Divide and Rule

by L. Sprague De Camp

  Juniper-Hallett smiled. "I'm an A.C. member. How about dropping in there for a steam bath and a rubdown?"

  "Swell. You really take exercise and everything? You'll be a man before your mother, sir."

  "Yep. One of these days I'll pull your neck out by the roots and tie it in knots, Your Loyalty."

  "Okay, if you can do it. Makes me almost wish you were a human being instead of a stinking Crosley. Let's go."

  Juniper-Hallett took a steam bath with his enemy, wishing that he, too, had a set of muscles like the tires of a transcontinental bus. Years of conscientious weight-lifting and other, equally dull, exercise had hardened Juniper-Hallett's stringy muscles until he was much stronger than he looked. But still he was not satisfied. Every bathing suit advertisement roused his inferiority complex.

  He said to Justin Lane-Walsh: "About that dormouse—"

  "Oh, forget the dormouse," said Lane-Walsh. "You know as much about him as I do. As I understand it, he's not due to wake up for another fifty years, so whoever's stolen him is welcome to him."

  "But suppose somebody's found a way of rousing a man from a hibernine trance—"

  "Bunk. They've tried over and over again, and all they accomplished was killing a few dormice. Shut up, sister, and let me enjoy the steam."

  Juniper-Hallett was too angry to say anything. But the heat soon sweated his sulks out of him, and he put his mind on the problem of the stunning brunette. When he spoke to Lane-Walsh again, it was to extol the abilities of a masseur named Gustav. Lane-Walsh bit.

  While Gustav was sinking his thumbs up to the second joint in Lane-Walsh's tortured muscles, Horace Juniper-Hallett calmly dressed, put Lane-Walsh's coat and pants in his new brief case, and walked out.

  Three hours later, he showed up at the ballroom of the American Empire Hotel. He was wearing Lane-Walsh's suit, with the Stromberg colors of green for the coat and brown, with yellow stars, for the pants. His landlady, Service bless her, had taken a few reefs in it, so that it did not fit quite as badly as when he had first tried it on. He had further disguised himself by screwing Lane-Walsh's monocle, which had been attached by a thread to the coat lapel, into his right eye. It made him see double, but that was a detail.

  Horace Juniper-Hallett was young; he was thin-skinned; he was afraid of doormen, headwaiters, and policemen; he had an inferiority complex a yard wide. But such is the magic of sex—well, love, if you want a nicer word for it—that he now marched up to the doorman of this ballroom as if he had had the courage of six lions poured into him. He had always considered himself a poor actor. But now he beamed confidence as he put his hand in his pocket. When the hand of course found no admission card, his expression of shocked dismay would have melted an even harder heart than that of this doorman—who had been specially picked for hardness of heart.

  "Must have left it in my other suit!" he bleated.

  "That's all right, sir," said the doorman, eying the green coat, the star-spangled pants, and the businessman's fountain pen. "Just give me your name."

  Juniper-Hallett gave an alias, and described himself as a Stromberg salesologist from Miami. He checked his hat and duelling stick, and went in.

  2

  The ballroom was full of Strombergs and their women. Juniper-Hallett thought that the Stromberg colors en masse were pretty depressing. Now, at a Crosley ball—

  A couple of Strombergs near him were talking; executives by their heavy watch chains, nobles by their self-assured bearing. One said: "When the uranium gave out, we went back to petroleum, and when that gave out, we went back to coal. If the Antarctic coal gives out—"

  "How about alcohol?" asked the other.

  "All you'd have to do would be to cut the earth's population by three quarters. You can't grow alcohol grains in little tin trays, you know."

  "The Hawaiians—" The speaker realized that his voice was carrying to Juniper-Hallett; he lowered it and pulled his companion farther away.

  Juniper-Hallett was not listening. He had located Janet Bickham-Coates. She was standing on the edge of a crowd of portly Stromberg lesser nobility surrounding His Integrity, the chairman.

  Juniper-Hallett strolled up and tapped his forehead in greeting. "Care to dance, my lady?" he asked casually. "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm afraid you don't remember me. Horace Stromberg Esker-Vanguard, Esquire. I met you at the last convention. You don't mind?"

