The great man spoke. “It’s a trifle crowded here, gentlemen. I wish somebody would move that all persons other than Board members be asked to leave—”
I got up and said: “I’ll save you the trouble, Sillery. Come on, boys. Sillery, I may be back.” I and my guard left.
The Institute for the Diffusion of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, a New York Non-Profit Corporation, turned out to be a shabby three-room suite downtown in Yonkers. There was a weird old gal in the outer office pecking away at a typewriter. It was like something out of Dickens. A sagging rack held printed pamphlets with flyspecks on them.
“I’m from Fowler Schocken Associates,” I told her. She jumped. “Excuse me, sir! I didn’t notice you. How is Mr. Schocken?”
I told her how he was, and she began to blubber. He was such a good man, giving so generously for the Cause. What on Earth would she and her poor brother ever do now? Poor Mr. Schocken! Poor her! Poor brother!
“All may not be lost,” I told her. “Who’s in charge here?” She sniffed that her brother was in the inner office. “Please break it to him gently, Mr. Courtenay. He’s so delicate and sensitive—”
I said I would, and walked in. Brother was snoring-drunk, flopped over his desk. I joggled him awake, and he looked at me with a bleary and cynical eye. “Washawan?”
“I’m from Fowler Schocken Associates. I want to look at your books.”
He shook his head emphatically. “Nossir. Only the old man himself gets to see the books.”
“He’s dead,” I told him. “Here’s the will.” I showed him the paragraph and my identification.
“Well,” he said. “The joy-ride’s over. Or do you keep us going? You see what it says there, Mr. Courtenay? He enjoins you—”
“I see it,” I told him. “The books, please.”
He got them out of a surprising vault behind a plain door.
A mere three hours of backbreaking labor over them showed me that the Institute was in existence solely for holding and voting 56 per cent of the stock of an outfit called General Phosphate Reduction Corporation of Newark according to the whims of Fowler Schocken.
I went out into the corridor and said to my guards: “Come on, boys. Newark next.”
I won’t bore you with the details. It was single-tracked for three stages and then it split. One of the tracks ended two stages later in the Frankfort Used Machine Tool Brokerage Company, which voted 32 per cent of the Fowler Schocken Associates “public sale” stock. The other track forked again one stage later and wound up eventually in United Concessions Corp. and Waukegan College of Dentistry and Orthodontia, which voted the remainder.
Two weeks later on Board morning I walked into the Board room with my guards.
Sillery was presiding. He looked haggard and worn, as though he’d been up all night every night for the past couple of weeks looking for something.
“Courtenay!” he snarled. “I thought you understood that you were to leave your regiment outside!”
I nodded to honest, dumb old Harvey Bruner, whom I’d let in on it. Loyal to Schocken, loyal to me, he bleated: “Mr. Chairman, I move that members be permitted to admit company plant-protection personnel assigned to them in such number as they think necessary for their bodily protection.”
“Second the motion, Mr. Chairman,” I said. “Bring them in, boys, will you?” My guards, grinning, began to lug in transfer cases full of proxies to me.
Eyes popped and jaws dropped as the pile mounted. It took a long time for them to be counted and authenticated. The final vote stood: For, 5.73×1013; against, 1.27×1013. All the Against votes were Sillery’s and Sillery’s alone. There were no abstentions. The others jumped to my side like cats on a griddle.
Loyal old Harve moved that chairmanship of the meeting be transferred to me, and it was carried unanimously. He then moved that Sillery be pensioned off, his shares of voting stock to be purchased at par by the firm and deposited in the bonus fund. Carried unanimously. Then—a slash of the whip just to remind them—he moved that one Thomas Heatherby, a junior Art man who had sucked up outrageously to Sillery, be downgraded from Board level and deprived without compensation of his minute block of voting shares. Carried unanimously. Heatherby didn’t even dare scream about it. Half a loaf is better than none, he may have said to himself, choking down his anger.
It was done. I was master of Fowler Schocken Associates. And I had learned to despise everything for which it stood.
