The Space Merchants

by Frederik Pohl; C. M. Kornbluth

  "Poor, poor fellow," said Schocken, almost sobbing. He turned to me and said: "You see? The overwhelming strains of our profession . . ."

  Sure I saw. A prefabricated diary and an unidentifiable splash of protoplasm. It might have been 180 pounds of Chicken Little down there on the first setback. But I would have been wasting my breath. I nodded soberly, humoring him.

  I was restored to my job at the top of Venus Section. I saw Fowler's analyst daily. And I kept my armed guard. In tearful sessions the old man would say: "You must relinquish this symbol. It's all that stands between you and reality now, Mitch. Dr. Lawler tells me—"

  Dr. Lawler told Fowler Schocken what I told Dr. Lawler. And that was the slow progress of my "integration." I hired a medical student to work out traumas for me backwards from the assumption that my time as a consumer had been a psychotic fugue, and he came up with some honeys. A few I had to veto as not quite consistent with my dignity, but there were enough left to make Dr. Lawler drop his pencil every once in a while. One by one we dug them up, and I have never been so bored in my life.

  But one thing I would not surrender, and that was my insistence that my life and Fowler Schocken's life were in danger.

  Fowler and I got closer and closer—a thing I've seen before. He thought he had made a convert. I was ashamed to string him along. He was being very good to me. But it was a matter of life or death. The rest was side show.

  The day came when Fowler Schocken said gently: "Mitch, I'm afraid heroic measures are in order. I don't ask you to dispense with this fence of yours against reality. But I am going to dismiss my guards."

  "They'll kill you, Fowler!" burst from me.

  He shook his head gently. "You'll see. I'm not afraid." Argument was quite useless. After a bit of it, acting on sound psychological principles, he told the lieutenant of his office squad: "I won't be needing you any more. Please report with your men to Plant Security Pool for reassignment. Thank you very much for your loyalty and attention to detail during these weeks."

  The lieutenant saluted, but he and his men looked sick. They were going from an easy job in executives' country to lobby patrol or night detail or mail guard or messenger service at ungodly hours. They filed out, and I knew Fowler Schocken's hours were numbered.

  That night he was garroted on his way home by somebody who had slugged his chauffeur and substituted himself at the pedals of the Fowler Schocken Cadillac. The killer, apparently a near-moron, resisted arrest and was clubbed to death, giggling. His tattoo had been torn off; he was quite unidentifiable.

  You can easily imagine how much work was done in the office the next day. There was a memorial Board meeting held and resolutions passed saying it was a dirty shame and a great profession never would forget and so on. Messages of condolence were sent by the other agencies, including Taunton's. I got some odd looks when I crumpled the Taunton message in my fist and used some very bad language. Commercial rivalry, after all, goes just so far. We're all gentlemen here, of course. A hard, clean fight and may the best agency win.

  But no Board member paid it much mind. They all were thinking of just one thing: the Schocken block of voting shares.

  Fowler Schocken Associates was capitalized at 7 X 1013 shares. Of these, 3.5 X 1013+ 1 shares were purchasable only by employees holding AAAA labor contracts or better—roughly speaking, star class. The remaining shares by SEC order had been sold on the open market in order to clothe Fowler Schocken Associates with public interest. As customary, Fowler Schocken himself had through dummies snapped these up at the obscure stock exchanges where they had been put on sale.

  In his own name he held a modest .75 X 1013 shares and distributed the rest with a lavish hand. I myself, relatively junior in spite of holding perhaps the number two job in the organization, had accumulated via bonuses and incentive pay only about .857 X 1012 shares. Top man around the Board table probably was Harvey Bruner. He was Schocken's oldest associate and had corralled .83 X 1013 shares over the years. (Nominally this gave him the bulge on Fowler—but he knew, of course, that in a challenge those other 3.5 X 1018+ 1 shares would come rolling in on carloads of proxies, all backing Fowler with a mysterious unanimity. Besides, he was loyal.) He seemed to think he was heir-apparent, and some of the more naive Research and Development people were already sucking up to him, more fools they. He was an utterly uncreative, utterly honest wheel horse. Under his heavy hand the delicate thing that was Fowler Schocken Associates would disintegrate in a year.

