The Space Merchants

by Frederik Pohl; C. M. Kornbluth

  And you paid 6 percent interest on the money advanced you.

  It had to be soon. If I didn't get out soon I never would. I could feel my initiative, the thing that made me me, dying, cell by cell, within me. The minute dosages of alkaloid were sapping my will, but most of all it was a hopeless, trapped feeling that things were this way, that they always would be this way, that it wasn't too bad, that you could always go into trance or get really lit on Popsie or maybe try one of the green capsules that floated around from hand to hand at varying quotations; the boys would be glad to wait for the money.

  It had to be soon.

  "Como 'sta, Gustavo?"

  He sat down and gave me his Aztec grin. "Como 'std, amigo Jorgef Sefuma?" He extended a pack of cigarettes.

  They were Greentips. I said automatically: "No thanks. I smoke Starrs; they're tastier." And automatically I lit one, of course. I was becoming the kind of consumer we used to love. Think about smoking, think about Stairs, light a Starr. Light a Starr, think about Popsie, get a squirt. Get a squirt, think about Crunchies, buy a box. Buy a box, think about smoking, light a Starr. And at every step roll out the words of praise that had been dinned into you through your eyes and ears and pores.

  "I smoke Stairs; they're tastier. I drink Popsie; it's zippy. I eat Crunchies; they tang your tongue. I smoke—"

  Gus said to me: "You don't look so happy, Jorge."

  "I don't feel so happy, amigo." This was it. "I'm in a very strange situation." Wait for him, now.

  "I figured there was something wrong. An intelligent fellow like you, a fellow who's been around. Maybe you can use some help?"

  Wonderful; wonderful. "You won't lose by it, Gus. You're taking a chance, but you won't lose by it. Here's the story—"

  "Sst! Not here!" he shushed me. In a lower voice he went on: "It's always a risk. It's always worth it when I see a smart young fellow wise up and begin to do things. Some day I make a mistake, seguro. Then they get me, maybe they brainburn me. What the hell, I can laugh at them. I done my part. Here. I don't have to tell you to be careful where you open this." He shook my hand and I felt a wad of something adhere to my palm. Then he strolled across the dayroom to the hypnoteleset, punched his clock number for a half-hour of trance and slid under, with the rest of the viewers.

  I went to the washroom and punched my combination for a ten-minute occupancy of a booth—bang went another nickel off my pay —and went in. The adhesive wad on my palm opened up into a single sheet of tissue paper which said:

  A Life Is in Your Hands

  This is Contact Sheet One of the World Conservationist Association, popularly known as "The Consies." It has been passed to you by a member of the W.C.A. who judged that you are (a) intelligent; (b) disturbed by the present state of the world; (c) a potentially valuable addition to our ranks. His life is now in your hands. We ask you to read on before you take any action.

  Facts About the W.C.A.

  The Facts: The W.C.A. is a secret organization persecuted by all the governments of the world. It believes that reckless exploitation of natural resources has created needless poverty and needless human misery. It believes that continued exploitation will mean the end of human life on Earth. It believes that this trend may be reversed if the people of the Earth can be educated to the point where they will demand planning of population, reforestation, soil-building, deurbanization, and an end to the wasteful production of gadgets and proprietary foods for which there is no natural demand. This educational program is being carried on by propaganda—like this—demonstrations of force, and sabotage of factories which produce trivia.

  Falsehoods About the W.C.A.

  You have probably heard that "the Consies" are murderers, psychotics, and incompetent people who kill and destroy for irrational ends or out of envy. None of this is true. W.C.A. members are humane, balanced persons, many of them successful in the eyes of the world. Stories to the contrary are zealously encouraged by people who profit from the exploitation which we hope to correct. There are irrational, unbalanced and criminal persons who do commit outrages in the name of conservation, either idealistically or as a shield for looting. The W.C.A. dissociates itself from such people and regards their activities with repugnance.

  What Will You Do Next?

  That is up to you. You can (a) denounce the person who passed you this contact sheet; (b) destroy this sheet and forget about it; (c) go to the person who passed you the sheet and seek further information. We ask you to think before you act.

