I was much relieved to see that she had left my commitments unchanged, except of course that the side contract for Pete was missing and also the one concerning my Hired Girl stock. I supposed that she had just burned those, to keep from raising questions. I examined with care the dozen or more places where she had changed “Mutual Assurance Company” to “Master Insurance Company of California.”
The gal was a real artist, no question. I suppose a scientific criminologist armed with microscope and comparison stereo and chemical tests and so forth could have proved that each of those documents had been altered, but I could not. I wondered how she had coped with the closed endorsement on the back of the certified check, since certified checks are always on paper guaranteed non-erasable. Well, she probably had not used an eraser—what one person can dream up another person can outsmart...and Belle was very smart.
Mr. Doughty cleared his throat. I looked up. “Do we settle my account here?”
“Yes.”
“Then I can put it in two words. How much?”
“Mmm...Mr. Davis, before we go into that question, I would like to invite your attention to one additional document...and to one circumstance. This is the contract between this sanctuary and Master Insurance Company of California for your hypothermia, custody, and revivification. You will note that the entire fee is paid in advance. This is both for our protection and for yours, since it guarantees your safe-being while you are helpless. The funds—all such funds—are placed in escrow with the superior-court division handling chancery matters and are paid quarterly to us as earned.”
“Okay. Sounds like a good arrangement.”
“It is. It protects the helpless. Now you must understand clearly that this sanctuary is a separate corporation from your insurance company; the custodial contract with us was a contract entirely separate from the one for the management of your estate.”
“Mr. Doughty, what are you getting at?”
“Do you have any assets other than those you entrusted to Master Insurance Company?”
I thought it over. I had owned a car once...but God alone knew what had become of it. I had closed out my checking account in Mojave early in the binge, and on that busy day when I ended up at Miles’ place—and in the soup—I had started with maybe thirty or forty dollars in cash. Books, clothes, slide rule—I had never been a pack rat—and that minor junk was gone anyhow. “Not even a bus transfer, Mr. Doughty.”
“Then—I am very sorry to have to tell you this—you have no assets of any sort.”
I held still while my head circled the field and came in for a crash landing. “What do you mean? Why, some of the stocks I invested in are in fine shape. I know they are. It says so right here.” I held up my breakfast copy of the Times.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Davis, but you don’t own any stocks. Master Insurance went broke.”
I was glad he had made me sit down; I felt weak. “How did this happen? The Panic?”
“No, no. It was part of the collapse of the Mannix Group...but of course you don’t know about that. It happened after the Panic, and I suppose you could say that it started from the Panic. But Master Insurance would not have gone under if it had not been systematically looted... gutted—‘milked’ is the vulgar word. If it had been an ordinary receiver-ship, something at least would have been salvaged. But it was not. By the time it was discovered there was nothing left of the company but a hollow shell...and the men who had done it were beyond extradition. Uh, if it is any consolation to you, it could not happen under our present laws.”
No, it was no consolation, and besides, I didn’t believe it. My old man claimed that the more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels.
But he also used to say that a wise man should be prepared to abandon his baggage at any time. I wondered how often I was going to have to do it to qualify as “wise.” “Uh, Mr. Doughty, just out of curiosity, how did Mutual Assurance make out?”
“Mutual Assurance Company? A fine firm. Oh, they took their licking during the Panic along with everybody else. But they weathered it. You have a policy with them, perhaps?”
“No.” I did not offer explanation; there was no use. I couldn’t look to Mutual; I had never executed my contract with them. I couldn’t sue Master Insurance; there is no point in suing a bankrupt corpse.
I could sue Belle and Miles if they were still around—but why be silly? No proof, none.
Besides, I did not want to sue Belle. It would be better to tattoo her all over with “Null and Void”...using a dull needle. Then I’d take up the matter of what she had done to Pete. I hadn’t figured out a punishment to suit the crime for that one yet.
