Bernie the Faust

by William Tenn

  “Make it four hundred and you’ve got a deal.”

  He began coughing his head off, and he looked mad. “What’s the matter,” he said between coughs, “three hundred and eighty is a bad price? It’s a small sea, one of the smallest. It’s only 14,000 square miles. And do you know what the maximum depth is?”

  I looked wise. “It’s deep enough.”

  “Forty-nine feet,” Eksar shouted. “That’s all, forty-nine feet! Where are you going to do better than three hundred and eighty dollars for a sea like that?”

  “Take it easy,” I said, patting his dirty shoulder. “Let’s split the difference. You say three eighty, I want four hundred. How about leaving it at three ninety?” I didn’t really care: ten bucks more, ten bucks less. But I wanted to see what would happen.

  He calmed down. “Three hundred and ninety dollars for the Sea of Azov,” he muttered to himself, a little sore at being a sucker, at being taken. “All I want is the sea itself; it’s not as if I’m asking you to throw in the Kerch Strait, or maybe a port like Taganrog or Osipenko …”

  “Tell you what.” I held up my hands. “I don’t want to be hard. Give me my three ninety and I’ll throw in the Kerch Strait as a bonus. Now how about that?”

  He studied the idea. He sniffled. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “All right,” he said, finally. “It’s a deal. Azov and the Kerch Strait for three hundred ninety.”

  Bang! went the druggist’s stamp. The bangs were getting louder.

  Eksar paid me with six fifties, four twenties and a ten, all new-looking bills from that thick roll in his pants pocket.

  I thought about the fifties still on the roll, and I felt the spit start to ball up in my mouth.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now what?”

  “You still selling?”

  “For the right price, sure. You name it.”

  “There’s lots of stuff I could use,” he sighed. “But do I need it right now? That’s what I have to ask myself.”

  “Right now is when you’ve got a chance to buy it. Later—who knows? I may not be around, there may be other guys bidding against you, all kinds of things can happen.” I waited a while, but he just kept scowling and coughing. “How about Australia?” I suggested. “Could you use Australia for, say, five hundred bucks? Or Antarctica? I could give you a real nice deal on Antarctica.”

  He looked interested. “Antarctica? What would you want for it? No—I’m not getting anywhere. A little piece here, a little piece there. It all costs so much.”

  “You’re getting damn favorable prices, buddy, and you know it. You couldn’t do better buying at wholesale.”

  “Then how about wholesale? How much for the whole thing?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What whole thing?”

  He looked impatient. “The whole thing. The world. Earth.”

  “Hey,” I said. “That’s a lot.”

  “Well, I’m tired of buying a piece at a time. Will you give me a wholesale price if I buy it all?”

  I shook my head, kind of in and out, not yes, not no. Money was coming up, the big money. This was where I was supposed to laugh in his face and walk away. I didn’t even crack a smile. “For the whole planet—sure, you’re entitled to a wholesale price. But what is it, I mean, exactly what do you want to buy?”

  “Earth,” he said, moving close to me so that I could smell his stinking breath. “I want to buy Earth. Lock, stock and barrel.”

  “It’s got to be a good price. I’ll be selling out completely.”

  “I’ll make it a good price. But this is the deal. I pay two thousand dollars, cash. I get Earth, the whole planet, and you have to throw in some stuff on the Moon. Fishing rights, mineral rights and rights to Moon-buried treasure. How about it?”

  “It’s a hell of a lot.”

  “I know it’s a lot,” he agreed. “But I’m paying a lot.”

  “Not for what you’re asking. Let me think about it.”

  This was the big deal, the big giveaway. I didn’t know how much money the TV people had given him to fool around with, but I was pretty sure two thousand was just a starting point. Only what was a sensible, businesslike price for the whole world?

  I mustn’t be made to look like a penny-ante chiseler on TV. There was a top figure Eksar had been given by the program director.

  “You really want the whole thing,” I said, turning back to him, “the Earth and the Moon?”

  He held up a dirty hand. “Not all the Moon. Just those rights on it. The rest of the Moon you can keep.”

