I went in. Kathy, very trim and handsome in her doctor’s smock, was putting a case chart in her desk. When she straightened up, she said, “Oh, Mitch!” in a very annoyed tone.
“I told only one lie,” I said. “I gave the girl a phony name. But it is an emergency. And my heart is involved.”
There was a faint impulse toward a smile, but it didn’t quite reach the surface. “Not medically,” she said.
“I told her it was probably psychosomatic. She said to come in anyhow.”
“I’ll speak to her about that. Mitch, you know I can’t see you during working hours. Now please—”
I sat down next to her desk. “You won’t see me any time, Kathy. What’s the trouble?”
“Nothing’s the trouble. Please go away, Mitch. I’m a doctor; I have work to do.”
“Nothing as important as this. Kathy, I tried to call you all last night and all this morning.”
She struck a cigarette without looking at me. “I wasn’t home.”
“No, you weren’t. I don’t suppose I have the right to ask my own wife where she spends her time, do I?”
“Damn it, Mitch, you know—” Her phone rang. She screwed her eyes shut for a moment. Then she picked up the phone, leaning back in her chair, looking across the room, relaxed, a doctor soothing a patient. It took only a few moments. But when it was all over, she was entirely self-possessed.
“Please go away,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette.
“Not until you tell me when you’ll see me.”
“I . . . haven’t time to see you. I’m not your wife. You have no right to bother me like this. I could have you enjoined or arrested.”
“My certificate’s on file,” I reminded her.
“Mine isn’t. It never will be. As soon as the year is up, we’re through, Mitch.”
“There was something I wanted to tell you.” Kathy had always been reachable through curiosity.
Instead of saying again. “Please go away,” she said, “Well, what is it?”
“It’s something big. It calls for a celebration. And I’m not above using it as an excuse to see you for just a little while tonight. Please, Kathy—I love you very much and I promise not to make a scene.”
“Well—” While she was thinking, her phone rang. “All right,” she said. “Call me at home. Seven o’clock. Now let me take care of the sick people.”
She picked up the phone. I let myself out of her office while she was talking, and she didn’t look after me.
FOWLER SCHOCKEN was hunched over his desk as I walked in. He was staring at the latest issue of Taunton’s Weekly. The magazine was blinking in full color as the triggered molecules of its inks collected photons by driblets and released them in bursts. He waved the brilliant pages at me and asked: “What do you think of this, Mitch?”
“Sleazy advertising,” I said promptly. “If we had to stoop so low as to sponsor a magazine like Taunton Associates, I think I’d resign. It’s too cheap a trick.” He put the magazine face down; the hashing inks gave one last burst and subsided as their light source was cut off.
“Yes, it’s cheap,” he said thoughtfully. “But you have to give them credit for enterprise. Taunton gets sixteen and a half million readers for his ads every week. Nobody else’s—just Taunton clients. And I hope you didn’t mean that literally about resigning. I just gave Harvey the go-ahead on Schock. The first issue comes out in the fall, with a print order of twenty million.”
He mercifully held up his hand to cut off my stammering try at an explanation. “I understood what you meant, Mitch. You were against cheap advertising. So am I. Taunton is to me the epitome of everything that keeps advertising from finding its rightful place with the clergy, medicine and the bar in our way of life. There isn’t a shoddy trick he wouldn’t pull, from bribing a judge to stealing away an employee. And, Mitch, he’s a man you’ll have to watch.”
“Why? I mean, why particularly?”
Schocken chuckled. “Because we stole Venus from him. It wasn’t easy to persuade the Government that it should be our baby.”
“I see,” I said, and I did. Our representative government now is more representative than it has ever been before in history. It is not, of course, representative per capita, but it most surely is ad valorem, which is the only realistic way to govern a country. A citizen’s vote must be weighed in the same way as a member of a family exerts influence—according to his wisdom and success. His power, in other words. Just as the head of a family makes its decisions because he bears the most responsibility and the ability to enforce his decisions, a nation must, obviously, be governed by its leaders. This has always been true in fact. Ours is the first civilization, however, which admits the reality of the situation and applies the correct solution with admirably logical practicality.
One thing was bothering me. “Won’t Taunton be likely to take—well, direct action?”
“Oh, he’ll try to steal it back,” Fowler said mildly.
“That’s not what I mean. You remember what happened with Antarctic Exploitation.”
“I was there. A hundred and forty casualities on our side. God knows what they lost.”
“And that was only one continent. Taunton takes these things pretty personally: If he filed a feud over that, won’t he do it for a whole planet?”
Fowler said patiently, “No, Mitch. He wouldn’t dare. In the first place, industrial feuds are expensive. Preliminary hearings alone can tie up the whole legal staff for weeks, when we get through with our injunctions and counter-claims. In the second place, he doesn’t have grounds—this is a legal, perfectly open-and-aboveboard assignment by the Incorporated Government of the United States of America; he can’t question it. In the third place, we’d whip his tail off.”
“I guess you’re right,” I admitted. It was just as well, as far as I’m concerned. Believe me, I’m a loyal employee of Fowler Schocken Associates; ever since cadet days I have tried to live my life “for Company and for Sales.” But industrial feuds can be pretty messy. Our profession has been comparatively free of them—reasonable men can talk these things out nine times out of ten. But it was only a few decades ago, back in 2039, that a small but highly effective advertising agency in London filed a feud against one of our bigger competitors, wiping out every executive on the. staff. And they say there are still bloodstains on the steps of the General Post Office where two delivery companies had fought it out for the Federal Postal Contract, which, like the Armed Services, national and local police forces and other former government agencies, are let to private enterprise as they should be.
Schocken was speaking again; my attention whipped back. “There’s one thing you’ll have to watch for,” he cautioned. “This is the kind of project that is bound to bring out the lunatic fringe. Every crackpot organization on the list, from the Connies themselves on down, is going to come out for or agin it. I don’t care how you do it, but make sure they’re all for. Butter them up. We don’t want them to contend with as well as Taunton.”
“Even the Connies?” I asked, astonished.
“Oh, no, Mitch. Don’t bother with them; they’re so discredited that they’d be more of a liability.” His white hair glinted in the lamplight as he bobbed his head. “Maybe you could spread the word that space-travel is violently opposed to the principles of Conservationism. Uses up too many raw materials, hurts the general living standard—you know, the usual unrealistic line. Bring in the fact that rocket fuel uses organic material that the Connies think should be made into fertilizer . . .”
I like to watch an expert at work. Fowler Schocken laid down a whole sub-campaign for me right there; I took it down and filled in the details. The Conservationists were fair game, those wild-eyed zealots who pretended that modern scientific method was not competent to meet with the demands of our expanding population and dwindling resources. I had been exposed to Connie sentiment in my time, and the arguments had always come down to one thing: Nature’s way of living was the r
ight way of living. If “Nature” had intended us to eat fresh vegetables, it wouldn’t have given us niacin or thiamin chloride.
I sat still for twenty minutes more of Fowler Schocken’s inspirational talk, and came away with the discovery that I had often made before: briefly and effectively, he had given me every fact and instruction I needed. The details he left to me; but I knew my job.
The government wanted Venus colonized by Americans. To accomplish this, three things were needed; colonists; a way of getting them to Venus: and something for them to do when they got there in one piece.
The first was direct advertising. Schocken’s TV commercial had blueprinted that, and it would be easy. It is always easy to persuade men and women—particularly American men and women who have pioneer blood in their veins—that the grass is greener far away. I had already penciled in a tentative campaign with the budget well under a megabuck. More would have been extravagant.
The second was only partly our problem. The ships had been designed—by Republic Aviation, Bell Telephone Labs and U.S. Steel, I believe, under Defense Corporation contract. Our job wasn’t to make the transportation to Venus possible, but to make it palatable. When your wife found her burned-out toaster impossible to replace because its nichrome element was part of a Venus rocket’s main drive jet, or when the inevitable disgruntled Congressman for a small and frozen-out firm waved an appropriations sheet around his head and talked about government waste on wildcat schemes, our job began: We had to convince your wife that rockets are more important than toasters; we had to convince the Congressman’s constituent firm that its tactics were unpopular and would cost it profits.
I thought briefly of an austerity campaign and vetoed it. Our other accounts would suffer. But I needed something that would offer vicarious gratification to the eight hundred million who would not ride the rockets themselves.
I tabled that; Bruner could help me there. And I went on to point three. There had to be something to keep the colonists busy on Venus.
This, I knew, was what Fowler Schocken had his eye on. The government money that would pay for the basic campaign was a nice addition to our year’s billing. but Fowler Schocken was too big for one-shot accounts. What we wanted was the year-after-year reliability of a major industrial account.
Fowler, of course, hoped to repeat on an enormously magnified scale our smashing success with Indiastries. His boards and he had organized all of India into a single giant cartel, with every last woven basket and iridium ingot it produced sold through Fowler Schocken advertising. Now he could do the same with Venus. Potentially, it was worth as much as every dollar of value in existence put together! A whole new planet, almost the size of Earth, in prospect as rich as Earth—and every micron, every milligram of it ours.
I looked at my watch. After four; my date with Kathy was for seven. I just had barely time. I dialed Hester and had her get me space on the Washington jet while I put through a call to the name Fowler had given me. The name was Jack O’Shea; he was the only human being who had been to Venus—so far. His voice was young and cocky as he made an appointment to see me.
WE were five extra minutes in the landing pattern over Washington and then there was a hassel at the ramp. Brinks Express guards were swarming around our plane and their lieutenant demanded identification from each emerging passenger. When it was my turn, I asked what was going on. He looked at my low-number Social Security card thoughtfully and then saluted.
“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Courtenay,” he apologized. “It’s the Connie bombing near Topeka. We got a tip that the man might be aboard the 4:05 New York jet. Seems to have been a lemon.”
“What Connie bombing was this?”
“DuPont Raw Materials Division—we’re under contract for their plant protection, you know—was opening up a new coal vein under some cornland they own out there. They made a nice little ceremony of it, and just as the hydraulic mining machine started ramming through the topsoil, somebody tossed a bomb from the crowd. Killed the machine operator, his helper and a vice president. He slipped away in the crowd, but he was identified. We’ll get him one of these days.”
