“Well?” asked LLon looking over at his wife. She had been peeling off her Terran head mask and was massaging the kinks out of her capital pseudopod.
“Oof!” she telepathed. “That feels better. I don’t think I can stand one more sewing circle. The hands are the worst of all. I simply can’t manage them. And, dear, I almost can’t hear little Mrs. Schmidt. Her mind keeps dying out. She literally doesn’t think.”
“That’s fine!” said LLon. “I mean fine that she doesn’t think. But darling, what do you think of my new Depth Motivation?”
“Now the trunk corset,” Llona said. “Peel it slowly. My rigid cartilages have been scraping together all evening.”
“Llona, you weren’t listening to me! I’ve spent weeks working on this. It may be the final step. Don’t you care?”
“Care? Of course I care. I care about you, LLon. And you’ve spent practically our whole honeymoon doing nothing but talk shop while I suffer in these skin tights and feed those wretched chickens and listen to that horrid mammal go moo-moo-moo all the time.” Llona began to shake. “You don’t l-l-l…”
“Stop it!” LLon cried, clasping the midsection where his brain was located “You know I can’t stand over thirty c/s.”
Bradley put down the magazine and laughed. And when he had finished laughing he thought about it a little.
“Say, Mona!” he called.
“59, 60,” Mona said. “61, just-a-minute, 62.”
“I want to show you something. It gives me an idea.”
“75, 76, 77,” Mona said.
“For God’s sake!” Bradley cried. He slapped the magazine down on the coffee table and strode into the bedroom. “Can’t you stop brushing your hair just once when I have something important to say?”
“100,” Mona said. “All right, what is it?” She took out her bobby pins and began to wind her pin curls, every other one counterclockwise, for a Froth Set.
“Well, look, Mona, I just read this crazy advertisement for crummy seeds so your neighbors won’t envy your garden. Now, most people read that advertisement and they just laugh or if they’re real stupid maybe they take it literally and send for the seeds. They raise these scraggly looking plants so their neighbors feel a little bit superior to them and like them instead of envying them. Now, listen to my idea, Mona.”
“Clockwise,” Mona said.
“Are you listening?”
“Counterclockwise. Of course, Honey.” Bradley sat down on the side of the bed and began running his hands through his hair, because he could think better that way.
“Look at my career this way, Mona. I’ve come up through the ranks like twenty other men twenty-eight years at Brandt Sheet Metal. Five of us are going to be vice-presidents. One of us is going to get to be president.”
Mona held a pin curl down firmly with her left forefinger and turned to give her husband a look of absolute faith. “You are going to get to be president.”
Even after five years of marriage and two children, Bradley never failed to be shaken by that look. It made him feel like he wore a Santa Claus suit. And like all uniforms, it had to be lived up to.
Mona unwound the curl carefully, because she had forgotten whether she had stopped on clockwise or counterclockwise.
“I hope I am,” Bradley said. “Anyway, as I was going to say, what do those other nineteen men have that I don’t have? Nothing. What do I have that they don’t have. Nothing. By this time, Mona, the duds and the misfits have been weeded out. The eggheads are gone. The morons are gone. And just us jolly good fellows are left.”
“Clockwise!” Mona said. “Darling, why do you sound cynical?”
“Because—well, because I went to Brandt Sheet Metal prepared to work my ears off and race my brain twenty-four hours a day and bust through hell itself, if necessary, to get ahead. That’s the way I am. When I want something, I go after it whole hog.”
“I know,” Mona said, sliding in the last bobby pin. She didn’t set her fringe of bangs and when Bradley came over to look at her in the mirror, her reflected eyes smiled up at him through the light curls.
Bradley grasped the sides of her chair, as though he were holding on to his thoughts. “But I’ve been realizing—I guess even for years I’ve been realizing this slowly—there are some things work and sweat and brains and will power won’t get you.”
“Such as what?” Mona asked, smiling softly at some secret thought as she got out her cold cream.