  “It’s still a lot. You’ve got to go a hell of a lot higher than two thousand dollars for any hunk of real estate that big.”

  Eksar began wrinkling and twitching. “How—how much higher?”

  “Well, let’s not kid each other. This is the big time now! We’re not talking about bridges or rivers or seas. This is a whole world and part of another that you’re buying. It takes dough. You’ve got to be prepared to spend dough.”

  “How much?” He looked as if he were jumping up and down inside his dirty Palm Beach suit. People going in and out of the store kept staring at us. “How much?” he whispered.

  “Fifty thousand. It’s a damn low price. And you know it.”

  Eksar went limp all over. Even his weird eyes seemed to sag. “You’re crazy,” he said in a low, hopeless voice. “You’re out of your head.”

  He turned and started for the revolving door, walking in a kind of used-up way that told me I’d really gone over the line. He didn’t look back once. He just wanted to get far, far away.

  I went through the door after him. I grabbed the bottom of his filthy jacket and held on tight.

  “Look, Eksar,” I said, fast, as he pulled. “I went over your budget, way over, I can see that. But you know you can do better than two thousand. I want as much as I can get. What the hell, I’m taking time out to bother with you. How many other guys would?”

  That got him. He cocked his head, then began nodding. I let go of his jacket as he came around. We were connecting again!

  “Good. You level with me, and I’ll level with you. Go up a little higher. What’s your best price? What’s the best you can do?”

  He stared down the street, thinking, and his tongue came out and licked at the side of his dirty mouth. His tongue was dirty, too. I mean that! Some kind of black stuff, grease or grime, was all over his tongue.

  “How about,” he said, after a while, “how about twenty-five hundred? That’s as high as I can go. I don’t have another cent.”

  I didn’t think so. I’ve got a feeling when a guy says this is as high as he can go that actually he’s prepared to go a little higher. Eksar wanted to make the deal real bad, but he couldn’t resist pulling back just a little. He was the kind of guy, he could be absolutely dying of thirst, ready to kick off in a second if he didn’t get something to drink. You offer him a glass of water, and you say you want a buck for it. He looks at it with his eyes popping and his tongue all swollen, and he asks will you take ninety-five cents?

  He was like me: he was a natural bargainer.

  “You can go to three thousand,” I urged. “How much is three thousand? Only another five hundred. Look what you get for it. Earth, the whole planet, and fishing and mineral rights and buried treasure, all that stuff on the Moon. How’s about it?”

  “I can’t. I just can’t. I wish I could.” He shook his head as if to shake loose all those tics and twitches. “Maybe this way. I’ll go as high as twenty-six hundred. For that, will you give me Earth and just fishing rights and buried treasure rights on the Moon? You keep the mineral rights. I’ll do without them.”

  “Make it twenty-eight hundred, and you can have the mineral rights, too. You want them, I can tell you do. Treat yourself. Just two hundred bucks more, and you can have them.”

  “I can’t have everything. Some things cost too much. How about twenty-six fifty, without the mineral rights and without the bu
ried treasure rights?”

  We were both really swinging now. I could feel it.

  “This is my absolutely last offer,” I told him. “I can’t spend all day on this. I’ll go down to twenty-seven hundred and fifty, and not a penny less. For that, I’ll give you Earth, and just fishing rights on the Moon. Or just buried treasure rights. You pick whichever one you want.”

  “All right,” he said. “You’re a hard man: we’ll do it your way.”

  “Twenty-seven fifty for the Earth, and either fishing or buried treasure rights on the Moon?”

  “No, twenty-seven even, and no rights on the Moon. I’ll forget about that. Twenty-seven even, and all I get is the Earth.”

  “Deal!” I sang out, and we struck hands. We shook on it.

  Then, with my arm around his shoulders—what did I care about the dirt on his clothes when the guy was worth twenty-seven hundred dollars to me?—we marched back to the drug store.

  “I want a receipt,” he reminded me.

  “Right,” I said. “But I put the same stuff on it: that I’m selling you whatever equity I own or have a right to sell. You’re getting a lot for your money.”

