One morning she told her husband so: 'Bill, I love the way Honest Jack Tighe has fixed everything up for us! Remember how it was, Bill?
Remember? And how, why--well, look. Don't you notice anything?'
'Hm?' inquired Cossett.
'Your breakfast,' said Essie Cossett. 'Don't you like it?'
Bill Cossett looked palely at his breakfast. Orange juice, toast, coffee.
He sighed deeply.
'Bill! I asked you if you liked it!'
'I'm eating it, aren't I? When did I ever have anything different?'
'Never, honey,' his wife said gently. 'You always have the same thing.
But don't you notice that the toast isn't burned?'
Cossett chewed a piece of it without emotion. 'That's nice,' he said.
'And the coffee is fit to drink. And so's the orange juice.'
Cossett said irritably: 'Essie, it's great orange juice. It will be remembered.'
Mrs. Cossett flared: 'Bill, I can't say a thing to you in the morning without your flying completely off the--'
'Essie,' shouted her husband, 'I had a bad night!' He glared at her, a good-looking man, still young, fine father and good provider, but at the end of his rope. 'I didn't sleep! Not a wink! I was awake all night, tossing and turning, tossing and turning, worrying, worrying, worrying. I'm sorry!' he cried, daring her to accept the apology.
'But I only-'
'Essie!'
Mrs. Cossett was wounded to the quick. Her lip quivered. Her eyes moistened. Her husband, seeing the signs, accepted defeat.
He sank back against his chair as she said meekly: 'I only wanted to point out that it isn't ruined. But you're so touchy, Bill, that--I mean,' she said hurriedly, 'do you remember what it was like in the old days, before Jack Tighe freed us all? When every month there was a new pop-up toaster, and sometimes you had to dial each slice separately for Perfect Custom Yumminess, and sometimes a red Magic Ruby Reddy-Eye did it for you?
When the coffee maker you bought in June used coarse percolator coffee grind and the one you got to replace it in September took drip?
'And now,' she cried radiantly, her momentary anger forgotten, 'and now I've had the same appliances for more than six months! I've had time to learn to use them! I can keep them until they wear out! And when they're gone, if I want I can get the exact same model again! Oh, Bill,' she wept, quite overcome, 'how did we get along in the old days, before Jack Tighe?'
Her husband pushed his chair back from the table and sat regarding her without a word for a long moment.
Then he got up, reached for his hat, groaning, 'Ah, who can eat?' and rushed out of the house to his place of business.
The sign over his store read:
A. COSSETT & CO.
Authorized Buick Dealer
He sobbed all the way down to the shop.
• • • •
You mustn't feel too sorry for old Bill Cossett; there were a lot like him those days. But it was pretty sad, no doubt of it.
When he got to the shop, he wanted to sob some more, but how could he, in front of the staff? One little break from him and all of them would have been wailing.
As it was, his head salesman, Harry Bull, was in a dither. He was lighting one cigarette after another, taking a single abstracted puff and placing each of them neatly, side by side like spokes, along the rim of his big glass ashtray. He didn't know he was doing it, of course. His eyes were fixed emptily on the ashtray, all right, but what his glazed vision beheld were the smouldering ashes of hellfire.
He looked up when his boss came in.
'Chief,' he burst out tragically, 'they've come in! The new models! I had the Springfield office on the phone a dozen times already this morning, I swear. But it's the same answer every time.'
Cossett took a deep breath. This was a time for manhood. He stuck his chin out proudly and-said, his voice perfectly level: 'They won't cancel, then.'
'They say they can't,' said Harry Bull, and stared with a corpse's eyes at the crowded showroom. 'They say the caverns are raising all the quotas.
Sixteen more cars,' he whispered dully, 'and that's just the Roadmasters, Chief. I didn't tell you that part. Tomorrow we get the Specials and the Estate Wagons, and--and-
'Mr. Cossett,' he wept, 'the Estate Wagons are eleven inches longer this month! I can't stand it!' he cried wildly. 'We got eighteen hundred and forty-one cars piled up already! The floor's full. The shop's full. The top two floors are full. The lot's full. We hauled all the trade-ins off to the junkyard yesterday and, even so, now we got them double-parked on both sides of the street for six blocks in every direction! You know, Chief, I couldn't even get to the place this morning? I had to park at the corner of Grand and Sterling and walk the rest of the way, because I couldn't get through!'
