The Space Merchants

by Frederik Pohl; C. M. Kornbluth

  "Why are you telling me all this?" he asked.

  "I said you're on the inside, Jack. There's a responsibility that goes with the power. Here in this profession we reach into the souls of men and women. We do it by taking talent and—redirecting it. Nobody should play with lives the way we do unless he's motivated by the highest ideals."

  "I get you," he said softly. "Don't worry about my motives. I'm not in this thing for money or fame. I'm in it so the human race can have some elbow room and dignity again."

  "That's it," I said, putting on Expression Number One. But inwardly I was startled. The "highest ideal" I had been about to cite was Sales.

  I buzzed for Tildy. "Talk to her," I said. "Answer her questions. Ask her some. Make it a long, friendly chat. Make her share your experiences. And, without knowing it, she'll write lyric fragments of your experiences that will go right to the hearts and souls of the readers. Don't hold out on her."

  "Certainly not. Uh, Mitch, will she hold out on me?"

  The expression on his face was from a Tanagra figurine of a hopeful young satyr.

  "She won't," I promised solemnly. Everybody knew about Tildy.

  That afternoon, for the first time in four months, Kathy called me.

  "Is anything wrong?" I asked sharply. "Anything I can do?"

  She giggled. "Nothing wrong, Mitch. I just wanted to say hello and tell you thanks for a lovely evening."

  "How about another one?" I asked promptly.

  "Dinner at my place tonight suit you?"

  "It certainly does. It certainly, certainly does. What color dress will you be wearing? I'm going to buy you a real flower!"

  "Oh, Mitch, you needn't be extravagant. We aren't courting and I already know you have more money than God. But there is something I wish you'd bring."

  "Only name it."

  "Jack O'Shea. Can you manage it? I saw by the 'cast that he came into town this morning and I suppose he's working with you."

  Very dampened, I said: "Yes, he is. I'll check with him and call you back. You at the hospital?"

  "Yes. And thanks so much for trying. I'd love to meet him."

  I got in touch with O'Shea in Tildy's office. "You booked up for tonight?" I asked.

  "Hmmm ...I could be," he said. O'Shea was evidently learning about Tildy too.

  "Here's my proposition. Quiet dinner at home with my wife and me. She happens to be beautiful and a good cook and a first-rate surgeon and excellent company."

  "You're on."

  So I called Kathy back and told her I'd bring the social lion about seven.

  He stalked into my office at six, grumbling: "I'd better get a good meal out of this, Mitch. Your Miss Mathis appeals to me. What a dope! Does she have sense enough to come in out of the smog?"

  "I don't believe so," I said. "But Keats was properly hooked by a designing wench, and Byron didn't have sense enough to stay out of the venereal ward. Swinburne made a tragic mess out of his life. Do I have to go on?"

  "Please, no. What kind of marriage have you got?"

  "Interlocutory," I said, a little painfully in spite of myself.

  He raised his eyebrows a trifle. "Maybe it's just the way I was brought up, but there's something about those arrangements that sets my teeth on edge."

  "Mine too," I said, "at least in my own case. In case Tildy missed telling you, my beautiful and talented wife doesn't want to finalize it, we don't live together, and unless I change her mind in four months we'll be washed up."

  "Tildy did miss telling me," he said. "You're pretty sick about it, seems to me."

  I almost gave in to self-pity. I almost invited his sympathy. I almost started to tell him how rough it was, how much I loved her, how she wasn't giving me an even break, how I'd tried everything I could think of and nothing would convince her. And then I realized that I'd be telling it to a sixty-pound midget who, if he married, might become at any moment his wife's helpless plaything or butt of ridicule.

  "Middling sick," I said. "Let's go, Jack. Time for a drink and then the shuttle."

  Kathy had never looked lovelier, and I wished I hadn't let her talk me out of shooting a couple of days' pay on a corsage at Carrier's.

  She said hello to O'Shea and he announced loudly and immediately: "I like you. There's no gleam in your eye. No 'Isn't he cute?" gleam. No. 'My, he must be rich and frustrated!' gleam. No 'A girl's got a right to try anything once' gleam. In short, you like me and I like you."

  As you may have gathered, he was a little drunk.

