The Space Merchants (13 page)

Are you an intelligent, forward-looking man or woman between the ages of 14 and 50—Do you have the drive and ambition needed to handle the really BIG JOBS tomorrow will bring—Can you be trusted—
absolutely trusted—
with the biggest, hopefulest news of our time?

If you can't stand up and shout YES! to
every one
of thesequestions, please read no further!

But if you
can,
then you and your friends or family canget in on the
ground floor
of. ...

And so on. Bowen was staggered. "You don't think that appeal to upper-level IQs limits it too much, do you?" he asked anxiously. I didn't tell him that the only difference between that and the standard come-on for Class 12 laborers was that the Class 12s got it aurally—they couldn't read. I said I didn't think so. He nodded. "You're a natural-born copysmith, Groby," he told me solemnly. "In a Conservationist America, you'd be star class." I was properly modest. He went on, "I can't hog you; I've got to pass you on to a higher echelon. It isn't right to waste your talents in a cell. I've forwarded a report on you—" he gestured at the communicator, "and I expect you'll be requisitioned. It's only right. But I hate to see you go. However, I'm pulling the strings already. Here's the Chlorella Purchasers' Handbook . . ."

My heart bounded. I knew that Chlorella contracted for raw materials with a number of outlets in New York City.

"Thanks," I mumbled. "I want to serve wherever I best can."

"I know you do, Groby," he soothed. "Uh—say, one thing before you go. This isn't official, George, but—well, I do a little writing too. I've got some of my things here—sketches, I guess you'd call them—and I'd appreciate it a lot if you'd take them along and . . ."

I finally got out with the handbook, and only fourteen of Bowen's "sketches." They were churlish little scraps of writing, with no sell in them at all that I could see. Bowen assured me he had lots more that he and I could work on.

I hit that handbook hard.

Twisting valves left me feeling more alive at the end of a day than scum-skimming, and Bowen made sure my Consie labors were as light as possible—to free me for work on his "sketches." The result was that, for the first time, I had leisure to explore my milieu. Herrera took me into town with him once, and I discovered what he did with those unmentioned weekends. The knowledge shocked, but did not disgust me. If anything, it reminded me that the gap between executive and consumer could not be bridged by anything as abstract and unreal as "friendship."

Stepping out of the old-fashioned pneumatic tube into a misty Costa Rican drizzle, we stopped first at a third-rate restaurant for a meal. Herrera insisted on getting us each a potato, and insisted on being allowed to pay for it—"No, Jorge, you call it a celebration. You let me go on living after I gave you the contact sheet, no? So we celebrate." Herrera was brilliant through the meal, a fountain of conversation and bilingual badinage with me and the waiters. The sparkle in his eye, the rapid, compulsive flow of speech, the easy, unnecessary laughter were like nothing so much as the gaiety of a young man on a date.

A young man on a date. I remembered my first meeting with Kathy, that long afternoon at Central Park, strolling hand in hand down the dim-lit corridors, the dance hall, the eternal hour we stood outside her door. . . .

Herrera reached over and pounded me on the shoulder, and I saw that he and the waiter were laughing. I laughed too, defensively, and their laughter doubled; evidently the joke had been on me. "Never mind, Jorge," said Herrera, sobering, "we go now. You will like what I have for us to do next, I think." He paid the check, and the waiter raised an eyebrow.

"In back?"

"In back," said Herrera. "Come, Jorge."

We threaded our way between the counters, the waiter leading the way. He opened a door and hissed something rapid and Spanish to Herrera. "Oh, don't worry," Herrera told him. "We will not be long."

"In back," turned out to be—a library.

I was conscious of Herrera's eyes on me, and I don't think I showed any of what I felt. I even stayed with him for an hour or so, while he devoured a wormy copy of something called
Moby Dick
and I glanced through half a dozen ancient magazines. Some of those remembered classics went a long way toward easing my conscience —there was actually an early "Do You Make These Common Mistakes in English?" and a very fine "Not a Cough in a Carload" that would have looked well on the wall of my office, back in Schocken Tower. But I could not relax in the presence of so many books without a word of advertising in any of them. I am not a prude about solitary pleasures when they serve a useful purpose. But my tolerance has limits.