  If I were gambling, I would have given odds on Sillery, the Media chief, for copping the Schocken bloc and on down in descending order to myself, on whom I would have taken odds—long, long odds. That obviously was the way most of them felt, except the infatuated Bruner and a few dopes. You could tell. Sillery was surrounded by a respectful little court that doubtless remembered such remarks from Fowler as: "Media, gentlemen, is basic-basic!" and: "Media for brains, copysmiths for talent!" I was practically a leper at the end of the table, with my guards silently eyeing the goings-on. Sillery glanced at them once, and I could read him like a book: "That's been going on long enough; we'll knock off that eccentric first thing."

  What we had been waiting for came about at last. "The gentlemen from the American Arbitration Association, Probate Section, are here, gentlemen."

  They were of the funereal type, according to tradition. Through case-hardening or deficient senses of humor they refrained from giggling while Sillery gave them a measured little speech of welcome about their sad duty and how we wished we could meet them under happier circumstances and so on.

  They read the will in a rapid mumble and passed copies around. The part I read first said: "To my dear friend and associate Mitchell Courtenay I bequeath and devise my ivory-inlaid oak finger-ring (inventory number 56,987) and my seventy-five shares of Sponsors' Stock in the Institute for the Diffusion of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, a New York Non-Profit Corporation, with the injunction that he devote his leisure hours to active participation in this organization and the furtherance of its noble aim." Well, Mitch, I told myself, you're through. I tossed the copy on the table and leaned back to take a swift rough inventory of my liquid assets.

  "Hard lines, Mr. Courtenay," a brave and sympathetic research man I hardly knew told me. "Mr. Sillery seems pleased with himself."

  I glanced at the bequest to Sillery—paragraph one. Sure enough, he got Fowler's personal shares and huge chunks of stock in Managerial Investment Syndicate, Underwriters Holding Corporation and a couple of others.

  The research man studied my copy of the will. "If you don't mind my saying so, Mr. Courtenay," he told me, "the old man could have treated you better. I never heard of this outfit and I'm pretty familiar with the psychoanalytic field."

  I seemed to hear Fowler chuckling nearby, and sat bolt upright. "Why the old so-and-so!" I gasped. It fitted like lock and key, with his bizarre sense of humor to oil the movement.

  Sillery was clearing his throat and an instant silence descended on the Board room.

  The great man spoke. "It's a trifle crowded here, gentlemen. I wish somebody would move that all persons other than Board members be asked to leave—"

  I got up and said: "I'll save you the trouble, Sillery. Come on, boys. Sillery, I may be back." I and my guard left.

  The Institute for the Diffusion of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, a New York Non-Profit Corporation, turned out to be a shabby three-room suite downtown in Yonkers. There was a weird old gal in the outer office pecking away at a typewriter. It was like something out of Dickens. A sagging rack held printed pamphlets with flyspecks on them.

  "I'm from Fowler Schocken Associates," I told her.

  She jumped. "Excuse me, sir! I didn't notice you. How is Mr. Schocken?"

  I told her how he was, and she began to blubber. He was such a good man, giving so generously for the Cause. What on Earth would she and her poor brother ever do now? Poor Mr. Schocken! Poor her! Poor brother!

  "All may not be lost," I told her. "Who
's in charge here?" She sniffled that her brother was in the inner office. "Please break it to him gently, Mr. Courtenay. He's so delicate and sensitive—"

  I said I would, and walked in. Brother was snoring-drunk, flopped over his desk. I joggled him awake, and he looked at me with a bleary and cynical eye. "Washawan?"

  "I'm from Fowler Schocken Associates. I want to look at your books."

  He shook his head emphatically. "Nossir. Only the old man himself gets to see the books."

  "He's dead," I told him. "Here's the will." I showed him the paragraph and my identification.

  "Well," he said. "The joy-ride's over. Or do you keep us going? You see what it says there, Mr. Courtenay? He enjoins you to participate—"

  "I see it," I told him. "The books, please."

  He got them out of a surprising vault behind a plain door.

  A mere three hours of backbreaking labor over them showed me that the Institute was in existence solely for holding and voting 56 per cent of the stock of an outfit called General Phosphate Reduction Corporation of Newark according to the whims of Fowler Schocken.