  "You are going to have some coffee, Mr. O'Shea," she said. "I ruined myself to provide real pork sausages and real apple sauce, and you're going to taste them."

  "Coffee?" he said. "Coffiest for me, ma'am. To drink coffee would be disloyal to the great firm of Fowler Schocken Associates with which I am associated. Isn't that right, Mitch?"

  "I give absolution this once," I said. "Besides, Kathy doesn't believe the harmless alkaloid in Coffiest is harmless." Luckily she was in the kitchen corner with her back turned when I said that, and either missed it or could afford to pretend she did. We'd had a terrific four-hour battle over that very point, complete with epithets like "baby-poisoner" and "crackpot reformer" and a few others that were shorter and nastier.

  The coffee was served and quenched O'Shea's mild glow. Dinner was marvelous. Afterward, we all felt more relaxed.

  "You've been to the Moon, I suppose?" Kathy asked O'Shea.

  "Not yet. One of these days."

  "There's nothing there," I said. "It's a waste of time. One of our dullest, deadest accounts. I suppose we only kept it for the experience we'd get, looking ahead to Venus. A few thousand people mining—that's the whole story."

  "Excuse me," O'Shea said, and retired.

  I grabbed the chance. "Kathy, darling," I said, "it was very sweet of you to ask me over. Does it mean anything?"

  She rubbed her right thumb and index finger together, and I knew that whatever she would say after that would be a lie. "It might, Mitch," she lied gently. "You'll have to give me time."

  I threw away my secret weapon. "You're lying," I said disgustedly. "You always do this before you lie to me—I don't know about other people." I showed her, and she let out a short laugh.

  "Fair's fair," she said with bitter amusement. "You always catch your breath and look right into my eyes when you lie to me—I don't know about your clients and fellow employees."

  O'Shea returned and felt the tension at once. "I ought to be going," he said. "Mitch, do we leave together?"

  Kathy nodded, and I said: "Yes."

  There were the usual politenesses at the door, and Kathy kissed me good night. It was a long, warm, clinging kiss; altogether the kind of kiss that should start the evening rather than end it. It set her own pulse going—I felt that!—but she coolly closed the door on us.

  "You thought about a bodyguard again?" O'Shea asked.

  "It was a mistake," I said stubbornly.

  "Let's stop by your place for a drink," he said ingenuously.

  The situation was almost pathetic. Sixty-pound Jack O'Shea was bodyguarding me. "Sure," I said. We got on the shuttle.

  He went into the room first and turned on the light, and nothing happened. While sipping a very weak whisky and soda, he drifted around the place checking window locks, hinges, and the like. "This chair would look better over there," he said. "Over there," of course, was out of the line of fire from the window. I moved it.

  "Take care of yourself, Mitch," he said when he left. "That lovely wife and your friends would miss you if anything happened."

  The only thing that happened was that I barked my shin setting up the bed, and that was happening all the time. Even Kathy, with a surgeon's neat, economical movements, bore the battle scars of life in a city apartment. You set up the bed at night, you took it down in the morning, you set up the table for breakfast, you took it down to get to the door. No wonder some shortsighted people sighed for the spacious old days, I thought, settling myself lux
uriously for the night.

  five

  Things were rolling within a week. With Runstead out of my hair and at work on the PregNot-A.I.G. hassle, I could really grip the reins.

  Tildy's girls and boys were putting out the copy—temperamental kids, sometimes doing a line a day with anguish; sometimes rolling out page after page effortlessly, with shining eyes, as though possessed. She directed and edited their stuff and passed the best of the best to me: nine-minute commercial scripts, pix cutlines, articles for planting, news stories, page ads, whispering campaign cuelines, endorsements, jokes-limericks-and-puns (clean and dirty) to float through the country.

  Visual was hot. The airbrush and camera people were having fun sculpturing a planet. It was the ultimate in "Before and After" advertising, and they were caught by the sense of history.

  Development kept pulling rabbits out of hats. Collier once explained to me when I hinted that he might be overoptimistic: "It's energy, Mr. Courtenay. Venus has got energy. It's closer to the sun. The sun pours all that energy into the planet in the form of heat and molecular bonds and fast particles. Here on Earth we don't have that level of tappable energy. We use windmills to tap the kinetic energy of the atmosphere. On Venus we'll use turbines. If we want electricity on Venus we'll just build an accumulator, put up a lightning rod and jump back. It's an entirely different level."

