The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein

by Robert A. Heinlein

  The important point is that, Thursday or Saturday, the session would adjourn sometime that night. I watched Ditworth’s bill come up in the Assembly. It was passed, without debate, in the amended form. I sighed with relief. About midnight Jedson joined me and reported that the same thing had happened in the Senate. Sally was on watch in the conference committee room, just to make sure that the bills stayed dead.

  Joe and I remained on watch in our respective houses. There was probably no need for it, but it made us feel easier. Shortly before two in the morning Bodie came in and said we were to meet Jedson and Sally outside the conference committee room.

  “What’s that?” I said, immediately all nerves. “Has something slipped?”

  “No, it’s all right and it’s all over. Come on.”

  Joe answered my question, as I hurried up with Bodie trailing, before I could ask it. “It’s O.K., Archie. Sally was present when the committee adjourned sine die, without acting on those bills. It’s all over; we’ve won!”

  We went over to the bar across the street to have a drink in celebration.

  In spite of the late hour the bar was moderately crowded. Lobbyists, local politicians, legislative attachés, all the swarm of camp followers who throng the capitol whenever the legislature is sitting—all such were still up and around, and many of them had picked this bar as a convenient place to wait for news of adjournment.

  We were lucky to find a stool at the bar for Sally. We three men made a tight little cluster around her and tried to get the attention of the overworked bartender. We had just managed to place our orders when a young man tapped on the shoulder of the customer on the stool to the right of Sally. He immediately got down and left. I nudged Bodie to tell him to take the seat.

  Sally turned to Joe. “Well, it won’t be long now. There go the sergeants at arms.” She nodded toward the young man, who was repeating the process farther down the line.

  “What does that mean?” I asked Joe.

  “It means they are getting along toward the final vote on the bill they were waiting on. They’ve gone to ‘call of the house’ now, and the Speaker has ordered the sergeant at arms to send his deputies out to arrest absent members.”

  “Arrest them?” I was a little bit shocked.

  “Only technically. You see, the Assembly has had to stall until the Senate was through with this bill, and most of the members have wandered out for a bit to eat, or drink. Now they are ready to vote, so they round them up.”

  A fat man took a stool near us which had just been vacated by a member. Sally said, “Hello, Don.”

  He took a cigar from his mouth and said, “How are yuh, Sally? What’s new? Say, I thought you were interested in that bill on magic?”

  We were all four alert at once. “I am,” Sally admitted. “What about it?”

  “Well, then, you had better get over there. They’re voting on it right away. Didn’t you notice the ‘call of the house’?”

  I think we set a new record getting across the street, with Sally leading the field in spite of her plumpness. I was asking Jedson how it could be possible, and he shut me up with, “I don’t know, man! We’ll have to see.”

  We managed to find seats on the main floor back of the rail. Sally beckoned to one of the pages she knew and sent him up to the clerk’s desk for a copy of the bill that was pending. In front of the rail the Assemblymen gathered in groups. There was a crowd around the desk of the administration floor leader and a smaller cluster around the floor leader of the opposition. The whips had individual members buttonholed here and there, arguing with them in tense whispers.

  The page came back with the copy of the bill. It was an appropriation bill for the Middle Counties Improvement Project—the last of the “must” bills for which the session had been called—but pasted to it, as a rider, was Ditworth’s bill in its original, most damnable form!

  It had been added as an amendment in the Senate, probably as a concession to Ditworth’s stooges in order to obtain their votes to make up the two-thirds majority necessary to pass the appropriation bill to which it had been grafted.

  The vote came almost at once. It was evident, early in the roll call, that the floor leader had his majority in hand and that the bill would pass. When the clerk announced its passage, a motion to adjourn sine die was offered by the opposition floor leader and it was carried unanimously. The Speaker called the two floor leaders to his desk and instructed them to wait on the governor and the presiding officer of the Senate with notice of adjournment.

  The crack of his gavel released us from stunned immobility. We shambled out.

  WE GOT IN TO SEE the governor late the next morning. The appointment, squeezed into an overcrowded calendar, was simply a concession to Sally and another evidence of the high regard in which she was held around the capitol. For it was evident that he did not want to see us and did not have time to see us.

  But he greeted Sally affectionately and listened patiently while Jedson explained in a few words why we thought the combined Ditworth-Middle Counties bill should be vetoed.

  The circumstances were not favorable to reasoned exposition. The governor was interrupted by two calls that he had to take, one from his director of finance and one from Washington. His personal secretary came in once and shoved a memorandum under his eyes, at which the old man looked worried, then scrawled something on it and handed it back. I could tell that his attention was elsewhere for some minutes after that.

  When Jedson stopped talking, the governor sat for a moment, looking down at his blotter pad, an expression of deep-rooted weariness on his face. Then he answered in slow words, “No, Mr. Jedson, I can’t see it. I regret as much as you do that this business of the regulation of magic has been tied in with an entirely different matter. But I cannot veto part of a bill and sign the rest—even though the bill includes two widely separated subjects.

