The Space Merchants

by Frederik Pohl; C. M. Kornbluth

  One of his men told me dryly: "It's a matter of population, Courtenay. Have you ever heard of Albert Fish?"

  "No."

  "He was a phenomenon of the dawn; the earliest days of the Age of Reason—1920 or thereabouts. Albert Fish stuck needles into himself, burned himself with alcohol-saturated wads of cotton, flogged himself—he liked it. He would have liked brainburning, I'll wager. It would have been twenty delightful subjective years of being flayed, suffocated, choked, and nauseated. It would have been Albert Fish's dream come true.

  "There was only one Albert Fish in his day. Pressures and strains of a very high order are required to produce an Albert Fish. It would be unreasonable to expect more than one to be produced out of the small and scattered population of the period—less than three billion. With our vastly larger current population there are many Albert Fishes wandering around. You only have to find them. Our matchless research facilities here at Taunton have unearthed several. They turn up at hospitals, sometimes in very grotesque shape. They are eager would-be killers; they want the delights of punishment. A man like you says we can't hire killers because they'd be afraid of being punished. But Mr. Taunton, now, says we can hire a killer if we find one who likes being punished. And the best part of it all is, the ones who like to get hurt are the ones who just love hurting others. Hurting, for instance—you."

  It had a bloodcurdlingly truthful ring to it. Our generation must be inured to wonder. The chronicles of fantastic heroism and abysmal wickedness that crowd our newscasts—I knew from research that they didn't have such courage or such depravity in the old days. The fact had puzzled me. We have such people as Malone, who quietly dug his tunnels for six years and then one Sunday morning blew up Red Bank, New Jersey. A Brink's traffic cop had got him sore. Conversely we have James Revere, hero of the White Cloud disaster. A shy, frail tourist-class steward, he had rescued on his own shoulders seventy-six passengers, returning again and again into the flames with his flesh charring from his bones, blind, groping his way along red-hot bulkheads with his hand-stumps. It was true. When there are enough people, you will always find somebody who can and will be any given thing. Taunton was an artist. He had grasped this broad and simple truth and used it. It meant that I was as good as dead. Kathy, I thought. My Kathy.

  Taunton's thick voice broke in on my reflections. "You grasp the pattern?" he asked. "The big picture? The theme, the message, what I might call the essential juice of it is that I'm going to repossess Venus. Now, beginning at the beginning, tell us about the Schocken Agency. All its little secrets, its little weaknesses, its ins and outs, its corruptible employees, its appropriations, its Washington contacts—you know."

  I was a dead man with nothing to lose—I thought. "No," I said.

  One of Taunton's men said abruptly: "He's ready for Hedy," got up and went out.

  Taunton said: "You've studied prehistory, Courtenay. You may recognize the name of Gilles de Rais." I did, and felt a tightness over my scalp, like a steel helmet slowly shrinking. "All the generations of prehistory added up to an estimated five billion population," Taunton rambled. "All the generations of prehistory produced only one Gilles de Rais, whom you perhaps think of as Bluebeard. Nowadays we have our pick of several. Out of all the people I might have picked to handle special work like that for me I picked Hedy. You'll see why."

  The door opened and a pale, adenoidal girl with lank blond hair was standing in it. She had a silly grin on her face; her lips were thin and bloodless. In one hand she held a six-inch needle set in a plastic handle.

  I looked into her eyes and began screaming. I couldn't stop screaming until they led her away and closed the door again. I was broken.

  "Taunton," I whispered at last. "Please . . ."

  He leaned back comfortably and said: "Give."

  I tried, but I couldn't. My voice wouldn't work right and neither would my memory. I couldn't remember whether my firm was Fowler Schocken or Schocken Fowler, for instance.

  Taunton got up at last and said: "We'll put you on ice for a while, Courtenay, so you can pull yourself together. I need a drink myself." He shuddered involuntarily, and then beamed again. "Sleep on it," he said, and left unsteadily.

  Two of his men carted me from the brain room, down a corridor and into a bare cubbyhole with a very solid door. It seemed to be night in executives' country. Nothing was going on in any of theoffices we passed, lights were low, and a single corridor guard was yawning at his desk.