  Market Research-Industrial Anthropology was at work in San Diego sampling the Cal-Mex area, trying Tildy's copy, Visual's layouts and films and extrapolating and interpolating. I had a direct wire to the desk of Ham Harris, Runstead's vice, in San Diego.

  A typical day began with a Venus Section meeting: pep talk by me, reports of progress by all hands, critique and cross-department suggestions. Harris, on the wire, might advise Tildy that "serene atmosphere" wasn't going well as a cue phrase in his sampling and that she should submit a list of alternatives. Tildy might ask Collier whether it would be okay to say "topaz sands" in a planted article which would hint that Venus was crawling with uncut precious and semiprecious stones. Collier might tell Visual that they'd have to make the atmosphere redder in a "Before" panorama. And I might tell Collier to lay off because it was permissible license.

  After adjournment everybody would go into production and I'd spend my day breaking ties, co-ordinating, and interpreting my directives from above down to the operational level. Before close of day we'd hold another meeting, which I would keep to some specific topic, such as: integration of Starrzelius products into the Venus economy, or income-level of prospective Venus colonists for optimum purchasing power twenty years after landing.

  And then came the best part of the day. Kathy and I were going steady again. We were still under separate cover, but I was buoyantly , certain that it wouldn't be long now. Sometimes she dated me, sometimes I dated her. We just went out and had fun eating well, drinking well, dressing well, and feeling that we were two good-looking people enjoying life. There wasn't much serious talk. She didn't encourage it and I didn't press it. I thought that time was on my side. Jack O'Shea made the rounds with us once before he had to leave for a lecture in Miami, and that made me feel good too. A couple of well-dressed, good-looking people who were so high-up they could entertain the world's number one celebrity. Life was good.

  After a week of solid, satisfying progress on the job I told Kathy it was time for me to visit the outlying installations—the rocket site in Arizona and sampling headquarters in San Diego.

  "Fine," she said. "Can I come along?"

  I was silly-happy about it; it wouldn't be long now.

  The rocket visit was routine. I had a couple of people there as liaison with Armed Forces, Republic Aviation, Bell Telephone Labs, and U.S. Steel. They showed Kathy and me through the monster, glib as tourist guides: "...vast steel shell . . . more cubage than the average New York office building . . . closed-cycle food and water and air regeneration . . . one-third drive, one-third freight, one-third living space . . . heroic pioneers . . . insulation . . . housekeeping power . . . sunside-darkside heat pumps . . . unprecedented industrial effort . . . national sacrifice . . . national security ..."

  Oddly, the most impressive thing about it to me was not the rocket itself but the wide swathe around it. For a full mile the land was cleared: no houses, no greenhouse decks, no food tanks, no sun traps. Partly security, partly radiation. The gleaming sand cut by irrigation pipes looked strange. There probably wasn't another sight like it in North America. It troubled my eyes. Not for years had I focused them more than a few yards.

  "How strange," Kathy said at my side. "Could we walk out there?"

  "Sorry, Dr. Nevin," said one of the liaison men. "It's a deadline. The tower guards are ordered to shoot anybody out there."

  "Have contrary orders issued," I said. "Dr. Nevin and I want to take a walk."

  "Of course, Mr. Courtenay," the man said, very worried. "I'll do my best, but it'll take a little time. I'll have to clear it with C.I.C., Naval Intelligence, C.I.A., F.B.I., A.E.C. Security and Intelligence-"

  I looked at Kathy, and she shrugged with helpless amusement. "Never mind," I said.

  "Thank God!" breathed my liaison man. "Excuse me, Mr. Courtenay. It's never been done before so there aren't any channels to do it through. You know what that means."

  "I do indeed," I said, from the heart. "Tell me, has all the security paid off?"

  "It seems so, Mr. Courtenay. There's been no sabotage or espionage, foreign or Consie, that we know of." He rapped a knuckle of his right hand solemnly on a handsome oak engagement ring he wore on the third finger of his left hand. I made a mental note to have his expense account checked up on. A man on his salary had no business wearing that kind of jewelry.