16
“Flash-flash, Mr. Courtenay,” said my secretary’s voice. I hit the GA button.
“Consie arrested Albany on neighbor’s denunciation. Shall I line it up?”
“God-damn it!” I exploded. “How many times do I have to give you standing orders? Of course you line it up. Why the hell not?”
She quavered: “I’m sorry, Mr. Courtenay—I thought it was kind of far out—”
“Stop thinking, then. Arrange the transportation.” Maybe I shouldn’t have been so rough on her—but I wanted to find Kathy, if I had to turn every Consie cell in the country upside down to do it. I had driven Kathy into hiding—out of fear that I would turn her in—now I wanted to get her back.
An hour later I was in the Upstate Mutual Protective Association’s HQ. They were a local outfit that had a lot of contracts in the area, including Albany. Their board chairman himself met me and my guards at the elevator. “An honor,” he burbled. “A great, great honor, Mr. Courtenay, and what may I do for you?”
“My secretary asked you not to get to work on your Consie suspect until I arrived. Did you?”
“Of course not, Mr. Courtenay! Some of the employees may have roughed him up a little, informally, but he’s in quite good shape.”
“I want to see him.”
He led the way, anxiously. He was hoping to get in a word that might grow into a cliency with Fowler Schocken Associates, but was afraid to speak up.
The suspect was sitting on a stool under the usual dazzler. He was a white-collar consumer of thirty or so. He had a couple of bruises on his face.
“Turn that thing off,” I said.
A square-faced foreman said: “But we always—” One of my guards, without wasting words, shoved him aside and switched off the dazzler.
“It’s all right, Lombardo,” the board chairman said hastily. “You’re to co-operate with these gentlemen.”
“Chair,” I said, and sat down facing the suspect. I told him: “My name’s Courtenay. What’s yours?”
He looked at me with pupils that were beginning to expand again. “Fillmore,” he said, precisely. “August Fillmore. Can you tell me what all this is about?”
“You’re suspected of being a Consie.”
There was a gasp from all the UMPA people in the room. I was violating the most elementary principle of jurisprudence by informing the accused of the nature of his crime. I knew all about that, and didn’t give a damn.
“Completely ridiculous,” Fillmore spat. “I’m a respectable married man with eight children and another coming along. Who on earth told you people such nonsense?”
“Tell him who,” I said to the board chairman.
He stared at me, goggle-eyed, unable to believe what he had heard. “Mr. Courtenay,” he said at last, “with all respect, I can’t take the responsibility for such a thing! It’s quite unheard of. The entire body of law respecting the rights of informers—”
“I’ll take the responsibility. Do you want me to put it in writing?”
“No, no, no, no, no! Nothing like that! Please, Mr. Courtenay—suppose I tell the informer’s name to you, understanding that you know the law and are a responsible person—and then I leave the room?”
“Any way you want to do it is all right with me.”
He grinned placatingly, and whispered in my ear: “A Mrs. Worley. The two families share a room. Please be careful, Mr. Courtenay—”
“Thanks,” I said. He gathered eyes like a hostess and nervously retreated with his employees.
&n
bsp; “Well, Fillmore,” I told the suspect, “he says it’s Mrs. Worley.”
He began to swear, and I cut him off. “I’m a busy man,” I said. “You know your goose is cooked, of course. You know what Vogt says on the subject of conservation?”
The name apparently meant nothing to him. “Who’s that?” he asked distractedly.
“Never mind. Let’s change subjects. I have a lot of money. I can set up a generous pension for your family while you’re away if you co-operate and admit you’re a Consie.”
He thought hard for a few moments and then said: “Sure I’m a Consie. What of it? Guilty or innocent, I’m sunk so why not say so?”
“If you’re such a red-hot Consie, suppose you quote me some passages from Osborne?”
He had never heard of Osborne, and slowly began to fake: “Well, there’s the one that starts: ‘A Consie’s first duty, uh, is to, to prepare for a general uprising—’ I don’t remember the rest, but that’s how it starts.”
“Pretty close,” I told him. “Now how about your cell meetings? Who-all’s there?”