  She touched her forehead too, then, and melted into his arms. She murmured: "I'm glad you had the nerve to ask me. The young whitecollars are all afraid to go near father. So I've been dancing with fat His Acumen this and His Efficiency that for an hour."

  "How was the dinner?" he asked.

  "Frightful. The speeches, I mean; the food was all right."

  "Was His Loyalty, Justin Lane-Walsh, there?"

  "No, now that I think, he wasn't." Then she asked: "What's your real name?"

  "Didn't I tell you?"

  "No, you didn't." She laughed up at him. It buoyed his ego to find that this girl laughed up at him, even if he was a shrimp compared to Lane-Walsh. She said: "You see, I never attended the last convention."

  "The music's good, isn't it?"

  "Now, my young friend, you can't get away with—"

  "Janet!" said a hearty female voice. Juniper-Hallett saw a tall, beaky, gray-haired woman. "I don't think I know this one."

  "Mother," said Janet, "this is . . . uh . . . Businessman—"

  "Horace Esker-Vanguard," put in Juniper-Hallett pleasantly.

  "Not a bad-looking young fellow," said the grand dame critically, "in spite of the silly eyeglass. I don't know why they wear them. What did you catch him with, Janet? Salt?"

  "Mother!"

  "Ha-ha, now she's embarrassed, Businessman Horace. Does the young good to be embarrassed occasionally. Keeps 'em from taking themselves too seriously. She's quite a pretty girl when she blushes, don't you think? Well, run along, children, and try not to be bored. These conventions are stupid, don't you think? Poor Janet's been dancing all evening with dodos of my generation." She and Juniper-Hallett touched their foreheads.

  "And now," said the girl, "how about telling me who you really are?"

  "Must we come back to that subject? They're starting a trepak."

  "I'm afraid we must."

  "You wouldn't want to see me scattered all over the ballroom, would you? A head here, a leg there?"

  "I'd hate to see you scattered all over—anything. But there'll be some investigating unless you talk."

  So Juniper-Hallett, his heart pounding with apprehension, told her who he was. Instead of being angry, she took it as a joke. Then she insisted on being told how he had come by the suit of Stromberg colors. She took this for an even better joke.

  "It served Justin right," she said. "I don't like his type—loud-mouthed ruffian, always bragging of his success with women. I suppose I shouldn't talk that way about my own cousin, especially in the presence of the enemy. But now, why did you go to all that trouble to crash our gate?"

  "To meet you."

  "Do I come up to your expectations?"

  "I could judge that better," he said thoughtfully, "on neutral ground. You remember what your mother said about conventions."

  "My mother," she replied, "has remarkably good sense at times."

  On the way out, Juniper-Hallett's ear caught a phrase ending with "—do with the dormouse."

  Hell's bones, he thought, why did that subject have to come up to distract him from his present business? The Strombergs were up to something; he was sure he hadn't been taken in by Lane-Walsh's elaborate protestations of ignorance. And then there was the Stromberg who had spoken of exhaustion of Antarctic coal. It never rained but it poured. You droned along with an uneventful existence. Then all at once you met the most wonderful girl in the world; you were elevated to businessmanhood, with the prospect of eventually becoming an executive or even an entrepreneur and being allowed to carry a personal two way radiophone; a couple of first-class mysteries were thrust under
your nose. You couldn't do all these subjects justice at the same time. The good god Service ought to arrange his timing better.

  He was sure Janet was the most wonderful girl in the world, on the quite inadequate grounds that her presence made him feel tall, brave, debonair, resourceful, cool-headed, and all the other things he'd wanted to be. He felt, in fact, as though he wouldn't mind taking on a dozen Justin Lane-Walshes with duelling sticks at the same time.

  He was lucky enough to get a couple of good seats to a show. He and Janet whispered for the first twenty minutes, until people shushed them.

  But Juniper-Hallett still had too much to think about to pay attention to the mesh—the three-dimensional woven structure on which the images were projected. He did remember later that the show was a violent melodrama laid in the Century of Revolutions, and that at one point the heroine said: "I am going to die, Boris! Do you hear me? I am going to die!" Whereat, Boris had ungallantly replied, "Well, stop talking about it and do it!"

