American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56

by Gary K. Wolfe

  Below decks we were a shabbier, tougher gang, but it was no labor freighter. We had no windows, but we had lights and vending machines and buckets. A plant protection man had made a little speech to us before we loaded: “You crumbs are going North, out of Costa Rican jurisdiction. You’re going to better jobs. But don’t forget that they are jobs. I want each and every one of you to remember that you’re in hock to Chlorella and that Chlorella’s claim on you is a prior lien. If any of you think you can break your contract, you’re going to find out just how fast and slick extradition for a commercial offense can be. And if any of you think you can just disappear, try it. Chlorella pays Burns Detective Agency seven billion a year, and Burns delivers the goods. So if you crumbs want to give us a little easy exercise, go ahead; we’ll be waiting for you. Is everything clear?” Everything was clear. “All right, crumbs. Get aboard and good luck. You have your assignment tickets. Give my regards to Broadway.”

  We slid into a landing at Montauk without incident. Down below, we sat and waited while the consumers on tourist deck filed out, carrying their baggage kits. Then we sat and waited while Food Customs inspectors, wearing the red-and-white A&P arm bands, argued vociferously with our stewards over the surplus rations—four of us had died on the trip, and the stewards, of course, had held out their Chicken Little cutlets to sell in the black market. Then we sat and waited.

  Finally the order came to fall out in fifties. We lined up and had our wrists stamped with our entry permits; marched by squads to the subway; and entrained for the city. I had a bit of luck. My group drew a freight compartment.

  At the Labor Exchange we were sorted out and tagged for our respective assignments. There was a bit of a scare when it came out that Chlorella had sold the contracts on twenty of us to I.G. Farben—nobody wants to work in the uranium mines— but I wasn’t worried. The man next to me stared moodily as the guards cut out the unlucky twenty and herded them off. “Treat us like slaves,” he said bitterly, plucking at my sleeve. “It’s a crime. Don’t you think so, Mac? It violates the essential dignity of labor.”

  I gave him an angry glare. The man was a Consie, pure and simple. Then I remembered that I was a Consie too, for the time being. I considered the use of the handclasp, and decided against it. He would be worth remembering if I needed help; but if I revealed myself prematurely he might call on me.

  We moved on to the Chlorella depot in the Nyack suburbs.

  Waste not, want not. Under New York, as under every city in the world, the sewage drains led to a series of settling basins and traps. I knew, as any citizen knows, how the organic waste of twenty-three million persons came water-borne through the venous tracery of the city’s drains; how the salts were neutralized through ion-exchange, the residual liquid piped to the kelp farms in Long Island Sound, the sludge that remained pumped into tank barges for shipment to Chlorella. I knew about it, but I had never seen it.

  My title was Procurement Expediter, Class 9. My job was coupling the flexible hoses that handled the sludge. After the first day, I shot a week’s pay on soot-extractor plugs for my nostrils; they didn’t filter out all the odor, but they made it possible to live in it.

  On the third day I came off shift and hit the showers. I had figured it out in advance: after six hours at the tanks, where no vending machines were for the simple reason that no one could conceivably eat, drink, or smoke anything in the atmosphere, the pent-up cravings of the crew kept them on the PopsieCrunchie-Starrs cycle for half an hour before the first man even thought of a shower. By sternly repressing the craving, weaker in me than in most because it had had less time to become established, I managed to have the showers almost alone. When the mob arrived, I hit the vending machines. It was a simple application of intelligence, and if that doesn’t bear out the essential difference between consumer and copysmith mentality, what does? Of course, as I say, the habits weren’t as strong in me.

  There was one other man in the shower, but, with only two of us, we hardly touched. He handed me the soap as I came in; I lathered and let the water roar down over me under the full pressure of the recirculators. I was hardly aware he was there. But, as I passed the soap back to him, I felt his third finger touch my wrist, the index finger circle around the base of my thumb.

  “Oh,” I said stupidly, and returned the handclasp. “Are you my con—”

  “Ssh!” he hissed. He gestured irritatedly to the Muzak spymike dangling from the ceiling. He turned his back on me and meticulously soaped himself again.

