The Space Merchants (14 page)

"Sorry," I said, and headed for the street door. It didn't figure that he would bother to follow me through the crowd in the lobby; he didn't. I dodged around the recreation room, where a group of consumers were watching a PregNot light love story on the screen and getting their samples of Coffiest, and ducked into the service elevators. "Eightieth," I said to the operator, and at once realized I had blundered. The operator's voice said sharply through the speaker grille:

"Service elevators go only to the seventieth floor, you in Car Five. What do you want?"

"Messenger," I lied miserably. "I got to make a pickup from Mr. Schocken's office. I
told
them I wouldn't be let in to Mr. Schocken's office, a fellow like me. I told them, 'Look, he's probably got twenty-five seckataries I got to go through before they let me see him,' I said—"

"The mail room is on forty-five," the operator said, a shade less sharply. "Stand in front of the door so I can see you."

I moved into range of the mike. I didn't want to, but I couldn't see any way out. I thought I heard a sound from the grille, but there was no way of being sure. I had never been in the elevator operators' room, a thousand feet below me, where they pushed the buttons that sent the cars up and down the toothed shafts; I would have given a year's pay to have been able to look into it then.

I stood there for half a minute. Then the operator's voice said noncommittally. "All right, you. Back in the car. Forty-fifth floor, first slide to the left."

The others in the car stared at me through an incurious haze of Coffiest's alkaloids until I got out. I stepped on the leftbound slidewalk and went past the door marked "Mail Room," to the corridor juncture where my slidewalk dipped down around its roller. It took me a little while to find the stairway, but that was all right. I needed the time to catch up on my swearing. I didn't dare use the elevators again.

Have you ever climbed thirty-five flights of stairs?

Toward the end the going got pretty bad. It wasn't just that I was aching from toe to navel, or that I was wasting time, of which I had none too much anyway. It was getting on toward ten o'clock, and the consumers whose living quarters were on the stairs were beginning to drift there for the night. I was as careful as I could be, but it nearly came to a fist fight on the seventy-fourth, where the man on the third step had longer legs than I thought.

Fortunately, there were no sleepers above the seventy-eighth; I was in executive country.

I skulked along the corridors, very conscious of the fact that the first person who paid any attention to me would either recognize me or throw me out. Only clerks were in the corridors, and none I'd known at all well; my luck was running strong.

But not strong enough. Fowler Schocken's office was locked.

I ducked into the office of his secretary
³
, which was deserted, and thought things over. Fowler usually played a few holes of golf at the country club after work. It was pretty late for him still to be there, but I thought I might as well take the chance—it was only four more flights to the club.

I made it standing up. The country club is a handsome layout, which is only fair because the dues are handsome too. Besides the golf links, the tennis court and the other sports facilities, the whole north end of the room is woods—more than a dozen beautifully simulated trees—and there are at least twenty recreation booths for reading, watching movies, or any other spectator pleasure.

A mixed foursome was playing golf. I moved close to their seats as unobtrusively as possible. They were intent on their dials and buttons, guiding their players along the twelfth hole fairway. I read their scores from the telltale with a sinking heart; all were in the high nineties. Duffers. Fowler Schocken averaged under eighty for the course. He couldn't be in a group like that, and as I came close I saw that both the men were strangers to me.

I hesitated before retreating, trying to decide what to do next. Schocken wasn't in sight anywhere in the club. Conceivably he was in one of the recreation booths, but I could scarcely open the doors of all of them to see; I'd be thrown out the first time I blundered into an occupied one, unless God smiled and the occupant was Fowler.

A babble of conversation from the golfers caught my ear. One of the girls had just sunk a four-inch putt to finish the hole; smiling happily as the others complimented her, she leaned forward to pull the lever that brought the puppet players back to the tee and changed the layout to the dogleg of the thirteenth hole, and I caught a glimpse of her face. It was Hester, my secretary.

That made it simple. I couldn't quite guess how Hester came to be in the country club, but I knew everything else there was to know about Hester. I retreated to an alcove near the entrance to the ladies' room; it was only about a ten-minute wait before she showed up.

