Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  “A man from the Culture section—a Mr. Hart, I believe—mentioned your name,” the Dobun said hopefully, feeling perhaps that Mr. Jason might be more generous knowing him to be sent by a friend.

  “Yes,” Mr. Jason said absentmindedly. “I’ll send him a check Monday.”

  Wilson, of Comparative Anthropology, dropped in on Charlie Howe of Administration.

  “Coffee time,” Wilson said.

  Charlie Howe looked up. “Uh? . . . Oh . . . hi. Sit.”

  Wilson sat. “I said, ‘Coffee time’.”

  “I heard you. Minute.”

  “. . . Whatcha doin’ ?”

  “Check slip. Analysis.” He went back to his writing.

  “So? What on?”

  “Kwiggi

  “Never heard of ’em.”

  “Dobun.”

  “Dobun, eh. What’s up?” Wilson asked sharply.

  “Shut up, damn it, till I finish.”

  Wilson broke out a cigarette, listened to the pen scratch on the paper, lit the cigarette.

  “There.” Charlie Howe straightened. “Have to write it out, first,” he explained. “Can’t think, talking.” He bent across the desk and flipped the recorder switch up. He took the corded mike and read off the information into it.

  “Central Lab. Organic. Check station. Preview. Re: Kwiggi. Life form: Dobun. Contained in a trading package deal with Jason and Son.

  “Two specimens: male and female.

  “Observational information. Size: about that of a small cat. Color: green. Docile. Biped. Pronged tail. Silken hair . . . Preliminary statistics, from Dobun report (attached): Gestation period: eight days. Litter: four to six; sometimes, two. Average life: three years.

  “Request routine embargo check.

  “Probable commercial value: as personal pets.”

  He clicked off the recorder.

  “Eight days?” Wilson asked.

  “Says so. Here.” Charlie Howe hammered the pen point at a word on a typed buck slip. “No typo, at any rate. I rechecked.”

  “Umph,” Wilson grunted. “Prolific.”

  Charlie Howe stood up. “You said coffee?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The two men left the office; as they passed through the door, Wilson said, “All right, give.”

  Charlie Howe shrugged expressively.

  They walked down the path that lead across and down the landscaped hillside toward the modernistic cafeteria. There were a hundred buildings, all told, all small and clean, unobtrusively studding the government preserve. There was a complex network of gravel paths.

  “There a report out?”

  Charlie Howe snorted. “Routine one. State’s probably got it for approval.”

  “Read it yet?” Wilson asked.

  “Sure.”

  Wilson listened to the gravel crunch under his feet for a moment. Then: “So. I’m assigned to Dobu. So. I walk into your office, and I find you’re finishing a check request for commercial trading on it. And State’s got a report.” He brought his foot down heavily and ground off leather against gravel. “So! Nobody asked us. Nobody told us. Do they think we’re mind readers, over there in State? If I hadn’t come in on you when I did, Anthropology would never even’ve heard about it!”

  “That’s life,” Charlie Howe admitted.

  “How does State expect us to get a team down there when they won’t even co-operate on simple things like this?”

  “Doubt if State cares one way or the other,” Charlie Howe said with a shrug. He opened the door to the cafeteria, and then he followed Wilson inside.

  The cafeteria was quiet. It had all of the modern conveniences. It shined of chrome.

  When they were sequestered in a far booth with their coffee, Wilson said, “Now, damn it, give me the dope on this trading deal.”

  Charlie Howe leveled his spoon with sugar, studied it critically, he turned the spoon sidewise, and the contents spilled into the coffee. “Oh. That. Some jazbo from their government . . .”

  “Smith? Little shrimp? Speaks perfect English?”

  “That’s the duck. Well: He talked State into okaying a non-war material trading package with Jason and Son.”

  “What’d he offer?”

  “Mostly artwork. Handicraft. Peculiar stuff. Some minerals, I think. I’ll bet he gets a lot of junk back, too.”

  “Well, then, what’s the tale on these kwiggi? That’s the thing I want to know.”

