“Doesn’t she grow at night?”
“No. They turn down the nutrient just enough, they let the waste run off. Each night she almost dies. Each morning she comes to life like Santo Lazaro. But nobody ever pray before pobrecita Gallina, hey?” He whacked the rubbery thing affectionately with the flat of his slicer.
“You like her,” I said inanely.
“Sure. She does tricks for me.” He looked around and then marched the circuit of the nest, peering into each of the tunnel mouths. Then he took a short beam from one of them and casually braced it against the door to the nest. It fitted against a crossbar on the door and against a seemingly random groove in the concrete floor. It would do very well as a lock.
“I’ll show you the trick.” He took out a sort of whistle. Instead of a mouthpiece, it had an air tank fed by a small hand pump. “They call it Galton’s whistle, but who this Galton is, I don’t know. Watch—and listen.”
He began working the pump, pointing the whistle purposefully at Chicken Little. I heard no sound, but I shuddered as the rubbery protoplasm bulged away from the pipe in a hemispherical depression.
“Don’t be scared, companero,” he told me. “Just follow.” He passed me a flashlight which I stupidly turned on. Pumping hard, Herrera played the soundless blast of the whistle against Chicken Little like a hose. She reacted with a bigger and bigger cavity that finally became an archway over the concrete floor of the nest. Herrera walked into the archway, saying: “Follow.”
I did, my heart pounding frightfully. He inched forward, pumping the whistle, and the archway became a dome. The entrance into Chicken Little behind us became smaller . . . smaller . . .
We were inside a hemispherical bubble moving slowly through a giant lump of gray-brown, rubbery flesh. “Light on the floor,” he said, and I flashed it there. The concrete was marked with lines that looked accidental, but which guided Herrera’s feet.
After endless inch-by-inch progress, I flashed my light on a crescent of metal. Herrera piped the bubble over it, and it became a disk. Still pumping, he stamped three times and it flipped open like a manhole. “You first,” he said, and I dived down, not knowing or caring whether the landing would be hard or soft. It was soft, and I lay there, shuddering. A moment later Herrera landed beside me and the manhole above clapped shut. He stood up, massaging his arm.
“Hard work,” he said. “I pump and pump that thing and I don’t hear it. Some day it’s going to stop working and I won’t know the difference until—” He grinned again.
HERRERA introduced me.
“This is Ronnie Bowan.” He was a short, phlegmatic consumer in a front-office suit. “And this is Arturo Denzer.” Denzer was very young and nervous.
The place was a well-lighted little office, all concrete, with air regenerators. There were desks and communication equipment. It was hard to believe that the only way to get in was barred by that mountain of protoplasm above. It was harder to believe that the squeak of inaudibly high-frequency sound waves could goad that insensate hulk into moving aside.
“Pleased to have you with us, Groby,” Bowen said. “Herrera says you have brains. We don’t go in for a great deal of red tape, but I want your profile.”
I gave him Groby’s profile and he took it down. His mouth tightened with suspicion as I told him the low educational level. “You don’t talk like an uneducated man.”
“You know how some kids are,” J said. “I spent my time reading and viewing. It’s tough being right in the middle of a family of five. You aren’t old enough to be respected and you aren’t young enough to be the pet. I felt kind of lost and I kept trying to better myself.”
“Fair enough. Now, what can you do?”
“Well, I think I can write a better contact sheet than you use.”
“Indeed. What else?”
“Well, propaganda generally. Things to make people feel discontented and wake them up.”
“Give me an example.”
My brain was chugging nicely. “Start a rumor going around that they’ve got a way of making new protein and you’ll be able to buy it at a dollar a pound. Say it’s going to be announced in three days. Then when the three days are up and there’s no announcement, start a wisecrack going. Something like that catches on and it’ll make them think about the old days favorably.”
It was easy. This wasn’t the first time I’d turned my talent to backing a product I didn’t care for personally.
