The Merchant's War (21 page)

There certainly was nothing inspiring about the grommet works. The job was dull, and the industry appeared to be dying. We never saw the finished product. We turned out the grommets and they were shipped to places like Calcutta and Kampuchea to be used in whatever they were used in—it was cheaper for the Indians and Kampucheans to buy from us than to make them locally, but not
much
cheaper, so business was not thriving. My first week there they closed down the wire-plastic division, though extruded-aluminum and enamel-brass were still going well enough. There was lots of unused space on the upper floors of the plant, and when things were slow I went poking around. You could see the history of industry written in the stratigraphy of the old plant. Bolt holes in the floor where once the individual punch presses had stood … overlaid by the scars of the high-speed extrusion lines … buried under the marks of the microprocessor-controlled customized machines … and now again outmoded by the individual punch presses. And covered all by dust, rust and must. There were lights on the upper floor, but when I pressed the switch only a handful came on, old fluorescents, most of them flickering wildly. A regiment of stair-sleepers could have found homes here, but Mr. Semmelweiss was pursuing the fantasy of “more desirable” tenants … or the even more fantastic hope that somehow grommets would boom again and all the old space would be bustling.

Fantasies, I sneered—enviously, for the little green pills had not only taken away my Moke-hunger, they had punctured my own fantasies as well. It is a terrible thing to wake up in the morning and realize that the day just dawned will be no better than the last.

What changed things? I don’t know. Nothing changed things. I made no resolve, settled no unanswerable questions. But one morning I got up early, changed trains at a different station, got out where I had not been in a long, long time and presented myself at Mitzi’s apartment building.

The doorthing opened its jaw to sniff my fingertips and read my palm print. Medium success. It didn’t admit me, but it didn’t clamp down to hold me until the cops came either. In a minute Mitzi’s sleepy face appeared on the screen. “It really is you,” she said, thought for a minute and then added, “You might as well come on up.”

The door opened long enough for me to squeeze through, and all the way up on the hang-on lift I was trying to figure out what had been odd about the way she looked. Hair tousled? Sure, but obviously I’d got her right out of bed. Expression peculiar? Maybe. It was clearly not the look of someone glad to see me.

I pushed that question to the corner of my mind where the growing mountain of unanswered questions and unresolved doubts was locked away. By the time she let me in to her own place she’d washed her face and thrown a kerchief over her hair. The only expression she wore was polite curiosity. Polite
distant
curiosity. “I don’t know why I’m here,” I said —“except that, really, I’ve got nowhere else to go.” I hadn’t planned to say that. I hadn’t planned anything, really, but as the words came out of my mouth and I heard them I recognized them as true.

She looked at my empty hands and unbulging pockets. “I don’t have any Mokes here, Tenny.”

I brushed it aside. “I’m not drinking Mokes any more. No. I haven’t kicked them; I’m just on replacements.”

She looked shocked. “Pills, Tenny? No wonder you look like hell.”

I said steadily, “Mitzi, I’m not mad and I don’t think you owe me anything, but I thought you’d listen to me. I need a job. A job that’ll use my skills, because what I’m doing now is so close to being dead that one morning I just won’t wake up because I won’t be able to tell the difference. I’m blacklisted, you know. It’s not your fault; I’m not saying that. But you’re my only hope.”

“Aw, Tenny,” she said. The polite curiosity face broke, and for a minute I thought she was going to cry. “Aw,
hell,
Tenny,” she said. “Come on in the kitchen and have some breakfast.”

Even when the world is all gray, even when the circumstances are so wildly unlike anything you’ve ever done before that part of your mind is chasing its tail in baffled circles, your habits and training carry you through. I watched Mitzi squeeze oranges (real fruit oranges!
Squeezed
them!) for juice, and grind coffee beans (real coffee beans!) to make coffee, and all the while I was pitching her as confidently and strongly as ever I’d done for the Old Man. “Product, Mitzi,” I said. “That’s what I’m good at, and I’ve worked out major new product campaigns. Try this: Did it ever occur to you that it’s a lot of trouble to be using disposable pocket tissues, razors, combs, toothbrushes? You have to keep a supply on hand. Whereas if you had permanent ones—” She wrinkled her brow, the frown lines very deep and very conspicuous. “I don’t see what you’re getting at, Tenny.”