  When he returned the soap a scrap of paper clung to it. In the locker room I squeezed it dry, spread it out. It read: “Tonight is pass night. Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Classics Room. Be in front of the Maidenform exhibit at exactly five minutes before closing time.”

  I joined the queue at the supervisor’s desk as soon as I was dressed. In less than half an hour I had a stamped pass authorizing me to skip bedcheck for the night. I returned to my bunk to pick up my belongings, warned the new occupant of the bed about the sleep-talking of the man in the tier above, turned in my bag to the supply room, and caught the shuttle down to Bronxville. I transferred to a north-bound local, rode one station, switched to the southbound side, and got out at Schocken Tower. No one appeared to be following me. I hadn’t expected anyone to, but it never pays to take chances.

  My Consie rendezvous at the Met was almost four hours off. I stood around in the lobby until a cop, contemptuously eyeing my cheap clothing, moved toward me. I had hoped Hester or perhaps even Fowler Schocken himself might come through; no such luck. I saw a good many faces I recognized, of course, but none I was sure I could trust. And, until I found out what lay behind the double cross on Starrzelius Glacier, I had no intention of telling just anybody that I was still alive.

  The Pinkerton boomed, “You want to give the Schocken people your business, crumb? You got a big account for them, maybe?”

  “Sorry,” I said, and headed for the street door. It didn’t figure that he would bother to follow me through the crowd in the lobby; he didn’t. I dodged around the recreation room, where a group of consumers were watching a PregNot light love story on the screen and getting their samples of Coffiest, and ducked into the service elevators. “Eightieth,” I said to the operator, and at once realized I had blundered. The operator’s voice said sharply through the speaker grille:

  “Service elevators go only to the seventieth floor, you in Car Five. What do you want?”

  “Messenger,” I lied miserably. “I got to make a pickup from Mr. Schocken’s office. I told them I wouldn’t be let in to Mr. Schocken’s office, a fellow like me. I told them, ‘Look, he’s probably got twenty-five seckataries I got to go through before they let me see him.’ I said—”

  “The mail room is on forty-five,” the operator said, a shade less sharply. “Stand in front of the door so I can see you.”

  I moved into range of the mike. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t see any way out. I thought I heard a sound from the grille, but there was no way of being sure. I had never been in the elevator operators’ room, a thousand feet below me, where they pushed the buttons that sent the cars up and down the toothed shafts; but I would have given a year’s pay to have been able to look into it then.

  I stood there for half a minute. Then the operator’s voice said noncommittally, “All right, you. Back in the car. Fortyfifth floor, first slide to the left.”

  The others in the car stared at me through an incurious haze of Coffiest’s alkaloids until I got out. I stepped on the leftbound slidewalk and went past the door marked “Mail Room,” to the corridor juncture where my slidewalk dipped down around its roller. It took me a little while to find the stairway, but that was all right. I needed the time to catch up on my swearing. I didn’t dare use the elevators again.

  Have you ever climbed thirty-five flights of stairs?

  Toward the end the going got pretty bad. It wasn’t just that I was aching from toe to navel, or that I was wasting time, of whic
h I had none too much anyway. It was getting on toward ten o’clock, and the consumers whose living quarters were on the stairs were beginning to drift there for the night. I was as careful as I could be, but it nearly came to a fist fight on the seventy-fourth, where the man on the third step had longer legs than I thought.

  Fortunately, there were no sleepers above the seventy-eighth; I was in executive country.

  I skulked along the corridors, very conscious of the fact that the first person who paid any attention to me would either recognize me or throw me out. Only clerks were in the corridors, and none I’d known at all well; my luck was running strong.

  But not strong enough. Fowler Schocken’s office was locked.

  I ducked into the office of his secretary3, which was deserted, and thought things over. Fowler usually played a few holes of golf at the country club after work. It was pretty late for him still to be there, but I thought I might as well take the chance— it was only four more flights to the club.

  I made it standing up. The country club is a handsome layout, which is only fair because the dues are handsome too. Besides the golf links, the tennis court and the other sports facilities, the whole north end of the room is woods—more than a dozen beautifully simulated trees—and there are at least twenty recreation booths for reading, watching movies, or any other spectator pleasure.