Bowen was taking it down on a silenced typewriter. “Good,” he said. “We’ll try that. Why do you say three days?”
I couldn’t very well tell him that three days was the optimum priming period for a closed social circuit to be triggered with a catalytic cue-phrase, which was the book answer. I said instead, with embarrassment: “It seemed about right to me.”
“Well, we’ll see if it works. Now, Groby, you’re going to have a study period. We’ve got the classic conservationist texts, and you should read them. We’ve got special publications of interest to us which you should follow: Statistical Abstracts, Journal of Space Flight, Biometrika, Agricultural Bulletin and lots more. If you run into tough going, and I expect you will, ask for help. Eventually you should pick a subject to which you’re attracted and specialize in it, with an eye to research. An informed conservationist is an effective conservationist.”
“Why the Journal of Space Flight?” I asked, with a growing excitement. Suddenly there seemed to be an answer: Runstead’s sabotage, my kidnaping, the infinite delays and breakdowns in the project. Could the Connies, in their depraved, illogical minds, have decided that space travel was anti-survival, or whatever you called it?
“Very important,” said Bowen.
“You need to know all you can about it.”
“So we can louse it up?”
“Good God, think what Venus means to us—an unspoiled planet, all the wealth the race needs, all the fields and food and raw materials! Use your head, man!”
“Oh,” I said, watching my theory evaporate.
I CURLED up with the reels of Biometrika and every once in a while asked for an explanation I didn’t need. Biometrika was one of the everyday tools of a copysmith. It holds the story of population changes, IQ changes, death-rate and causes of death and all the rest of it. Almost every issue had good news in it for us—the same news that these Connies clucked over. Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales. Decrease of IQ was always good news to us. Less brains, more sales. But these eccentrically oriented fanatics couldn’t see it that way and I had to pretend to go along with them.
I switched to the Journal of Space Flight after a while. The news was bad—all bad. There was public apathy, sullen resistance to the shortages that the Venus rocket construction entailed, defeatism about planting a Venus colony at all, doubt that the colony could do anything if it ever did get planted.
That lousy Runstead!
But the worst news of all was on the cover of the latest issue. The cutline said: “Jack O’Shea Grins as Pretty Friend Congratulates with Kiss after President Awards Medal of Honor.” The pretty friend was my wife Kathy.
I got behind the Connie cell then and pushed. In three days there was a kind of bubbling discontent about the chow. In a week the consumers were saying things like: “I wish to hell I was born a hundred years ago . . . I wish to hell this Dorm wasn’t so damned crowded . . . I wish to hell I could get out on a piece of land somewhere and work for myself.”
The cell was elated. Apparently I had done more in a week than they had done in a year. Bowen—he was stationed in Personnel—told me: “We need a head like yours, Groby. You’re not going to sweat your life away as a scum-skimmer. One of these days the assignment boss will ask you if you know nutrient chemistry. Tell him yes. I’ll give you a quickie course in everything you need to know.”
It happened in another week, when everybody was saying things like: “Be nice to walk in a forest some day. Can y’imagine all those trees they useta h
ave?” and: “This stinking salt-water soap!” when it had never occurred to them to think of it as “salt-water soap.” The assignment boss came up to me and duly said: “Groby, you know any nutrient chemistry?”
“Funny you should ask,” I told him. “I’ve studied it quite a bit. I know the sulfur-phosphorus-carbon-oxygen-hydrogen-nitrogen ratios for chlorella, and I know the optimum temperatures and stuff like that.”
Obviously this little was more than he knew. He grunted, “Yeah?” and went away, impressed.
A week later everybody was telling a dirty joke about the Starrzelius Verily trust and I was transferred to an eight-hour job inside the pylon, reading gauges and twisting valves that controlled the nutrient flow to the tanks of chlorella. It was lighter and easier work. I spent my time under Chicken Little—I could pass through her with a Galton whistle almost without cringing—rewriting the Connies’ fantastically inept Contact Sheet One:
CAN YOU QUALIFY FOR
TOP-LEVEL PROMOTION?
