Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (59 page)

"Glad you're back, kid," Hennessey told him. "I've been needing a left-handed paintbrush. Shop around and see if you can pick one up for me. But it must be left-handed."

A couple of characters on the loading platform started to chuckle. The kid started out. He turned at the big sliding doors.

"I'll try, sir," he said in a voice like he had a flute in his throat. "I'll do my best. But this paint—I couldn't find any green paint with orange polka dots. This only has red polka dots. I hope it will do."

Then
he left.

For a moment we all stared at the patch of sidewalk where he'd been standing. Then I laughed; in a second the roars were bouncing off the second-story ceiling. The men just stood there with dollies and paint stacked on them, laughing their heads off.

"Hennessey, the wise guy!" someone yelled.

"All I could find was green paint with red polka dots!"

"Please, sir, I hope it will do. Wow!"

"Did that kid let you have it!"

"Poor Hennessey!"

Hennessey stood there, his great big fists hanging at his sides and no one to use them on. Suddenly he noticed the can of paint. He drew his right leg back and came tearing at it with a kick that would have sent it into Long Island Sound. Only he missed it. He just touched a corner of the can—rocking it enough to spill a drop—missed his footing and came smashing down on his great big backside. The roars got louder as he scrambled to his feet.

In a second, the laughter had stopped cold and everyone and his brother was hustling again. Not a man in that warehouse wanted to attract Hennessey's attention after his joke had bounced back at him.

Still chuckling, I strolled over and looked at the can. I wanted to see what junk the kid had used to fill it. Looked like water. The liquid in the can was mostly transparent, with little brown flecks floating around. Not paint, certainly—no kind I knew.

I glanced at the floor where a drop had been spilled when my foreman tried to kick the can.

I began strangling on a howl.

The junk the kid had used to fill the can—the junk had been green paint with red polka dots.
Red polka dots!

No doubt at all: a little oval puddle dripped up to the side of the can; the warehouse floor now had a spot painted green with red polka dots. And this kid—this errand boy—this Ernest—had found it somewhere.

One thing I told you I can tell. Saleability. I can tell the saleable something in somebody else's dream at night when I'm sleeping on the other side of town. I can sniff it—but, you know all that. But do you know how saleable that kind of paint would be? Sell it as a sure-fire novelty to manufacturers, sell it as a gimmick to guys who putter around their own home, sell it as a brand-new idea in design to interior decorators. It's a natural; it's a gold mine.

But I had to move fast. I picked up the can by the wire handle; I scuffed the paint spot carelessly with my foot. Luckily, it seemed to take a long time to dry: it mixed with the dust on the floor and lost its color. I walked out into the street where Hennessey was standing near the truck watching his crew load.

"What did you say that kid's name was? Ernest?"

He looked up. "Yeah," he brooded. "Ernest. Didn't give me his last name. But if he ever shows his wise puss around here—"

"OK. I have an important business appointment. Take over until I get back and get that flat white out." I turned and started in the direction the kid had gone. I knew Hennessey was staring at the can of paint I carried swinging from my left hand. He was wondering what I wanted with it, with the kid. Let him wonder, I told myself. Give Hennessey the curiosity; I'll take the profit.

—|—

I caught sight of the kid about three blocks away; he was going east, in the direction of the park. He stopped in front of a hardware store, thought a moment, walked in. By the time he came out again, I'd caught up with him. He was shaking his head unhappily.

We walked side by side for a while before he noticed me. I couldn't get over those clothes of his. Even the old-fashioned high shoes he was wearing weren't made out of anything I'd ever seen; the material hugged his foot like another layer of skin; it wasn't leather, I was sure of that.

"No luck?" I asked.

He jumped and stared a bit. Then he seemed to recognize the face as one of those that had been staring at him a while ago. "No. No... er, luck. The distributor said he was very sorry but he was just this moment fresh out of left-handed paintbrushes. Exactly what they all said when I asked them for the paint with the polka dots. I don't mean any offense, but... but this
is
an inefficient method of circulating goods."

I watched his face while he said that. Really meant every word of it. What a kid! I stopped and scratched my head. Should I come right out and ask him where he'd found the paint, or should I let him talk into the secret as most people will usually do?