“A permanent replacement for, say, pocket tissues. I’ve researched it; they used to be called handkerchiefs. A luxury item, don’t you see? Priced for prestige.”

She said dubiously, “There’s no repeat business, though, is there? I mean if they’re permanent—”

I shook my head. “Permanent’s only as long as the consumer wants to keep it. The key is fashion. First year we sell square ones. Next year triangular, maybe—then with different designs, prints, colors, maybe embroidery; the numbers say there’s bigger grosses in that than in disposables.”

“Not bad, Tenny,” she conceded, putting a cup of this peculiar coffee in front of me. Actually it didn’t taste bad.

“That’s only one little one,” I said, swallowing my first sip. “I’ve got big ones.
Very
big ones. Val Dambois tried to steal my self-help substitution groups from me, but he only got part of it.”

“There’s more?” she asked, glancing at her watch.

“You bet there’s more! They just never let me work it all out. See, after the groups are formed, each member goes out and digs up other members. He gets a commission on the new ones. You get ten new members at fifty dollars a year each, and you get a ten percent commission on each one—that pays your dues.”.

She pursed her lips. “I suppose it’s a good way to expand.”

“Not just expand! How do you recruit these new members? You have a party in your condo. Invite your friends. Give them food and drinks and party favors
—and we sell them the favors.
And then—” I took a deep breath—“the beauty part, the member that signs up new members gets promoted. He becomes a Fellow of the group, and that means his dues go up to seventy-five a year. Twenty members, he becomes a Councilor—dues, a hundred. Thirty he’s a, I don’t know, Grand Exalted Theta-Class Selectman or something. See, we always stay ahead of them, so no matter how many memberships he peddles he pays half of it back—and we go on selling him the merchandise.”

I sat back with my coffee, watching the expression on her face. Whatever that expression was. I had thought it might be admiration, but I could not really tell. “Tenny,” she sighed, “you are one hell of a true-blue huckster.”

And that broke through the well-trained reflexes. I set the coffee cup down so hard that some of the coffee spilled into the saucer. Once more I listened to the words coming out of my mouth and, although I had not planned to say them, I recognized they were true. “No,” I said, “I’m not. As far as I can tell I’m not a true-blue anything. The reason I want to get back into the ad business is that I have a notion I
ought
to want it. What I really want is only—”

And I stopped there, because I was afraid to finish the sentence with the word “you” … and because the other thing I noticed was that my voice was shaking.

“I wish,” I said despairingly, and thought for a minute before going on: “I wish this was a different world.”

Now, what do you suppose I meant by that?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I didn’t know the answer to it then and don’t now; my heart was saying something my head hadn’t considered at all. I guess the meaning of the question isn’t that important. The feeling was what counted, and I could see that it reached Mitzi. “Oh, hell, Tenny,” she said, and her eyes dropped.

When she raised them again she stared at me searchingly for a moment before she spoke. “Do you know,” she said—funny, but as much to herself, I thought, as to me, “that you keep me awake at night?”

Shocked, I began, “I had no idea—” But she pressed on.

“It’s foolish,” she mused. “You’re a huck. True, you’re down right now, and you’re thinking things you wouldn’t have let yourself think a few weeks ago. But you’re a huck.”

I said—not quarrelsomely, just making my point, “I’m an adman, yes, Mitzi.” It wasn’t like her to use that kind of language.

She might as well not have heard. “When I was a little girl Daddy-san used to tell me that I’d fall in love and I wouldn’t be able to help myself, and the best and only thing for me to do was to stay away from the kind of man I wouldn’t be able to help myself with. I wish I’d listened to Daddy-san.”

My heart swelled inside me. Hoarsely I cried, “Oh, Mitzi!” And I reached out for her. Didn’t touch her though. Easily, not hurrying a bit, she stood up, just fast enough for my reaching hands to miss her, and stepped back.

“Stay here, Tenny,” she ordered calmly and disappeared into her sleep room. The door slid locked behind her. In a minute I heard the shower begin to run, and there I sat, studying Mitzi’s queer ideas of interior decoration, trying to see what anybody would like about the painting of Venus on the wall—trying to make sense of what she had said.

