The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  “We?” asked Vickers. “Who are we?”

  “North American Research.”

  “And North American Research?”

  “You’re getting interested,” said Crawford.

  “I want to know who I’m talking to and what you want of me and what it’s all about.”

  CRAWFORD sat for a long time without speaking, and then he finally said, “That is what I meant when I told you what I had Jo say was highly confidential.”

  “I will swear no oath,” said Vickers, “if that is what you mean.”

  “Let’s go back and review some history. Who we are and what we are will become apparent then.

  “You remember the razor blade. It was the first to come out. An everlasting razor blade. The news spread quickly and everyone went out and bought one. Now the ordinary man will get anywhere from one to half a dozen shaves out of a blade. Then he throws it away and puts in another. That means he is a continuous buyer of razor blades. As a result, the razor blade industry employed thousands of workers, it represented a certain profit for thousands of dealers, it was a buyer of steel. In other words, it was an economic factor which, linked with thousands of others, make up the picture of world industry. So what happens?”

  “I can tell you that,” said Vickers, “although I’m no economist. No one bought any more razor blades. The razor blade industry was out the window.”

  “Then there was the lighter. A small thing in itself, of course, but fairly large when you look at it from the world point of view. The same thing happened there. And the everlasting light bulbs. Three industries gone. Mr. Vickers. Three industries wiped out. You said a while ago that I was scared and I told you that I was. It was after the bulbs that we got scared. Because if someone could wipe out three industries, why not half a dozen, a dozen, a hundred—why not all of them?

  “We organized, and by we I mean the industry of the world—not American industry alone, but the industry of America and the British commonwealth and the continent of Europe and Russia and all of the rest of them. There were a few, of course, who were skeptical. There still are a few who never have come in, but by and large I can tell you that our organization represents and is backed by every major industry of the entire world. I would prefer you not to mention this.”

  “At the moment,” Vickers told him, “I have no intention of saying anything about it.”

  “We organized,” said Crawford, “and we swung a lot of power, as you can well imagine. We made certain representations and we brought certain pressures and we got a few things done. For one thing, no newspaper, no periodical, no radio station now will accept advertising for any of the gadgets or give them any mention in the news. For another, no reputable drugstore or any other place of business will sell a razor blade or a bulb or lighter.”

  “That was when they set up the gadget shops?”

  “Exactly,” said Crawford. “They’re branching out,” said Vickers. “One opened in Cliffwood just the other day.”

  “THEY set up the gadget shops,” said Crawford, “and they developed a new form of advertising. They hired thousands of men and women who went around from place to place and said to people they would meet, ‘Did you hear about those wonderful new gadgets they are getting out? You haven’t? Well, just let me tell you . . .’ That is the best kind of advertising there is. But it’s more expensive than you can possibly imagine.

  “So we knew that we were up against not merely inventive and productive genius, but almost unlimited money as well.

  “And we investigated. We tried to find out who they were and how they operated and what they meant to do. As I’ve told you, we ran into stone walls.”

  “There might be legal angles,” said Vickers.

  “We have run down the legal angles. These people, whoever they may be, are covered from hell to breakfast. Taxes? So there won’t be any investigation, they actually pay more taxes than they need to pay. Rules of corporation? They are more than meticulous in meeting all the rules. Social security? They pay it on huge payrolls that we are convinced are utterly fictitious, but you can’t go to the social security people and say, ‘Look, there aren’t any such people as these they’re paying for.’ There are other points, but those serve as illustrations. We’ve run down so many legal blind alleys that our legal force is dizzy.”

  “Mr. Crawford,” said Vickers, “you make out a most interesting case, but I can’t see the point of what you said earlier. You said this was a conspiracy to break world industry. If you study your economic history, you will find example on example of cutthroat competition. That’s all this is.”

  “You forget,” Crawford replied, “about the carbohydrates.”

  AND that was true, thought Vickers. The carbohydrates had no place in mere cutthroat competition.

  “We checked into them,” Crawford said. “So far as we’re concerned, the carbohydrates aren’t being manufactured—they simply exist. They are shipped to the distribution offices from several warehouses and none of the warehouses are big enough to carry more than a day or two’s supply. We can find no factories and we can’t trace transportation—oh, sure, from the warehouses to the distribution points, but not from anywhere to the warehouses. It’s like the old story that Hawthorne told about the pitcher of milk that never ran dry.”

  “What happens when the men who are out of work need more than just a gift of food?” asked Vickers. “What happens when their families are in tatters and they need clothes and they’re thrown out into the street?”

  “I think I can answer that. Some other philanthropic society will spring up overnight and will furnish clothes and shelter. They’re selling houses now for five hundred a room, which is no more than token payment. Why not give them away? Why not clothing that will cost no more than a tenth or a twentieth of what you pay today. A suit for five dollars, say, or a dress for fifty cents.”

  “You have no idea of what is coming next?”