He had turned pale and then begun blushing. I didn't like to see that in a boy. That musical soprano voice was bad enough, his thinness for a kid his size—he was almost as tall as me—I could take; but a boy who blushed had just never met a real school bully.

"Look, Ernest," I began. I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder, you know, fatherly-like. "Ernest, I—"

Zing! He jumped backward as if I'd gone to work on his neck with a can opener. And blush! Reminded me of a bride who'd led a full life and was doing her rosy best to convince the groom's mother at the altar that she hadn't.

"Don't
do
that," he said, shaking himself all over.

Better change the subject. "Nice outfit, you've got there. Where did you get it?" Subtle, you know. Catch him off guard.

He looked down complacently. "It was my costume in the school play. Of course, it was a little off-period, but I thought—"

His voice trailed away awkwardly like he'd just realized he was breaking a lodge secret. This thing had angles, all right.

"Where do you live?" I shot at him fast.

"Brooks," he came right back.

I thought that over. No, it couldn't be. "Brooks?"

"Yes, you know—Brooks. Or maybe it's Bronklyn?"

I stroked my chin, trying to work it out. He was shuddering again.

"Please," he said in that high voice. "Please. Do you have to skinge?"

"Do I have to what?"

"Skinge. Touch your body with your hands. In a public place, too. Spitting and belching are bad enough—though most of your people avoid it. But everyone—everyone is always skingeing!"

I took a deep breath and promised him I wouldn't skinge. But if I wanted to see his hole card, I'd have to flip mine over first. "Look, Ernest, what I wanted to say... well, I'm Malcolm Blyn. I—"

His eyes widened. "The robber baron of the warehouse!"

"The
what
?"

"You own Blyn's Paints. I saw your name on the door." He nodded to himself. "I've read all the adventure stories. Dumas... no, Dumas isn't right... Alger, Sinclair, Capon. Capon's
The Sixteen Salesmen
, there's one fully conscious book! I read it five times. But you wouldn't know Capon, would you? He wasn't published until—"

"Until when?"

"Until... until... oh, I can tell you. You're one of the ruling powers: you own a warehouse. I don't come from here."

"No? Where do you come from?" I had my own ideas on that. Some overeducated rich kid—a refugee, maybe, to account for his accent and slenderness.

"From the future. I shouldn't have done it; it may mean my being set back a whole responsibility group, but I just had to see the robber barons with my own eyes. Wolf bait! I wanted to see them forming pools, freezing out competitors, getting a corner on—

"Hold the economics, Jackson! From the future, did you say?" This kid was getting too big for his corduroy britches.
Corduroy
britches?

"Yes. According to the calendar of this time... let me see, and this part of the world, it would be... oh, the year 6130. No, that's still another calendar. According to
your
calendar I came from 2369 AD. Or is it 2370? 2369, I think."

I was glad he'd settled the point to his satisfaction. I told him so, and he thanked me. And all the time, I was thinking: if this kid's crazy, or if he's lying, how come paint that brushes out green with red polka dots? And how come his clothes? They hadn't been made in any factories I'd ever heard of. Check.

"This paint... that come from the future... from your time?"

"Well, the shops were all out of it, and I wanted to prove myself to Hennessey... he's a real swashbuckler, isn't he? I went home and probed the spirillix, and finally I found—"

"Spirillix? What spirillix?"

"The spirillix—the rounded usicon, you know. Your American scientist Wenceslaus invented it just about this time. I
think
it was just about this time—I remember reading of the trouble he had getting it financed. Or was it this time? Yes, I think—"

He was starting another of those debates with himself. I stalled him off. "OK. What's the difference, a hundred years more or less. This paint: do you know how it's made, what's in it?"

"How it's made." He swung a high-booted foot around in a little circle and studied it. "Well, it's hydrofluoric acid, of course. Triple-blasted. Although the container didn't mention the number of times it had been blasted. I
assume
it was triple-blasted, though—"

"Sure, sure. What do you mean—blasted, triple-blasted?"