“I don’t know them by name,” he said more glibly. “We go by numbers. There’s a dark-haired fellow, he’s the boss, and, uh—”
It was a remarkable performance. It certainly, however, had nothing to do with the semi-mythical Conservationist heroes, Vogt and Osborne, whose books were required reading in all cells—when copies could be found.
We left.
I told the board chairman, hovering anxiously outside in the corridor: “I don’t think he’s a Consie.”
I was president of Fowler Schocken Associates and he was only the board chairman of a jerkwater local police outfit, but that was too much. He drew himself up and said with dignity: “We administer justice, Mr. Courtenay. And an ancient, basic tenet of justice is: ‘Better that one thousand innocents suffer unjustly than one guilty person be permitted to escape.’ ”
“I am aware of the maxim,” I said. “Good day.”
My instrument corporal went boing as the crash-crash priority signal sounded in his ear and handed me the phone. It was my secretary back in Schocken Tower, reporting another arrest, this one in Pile City Three, off Cape Cod.
We flew out to Pile City Three, which was rippling that day over a long, swelling sea. I hate the Pile Cities—as I’ve said, I suffer from motion sickness.
This Consie suspect turned out to be a professional criminal. He had tried a smash-and-grab raid on a jewelry store, intending to snatch a trayful of oak and mahogany pins, leaving behind a lurid note all about Consie vengeance and beware of the coming storm when the Consies take over and kill all the rich guys. It was intended to throw off suspicion.
He was very stupid.
It was a Burns-protected city, and I had a careful chat with their resident manager. He admitted first that most of their Consie arrests during the past month or so had been like that, and then admitted that all their Consie arrests for the past month or so had been like that. Formerly they had broken up authentic Consie cells at the rate of maybe one a week. He thought maybe it was a seasonal phenomenon.
From there we went back to New York, where another Consie had been picked up. I saw him and listened to him rant for a few minutes. He was posted on Consie theory and could quote you Vogt and Osborne by the page. He also asserted that God had chosen him to wipe the wastrels from the face of Mother Earth. He said of course he was in the regular Consie organization, but he would die before he gave up any of its secrets. And I knew he certainly would, because he didn’t know any. The Consies wouldn’t have accepted anybody that unstable if they were down to three members with one sinking fast.
We went back to Schocken Tower at sunset, and my guard changed. It had been a lousy day. It had been, as far as results were concerned, a carbon copy of all the days I had spent since I inherited the agency.
There was a meeting scheduled. I didn’t want to go, but my conscience troubled me when I thought of the pride and confidence Fowler Schocken must have felt in me when he made me his heir. Before I dragged myself to the Board room I checked with a special detail I had set up in the Business Espionage section.
“Nothing, sir,” my man said. “No leads whatsoever on your —on Dr. Nevin. The tracer we had on the Chlorella personnel man petered out. Uh, shall we keep trying—?”
“Keep trying,” I said. “If you need a bigger appropriation or more investigators, don’t hesitate. Do me a real job.”
He swore loyalty and hung up, probably thinking that the boss was an old fool, mooning over a wife—not even permanently married to him—who had decided to slip out of the picture. What he made out of the others I had asked him to trace, I didn’t know. All I knew was that they had vanished, all my few contacts with the Consies picked up in Costa Rica, the sewers of New York, and on the Moon. Kathy had never come back to her apartment or the hospital, Warren Astron had never returned to his sucker-trap on Shopping One, my Chlorella cellmates had vanished into the jungle—and so it went, all down the line.
Board meeting.
“Sorry to be late, gentlemen. I’ll dispense with opening remarks. Charlie, how’s Research and Development doing on the Venus question?”