  The Hawaiians—Justin Lane-Walsh had mentioned them; so had the Stromberg executive at the ball. Horace Juniper-Hallett had been brought up to scorn and suspect them. They did not acknowledge the sovereignty of any of the big, orderly empires that divided the globe between them. They did not worship the great god Service. Instead of trying with all their might to increase production and consumption, as civilized people did, the wicked, immoral Hawaiians made their goods as durable as possible, worked no more than they had to, and sat around in the sun loafing the rest of the time.

  To add injury to insult, they raided the shipping lanes now and then with their privateering submarines, robbing the ships of raw materials. And nothing, it seemed, could be done about it. An attempt by the combined American and Mongolian navies to do something about it, some years before, had ended in disaster for the attackers—

  "The show's over," said Janet in his ear.

  "Oh, is it?" he replied blankly. "Let's go somewhere where we can talk."

  Next morning, Horace Juniper-Hallett showed up at the Exposition, walking warily and frowning. He was wondering what he ought to do, being a young man much given to wondering what he ought to do. If he showed his face around there too much, Justin Lane-Walsh would appear thirsting for his blood. He was not afraid of Lane-Walsh, having exchanged a few stick slashes with him the day before and found him nothing extraordinary. But if he got in a fight, it would lead to all sorts of complications; perhaps his own degradation. And with his private affairs in such a delicate state, he did not want complications. On the other hand he didn't want people to think he was afraid— On the other hand—

  He ascertained that Lord Archwin of Crosley was in his semi-office behind the Crosley exhibit. A conference with His Integrity would solve the problem for the present.

  "Well, my boy," said the bold, billikenlike chairman, "how does it feel to be a businessman?"

  "Fine. But, Your Integrity, I thought you'd be interested in a couple of clues to the whereabouts of the stolen dormouse."

  Archwin's eyebrows, what little there was of them, went up. "Yes, Horace, I would be. Yes, I would be. What do you know about it?"

  Juniper-Hallett told him of Lane-Walsh's reaction, and of the mention of the dormouse at the Stromberg ball.

  "That's interesting, if hardly conclusive," said Archwin. "What interests me more is how you got into that ball."

  Juniper-Hallett gulped. He thought he'd been keeping out of trouble! But a businessman could not tell a lie, except in advertising his product. At least, so Juniper-Hallett had been taught to believe. He was in for disgrace and disaster, no doubt, but—He blurted out the story of his embezzlement of Lane-Walsh's clothes, without mentioning his evening with Janet. Then he waited for the lightning to strike.

  The chairman's forehead wrinkled; his nose twitched; his lips jerked; he burst into a roar of laughter. "That's the best thing since Billiam lost his pants in a duel with me back in '12! Congratulations, Horace."

  "Then . . . then I'm not going to be degraded for wearing false colors?"

  "Service bless you, no. If they'd caught you and made a protest, I might have had to go through some motion or other. But if they'd caught you, you probably wouldn't have survived to tell the story."

  "Whew!" Juniper-Hallett gave a long sigh of relief. Mixed with the relief was a slight feeling of disillusionment. He'd always been taught that the rules of businessmanhood were adamantine. Now they seemed to have a few soft spots, after all. And His Integrity's integrity had acquired the faintest tarnish. Juniper-Hallett had taken his code so seriously, and worried so about its violation—

  "Let me think it over," said Archwin. "I didn't know you were such a Sherlock. The last regular agent we sent around to the Stromberg building was beaten nearly to death with sticks. Maybe I'll have some more use for you. Maybe I shall."

  The chairman agreed that it would be prudent to transfer Juniper-Hallett from the Exposition back to the main office in the Crosley building. Thither Juniper-Hallett went, almost getting run over twice. His mind was on his date with Janet the coming evening. Not until he reached the office, which stretched along Wilshire Boulevard for six blocks, did he remember that he had meant to ask Lord Archwin about the state of the Antarctic coal fields.

  They met in the Los Angeles Nominatorium, one place they were unlikely to be disturbed. The long lines of columns stretched for blocks in all directions. Each line was sacred to one company or clan, and each pillar bore the names and dates of the members of one family of that company.