  I asked unsteadily: "Will you take the cocoon off me? I'm going to be a filthy mess if I don't get out of it."

  "No orders about it," one of them said briefly, and they slammed the solid door and locked it. I flopped around the small floor trying to find something sharp enough to break the film and give me an even chance of bursting the plastic, but there was nothing. After incredible contortions and a dozen jarring falls I found that I could never get to my feet. The doorknob had offered a very, very faint ghost of hope, but it might as well have been a million miles away.

  Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith. Mitchell Courtenay, key man of the Venus section. Mitchell Courtenay, destroyer-to-be of the Consies. Mitchell Courtenay flopping on the floor of a cell in the offices of the sleaziest, crookedest agency that ever blemished the profession, without any prospect except betrayal and—with luck—a merciful death. Kathy at least would never know. She would think I had died like a fool on the glacier, meddling with the power pack when I had no business to ...

  The lock of the door rattled and raided. They were coming for me.

  But when the door opened I saw from the floor not a forest of trousered legs but a single pair of matchstick ankles, nylon-clad.

  "I love you," said the strange, dead voice of a woman. "They said I would have to wait, but I couldn't wait." It was Hedy. She had her needle.

  I tried to cry for help, but my chest seemed paralyzed as she knelt beside me with shining eyes. The temperature of the room seemed to drop ten degrees. She clamped her bloodless lips on mine; they were like heated iron. And then I thought the left side of my face and head were being torn off. It lasted for seconds and blended into a red haze and unconsciousness.

  "Wake up," the dead voice was saying. "I want you. Wake up." Lightning smashed at my right elbow, and I cried out and jerked my arm. My arm moved—

  I moved.

  The bloodless lips descended on mine again, and again her needle ran into my jaw, probing exactly for the great lump of the trigeminal facial nerve, and finding it. I fought the red haze that was trying to swallow me up. My arm had moved. She had perforated the membrane of the cocoon, and it could be burst. The needle searched again and somehow the pain was channeled to my right arm. In one convulsive jerk it was free.

  I think I took the back of her neck in my hand and squeezed. I am not sure. I do not want to be sure. But after five minutes she and her love did not matter. I ripped and stripped the plastic from me and got to my feet an inch at a time, moaning from stiffness.

  The corridor guard could not matter any more. If he had not come at my cries he would never come. I walked from the room and saw the guard apparently sleeping face-down on his desk. As I stood over him I saw a very little blood and serum puddled and coagulating in the small valley between the two cords of his shrunken old neck. One thrust transfixing the medulla had been enough for Hedy. I could testify that her knowledge of the nervous system's topography was complete.

  The guard wore a gun that I hesitated over for a moment and then rejected. In his pockets were a few dollars that would be more useful. I hurried on to the ladders. His desk clock said 0605.

  I knew already about climbing up stairs. I learned then about climbing down stairs. If your heart's in good shape there's little to choose between them. It took me an estimated thirty minutes in my condition to get down the ladders of executives' country and onto the populated stairs below. The first sullen stirrings of the work-bound consumers were well under way. I passed half a dozen bitter fist fights and one cutting
scrape. The Taunton Building nightdwellers were a low, dirty lot who would never have been allowed stair-space in the Schocken Tower, but it was all to the good. I attracted no attention whatsoever in my filthy clothes and sporting a fresh stab wound in my face. Some of the bachelor girls even whistled, but that was all. The kind of people you have in the ancient, run-down slum buildings like R.C.A. and Empire State would have pulled me down if I'd taken their eye.

  My timing was good. I left the building lobby in the very core of a cheek-by-jowl mob boiling out the door to the shuttle which would take them to their wretched jobs. I thought I saw hardguys in plain clothes searching the mob from second-floor windows, but I didn't look up and I got into the shuttle station.

  At the change booth I broke all my bills and went in the washroom. "Split a shower, bud?" somebody asked me. I wanted a shower terribly, and by myself, but I didn't dare betray any white-collar traits. She and I pooled our coins for a five-minute salt, thirty-second fresh, with soap. I found that I was scrubbing my right hand over and over again. I found that when the cold water hit the left side of my face the pain was dizzying.

