The Space Merchants

by Frederik Pohl; C. M. Kornbluth

  They were properly sorry to see me go and properly delighted about everybody's moving up a notch.

  And then it was lunch time, so I postponed the problem of the planet Venus until the afternoon.

  I made a phone call, ate quickly in the company cafeteria, took the elevator down to the shuttle, and the shuttle south for sixteen blocks. Coming out, I found myself in the open air for the first time that day, and reached for my antisoot plugs but didn't put them in. It was raining lightly and the air had been a little cleared. It was summer, hot and sticky; the hordes of people crowding the sidewalks were as anxious as I to get back inside a building. I had to bulldoze my way across the street and into the lobby.

  The elevator took me up fourteen floors. It was an old building with imperfect air conditioning, and I felt a chill in my damp suit. It occurred to me to use that fact instead of the story I had prepared, but I decided against it.

  A girl in a starched white uniform looked up as I walked into the office. I said: "My name is Silver. Walter P. Silver. I have an appointment."

  "Yes, Mr. Silver," she remembered. "Your heart—you said it was an emergency."

  "That's right. Of course it's probably only some psychosomatic thing, but I felt—"

  "Of course." She waved me to a chair. "Dr. Nevin will see you in just a moment."

  It was ten minutes. A young woman came out of the doctor's office, and a man who had been waiting in the reception room before me went in; then he came out and the nurse said: "Will you go into Dr. Nevin's office now?"

  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 lied about my 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 your girl 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 morning."

  She lit a cigarette without looking at me. "I wasn't home," she said.

  "No, you weren't." I leaned forward and took the cigarette from her and puffed on it. She hesitated, shrugged, and took out another. I said: "I don't suppose I have the right to ask my wife where she spends her time?"

  Kathy flared: "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, Mitch. 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.

  There was a long pause and instead of saying again: "Please go away," she said: "Well, what is it?"

  I said: "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."

  "... No."

  But she had hesitated. I said: "Please?"

  "Well—" While she was thinking, her phone rang. "All right," she said to me. "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, 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—well, I think I'd resign. It's too cheap a trick."

  "Um." He put the magazine face down; the flashing 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 hopeyou didn't mean that literally about resigning. I just gave Harvey the go-ahead on Shock. The first issue comes out in the fall, with a print order of twenty million. No—" 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. And 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 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, that's why. I told you he was enterprising. He had the same idea I did. 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 perhaps more representative than it has ever been before in history. It is not necessarily representative per capita, but it most surely is ad valorem. If you like philosophical problems, here is one for you: should each human being's vote register alike, as the lawbooks pretend and as some say the founders of our nation desired? Or should a vote be weighed according to the wisdom, the power, and the influence—that is, the money—of the voter? That is a philosophical problem for you, you understand; not for me. I am a pragmatist, and a pragmatist, moreover, on the payroll of Fowler Schocken.

  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 casualties on our side. God knows what they lost."

  "And that was only one continent. Taunton takes these things pretty personally. If he started a feud for a lousy frozen continent, what will he do for a whole planet?"

  Fowler said patiently, "No, Mitch. He wouldn't dare. Feuds are expensive. Besides, we're not giving him grounds—not grounds that would stand up in court. And, in the third place . . . we'd whip his tail off."

  "I guess so," I said, and felt reassured. Believe me, I am 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, even in our profession, can be pretty messy. It was only a few decades ago that a small but effective agency in London filed a feud against the English branch of B.B.D. & O. and wiped it out to the man except for two Bartons and a single underage Osborn. And they say there are still bloodstains on the steps of the General Post Office where United Parcel and American Express fought it out for the mail contract.

  Schocken was speaking again. "There's one thing you'll have to watch out for: the lunatic fringe. This is the kind of project that's bound to bring them out. Every crackpot organization on the list, from the Consies to the G.O.P., is going to come out for or against it. Make sure they're all for; they swing weight."

  "Even the Consies?" I squeaked.

