American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Read online

  Something that sounded like a sob.

  I asked quietly: “Kathy, don’t you still love me?”

  She was absolutely quiet for a long moment. Then she laughed wildly and very briefly. “Here’s the hospital, Mitch,” she said. “It’s midnight.”

  I threw back the top and we climbed out. “Wait,” I said to the lead boy, and walked with her to the door. She wouldn’t kiss me good night and she wouldn’t make a date to see me again. I stood in the lobby for twenty minutes to make sure she was really staying there that night, and then got into the cab to go to the nearest shuttle station. I was in a vile mood. It wasn’t helped any when the lead boy asked innocently after I paid him off: “Say, mister, what does Mac—Machiavellian mean?”

  “Spanish for ‘mind your own God-damned business,’ ” I told him evenly. On the shuttle I wondered sourly how rich I’d have to be before I could buy privacy.

  My temper was no better when I arrived at the office next morning. It took all Hester’s tact to keep me from biting her head off in the first few minutes, and it was by the grace of God that there was not a Board meeting. After I’d got my mail and the overnight accumulation of interoffice memos, Hester intelligently disappeared for a while. When she came back she brought me a cup of coffee—authentic, plantationgrown coffee. “The matron in the ladies’ room brews it on the sly,” she explained. “Usually she won’t let us take it out because she’s afraid of the Coffiest team. But now that you’re star class—”

  I thanked her and gave her Jack O’Shea’s tape to put through channels. Then I went to work.

  First came the matter of the sampling area, and a headache with Matt Runstead. He’s Market Research, and I had to work with and through him. But he didn’t show any inclination to work with me. I put a map of southern California in the projector, while Matt and two of his faceless helpers boredly sprinkled cigarette ashes on my floor.

  With the pointer I outlined the test areas and controls: “San Diego through Tijuana; half the communities around L.A. and the lower tip of Monterrey. Those will be controls. The rest of Cal-Mexico from L.A. down we’ll use for tests. You’ll have to be on the scene, I guess, Matt; I’d recommend our Diego offices as headquarters. Turner’s in charge there and he’s a good man.”

  Runstead grunted. “Not a flake of snow from year’s end to year’s end. Couldn’t sell an overcoat there if you threw in a slave girl as a premium. For God’s sake, man, why don’t you leave market research to somebody who knows something about it? Don’t you see how climate nulls your sigma?”

  The younger of his stamped-out-of-tin assistants started to back the boss up, but I cut him off. Runstead had to be consulted on test areas—it was his job. But Venus was my project and I was going to run it. I said, sounding just a little nasty: “Regional and world income, age, density of population, health, psyche-friction, age-group distribution and mortality causes and rates are seven-place sigmas, Matt. Cal-Mex was designed personally by God Himself as a perfect testing area. In a tiny universe of less than a hundred million it duplicates every important segment of North America. I will not change my project and we are going to stick to the area I indicated.” I bore down on the word “my.”

  Matt said: “It won’t work. The temperature is the major factor. Anybody should be able to see that.”

  “I’m not just anybody, Matt. I’m the guy in charge.”

  Matt Runstead stubbed out his cigarette and got up. “Let’s go talk to Fowler,” he said and walked out. There wasn’t anything for me to do except follow him. As I left I heard the older of his helpers picking up the phone to notify Fowler Schocken’s secretary that we were coming. He had a team all right, that Runstead. I spent a little time wondering how I could build a team like that myself before I got down to the business of planning how to put it to Fowler.

  But Fowler Schocken has a sure-fire technique of handling interstaff hassles. He worked it on us. When we came in he said exuberantly: “There you are! The two men I want to see! Matt, can you put out a fire for me? It’s the A.I.G. people. They claim our handling of the PregNot account is hurting their trade. They’re talking about going over to Taunton unless we drop PregNot. Their billing isn’t much, but a birdie told me that Taunton put the idea into their heads.” He went on to explain the intricacies of our relationship with the American Institute of Gynecologists. I listened only half-heartedly; our “Babies Without Maybes” campaign on their sex-determination project had given them at least a 20 per cent plus on the normal birthrate. They should be solidly ours after that. Runstead thought so too.

  He said: “They don’t have a case, Fowler. We sell liquor and hang-over remedies both. They’ve got no business bitching about any other account. Besides, what the hell does this have to do with Market Research?”

  Fowler chuckled happily. “That’s it!” he crowed. “We throw them a switch. They’ll expect the account executives to give them the usual line—but instead we’ll let you handle them yourself. Snow them under with a whole line of charts and statistics to prove that PregNot never prevents a couple from having a baby; it just permits them to postpone it until they can afford to do the job right. In other words, their unit of sale goes up and their volume stays the same. And—it’ll be one in the eye for Taunton. And—lawyers get disbarred for representing conflicting interests. It’s cost a lot of them a lot of money. We’ve got to make sure that any attempt to foist the same principle on our profession is nipped in the bud. Think you can handle it for the old man, Matt?”

  “Oh, hell, sure,” Runstead grumbled. “What about Venus?”

  Fowler twinkled at me. “What about it? Can you spare Matt for a while?”