I suddenly remembered that it was the Mannix group that Miles and Belle had been about to sell Hired Girl, Inc., to when they had booted me out. “Mr. Doughty? Are you sure that the Mannix people haven’t any assets? Don’t they own Hired Girl?”
“ ‘Hired Girl?’ Do you mean the domestic autoappliance firm?”
“Yes, of course.”
“It hardly seems possible. In fact, it is not possible, since the Mannix empire, as such, no longer exists. Of course I can’t say that there never was any connection between Hired Girl Corporation and the Mannix people. But I don’t believe it could have been much, if any, or I think I would have heard of it.”
I dropped the matter. If Miles and Belle had been caught in the collapse of Mannix, that suited me fine. But, on the other hand, if Mannix had owned and milked Hired Girl, Inc., it would have hit Ricky as hard as it hit them. I didn’t want Ricky hurt, no matter what the side issues were.
I stood up. “Well, thanks for breaking it gently, Mr. Doughty. I’ll be on my way.”
“Don’t go yet. Mr. Davis...we of this institution feel a responsibility toward our people beyond the mere letter of the contract. You understand that yours is by no means the first case of this sort. Now our board of directors has placed a small discretionary fund at my disposal to ease such hardships. It—”
“No charity, Mr. Doughty. Thanks anyhow.”
“Not charity, Mr. Davis. A loan. A character loan, you might call it. Believe me, our losses have been negligible on such loans...and we don’t want you to walk out of here with your pockets empty.”
I thought that one over twice. I didn’t even have the price of a haircut. On the other hand, borrowing money is like trying to swim with a brick in each hand...and a small loan is tougher to pay back than a million. “Mr. Doughty,” I said slowly, “Dr. Albrecht said that I was entitled to four more days of beans and bed here.”
“I believe that is right—I’d have to consult your card. Not that we throw people out even when their contract time is up if they are not ready.”
“I didn’t suppose that you did. But what are the rates on that room I had, as hospital room and board?”
“Eh? But our rooms are not for rent in that way. We aren’t a hospital; we simply maintain a recovery infirmary for our clients.”
“Yes, surely. But you must figure it, at least for cost accounting purposes.”
“Mmm...yes and no. The figures aren’t allocated on that basis. The subheads are depreciation, overhead, operation, reserves, diet kitchen, personnel, and so forth. I suppose I could make an estimate.”
“Uh, don’t bother. What would equivalent room and board in a hospital come to?”
“That’s a little out of my line. Still...well, you could call it about one hundred dollars per day, I suppose.”
“I had four days coming. Will you lend me four hundred dollars?”
He did not answer but spoke in a number code to his mechanical assistant. Then eight fifty-dollar bills were being counted into my hand. “Thanks,” I said sincerely as I tucked it away. “I’ll do my damnedest to see that this does not stay on the books too long. Six percent? Or is money tight?”
He shook his head. “It’s not a loan. Since you put it as you did, I canceled it against your unused time.”
“Huh?
Now, see here, Mr. Doughty, I didn’t intend to twist your arm. Of course, I’m going to—”
“Please. I told my assistant to enter the charge when I directed it to pay you. Do you want to give our auditors headaches all for a fiddling four hundred dollars? I was prepared to loan you much more than that.”
“Well—I can’t argue it now. Say, Mr. Doughty, how much money is this? How are price levels now?”
“Mmm...that is a complex question.”
“Just give me an idea? What does it cost to eat?”
“Food is quite reasonable. For ten dollars you can get a very satisfactory dinner...if you are careful to select moderate-priced restaurants.”
I thanked him and left with a really warm feeling. Mr. Doughty reminded me of a paymaster I used to have in the Army. Paymasters come in only two sizes: One sort shows you where the book says that you can’t have what you’ve got coming to you; the second sort digs through the book until he finds a paragraph that lets you have what you need even if you don’t rate it.
Doughty was the second sort.