  After the shower I wedged myself into the shuttle and spent two hours zigzagging under the city. My last stop was Times Square, in the heart of the market district. It was mostly a freight station. While cursing consumers hurled crates of protein ticketed for various parts of town onto the belts I tried to phone Kathy again. Again there was nobody home.

  I got Hester at the Schocken Tower. I told her: "I want you to raise every cent you can, borrow, clean our your savings, buy a Starrzelius apparel outfit for me, and meet me with it soonest at the place where your mother broke her leg two years ago. The exact place, remember?"

  "Mitch," she said. "Yes, I remember. But my contract—"

  "Don't make me beg you, Hester," I pleaded. "Trust me. I'll see you through. For God's sake, hurry. And—if you get here and I'm in the hands of the guards, don't recognize me. Now, into action."

  I hung up and slumped in the phone booth until the next party hammered indignantly on the door. I walked slowly around the station, had Coffiest and a cheese sandwich, and rented a morning paper at the newsstand. The story about me was a bored little item on page three out of a possible four: SOUGHT FOR CB & FEMICIDE. It said George Groby had failed to return from a pass to his job with Chlorella and had used his free time to burglarize executives' country in the Taunton Building. He had killed a secretary who stumbled on him and made his escape.

  Hester met me half an hour later by the loading chute from which a crate had once whizzed to break her mother's leg. She looked frantically worried; technically she was as guilty of contract breach as "George Groby."

  I took the garment box from her and asked: "Do you have fifteen hundred dollars left?"

  "Just about. My mother was frantic—"

  "Get us reservations on the next Moon ship; today if possible. Meet me back here; I'll be wearing the new clothes."

  "Us? The Moon?" she squeaked.

  "Yes; us. I've got to get off the Earth before I'm killed. And this time it'll be for keeps."

  twelve

  My little Hester squared her shoulders and proceeded to work miracles.

  In ten hours we were grunting side by side under the take-off acceleration of the Moon ship David Ricardo. She had coldbloodedly passed herself off as a Schocken employee on special detail to the Moon and me as Groby, a sales analyst 6. Naturally the dragnet for Groby, expediter 9, had not included the Astoria spaceport. Sewage workers on the lam from CB and femicide wouldn't have the money to hop a rocket, of course.

  We rated a compartment and the max ration. The David Ricardo was so constructed that most passengers rated compartments and max rations. It wasn't a trip for the idly curious or the submerged fifteen sixteenths of the population. The Moon was strictly business —mining business—and some sight-seeing. Our fellow-passengers, what we saw of them at the ramp, were preoccupied engineers, a few laborers in the minute steerage, and silly-rich men and women who wanted to say they'd been there.

  After take-off, Hester was hysterically gay for a while, and then snapped. She sobbed on my shoulder, frightened at the enormity of what she'd done. She'd been brought up in a deeply moral, sales-fearing home, and you couldn't expect her to commit the high commercial crime of breaking a labor contract without there being a terrific emotional lashback.

  She wailed: "Mr. Courtenay—Mitch—if only I could be sure it was all right! I know you've always been good to me and I know you wouldn't do anything wrong, but I'm so scared and miserable!"

  I dried her eyes and made a decision.

  "I'll tell you what it's all about, Hester," I said. "You be the judge. Taunton has discovered something very terrible. He's found out that there are people who are not deterred by the threat of cerebrin as the punishment for an unprovoked commercial murder. He thinks Mr. Schocken grabbed the Venus project from him unethically, and he'll stop at nothing to get it back. He's tried twice at least to kill me. I thought Mr. Runstead was one of his agents, assigned to bitch up Schocken's handling of the Venus account. Now, I don't know. Mr. Runstead clubbed me when I went after him at the South Pole, spirited me away to a labor freighter under a faked identity, and left a substitute body for mine. And," I said cautiously, "there are Consies in it."

  She uttered a small shriek.

  "I don't know how they dovetail," I said. "But I was in a Consie cell—"

  "Mister Courtenay!"

  "Strictly as a blind," I hastily explained. "I was stuck in Chlorella Costa Rica and the only way north seemed to be through the Consie network. They had a cell in the factory, I joined up, turned on the talent, and got transferred to New York. The rest you know."