  “You’re getting a lot of money for what you’re selling,” he came right back. I liked him. Twitches and dirt or not, he was my kind of guy.

  We got back to the druggist for notarization, and, honest, I’ve never seen a man look more disgusted in my life. “Business is good, huh?” he said. “You two are sure hotting it up.”

  “Listen, you,” I told him. “You just notarize.” I showed the receipt to Eksar. “This the way you want it?”

  He studied it, coughing. “Whatever equity you own or have a right to sell. All right. And put in, you know, in your capacity as sales agent, your professional capacity.”

  I changed the receipt and signed it. The druggist notarized.

  Eksar brought that lump of money out of his pants pocket. He counted out fifty-four crisp new fifties and laid them on the glass counter. Then he picked up the receipt, folded it and put it away. He started for the door.

  I grabbed the money up and went with him. “Anything else?”

  “Nothing else,” he said. “It’s all over. We made our deal.”

  “I know, but we might find something else, another item.”

  “There’s nothing else to find. We made our deal.” And his voice told me he really meant it. It didn’t have a trace of the tell-me-more whine that you’ve got to hear before there’s business.

  I came to a stop and watched him push out through the revolving door. He went right out into the street and turned left and kept moving, all fast, as if he was in a hell of a hurry.

  There was no more business. Okay. I had thirty-two hundred and thirty dollars in my wallet that I’d made in one morning.

  But how good had I really been? I mean, what was the top figure in the show’s budget? How close had I come to it?

  I had a contact who maybe could find out—Morris Burlap.

  Morris Burlap is in business like me, only he’s a theatrical agent, sharp, real sharp. Instead of selling a load of used copper wire, say, or an option on a corner lot in Brooklyn, he sells talent. He sells a bunch of dancers to a hotel in the mountains, a piano player to a bar, a disc jockey or a comic to late-night radio. The reason he’s called Morris Burlap is because of these heavy Harris tweed suits he wears winter and summer, every day in the year. They reinforce the image, he says.

  I called him from a telephone booth near the entrance and filled him in on the giveaway show. “Now, what I want to find out—”

  “Nothing to find out,” he cut in. “There’s no such show, Bernie.”

  “There sure as hell is, Morris. One you haven’t heard of.”

  “There’s no such show. Not in the works, not being rehearsed, not anywhere. Look: before a show gets to where it’s handing out this kind of dough, it’s got to have a slot, it’s got to have air time all bought. And before it even buys air time, a packager has prepared a pilot. By then I’d have gotten a casting call—I’d have heard about it a dozen different ways. Don’t try to tell me my business, Bernie: when I say there’s no such show, there’s no such show.”

  So damn positive he was. I had a crazy idea all of a sudden and turned it off. No. Not that. No.

  “Then it’s a newspaper or college research thing, like Ricardo said?”

  He thought it over. I was willing to sit in that stuffy telephone booth and wait: Morris Burlap has a good head. “Those damn documents, those receipts, newspapers and colleges doing research don’t operate that way. And nuts don’t either. I think you’re being taken, Bernie. How you’re being taken, I don’t know, but you’re being taken.”

  That was enough for me. Morris Burlap can smell a hustle through sixteen feet of rockwool insulation. He’s never wrong. Never.

  I hung up, sat, thought. The crazy idea came back and exploded.

  A bunch of characters from outer space, say they want Earth. They want it for a colony, for a vacation resort, who the hell knows what they want it for? They got their reasons. They’re strong enough and advanced enough to come right down and take over. But they don’t want to do it cold.

  You know, a big country wants to invade a small country, it doesn’t start until there’s at least a riot on the border. It gives them a legal leg. Even a big country needs a legal leg.

  All right. These characters from outer space, maybe all they had to have was a piece of paper from just one genuine, accredited human being, signing the Earth over to them. No, that couldn’t be right. Any piece of paper? Signed by any Joe Jerk?

  I jammed a dime into the telephone and called Ricardo’s college. He wasn’t in. I told the switchboard girl it was very important: she said, all right, she’d ring around and try to spot him.