The sanctuary faced on the Wilshire Ways. There were benches in front of it and bushes and flowers. I sat down on a bench to take stock and to decide whether to go east or west. I had kept a stiff lip with Mr. Doughty but, honestly, I was badly shaken, even though I had the price of a week’s meals in my jeans.
But the sun was warm and the drone of the Ways was pleasant and I was young (biologically at least) and I had two hands and my brain. Whistling “Hallelujah, I’m a bum,” I opened the Times to the “Help Wanted” columns.
I resisted the impulse to look through “Professional—Engineers” and turned at once to “Unskilled.”
That classification was darned short. I almost couldn’t find it.
VI
I GOT A JOB the second day, Friday, the fifteenth of December. I also had a mild run-in with the law and had repeated tangles with new ways of doing things, saying things, feeling about things. I discovered that “reorientation” by reading about it is like reading about sex—not the same thing.
I suppose I would have had less trouble if I had been set down in Omsk, or Santiago, or Djakarta. In going to a strange city in a strange land you know that the customs are going to be different, but in Great Los Angeles I subconsciously expected things to be unchanged even though I could see that they were changed. Of course thirty years is nothing; anybody takes that much change and more in a lifetime. But it makes a difference to take it in one bite.
Take one word I used all in innocence. A lady present was offended and only the fact that I was a Sleeper—which I hastily explained—kept her husband from giving me a mouthful of knuckles. I won’t use the word here—oh yes, I will; why shouldn’t I? I’m using it to explain something. Don’t take my word for it that the word was in good usage when I was a kid; look it up in an old dictionary. Nobody scrawled it in chalk on sidewalks when I was a kid.
The word was “kink.”
There were other words which I still do not use properly without stopping to think. Not taboo words necessarily, just ones with changed meanings. “Host” for example—“host” used to mean the man who took your coat and put it in the bedroom; it had nothing to do with the birth rate.
But I got along. The job I found was crushing new ground limousines so that they could be shipped back to Pittsburgh as scrap. Cadillacs, Chryslers, Eisenhowers, Lincolns—all sorts of great, big, new powerful turbobuggies without a kilometer on their clocks. Drive ’em between the jaws, then crunch! smash! crash!—scrap iron for blast furnaces.
It hurt me at first, since I was riding the Ways to work and didn’t own so much as a gravJumper. I expressed my opinion of it and almost lost my job...until the shift boss remembered that I was a Sleeper and really didn’t understand.
“It’s a simple matter of economics, son. These are surplus cars the government has accepted as security against price-support loans. They’re two years old now and they can never be sold...so the government junks them and sells them back to the steel industry. You can’t run a blast furnace just on ore; you have to have scrap iron as well. You ought to know that even if you are a Sleeper. Matter of fact, with high-grade ore so scarce, there’s more and more demand for scrap. The steel industry needs these cars.”
“But why build them in the first place if they can’t be sold? It seems wasteful.”
“It just seems wasteful. You want to throw people out of work? You want to run down the standard of living?”
“Well, why not ship them abroad? It seems to me they could get more for them on the open market abroad than they are worth as scrap.”
“What!—and ruin the export market? Besides, if we started dumping cars abroad we’d get everybody sore at us—Japan, France, Germany, Great Asia, everybody. What are you aiming to do? Start a war?” He sighed and went on in a fatherly tone. “You go down to the public library and draw out some books. You don’t have any right to opinions on these things until you know something about them.”
So I shut up. I didn’t tell him that I was spending all my off time at the public library or at UCLA’s library; I had avoided admitting that I was, or used to be, an engineer—to claim that I was now an engineer would be too much like walking up to du Pont’s and saying, “Sirrah, I am an alchymiste. Hast need of art such as mine?”
I raised the subject just once more because I noticed that very few of the price-support cars were really ready to run. The workmanship was sloppy and they often lacked essentials like instrument dials or air conditioners. But when one day I noticed from the way the teeth of the crusher came down on one that it lacked even a power plant, I spoke up about it.