  She paused for a long time and asked: "Are you sure it's all right?"

  Wishing desperately that it were, I firmly said: "Of course, Hester."

  She gave me a game smile. "I'll get our rations," she said, unsnapping herself. "You'd better stay here."

  Forty hours out I said to Hester: "The blasted blackmarketing steward is going too far! Look at this!" I held up my bulb of water and my ration box. The seal had clearly been tampered with on both containers, and visibly there was water missing. "Max rations," I went on oratorically, "are supposed to be tamperproof, but this is plain burglary. How do yours look?"

  "Same thing," she said listlessly. "You can't do anything about it. Let's not eat just yet, Mr. Courtenay." She made a marked effort to be vivacious. "Tennis, anyone?"

  "All right," I grumbled, and set up the field, borrowed from the ship recreation closet. She was better at tennis than I, but I took her in straight sets. Her co-ordination was 'way off. She'd stab for a right forecourt deep cross-court return and like as not miss the button entirely—if she didn't send the ball into the net by failing to surge power with her left hand on the rheostat. A half hour of the exercise seemed to do both of us good. She cheered up and ate her rations and I had mine.

  The tennis match before meals became a tradition. There was little enough to do in our cramped quarters. Every eight hours she would go for our tagged rations, I would grumble about the shortage and tampering, we'd have some tennis, and then eat. The rest of the time passed somehow, watching the ads come and go—all Schocken—on the walls. Well enough, I thought. Schocken's on the Moon and I won't be kept from him there. Things weren't so crowded. Moon to Schocken to Kathy—a twinge of feeling. I could have asked casually what Hester had heard about Jack O'Shea, but I didn't. I was afraid I might not like what she might have heard about the midget hero and his triumphal procession from city to city and woman to woman.

  A drab service announcement at last interrupted the parade of ads: COOKS TO THE GALLEY (the David Ricardo was a British ship) FOR FINAL LIQUID FEEDING. THIS IS H-8 AND NO FURTHER SOLID OR LIQUID FOOD SHOULD BE CONSUMED UNTIL TOUCHDOWN.

  Hester smiled and went out with our tray.

  As usual it was ten minutes before she returned. We were getting some minor course corre
ctions, enough to unsettle my stomach. I burped miserably while waiting.

  She came back with two Coffiest bulbs and reproached me gaily: "Why, Mitch, you haven't set up the tennis court!"

  "Didn't feel like it. Let's eat." I put out my hand for my bulb. She didn't give it to me. "Well?"

  "Just one set?" she coaxed.

  "Hell, girl, you heard me," I snapped. "Let's not forget who's who around here." I wouldn't have said it if it hadn't been Coffiest, I suppose. The Starrzelius-red bulb kicked things off in me—nagging ghosts of withdrawal symptoms. I'd been off the stuff for a long time, but you never kick Coffiest.

  She stiffened. "I'm sorry, Mr. Courtenay." And then she clutched violently at her middle, her face distorted. Astounded, I grabbed her. She was deathly pale and limp; she moaned with pain.

  "Hester," I said, "what is it? What—?"

  "Don't drink it," she croaked, her hand kneading her belly. "TheCoffiest. Poison. Your rations. I've been tasting them." Her nails tore first the nylon of her midriff and then her skin as she clawed at the pain.

  "Send a doctor!" I was yelling into the compartment mike. "Woman's dying here!"

  The chief steward's voice answered me: "Right away, sir. Ship's doctor'll be there right away."

  Hester's contorted face began to relax, frightening me terribly. She said softly: "Bitch Kathy. Running out on you. Mitch and bitch. Funny. You're too good for her. She wouldn't have. My life. Yours." There was another spasm across her face. "Wife versus secretary. A laugh. It always was a laugh. You never even kissed me—"

  I didn't get a chance to. She was gone, and the ship's doctor was hauling himself briskly in along the handline. His face fell. We towed her to the lazarette and he put her in a cardiac-node exciter that started her heart going again. Her chest began to rise and fall and she opened her eyes.

  "Where—are—you?" asked the doctor, loudly and clearly. She moved her head slightly, and a pulse of hope shot through me.

  "Response?" I whispered to the doctor.