  “We’ve tried to dope it out,” said Crawford. “We figured the car would come quickly, and it did. We figured houses, too, and they have put them out. Clothing should be one of the next items to go on the market.”

  “Food, shelter, transportation, clothing,” said Vickers. “Those are four basics.”

  “They also have fuel and power,” Crawford added.

  “But who is it? You’ve told me you don’t know, but you must have some idea, some educated guess.”

  “Not an inkling. We have tables of organization for their corporation setups. We can’t find the men themselves; they are names we’ve never heard of.”

  “Russia?”

  Crawford shook his head. “Russia is cooperating. That should prove how scared they are.”

  For the first time, Crawford moved. He unfolded his hands from across his paunch, grasped the arms of his massive chair and pulled himself straight, sitting upright now.

  “I suppose,” he said, “that you are wondering where you fit in on this.”

  “Naturally.”

  “We can’t say, ‘here we are, a combine of the world’s industrial might, fighting to protect your way of life.’ We can’t explain to the people what the situation is. They’d laugh at us. After all, you can’t tell them that a car that will last forever or a house that costs only five hundred a room is a bad thing for them. We can’t tell them anything and yet this needs telling. We want you to write a book about it.”

  “I don’t see . . .” said Vickers, but Crawford stopped him in mid-sentence.

  “You would write it as if you had doped it out yourself. You would hint at informed sources that were too high to name. We’d furnish all the data, but the material would appear as yours.” Vickers came slowly to his feet. He reached out a hand and picked up his hat.

  “Thanks for the chance,” he said. “I’m not having any.”

  VII

  ANN CARTER said to Vickers: “Someday I’m going to get sore enough at you to take you apart. And when I do maybe I’ll have a chance to find what
makes you tick.”

  “I have a book to write,” said Vickers. “I’m writing it. What more do you want?”

  “That book could keep. You could write it anytime.”

  “Go ahead, tell me I threw away a million bucks. That’s what you’re thinking.”

  “You could have charged them a fancy fee for writing and gotten a contract with the publisher like there never was before . . .”

  “And pushed aside the greatest piece of work I’ve ever done,” said Vickers, “and come back to it cold and find I’d lost the feel.”

  “Every book you write is your greatest one. You’re nothing but a literary ham. Sure, you do good work and your darn books sell, although sometimes I wonder why, but if there were no money in it, you’d never write another word. Tell me, honest, why do you write?”

  “You’ve answered it for me. You say it is for money. All right, so it is for money.”

  “All right, so I have a sordid soul.”

  “My God, we’re fighting as if we’re married!”

  “That’s another thing. You’ve never married, Jay. It’s an index of your selfishness. I bet you never even thought of it.”

  “Once I did,” said Vickers. “Once long ago.”

  “Here, put your head down here and have a good long cry. I bet it was pitiful. I bet that’s how you get some of those excruciating love scenes you put into your books.”

  “Ann, you’re getting maudlin drunk.”

  “If I’m getting drunk, you’re the man who drove me to it. Thanks for the chance, but I’m not having any.”

  “I had a hunch there was something phony there,” insisted Vickers.

  “That was you,” Ann retorted. She finished off her drink. “Don’t use a hunch,” she said, “to duck the responsibility of turning down the best thing you ever had. Anytime someone dangles money like that in front of me, I’m not letting any hunch stand in my way.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t,” Vickers agreed.

  “That was a nasty thing to say,” Ann told him. “Pay for the drinks and let’s get out of here. I’m putting you on that bus and don’t you come back here again.”

  VIII

  THE huge sign was draped diagonally across the front of the huge show window. It read:

  HOUSES

  TAILORED TO ORDER

  $500 a room

  LIBERAL TRADE-IN

  ON YOUR OLD HOME

  In the window was a five or six room house, set in the middle of a small, beautifully planned lawn and garden. There was a sun dial in the garden and a cupola with a flying duck weather vane on the attached garage. Two white lawn chairs and a white round table stood on the clipped grass and there was a new and shiny car standing in the driveway.

  Ann squeezed Vickers’ arm. “Let’s go in.”

  “This must be what Crawford was talking about,” said Vickers.

  “You got lots of time to catch the bus and we could have a look.”

  “We might as well. If you get interested in looking at a house, you won’t be chewing me.”

  “If I thought it were possible, I’d trap and marry you.”

  “And make my life a hell.”

  “Why, certainly,” Ann told him sweetly. “Why else would I do it?”

  The door swung to behind them and the noise of the street was shut away and they walked on the deep green carpeting that doubled as a lawn.

  A salesman saw them and came over.

  “We were just passing by,” said Ann, “and we thought we would drop in. It looks like a fine house and . . .”

  “It is a fine house,” the salesman assured them, “and it has many special features.”

  “Is that true what the sign said?” asked Vickers. “Five hundred dollars a room?”

  “Everyone asks me that. They read the sign, but they don’t believe it, so the first thing they ask me when they come in is whether it is really true that we sell these houses for five hundred a room.”