The shift boss just stared at me. “Great jumping Jupiter, son, surely you don’t expect them to put their best workmanship into cars that are just surplus? These cars had price-support loans against them before they ever came off the assembly line.”
So that time I shut up and stayed shut. I had better stick to engineering; economics is too esoteric for me.
But I had plenty of time to think. The job I had was not really a “job” at all in my book; all the work was done by Flexible Frank in his various disguises. Frank and his brothers ran the crusher, moved the cars into place, hauled away the scrap, kept count, and weighed the loads; my job was to stand on a little platform (I wasn’t allowed to sit) and hang onto a switch that could stop the whole operation if something went wrong. Nothing ever did, but I soon found that I was expected to spot at least one failure in automation each shift, stop the job, and send for a trouble crew.
Well, it paid twenty-one dollars a day and it kept me eating. First things first.
After social security, guild dues, income tax, defense tax, medical plan, and the welfare mutual fund I took home about sixteen of it. Mr. Doughty was wrong about a dinner costing ten dollars; you could get a very decent plate dinner for three if you did not insist on real meat, and I would defy anyone to tell whether a hamburger steak started life in a tank or out on the open range. With the stories going around about bootleg meat that might give you radiation poisoning I was perfectly happy with surrogates.
Where to live had been somewhat of a problem. Since Los Angeles had not been treated to the one-second slum-clearance plan in the Six Weeks War, an amazing number of refugees had gone there (I suppose I was one of them, although I hadn’t thought of myself as such at the time) and apparently none of them had ever gone home, even those that had homes left to go back to. The city—if you can call Great Los Angeles a city; it is more of a condition—had been choked when I went to sleep; now it was as jammed as a lady’s purse. It may have been a mistake to get rid of the smog; back in the ’60s a few people used to leave each year because of sinusitis.
Now apparently nobody left, ever.
The day I checked out of the sanctuary I had had several things on my mind, principally (1) find a job, (2) find a place to sleep, (3) catch up in engineering, (4) find Ricky, (5) get back into engineering—on my own
if humanly possible, (6) find Belle and Miles and settle their hash—without going to jail for it, and (7) a slug of things, like looking up the original patent on Eager Beaver and checking my strong hunch that it was really Flexible Frank (not that it mattered now, just curiosity), and looking up the corporate history of Hired Girl, Inc., etc., etc.
I have listed the above in order of priority, as I had found out years ago (through almost flunking my freshman year in engineering) that if you didn’t use priorities, when the music stopped you were left standing. Some of these priorities ran concurrently, of course; I expected to search out Ricky and probably Belle & Co. as well, while I was boning engineering. But first things first and second things second; finding a job came even ahead of hunting for a sack because dollars are the key to everything else ...when you haven’t got them.
After getting turned down six times in town I had chased an ad clear out to San Bernardino Borough, only to get there ten minutes too late. I should have rented a flop at once; instead I played it real smart and went back downtown, intending to find a room, then get up very early and be first in line for some job listed in the early edition.
How was I to know? I got my name on four rooming-house waiting lists and wound up in the park. I stayed there, walking to keep warm, until almost midnight, then gave up—Great Los Angeles winters are subtropical only if you accent the “sub.” I then took refuge in a station of Wilshire Ways...and about two in the morning they rounded me up with the rest of the vagrants.
Jails have improved. This one was warm and I think they required the cockroaches to wipe their feet.
I was charged with barracking. The judge was a young fellow who didn’t even look up from his newspaper but simply said, “These all first offenders?”
“Yes, your honor.”
“Thirty days, or take a labor-company parole. Next.” They started to march us out but I didn’t budge. “Just a minute, Judge.”
“Eh? Something troubling you? Are you guilty or not guilty?”
“Uh, I really don’t know because I don’t know what it is I have done. You see—”
The Door Into Summer Page 10