Job: A Comedy of Justice

by Robert A. Heinlein

And so I did, again and again and again. Prayer is always answered. But it is necessary to recognize the answer…and it may not be the answer you want.

  In the meantime one must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Of course I elected to work six days a week rather than five ($31,200 a year!)—as I needed every shekel I could garner. Margrethe needed everything!—and so did I. Especially we needed shoes. The shoes we had been wearing when disaster struck in Mazatlán had been quite good shoes—for peasants in Mazatlán. But they had been worn during two days of digging through rubble after the quake, then had been worn continuously since then; they were ready for the trash bin. So we needed shoes, at least two pairs each, one pair for work, one for Sunday-go-to-meeting.

  And many other things. I don’t know what all a woman needs, but it is more complex than what a man needs. I had to put money into Margrethe’s hands and encourage her to buy what she needed. I could pig it with nothing much more than shoes and a pair of dungarees (to spare my one good outfit)—although I did buy a razor, and got a haircut at a barber’s college near the mission, one where a haircut was only two dollars if one was willing to accept the greenest apprentice, and I was. Margrethe looked at it and said gently that she thought she could do as well herself, and save us that two dollars. Later she took scissors and straightened out what that untalented apprentice had done to me…and thereafter I never again spent money on barbers.

  But saving two dollars did not offset a greater damage. I had honestly thought, when Mr. Cowgirl hired me, that I was going to be paid a hundred dollars every day I worked.

  He didn’t pay me that much and he didn’t cheat me. Let me explain.

  I finished that first day of work tired but happy. Happier than I had been since the earthquake struck, I mean—happiness is relative. I stopped at the cashier’s stand where Mr. Cowgirl was working on his accounts, Ron’s Grill having closed for the day. He looked up. “How did it go, Alec?”

  “Just fine, sir.”

  “Luke tells me that you are doing okay.” Luke was a giant blackamoor, head cook and my nominal boss. In fact he had not supervised me other than to show me where things were and make sure that I knew what to do.

  “That’s pleasant to hear. Luke’s a good cook.” That one-meal-a-day bonus over minimum wage I had eaten at four o’clock as breakfast was ancient history by then. Luke had explained to me that the help could order anything on the menu but steaks or chops, and that today I could have all the seconds I wanted if I chose either the stew or the meat loaf.

  I chose the meat loaf because his kitchen smelled and looked clean. You can tell far more about a cook by his meat loaf than you can from the way he grills a steak. I took seconds on the meat loaf—with no catsup.

  Luke was generous in the slab of cherry pie he cut for me, then he added a scoop of vanilla ice cream…which I did not rate, as it was an either/or, not both.

  “Luke seldom says a good word about white boys,” my employer went on, “and never about a Chicano. So you must be doing okay.”

  “I hope so.” I was growing a mite impatient. We are all the Lord’s children but it was the first time in my life that a blackamoor’s opinion of my work had mattered. I simply wanted to be paid so that I could hurry home to Margrethe—to the Salvation Army mission, that is.

  Mr. Cowgirl folded his hands and twiddled his thumbs. “You want to be paid, don’t you?”

  I controlled my annoyance. “Yes, sir.”

  “Alec, with dishwashers I prefer to pay by the week.”

  I felt dismay and I am sure my face showed it.

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” he added. “You’re an hourly-rate employee, so you are paid at the end of each day if that’s what you choose.”

  “Then I do choose. I need the money.”

  “Let me finish. The reason I prefer to pay dishwashers weekly instead of daily is that, all too often, if I hire one and pay him at the end of the day, he goes straight out and buys a jug of muscatel, then doesn’t show up for a couple of days. When he does, he wants his job back. Angry at me. Ready to complain to the Labor Board. Funny part about it is that I may even be able to give him his job back—for another one-day shot at it—because the bum I’ve hired in his place has gone and done the same thing.