  A mixed foursome was playing golf. I moved close to their seats as unobtrusively as possible. They were intent on their dials and buttons, guiding their players along the twelfth hole fairway. I read their scores from the telltale with a sinking heart; all were in the high nineties. Duffers. Fowler Schocken averaged under eighty for the course. He couldn’t be in a group like that, and as I came close I saw that both the men were strangers to me.

  I hesitated before retreating, trying to decide what to do next. Schocken wasn’t in sight anywhere in the club. Conceivably he was in one of the recreation booths, but I could scarcely open the doors of all of them to see; I’d be thrown out the first time I blundered into an occupied one, unless God smiled and the occupant was Fowler.

  A babble of conversation from the golfers caught my ear. One of the girls had just sunk a four-inch putt to finish the hole; smiling happily as the others complimented her, she leaned forward to pull the lever that brought the puppet players back to the tee and changed the layout to the dog-leg of the thirteenth hole, and I caught a glimpse of her face. It was Hester, my secretary.

  That made it simple. I couldn’t quite guess how Hester came to be in the country club, but I knew everything else there was to know about Hester. I retreated to an alcove near the entrance to the ladies’ room; it was only about ten minutes’ wait before she showed up.

  She fainted, of course. I swore and carried her into the alcove. There was a couch; I put her on it. There was a door; I closed it. She blinked up at me as consciousness came back. “Mitch,” she said, in a tone between a whisper and a shriek.

  “I am not dead,” I told her. “Somebody else died, and they switched bodies. I don’t know who ‘they’ are; but I’m not dead. Yes, it’s really me. Mitch Courtenay, your boss. I can prove it. For instance, remember last year’s Christmas party, when you were so worried about—”

  “Never mind,” she said hastily. “My God, Mitch—I mean, Mr. Courtenay—”

  “Mitch is good enough,” I said. I dropped the hand I had been massaging, and she pushed herself up to get a better look at me. “Listen,” I said, “I’m alive, all right, but I’m in a kind of peculiar foul-up. I’ve got to get in touch with Fowler Schocken. Can you fix it—right away?”

  “Uh.” She swallowed and reached for a cigarette, recovering. I automatically took out a Starr. “Uh, no, Mitch. Mr. Schocken’s on the Moon. It’s a big secret, but I guess I can tell you about it. It’s something to do with the Venus project. After you got killed—well, you know what I mean—after that, when he put Mr. Runstead on the project and it began to slip so, he decided to take matters into his own hands. I gave him all your notes. One of them said something about the Moon, I guess; anyway, he took off a couple of days ago.”

  “Hell,” I said. “Well, who’d he leave in charge here? Harvey Bruner? Can you reach—”

  Hester was shaking her head. “No, not Mr. Bruner, Mitch. Mr. Runstead’s in charge. Mr. Schocken switched in such a hurry, there wasn’t anyone to spare to take over his job except Mr. Runstead. But I can call him right away.”

  “No,” I said. I looked at my watch, and groaned. I would have just about time to make it to the Met. “Look,” I said. “I’ve got to leave. Don’t say anything to anybody, will you? I’ll figure something out, and I’ll call you. Let’s see, when I call I’ll say I’m—what’s the name of that doctor of your mother’s?— Dr. Gallant. And I’ll arrange to meet you and tell you what we’re going to do. I can count on you, Hester, can’t I?”

  “Sure, Mitch,” she said breathlessly.

  “Fine,” I said. “Now you’ll have to convoy me down in the elevator. I haven’t got time to walk, and there’ll be trouble if a guy like me gets caught on the club floor.” I stopped and looked her over. “Speaking of which,” I said, “what in the world are you doing here?”

  Hester blushed. “Oh, you know how it is,” she said unhappily. “After you were gone there weren’t any other secretarial jobs; the rest of the executives had their girls, and I just couldn’t be a consumer again, Mitch, not with the bills and all. And— well, there was this opening up here, you see. . . .”

  “Oh,” I said. I hope nothing showed on my face; God knows I tried. Damn you to hell, Runstead, I said to myself, thinking of Hester’s mother and Hester’s young man that she’d maybe been going to marry some day, and the absolute stinking injustice of a man like Runstead taking the law into his own hands and wrecking executive lives—mine—and staff lives—Hester’s—and dragging them down to the level of consumers. “Don’t worry, Hester,” I said gently. “I’ll owe you something for this. And believe me, you won’t have to remind me. I’ll make everything up to you.” And I knew how to do it, too.