  All that stuff, I kept thinking, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sea of Azov—they were as much a part of the hook as the twenty-for-a-five routine. There’s one sure test of what an operator is really after: when he stops talking, closes up shop and goes away.

  With Eksar, it had been the Earth. All that baloney about extra rights on the Moon! They were put in to cover up the real thing he was after, for extra bargaining power.

  I go out to buy a shipment of small travel alarm clocks that I’ve heard a jobber is stuck with. Do I start arguing about the price of clocks? I do not. I tell the jobber I want to buy a truckload of folding ladies’ umbrellas, maybe a couple of gross of alarm clocks, say travel alarms if he’s got a nice buy in them, and can he do me any good in the men’s wallet line?

  That’s what Eksar had worked on me. It was like he’d made a special study of how I operate. From me alone, he had to buy.

  But why me?

  All that stuff on the receipt, about my equity, about my professional capacity, what the hell did it mean? I don’t own Earth; I’m not in the planet-selling business. You have to own a planet before you can sell it. That’s law.

  So what could I have sold Eksar? I don’t own any real estate. Are they going to take over my office, claim the piece of sidewalk I walk on, attach the stool in the diner where I have my coffee?

  That brought me back to my first question. Who was this “they”? Who the holy hell were “they”?

  The switchboard girl finally dug up Ricardo. He was irritated. “I’m in the middle of a faculty meeting, Bernie. Call you back?”

  “Just listen a second,” I begged. “I’m in something, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. I’ve got to have some advice.”

  Talking fast—I could hear a lot of big-shot voices in the background—I ran through the story from the time I’d called him in the morning. What Eksar looked like and smelled like, the funny portable color TV he had, the way he’d dropped all those Moon rights and gone charging off once he’d been sure of the Earth. What Morris Burlap had said, the suspicions I’d been building up, everything. “Only thing is,” I laughed a little to show that maybe I wasn’t really serious about it, “who am I to mak
e such a deal, huh?”

  He seemed to be thinking hard for a while. “I don’t know, Bernie, it’s possible. It does fit together. There’s the U.N. aspect.”

  “U.N. aspect? Which U.N. aspect?”

  “The U.N. aspect of the situation. The—uh—study of the U.N. on which we collaborated two years ago.” He was using double-talk because of the college people around him. But I got it. I got it.

  Eksar must have known all along about the deal that Ricardo had thrown my way, getting rid of old, used-up office equipment for the United Nations here in New York. They’d given me what they called an authorizing document. In a file somewhere there was a piece of paper, United Nations stationery, saying that I was their authorized sales agent for surplus, second-hand equipment and installations.

  Talk about a legal leg!

  “You think it’ll stand up?” I asked Ricardo. “I can see how the Earth is second-hand equipment and installations. But surplus?”

  “International law is a tangled field, Bernie. And this might be even more complex. You’d be wise to do something about it.”

  “But what? What should I do, Ricardo?”

  “Bernie,” he said, sounding sore as hell, “I told you I’m in a faculty meeting, damn it! A faculty meeting!” And he hung up.

  I ran out of the drug store like a wild man and grabbed a cab back to Eksar’s hotel.

  What was I most afraid of? I didn’t know, I was so hysterical. This thing was too big-time for a little guy like me, too damn dangerously big-time. It would put my name up in lights as the biggest sellout sucker in history. Who could ever trust me again to make a deal? I had the feeling like somebody had asked me to sell him a snapshot, and I’d said sure, and it turned out to be a picture of the Nike Zeus, you know, one of those top-secret atomic missiles. Only this was worse: I’d sold out my whole goddamn world. I had to buy it back—I had to!

  When I got to Eksar’s room, I knew he was about ready to check out. He was shoving his funny portable TV in one of those cheap leather grips they sell in chain stores. I left the door open, for the light.

  “We made our deal,” he said. “It’s over. No more deals.”

  I stood there, blocking his way. “Eksar,” I told him, “listen to what I figured out. First, you’re not human. Like me, I mean.”