  I thought—hard. I thought the broadside was (a) the dullest, lousiest piece of copysmithing I had ever seen in my life; (b) a wildly distorted version of reality; (c) a possible escape route for me out of Chlorella and back to Kathy.

  So these were the dreaded Consies! Of all the self-contradictory gibberish—but it had a certain appeal. The ad was crafted—unconsciously, I was sure—the way we'd do a pharmaceutical-house booklet for doctors only. Calm, learned, we're all men of sound judgment and deep scholarship here; we can talk frankly about bedrock issues. Does your patient suffer from hyperspasm, Doctor?

  It was an appeal to reason, and they're always dangerous. You can't trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it.

  Well, there were obviously two ways to do it. I could go to the front office and put the finger on Herrera. I'd get a little publicity maybe; they'd listen to me, maybe; they might believe enough of what I told them to check. I seemed to recall that denouncers of Consies were sometimes brainburned on the sensible grounds that they had been exposed to the virus and that it might work out later, after the first healthy reaction. That wasn't good. Riskier but more heroic: I could bore from within, playing along with the Consies. If they were the world-wide net they claimed to be, there was no reason why I shouldn't wind up in New York, ready and able to blow the lid off them.

  Not for a moment did I have any doubts about being able to get ahead. My fingers itched for a pencil to mark up that contact sheet, sharpening the phrases, cutting out the dullness, inserting see-hear-taste-feel words with real shock. It could use it.

  The door of the booth sprang open; my ten minutes were up. I hastily flushed the contact sheet down the drain and went out into the day room. Herrera was still in the trance before the set.

  I waited some twenty minutes. Finally he shook himself, blinked, and looked around. He saw me, and his face was immobile granite. I smiled and nodded, and he came over. "All right, companero?" he asked quietly.

  "All right," I said. "Any time you say, Gus."

  "It will be soon," he said. "Always after a thing like that I plug in for some trance. I cannot stand the suspense of waiting to find out. Some day I come up out of trance and find the bulls are beating hell out of me, eh?" He began to sleek the edge of his slicer with the pocket hone.

  I looked at it with new understanding. "For the bulls?" I asked.

  His face was shocked. "No," he said. "You have the wrong idea a little, Jorge. For me. So I have no chance to rat."

  His words were noble, even in such a cause. I hated the twisted minds who had done such a thing to a fine consumer like Gus. It was something like murder. He could have played his part in the world, buying and using and making work and profits for his brothers all around the globe, ever increasing his wants and needs, ever increasing everybody's work and profits in the circle of consumption, raising children to be consumers in turn. It hurt to see him perverted into a sterile zealot.

  I resolved to do what I could for him when I blew off the lid. The fault did not lie with him. It was the people who had soured him on the world who should pay. Surely there must be some sort of remedial treatment for Consies like Gus who were only dupes. I would ask—no; it would be better not to ask. People would jump to conclusions. I could hear them now: "I don't say Mitch isn't sound, but it was a pretty farfetched idea." "Yeah. Once a Consie, always a Consie." "Everybody knows that. I don't say Mitch isn't sound, mind you, but—"

  The hell
with Herrera. He could take his chances like everybody else. Anybody who sets out to turn the world upside down has no right to complain if he gets caught in its gears.

  nine

  Days went by like weeks. Herrera talked little to me, until one evening in the dayroom he suddenly asked: "You ever see Gallina?" That was Chicken Little. I said no. "Come on down, then, I can get you in. She's a sight."

  We walked through corridors and leaped for the descending cargo net. I resolutely shut my eyes. You look straight down that thing and you get the high-shy horrors. Forty, Thirty, Twenty, Ten, Zero, Minus Ten—

  "Jump off, Jorge," Herrera said. "Below Minus Ten is the machinery." I jumped.

  Minus Ten was gloomy and sweated water from its concrete walls. The roof was supported by immense beams. A tangle of pipes jammed the corridor where we got off. "Nutrient fluid," Herrera said.

  I asked about the apparently immense weight of the ceiling. "Concrete and lead. It shields cosmic rays. Sometimes a Gallina goes cancer." He spat. "No good to eat for people. You got to burn it all if you don't catch it real fast and—" He swung his glittering slicer in a screaming arc to show me what he meat by "catch."