  "The Consies interested?" I asked.

  "Who knows? C.I.C., C.I.A. and A.E.C. S.&I. say yes. Naval Intelligence, F.B.I, and S.S. say no. Would you like to meet Commander MacDonald? He's the O.N.I. chief here. A specialist in Consies."

  "Like to meet a Consie specialist, Kathy?" I asked.

  "If we have time," she said.

  "I'll have them hold the jet for you if necessary," the liaison man said eagerly, trying hard to undo his fiasco on the tower guards. He led us through the tangle of construction shacks and warehouses to the administration building and past seven security checkpoints to the office of the commander.

  MacDonald was one of those career officers who make you feel good about being an American citizen—quiet, competent, strong. I could see from his insignia and shoulder flashes that he was a Contract Specialist, Intelligence, on his third five-year option from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. He was a regular; he wore the class ring of the Pinkerton Graduate School of Detection and Military Intelligence, Inc. It's pine with an open eye carved on it; no flashy inlay work. But it's like a brand name. It tells you that you're dealing with quality.

  "You want to hear about Consies?" he asked quietly. "I'm your man. I've devoted my life to running them down."

  "A personal grudge, Commander?" I asked, thinking I'd hear something melodramatic.

  "No. Old-fashioned pride of workmanship if anything. I like the thrill of the chase, too, but there isn't much chasing. You get Consies by laying traps. Did you hear about the Topeka bombing? Of-course-I-shouldn't-knock-the-competition but those guards should have known it was a setup for a Consie demonstration."

  "Why, exactly, Commander?" Kathy asked.

  He smiled wisely. "Feel," he said. "The kind of thing it's hard to put over in words. The Consies don't like hydraulic mining—ever. Give them a chance to parade their dislike and they'll take it if theycan."

  "But why don't they like hydraulic mining?" she persisted. "We've got to have coal and iron, don't we?"

  "Now," he said with pretended, humorous weariness, "you're asking me to probe the mind of a Consie. I've had them in the wrecking room for up to six hours at a stretch and never yet have they talked sense. If I caught the Topeka Consie, say, he'd talk willingly—but it would be gibberish. He'd tell me
the hydraulic miner was destroying topsoil. I'd say yes, and what about it. He'd say, well can't you see? I'd say, see what? He'd say, the topsoil can never be replaced. I'd say, yes it can if it had to be and anyway tank farming's better. He'd say something like tank farming doesn't provide animal cover and so on. It always winds up with him telling me the world's going to hell in a hand-basket and people have got to be made to realize it—and me telling him we've always got along somehow and we'll keep going somehow."

  Kathy laughed incredulously and the commander went on: "They're fools, but they're tough. They have discipline. A cell system. If you get one Consie you always get the two or three others in his cell, but you hardly ever get any more. There's no lateral contact between cells, and vertical contact with higher-ups is by rendezvous with middlemen. Yes, I think I know them and that's why I'm not especially worried about sabotage or a demonstration here. It doesn't have the right ring to it."

  Kathy and I lolled back watching the commercials parade around the passenger compartment of the jet at eye level. There was the good old Kiddiebutt jingle I worked out many years ago when I was a trainee. I nudged Kathy and told her about it as it blinked and chimed Victor Herbert's Toyland theme at us.

  All the commercials went blank and a utility announcement, without sound effects, came on.

  In Compliance With Federal Law, Passengers Are Advised That They Are Now Passing Over The San Andreas Fault Into Earthquake Territory, And That Earthquake Loss And Damage Clauses In Any Insurance They May Carry Are Now Canceled And Will Remain Canceled Until Passengers Leave Earthquake Territory.

  Then the commercials resumed their parade.

  "And," said Kathy, "I suppose it says in the small print that yak-bite insurance is good anywhere except in Tibet."

  "Yak-bite insurance?" I asked, astonished. "What on earth do you carry that for?"

  "A girl can never tell when she'll meet an unfriendly yak, can she?"

  "I conclude that you're kidding," I said with dignity. "We ought to land in a few minutes. Personally, I'd like to pop in on Ham Harris unexpectedly. He's a good kid, but Runstead may have infected him with defeatism. There's nothing worse in our line."