Bernie the Faust

by William Tenn

  “I’m a hell of a lot more human than you, buddy boy.”

  “Oh, sure. You’re a custom-built Cadillac and I’m a four-cylinder factory job. But you’re not from Earth—that’s my point. My point is why you want Earth. You can’t personally need a—”

  “I don’t need it. I’m an agent. I represent someone.”

  And there it was, straight out, you are right, Morris Burlap! I stared into his fish eyes, practically pushing into my face. I wouldn’t budge an inch if he killed me. “You’re an agent for someone,” I repeated slowly. “Who? What do they want Earth for?”

  “That’s their business. I’m an agent. I just buy for them.”

  “You work on a commission?”

  “I’m not in business for my health.”

  You sure as hell aren’t in it for your health, I thought. That cough, those tics and twitches—Then I realized what they meant. This wasn’t the kind of air he was used to. Like if I go up to Canada, right away I’m down with diarrhea. It’s the water or something.

  The dirt on his face was a kind of suntan oil! A protection against our sunlight. Blinds pulled down, face smeared over—and dirt all over his clothes so they’d fit in with his face.

  Eksar was no bum. He was anything but. I was the bum. Think, Bernie, I said to myself. Think and hustle and operate like you never did before in your whole life. This guy took you, and big!

  “How much you work on—ten percent?” No answer: he leaned his chest against mine, and he breathed and he twitched, he breathed and he twitched. “I’ll top any deal you have, Eksar. You know what I’ll give you? Fifteen percent! I’m the kind of a guy, I hate to see someone running back and forth for a lousy ten percent.”

  “What about ethics?” he said hoarsely. “I got a client.”

  “Look who’s bringing up ethics! A guy goes out to buy the whole damn Earth for twenty-seven hundred! You call that ethics?”

  Now he got sore. He set down the grip and punched his fist into his hand. “No, I call that business. A deal. I offer, you take. You go away happy, you feel you made out. All of a sudden, here you are back, crying you didn’t mean it, you sold too much for the price. Too bad! I got ethics: I don’t screw my client for a crybaby.”

  “I’m not a crybaby. I’m just a poor schnook trying to scratch out a living. But who are you? You’re a big-time operator from another world with all kinds of gimmicks going for you, buttons you can press, angles I can’t even begin to figure.”

  “You had these angles, these gimmicks, you wouldn’t use them?”

  “Certain things I wouldn’t use, certain things I wouldn’t do. Don’t laugh, Eksar, I mean it. I wouldn’t hustle a guy in an iron lung no matter how much of a buck was in it. And I wouldn’t hustle a poor schnook with a hole-in-the-wall office and leave him looking like he’s sold out his entire planet.”

  “Sold out isn’t the word for it,” he said. “That receipt you signed will stand up anywhere. We got the legal machinery to make it stand up, and we got other machinery, too, planet-size machinery. Once my client takes possession, the human race is finished, it’s kaput, gone with the wind, forget about it. And you’re Mr. Patsy.”

  It was hot in that hotel room doorway, and I was sweating like crazy. But I was feeling better. First that ethics pitch, now this routine of trying to scare the hell out of me. Maybe his deal with his client wasn’t so good, maybe something else, but one thing I knew—Eksar wanted to do business with me. I grinned at him.

  He got it. He changed color a little under all that dirt. “What’s your offer, anyway?” he asked, coughing. “Name a figure.”

  “Well, I’ll admit you’re entitled to a profit. That’s only fair. Let’s say thirty-one hundred and five. The twenty-seven you paid, plus a full fifteen percent. Do we have a deal?”

  “Hell no!” he screamed. “On all three deals, you got a total of thirty-two hundred and thirty dollars out of me—and you’re offering thirty-one hundred five to buy it back? You’re going down, buddy, you’re going down instead of up! Get out of my way—I’m wasting time.”

  He turned a little and pushed me out of the way. I banged across the corridor. He was strong! I ran after him to the elevator—that receipt was still in his pocket.

  “How much do you want, Eksar?” I asked him as we were going down. Get him to name a price, then I can bargain from it, I figured.

  A shrug. “I got a planet, and I got a buyer for it. You, you’re in a jam. The one in a pickle is the one who’s got to tickle.”

  The louse! For every one of my moves, he knew the countermove.

  He checked out and I followed him into the street. Down Broadway we went, people staring at a respectable guy like me walking with such a Bowery-type character.

  I threw up my hands and offered him the thirty-two hundred and thirty he’d paid me. He said he couldn’t make a living out of shoving the same amount of money back and forth all day.

  “Thirty-four, then? I mean, you know, thirty-four fifty?”

  He didn’t say anything. He just kept walking.

  “You want it all?” I said. “Okay, take it all, thirty-seven hundred—every last cent. You win.”

  Still no answer. I was getting worried. I had to get him to name a figure, any figure at all, or I’d be dead.

  I ran in front of him. “Eksar, let’s stop hustling each other. If you didn’t want to sell, you wouldn’t be talking to me in the first place. You name a figure. Whatever it is, I’ll pay it.”

  That got a reaction. “You mean it? You won’t try to chisel?”

  “How can I chisel? I’m over a barrel.”

  “Okay. It’s a long, long trip back to where my client is. Why should I knock myself out when I can help somebody who’s in trouble? Let’s see—we need a figure that’s fair for you and fair for me and fair all around. That would be—oh, say, sixteen thousand.”

  So there it was. I was booked for a thorough bath. Eksar saw my face and began laughing. He laughed himself into a coughing fit.

  Choke, you bastard, I thought, choke! I hope the air of this planet poisons you. I hope you get gangrene of the lungs.

  That sixteen thousand figure—it was exactly twice what I had in the bank. He knew my bank account cold, up to the last statement.

  He knew my thoughts cold, too. “You’re going to do business with a guy,” he said, between coughs, “you check into him a little.”

  “Tell me more,” I said sarcastically.

  “All right. You got seven thousand, eight hundred and change. Two hundred more in accounts receivable. The rest you’ll borrow.”

  “That’s all I need to do—go into hock on this deal!”

  “You can borrow a little,” he coaxed. “A guy like you, in your position, with your contacts, you can borrow a little. I’ll settle for twelve thousand. I’ll be a good guy. Twelve thousand?”

  “Baloney, Eksar. You know me so well, you know I can’t borrow.”

  He looked away at the pigeon-green statue of Father Duffy in front of the Palace Theater. “The trouble is,” he said in a mournful voice, “that I wouldn’t feel right going back to my client and leaving you in such a jam. I’m just not built that way.” He threw back his twitching shoulders—you knew, he was about to take a beating for a friend, and he was proud of himself. “Okay, then. I’ll take only the eight thousand you have and we’ll call it square.”

  “Are you through, you mother’s little helper you, you Florence Goddamn Nightingale? Then let me set you straight. You’re not getting any eight thousand out of me. A profit, yes, a little skin I know I have to give up. But not every cent I own, not in a million years, not for you, not for Earth, not for anybody!”

  I’d been yelling, and a cop walking by came in close for a look. I thought of calling out “Help! Police! Aliens invading us!” but I knew it was all up to me. I calmed down and waited until he went away, puzzled. But the Broadway we were all standing on—what would it look like in ten years if I didn’t talk Eksar out of t
hat receipt?

  “Eksar, your client takes over Earth waving my receipt—I’ll be hung high. But I’ve got only one life, and my life is buying and selling. I can’t buy and sell without capital. Take my capital away, and it makes no difference to me who owns Earth and who doesn’t.”

  “Who the hell do you think you’re kidding?” he said.

  “I’m not kidding anybody. Honest, it’s the truth. Take my capital away, and it makes no difference if I’m alive or if I’m dead.”

  That last bit of hustle seemed to have reached him. Listen, there were practically tears in my eyes the way I was singing it. How much capital did I need, he wanted to know—five hundred? I told him I couldn’t operate one single day with less than seven times that. He asked me if I was really seriously trying to buy my lousy little planet back—or was today my birthday and I was expecting a present from him? “Don’t give your presents to me,” I told him. “Give them to fat people. They’re better than going on a diet.”

  And so we went. Both of us talking ourselves blue in the face, swearing by everything, arguing and bargaining, wheeling and dealing. It was touch and go who was going to give up first.

  But neither of us did. We both held out until we reached what I’d figured pretty early we were going to wind up with, maybe a little bit more.

  Six thousand, one hundred and fifty dollars.

  That was the price over and above what Eksar had given me. The final deal. Listen, it could have been worse.

  Even so, we almost broke up when we began talking payment.

  “Your bank’s not far. We could get there before closing.”

  “Why walk myself into a heart attack? My check’s good as gold.”

  “Who wants a piece of paper? I want cash. Cash is definite.”

  Finally, I managed to talk him into a check. I wrote it out, he took it and gave me the receipts, all of them. The twenty for a five, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sea of Azov—every last receipt I’d signed. Then he picked up his little satchel and marched away.

  Straight down Broadway, without even a good-by. All business, Eksar was, nothing but business. He didn’t look back once.

  All business. I found out next morning he’d gone right to the bank and had my check certified before closing time. What do you think of that? I couldn’t do a damn thing: I was out six thousand, one hundred and fifty dollars. Just for talking to someone.

  Ricardo said I was a Faust. I walked out of the bank, beating my head with my fist, and I called up him and Morris Burlap and asked them to have lunch with me. I went over the whole story with them in an expensive place that Ricardo picked out. “You’re a Faust,” he said.

  “What Faust?” I asked him. “Who Faust? How Faust?”

  So naturally he had to tell us all about Faust. Only I was a new kind of Faust, a twentieth-century American one. The other Fausts, they wanted to know everything. I wanted to own everything.

  “But I didn’t wind up owning,” I pointed out. “I got taken. Six thousand one hundred and fifty dollars worth I got taken.”

  Ricardo chuckled and leaned back in his chair. “O my sweet gold,” he said under his breath. “O my sweet gold.”

  “What?”

  “A quotation, Bernie. From Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. I forget the context, but it seems apt. ‘O my sweet gold.’ ”

  I looked from him to Morris Burlap, but nobody can ever tell when Morris Burlap is puzzled. As a matter of fact, he looks more like a professor than Ricardo, him with those thick Harris tweeds and that heavy, thinking look. Ricardo is, you know, a bit too natty.

  The two of them added up to all the brains and sharpness a guy could ask for. That’s why I was paying out an arm and a leg for this lunch, on top of all my losses with Eksar.

  “Morris, tell the truth. You understand him?”

  “What’s there to understand, Bernie? A quote about the sweet gold? It might be the answer, right there.”

  Now I looked at Ricardo. He was eating away at a creamy Italian pudding. Two bucks even, those puddings cost in that place.

  “Let’s say he was an alien,” Morris Burlap said. “Let’s say he came from somewhere in outer space. Okay. Now what would an alien want with U.S. dollars? What’s the rate of exchange out there? How much is a dollar worth forty, fifty light years away?”

  “You mean he needed it to buy some merchandise here on Earth?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. But what kind of merchandise, that’s the question. What could Earth have that he’d want?”

  Ricardo finished the pudding and wiped his lips with a napkin. “I think you’re on the right track, Morris,” he said, and I swung my attention back to him. “We can postulate a civilization far in advance of our own. One that would feel we’re not quite ready to know about them. One that has placed primitive little Earth strictly off limits—a restriction only desperate criminals dare ignore.”

  “From where come criminals, Ricardo, if they’re so advanced?”

  “Laws produce lawbreakers, Bernie, like hens produce eggs. Civilization has nothing to do with it. I’m beginning to see Eksar now. An unprincipled adventurer, a star-man version of those cutthroats who sailed the South Pacific a hundred years or more ago. Once in a while, a ship would smash up against the coral reefs, and a bloody opportunist out of Boston would be stranded for life among primitive, backward tribesmen. I’m sure you can fill in the rest.”

  “No, I can’t. And if you don’t mind, Ricardo—”

  Morris Burlap said he’d like another brandy. I ordered it. He came as close to smiling as Morris Burlap ever does and leaned toward me confidentially. “Ricardo’s got it, Bernie. Put yourself in this guy Eksar’s position. He wraps up his spaceship on a dirty little planet which it’s against the law to be near in the first place. He can make some half-assed repairs with merchandise that’s available here—but he has to buy the stuff. Any noise, any uproar, and he’ll be grabbed for a Federal rap in outer space. Say you’re Eksar, what do you do?”

  I could see it now. “I’d peddle and I’d parlay. Copper bracelets, strings of beads, dollars—whatever I had to lay my hands on to buy the native merchandise, I’d peddle and I’d parlay in deal after deal. Until I’d run it up to the amount I needed. Maybe I’d get my start with a piece of equipment from the ship, then I’d find some novelty item that the natives would go for. But all this is Earth business know-how, human business know-how.”

  “Bernie,” Ricardo told me, “Indians once traded pretty little shells for beaver pelts at the exact spot where the Stock Exchange now stands. Some kind of business goes on in Eksar’s world, I assure you, but its simplest form would make one of our corporate mergers look like a game of potsy on the sidewalk.”

  Well, I’d wanted to figure it out. “So I was marked as his fish all the way. I was screwed and blued and tattooed,” I mumbled, “by a hustler superman.”

  Ricardo nodded. “By a businessman’s Mephistopheles fleeing the thunderbolts of heaven. He needed to double his money one more time and he’d have enough to repair his ship. He had at his disposal a fantastic sophistication in all the ways of commerce.”

  “What Ricardo’s saying,” came an almost-soft voice from Morris Burlap, “is the guy who beat you up was a whole lot bigger than you.”

  My shoulders felt loose, like they were sliding down off my arms. “What the hell,” I said. “You get stepped on by a horse or you get stepped on by an elephant. You’re still stepped on.”

  I paid the check, got myself together and went away.

  Then I began to wonder if maybe this was really the story after all. They both enjoyed seeing me up there as an interplanetary jerk. Ricardo’s a brilliant guy, Morris Burlap’s sharp as hell, but so what? Ideas, yes. Facts, no.

  So here’s a fact.

  My bank statement came at the end of the month with that canceled check I’d given Eksar. It had been endorsed by a big store in the Cortlandt Street area. I know that store. I’ve dealt with them. I went down and
asked them about it.

  They handle mostly marked-down, surplus electronic equipment. That’s what they said Eksar had bought. A walloping big order of transistors and transformers, resistors and printed circuits, electronic tubes, wiring, tools, gimmicks like that. All mixed up, they said, a lot of components that just didn’t go together. He’d given the clerk the impression that he had an emergency job to do—and he’d take as close as he could get to the things he actually needed. He’d paid a lot of money for freight charges: delivery was to some backwoods town in northern Canada.

  That’s a fact, now, I have to admit it. But here’s another one.

  I’ve dealt with that store, like I said. Their prices are the lowest in the neighborhood. And why is it, do you think, they can sell so cheap? There’s only one answer: because they buy so cheap. They buy at the lowest prices; they don’t give a damn about quality: all they want to know is, how much mark-up? I’ve personally sold them job-lots of electronic junk that I couldn’t unload anywhere else, condemned stuff, badly wired stuff, stuff that was almost dangerous—it’s a place to sell when you’ve given up on making a profit because you yourself have been stuck with inferior merchandise in the first place.

  You get the picture? It makes me feel rosy all over.

  There is Eksar out in space, the way I see it. He’s fixed up his ship, good enough to travel, and he’s on his way to his next big deal. The motors are humming, the ship is running, and he’s sitting there with a big smile on his dirty face: he’s thinking how he took me, how easy it was.

  He’s laughing his head off.

  All of a sudden, there’s a screech and a smell of burning. That circuit that’s running the front motor, a wire just got touched through the thin insulation, the circuit’s tearing the hell out of itself. He gets scared. He turns on the auxiliaries. The auxiliaries don’t go on—you know why? The vacuum tubes he’s using have come to the end of their rope, they didn’t have much juice to start with. Blooie! That’s the rear motor developing a short-circuit. Ka-pow! That’s a defective transformer melting away in the middle of the ship.