  “Forever,” I said. “In fact, that’s what I came to see you about. Matt’s scared of southern California.”

  Runstead dropped his cigarette and let it lay, crisping the nylon pile of Fowler’s rug. “What the hell—” he started belligerently.

  “Easy,” said Fowler. “Let’s hear the story, Matt.”

  Runstead glowered at me. “All I said was that southern California isn’t the right test area. What’s the big difference between Venus and here? Heat! We need a test area with continental-average climate. A New Englander might be attracted by the heat on Venus; a Tijuana man, never. It’s too damn hot in Cal-Mex already.”

  “Um,” said Fowler Schocken. “Tell you what, Matt. This needs going into, and you’ll want to get busy on the A.I.G. thing. Pick out a good man to vice you on the Venus section while you’re out, and we’ll have it hashed over at the section meeting tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile—” he glanced at his desk clock, “Senator Danton has been waiting for seven minutes. All right?”

  It was clearly not all right with Matt, and I felt cheered for the rest of the day. Things went well enough. Development came in with a report on what they’d gleaned from O’Shea’s tape and all the other available material. The prospects for manufacture were there. Quick, temporary ones like little souvenir globes of Venus manufactured from the organics floating around in what we laughingly call the “air” of Venus. Long-term ones—an assay had indicated pure iron: not ninenines pure and not ninety-nine nines pure, but absolute iron that nobody would ever find or make on an oxygen planet like Earth. The labs would pay well for it. And Development had not developed but found a remarkable little thing called a high-speed Hilsch Tube. Using no power, it could refrigerate the pioneers’ homes by using the hot tornadoes of Venus. It was a simple thing that had been lying around since 1943. Nobody until us had any use for it because nobody until us had that kind of winds to play with.

  Tracy Collier, the Development liaison man with Venus Section, tried also to tell me about nitrogen-fixing catalysts. I nodded from time to time and gathered that sponge-platinum “sown” on Venus would, in conjunction with the continuous, terrific lightning cause it to “snow” nitrates and “rain” hydrocarbons, purging the atmosphere of formaldehyde and ammonia.

  “Kind of expensive?” I asked cautiously.<
br />
  “Just as expensive as you want it to be,” he said. “The platinum doesn’t get used up, you know. Use one gram and take a million years or more. Use more platinum and take less time.”

  I didn’t really understand, but obviously it was good news. I patted him and sent him on his way.

  Industrial Anthropology gave me a setback. Ben Winston complained: “You can’t make people want to live in a steamheated sardine can. All our folkways are against it. Who’s going to travel sixty million miles for a chance to spend the rest of his life cooped up in a tin shack—when he can stay right here on Earth and have corridors, elevators, streets, roofs, all the wideopen space a man could want? It’s against human nature, Mitch!”

  I reasoned with him. It didn’t do much good. He went on telling me about the American way of life—walked to the window with me and pointed out at the hundreds of acres of rooftops where men and women could walk around in the open air, wearing simple soot-extractor nostril plugs instead of a bulky oxygen helmet.

  Finally I got mad. I said: “Somebody must want to go to Venus. Otherwise why would they buy Jack O’Shea’s book the way they do? Why would the voters stand still for a billionand-up appropriation to build the rocket? God knows I shouldn’t have to lead you by the nose this way, but here’s what you are going to do: survey the book-buyers, the repeatviewers of O’Shea’s TV shows, the ones who come early to his lectures and stand around talking in the lobby afterwards. O’Shea is on the payroll—pump him for everything you can get. Find out about the Moon colony—find out what types they have there. And then we’ll know whom to aim our ads at. Any arguments, for God’s sake?” There weren’t.

  Hester had done wonders of scheduling that first day, and I made progress with every section head involved. But she couldn’t read my paper work for me, and by quitting time I had six inches of it stacked by my right arm. Hester volunteered to stay with me, but there wasn’t really anything for her to do. I let her bring me sandwiches and another cup of coffee, and chased her home.

  It was after eleven by the time I was done. I stopped off in an all-night diner on the fifteenth floor before heading home, a windowless box of a place where the coffee smelled of the yeast it was made from and the ham in my sandwich bore the taint of soy. But it was only a minor annoyance and quickly out of my mind. For as I opened the door to my apartment there was a snick and an explosion, and something slammed into the doorframe by my head. I ducked and yelled. Outside the window a figure dangling from a rope ladder drifted away, a gun in its hand.

  I was stupid enough to run over to the window and gawk out at the helicopter-borne figure. I would have been a perfect target if it had been steady enough to shoot at me again, but it wasn’t.

  Surprised at my calm, I called the Metropolitan Protection Corporation.

  “Are you a subscriber, sir?” their operator asked.

  “Yes, dammit. For six years. Get a man over here! Get a squad over here.”

  “One moment, Mr. Courtenay. . . . Mr. Mitchell Courtenay? Copysmith, star class?”

  “No,” I said bitterly. “Target is my profession. Will you kindly get a man over here before the character who just took a shot at me comes back?”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Courtenay,” said the sweet, unruffled voice. “Did you say you were not a copysmith, star class?”