She fainted, of course. I swore and carried her into the alcove. There was a couch; I put her on it. There was a door; I closed it.

She blinked up at me as consciousness came back. "Mitch," she said, in a tone between a whisper and a shriek.

"I am not dead," I told her. "Somebody else died, and they switched bodies. I don't know who 'they' are; but I'm not dead. Yes, it's really me. Mitch Courtenay, your boss. I can prove it. For instance, remember last year's Christmas party, when you were so worried about—"

"Never mind," she said hastily. "My God, Mitch—I mean, Mr. Courtenay—"

"Mitch is good enough," I said. I dropped the hand I had been massaging, and she pushed herself up to get a better look at me. "Listen," I said, "I'm alive, all right, but I'm in a kind of peculiar foul-up. I've got to get in touch with Fowler Schocken. Can you fix it —right away?"

"Uh." She swallowed and reached for a cigarette, recovering. I automatically took out a Starr. "Uh, no, Mitch. Mr. Schocken's on the Moon. It's a big secret, but I guess I can tell
you
about it. It's something to do with the Venus project. After you got killed—well, you know what I mean—after that, when he put Mr. Runstead on the project and it began to slip so, he decided to take matters into his own hands. I gave him all your notes. One of them said something about the Moon, I guess; anyway, he took off a couple of days ago."

"Hell," I said. "Well, who'd he leave in charge here? Harvey Bruner? Can you reach—"

Hester was shaking her head. "No, not Mr. Bruner, Mitch. Mr. Runstead's in charge. Mr. Schocken switched in such a hurry, there wasn't anyone to spare to take over the job except Mr. Runstead. But I can call him right away."

"No," I
said. I looked at my watch, and groaned. I would have just about time to make it to the Met. "Look," I said. "I've got to leave. Don't say anything to
anybody,
will you? I'll figure something out, and I'll call you. Let's see, when I call I'll say I'm—what's the name of that doctor of your mother's?—Dr. Gallant. And I'll arrange to meet you and tell you what we're going to do. I can count on you, Hester, can't I?"

"Sure, Mitch," she said breathlessly.

"Fine," I said. "Now you'll have to convoy me down in the elevator. I haven't got time to walk, and there'll be trouble if a guy like me gets caught on the club floor." I stopped and looked her over. "Speaking of which," I said, "what in the world are you doing here?"

Hester blushed. "Oh, you know how it is," she said unhappily. "After you were gone there weren't any other secretarial jobs; the rest of the executives had their girls, and I just couldn't be a consumer again, Mitch, not with the bills and all. And—well, there was this opening up here, you see. . . ."

"Oh," I said. I hope nothing showed on my face; God knows I tried. Damn you to hell, Runstead, I said to myself, thinking of Hester's mother and Hester's young man that she'd maybe been going to marry some day, and the absolute stinking injustice of a man like Runstead taking the law into his own hands and wrecking executive lives—mine—and staff lives—Hester's—and dragging them down to the level of consumers.

"Don't worry, Hester," I said gently. "I'll owe you something for this. And believe me, you won't have to remind me. I'll make everything up to you." And I knew how to do it, too. Quite a lot of the girls on the ZZ contract manage to avoid the automatic renewal and downgrading. It would cost a lot for me to buy out her contract before the year was up, so that was out of the question; but some of the girls do pretty well with single executives after their first year. And I was important enough so that if I made a suggestion to some branch head or bureau chief, he would not be likely to ignore it, or even to treat her badly.

I don't approve of sentiment in business matters, but as you see I'm an absolute sucker for it in any personal relationship.

Hester insisted on lending me some money, so I made it to the Met with time to spare by taking a cab. Even though I had paid the driver in advance, he could not refrain from making a nasty comment about high-living consumers as I got out; if I hadn't had more important things on my mind I would have taught him a lesson then and there.

I have always had a fondness for the Met. I don't go much for religion—partly, I suppose, because it's a Taunton account—but there is a grave, ennobling air about the grand old masterpieces in the Met that gives me a feeling of peace and reverence. I mentioned that I was a little ahead of time. I spent those minutes standing silently before the bust of G. Washington Hill, and I felt more relaxed than I had since that first afternoon at the South Pole.