  I went out into the corridor and said to my guards: "Come on, boys. Newark next."

  I won't bore you with the details. It was single-tracked for three stages and then it split. One of the tracks ended two stages later in the Frankfort Used Machine Tool Brokerage Company, which voted 32 per cent of the Fowler Schocken Associates "public sale" stock. The other track forked again one stage later and wound up eventually in United Concessions Corp. and Waukegan College of Dentistry and Orthodontia, which voted the remainder.

  Two weeks later on Board morning I walked into the Board room with my guards.

  Sillery was presiding. He looked haggard and worn, as though he'd been up all night every night for the past couple of weeks looking for something.

  "Courtenay!" he snarled. "I thought you understood that you were to leave your regiment outside!"

  I nodded to honest, dumb old Harvey Bruner, whom I'd let in on it. Loyal to Schocken, loyal to me, he bleated: "Mr. Chairman, I move that members be permitted to admit company plant-protection personnel assigned to them in such number as they think necessary for their bodily protection."

  "Second the motion, Mr. Chairman," I said. "Bring them in, boys, will you?" My guards, grinning, began to lug in transfer cases full of proxies to me.

  Eyes popped and jaws dropped as the pile mounted. It took a long time for them to be counted and authenticated. The final vote stood: For, 5.73 X 1013; against, 1.27 X 1013. All the Against votes were Sillery's and Sillery's alone. There were no abstentions. The others jumped to my side like cats on a griddle.

  Loyal old Harve moved that chairmanship of the meeting be transferred to me, and it was carried unanimously. He then moved that Sillery be pensioned off, his shares of voting stock to be purchased at par by the firm and deposited in the bonus fund. Carried unanimously. Then—a slash of the whip just to remind them—he moved that one Thomas Heatherby, a junior Art man who had sucked up outrageously to Sillery, be downgraded from Board level and deprived without compensation of his minute block of voting shares. Carried unanimously. Heatherby didn't even dare scream about it. Half a loaf is better than none, he may have said to himself, choking down his anger.

  It was done. I was master of Fowler Schocken Associates. And I had learned to despise everything for which it stood.

  sixteen

  "Flash-flash, Mr. Courtenay," said my secretary's voice. I hit the GA button.

  "Consie arrested Albany on neighbor's denunciation. Shall I line it up?"

  "God-damn it!" I exploded. "How many times do I have to give you standing orders? Of course you line it up. Why the hell not?"

  She quavered: "I'm sorry, Mr. Courtenay—I thought it was kind of far out—"

  "Stop thinking, then. Arrange the transportation." Maybe I shouldn't have been so rough on her—but I wanted to find Kathy, if I had to turn every Consie cell in the country upside down to do it. I had driven Kathy into hiding—out of fear that I would turn her in— now I wanted to get her back.

  An hour later I was in the Upstate Mutual Protective Association's HQ. They were a local outfit that had a lot of contracts in the area, including Albany. Their board chairman himself met me and my guards at the elevator. "An honor," he burbled. "A great, great honor, Mr. Courtenay, and what may I do for you?"

  "My secretary asked you not to get to work on your Consie suspect until I arrived. Did you?"

  "Of course not, Mr. Courtenay! Some of the employees may have roughed him up a little, informally, but he's in quite good shape."

  "I want to see him."

  He led the way anxiously. He was hoping to get in a word that might grow into a cliency with Fowler Schocken Associates, but he was afraid to speak up.

  The suspect was sitting on a stool under the usual dazzler. He was a white-collar consumer of thirty or so. He had a couple of bruises on his face.

  "Turn that thing off," I said.

  A square-faced foreman said: "But we always—" One of my guards, without wasting words, shoved him aside and switched off the dazzler.

  "It's all right, Lombardo," the board chairman said hastily. "You're to co-operate with these gentlemen."

  "Chair," I said, and sat down facing the suspect. I told him: "My name's Courtenay. What's yours?"

  He looked at me with pupils that were beginning to expand again. "Fillmore," he said, precisely. "August Fillmore. Can you tell me what all this is about?"

  "You're suspected of being a Consie."

  There was a gasp from all the UMPA people in the room. I was violating the most elementary principle of jurisprudence by informing the accused of the nature of his crime. I knew all about that, and didn't give a damn.