“Such as upper echelon promotion at Brandt Sheet Metal.” Bradley, sure of his thought now, let go of the chair to walk up and down. “The men they watch,” he said, “are the men that can cooperate. The men that don’t jar up the group thinking. And it really boils down to this, honey. The men they watch are the men everybody likes.”
“Then all you have to do is Win Friends and Influence People.”
“It’s more subtle than that. It takes more than a likable moron to get where I’ve got at Brandt Sheet Metal. We’re all smart. We’re all likable. We all try to be just a little bit better than the other fellow. But not so much as to be offensive. A slightly better-cut suit. A slightly better-worded letter. A slightly more eager expression.”
Mona was massaging the pink cream with slower and slower strokes, watching her husband in the mirror. “It’s hard for me to forgive any woman,” she said, “who has naturally curly hair.”
“That’s it!” he said, pushing her chin back to look into her face and then holding his sticky fingers out helplessly, like a child in the aftermath of a chocolate bar. “There’s no way to be slightly better without being offensive. We all know what each other is doing and why we’re doing it and—look, honey, I don’t hate these guys. They’re good guys. What I mean is… I want to be different in some really inoffensive way. I want to sneak up behind management and hit them in the head before anybody knows what’s going on.”
“Is this the idea you started out on while I was brushing my hair?”
“It is. Mona, I’m going to stop trying to be a little better than everybody else. I’m going to be a little worse.”
Mona wiped off her cold cream and began methodically taking the bobby pins out of her hair.
“You just spent half an hour putting those things in!” Bradley said.
“I’m having lunch with Geraldine Baldwin tomorrow.”
“Well?”
“I don’t want her to think I have naturally curly hair.”
Link Creston threw the report across the polished desk and it flapped to the floor. This irritated Victor Grant to the point where he bit the fever blister on his thin lips and hoped he’d get blood poisoning.
Victor walked over and picked up the report, because it was only three feet from where he stood, whereas Link would have had to hoist his bulk out of his chair and walk all the way around the desk and this would make Victor seem sensitive and picayunish about his status.
Whereas they were all supposed to be pulling together on this thing and For God’s sake I’m not the boss. I just make more money than you.
“Downgrading!” Link said. “Oh, that’s just swell! Use Glimmer Tooth Paste and you’ll find out where the yellow went.”
“Obviously that’s not what it means, Link.” That wasn’t I right. A little joke would have been in order. But he’d been sweating over this thing and working out copy late last night and all morning and suddenly he didn’t have the energy to care about it.
“Then you tell me what it does mean and how we can use it.”
“See here,” Victor said, wishing vaguely he could stop himself, “I didn’t come up with this idea. This is the latest trend, according to those psychology boys you hired. I don’t have any opinions about depth psychology. If you don’t want any, O.K. I’ll go work on something else.”
“Oh, come off it, Victor. Look, you worried about your son? I heard. I’ll get him in another school. He’ll straighten out. I remember when my boy—”
“I wasn�
�t thinking about Jerry.” It was true. He hadn’t been, consciously! But something had been driving him to work too hard and react too fast to everything.
“O.K. We’ll shelve that and get back to this Downgrading business. O.K. You’re not responsible and you don’t have to defend it Read me your copy.”
Victor unfolded a sheet of dirty, lined tablet paper. It looked like something a third grade child might carry around.
WHEN YOU BUY MANNEN WOOL SUITS YOU GET QUALITY WITHOUT THAT “TOO EXPENSIVE LOOK.” YOU CAN GO ANYWHERE IN THE MANNEN SUIT WITHOUT FEAR THAT SOMEONE WILL SNICKER BEHIND YOUR BACK, “TOM’S UPGRADING TOO FAST.” MANNEN WOOL SUITS ARE WELL CUT, BUT NOT TOO WELL CUT.
There was a silence when Victor finished. “Well?” he asked.
Link said the last thing in the world anyone who knew him would expect him to say. And he said it with absolute seriousness.
“It’s dishonest,” Link said.