He got up. “Mr. Courtenay, gentlemen, in my humble way I think I can say, informally, that R. and D. is in there punching and that my boys are a credit to Fowler Schocken Associates. Specifically, we’ve licked the greenhouse effect. Quantitatively. Experiments in vitro have confirmed the predictions of our able physical chemistry and thermodynamics section based on theory and math. A CO2 blanket around Venus at forty thousand feet, approximately .05 feet thick, will be self-sustaining and self-regulating, and will moderate surface temperatures some five degrees a year, steadying at eighty to eighty-five degrees. We’re exploring now the various ways this enormous volume of gas can be obtained and hurled at high velocity into the stratosphere of Venus. Considered broadly, we can find the CO2, or manufacture it, or both. I say, find it. Volcanic activity is present, but your typical superficial Venus eruption would seem to be liquid NH4compressed by gravity in crevices until it seeps to a weaker formation through faults and porous rock and then blows its top. We are certain, however, that deep drilling would tap considerable reservoirs of liquid CO2—”
“How certain?” I asked.
“Quite certain, Mr. Courtenay,” he said, hardly able to suppress the you-couldn’t-be-expected-to-understand smile that technical people give you. “Phase-rule analysis of the O’Shea reports—”
I interrupted again. “Would you go to Venus on the strength of that certainty, other things being equal?”
“Certainly,” he said, a little offended. “Shall I go into the technical details?”
“No thanks, Charlie. Continue as before.”
“Hrrmp. So—at present we are wrapping up the greenhouseeffect phase in two respects. We are preparing a maximumprobability map of drilling sites, and we are designing a standard machine for unattended deep drilling. My policy on the design is cheapness, self-power, and remote control. I trust this is satisfactory?”
“Very much so. Thank you, Charlie. One point, though. If the stuff is there and if it’s abundant, we have a prospect of trouble. If it’s too abundant and easy to get at, it might become feasible for Venus to export liquid CO2 to Earth—which we definitely do not want. CO2 is in good supply here, and no purpose would be served by underselling the earthside producers of it. Let’s bear in mind always that Venus is going to pay its way with raw materials in short supply on Earth, and is not going to compete pricewise with the mother planet. Iron, yes. Nitrates, emphatically yes. We’ll pay them a good enough price for such things to keep them buying earthside products and enable them to give earthside bankers, insurance companies, and carrying trade their business. But never forget that Venus is there for us to exploit, and don’t ever get it turned around. I want you, Charlie, to get together with Auditing and determine whether tapping underground CO2 pools will ever make it possible for Venus to deliver C
O2 F.O.B. New York at a competitive price. If it does, your present plans are out. You’ll have to get your greenhouse-effect blanketing gas by manufacturing it in a more expensive way.”
“Right, Mr. Courtenay,” Charlie said, scribbling busily.
“Right. Does anybody else have anything special on the Venus program before we go on?”
Bernhard, our comptroller, stuck his hand up, and I nodded.
“Question about Mr. O’Shea,” he rumbled. “We’re carrying him as a consultant at a very healthy figure. I’ve been asking around—and I hope I haven’t been going offside, Mr. Courtenay, but it’s my job—I’ve been asking around and I find that we’ve been getting damn-all consultation from him. Also, I should mention that he’s drawn heavily in recent weeks on retainers not yet due. If we canned—if we severed our connection with him at this time, he’d be owing us money. Also—well, this is trivial, but it gives you an idea. The girls in my department are complaining about his annoying them.”
My eyebrows went up. “I think we should hang on to him for whatever prestige rubs off, Ben, though his vogue does seem to be passing. Give him an argument about further advances. And as for the girls—well, I’m surprised. I thought they didn’t complain when he made passes at them.”
“Seen him lately?” grunted Bernhard.
No; I realized I hadn’t.
The rest of the meeting went fast.
Back in my office I asked my night-shift secretary whether O’Shea was in the building, and if so to send for him.
He came in smelling of liquor and complaining loudly. “Damn it, Mitch, enough is enough! I just stepped in to pick up one of the babes for the night and you grab me. Aren’t you taking this consultation thing too seriously? You’ve got my name to use; what more do you want?”
He looked like hell. He looked like a miniature of the fat, petulant, shabby Napoleon I at Elba. But a moment after he had come in I suddenly couldn’t think of anything but Kathy. It took me a moment to figure out.
“Well?” he demanded. “What are you staring at? Isn’t my lipstick on straight?”
American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Page 16