  “Them? Dobun pets, I guess. Funny little devils. I saw the pair. This geezer—Smith? Yeah, Smith—had them with his bags. Didn’t seem anxious to run ’em in on the deal. But you know old man Jason. He got his nose in the wind and started pressuring. So this guy agrees to ship in a consignment. Turned a litter over to us for the Lab. We’ll check ’em, and if it’s okay, all State has to do is slap on their stamp.”

  “What’re they like?” Wilson asked.

  “Cute, maybe you’d say. I don’t know. Funny, all right. Eat anything. Sharp teeth. Like needles. Harmless, though. Probably make good pets. But awkward as hell. And when I say awkward, I mean awkward. When one of them gets mixed up, he doesn’t look like he can find his fanny with both hands. You can’t help laughing. But it’s like laughing—well, there’s something sadistic in it, laughing at a Quiggie, like laughing at a hunch backed jester, if you know what I mean. Anyhow—or maybe because of that—Jason’ll make a pot full on ’em alone. High pressure stuff. ‘No home in the system should be without a pair.’ ”

  “Nothing else, then, you think?”

  “Naah . . . Lab’ll fine-tooth ’em, anyway.”

  Wilson sipped at the coffee. “Funny one, too, that Smith,” he said reflectively.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I run an interview on arrival. I gave him the song and dance about our Anthro-Teams. But he gives me just a frozen smile. Finally he says, ‘At the moment, I can’t commit my government.’ Damn’ right he can’t! Not after the Starlight stink!”

  Charlie Howe shrugged. “I think they’d probably let you put down a team if State wasn’t so damn’ bull headed. I think they’re trying to play along, hoping the quarantine’ll blow over. I think the whole thing’s more political than anything else.”

  “I don’t trust ’em,” Wilson said. He had been reading the newspapers.

  Mr. Porter was a middle-size name producer of think pieces. (Editorial writers come in three sizes.) Once upon a time, he had been an idealist, of sorts, possessed of a certain moral consciousness, filled with a certain unusual enthusiasm, and obsessed with the importance of the free and independent press. But that was long ago.

  When he sang, morosely mellow, late at night, his voice was referred to as a whiskey tenor; there were bottle scars on the vocal chords.

  He quit typing, reached into his left hand desk drawer, failed to find what he reached for, and began to curse in a dispirited monotone. Eventually, as righteous indignation increased, the volume became louder.

  The office door popped open, and the copy boy asked, “You call for me, Mr. Porter?”

  “Where’s ma God damn’ whiskey?” Mr. Porter croaked.

  The copy boy said that he hadn’t seen it, honest, he hadn’t.

  Once Mr. Porter was out of the building, it was a mere minute’s walk, at his headlong pace, to the bar at the corner where the working press assembled to curse the city desk, the local administration, and practically everything else under the sun, except the wife and kids.

  “Hi, Porky,” Warren, of the News, called when he came in.

  Mr. Porter swiveled his head; his eyebrows went up; and then, spotting Warren, he lumbered across the room to his table and squeezed in. “God damn your bloody eyes,” he said—and, to the arriving waitress, “Yours, too.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “The usual?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well,” Warren said, “why the fire under the boilers today?”

  “Some dizzard stole ma whiskey—right out. of ma desk drawer, he stol
e it. Damn’ near a full quart. Opened it just before lunch, in fact.”

  “Tough,” said Warren, absently studying the display of sparkling bar glass, of which there was a great variety.

  “I was trying to write one of the Old Man’s editorials,” Mr. Porter said. “I can’t do that sober: did you ever know a man to do that sober?”

  “Once,” Warren said.

  Mr. Porter took his drink, drank it like a man, and returned the glass to the waitress.

  “Against Dobu,” he said.

  “Naturally,” said Warren, studying the moving lights of the coin-O.

  “Usual sheep-dip.”

  Warren agreed silently.

  Mr. Porter hammered the table half heartedly. “He ought to drop the crossword puzzle for a week and find out the facts of life. Honest to Jesus, if he thinks—”

  “I know,” said Warren. “I know.” He waved his hand vaguely. “We’ve got Bully in our office; don’t tell me about it. He’s running for Councilman.”

  “A couple more,” Mr. Porter brooded, taking the second drink from the waitress, “and I’ll be in the mood to tackle it: but sometimes it gets you.” And, with increasing vigor, “Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Warren said; he opened his mouth to follow up his agreement with a personal illustration, but Mr. Porter cut him short.

