The Space Merchants

by Frederik Pohl; C. M. Kornbluth

  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 nine-nines 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 wind 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.

  "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 steam-heated 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 wide-open 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 billion-and-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 bookbuyers, the repeat-viewers 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 paperwork 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 window-less 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 star-class 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?

  four

  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 ta
ke 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 cover 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 whoever-it-was couldn't shoot."

  "So am I, Mitch, so am I! Enough of your personal life. We've got business. You saw O'Shea?" He had already dismissed the shooting from his mind.

  "I did. He's coming up here today. He'll be working closely with me."

  "Splendid! Some of that glory will rub off on Fowler Schocken Associates if we play our cards right. Dig into it, Mitch. I don't have to tell you how."

  It was a dismissal.

  O'Shea was waiting in the anteroom of my office. It wasn't an ordeal; most of the female personnel were clustered around him as he sat perched on a desk, talking gruffly and authoritatively. There was no mistaking the looks in their eyes. He was a thirty-five-inch midget, but he had money and fame, the two things we drill and drill into the population. O'Shea could have taken his pick of them. I wondered how many he had picked since his return to Earth in a blaze of glory.

  We run a taut office, but the girls didn't scatter until I cleared my throat.

  "Morning, Mitch," O'Shea said. "You over your shock?"

  "Sure. And I ran right into another one. Somebody tried to shoot me." I told the story and he grunted thoughtfully.

  "Have you considered getting a bodyguard?" he asked.

  "Of course. But I won't. It must have been a mistake."

  "Like that cargo nacelle?"

  I paused. "Jack, can we please get off this subject? It gives me the horrors."

  "Permission granted," he beamed. "Now, let's go to work—and on what?"

  "First, words. We want words that are about Venus, words that'll tickle people. Make them sit up. Make them muse about change, and space, and other worlds. Words to make them a little discontented with what they are and a little hopeful about what they might be. Words to make them feel noble about feeling the way they do and make them happy about the existence of Indiastries and Starrzelius Verily and Fowler Schocken Associates. Words that will do all these things and also make them feel unhappy about the existence of Universal Products and Taunton Associates."

  He was staring at me with his mouth open. "You aren't serious," he finally exclaimed.

  "You're on the inside now," I said simply. "That's the way we work. That's the way we worked on you."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You're wearing Starrzelius Verily clothes and shoes, Jack. It means we got you. Taunton and Universal worked on you, Starrzelius and Schocken worked on you—and you chose Starrzelius. We reached you. Smoothly, without your ever being aware that it was happening, you became persuaded that there was something rather nice about Starrzelius clothes and shoes and that there was something rather not-nice about Universal clothes and shoes."

  "I never read the ads," he said defiantly.

  I grinned. "Our ultimate triumph is wrapped up in that statement," I said.

  "I solemnly promise," O'Shea said, "that as soon as I get back to my hotel room I'll send my clothes right down the incinerator chute—"

  "Luggage too?" I asked. "Starrzelius luggage?"

  He looked startled for a moment and then regained his calm. "Starrzelius luggage too," he said. "And then I'll pick up the phone and order a complete set of Universal luggage and apparel. And you can't stop me."

  "I wouldn't dream of stopping you, Jack! It means more business for Starrzelius. Tell you what you're going to do: you'll get your complete set of Universal luggage and apparel. You'll use the luggage and wear the apparel for a while with a vague, submerged discontent. It's going to work on your libido, because our ads for Starrzelius—even though you say you don't read them—have convinced you that it isn't quite virile to trade with any other firm. Your self-esteem will suffer; deep down you'll know that you're not wearing the best. Your subconscious won't stand up under much of that. You'll find yourself 'losing' bits of Universal apparel. You'll find yourself 'accidentally' putting your foot through the cuff of your Universal pants. You'll find
yourself overpacking the Universal luggage and damning it for not being roomier. You'll walk into stores and in a fit of momentary amnesia regarding this conversation you'll buy Starrzelius, bless you."

  O'Shea laughed uncertainly. "And you did it with words?"

  "Words and pictures. Sight and sound and smell and taste and touch. And the greatest of these is words. Do you read poetry?"

  "My God, of course not! Who can?"

  "I don't mean the contemporary stuff; you're quite right about that. I mean Keats, Swinburne, Wylie—the great lyricists."

  "I used to," he cautiously admitted. "What about it?"

  "I'm going to ask you to spend the morning and afternoon with one of the world's great lyric poets: a girl named Tildy Mathis. She doesn't know that she's a poet; she thinks she's a boss copywriter. Don't enlighten her. It might make her unhappy.

  'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time—'

  That's the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down. There are only so many people capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity."