Alternating Currents (27 page)

Mr VandenBlumer said approvingly, ‘That’s good thinking, Charley. When you hear that fire bell, you really jump, boy.’

Baggot’s hand was up. He said, ‘Let me get this straight, Chief. Is it Charley’s idea that we recommend to Mason-Dixon that they go out of the tobacco business and start making something else ?’

The old man looked at him blandly for a moment. ‘Why should it be Mason-Dixon ?’ he asked softly, and left it at that while we all thought of the very good reasons why it
shouldn’t
be Mason-Dixon. After all, loyalty to a client is one thing, but you’ve got an obligation to your own people too.

The old man let it sink in, then he turned back to me. ‘Well, Charley?’ he asked. ‘We’ve heard you pinpoint what we need. Got any specific suggestions ?’

They were all looking at me to see if I had anything concrete to offer.

Unfortunately, I had.

~ * ~

I just asked Hazel to get me the folder on Leslie Clary Cloud, and she came in with a copy of my memo putting him on the payroll two years back. ‘That’s all there was in the file,’ she said dreamily, her jaw muscles moving rhythmically. There wasn’t any use arguing with her, so I handed her the container of lemon Coke and told her to ditch it and bring me back some
coffee,
C-O-F-F-E-E, coffee. I tried going through the files myself when she was gone, but
that
was a waste of time.

So I’ll have to tell you about Leslie Clary Cloud from memory. He came into the office without an appointment and why Hazel ever let him in to see me I’ll never know. But she did. He told me right away, ‘I’ve been fired, Mr McGory. Canned. After eleven years with the Wyoming Bureau of Standards as a senior chemist.’

‘That’s too bad, Dr Cloud,’ I said, shuffling the papers on my desk. ‘I’m afraid, though, that our organization doesn’t -’

‘No, no,’ he said hastily. ‘I don’t know anything about advertising. Organic chemistry’s my field. I have a, well, a suggestion for a process that might interest you. You have the Mason-Dixon Tobacco account, don’t you ? Well, in my work for my doctorate I -’ He drifted off into a fog of long-chain molecules and short-chain molecules and pentose sugars and common garden herbs. It took me a little while, but I listened patiently and I began to see what he was driving at. There was, he was saying, a substance in a common plant which, by cauliflamming the whingdrop and di-tricolating the residual glom, or words something like that, you could convert into another substance which appeared to have many features in common with what is sometimes called hop, snow or joy-dust. In other words, dope.

I stared at him aghast. ‘Dr Cloud,’ I demanded, ‘do you know what you’re suggesting? If we added this stuff to our client’s cigarettes we’d be flagrantly violating the law. That’s the most unheard-of thing I ever heard of! Besides, we’ve already looked into this matter, and the cost estimates are -’

‘No, no!’ he said again. ’You don’t understand, Mr McGory. This isn’t any of the drugs currently available, it’s something new and different.’

‘Different?’

‘Non-habit forming, for instance.’

‘Non-habit-forming ?’

‘Totally. Chemically it is entirely unrelated to any narcotic in the pharmacopeia. Legally - well, I’m no lawyer, but I swear, Mr McGory, this isn’t covered by any regulation. No reason it should be. It doesn’t hurt the user, it doesn’t form a habit, it’s cheap to manufacture, it -’

‘Hold it,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘Don’t go away - I want to catch the boss before he goes to lunch.’

~ * ~

So I caught the boss, and he twinkled thoughtfully at me. No, he didn’t want me to discuss it with Mason-Dixon just yet, and yes, it did seem to have some possibilities, and certainly, put this man on the payroll and see if he turns up with something.

So we did; and he did.

Auditing raised the roof when the vouchers began to come through, but I bucked them up to the Chief and he calmed them down. It took a lot of money, though, and it took nearly six months. But then Leslie Clary Cloud called up one morning and said, ‘Come on down, Mr McGory. We’re in.’

The place we’d fixed up for him was on the lower East Side and it reeked of rotten vegetables. I made a mental note to double-check all our added-chlorophyll copy and climbed up the two flights of stairs to Cloud’s private room. He was sitting at a lab bench, beaming at a row of test tubes in front of him.

‘This is it ?’ I asked, glancing at the test tubes.

‘This is it.’ He smiled dreamily at me and yawned. ‘Excuse me,’ he blinked amiably. ‘I’ve been sampling the little old product.’

I looked him over very carefully. He had been sampling something or other, that was clear enough. But no whisky breath; no dilated pupils; no shakes; no nothing. He was relaxed and cheerful, and that was all you could say.

‘Try a little old bit,’ he invited, gesturing at the test tubes.

Well, there are times when you have to pay your dues in the club. V.B. & S. had been mighty good to me, and if I had to swallow something unfamiliar to justify the confidence the Chief had in me, why I just had to go ahead and do it. Still, I hesitated for a moment.

‘Aw,’ said Leslie Clary Cloud, ‘don’t be scared. Look, I just had a shot but I’ll take another one.’ He fumbled one of the test tubes out of the rack and, humming to himself, slopped a little of the colourless stuff into a beaker of some other colourless stuff - water, I suppose. He drank it down and smacked his lips. ‘Tastes awful,’ he observed cheerfully, ‘but we’ll fix that. Whee!’

I looked him over again, and he looked back at me, giggling. ‘Too strong,’ he said happily. ‘Got it too strong. We’ll fix that too.’ He rattled beakers and test tubes aimlessly while I took a deep breath and nerved myself up to it.

‘All right,’ I said, and took the fresh beaker out of his hand. I swallowed it down almost in one gulp. It tasted terrible, just as he said, tasted like the lower floors had smelled, but that was all I noticed right away. Nothing happened for a moment except that Cloud looked at me thoughtfully and frowned.

‘Say,’ he said, ‘I guess I should have diluted that.’

I guess he should have.
Wham.

~ * ~

But a couple of hours later I was all right again.

Cloud was plenty apologetic. ‘Still,’ he said consolingly, standing over me as I lay on the lab bench, ‘it proves one thing. You had a dose about the equivalent of ten thousand normal shots, and you have to admit it hasn’t hurt you.’

‘I do?’ I asked, and looked at the doctor. He
swung his stethoscope by the earpieces and shrugged.

‘Nothing organically wrong with you, Mr McGory - not that I can find, anyway. Euphoria, yes. Temporarily high pulse, yes. Delirium there for a little while, yes - though it was pretty mild. But I don’t think you even have a headache now.’

‘I don’t,’ I admitted. I swung my feet down and sat up, apprehensively. But no hammers started in my head. I had to confess it: I felt wonderful.

Well, between us we tinkered it into what Cloud decided would be a ‘normal’ dosage - just enough to make you feel good - and he saturated some sort of powder and rolled it into pellets and clamped them in a press and came out with what looked as much like aspirins as anything else. ‘They’d probably work that way too,’ he said. ‘A psychogenic headache would melt away in five minutes with one of those.’

‘We’ll bear that in mind,’ I said.

What with one thing and another, I couldn’t get to the old man that day before he left, and the next day was the weekend and you
don’t
disturb the Chief’s weekends, and it was Monday evening before I could get him alone for long enough to give him the whole pitch. He was delighted.

‘Dear, dear,’ he twinkled. ‘So much out of so little. Why, they hardly look like anything at all.’

‘Try one, Chief,’ I suggested.

‘Perhaps I will. You checked the legal angle ?’

‘On the quiet. It’s absolutely clean.’

He nodded and poked at the little pills with his finger. I scratched the back of my neck, trying to be politely inconspicuous, but the Chief doesn’t miss much. He looked at me inquiringly.

‘Hives,’ I explained, embarrassed, ‘I, uh, got an overdose the first time, like I said. I don’t know much about these things, but what they told me at the clinic was I set up an allergy.’

‘Allergy?’ Mr VandenBlumer looked at me thoughtfully. ‘We don’t want to spread allergies with this stuff, do we ?’

‘Oh, no danger of that, Chief. It’s Cloud’s fault, in a way; he handed me an undiluted dose of the stuff, and I drank it down. The clinic was very positive about that: even twenty or thirty times the normal dose won’t do you any harm.’

‘Um.’ He rolled one of the pills in his finger and thumb and sniffed it thoughtfully. ‘How long are you going to have your hives ?’