  "Now up here," said the guide, "is sumthin' interesting. You see that blank space on the Froman column? That's where they'd have put John Generalmotors Froman-Epstein, only they didn't put him nowheres. And on the Packard colonnade, they's a blank space where they didn't put Theodora Packard Hughes-Halloran, who married him. A Generalmotors marryin' a Packard—hm-m-m." He saw that his visitors were clearly not listening, and gave up.

  "Personally," said Janet, "I don't care whether they put me on a column or not."

  "Neither do I," said Juniper-Hallett.

  "Do we have to agree on everything, Horace?"

  "It sure looks that way. Maybe you agree with me that this Crosley-Stromberg feud's gone on long enough."

  "I certainly do. I asked Father once what started it, and he said nobody in the company remembered any more, but I could probably find out if I wanted to dig back far enough into the records."

  "It's a lot of bunk," said Juniper-Hallett. Taking his courage in both hands, he added: "I don't see why a person can't marry whom he pleases, companies or no companies."

  She nodded gravely. "It's their affair, isn't it? Of course they ought to stay within their own class."

  "Right. It doesn't do to mix classes. But there's no logical reason why you and I shouldn't marry if we felt like it, for instance."

  "No reason at all, if we felt like it. Why, you're much better suited to me than anyone in the Stromberg Co."

  "Make it both ways. As a matter of fact, I think it would be about a perfect match."

  "Just about, wouldn't it?"

  "If we felt like it."

  "Oh, of course."

  Juniper-Hallett looked at his shoe buckles. "Matter of fact, I know an old geneticist who'd do it if I asked him to."

  She turned to face him. "Horace, you mean you do feel like it?"

  "Of course! I was afraid you were just citing an imaginary case—"

  "And I was afraid you were just being nice—"

  "Ever since I met you last—"

  "Ever since I saw you—"

  The guide looked back over his shoulder. He said. "Hm-m-m! and shuffled off into the night.

  "I'm afraid," said Juniper-Hallett.

  "You afraid? You weren't afraid of Justin yesterday. And you weren't afraid to invade the ball last night."

  "It's not that. I feel somehow that something's going to happen. Something to separate us."

  "How frightful, Horace!"

  "Yep, that's the w
ord for it. For instance, do you know anything about the Antarctic coal situation?"

  "No, I don't suppose I do. Though I've heard Father—"

  "Go on."

  "Nothing definite; just a few words now and then. I suppose I ought to be more interested in coal and such things. It's hard to be though. But if that's the case, I don't suppose we ought to wait—"

  "Any longer than we have to—" said Juniper-Hallett.

  "We could start right now—" said Janet.

  "And see that geneticist of mine. I'll have to go back to my house, though, and get my pedigree. I suppose you will, too."

  "No," she said brightly, "I brought mine along with me!"

  The geneticist was a benevolent old gent named Miles Carey-West. He said hello to Juniper-Hallett, and implied with a look that he knew what his young friend had come for.

  "Got your pedigrees?" he asked. He glanced over Juniper-Hallett's. Then he looked at Janet's. He whistled when he saw the name at the top.

  "I thought I'd seen your face somewhere," he said, peering through thick glasses. "Won't this cause all kinds of trouble?" ,

  The young pair shrugged. Juniper-Hallett said: "Yep. We're ready for it."

  "Ah, well," said Carey-West. "No reasoning with the young and headstrong. Maybe it'll be a good thing; heal up this silly feud. Just like Romeo and Juliet."

  "Who?" asked Juniper-Hallett.

  "Romeo and Juliet. Couple of characters in a play by a pre-industrial English dramatist. Hope you make out better than they did, though."

  "What happened to them? I'd like to read it."

  "They died. And you'd have to read it in translation, unless you're a student of Old English. Raise your right hands, both of you."

  Of course, thought Horace Juniper-Hallett, it was another dazzling piece of luck, getting the girl of one's dreams right off the bat. But he couldn't help a slight feeling of dissatisfaction; a feeling that by rushing things so impetuously he'd missed something. Maybe it meant nothing to have a big wedding and walk out of the Gyratory Club under an arch of duelling sticks held by his fellow businessmen. But it would have been nice to have had the experience.