For the first time, Cossett's expression changed. 'Grand and Sterling?' he repeated thoughtfully. 'Yeah? I'll have to try coming that way tomorrow.' Then he laughed, a bitter laugh. 'One thing, Harry. Be glad we're handling Buicks and not, you know, one of the Low-Priced Three. I came by Culex Motors yesterday, and--
'By Godfrey,' he shouted suddenly, 'I'm going to go down and talk to Manny Culex. Why not? It isn't just our problem, Harry--it's everybody's.
And may be the whole industry ought to get together, just for once. We never did; nobody would start it. But things are getting to a point where somebody's got to lead the way. Well, it's going to be me! There just isn't any sense letting the caverns turn out all these new cars after Jack Tighe has told the whole blasted country that they don't have to buy them any more. Washington will do something. They'll have to!'
But all the way over to Manny Culex's, past the carton-barricaded appliance stores, widely skirting the shambles that surrounded the five and ten, rolling up the windows as he threaded his way past the burst spoiled food cans at the supermarket, Cossett couldn't put one question out of his mind:
Suppose they couldn't?
• • • •
2
Now you mustn't think Jack Tighe wasn't right on top of this situation. He knew about it. Oh, yes! Because it wasn't just Archibald Cossett and Manny Culex--it was every car dealer--and it wasn't just the car dealers, but every merchant in Rantoul who sold goods to the public; and it wasn't just Rantoul, but all of Illinois, all of the Middle West, all the country--and, yes, when you come right down to it, all of the world. (I mean all the inhabited world. Naturally there was no problem in, say, Lower Westchester.) Things were piling up.
It was a matter of automation and salesmanship. In the big war, it had seemed like a good idea to automate the factories. Maybe it was--
production was what counted then, all kinds of production. They certainly got the production, sure enough. Then, when the war was over, there was a method for handling the production--a method named advertising. But what did that mean, when you came to think it over? It meant that people had to be hounded into buying what they didn't really want, with money they hadn't yet earned. It meant pressure. It meant hypertension and social embarrassment and competition and confusion.
Well, Jack Tighe took care of that part, him and his famous Bill of Wrongs.
Everybody agreed that things had been intolerable before--before, that is, Tighe and his heroic band had marched on the Pentagon and set us all free. The trouble was that now advertising had been abolished and nobody felt he had to buy the new models as they came out of the big automated plants in the underground caverns ... and what were we going to do with the products?
Jack Tighe felt that problem as keenly as any vacuum-cleaner salesman hard-selling a suburban neighbourhood from door to door. He knew what the people wanted. And if he hadn't, why, he would have found it pretty quickly, because the people, in their delegations and petitions, were taking every conceivable opportunity to let him know.
For instance, there was the Midwest Motor Car Association's delegation, led by Bill Cossett, his very own self. Cossett hadn't wanted to be chairman, but he'd bee
n the one to suggest it, and that usually carries a fixed penalty: 'You thought it up? Okay. You make it go.'
Jack Tighe received them in person. He listened with great courtesy and concern to their prepared speech; and that was unusual, because Tighe wasn't the relaxed old man who'd fished the Delaware south of Pung's Corners for so many happy years. No, he was an irritable President now, and delegations were nothing in his life; he faced fifty of them a day.
And they all wanted the same thing. Just let us push our product a little, please? Naturally, no other commodity should be privileged to violate the Bill of Wrongs--nobody wants the Age of Advertising back!--but, Mr.
President, the jewellery findings game (or shoes, or drugs, or business machines, or frozen food, and so forth) is historically, intrinsically dynamically and pre-eminently different, because...
And, you'd be surprised, they all thought up reasons to follow the 'because'. Some of the reasons were corkers.