It broke Victor’s mood and he began to laugh unrestrainedly at the whole cockeyed world. He’d been pushed beyond the final point of irritation and all of a sudden, observing life from the fourth dimension, he saw that it was totally and irresponsibly cute.
Link didn’t like being laughed at. Particularly when he didn’t know why.
“I mean,” Link went on, frowning and drawing on his desk with his eraser, “the assumption that everyone wants to be successful and enviable and good looking is honest. To give the impression that you want to downgrade yourself is sneaky.”
“It’s just a subterfuge for upgrading yourself,” Victor pointed out, still laughing and enjoying immensely his new knowledge about the world.
“Obviously,” Link said, making a mental note that something had to be done about Victor. Maybe the boy, Jerry, could be sent to live with his mother, “That’s why it’s sneaky. I don’t mind saying Glimmer tooth paste contains an ingredient that makes you a brilliant conversationalist. It’s a lie, of course. But the assumption it’s based on is true. And maybe our advertising really will give someone self-confidence and make him a brilliant conversationalist. But to say that Glimmer tooth paste makes you a little awkward at cocktail parties…”
“The basic assumption, as I said, remains the same.”
“Yes, but it’s buried so far down. We’ll be operating on all these different levels of appeal, Victor. We say, Use our product and be inferior so you can eventually be a success. I don’t like it. It’s too far from the basic human motive. And I don’t think basic human motives change.”
“Human motives? No, you wouldn’t think they’d change.”
There was a violent clicking sound from inside a canister marked, “Tea.”
LLon and Llona looked at each other.
Llona shivered. “Let’s give it up,” she said. “Now it’s on the map.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s on the map,” LLon said. “All it means is that it’s marked for checking. It’ll be four or five C’s before they send a mapping crew out to this area. By that time it’ll all be over. Except our share of a Public Energy Find. Which I think is one-fourth. Enough to keep you in grotelized force fields the rest of your life, darling. And all the spined ebees you can fit into an ebee room.”
“A lot of good that’ll do us in the Dark Exile!”
“There won’t be any Dark Exile. We haven’t done anything illegal. All we’ve done is honeymoon on a subgalactic planet and engage in simple commerce in native goods. What could be more innocent?”
“And they just happen to blow their planet, and possibly their entire solar system, to pieces just after we leave so we can claim discovery?”
“Exactly.”
Llona lowered her eating pesudopod into their tank of algae. She wasn’t hungry and the algae was tasteless, but she had trained herself to eat the stuff every seven hours, regardless.
LLon rolled over to the window to stare out at the bleak, alien landscape. It annoyed him intensely to watch women eat.
“And no one will be suspicious?” Llona asked, her thoughts a little muddled with the digestive process.
“Suppose they are? Suppose they put us in the Truth Room? We tell them the truth.”
“That we planned the destruction of a subcivilized planet?”
“That we engaged in simple commerce in native fashion. What’s the difference what our intentions were? Intentions have no legal bearing. We supplied no galactic scientific information. We used no telepathic compulsion.”
“Didn’t we?”
“I didn’t. Unless you forced your sewing circle to break up early by telepathic compulsion.”
“Don’t be silly. I mean you supplied this Downgrading idea that you think is going to have such a traumatic effect on this culture.”
“I merely suggested it in an advertisement. These creatures did the rest. They’re very suggestible. I mean if you know what to suggest and when to suggest it. I know what to suggest, Llona, because I’m an anthropologist. And it’s odd when you think of it, that we should have found this little out of the way, unexplored planet and that I was able to spot the possibilities.”
“Didn’t you honestly have some such thing in mind, LLon, when we started out on the trip?”
“Well, I… no… rather, to be truthful, I’ve always wondered whether you couldn’t get a world to blow itself up by some subtle means such as this. The perfect crime, so to speak. For many years I’ve studied a number of subcivilized, non-telepathic cultures and worked out various schemes… but I was always under government supervision… and then ideas spread slowly among non-telepathic creatures.”