At precisely five minutes before midnight I was standing before the big, late-period Maidenform—number thirty-five in the catalogue: "I Dreamed I Was Ice-Fishing in My Maidenform Bra"— when I became conscious of someone whistling in the corridor behind me. The notes were irrelevant; the cadence formed one of the recognition signals I'd learned in the hidey-hole under Chicken Little.

One of the guards was strolling away. She looked over her shoulder at me and smiled.

To all external appearances, it was a casual pickup. We linked arms, and I felt the coded pressure of her fingers on my wrist: "D-O-N-T T-A-L-K W-H-E-N I L-E-A-V-E Y-O-U G-O T-O T-H-E B-A-C-K O-F T-H-E R-O-O-M S-I-T D-O-W-N A-N-D W-A-I-T."

I nodded. She took me to a plastic-finished door, pushed it open, pointed inside. I went in alone.

There were ten or fifteen consumers sitting in straight-back chairs, facing an elderly consumer with a lectorial goatee. I found a seat in the back of the room and sat in it. No one paid any particular attention to me.

The lecturer was covering the high spots of some particularly boring precommercial period. I listened with half my mind, trying to catch some point of similarity in the varying types around me. All were Consies, I was reasonably sure—else why would I be here? But the basic stigmata, the surface mark of the lurking fanatic inside, that should have been apparent, escaped me. They were all consumers, with the pinched look that soyaburgers and Yeasties inevitably give; but I could have passed any of them in the street without a second glance. Yet—this was New York, and Bowen had spoken of it as though the Consies I'd meet here were pretty high up in the scale, the Trotskys and Tom Paines of the movement.

And that was a consideration too. When I got out of this mess—when I got through to Fowler Schocken and cleared up my status—I might be in a position to break up this whole filthy conspiracy, if I played my cards right. I looked over the persons in the room a little more attentively, memorizing their features. I didn't want to fail to recognize them, next time we came in contact.

There must have been some sort of signal, but I missed it. The lecturer stopped almost in midsentence, and a plump little man with a goatee stood up from the first row. "All right," he said in an ordinary tone, "we're all here and there's no sense wasting any more time. We're against waste; that's why we're here." He stepped on the little titter. "No noise," he warned, "and no names. For the purpose of this meeting we'll use numbers; you can call me 'One,' you 'Two—" he pointed to the man in the next seat, "and so on by rows to the back of the room. All clear? Okay, now listen closely. We've got you together because you're all new here. You're in the big leagues now. This is world operational headquarters, right here in New York; you can't go any higher. Each of you was picked for some special quality—you know what they are. You'll all get assignments right here, tonight. But before you do, I want to point out one thing. You don't know me and I don't know you; every one of you got a big buildup from your last cells, but sometimes the men in the field get a little too enthusiastic. If they were wrong about you . . . Well, you understand these things, eh?"

There was a general nod. I nodded too, but I paid particular attention to memorizing that plump little goatee. One by one numbers were called, and one by one the new-Johns got up, conferred briefly with the goatee, and left, in couples and threes, for unannounced destinations. I was almost the last to be called; besides me, only a very young girl with orange hair and a cast in her eye was still in the room.

"Okay, you two," said the man with the goatee. "You two are going to be a team, so you might as well know names. Groby, meet Corwin. Groby's a kind of copysmith. Celia's an artist."

"Okay," she said, lighting a Starr from the butt of another in a flare of phosphorus. A perfect consumer type if only she hadn't been corrupted by these zealots; I noticed her jaws working on gum even while she chain-smoked.

"We'll get along fine," I said approvingly.

"You sure will," said the man in the goatee. "You have to. You understand these things, Groby. In order to give you a chance toshow your stuff, we'll have to let you know a lot of stuff dial we don't want to read in the morning paper. If you don't work out for us, Groby," he said pleasantly, "you see the fix we're in; we'll have to make some other arrangements for you." He tapped a little bottle of colorless fluid on the desk top. The tinny rattle of die aluminum top was no tinnier than my voice as I said, "Yes, sir," because I knew what little bottles of colorless fluid could reasonably be assumed to contain.