  “Please,” he said. “Please. I’ve got the troubles today.” He thumped his left shoulder with the palm of his right hand to show where they were.

  “Okay,” Warren said.

  “Old Man wants a new Dobun story. Says, ‘We’ve been overdoing the Starjiight thing lately.’ Says, ‘Stale news,’ he says. ‘Nobody buys a paper to read stale news. We gotta have something new. Some fine, new outrage, that’s what we gotta have,’ he says.”

  Mr. Porter paused. Then; “Okay. It just so happens the police reporter, Harris—you know him, the runty one? hen-pecked?—stumbled across a trading deal between the Dobuns and Jason and Son. So I dug the facts out of State, and I was all ready to splatter it across the page: ‘JASON PULLS THE WOOL’. That sort of thing.

  “You shoulda seen the Old Man pop his cork when I told him about it. Fit to be tied. Face got red. Blood vessels stood out on his forehead like cordwood.”

  The Old Man was the Big, Economy Size, name editorial writer; he had responsibilities that most mere mortals wot not of.

  “Advertiser, huh?” Warren asked. Fie was watching the new waitress dust the bar.

  “And it was such a pretty little lead,” Mr. Porter said. He sighed. “Have to use creative imagination again.”

  “How about having an Imperial Missionary slapped in the face?” Warren suggested helpfully.

  “Be fine—if we only had one on their planet.”

  Warren shook his head sadly. “Shouldn’t let a thing like that—a little thing like that—stop you.” He stared at the indirect lighting fixtures.

  “Tell you about the trade deal,” Mr. Porter said. “Seems Jason and Son are gonna exploit some native fauna: animal pets. Called kwiggi. K-w-i-g-g-i. Only now they’re to be known as Q-u-i-g-g-i-e. Looks better spelled.” He boomed out an artificial laugh.

  “Jesus,” said Warren.

  “Yeah. An’ they’ll be billed as importations from some miserable system, Some place nobody ever heard of—so the tainted name of Dobu won’t contaminate their commercial value.

  “Now these Quiggies,” Mr. Porter continued, “are the damnedest things, themselves. You know what they remind me of? They remind me of a politician trying to find out the climate of opinion on Universal Union Tariff. When you see ’em, you’ll know what I mean.”

  He paused a moment, and then he said, “Some day Pm gonna quit this racket.”

  Warren was watching the new waitress again. “And write a book,” he finished for Mr. Porter.

  Mr. Jason beamed at the man from System Wide. “They’ve had that pair for just a little over a month, and now they’ve got forty,” he said. “And State’s cleared ’em, too.”

  The little man across the desk gave the impression of treasuring each golden word Mr. Jason let fall.

  “They’re shipping us twenty-five tomorrow,” Mr. Jason continued. “I got the farm ready for ’em. There’s a lesson in that, boy. Yes, sir, there is: be prepared, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In that case, you brought the layout with you?”

  Mr. Jason’s office was an antique. In six generations, not one stick of new furniture had been added. Pictures of the long deceased Jasons and their sons leered down, their eyes hard with business acumen. The current Mr. Jason’s desk was cluttered up with nick-nacks. In the vault to the left was the System’s finest collection of rare stamps. The current Mr. Jason loved to collect things, and after they were collected, he loved to count them.

  “Well . . . no, sir,” said the man from System Wide. “But we had expected it wouldn’t be until a month after the first shipment arrived from Dobu . . .”

  “From Xantope, my boy,” Mr. Jason said. “We must remember that. Not Dobu. Xantope.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now. Surely you have something in mind. You don’t intend to have me sit here listening to a vacuum?”

  The little man reddened. “Uh . . . No, sir. That is—Well, for instance, Mr. Morrow—he’s Mr. William’s aide—he suggested that maybe we run an initial series—to get reader reaction, I mean—in the Express. On what noted people have to say about Quiggies as household pets.” He rummaged in his brief case, talking all the while. “I have here an indorsement (the five thousand credit class) from Mr. Athelwood Carlton, the explorer—ha—right here it is—yes, this is it.” He removed the paper and began to read. “I’m quoting. ‘I have been privileged to purchase one of the first Quiggies offered for sale in this system, and I—’ ”

  “No.” Mr. Jason shook his head. “No. It needs pep. No zest in it. No enthusiasm. No fire!”

