Job: A Comedy of Justice

by Robert A. Heinlein

  I could say that I overwhelmed her with the brilliance of my rebuttal. Yes, I could say that, but it would not be true. I was still trying to think of an answer when a car slowed down as it overtook us. I heard a whistle of the sort called “wolf.” The car stopped beyond us and backed up. “Need a ride?” a voice called out.

  “Yes!” Margrethe answered, and hurried. Perforce, I did, too.

  It was a station wagon with a woman behind the wheel, a man riding with her. Both were my age or older. He reached back, opened the rear door. “Climb in!”

  I handed Margrethe in, followed her and closed the door. “Got room enough?” he asked. “If not, throw that junk on the floor. We never sit in the back seat, so, stuff sort o’ gravitates to it. We’re Clyde and Bessie Bulkey.”

  “He’s Bulkey; I’m just well fed,” the driver added.

  “You’re supposed to laugh at that; I’ve heard it before.” He was indeed bulky, the sort of big-boned beefy man who is an athlete in school, then puts on weight later. His wife had correctly described both of them; she was not fat but carried some extra padding.

  “How do you do, Mrs. Bulkey, Mr. Bulkey. We’re Alec and Margrethe Graham. Thank you for picking us up.”

  “Don’t be so formal, Alec,” she answered. “How far you going?”

  “Bessie, please keep one eye on the road.”

  “Clyde, if you don’t like the way I’m herding this heap, I’ll pull over and let you drive.”

  “Oh, no, no; you’re doing fine!”

  “Pipe down then, or I invoke rule K. Well, Alec?”

  “We’re going to Kansas.”

  “Coo! We’re not going that far; we turn north at Chambers. That’s just a short piece down the road, about ninety miles. But you’re welcome to that much. What are you going to do in Kansas?”

  (What was I going to do in Kansas? Open an ice cream parlor…bring my dear wife back to the fold…prepare for Judgment Day—) “I’m going to wash dishes.”

  “My husband is too modest,” Margrethe said quietly. “We’re going to open a small restaurant and soda fountain in a college town. But on our way to that goal we are likely to wash dishes. Or almost any work.”

  So I explained what had happened to us, with variations and omissions to avoid what they wouldn’t believe. “The restaurant was wiped out, our Mexican partners were dead, and we lost everything we had. I said ‘dishwashing’ because that is the one job I can almost always find. But I’ll take a swing at ’most anything.”

  Clyde said, “Alec, with that attitude you’ll be back on your feet before you know it.”

  “We lost some money, that’s all. We’re not too old to start over again.” (Dear Lord, will You hold off Judgment Day long enough for me to do it? Thy will be done. Amen.)

  Margrethe reached over and squeezed my hand. Clyde noticed it. He had turned around in his seat so that he faced us as well as his wife. “You’ll make it,” he said. “With your wife backing you, you’re bound to make it.”

  “I think so. Thank you.” I knew why he was turned to face us: to stare at Margrethe. I wanted to tell him to keep his eyes to himself but, under the circumstances, I could not. Besides that, it was clear that Mr. and Mrs. Bulkey saw nothing wrong with the way my beloved was dressed; Mrs. Bulkey was dressed the same way, only more so. Or less so. Less costume, more bare skin. I must admit, too, that, while she was not the immortal beauty Margrethe is, she was quite comely.

  At Painted Desert we stopped, got out, and stared at the truly unbelievable natural beauty. I had seen it once before; Margrethe had never seen it and was breathless. Clyde told me that they always stopped, even though they had seen it hundreds of times.

  Correction: I had seen it once before…in another world. Painted Desert tended to prove what I had strongly suspected: It was not Mother Earth that changed in these wild changes; it was man and his works—and even those only in part. But the only obvious explanation seemed to lead straight to paranoia. If so, I must not surrender to it; I must take care of Margrethe.

  Clyde bought us hot dogs and cold drinks and brushed aside my offer to pay. When we got back into their car, Clyde took the wheel and invited Margrethe to ride up front with him. I was not pleased but could not show it, as Bessie promptly said, “Poor Alec! Has to put up with the old bag. Don’t sulk, dear; it’s only twenty-three miles to the turn-off for Chambers…or less than twenty-three minutes the way Clyde drives.”