Herrera knew, I think, that I lied when I told him I had a headache. When, much later, he came stumbling into the dorm I turned my head away. We scarcely spoke after that.

A week later, after a near-riot in the mess hall—sparked by a rumor that the yeast fritters were adulterated with sawdust—I was summoned to the front office.

A veep for Personnel saw me after I had waited an hour. "Groby?"

"Yes, Mr. Milo."

"Remarkable record you've made. Quite remarkable. I see your efficiency rating is straight fours."

That was Bowen's work. He kept records. He had taken five years to worm himself into that very spot. "Thank you, Mr. Milo."

"Welcome, I'm sure. We, uh, happen to have a vacancy approaching. One of our people up North. I see his work is falling off badly."

Not his work—the ghost of his work; the shadow on paper of his work; the shadow carefully outlined and filled in by Bowen. I began to appreciate the disproportionate power that Consies could wield.

"Do you happen to have any interest in purchasing, Groby?"

"It's odd that you should ask, Mr. Milo," I said evenly. "I've always had a feel for it. I think I'd make good in purchasing."

He looked at me skeptically; it was a pretty standard answer. He began firing questions and I respectfully regurgitated answers from the Chlorella manual. He had memorized it twenty-odd years ago, and I had memorized it only a week ago. He was no match for me. After an hour he was convinced that George Groby was the only hope of Chlorella Protein, and that I should be hurled into the breach forthwith.

That night I told the cell about it.

"It means New York," Bowen said positively. "It means New York." I couldn't keep back a great sigh. Kathy, I thought. He went on, heedlessly: "I've got to tell you some special things now. To begin with—the recognition signals."

I learned the recognition signals. There was a hand sign for short range. There was a grand hailing sign of distress for medium range. For long range there was a newspaper-ad code; quite a good one. He made me practice the signs and memorize the code cold. It took us into the small hours of the morning. When we left through Chicken Little I realized that I hadn't seen Herrera all day. I asked as we emerged what had happened.

"He broke," Bowen said simply.

I didn't say anything. It was a kind of shorthand talk among Consies. "Soandso broke." That meant: "Soandso toiled for years and years in the cause of the W.C.A. He gave up his nickels and dimes and the few pleasures they could buy him. He didn't marry and he didn't sleep with women because it would have imperiled security. He became possessed by doubts so secret that he didn't admit them to himself or us. The doubts and fears mounted. He was torn too many ways and he turned on himself and died."

"Herrera broke," I said stupidly.

"Don't brood about it," Bowen said sharply. "You're going North. You've got a job to do."

Indeed I had.

I went to New York City almost respectably, in a cheap front-office suit, aboard a tourist rocket, steerage class. Above me the respectable Costa Rican consumers oohed and ahed at the view from the prism windows or anxiously counted their pennies, wondering how far they'd take them in the pleasures for sale by the colossus of the North.

Below decks we were a shabbier, tougher gang, but it was no labor freighter. We had no windows, but we had lights and vending machines and buckets. A plant protection man had made a little speech to us before we loaded: "You crumbs are going North, out of Costa Rican jurisdiction. You're going to better jobs. But don't forget that they
are jobs. I
want each and every one of you to remember that you're in hock to Chlorella and that Chlorella's claim on you is a prior lien. If any of you think you can break your contract, you're going to find out just how fast and slick extradition for a commercial offense can be. And if any of you think you can just disappear, try it. Chlorella pays Burns Detective Agency seven billion a year, and Burns delivers the goods. So if you crumbs want to give us a little easy exercise, go ahead; we'll be waiting for you. Is everything clear?" Everything was clear. "All right, crumbs. Get aboard and good luck. You have your assignment tickets. Give my regards to Broadway."

We slid into a landing at Montauk without incident. Down below, we sat and waited while the consumers on tourist deck filed out, carrying their baggage kits. Then we sat and waited while Food Customs inspectors, wearing the red-and-white A&P arm bands, argued vociferously with our stewards over the surplus rations—four of us had died on the trip, and the stewards, of course, had held out their Chicken Little cutlets to sell in the black market. Then we sat and waited.