  He swung open a door. "This is her nest," he said proudly. I looked and gulped.

  It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive.

  Herrera said to me: "All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice." His two-handed blade screamed again. This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak. "Crumbs behind me hook it away and cut it up and put it on the conveyor." There were tunnel openings spotted around the circumference of the dome, with idle conveyor belts visible in them.

  "Doesn't she grow at night?"

  "No. They turn down the nutrient just enough; they let the waste accumulate in her just right. Each night she almost dies. Each morning she comes to life like San 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, Jorge. 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 cross-bar 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 said, with an Aztec grin. With a magician's elaborate gesture he took from his pocket a sort of whistle. It didn't have a mouthpiece. It had an air tank fed by a small hand pump. "I didn't make this," he hastened to assure me. "They call it Gallon's whistle, but who this Gallon is I don't know. Watch— and listen."

  He began working the pump, pointing the whistle purposefully al Chicken Little. I heard no sound, but I shuddered as the rubbery protoplasm bulged in away from the pipe in the hemispherical depression.

  "Don't be scared, companero," he told me. "Just follow." He pumped harder and passed me a flashlight which I stupidly turned on. 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 whose floor was 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 . . . smaller . . .

  We were quite inside, in a hemispherical bubble moving slowly through a hundred-ton lump of gray-brown, rubbery flesh. "Lighton the floor, companero," he said, and I flashed it on the floor. The concrete was marked with lines that looked accidental, but which guided Herrera's feel. We inched forward, and I wondered vividly what would happen if the Gallon whistle sprang a leak . . .

  After about two thousand years of inch-by-inch progress my light flashed on a crescent of metal. Herrera piped the bubble over it, and it became a disk. Still pumping, he stamped three limes on it. It flipped open like a manhole. "You first," he said, and I dived into it, 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 slop working and I won't know the difference until—" He grinned again.

  "George Groby," Herrera introduced me. "This is Ronnie Bowen." He was a short, phlegmatic consumer in a front-office suit. "And this is Arluro 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.

  Bowen took over. "Pleased to have you with us, Groby," he said. "Herrera says you have brains. We don't go in a great deal for red tape, but I want your profile."

  I gave him Groby's profile and he look it down. His mouth tightened with suspicion as I told him the low educational level. "I'll be frank," he said. "You don't talk like an uneducated man."

  "You know how some kids are," I 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 kepi trying lo better myself."

  He accepted it. "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. You could start stories going around and people wouldn't know they were from the Co—from us. Things to make them feel discontented and wake them up."

  "That's a very interesting idea. Give me an example."

  My brain was chugging nicely. "Start a rumor going around the mess hall that they've got a way of making new protein. Say it tastes exactly like roast beef 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. Like: 'What's the difference between roast beef and Chicken Little?' Answer, 'A hundred and fifty years of progress.' Something like that catches on and it'll make them think about the old days favorably."

  It was easy. It 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. "Very ingenious, Groby. We'll try that. Why do you say 'three clays'?"

  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 just seemed about right to me."

  "Well, we'll try it at that. 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. Were they Consie plots? Could the Consies, in their depraved, illogical minds, have decided that space travel was antisurvival, or whatever you call it?

&nbs
p; "Very important," said Bowen. "You need to know all you can about it."

  I probed. "You mean so we can louse it up?"

  "Of course not!" Bowen exploded. "Good God, Groby, think what Venus means to us—an unspoiled planet, all the wealth therace needs, all the fields and food and raw materials. Use your head, man!"

  "Oh," I said. The Gordian knot remained unslashed.

  I curled up with the reels of Biometrika and every once in a while asked for an explanation which I didn't need. Biometrika was one of the everyday tools of a copysmith. It told the story of population changes, IQchanges, 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 Consies tut-tutted 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. There the news was bad—all bad. There was public apathy; there was sullen resistance to the shortages that the Venus rocket construction entailed; there was defeatism about planting a Venus colony at all; there was doubt that the colony could do anything if it ever did get planted.

  That damned 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. She never looked lovelier.