Time Will Run Back (25 page)

Adams shrugged his shoulders in despair. “We’re simply going to have to produce more goods which we don’t really need to produce. I hope you’re at least not going to permit people to exchange the actual commodities
themselves
with each other! That would make the chaos greater still. The government would have no way of tracing who was consuming what. That’s precisely why we have always forbidden people to exchange goods with each other. Some people would have unbalanced diets; others would drink too much Marxi-Cola—”

“All right; for the present we’ll simply permit the exchange of ration coupons, and see how
that
works.”

Adams sighed. “Try it if you like, chief. Maybe it will work. But I must tell you in all candor that if
I
were running affairs I wouldn’t fool around with all these economic theories until I had taken care of more immediately important things first!”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, take this parade that Bolshekov has called for tomorrow afternoon—”

“Parade? Bolshekov?”

“Great Marx, chief! Hadn’t you even
heard
about it? He announced it on the radio this morning.”

Peter was dazed.

Adams stared at him incredulously. “I thought it was bad enough, chief, when Bolshekov announced the parade in his own name, announced that he had called it and that he would review it, and never even mentioned you or even Stalenin! But I assumed that at least he had had your consent, and that you had encouraged him to do it. This move is pretty ominous!”

“I’ll soon stop this,” said Peter. He flicked the intercom and asked Sergei to get Bolshekov on the wire.

“What is the meaning of this parade, No. 2?” demanded Peter.

“It means that I have ordered a parade, Uldanov, and that I am reviewing the armed forces.” His tone was one of quiet contempt.

“Well, Bolshekov, I am ordering you, in the name of Stalenin, to call off the parade.”

“I am
giving
orders, not taking them, Uldanov. Do
you
want to call off the parade? Try it. See what happens!”

Peter hung up. He turned to Adams.

“I heard him,” said Adams.

“You were right,” Peter said. “I’ve been a fool. I should never have appointed Bolshekov head of the Army and Navy. I should have had him liq—Well, I should have done something else than I did. He wouldn’t be challenging me the way he is unless he were sure that he and not I had the loyalty of the army.”

“The army knows Bolshekov; it doesn’t know you, chief. And Bolshekov has been building up his own personal machine ever since Stalenin began to lose his grip. It’s too late to try to remove him by a simple order.... I’m afraid, chief, that you and I are now the ones in grave danger not merely of losing our jobs, but our lives.”

Peter got up and walked around the room.

“Why have you been sticking along with me, Adams?”

“I thought I’d already made that clear, chief. I didn’t have much choice. Not being Russian, I haven’t the ghost of a chance of becoming Dictator myself. I knew that if Bolshekov came to power his first act would be my liquidation. What did I have to lose by lining up with his only possible alternative?”

“Were those your only reasons?”

Adams paused. “I happen to like you,” he said at length, and as if reluctantly. “Your sincerity... your disinterestedness... your innocent and naïve idealism....”

“You say that almost as if you were ashamed of it.”

“These are not the things that a good Bolshevist ought to like,” said Adams. “He ought to be strong; he ought to be hard; he ought to be cruel; he ought to be devious.... I have been all these things, or I would never have got to be No. 3. Maybe I got to be so cynical that I finally became cynical about cynicism itself.”

“I want you to know, Adams, that I trust you completely. And I want you to know also that I’m not licked yet. I’ve been a fool, yes; but there’s still time to act. Thanks to your advice, I think I still have the loyalty of the Air Force. We must and will continue to consolidate that. And now that I’ve had my ears pinned back, I’m humbled, and I’m asking you for more of your practical advice....”

AN hour before Bolshekov’s parade was due to start, Peter, acting on Adams’ advice, went on the radio on a worldwide hookup. The loud speakers were turned on full blast in every street. Peter declared on the radio that he had instructed Bolshekov to order and review this parade (this was Adams’ fabrication) in order to signalize and mark the day on which he, Peter Uldanov, acting in the name of Stalenin, was announcing one of the greatest economic reforms put into effect in the history of Wonworld.