  “Yes, sir; quite right there. Uh . . . Well, we thought you might like it for us to run a picture of explorer Carlton getting out of The Ranger, standing there on the platform wav—”

  “No,” said Mr. Jason. “That’s not quite what I had in mind. I’m afraid it won’t do. I want something that’ll shock ’em. Hit ’em between the eyes, like with a hammer, see. Something like—FROM XANTOPE!” He held his hands wide apart. “In great big type, so they’ll stop to see what it’s all about.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the man from System Wide, scribbling in his notebook. “Yes, sir. That’s very good.”

  “Then after that—Maybe we can use the indorsements.”

  Mr. Jason rubbed his hands together. “There’s going to be money in this. Lots of money. I’m prepared to spend a half million credits—that’s a half million, my boy: figure your commission on that! Everywhere people go, I want ’em to see the word. I want everybody to be talkin’ about Quiggies. I want teleo-comedians to make jokes about Quiggies.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If a man doesn’t have a Quiggie, I want him to feel like he’s a social outcast.”

  “Ha-ha,” said the little man from System Wide. “That’s very good.”

  “I want a slogan. Something like—ah—the one I thought of coming to the office this morning. A Quiggie is cuddly.”

  “Oh, that’s very good,” said the man from System Wide. “That’s very good indeed. A Quiggie is cuddly. I’ll write that right down.”

  “All kinds of money in Quiggies,” said Mr. Jason, who had a nose for that sort of thing. “And not just here, either. I’m already working out arrangements with three other systems to handle distribution there. Didn’t know that, did you? No, I thought not. But Jason and Son don’t let grass grow. That’s why I say it’s going to be big. Three systems, four systems, pretty soon all the systems. A million worlds: and every one of them having Quiggie pets supplied by Jason and Son. You can think about that: put it in your advertising maybe.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll do just that.”

/>   “And I’ll think of some other things, too. We’re going to hit this from all angles.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man agreed.

  “Good. Good. I’ll want to see the first layout on this first thing in the morning.”

  “But Mr. Jason—” the advertising man protested, thinking, perhaps, of a long, bleak night and sweat and coffee and stale tasting cigarettes.

  “But? But! I don’t care if you have to keep the whole staff up, I want that layout.”

  “Yes, sir. I understand, sir. I’ll have it over here first thing in the morning.”

  “All right, then. See that you do . . .”

  “It’s a great field you’re in, boy. Great. It’s what makes the wheels go ’round: advertising. We’re a race of people who depend on it. Production and salesmanship are the keys to our prosperity. Stop advertising, you couldn’t sell, and how would that be? Without advertising, people wouldn’t have half the stuff they got.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now. Don’t sit around, boy. Waste no time. Be up and doing.” He snapped his fingers twice at the retreating figure.

  As soon as the door closed behind the man, Mr. Jason flicked on the frequency phone. “Get me Williams, of System Wide.” Within seconds, someone was on the other end of the frequency.

  “Williams, I want . . . Oh. Hello, Johnson. No. I want Williams . . . Oh? . . . Well, this is Jason . . . That’s better.”

  After a moment, he heard the familiar voice on the other end. “Williams? Jason. A little ass from your company just left. Thought I’d better phone. Look. I’d like a two page spread in the Sunday issue of the Express . . . What? . . . I don’t care if it is—you can tell ’em to hold it, can’t you, and get the copy out tomorrow? . . . Look. Who pays for their paper, your advertising agency, or their subscribers? . . . Yeah. Yeah . . . That’s better . . . And look, old man, ask them to take it easy on Dobu—just in case . . . No. I don’t expect anyone to cause a stink, but you know . . .”

  “Maybe they’d run an editorial on the Quiggies, too; maybe Cal Hustvedt would do one . . . Sure, he’s their best, but . . . Oh. Yeah, Porter would do . . . Human interest, you know . . . Naturally. We’ll pay if you can’t get it for goodwill . . . What? . . . No. No. If you have to talk to Hartz, tell him there’s absolutely no danger of Quiggies falling into the hands of the vivisectionists.”