Finally the order came to fall out in fifties. We lined up and had our wrists stamped with our entry permits; marched by squads to the subway; and entrained for the city. I had a bit of luck. My group drew a freight compartment.

At the Labor Exchange we were sorted out and tagged for our respective assignments. There was a bit of a scare when it came out that Chlorella had sold the contracts on twenty of us to I. G. Farben —nobody wants to work in the uranium mines—but I wasn't worried. The man next to me stared moodily as the guards cut out the unlucky twenty and herded them off. "Treat us like slaves," he said bitterly, plucking at my sleeve. "It's a crime. Don't you think so, Mac? It violates the essential dignity of labor."

I gave him an angry glare. The man was a Consie, pure and simple. Then I remembered that I was a Consie too, for the time being. I considered the use of the handclasp, and decided against it. He would be worth remembering if I needed help; but if I revealed myself prematurely he might call on
me.

We moved on to the Chlorella depot in the Nyack suburbs.

Waste not, want not. Under New York, as under every city in the world, the sewage drains led to a series of settling basins and traps. I knew, as any citizen knows, how the organic waste of twenty-three million persons came water-borne through the venous tracery of the city's drains; how the salts were neutralized through ion-exchange, the residual liquid piped to the kelp farms in Long Island Sound, the sludge that remained pumped into tank barges for shipment to Chlorella. I knew about it, but I had never seen it.

My title was Procurement Expediter, Class 9. My job was coupling the flexible hoses that handled the sludge. After the first day, I shot a week's pay on soot-extractor plugs for my nostrils; they didn't filter out all the odor, but they made it possible to live in it.

On the third day I came off shift and hit the showers. I had figured it out in advance: after six hours at the tanks, where no vending machines were for the simple reason that no one could conceivably eat, drink, or smoke
anything
in the atmosphere, the pent-up cravings of the crew kept them on the Popsie-Crunchie-Starrs cycle for half an hour before the first man even thought of a shower. By sternly repressing the craving, weaker in me than in most because it had had less time to become established, I managed to have the showers almost alone. When the mob arrived, I hit the vending machines. It was a simple application of intelligence, and if that doesn't bear out the essential difference between consumer and copysmith mentality, what does? Of course, as I say, the habits weren't as strong in me.

There was one other man in the shower, but, with only two of us, we hardly touched. He handed me the soap as I came in; I lathered and let the water roar down over me under the full pressure of the recirculators. I was hardly aware he was there. But, as I passed the soap back to him, I felt his third finger touch my wrist, the index finger circle around the base of my thumb.

"Oh," I said stupidly, and returned the handclasp. "Are you my con—"

"Ssh!" he hissed. He gestured irritatedly to the Muzak spymike dangling from the ceiling. He turned his back on me and meticulously soaped himself again.

When he returned the soap a scrap of paper clung to it. In the locker room I squeezed it dry and spread it out. It read: "Tonight is pass night. Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Classics Room. Be in front of the Maidenform exhibit at exactly five minutes before closing time."

I joined the queue at the supervisor's desk as soon as I was dressed. In less than half an hour I had a stamped pass authorizing me to skip bedcheck for the night. I returned to my bunk to pick up my belongings, warned the new occupant of the bed about the sleep-talking of the man in the tier above, turned in my bag to the supply room, and caught the shuttle down to Bronxville. I transferred to a north-bound local, rode one station, switched to the south-bound side, and got out at Schocken Tower. No one appeared to be following me. I hadn't expected anyone to, but it never pays to take chances.

My Consie rendezvous at the Met was almost four hours off. I stood around in the lobby until a cop, contemptuously eyeing my cheap clothing, moved toward me. I had hoped Hester or perhaps even Fowler Schocken himself might come through; no such luck. I saw a good many faces I recognized, of course, but none I was sure I could trust. And, until I found out what lay behind the double cross on Starrzelius Glacier, I had no intention of telling just anybody that I was still alive.

The Pinkerton boomed, "You want to give the Schocken people your business, crumb? You got a big account for them, maybe?"