  This time Clyde took thirty minutes. But he waited and made sure that we had a ride to Gallup.

  We reached Gallup long before dark. Despite $8.80 in our pockets, it seemed time to look for dirty dishes. Gallup has almost as many motels and cabin courts as it has Indians and almost half of these hostelries have restaurants. I checked a baker’s dozen before I found one that needed a dishwasher.

  Fourteen days later we were in Oklahoma City. If you think that is slow time, you are correct; it is less than fifty miles a day. But plenty had happened and I was feeling decidedly paranoid—world change after world change and always timed to cause me maximum trouble.

  Ever seen a cat play with a mouse? The mouse never has a chance. If he has even the brains the good Lord gives a mouse, he knows that. Nevertheless the mouse keeps on trying…and is hauled back every time.

  I was the mouse.

  Or we were the mice, for Margrethe was with me…and she was all that kept me going. She didn’t complain and she didn’t quit. So I couldn’t quit.

  Example: I had figured out that, while paper money was never any good after a world change, hard money, gold and silver, would somehow be negotiable, as bullion if not as coin. So, when I got a chance to lay hands on hard money, I was stingy with it and refused to take paper money in change for hard money.

  Smart boy. Alec, you’re a real brain.

  So on our third day in Gallup Marga and I took a nap in a room paid for by dishwashing (me) and by cleaning rooms (Margrethe). We didn’t intend to go to sleep; we simply wanted to rest a bit before eating; it had been a long, hard day. We lay down on top of the bedspread.

  I was just getting relaxed when I realized that something hard was pressing against my spine. I roused enough to figure out that our hoarded silver dollars had slipped out of my side pocket when I had turned over. So I eased my arm out from under Marga’s head, retrieved the dollars, counted them, added the loose change, and placed it all on the bedside table a foot from my head, then got horizontal again, slid my arm under Marga’s head and fell right to sleep.

  When I woke up it was pitch dark.

  I came wide awake. Margrethe was still snoring softly on my arm. I shook her a little “Honey. Wake up.”

  “Mrrrf?”

  “It’s late. We may have missed dinner.”

  She came quickly awake. “Can you switch on the bed lamp?”

  I fumbled at the bedside table, nearly fell out of bed. “Can’t find the pesky thing. It’s dark as the inside of a pile of coal. Wait a sec, I’ll get the overhead light.”

  I got cautiously off the bed, headed for the door, stumbled over a chair, could not find the door—groped for it, did find it, groped some more and found a light switch by it. The overhead light came on.

  For a long, dismal moment neither of us said anything. Then I said, inanely and unnecessarily, “They did it again.”

  The room had the characterless anonymity of any cheap motel room anywhere. Nevertheless it was different in details from the room in which we had gone to sleep.

  And our hoarded silver dollars were gone.

  Everything but the clothes we were wearing was gone—knapsack, clean socks, spare underwear, comb, safety razor, everything. I inspected, made certain.

  “Well, Marga, what now?”

  “Whatever you say, sir.”

  “Mmm. I don’t think they’ll know me in the kitchen. But they still might let me wash dishes.”

  “Or they may need a waitress.”

  The door had a spring lock and I had no key, so I left it an
inch ajar. The door led directly outdoors and looked across a parking court at the office—a corner room with a lighted sign reading OFFICE—all commonplace except that it did not match the appearance of the motel in which we had been working. In that establishment the manager’s office had been in the front end of a central building, the rest of that central building being the coffee shop.

  Yes, we had missed dinner.

  And breakfast. This motel did not have a coffee shop.

  “Well, Marga?”

  “Which way is Kansas?”

  “That way… I think. But we have two choices. We can go back into the room, go to bed properly, and sleep until daylight. Or we can get out there on the highway and try to thumb a ride. In the dark.”