  "Well, no.
I didn't mean that; they'd be more of a liability." His white hair glinted as he nodded thoughtfully. "Mm. Maybe you could spread the word that spaceflight and Conservationism are diametrically opposed. It uses up too many raw materials, hurts the living standard—you know. Bring in the fact that the fuel uses organic material that the Consies think should be made into fertilizer—"

  I like to watch an expert at work. Fowler Schocken laid down a whole subcampaign for me right there; all I had to do was fill in the details. The Conservationists were fair game, those wild-eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way "plundering" our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.

  I had been exposed to Consie sentiment in my time, and the arguments had all come down to one thing: Nature's way of living was the right way of living. Silly. If "Nature" had intended us to eat fresh vegetables, it wouldn't have given us niacin or ascorbic acid.

  I sat still for twenty minutes more of Fowler Schocken's inspirational talk, and came away with the discovery 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:

  We 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.

  The first was easy to handle through direct advertising. Schocken's TV commercial was the perfect model on which we could base the rest of that facet of our appeal. It is always easy to persuade a consumer 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 Department 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's 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. A religious movement, perhaps— something that would offer vicarious dedication 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 complex; what we wanted was the colonists, and their children, added to our complex of accounts. 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 and caddy of opium it produced sold through Fowler Schocken advertising. Now he could do the same with Venus. Potentially this was worth as much as every dollar of value in existence put together! A whole new planet, the size of Earth, in prospect as rich as Earth—and every micron, every milligram of it ours. I looked at my watch. About four, my date with Kathy was for seven. I just barely had 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 a date to see me.

  We were five extra minutes in the landing pattern over Washington, and then there was a hassle at the ramp. Brink's 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 Consie 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 Consie bombing was this?"

  "Du Pont 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. Man 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 jetport's main refreshment lounge. O'Shea was waiting in a window seat, visibly annoyed, but he grinned when I apologized.

  "It could happen to anybody," he said, and swinging his short legs 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 F.D.R. memorial blinked its marker signal; behind it lay the tiny, dulled dome of the old Capitol. I, a glib ad man, hardly knew where to start. And O'Shea was enjoying it. "Well?" he asked again, 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 took the plunge. "What's on Venus?" I asked.

  "Sand and smoke," he said promptly. "Didn't you read my report?"

  "Certainly. I want to know more."

  "Everything's in the report. Good Lord, they kept me in the interrogation room for three solid days when I got back. If I left anything out, it's gone permanently."

  I said: "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 know something more. 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 hadn't," O'Shea said wearily. "Well, where do I start? You know how 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 eyes stared at me from his round little face. There is an opaque quality, like porcelain, to the features of midgets: as though the destiny that had made them small at the same time made them more perfect and polished than ordinary men, 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, and with him it mattered. He was no civil service puppet dancing to the strings that Fowler Schocken knew ways of pulling. Neither was he a civilian who could be bought with a tiny decimal of our appropriation. Fowler had helped him a little 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," he said, with a small frown chiseling across his lacquered 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 were any water on Venus, which there isn't. Not accessible, anyhow. Or the winds? I clocked five hundred miles an hour."

  "No, not exactly that," I said. "I know about that. And honestly, Jack, there are answers for all those things. I want to get the feel of the place, 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," he said, "let's start at the beginning. Get us another drink, won't you?"

  The waiter came, took our order, and came back with the liquor. Jack drummed on the table, sipped his rhinewine and seltzer, andbegan to talk.

  He started way back, which was good. I wanted to know the soul of the fact, 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, billowy 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, offhand 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 had run 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. A dilemma. They could blast the ship to Venus in a few days— at so squandersome a fuel expenditure that ten ships couldn't carry it. Or they could ease it to Venus along its natural orbits as you might float a barge down a gentle river—which saved the fuel but lengthened the trip to months. A man in eighty days eats twice his own weight in food, breathes nine times his weight of air, and drinks water enough to float a yawl. Did somebody say: distill water from the waste products and recirculate it; do the same with food; do the same with air? Sorry. The necessary equipment for such cycling weighs more than the food, air, and water. So the human pilot was out, obviously.