  “This isn’t likely to happen with Chicanos as they usually want to save money to send back to Mexico. But I’ve yet to see the Chicano who could handle the scullery to suit Luke…and I need Luke more than I need a particular dishwasher. Negras—Luke can usually tell me whether a spade is going to work out, and the good ones are better than a white boy any time. But the good ones are always trying to improve themselves…and if I don’t promote them to pantry boy or assistant cook or whatever, soon they go across the street to somebody who will. So it’s always a problem. If I can get a week’s work out of a dishwasher, I figure I’ve won. If I get two weeks, I’m jubilant. Once I got a full month. But that’s once in a lifetime.”

  “You’re going to get three full weeks out of me,” I said. “Now can I have my pay?”

  “Don’t rush me. If you elect to be paid once a week, I go for a dollar more on your hourly rate. That’s forty dollars more at the end of the week. What do you say?”

  (No, that’s forty-eight more per week, I told myself. Almost $34,000 per year just for washing dishes. Whew!) “That’s forty-eight dollars more each week,” I answered. “Not forty. As I’m going for that six-days-a-week option. I do need the money.”

  “Okay. Then I pay you once a week.”

  “Just a moment. Can’t we start it tomorrow? I need some cash today. My wife and I haven’t anything, anything at all. I’ve got the clothes I’m standing in, nothing else. The same for my wife. I can sweat it out a few more days. But there are things a woman just has to have.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself. But you don’t get the dollar-an-hour bonus for today’s work. And if you are one minute late tomorrow, I’ll assume you’re sleeping it off and I put the sign back in the window.”

  “I’m no wino, Mr. Cowgirl.”

  “We’ll see.” He turned to his bookkeeping machine and did something to its keyboard. I don’t know what because I never understood it. It was an arithmetic machine but nothing like a Babbage Numerator. It had keys on it somewhat like a typewriting machine. But there was a window above that where numbers and letters appeared by some sort of magic.

  The machine whirred and tinkled and he reached into it and brought out a card, handed it to me. “There you are.”

  I took it and examined it, and again felt dismay.

  It was a piece of pasteboard about three inches wide and seven long, with numerous little holes punched in it and with printing on it that stated that it was a draft on Nogales Commercial and Savings Bank by which Ron’s Grill directed them to pay to Alec L. Graham—No, not one hundred dollars.

  Fifty-one dollars and twenty-seven cents.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “Uh, I had expected twelve-fifty an hour.”

  “That’s what I paid you. Eight hours at minimum wage. You can check the deductions yourself. That’s not my arithmetic; this is an IBM 1990 and it’s instructed by IBM software, Paymaster Plus… and IBM has a standing offer of ten thousand dollars to any employee who can show that this model IBM and this mark of their software fouled up a pay check. Look at it. Gross pay, one hundred dollars. Deductions all listed. Add ’em up. Subtract them. Check your answer against IBM’s answer. But don’t blame me. I didn’t write those laws—and I like them even less than you do. Do you realize that almost every dishwasher that comes in here, whether wetback or citizen, wants me to pay him in cash and forget the deductions? Do you know what the fine is if they catch me doing it just once? What happens if they catch me a second time? Don’t look sour at me—go talk to the government.”

  “I just don’t understand it. It’s new to me, all of it. Can you tell me what these deductions mean? This one that says ‘Admin,’ for example.”

&
nbsp; “That stands for ‘administration fee’ but don’t ask me why you have to pay it, as I am the one who has to do the bookkeeping and I certainly don’t get paid to do it.”

  I tried to check the other deductions against the fine-print explanations. “SocSec” turned out to be “Social Security.” The young lady had explained that to me this morning…but I had told her at the time that, while it was certainly an excellent idea, I felt that I would have to wait until later before subscribing to it; I could not afford it just yet. “MedIns” and “HospIns” and “DentIns” were simple enough but I could not afford them now, either. But what was “PL217?” The fine print simply referred to a date and page in “PubReg.” What about “DepEduc” and “UNESCO?”

  And what in the world was “Income Tax?”

  “I still don’t understand it. It’s all new to me.”

  “Alec, you’re not the only one who doesn’t understand it. But why do you say it is new to you? It has been going on all your life…and your daddy’s and your granddaddy’s, at least.”