And then he announced his ration coupon exchange scheme. Beginning at midnight, anyone was free to exchange any ration ticket in his possession—regardless of the fact that it bore his own personal serial number as well as the serial number of the ticket itself—for anybody else’s ration ticket. Ration tickets for cigarettes, for example, could be exchanged for ration tickets for bread or shoes or anything else, and at any ratio mutually agreeable to the parties to the exchange. He went on to explain how people with different needs, tastes and preferences would all be able to satisfy them better now than under the old system. He had ordered Bolshekov to call this parade, he said in conclusion, in order to celebrate the fact that the battle of the ration tickets had at last been won.

This time Peter was determined not to depend merely on second-hand official reports to know how his reform was working. He frequently put on his old Proletarian uniform, and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, to wander around and see the reaction of people at first hand.

At first there was no reaction at all. Nobody exchanged ration coupons, in spite of the fact that Peter’s broadcast had been published in every newspaper in Wonworld. By his own discreet inquiries and those of his agents he soon learned the reason. Everyone knew that all his own ration tickets were stamped with his personal serial number. Everyone feared a new sort of trap.

On Adams’ advice, Peter decided to dramatize the reform. He ordered the following week to be celebrated as Ration Coupon Exchange Week. Outstanding members of the Protectorate were ordered to stand in line on either side of the Red Square at noon each day. They would march towards each other, to the strains of the
International,
meet in the center, and there exchange their least valued ration ticket for another.

The result of this was again unsatisfactory. People now began to assume that it was
compulsory
to exchange at least a few ration tickets. They tried to learn from the Central Planning Board how many they were supposed to exchange and at what rates.

But after a few months these fears began to quiet down. Repeated instructions in the government press began to give people the idea. Genuinely voluntary exchanges of ration tickets began to take place, and at varying rates.

And now it was Peter’s turn to make a few surprising discoveries.

At first individuals or families merely exchanged ration tickets with other persons or families living in the same room with them. Then in the same house. Then in the same neighborhood or factory. The rates at which the ration tickets exchanged was a matter of special bargaining in each case. They at first revealed no describable pattern whatever. In one tenement or barracks someone would be exchanging, say, one shirt coupon for five bread coupons; next door one shirt coupon might exchange for fifteen bread coupons.

But gradually a distinct pattern began to take form. The man who had exchanged his shirt coupon for five bread coupons would learn that he could have got fifteen bread coupons from someone else; the man who had given up fifteen bread coupons for one shirt coupon would learn that he might have got a shirt coupon for only five bread coupons. So people began to “shop around,”
⁶
as they called it, each trying to get the highest bid for what he had to offer, each trying to get the greatest number of the coupons he desired for the coupons with which he was willing to part. The result, after a surprisingly short time, was that a uniform rate of exchange prevailed at any given moment between one type of coupon and another.

Throughout all of Moscow, for example—as throughout any district in which people were permitted to move freely without passports—virtually the same rate would establish itself as between any two coupons. For example, a uniform rate would be established of ten bread for one shirt coupon; and when this general rate was established, practically nobody would exchange for any other. For no man with a shirt coupon to exchange would take only nine bread coupons for it from anyone when he knew that somebody else would offer him ten; and nobody with bread coupons would give eleven of them for a shirt coupon as long as he knew that someone stood ready to give him a shirt coupon for only ten.

Then another striking thing happened. People had at first shopped around from house to house and street to street, trying to get the best rate in the kind of coupons they valued most for the kind of coupons they valued least. But soon people anxious to trade their coupons took to meeting regularly at certain places where they had previously discovered that they found the most other traders and bidders and could get the best rates in the quickest time. These meeting points, which people took to calling coupon “markets,” tended to become fewer and larger.

Two principal “markets” gradually established themselves in Moscow, one in Engels Square and the other at the foot of Death-to-Trotsky Street. Here large crowds, composed in turn of smaller groups, gathered on the sidewalk and spread into the street. They were made up of shouting and gesticulating persons, each holding up a coupon or sheet of coupons, each asking how much he was bid, say, in beer coupons for his shirt coupon, or offering his shirt coupon for, say, twelve beer coupons, and asking whether he had any takers.