  “Well, is it?” persisted Vickers. “Absolutely,” said the salesman. “A five room house is twenty-five hundred dollars and a ten room house would be five thousand dollars. Most people, of course, aren’t interested in a ten room house at first.”

  “What do you mean, at first?”

  “Well, this is what you might call a house that grows. You buy a five room house, say, and in a little while you figure that you want another room, so we come out and redesign the house and make it a six room house.”

  “Isn’t that expensive?” Ann asked.

  “Oh, not at all,” the salesman said. “It only costs you five hundred dollars for the extra room. That is a flat and standard charge.”

  “This is a prefabricated house, isn’t it?” asked Ann.

  “I suppose you could call it that, although it does the house injustice. When you say ‘prefabricated you are thinking of a house that is pre-cut and sort of stuck together. Takes a week or ten days to put it together and then you just have a shell—no heating plant, no fireplace, nothing.”

  “I’m interested in this extra room angle,” said Vickers. “You say that when they want an extra room, they just tall you up and you come out and stick one on.”

  THE salesman stiffened slightly.

  “We stick nothing on. At all times, your house is well planned and practical, designed in accordance with the highest scientific and esthetic concepts of what a home should be. In some cases, adding another room means that we have to change the whole house around, rearrange the rooms and such. If you wanted to change the place completely, the best thing might be to trade the house in on a new one. For doing that, we make a service charge of one per cent per year of the original cost, plus, of course, the charge for the extra rooms.”

  He looked at the two of them hopefully. “You have a house, perhaps?”

  “A little cottage up the valley,” said Vickers. “It’s not much of a place.”

  “Worth how much, would you say?”

  “Fifteen or twenty thousand, but I doubt if I could get that much.”

  “We’d give you twenty thousand,” said the salesman, “subject to appraisal. Our appraisals are most liberal.”

  “Look,” Vickers objected, “I’d only want a five or six room house. That would come to twenty five hundred or three thousand.”

  “We’d pay the difference in cash.”

  “It doesn’t make sense!”

  “We’re willing to pay the going market value on existing homes in order to introduce our own. In your case, we’d pay you the difference, then take your old place and move it away and set up the new one. It’s as simple as that.” Ann said to Vickers, “Go ahead and tell the man that you aren’t having any. This sounds like a good sound business proposition to me, so you’ll naturally turn it down.”

  “Madam,” said the salesman, “I don’t quite understand.”

  “It’s just a private joke,” Vickers interpreted.

  “Oh . . . Well, I was telling you that this house has some special features.”

  “Go ahead, please,” said Ann. “Tell us about them.”

  “Very happy to. For instance, there is the solar plant. You do know what a solar plant is?” Vickers nodded. “A power plant operated by the Sun.”

  “Exactly,” said the salesman. “This plant, however, is somewhat more efficient than the usual solar plant. It not only heats the house in winter, but supplies electrical power for the year round. It eliminates the necessity of relying upon a public utility for your power. I might add there is much more than you will ever need.”

  “A nice feature,” said Ann. “Then,” continued the salesman, “it comes fully equipped. You get a refrigerator and a deep freeze, an automatic washer and drier, a dish washer, a garbage disposal unit, a toaster, a waffle iron, radio, television, and other odds and ends.”

  “An extra charge for them, of course,” said Vickers.

  “Positively not. All you pay is five hundred a room.”

  “And beds?” asked Ann. “
Chairs and stuff like that?”

  “I’m sorry,” said the salesman. “You have to furnish those yourself.”

  “There is an extra charge,” Vickers pushed on, “for carting away the old house and putting up the new one.”

  DRAWING himself erect, the salesman spoke with quiet dignity. “There are no hidden costs. You buy the house and pay—or arrange to pay—at the rate of five hundred a room. We have trained crews of workmen who move away your old house and erect the new one. All of that is included in the original cost. Some buyers want to change location. In that case we are usually able to work out an acceptable exchange plan between their old real estate and the new location they select. You, I presume, would want to stay where you are. You said you were up the valley. A most attractive place.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Vickers.

  “I forgot to mention one thing,” the salesman went on. “You never have to paint this house. It is built of material that is of the same color all the way through and never wears off or fades. We have a wide range of very attractive color combinations.”

  “We don’t want to take up too much of your time,” said Vickers. “You see, we’re not really customers. We just dropped in.”

  “But you have a house?”

  “Yes, I have a house.”

  “And we stand ready to replace it with a new one and pay you a comfortable sum besides.”

  “I know all that,” said Vickers, “but . . .”

  “It seems to me,” the salesman said, “that you should be trying to sell me instead of me trying to sell you.”

  “I have a house and I like it. How would I know I’d like one of these new houses?”

  “Why, sir, I’ve just been telling you—”

  “I’m used to my house. I’m acquainted with it and it’s got used to me. I’ve become attached to it—”

  “Jay Vickers,” said Ann, “you can’t become attached to a house in only three years. To hear you talk about it, one would think you’d lived all your life in an old ancestral home.”