  I ground my teeth. “I’m star class,” I admitted.

  “Thank you, sir. I have your record before me, sir. I am sorry, sir, but your account is in arrears. We do not accept starclass accounts at the general rate because of the risk of industrial feuds, sir.” She named a figure that made each separate hair on my head stand on end.

  I didn’t blow my top; she was just a tool. “Thanks,” I said heavily, and rang off. I put the Program-Printing to Quarry Machinery reel of the Red Book into the reader and spun it to Protective Agencies. I got turndowns from three or four, but finally one sleepy-sounding private detective agreed to come on over for a stiff fee.

  He showed up in half an hour and I paid him, and all he did was annoy me with unanswerable questions and look for nonexistent fingerprints. After a while he went away saying he’d work on it.

  I went to bed and eventually to sleep with one of the unanswered questions chasing itself around and around in my head: who would want to shoot a simple, harmless advertising man like me?

  4

  I took my courage in my hands and walked briskly down the hall to Fowler Schocken’s office. I needed an answer, and he might have it. He might also throw me out of the office for asking. But I needed an answer.

  It didn’t seem to be the best possible time to ask Fowler questions. Ahead of me, his door opened explosively and Tildy Mathis lurched out. Her face was working with emotion. She stared at me, but I’ll take oath she didn’t know my name. “Rewrites,” she said wildly. “I slave my heart out for that white-haired old rat, and what does he give me? Rewrites. ‘This is good copy, but I want better than good copy from you,’ he says. ‘Rewrite it,’ he says. ‘I want color,’ he says, ‘I want drive and beauty, and humble, human warmth, and ecstasy, and all the tender, sad emotion of your sweet womanly heart,’ he says, ‘and I want it in fifteen words.’ I’ll give him fifteen words,” she sobbed, and pushed past me down the hall. “I’ll give that sanctimonious, mellifluous, hyperbolic, paternalistic, star-making, genius-devouring Moloch of an old—”

  The slam of Tildy’s own door cut off the noun. I was sorry; it would have been a good noun.

  I cleared my throat, knocked once, and walked into Fowler’s office. There was no hint of his brush with Tildy in the smile he gave me. In fact, his pink, clear-eyed face belied my suspicions, but—I had been shot at.

  “I’ll only be a minute, Fowler,” I said. “I want to know whether you’ve been playing rough with Taunton Associates.”

  “I always play rough,” he twinkled. “Rough, but clean.”

  “I mean very, very rough and very, very dirty. Have you, by any chance, tried to have any of their people shot?”

  “Mitch! Really!”

  “I’m asking,” I went on doggedly, “because last night a ’copter-borne marksman tried to plug me when I came home. I can’t think of any angle except retaliation from Taunton.”

  “Scratch Taunton,” he said positively.

  I took a deep breath. “Fowler,” I said, “man-to-man, you haven’t been Notified? I may be out of line, but I’ve got to ask. It isn’t just me. It’s the Venus Project.”

  There were no apples in Fowler’s cheeks at that moment, and I could see in his eyes that my job and my star-class rating hung in the balance.

  He said: “Mitch, I made you star class because I thought you could handle the responsibilities that came with it. It isn’t just the work. I know you can do that. I thought you could live up to the commercial code as well.”

  I hung on. “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He sat down and lit a Starr. After just exactly the right split second of hesitation, he pushed the pack to me. “Mitch, you’re a youngster, only star class a short time. But you’ve got power. Five words from you, and in a matter of weeks or months half a million consumers will find their lives completely changed. That’s power, Mitch, absolute power. And you know the old saying. Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I knew all the old sayings. I also knew that he was going to answer my question eventually.

  “Ah, Mitch,” he said dreamily, waving his cigarette, “we have our prerogatives and our duties and our particular hazards. You can’t have one without the others. If we didn’t have feuds, the whole system of checks and balances would be thrown out of gear.”

  “Fowler,” I said, greatly daring, “you know I have no complaints about the system. It works; that’s all you have to say for it. I know we need feuds. And it stands to reason that if Taunton files a feud against us, you’ve got to live up to the code. You can’t broadcast the information; every executive in the shop would be diving for cov
er instead of getting work done. But—Venus Project is in my head, Fowler. I can handle it better that way. If I write everything down, it slows things up.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Suppose you were Notified, and suppose I’m the first one Taunton knocks off—what happens to Venus Project?”

  “You may have a point,” he admitted. “I’ll level with you, Mitch. There has been no Notification.”

  “Thanks, Fowler,” I said sincerely. “I did get shot at. And that accident in Washington—maybe it wasn’t an accident. You don’t imagine Taunton would try anything without Notifying you, do you?”

  “I haven’t provoked them to that extent, and they’d never do a thing like that anyhow. They’re cheap, they’re crooked, but they know the rules of the game. Killing in an industrial feud is a misdemeanor. Killing without Notification is a commercial offense. You haven’t been getting into any of the wrong beds, shall I say?”

  “No,” I said. “My life’s been very dull. The whole thing’s crazy. It must have been a mistake. But I’m glad that whoeverit-was couldn’t shoot.”