  "Completely ridiculous," Fillmore spat. "I'm a respectable married man with eight children and another coming along. Who on earth told you people such nonsense?"

  "Tell him who," I said to the board chairman.

  He stared at me, goggle-eyed, unable to believe what he had heard. "Mr. Courtenay," he said at last, "with all respect, I can't take the responsibility for such a thing! It's quite unheard of. The entire body of law respecting the rights of informers—"

  "I'll take the responsibility. Do you want me to put it in writing?"

  "No, no, no, no, no! Nothing like that! Please, Mr. Courtenay— suppose I tell the informer's name to you, understanding that you know the law and are a responsible person—and then I leave the room?"

  "Any way you want to do it is all right with me."

  He grinned placatingly, and whispered in my ear: "A Mrs. Worley. The two families share a room. Please be careful, Mr. Courtenay—"

  "Thanks," I said. He gathered eyes like a hostess and nervously retreated with his employees.

  "Well, Fillmore," I told the suspect, "he says it's Mrs. Worley."

  He began to swear, and I cut him off. "I'm a busy man," I said.

  "You know your goose is cooked, of course. You know what Vogt says on the subject of conservation?"

  The name apparently meant nothing to him. "Who's that?" he asked distractedly.

  "Never mind. Let's change subjects. I have a lot of money. I can set up a generous pension for your family while you're away if you co-operate and admit you're a Consie."

  He thought hard for a few moments and then said: "Sure I'm a Consie. What of it? Guilty or innocent, I'm sunk so why not say so?"

  "If you're a red-hot Consie, suppose you quote me some passages from Osborne?"

  He had never heard of Osborne, and slowly began to fake: "Well, there's the one that starts: 'A Consie's first duty, uh, is to, to prepare for a general uprising—' I don't remember the rest, but that's how it starts."

  "Pretty close," I told him. "Now how about your cell meetings? Who-all's there?"

  "I don't know them by name," he said more glibly. "We go by numbers. There's a heavyset dark-haired fellow, he's the boss, and, uh—"

  It was a remarkable per
formance. It certainly, however, had nothing to do with the semi-mythical Conservationist heroes, Vogt and Osborne, whose books were required reading in all cells—when copies could be found.

  We left.

  I told the board chairman, hovering anxiously outside in the corridor: "I don't think he's a Consie."

  I was president of Fowler Schocken Associates and he was only the board chairman of a jerkwater local police outfit, but that was too much. He drew himself up and said with dignity: "We administer justice, Mr. Courtenay. And an ancient, basic tenet of justice is: 'Better that one thousand innocents suffer unjustly than one guilty person be permitted to escape.' "

  "I am aware of the maxim," I said. "Good day."

  My instrument corporal went boing as the crash-crash priority signal sounded in his ear and handed me the phone. It was my secretary back in Schocken Tower, reporting another arrest, this one in Pile City Three, off Cape Cod.

  We flew out to Pile City Three, which was rippling that day over along, swelling sea. I hate the Pile Cities—as I've said, I suffer from motion sickness.

  This Consie suspect turned out to be a professional criminal. He had tried a smash-and-grab raid on a jewelry store, intending to snatch a trayful of oak and mahogany pins, leaving behind a lurid note all about Consie vengeance and beware of the coming storm when the Consies take over and kill all the rich guys. It was intended to throw off suspicion.

  He was very stupid.

  It was a Burns-protected city, and I had a careful chat with their resident manager. He admitted first that most of their Consie arrests during the past month or so had been like that, and then admitted that all their Consie arrests for the past month or so had been like that. Formerly they had broken up authentic Consie cells at the rate of maybe one a week. He thought maybe it was a seasonal phenomenon.

  From there we went back to New York, where another Consie had been picked up. I saw him and listened to him rant for a few minutes. He was posted on Consie theory and could quote you Vogt and Osborne by the page. He also asserted that God had chosen him to wipe the wastrels from the face of Mother Earth. He said of course he was in the regular Consie organization, but he would die before he gave up any of its secrets. And I knew he certainly would, because he didn't know any. The Consies wouldn't have accepted anybody that unstable if they were down to three members with one sinking fast.