She gave me plenty of time. I didn’t succeed, though, and when she came out she was fully dressed, her hair was neat, her face was composed, and she was somebody else entirely. “Tenny,” she said directly, “listen to me. I think I’m crazy and I’m sure I’m going to have trouble over this. But still, three things:

“First, I’m not interested in your product ideas or your ConsumAnon scams. That’s not the kind of Agency I’m running.

“Second, at this moment I can’t do a thing for you. Probably I shouldn’t even if I could. Probably in a day or two I’ll come to my senses and then I won’t see you at all. But right now there’s no space for another adman in our offices—and no time in my life, either.

“Third—” she hesitated, then shrugged— “third, there
might
be something for us to talk about later on. Intangibles, Tenny. Political. A special project. So hush-hush I shouldn’t even be saying it exists. Maybe it never will. It won’t unless we can get a lot of things straight—we even need a place to house it, out of sight, because it’s
really
hush-hush. Even then maybe we’ll decide the time isn’t ripe and we shouldn’t go ahead with it now anyway. Do you hear how iffy all this is, Tenn? But if it does happen, then maybe, just maybe, I can find a place for you in it. Call me in a week.” She stepped briskly toward me. With my heart in my eyes I reached out for her but she sidestepped, leaned forward to kiss me chastely and firmly on the cheek and then went to the door. “Don’t come with me,” she ordered. “Wait ten minutes, then leave.”

And she was gone.

Although those little, flat green tablets seemed to be clarifying my thoughts, they didn’t make what I was trying to think about Mitzi clear at all. I rehearsed every word of our conversation in my mind, tossing on my futon while the babies whimpered and the parents snored or bickered softly between themselves in the same room. I could not make sense of it. I couldn’t figure out what Mitzi felt about me (oh, she’d all but said the word “love”—but surely she never acted it!). I could not square the Mitzi I had known so casually and carnally on Venus, her only secrets Agency ones, with the increasingly mysterious and unpredictable one on Earth.

I couldn’t understand anything at all—except for one thing that rang clear in my memory. And so I finished my shift at the grommet works, cleaned myself up, combed my hair and presented myself at the glass cubicle at the end of the floor. Semmelweiss wasn’t alone; the man with him was there at least once a week, staying for hours sometimes, going out to lunch with him and coming back with that three-martini lurch. I knew what they talked about: nothing. I coughed from the doorway and said: “Excuse me, Mr. Semmelweiss.”

He gave me the exasperated can’t-you-see-I’m-in-conference growl: “In a minute, Tarb!” And went back to his friend. The conference was about their pedicars:

“Acceleration? Listen, I had an old Ford with the outside pushoff, first pedicar I ever owned, secondhand, real clunker—but when I’d be waiting for a light to change I’d just stick that old right foot outside and
zoom!
I’d cut right in front of the pedicabs and all!”

I coughed again. Semmelweiss cast a despairing glance at heaven and then turned to me: “Why aren’t you at your machine, Tarb?”

“My shift’s over, Mr. Semmelweiss. I just wanted to ask you something.”

“Tchah,” he said, glancing at his friend, eyebrows raised in scorn—scornful of me, who had once owned a battery-powered bike! But he said, “What the hell is it, then?”

“It’s about that extra space, Mr. Semmelweiss. I think I know someone who might rent it They’re an Agency.”

His eyes popped. “Hell, Tarb! Why didn’t you say so?” And then everything was all right. It was all right for me to show Mitzi and Haseldyne the space. It was all right to take off work the next day to bring them there. It was all right to interrupt him, hell, Tarb, sure it was, any time! Everything in the world was all right … except maybe me, and all the worries and fears and puzzles that I couldn’t even put a name to.

When I finally got Mitzi on the phone she was very irritable, exactly as though she was mad at herself for encouraging me at all—which, I was sure, was exactly the ease. She demurred, and hesitated, and finally admitted that yes, she had said they needed hideout space. She’d have to check with Des Haseldyne, though.

But when I called her back, on her instructions, ten minutes later, she said, “We’ll be there.” And so they were.

When I met them on the filthy sidewalk outside the grommet plant Haseldyne looked far more irritated than Mitzi had sounded. I put out my hand. “Hello, Des,” I said civilly.