  “Alec, I see only one choice. If we go back inside and go to bed, we’ll get up at daylight, some hours hungrier and no better off. Maybe worse off, if they catch us sleeping in a room we didn’t pay for—”

  “I washed an awful lot of dishes!”

  “Not here, you didn’t. Here they might send for the police.”

  We started walking.

  That was typical of the persecution we suffered in trying to get to Kansas. Yes, I said “persecution.” If paranoia consists in believing that the world around you is a conspiracy against you, I had become paranoid. But it was either a “sane” paranoia (if you will pardon the Irishism), or I was suffering from delusions so monumental that I should be locked up and treated.

  Maybe so. If so, Margrethe was part of my delusions—an answer I could not accept. It could not be folie à deux; Margrethe was sane in any world.

  It was the middle of the day before we got anything to eat, and by then I was beginning to see ghosts where a healthy man would see only dust devils. My hat had gone where the woodbine twineth and the New Mexico sun on my head was not helping my state.

  A carload of men from a construction site picked us up and took us into Grants, and bought us lunch before they left us there. I may be certifiably insane but I am not stupid; we owe that ride and that meal to the fact that Margrethe in shorts indecently tight is a sight that attracts the attention of men. That gave me plenty to think about while I enjoyed (and I did enjoy it!) that lunch they bought us. But I kept my ruminations to myself.

  After they left us I said, “East?”

  “Yes, sir. But first I would like to check the public library. If there is one.”

  “Oh, yes! Surely.” Earlier, in the world of our friend Steve, the lack of any sort of air travel had caused me to suspect that Steve’s world might be the world where Margrethe was born (and therefore the home of “Alec Graham” as well). In Gallup we had checked on this at the public library—I had looked up American history in an encyclopedia while Marga checked on Danish history. It took us each about five minutes to determine that Steve’s world was not the world Marga was born in. I found that Bryan had been elected in 1896 but had died in office, succeeded by his vice president, Arthur Sewall—and that was all I needed to know; I then simply raced through presidents and wars I had never heard of.

  Margrethe had finished her line of investigation with her nose twitching with indignation. Once outside where we didn’t have to whisper I asked her what was troubling her. “This isn’t your world, dear; I made sure of that.”

  “It certainly isn’t!”

  “But we didn’t have anything but a negative to go on. There may be many worlds that have no aeronautics of any sort.”

  “I’m glad this isn’t my world! Alec, in this world Denmark is part of Sweden. Isn’t that terrible?”

  Truthfully I did not understand her upset. Both countries are Scandinavian, pretty much alike—or so it seemed to me. “I’m sorry, dear. I don’t know much about such things.” (I had been to Stockholm once, liked the place. It didn’t seem a good time to tell her so.)

  “And that silly book says that Stockholm is the capital and that Carl Sixteenth is king. Alec, he isn’t even royal! And now they tell me he’s my king!”

  “But, sweetheart, he’s not your king. This isn’t even your world.”

  “I know. Alec? If we have to settle here—if the world doesn’t change again—couldn’t I be naturalized?”

  “Why, yes. I suppose so.”

  She sighed. “I don’t want to be a Swede.”

  I kept quiet. There were some things I couldn’t help her with.

  So in Grants we again went to a public library to see what the latest changes had done to the world. Since we had seen no aeroplanos and no dirigibles, again it was possible that we were in Margrethe’s world. This time I looked first under “Aeronautics”—did not find dirigibles but did find flying machines…invented by Dr. Alberto Santos-Dumont of Brazil early in this century—and I was bemused by the inventor’s name, as, in my world, he had been a pioneer in dirigibles second only to Count von Zeppelin. Apparently the doctor’s aerodynes were primitive compared with jet planes, or even aeroplanos; they seemed to be curiosities rather than commercial vehicles. I dropped it and turned to American history, checking first on William Jennings Bryan.

  I couldn’t find him at all. Well, I had known that this was not my world.

  But Marga was all smiles, could hardly wait to get outside the no-talking area to tell me about it. “In this world Scandinavia is all one big country…and København is its capital!”

  “Well, good!”