  “I’m sorry. What is ‘Income Tax’?”

  He blinked at me. “Are you sure you don’t need to see a shrink?”

  “What is a ‘shrink’?”

  He sighed. “Now I need to see one. Look, Alec. Just take it. Discuss the deductions with the government, not with me. You sound sincere, so maybe you were hit on the head when you got caught in the Mazatlán quake. I just want to go home and take a Miltown. So take it, please.”

  “All right. I guess. But I don’t know anyone who would cash this for me.”

  “No problem. Endorse it back to me and I’ll pay you cash. But keep the stub, as the IRS will insist on seeing all your deduction stubs before paying you back any overpayment.”

  I didn’t understand that, either, but I kept the stub.

  Despite the shock of learning that almost half my pay was gone before I touched it, we were better off each day, as, between us, Margrethe and I had over four hundred dollars a week that did not have to be spent just to stay alive but could be converted into clothing and other necessities. Theoretically she was being paid the same wages as had been the cook she replaced, or twenty-two dollars an hour for twenty-four hours a week, or $528/week.

  In fact she had the same sort of deductions I had, which caused her net pay to come to just under $290/ week. Again theoretically. But $54/week was checked off for lodging—fair enough, I decided, when I found out what rooming houses were charging. More than fair, in fact. Then we were assessed $ 105/week for meals. Brother McCaw at first had put us down for $l40/week for meals and had offered to show by his books that Mrs. Owens, the regular cook, had always paid, by checkoff, $10 each day for her meals…so the two of us should be assessed $l40/week.

  I agreed that that was fair (having seen the prices on the menu at Ron’s Grill)—fair in theory. But I was going to have my heaviest meal of the day where I worked. We compromised on ten a day for Marga, half that for me.

  So Margrethe wound up with a hundred and thirty-one a week out of a gross of five hundred and twenty-eight.

  If she could collect it. Like most churches, the Salvation Army lives from hand to mouth…and sometimes the hand doesn’t quite reach the mouth.

  Nevertheless we were well off and better off each week. At the end of the first week we bought new shoes for Margrethe, first quality and quite smart, for only $279.90, on sale at J. C. Penney’s, marked down from $350.

  Of course she fussed at getting new shoes for her before buying shoes for me. I pointed out that we still had over a hundred dollars toward shoes for me—next week—and would she please hold it for us so that I would not be tempted to spend it. Solemnly she agreed.

  So the following Monday we got shoes for me even cheaper—Army surplus, good, stout comfortable shoes that would outlast anything bought from a regular shoe store. (I would worry about dress shoes for me after I had other matters under control. There is nothing like being barefoot broke to adjust one’s mundane values.) Then we went to the Goodwill retail store and bought a dress and a summer suit for her, and dungaree pants for me.

  Margrethe wanted to get more clothes for me—we still had almost sixty dollars. I objected.

  “Why not, Alec? You need clothes every bit as badly as I do…yet we have spent almost all that you have saved on me. It’s not fair.”

  I answered, “We’ve spent it where it was needed. Next week, if Mrs. Owens comes back on time, you’ll be out of a job and we’ll have to move. I think we should move on. So let’s save what we can for bus fare.”

  “Move on where, dear?”

  “To Kansas. This is a world strange to each of us. Yet it is familiar, too—same language, same geography, some of the same history. Here I’m just a dishwasher, not earning enough to support you. But I have a strong feeling that Kansas—Kansas in this world—will be so much like the Kansas I was born in that I’ll be able to cope better.”

  “Whither thou goest, beloved.”

  The mission was almost a mile from Ron’s Grill; instead of trying to go “home” at my four-to-six break, I usually spent my free time, after eating, at the downtown branch library, getting myself oriented. That, and newspapers that customers sometimes left in the restaurant, constituted my principal means of reeducation.

  In this world Mr. William Jennings Bryan had indeed been President and his benign influence had kept us out of the Great European War. He then had offered his services for a negotiated peace. The Treaty of Philadelphia had more or less restored Europe to what it had been before 1913.