  Quite a lot of the girls on the ZZ contract manage to avoid the automatic renewal and downgrading. It would cost a lot for me to buy out her contract before the year was up, so that was out of the question; but some of the girls do pretty well with single executives after their first year. And I was important enough so that if I made a suggestion to some branch head or bureau chief, he would not be likely to ignore it, or even to treat her badly.

  I don’t approve of sentiment in business matters, but as you see I’m an absolute sucker for it in any personal relationship.

  Hester insisted on lending me some money, so I made it to the Met with time to spare by taking a cab. Even though I had paid the driver in advance, he could not refrain from making a nasty comment about high-living consumers as I got out; if I hadn’t had more important things on my mind I would have taught him a lesson then and there.

  I have always had a fondness for the Met. I don’t go much for religion—partly, I suppose, because it’s a Taunton account —but there is a grave, ennobling air about the grand old masterpieces in the Met that gives me a feeling of peace and reverence. I mentioned that I was a little ahead of time. I spent those minutes standing silently before the bust of G. Washington Hill, and I felt more relaxed than I had since that first afternoon at the South Pole.

  At precisely five minutes before midnight I was standing before the big, late-period Maidenform—number thirty-five in the catalogue: “I Dreamed I Was Ice-Fishing in My Maidenform Bra”—when I became conscious of someone whistling in the corridor behind me. The notes were irrelevant; the cadence formed one of the recognition signals I’d learned in the hideyhole under Chicken Little.

  One of the guards was strolling away. She looked over her shoulder at me and smiled.

  To all external appearances, it was a casual pickup. We linked arms, and I felt the coded pressure of her fingers on my wrist: “D-O-N-T T-A-L-K W-H-E-N I L-E-A-V-E Y-O-U G-O
T-O T-H-E B-A-C-K O-F T-H-E R-O-O-M S-I-T D-O-W-N A-N-D W-A-I-T.”

  I nodded. She took me to a plastic-finished door, pushed it open, pointed inside. I went in alone.

  There were ten or fifteen consumers sitting in straight-back chairs, facing an elderly consumer with a lectorial goatee. I found a seat in the back of the room and sat in it. No one paid any particular attention to me.

  The lecturer was covering the high spots of some particularly boring precommercial period. I listened with half my mind, trying to catch some point of similarity in the varying types around me. All were Consies, I was reasonably sure—else why would I be here? But the basic stigmata, the surface mark of the lurking fanatic inside, that should have been apparent, escaped me. They were all consumers, with the pinched look that soyaburgers and Yeasties inevitably give; but I could have passed any of them in the street without a second glance. Yet— this was New York, and Bowen had spoken of it as though the Consies I’d meet here were pretty high up in the scale, the Trotskys and Tom Paines of the movement.

  And that was a consideration too. When I got out of this mess—when I got through to Fowler Schocken and cleared up my status—I might be in a position to break up this whole filthy conspiracy, if I played my cards right. I looked over the persons in the room a little more attentively, memorizing their features. I didn’t want to fail to recognize them, next time we came in contact.

  There must have been some sort of signal, but I missed it. The lecturer stopped almost in mid-sentence, and a plump little man with a goatee stood up from the first row. “All right,” he said in an ordinary tone, “we’re all here and there’s no sense wasting any more time. We’re against waste; that’s why we’re here.” He stepped on the little titter. “No noise,” he warned, “and no names. For the purpose of this meeting we’ll use numbers; you can call me ‘One,’ you ‘Two’—” he pointed to the man in the next seat, “and so on by rows to the back of the room. All clear? Okay, now listen closely. We’ve got you together because you’re all new here. You’re in the big leagues now. This is world operational headquarters, right here in New York; you can’t go any higher. Each of you was picked for some special quality—you know what they are. You’ll all get assignments right here, tonight. But before you do, I want to point out one thing. You don’t know me and I don’t know you; every one of you got a big build-up from your last cells, but sometimes the men in the field get a little too enthusiastic. If they were wrong about you. . . . Well, you understand these things, eh?”