You and only you can answer these important questions:
Are you an intelligent, forward-looking-man or woman between the ages of 14 and 50—
Do you have the drive and ambition needed to handle the really BIG JOBS tomorrow will bring—
Can you be trusted—absolutely trusted—with the biggest, hopefulness news of our time?
If you can’t stand up and shout “YES!” to every one of those questions, please read no further!
But if you can, then you and your friends or family can get in on the ground floor of. . . .
And so on—
Bowen was worried. “You don’t think that appeal to upper-level IQs limits it too much, do you?” he asked anxiously.
I didn’t tell him that the only difference between that and the standard come-on for Class 12 laborers was that Class 12s got it aurally—they couldn’t read. I said I didn’t think so.
He nodded. “You’re a natural-born copysmith, Groby,” he told me solemnly. “In a Conservationist America, you’d be star class.”
I was properly modest.
He went on, “I can’t hog you; I’ve got to pass you on to a higher echelon. It isn’t right to waste your talents in a cell. I’ve forwarded a report on you—” he gestured at the communicator—“and I expect you’ll be requisitioned. I hate to see you go, but I’m pulling the strings already. Here’s the Chlorella Purchaser’s Handbook . . .”
My heart bounded. I knew that Chlorella contracted for raw materials in New York City.
“Thanks,” I mumbled. “I want to serve wherever I can.”
“I know you do, Groby. Uh—one thing before you go. This isn’t official, George, but—well, I do a little writing, too. I’ve got some of my things here—sketches, I guess you’d call them—and I’d appreciate it a lot if you’d take them along and . . .”
I finally got out with the handbook and only fourteen of Bowen’s “sketches.” They were churlish little scraps of writing, with no sale in them at all that I could see. Bowen assured me he had lots more that he and I could work on.
I hit that handbook hard.
TWISTING valves left me feeling more alive at the end of a day than scum-skimming, and Bowen made sure my Connie labors were as light as possible—to face me for work on his “sketches.” The result was that, for the first time, I had leisure to explore. Herrera took me into town with him once, and I discovered what he did with those unmentioned weekends. The knowledge shocked and yet did not disgust me. If anything, it reminded me that the gap between the executive and consumer could not be bridged by anything as abstract and unreal as “friendship.”
Stepping out of the old-fashioned pneumatic tube into ” a Costa Rican drizzle, we stopped at a third-rate restaurant for a meal.
Herrera insisted on getting us each a potato and being allowed to pay for it—“No, call it a celebration. You let me go on living after I gave you the contact sheet, no? So we celebrate.”
He was brilliant through the meal, a fountain of conversation and bilingual badinage with me and the waiters. The sparkle in his eye, the rapid, compulsive flow of speech, the easy, unnecessary laughter were like nothing so much as the gaiety of a young man on a date. I remembered my first meeting with Kathy, that long afternoon at Central Park, strolling hand in hand down the dim-lit corridors, the dance hall, the eternal hour we stood outside her door . . .
Herrera reached over and pounded me on the shoulder, and I saw that he and the waiter were laughing. I laughed, too, defensively, and their laughter doubled; evidently the joke had been on me.
“Never mind,” said Herrera, sobering; “we go now. You will like what I have for us to do in back, I think.”
He paid the check and we threaded our way between the counters, the waiter leading the way. He opened a door and hissed something rapid in Spanish to Herrera.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Herrera told him. “We will not be long.”
“In back” turned out to be—a library.
I was conscious of Herrera’s eyes on me, and I don’t think I showed any of what I felt. I even stayed with him for an hour or so, while he devoured a wormy copy of something called Moby Dick and I glanced through half a dozen ancient magazines. Some of those remembered classics went a long way toward easing my conscience—there was actually an early “Do You Make These Common Mistakes in English?” and a “Not a Cough in a Carload” that would have looked fine on the wall of my office, back in Schocken Tower. But I could not relax in the presence of so many books without a word of advertising in any of them. I am not a prude about solitary pleasures when they serve a useful purpose, but my tolerance has limits.