  I didn’t recognize any of the Presidents after Bryan, either from my own world or from Margrethe’s world. Then I became utterly bemused when I first ran across the name of the current President: His Most Christian Majesty, John Edward the Second, Hereditary President of the United States and Canada, Duke of Hyannisport, Comte de Québec, Defender of the Faith, Protector of the Poor, Marshal in Chief of the Peace Force.

  I looked at a picture of him, laying a cornerstone in Alberta. He was tall and broad-shouldered and blandly handsome and was wearing a fancy uniform with enough medals on his chest to ward off pneumonia. I studied his face and asked myself, “Would you buy a used car from this man?”

  But the more I thought about it, the more logical it seemed. Americans, all during their two and a quarter centuries as a separate nation, had missed the royalty they had shucked off. They slobbered over European royalty whenever they got the chance. Their wealthiest citizens married their daughters to royalty whenever possible, even to Georgian princes—a “prince” in Georgia being a farmer with the biggest manure pile in the neighborhood.

  I did not know where they had hired this royal dude. Perhaps they had sent to Estoril for him, or even had him shipped in from the Balkans. As one of my history profs had pointed out, there are always out-of-work royalty around, looking for jobs. When a man is out of work, he can’t be fussy, as I knew too well. Laying cornerstones is probably no more boring than washing dishes. But the hours are longer. I think. I’ve never been a king. I’m not sure that I would take a job in the kinging business if it were offered to me; there are obvious drawbacks and not just the long hours.

  On the other hand—

  Refusing a crown that you know will never be offered to you is sour grapes, by definition. I searched my heart and concluded that I probably would be able to persuade myself that it was a sacrifice I should make for my fellow men. I would pray over it until I was convinced that the Lord wanted me to accept this burden.

  Truly I am not being cynical. I know how frail men can be in persuading themselves that the Lord wants them to do something they wanted to do all along—and I am no better than my brethren in this.

  But the thing that stonkered me was the idea of Canada united with us. Most Americans do not know why Canadians dislike us (I do not), but they do. The idea that Canadians would ever vote to unite with us boggles the mind.

  I went to the library desk and asked for a recent general, his
tory of the United States. I had just started to study it when I noted by the wall clock that it was almost four o’clock…so I had to check it back in and hustle to get back to my scullery on time. I did not have library loan privileges as I could not as yet afford the deposit required of nonresidents.

  More important than the political changes were technical and cultural changes. I realized almost at once that this world was more advanced in physical science and technology than my own. In fact I realized it almost as quickly as I saw a “television” display device.

  I never did understand how televising takes place. I tried to learn about it in the public library and at once bumped into a subject called “electronics.” (Not “electrics” but “electronics.”) So I tried to study up about electronics and encountered the most amazing mathematical gibberish. Not since thermodynamics had caused me to decide that I had a call for the ministry have I seen such confusing and turgid equations. I don’t think Rolla Tech could ever cope with such amphigory—at least not Rolla Tech when I was an undergraduate there.

  But the superior technology of this world was evident in many more things than television. Consider “traffic lights.” No doubt you have seen cities so choked with traffic that it is almost impossible to cross major streets other than through intervention by police officers. Also no doubt you have sometimes been annoyed when a policeman charged with controlling traffic has stopped the flow in your direction to accommodate some very important person from city hall or such.

  Can you imagine a situation in which traffic could be controlled in great volume with no police officers whatever at hand—just an impersonal colored light?

  Believe me, that is exactly what they had in Nogales.

  Here is how it works:

  At every busy intersection you place a minimum of twelve lights, four groups of three, a group facing each of the cardinal directions and so screened that each group can be seen only from its direction. Each group has one red light, one green light, one amber light. These lights are served by electrical power and each shines brightly enough to be seen at a distance of a mile, more or less, even in bright sunlight. These are not arc lights; these are very powerful Edison lamps—this is important because these lights must be turned on and off every few moments and must function without fail hours on end, even days on end, twenty-four hours a day.