  “I appreciate the work you did to help elect my administration”—I could see Sally’s hand in that remark—“and wish that we could agree in this. But the Middle Counties Project is something that I have worked toward since my inauguration. I hope and believe that it will be the means whereby the most depressed area in our state can work out its economic problems without further grants of public money. If I thought that the amendment concerning magic would actually do a grave harm to the state—”

  He paused for a moment. “But I don’t. When Mrs. Logan called me this morning I had my legislative counsel analyze the bill. I agree that the bill is unnecessary, but it seems to do nothing more than add a little more bureaucratic red tape. That’s not good, but we manage to do business under a lot of it; a little more can’t wreck things.”

  I butted in—rudely, I suppose—but I was all worked up. “But, Your Excellency, if you would just take time to examine this matter yourself, in detail, you would see how much damage it will do!”

  I would not have been surprised if he had flared back at me. Instead, he indicated a file basket that was stacked high and spilling over. “Mr. Fraser, there you see fifty-seven bills passed by this session of the legislature. Every one of them has some defect. Every one of them is of vital importance to some, or all, of the people of this state. Some of them are as long to read as an ordinary novel. In the next nine days I must decide what ones shall become law and what ones must wait for revision at the next regular session. During that nine days at least a thousand people will want me to see them about some one of those bills—”

  His aide stuck his head in the door. “Twelve-twenty, chief! You’re on the air in forty minutes.”

  The governor nodded absently and stood up. “You will excuse me? I’m expected at a luncheon.” He turned to his aide, who was getting out his hat and gloves from a closet. “You have the speech, Jim?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Just a minute!” Sally had cut in. “Have you taken your tonic?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You’re not going off to one of those luncheons without it!�
�� She ducked into his private washroom and came out with a medicine bottle. Joe and I bowed out as quickly as possible.

  Outside I started fuming to Jedson about the way we had been given the run-around, as I saw it. I made some remark about dunderheaded, compromising politicians when Joe cut me short.

  “Shut up, Archie! Try running a state sometime instead of a small business and see how easy you find it!”

  I shut up.

  Bodie was waiting for us in the lobby of the capitol. I could see that he was excited about something, for he flipped away a cigarette and rushed toward us. “Look!” he commanded. “Down there!”

  We followed the direction of his finger and saw two figures just going out the big doors. One was Ditworth, the other was a well-known lobbyist with whom he had worked. “What about it?” Joe demanded.

  “I was standing here behind this phone booth, leaning against the wall and catching a cigarette. As you can see, from here that big mirror reflects the bottom of the rotunda stairs. I kept an eye on it for you fellows. I noticed this lobbyist, Sims, coming downstairs by himself, but he was gesturing as if he were talking to somebody. That made me curious, so I looked around the corner of the booth and saw him directly. He was not alone; he was with Ditworth. I looked back at the mirror and he appeared to be alone. Ditworth cast no reflection in the mirror!”

  Jedson snapped his fingers. “A demon!” he said in an amazed voice. “And I never suspected it!”

  I AM SURPRISED THAT MORE suicides don’t occur on trains. When a man is down, I know of nothing more depressing than staring at the monotonous scenery and listening to the maddening lickety-tock of the rails. In a way I was glad to have this new development of Ditworth’s inhuman status to think about; it kept my mind off poor old Feldstein and his thousand dollars.

  Startling as it was to discover that Ditworth was a demon, it made no real change in the situation except to explain the efficiency and speed with which we had been outmaneuvered and to confirm as a certainty our belief that the racketeers and Magic, Incorporated, were two heads of the same beast. But we had no way of proving that Ditworth was a Half World monster. If we tried to haul him into court for a test, he was quite capable of lying low and sending out a facsimile, or a mandrake, built to look like him and immune to the mirror test.

  We dreaded going back and reporting our failure to the committee—at least I did. But at least we were spared that. The Middle Counties Act carried an emergency clause which put it into effect the day it was signed. Ditworth’s bill, as an amendment, went into action with the same speed. The newspapers on sale at the station when we got off the train carried the names of the new commissioners for thaumaturgy.

  Nor did the commission waste any time in making its power felt. They announced their intention of raising the standards of magical practice in all fields, and stated that new and more thorough examinations would be prepared at once. The association formerly headed by Ditworth opened a coaching school in which practicing magicians could take a refresher course in thaumaturgic principles and arcane law. In accordance with the high principles set forth in their charter, the school was not restricted to members of the association.

  That sounds bighearted of the association. It wasn’t. They managed to convey a strong impression in their classes that membership in the association would be a big help in passing the new examinations. Nothing you could put your finger on to take into court—just a continuous impression. The association grew.

  A couple of weeks later all licenses were canceled and magicians were put on a day-to-day basis in their practice, subject to call for re-examination at a day’s notice. A few of the outstanding holdouts against signing up with Magic, Incorporated, were called up, examined, and licenses refused them. The squeeze was on. Mrs. Jennings quietly withdrew from any practice. Bodie came around to see me; I had an uncompleted contract with him involving some apartment houses.