But Jack Tighe didn't let them get quite as far as the reasons. He listened about a sentence and a half past the 'nobody wants the Age of Advertising back' movement and into the broad largo that began the threnody of their unique troubles. And then he said, with a sudden impulse:
'You there! The young fellow!'
'Cossett! Good old Bill Cossett!' cried a dozen eager voices, as they pushed him forward.
'I'm impressed,' said Jack Tighe thoughtfully, seizing him by the hand.
He had had an idea, and maybe it was time to act on it. 'I like your looks, Gossop,' he said, 'and I'm going to do something for you.'
"You mean you're going to let us ad--' began the eager voices.
'Why, no,' said Jack Tighe, surprised. 'Of course not. But I'm setting up a Committee of Activity to deal with this situation, gentlemen. Yes, indeed. You mustn't think we've been idle here in Washington. And I'm going to put Artie Gossop--I mean Hassop--here on the Committee.
There!' he said kindly, but proudly too. 'And now,' he added, leaving through his private door, 'good day to you all.'
It was a signal honour, Bill Cossett thought, or anyway all the eager voices assured him that it was.
But forty-eight hours later, he wasn't so sure.
The rest of the delegation had gone home. Why wouldn't they? They had accomplished what they set out to do. The problem was being taken care of.
But as for good old Bill Cossett, why, at that moment he was doing the actual taking care.
And he didn't like it. It turned out that this Committee of Activity was not merely to study and make recommendations. Oh, no. That wasn't Jack Tighe's way. The Committee was to do something. And for that reason, Cossett found himself with a rifle in his hand, in an armoured half track. He was part of a task force of heavy assault troops, staring down the inclined ramp that led to the cavern factory under Farmingdale, Long Island.
Let me tell you about Farmingdale.
National Electro-Mech had its home office there--in the good old days, you know. Came the Cold War. The Board of Directors of National Electro-Mechanical Appliances, Inc., tool a look at its balance sheet, smiled, thought of taxes, wept, and determined to plough a considerable part of its earnings into a new plant.
It was to be not merely a new plant, but a fine plant--wasn't the government paying for it anyhow, in a way? I mean what didn't come off taxes as capital expansion came back as pay for proximity-fuse contracts.
So they dug themselves a great big hole--a regular underground Levittown of the machine, so to speak--acres and acres of floor surface, and all of it hidden from the light of day. Okay, chuckled the Board of Directors, rubbing its hands, let them shoot their ICBMs! Yah, Yah! Can't touch me!
That was during the Cold War. Well, then the Cold War hotted up, you know. The missiles flew. The Board got its orders from Washington, hurry-up orders: automate, mechanize, make it faster, boost its size. They took a deep breath and gamely sent the engineers back to the drawing boards.
The orders were to double production and make it independent of the outside world. The engineers whispered among themselves--'Are they kidding?' they asked--but they went to work, and as fast as the designs were approved, the construction machines went back to work to make them real.
The digging machines chugged down into the factory bays again, expanding them, making concealed tunnels; and this time they were followed by concrete-and-armour-plate layers, booby-trap setters, camoufleurs, counterattack planners.
They hid that plant, friend. They concealed it from infrared, ultra-violet and visual-wave spotting, from radar and sonic echo beams, from everything but the nose of a seeing-eye dog, and maybe even from that They armoured it.
They fixed it so you couldn't get near it, at least not alive. They armed it--with homing missiles, batteries of rapid-fire weapons, everything they could think of--and they had a lot of people thinking--that would discourage intruders.
They automated it; not only would it make its products, but it would keep on making them as long as the raw materials held out--yes, and change the designs, too, because it is a basic part of industrial technology that planned obsolescence should be built into every unit.
Yes, that was the idea. Without a man anywhere in sight, the cavern factories could build their products, change their designs, retool and bring out new ones.
More than that. They set sales quotas, by direct electronic hook-up with the master computer of the Bureau of the Census in Washington; they wrote on electric typewriters and printed on static-electricity presses all the needed leaflets, brochures, instruction manuals and diagrams.