“It seems to me ideas spread incredibly fast among these creatures. Look at that Organization suggestion. Togetherness. Group thinking. And look at that loose credit suggestion. Why, it’s contrary to everything in these peoples’ religious and moral background to run up all those personal debts. But all you do is throw out a suggestion and it spreads like joy mist in a windy creel.”
“Sure. These people are not telepathic by our definition. But they obviously have some means of spreading ideas fast. I’d call it a collective unconscious telepathy. They don’t seem to know it themselves. I don’t know why. I don’t know how else they account for their mob emotions. But I suppose it’s like any other self-conscious life form. It takes an outsider to see it whole. And they’ve never known an outsider.”
“Yet,” said Llona.
“Ever,” said LLon. “They’re about to run out of ‘yet.’ ”
Bradley sat in his glassed-in office and thought uneasily that a fish needs the glass to hold the water in but all his glass did was prevent the free flow of cigarette smoke. It did not cut off the view of Jimmy bringing around those long, white envelopes, a name scrawled in ink on each one. The personal touch.
Bradley and Guy Baldwin caught each other in a covert glance. They both looked away quickly embarrassed by the grade school atmosphere, infuriated with themselves but both too full of inward thoughts to try to cover up.
Each envelope contained a letter which said almost the same thing. “This is to inform you that we are temporarily reducing our executive staff due to the Depression.” Then ten of them added, “It is solely for this reason that we regretfully suspend your services, with the hope that you will still be available when we are able to resume full production.”
Jimmy went into Guy’s office, a fan of letters in his hand. Bradley tried hard not to look. He sat and stared at an open file folder. A line of green letters. A line of red letters. But when his eyes flicked up to the top of the page, just to see what company’s letter he was reading, there he was with his eyes glued on Guy.
Guy was running his tongue over the sharp edge of his upper lip. He turned the envelope over, hesitated for a flicker of an instant, and stuck it in his inside coat pocket. Either way, Bradley could see, Guy couldn’t take it in public. He’d rather have the familiar torment of waiting.
Somehow watching Guy had made Bradley feel strong and sure of himself.
“Hi, Jimmy,” Bradley said. “How’s the wife?” It was absurd that Jimmy should be, married, but he was.
“Won’t speak to me.” Jimmy tossed the envelope on Bradley’s desk and drew his finger across his neck in a throat slitting gesture. Was that a reference to his wife? Or to the letters in general, in the unlikely case Bradley didn’t know what they were? Or did Jimmy, whose inside information was always appalling, know who was going to get which kind of letter?
Bradley grinned, ripped open the envelope, glanced through the letter, and dropped it into the waste basket.
Then he picked up the telephone. “Get me statistical,” he said, and drummed impatient fingers on the desk while he waited for the May production figures.
Link looked at both sides of four sheets of blank paper. He was not amused.
“What the hell?” he asked.
“You wanted to know what I came up with. That’s what I came up with.”
“Damn you, Victor, you know this is no time for jokes.”
“I wasn’t joking. That’s the way I operate. You want a report, I send you a report. Now I can think some more.”
“You’ve been thinking for two weeks.”
Victor shrugged. “Fire me.”
“Wouldn’t you just love that!” Link was tired of Victor. It was impossible to be around Victor for any length of time without feeling responsible for him. And Victor reacted instinctively to this by daring people to put him on their consciences. Furthermore he really wanted to be fired. He wanted some outside reason for those intense, pink-edged eyes and that tight, pale mouth.
“Look, Victor,” Link said, “If you weren’t worth a million dollars now and then, I would fire you.”
“I’m not worth anything now,” Victor said. “I don’t have no ideas. Take it or leave it.”
“You’re so damned irresponsible you think I have a choice. I don’t. Look. You came up with that Downgrading idea. It was terrific! Well, now we’re in a pinch. A real pinch. Everybody says the Depression is psychological. All Depressions are psychological.”
“Everything is psychological,” Victor said, blowing the words out with a puff of cigarette smoke.
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