  “Here’s your contract, Archie,” he said bitterly. “I’ll need some time to pay the penalties for noncompletion; my bond was revoked when they canceled the licenses.”

  I took the contract and tore it in two. “Forget that talk about penalties,” I told him. “You take your examinations and we’ll write a new contract.”

  He laughed unhappily. “Don’t be a Pollyanna.”

  I changed my tack. “What are you going to do? Sign up with Magic, Incorporated?”

  He straightened himself up. “I’ve never temporized with demons; I won’t start now.”

  “Good boy,” I said. “Well, if the eating gets uncertain, I reckon we can find a job of some sort here for you.”

  IT WAS A GOOD THING that Bodie had some money saved, for I was a little too optimistic in my offer. Magic, Incorporated, moved quickly into the second phase of their squeeze, and it began to be a matter of speculation as to whether I myself would eat regularly. There were still quite a number of licensed magicians in town who were not employed by Magic, Incorporated—it would have been an evident, actionable frame-up to freeze out everyone—but those available were all incompetent bunglers, not fit to mix a philter. There was no competent, legal magical assistance to be gotten at any price—except through Magic, Incorporated.

  I was forced to fall back on old-fashioned methods in every respect. Since I don’t use much magic in any case, it was possible for me to do that, but it was the difference between making money and losing money.

  I had put Feldstein on as a salesman after his agency folded up under him. He turned out to be a crackajack and helped to reduce the losses. He could smell a profit even farther than I could—farther than Dr. Worthington could smell a witch.

  But most of the other businessmen around me were simply forced to capitulate. Most of them used magic in at least one phase of their business; they had their choice of signing a contract with Magic, Incorporated, or dosing their doors. They had wives and kids—they signed.

  The fees for thaumaturgy were jacked up until they were all the traffic would bear, to the point where it was just cheaper to do business with magic than without it. The magicians got none of the new profits; it all stayed with the corporation. As a matter of fact, the magicians got less of the proceeds than when they had operated independently, but they took what they could get and were glad of the chance to feed their families.

  Jedson was hard hit—disastrously hit. He held out, naturally, preferring honorable bankruptcy to dealing with demons, but he used magic throughout his business. He was through. They started by disqualifying August Welker, his foreman, then cut off the rest of his resources. It was intimated that Magic, Incorporated, did not care to deal with him, even had he wished it.

  WE WERE ALL OVER AT Mrs. Jennings’s late one afternoon for tea—myself, Jedson, Bodie, and Dr. Royce Worthington, the witch smeller. We tried to keep the conversation away from our troubles, but we just could not do it. Anything that was said led back somehow to Ditworth and his damnable monopoly.

  After Jack Bodie had spent ten minutes explaining carefully and mendaciously that he really did not mind being out of witchcraft, that he did not have any real talent for it, and had only taken it up to please his old man, I tried to change the subject. Mrs. Jennings had been listening to Jack with such pity and compassion in her eyes that I wanted to bawl myself.

  I turned to Jedson and said inanely, “How is Miss Megeath?”

  She was the white witch from Jersey City, the one who did creative magic in textiles. I had no special interest in her welfare.

  He looked up with a start. “Ellen? She’s…she’s all right. They took her license away a month ago,” he finished lamely.

  That was not the direction I wanted the talk to go. I turned it again. “Did she ever manage to do that whole-garment stunt?”

  He brightened a little. “Why, yes, she did—once. Didn’t I tell you about it?” Mrs. Jennings showed polite curiosity, for which I silently thanked her. Jedson explained to the others what they had been trying to accomplish. “She really succeeded to
o well,” he continued. “Once she had started, she kept right on, and we could not bring her out of her trance. She turned out over thirty thousand little striped sports dresses, all the same size and pattern. My lofts were loaded with them. Nine tenths of them will melt away before I dispose of them.

  “But she won’t try it again,” he added. “Too hard on her health.”

  “How?” I inquired.

  “Well, she lost ten pounds doing that one stunt. She’s not hardy enough for magic. What she really needs is to go out to Arizona and lie around in the sun for a year. I wish to the Lord I had the money. I’d send her.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Getting interested, Joe?” Jedson is an inveterate bachelor, but it pleases me to pretend otherwise. He generally plays up, but this time he was downright surly. It showed the abnormal state of nerves he was in.

  “Oh, for cripes’ sake, Archie! Excuse me, Mrs. Jennings! But can’t I take a normal humane interest in a person without you seeing an ulterior motive in it?”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right.” He grinned. “I shouldn’t be so touchy. Anyhow, Ellen and I have cooked up an invention between us that might be a solution for all of us. I’d been intending to show it to all of you just as soon as we had a working model. Look, folks!” He drew what appeared to be a fountain pen out of a vest pocket and handed it to me.

  “What is it? A pen?”

  “No.”

  “A fever thermometer?”

  “No. Open it up.”

  I unscrewed the cap and found that it contained a miniature parasol. It opened and closed like a real umbrella, and was about three inches across when opened. It reminded me of one of those clever little Japanese favors one sometimes gets at parties, except that it seemed to be made of oiled silk and metal instead of tissue paper and bamboo.