Tricky problems were met with clever answers. For instance, argued one R&D V.P., 'Won't the factory have to have at least a couple of pretty girls to use as models for the leaflets illustrations?'
'Nah,' said an engineer bluntly. 'Look, Boss, here's what we'll do.'
He drew a quick and complicated schematic.
'I see,' said the V.P., his eyes glazing.
Truthfully, he didn't understand at all, but then they went ahead and built it and he saw that the thing worked.
A memory-bank selector, informed of the need for a picture of a pretty girl operating, say, an electric egg-cooker, drew upon taped files of action studies of models for the girl they wanted in the pose the computers decreed. Another tape supplied appropriate clothing--anything from a parka to a Bikini (mostly it was Bikinis)--and an electronic patcher dubbed it in. A third file, filmed on the spot, produced the egg-cooker itself, dubbed in as large as life and twice as pretty.
It worked.
And then there was the problem of writing the manuals.
It wasn't so much the composition of the how-to-do directions. There was nothing hard about that; after all, the whole idea was that the consumer should be told how to operate the thing without his having to know what was under the chromium-plated shell. But--well, what about trade-marked names? Some brain had to coin the likes of Kleen-Heet Auto-Tyme Hardboyler, or Shel-Krak Puncherator.
They tried programming the computer to think that sort of thing up.
The computer gulped, clucked and spewed out an assortment. The engineers looked at each other and scratched their heads. Kleen-Krak Boylerator? Eg-Sta-Tik Clocker?
Discouraged, they trailed with their reports to the V.P.
'Boss,' they said, 'maybe we better put this thing back on the drawing boards. These names the machine came up with don't make sense.'
This time it was the V.P. who said bluntly: 'Nah, don't worry. Didn't you ever hear of Hotpoint Refrigerators?'
So merrily they went on, and the cavern factories were automated.
Then, when the frantically dreaming engineers had them complete, they added one more touch.
Electric percolators need steel, chromium, copper, plastics for the extension cord, plastics for the handle, a different sort of plastic yet for the ornamental knobs and embellishments. So they supplied them--not by stockpiles, no, for stockpiles can be used up, but by telling the vast computers that ran the
plant where its raw materials might be found.
They supplied National Electro-Mech with a robot-armed computer that could sniff out its raw materials and direct diggers to the lodes. They added a fusion powerplant that would run as long as its supply of fuel held out (and its fuel was hydrogen, from the water of Long Island Sound or, if that went dry, from the waters bound in the clay, the silicate sand, the very bedrock underneath).
Then they pushed the little red switch to 'on', stepped back--and ducked.
Percolators came pouring out by the thousands that first day.
Then the machines began to speed up. Percolators flooded out by the tens of thousands. And then the machines settled down to full production.
'Ahem,' coughed one of the engineers. 'Say,' he said. 'I wonder. That little red button. Suppose we wanted to turn it off. Could we?'
Top management frowned. 'Don't you know there's a war on?' they asked. 'Production--that's what counts. Then, when the war is won,' we can worry about turning the fool thing off. Right now, we can't take the risk that enemy agents might penetrate our defences and cripple our war effort, so the button only works one way.'
Then the war was won. And, yes, they could worry.
• • • •
3
On the ramp outside Farmingdale, Major Commaigne rattled into his microphone: 'Korowicz? Back me up and watch for missiles. You're air cover for the whole detachment. Bonfils, I want you on the road. Draw fire when the trucks come out, and then retire, Goodpastor, you cover the demolition crews. Gershenow, you're our reserve. Watch it now. They'll be coming out in a minute.' He clicked off his microphone switch and stared, sweating, at the ramp.
Bill Cossett shifted nervously in his seat and looked at the rifle in his hand. It was a stripped-down rough-duty model, made to Jack Tighe's personal specifications, and the only thing you had to remember was that when you pulled the trigger, it would go off. But rifles weren't much a part of Cossett's life. He caught himself thinking wretchedly how nice it would be to be back in Rantoul. Then he remembered those crowded blocks of unsold Buicks.
The Frederick Pohl Omnibus (1966) SSC Page 31