“Good luck, Lieutenant,” I said, and hurried on to the refreshment lounge.
O’Shea was waiting at a window seat, visibly annoyed, but he grinned when I apologized.
“It could happen to anybody,” he said, and shrilled at a waiter. When we had placed our orders, he leaned back and said: “Well?” I looked down at him across the table and looked away through the window. Off to the south, the gigantic pylon of the Hearst Memorial blinked its marker signal; behind it lay the tiny, dulled dome of the old Capitol. I, an ad man, was embarrassed, and O’Shea was enjoying it.
“Well?” he asked again, quite amusedly, and I knew he meant: “Now all of you have to come to me, and how do you like it for a change?”
I plunged. “I came for information,” I said. “For instance: what’s on Venus?”
“Sand and smoke,” he said promptly. “Didn’t you read my report?”
“Certainly. I want to know more.”
“Everything’s in the report. Jesus, they kept me in the interrogation room for three solid days when I got back! If I left anything out, it’s gone permanently.”
“That’s not what I mean, Jack. Who wants to spend his life reading reports? I have fifteen men in Research doing nothing but digesting reports for me so I don’t have to read them. I want to get the feel of the planet. There’s only one place I can get it—because only one man’s been there.”
“And sometimes I wish I had not,” O’Shea said wearily. “Well, where do I start? You know why they picked me—the only midget in the world with a pilot’s license. And you know all about the ship. And you saw the assay reports on the samples I brought back. Not that they mean much. I only touched down once and five miles away the geology might be entirely different.”
“I know all that. Look, Jack, put it this way. Suppose you wanted a lot of people to go to Venus. What would you tell them about it?”
He laughed. “I’d tell them a lot of damn big lies. Start from scratch, won’t you? What’s the deal?”
I gave him a fill-in on what Schocken Associates was up to, while his round little face stared at me through his round little eyes. There is an opaque quality, like porcelain, to the features of a midget: as though the destiny that had made them small at the same time made them more perfect and polished than ordinary men, as if to show that their lack of size did not mean lack of completion. He sipped his drink and I gulped mine between paragraphs.
When my pitch was finished, I still didn’t know whether he was on my side or not. Fowler had helped him to capitalize on his fame via testimonials, books and lectures, so he owed us a little gratitude and no more.
He said: “I wish I could help,” and that made things easier.
“You can,” I told him. “That’s what I’m here for. Tell me what Venus has to offer.”
“Damn little.” A small frown chiseled across his lacquer forehead. “Where shall I start? Do I have to tell you about the atmosphere? There’s free formaldehyde, you know—embalming fluid. Or the heat? It averages above the boiling-point of water—if there was any water on Venus, which there isn’t. Not accessible, anyhow. Or the winds. I clocked five hundred miles an hour.”
“Honestly, Jack, there are answers for all those things. I want to get what you thought when you were there, how you reacted. Just start talking. I’ll tell you when I’ve had what I wanted.”
He dented his rose-marble lip with his lower teeth. “Well, let’s start at the beginning. Get us another drink, won’t you?”
The waiter took our order and came back with the liquor. Jack drummed on the table, sipped his rhine wine and seltzer, and began to talk.
He started way back, which was good. I wanted to know the elusive, subjective mood that underlay his technical reports on the planet Venus, the basic feeling that would put compulsion and conviction into the project.
; He told me about his father, the six-foot chemical engineer, and his mother, the plump, strapping housewife. He made me feel their dismay and their ungrudging love for their thirty-five-inch son. He had been eleven years old when the subject of his adult life and work first came up. He remembered the unhappiness on their faces at his first, inevitable, off-hand suggestion about the circus. It was no minor tribute to them that the subject never came up again. It was a major tribute that Jack’s settled desire to learn enough engineering and rocketry to be a test pilot had been granted, paid for and carried out in the face of every obstacle of ridicule and refusal from the schools.
Of course Venus had made it all pay off.
The Venus rocket designers ran into one major complication. It had been easy enough to get a rocket to the Moon, a quarter-million miles away; theoretically, it was not much harder to blast one across space to the nearest other world, Venus. The question was one of orbits and time, of controlling the ship and bringing it back again.
They could blast the ship to Venus in days—at so squander-some a fuel expenditure that ten ships couldn’t carry enough. Or they could ease it to Venus along its natural orbits as you might float a barge down a gentle river—which saved fuel, but lengthened the trip to months. A man in that length of time eats twice his own weight in food, breathes nine times his weight of air and drinks water enough to float a yawl. Closing the cycle with waste products is the answer, of course—only the equipment weighs more than the food, air and water. So the human pilot was out.
A team of designers went to work on an automatic pilot. When it was done it worked pretty well, and weighed four and one-half tons in spite of printed circuits and relays constructed under a microscope. The project stopped right there until somebody thought of that most perfect servo-mechanism: a sixty pound midget. A third of a man in weight, Jack O’Shea ate a third of the food, breathed a third of the oxygen. With minimum-weight, low-efficiency water-and air-purifiers, Jack came in just under the limit and thereby won himself undying fame.
Collected Short Fiction Page 159