  “Queen Margrethe’s son Prince Frederik was crowned King Eric Gustav—no doubt to please the outlanders. But he is true Danish royalty and a Dane right down to his skull bone. This is as it should be!”

  I tried to show her that I was happy, too. Without a cent between us, with no idea where we would sleep that night, she was delighted as a child at Christmas…over an event that I could not see mattered at all.

  Two short rides got us into Albuquerque and I decided that it was prudent to stay there a bit—it’s a big place—even if we had to throw ourselves on Salvation Army charity. But I quickly found a job as a dishwasher in the coffee shop of the local Holiday Inn and Margrethe went to work as a waitress in the same shop.

  We had been working there less than two hours when she came back to the scullery and slid something into my hip pocket while I was bent over a sink. “A present for you, dear!”

  I turned around. “Hi, Gorgeous.” I checked my pocket—a safety razor of the travel sort—handle unscrews, and razor and handle and blades all fit into a waterproof case smaller than a pocket Testament, and intended to be carried in a pocket. “Steal it?”

  “Not quite. Tips. Got it at the lobby notions stand. Dear, at your first break I want you to shave.”

  “Let me clue you, doll. You get hired for your looks. I get hired for my strong back, weak mind, and docile disposition. They don’t care how I look.”

  “But I do.”

  “Your slightest wish is my command. Now get out of here; you’re slowing up production.”

  That night Margrethe explained why she had bought me a razor ahead of anything else. “Dear, it’s not just because I like your face smooth and your hair short—although I do! These Loki tricks have kept on and each time we have to find work at once just to eat. You say that nobody cares how a dishwasher looks…but I say looking clean and neat helps in getting hired for any job, and can’t possibly hurt.

  “But there is another reason. As a result of these changes, you’ve had to let your whiskers grow once, twice—I can count five times, once for over three days. Dearest, when you are freshly shaved, you stand tall and look happy. And that makes me happy.”

  Margrethe made for me a sort of money belt—actually a cloth pocket and a piece of cloth tape—which she wanted me to wear in bed. “Dear, we’ve lost anything we didn’t have on us whenever a shift took place. I want you to put your razor and our hard money into this when you undress for bed.”

  “I don’t think we can outwit Satan that easily.”

  “Maybe not. We can try. We come through each change with the clothes we are wearing at the tim
e and with whatever we have in our pockets. This seems to fit the rules.”

  “Chaos does not have rules.”

  “Perhaps this is not chaos. Alec, if you won’t wear this to bed, do you mind if I do?”

  “Oh, I’ll wear it. It won’t stop Satan if he really wants to take it away from us. Nor does it really worry me. Once he dumped us mother naked into the Pacific and we pulled out of it—remember? What does worry me is—Marga, have you noticed that every time we have gone through a change we’ve been holding each other? At least holding hands?”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Change happens in the blink of an eye. What happens if we’re not together, holding each other? At least touching? Tell me.”

  She kept quiet so long that I knew she did not intend to answer.

  “Uh huh,” I said. “Me, too. But we can’t be Siamese twins, touching all the time. We have to work. My darling, my life, Satan or Loki or whatever bad spirit is doing this to us, can separate us forever simply by picking any instant when we are not touching.”

  “Alec.”

  “Yes, my love?”

  “Loki has been able to do this to us at any moment for a long time. It has not happened.”

  “So it may happen the next second.”

  “Yes. But it may not happen at all.”

  We moved on, and suffered more changes. Margrethe’s precautions did seem to work—although in one change they seemed to work almost too well; I barely missed a jail sentence for unlawful possession of silver coins. But a quick change (the quickest we had seen) got rid of the charge, the evidence, and the complaining witness. We found ourselves in a strange courtroom and were quickly evicted for lacking tickets entitling us to remain there.

  But the razor stayed with me; no cop or sheriff or marshal seemed to want to confiscate that.

  We were moving on by our usual method (my thumb and Margrethe’s lovely legs; I had long since admitted to myself that I might as well enjoy the inevitable) and had been dropped in a pretty part of—Texas, it must have been—by a trucker who had turned north off 66 on a side road.