A mouthful of perfect white teeth flashed out as he laughed right up and down the scale. "I wouldn't know that! It's all part of the Schmootz Dejector Process—my conditioning is two whole responsibility groups behind the Schmootz Process. I may never even reach it if I do well enough in self-expression. And I like self-expression better than conditioning; I only have two hours now, but—"

He raved on and on about how he was persuading some committee or other to give him more self-expression; I concentrated on worrying. This wasn't so good. I couldn't expect to import much more of the paint from this kid's hunting ground; my only hope was analysis of the sample he'd given me. And with this hydrofluoric acid and triple-blasting deal that didn't look so good.

Figure it out. Man has had steel for a long time now. But take some heat-treated steel from the best factory in Gary or Pittsburgh back to the time of that chemist character Priestley. Even if he had a modern lab available and knew how to use the equipment in it he wouldn't be able to find much useful information. He'd know it was steel maybe, and he might even be able to tell how much carbon, manganese, sulphur, phosphorus and silicon it contained—in addition to iron—if someone gave him a briefing on modern elementary chemistry, that is. But how it had acquired its properties, where its elasticity and tensile strength came from—the poor guy wouldn't know from nothing. Tell him "heat-treatment," "inward combustion of the carbon," and all he'd be able to do is open and close his mouth like a fish in Fulton Market wondering what happened to all the water.

Or spun glass. They had glass way back in ancient Egypt. Shove some of that shiny fabric we have at them, though, even say it's
spun
glass. They'd say, "Yah, sure. Have another piece of pie."

So I had the paint. One can of it hanging from my sweaty little palm. But it looked like a one-shot proposition unless I could be foxy grandpa himself—or, considering the kid, foxy great-great-great-grandpa.

Standing in front of me was the greatest errand boy a greedy businessman ever saw. And let me tell you I'm greedy; I admit it. But only for money.

How to swing it? How to turn this kid's errands into nice, bulging mounds of green paper with lots and lots of zeros on them? I didn't want him to get suspicious or upset; I didn't want him to feel I was using him as the tool I intended using him as.

I had to be a salesman; I had to sell him a bill of goods. I had to get him running the errands right, with a maximum of profit to all concerned, especially me.

Carelessly, I started walking in the direction he'd been going. He swung along beside me. "Where's your time machine, Ernest?"

"Time machine?" His delicate face wrinkled. "I don't have any time ma—Oh! You mean the chrondromos. Time machine—what a thought! No, I sunk a small chrondromos for my own personal use. My favorite father is an assistant engineer on the main chrondromos—the one they use for field trips? I wanted to go unsupervised for this once, no carnuplicators or anything. I wanted to see the ragged but determined newsboys rising steadily to riches. I wanted to see the great, arrogant robber barons like yourself—perhaps, I thought, I might even come across a real economic royalist! And I might get involved in some great intrigue, some market manipulation where millions of small investors are closed down and lose their last shred of—what is it again?—margin?"

"Yeah, they lose all their margin. Where did you sink this—this chrondromos?"

"Not where—
when
. I sank it after school. I'm supposed to be having self-expression now, so it doesn't make much difference. But I hope I can get back before a Census Keeper winds a total."

"Sure you can. I wouldn't worry about it. Uh... can I use this chrondromos of yours?"

He laughed real hard at my foolishness. "How can you? You have no conditioning, not even responsibility group two. No, you wouldn't know how to begin to unstable. I'll be glad to get back. Not that I haven't enjoyed myself. Wolf bait! To think I met a robber baron! This has been one fully conscious experience."

I dug into my tweed jacket and lit a baronial cigarette. "Guess you wouldn't have much trouble finding a left-handed paintbrush."

"Well, it might be difficult. I've never heard of one before."

"One thing I was wondering." I flicked ashes elaborately onto the sidewalk. "Do you have anything that sees ahead in time?"

"A revolving distringulatrix, you mean? There's one at the main chrondromos. I don't know how it works; they don't allow anyone from responsibility group four near it—you have to be at least six or seven."

Nasty. It had looked good. I might be able to persuade the kid to ferry back and forth with a couple of more cans of paint—but it would never amount to much. Especially if I couldn't get an analysis that would enable me to produce the stuff with present-day methods. But if I could get a gadget from the future—something I wouldn't have to sell, something I could make a million out of just by using it myself—like a dingus for seeing into the future, predicting race results, elections, sweepstake winners...