‘They’ll go away. I just have to keep away from the stuff. I wouldn’t have them now, but - well, I liked it so much I tried another shot yesterday.’ I coughed, and added, ‘It works out pretty well, though. You see the advantages, of course, Chief. I have to give it up, and I can swear that there’s no craving, no shakes, no kick-off symptoms, no nothing. I, well, I wish I could enjoy it like anyone else, sure. But I’m here to testify that Cloud told the simple truth: It isn’t habit-forming.’

‘Um,’ he said again; and that was the end of the discussion.

Oh, the Chief is a cagey man. He gave me my orders: keep my mouth shut about it. I have an idea that he was waiting to see what happened to my hives, and whether any craving would develop, and what the test series on animals and Cloud’s Bowery-derelict volunteers would show. But even more, I think he was waiting until the time was exactly, climactically right.

Like at the Plans meeting, the day after the doctor’s report and the panic at Mason-Dixon.

And that’s how Cheery-Gum was born.

~ * ~

Hazel just came in with the cardboard container from the drug store, and I could tell by looking at it - no steam coming out from under the lid, beads of moisture clinging to the sides - that it wasn’t the coffee I ordered. ‘Hey!’ I yelled after her as she was dreamily waltzing through the door. ‘Come back here!’

‘Sure ‘nough, Massa,’ she said cheerfully, and two-stepped back. ‘S’matter?’

I took a grip on my temper.’ Open that up,’ I ordered.’ Take a look at what’s in it.’

She smiled at me and plopped the lid off the container. Half the contents spilled across my desk. ‘Oh, dear,’ said Hazel, ‘excuse me while I get a cloth.’

‘Never mind the cloth,’ I said, mopping at the mess with my handkerchief. ‘What’s in there?’

She gazed wonderingly into the container for a moment; then she said, ‘Oh,
honestly,
boss! I see what you mean. Those idiots in the drug store, they’re gummed up higher than a kite, morning, noon and night. I always say, if you can’t handle it, you shouldn’t touch it during working hours. I’m sorry about this, boss. No lemon! How can they call it a lemon Coke when they forget the -’

‘Hazel,’ I said, ‘what I wanted was coffee. Coffee.’

She looked at me. ‘You mean
I
got it wrong? Oh, I’m sorry, Mr McGory. I’ll go right down and get it now.’ She smiled repentantly and hummed her way towards the door. With her hand on the knob, she stopped and turned to look at me. ‘All the same, boss,’ she said, ‘that’s a funny combination. Coffee
and
Coke. But I’ll see what I can do.’

And she was gone, to bring me heaven knows what incredible concoction. But what are you going to do ?

No, that’s no answer. I know it’s what
you
would do. But it makes me break out in hives.

~ * ~

The first week we were delighted, the second week we were triumphant, the third week we were millionaires.

The sixth week I skulked along the sidewalks all the way across town and down, to see Leslie Clary Cloud. Even so I almost got it when a truckdriver dreamily piled into the glass front of a saloon a yard or two behind me.

When I saw Cloud sitting at his workbench, feet propped up, hands clasped behind his head, eyes half-closed, I could almost have kissed him. For his jaws were not moving. Alone in New York, except for me, he wasn’t chewing Cheery-Gum.

‘Thank heaven!’ I said sincerely.

He blinked and smiled at me. ‘Mr McGory,’ he said in a pleasant drawl. ‘Nice of you.’

His manner disturbed me, and I looked more closely. ‘You’re not - you’re not gummed up, are you ?’

He said gently, ‘Do I look gummed up ? I never chew the stuff.’

‘Good!’ I unfolded the newspaper I had carried all the way from Madison Avenue and showed him the inside pages - the ones that were not a mere smear of ink. ‘See here, Cloud. Planes crashing into Radio City. Buses driving off the George Washington Bridge. Ships going aground at the Battery. We did it, Cloud, you and I!’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t get upset about it, old man,’ he said comfortably. ‘All local, isn’t it?’

‘Isn’t that bad enough ? And it isn’t local - it can’t be. It’s just that there isn’t any communication outside the city any more - outside of any city, I guess. The shipments of Cheery-Gum, that’s all that ever gets delivered anywhere. Because that’s all anybody cares about any more, and we did it, you and I!’