirt on them! “Where’d you get these things?” I asked, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do to “peel” them.

“Money will get you anything,” she said, shredding some other raw unprocessed vegetables, orange and green colored ones this time. It wasn’t exactly an answer, since I hadn’t really wondered where, or even how, but why?

I was brought up polite, though. I really did eat quite a lot of her dinner, even the raw roots and leaves she called salad, and I didn’t say anything critical at all. Well, not
critical.
I did, after a while, when the conversation seemed to be limping along, ask if she really liked that stuff.

Mitzi was chomping away with a faraway look in her eyes, but she collected herself. “Like it? Of course I like it! It’s—” She paused, as though something had occurred to her. “It’s
healthy, “
she said.

“I thought it must be,” I said politely.

“No, really! There are some new, uh, studies, not yet published, that show that. For example, did you know that processed foods may cause memory deficiencies?”

“Aw, come on, Mitzi,” I grinned. “Nobody would sell consumers things that did them harm.”

She gave me a quizzical look. “Well, not on purpose,” she said, “maybe. But these are new studies. Tell you what. Let’s test it out!”

“Test what out?”

“Test out whether your diet has screwed up your memory, damn it,” she flared. “We’ll try a little experiment to see how much you remember about something and, uh, I’ll tape it so we can check it over.”

It did not sound like a very fun game to me, but I was still trying to be polite. “Why not?”

I said. “Let’s see. Suppose I give you the annual billings of the Agency for the past fifteen years, broken down for—”

“No, nothing that dull,” she complained. “I know! Let’s see how much you remember about what was going on in the Embassy on Venus. Some particular aspect—I don’t know —sure! Let’s hear everything you remember about the spy ring I was running.”