Then shortly there took place a still further development. One enterprising coupon trader, a Deputy, brought along his little girl’s school slate, on which he marked the rates at which he was willing to exchange different coupons for other coupons. He would hold this slate up for the crowd to see.

He offered to trade other people’s coupons for them, to get the best rates and to save them the time and trouble of doing all this exchanging themselves. All he asked in return was a small fraction of what he got in exchange. If he got twelve beer coupons for a “client’s” shirt coupon, for example, he would keep one beer coupon for his trouble. This takeout gradually came to be called his “commission”—apparently because it was his reward for having the coupons committed to his charge.

And more and more people came to find that they could do better, everything considered, by turning their coupons over to him to exchange, than by trying to trade them directly themselves. For the process of trading was often wearisome and complicated. Someone would want, say, beer coupons for his shirt coupon. But he would not find anyone who wanted a shirt coupon for beer coupons, or who was willing to make this exchange at a satisfactory rate. So he might have to trade his shirt coupon first for bread coupons, and then perhaps trade these in turn for cigarette coupons—because he had learned of someone who was offering beer coupons for cigarette coupons. He saved all this tiring complication by turning his coupons for exchange over to the enterprising coupon trader, Comrade N-13, and letting the latter keep for his services a small percentage of what he got. Somebody happily thought of calling N-13 a “middleman.”

Others, for more obscure reasons, started calling him a “broker.” Both names stuck.

People found that they saved amazing time and work by taking their coupons for exchange to N-13. For if a man came with a shirt coupon, say, to exchange for beer coupons, N-13 would look in a little notebook he carried, which he called a “customer’s book,” and might find that someone had left beer coupons with him to exchange for a shirt coupon. Or he might find that someone had left beer coupons with him to exchange for cigarette coupons, and that someone else had left cigarette coupons to exchange for a shirt coupon. So he would make the “triangular” exchange himself.

The business of N-13 snowballed. But it was only for a few weeks that he had a monopoly on it. Other coupon traders also got slates, also set up as middlemen and brokers, also took orders from others. One result was that the “commission,” or percentage of the coupons that the brokers kept for themselves, gradually narrowed as they competed with each other to get this “business.”

Still another result was that the crowds began to diminish instead of growing bigger. They finally came to consist wholly of “professional” brokers (meeting late in the evening after their regular factory jobs were over) who acted as agents for exchanging the tickets left in their care. These brokers would often make their exchanges merely by comparing the orders on each other’s notebooks.

And still a third result was that the professional brokers finally put all their slates together to form in effect one great slate, which they hung against the blank wall of a building in Death-to-Trotsky Street, and on which they marked the prevailing “quotations” of different coupons in terms of other coupons.

These quotations consisted of a record of the ratios at which the last exchanges or transactions had been made. There was also often a record of, say, the maximum number of beer coupons being offered by any broker for cigarette coupons, and the maximum number of cigarette coupons being bid for beer coupons.

These latter quotations came to be known as the “bid and asked” prices. If they were equal, or overlapped, an exchange was possible and took place. But the best offer of anyone with beer coupons might be three of them for one cigarette coupon, while the best bid of anyone with cigarette coupons might be one of them for four beer coupons. In that case no exchange or transaction would occur until the highest bid and the lowest offer came together.

Then still a fourth development took place, to Peter the most unlooked for and fascinating of all. The market in ration coupons had become bewilderingly complicated. The immense slate could not begin to hold the bid-and-asked ratios of exchange for everything. For example, the ratio at which beer coupons were offered for exchange had to be stated in terms of shoe coupons, cap coupons, bean coupons, potato coupons, trouser coupons, cigarette coupons, and so on endlessly. But the ratio of potato coupons, in turn, had to be stated in terms of beer coupons, bread coupons, shoe coupons, cigarette coupons.... Though this made an infinite network of possible exchange ratios, the exchange ratio of any two items against a third always worked out to be pretty much in accord with their exchange ratios with each other.