Herrera knew, I think, that I lied when I told him I had a headache.
Much later, he came stumbling into the Dorm and I turned my head away. We scarcely spoke after that.
A week later, after a near-riot sparked by a rumor that the yeast fritters were adulterated with sawdust, I was summoned to the front office.
A veep for Personnel saw me after I had waited an hour. “Groby?”
“Yes, Mr. Milo.”
“Remarkable record you’ve made. Quite remarkable. I see your efficiency rating is straight fours.”
That was Bowen’s work. He kept records. He had taken five years to worm himself into that very spot. “Thank you, Mr. Milo.”
“Welcome, I’m sure. We, uh, happen to have a vacancy approaching. One of our people up North. I see his work is falling off badly.”
Not his work—the ghost of his work, the shadow on paper carefully outlined and filled in by Bowen. I began to appreciate the disproportionate power that Connies could wield.
“Do you happen to have any interest in purchasing, Groby?”
“Strange that you sensed it, Mr. Milo,” I said evenly. “I’ve always had a feel for purchasing. Read everything I could find on the subject.”
He began firing questions and I respectfully regurgitated answers from the Chlorella manual. He had memorized it twenty-odd years ago and I had memorized it only a week ago, so he was no match for me. After an hour he was convinced that George Groby was the very man needed for Chlorella Protein.
That night I told the cell about it.
“It means New York,” Bowen said positively. I couldn’t keep back a great sigh. Kathy!
He went on unaware: “I’ve got to issue you some— equipment. Look into my mouth.”
I peered in. Good fillings, a passable bridge and nothing else as far as I could see. I told him so.
Bowen grinned. “By popping my lower jaw out and biting down hard, I can kill myself in a fifth of a second. One of those fillings is a shell that contains pure nicotine. You’re going to get one like it.”
“The hell I am!” I started to say, and then shut up. The game was risky enough.
“Our records,” he said, taking a kit from a desk drawer, “contain only a single case of the filling being accidentally perforated. It never could happen again in a million years. You have nothing to worry abou
t. Open your mouth, please.”
I opened:
“Bite, please.”
I bit.
“There!”
“Done?” I guttered, curiously reluctant to close my mouth.
“All done,” he said. “Let me see you bite. Harder . . . harder . . . harder. That’s it!” He touched a molar with a tweezer. “That’s the one. You just bite down on it if captured. And for God’s sake, have one of us remove it temporarily before you go to the dentist.”
“I’ll do that,” I said faintly.
“Now,” he said, “the recognition signals.”
There was a hand sign for short range, a grand hailing sign of distress for medium range. For long range there was a newspaper-ad code; quite a good one. He made me practice the signs and memorize the code until the small hours of the morning. When we left through Chicken Little, I realized that I hadn’t seen Herrera all day. I asked as we emerged what had happened.
“He broke,” Bowen said bluntly.
I didn’t say anything. A kind of shorthand talk among Connies, it meant: “Herrera toiled for years and years in the cause of the W. C. A. He gave up his nickels and dimes and the few pleasures they could buy him. He didn’t marry and he didn’t sleep with women because it would have imperiled security. He became possessed by doubts so secret that he didn’t admit them to himself or us. The doubts and fears mounted. He was torn too many ways and he died.”
“Don’t brood about it,” Bowen said. “You’re going North.
You’ve got a job to do.”
I did. A big job.
X
I WENT to New York City almost respectably, in a cheap front-office suit, aboard a tourist rocket, steerage class. Above me the respectable Costa Rican consumers oohed and ahed at the view from the prism windows or anxiously counted their few bills, wondering how far they’d go in the pleasures for sale by the colossus of the North.
Collected Short Fiction Page 167