The Merchant's War (12 page)

“Ah, but that’s not fair!” I protested. “You were doing the actual running, all I know is bits and pieces.”

“We’ll make allowances for that,” she promised, and I shrugged.

“All right. Well, for a starter, you had twenty-three active agents and about a hundred and fifty free lancers and part-timers— most of them weren’t actual agents, at least they didn’t know who they were working for.”

“Names, Tenny!”

I looked at her in surprise—she was taking this pretty seriously. “Well, there was Glenda Pattison in the Park Department, she was the one who got the defective parts in the new powerplant. Al Tischler, from Learoyd City— I don’t know what he did, but I remember him because he was so short for a Veenie. Margaret Tucsnak, the doctor that put anticonception pills in with the aspirins. Mike Vaccaro, the prison guard from the Pole—say, should I count Hamid or not?”

“Hamid?”

“The grek,” I explained. “The one that I tricked old Harriman into taking as a bona-fide political refugee. Of course, you left before he got to make contact, so I don’t know whether I should include him on the list. But I’m surprised you don’t remember him.” I grinned. “You’ll be saying you don’t remember Hay next,” I ventured. Bafflingly, she looked puzzled even at that. “Jesus Maria Lopez, for God’s sake,” I said, exasperated, and she looked at me opaquely for a moment.

Then she said, “That’s all back on Venus, Tenny. He’s there. We’re here.”

“That a girl!” Things were looking up. I moved closer to her, and she looked at me almost invitingly. But there was still the ghost of a scowl on her face. I reached up and touched her frown lines; they seemed actually sculpted into her brow. “Mitzi,” I said tenderly, “you’re working too hard.”

She flinched away almost angrily from my hand, but I persisted. “No, really. You’re—I don’t know. More tired. More mellow, too.” She was; my brassy lady was bronze now. Even her voice was deeper and softer.

And, as a matter of fact, I liked her better that way. She said, “Keep going with the names, please?” But she smiled when she said it.

“Why not? Theiller, Weeks, Storz, the Yurkewitch brothers—how’m I doing so far?” She was biting her lip—vexed, I thought, because my memory was pretty good after all. “Just go on,” she said. “There’s plenty more.” So I did. Actually I only remembered about a dozen names, but she agreed to accept my remembering some of the agents just by where they worked and what they did for her, and when I wasn’t just sure of something she helped out by asking questions until I got it straight. But it went on so long! “Let’s try something else,” I offered. “For instance, let’s see which of us can remember more about the last night we spent together.”

She smiled absently. “In a minute, Tenn, but first, this person from Myers-White who spoiled the wheat crop—”

I laughed out loud. “Mitzi dear,” I said, “the Myers-White agent was growing rice; it was at Nevindale that they messed up the wheat crop! See? If diet messes up memory, maybe you ought to switch to Kelpy Crisps!”

She was biting her lip again, and for a moment her expression was not friendly at all. Funny. I’d never thought of Mitzi as a sore loser. Then she smiled and surrendered, clicking off the recorder. “I guess you’ve proved your point, dear,” she said, and patted the couch beside her. “Why don’t you come over here and collect your winnings?” And so it turned out that we had a nice time after all.

The nice time didn’t get repeated very rapidly, though. Mitzi didn’t leave any more messages for me. I called her a few times—she was friendly enough, to be sure—she was also, she explained,
really
busy, and maybe some time next week, Tenn, dear, or anyway right after the first of the month—

Of course, I had plenty to keep me busy. I was doing very well on the Religion account, and even Desmond Haseldyne was flattering. But I wanted to see Mitzi. Not just for the sake of, well, you know, the things for the sake of which I’d got interested in her in the first place. There were other things.

A couple of times when I went into Haseldyne’s office, he was making mysterious private calls, and I had the funny idea that some of them were to Mitzi. And I saw him, along with Val Dambois and Mitzi and the Old Man himself, in a huddle in a fast-food place a long way from the Agency. It wasn’t a place where executives went for dinner. It wasn’t even a place where junior copy trainees like me went for dinner very often, but it happened to be near Columbia Advertising & Promotion University. When they saw me it obviously shook them up. They were all in on something together. I didn’t know what. None of my business, maybe—but it hurt me that Mitzi didn’t tell me what it was. I went on to my Columbia class—that was the creative writing one—and that whole evening I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention.

That was the best of the courses I was taking, too. Creative writing is really—well—creative. At the beginning of the course the professor told us that it was only in our time that the subject had been taught in a reasonable way. In the old days, she said, creative-writing students would just sort of make things up themselves, and the teachers would have to try to distinguish how much of what was good, or bad, about a paper was the idea or how the ideas were expressed. And yet, she said, they had the example of art courses for hundreds of years to show them the right way to do it. Aspiring artists had always been set to copy the works of Cezanne and Rembrandt and Warhol in order to learn their craft, while all aspiring writers were urged to create was their own blather. Handy word-processors changed all that, and so the first assignment she gave us was to rewrite
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in modern English. And I got an A.

Well, from then on I was teacher’s pet, and she let me do all sorts of extracredit themes. There was a good chance, she said, that I would pass her course with the highest mark ever attained, and you know that sort of thing can do you nothing but good when it comes time to add up your degree credits. So I took on some pretty ambitious projects. The hardest one, I guess, was to rewrite all of
The Remembrance of Things Past
in the style of Ernest Hemingway, changing the locale to Germany in the time of Hitler and presenting it as a one-act play.

That sort of thing was well beyond the capacity of any equipment I had in my little shared-time condo, not to mention that my roomies were likely to interrupt me, so I took to staying after work now and then to use the big machines in the copy consoles. I had set sentence length for not more than six words, dialed introspection down to 5 percent and programmed playscript format, and I was just getting set to run the program when I ran out of Mokes. The soft-drink machine had nothing but our own Agency brands in it, of course. I had tried them before; they didn’t satisfy the craving. I had the idea that I’d seen a Mokie-Koke bottle in the wastebasket in Desmond Haseldyne’s office once—I suppose it was jus my imagination—so I wandered over in that direction.

Somebody was in his office. I could hear voices; the lights were on; the data processors had their hoods off and were running some sort of financial programs. I would have turned quietly away and gone back to my copy console, except that one of the voices was Mitzi’s.

Curiosity was my undoing.

I paused to look at the programs running on the machines. At first I thought it was a projection for some sort of investment plan, for it was all about stock holdings and percentages of total shares outstanding. But it seemed to make a pattern. I stood up, deciding to get out of there—

And made the mistake of trying to leave inconspicuously through the darkened offices on the other side of the processors. They had been locked for the night. Nothing kept me from entering, but the break-in trap had been set. I heard a great, hollow hissing, like the sound of the Hilsch tubes around Port Kathy, and a huge cloud of white blew up around me. I’d been foamed! I could see nothing at all. The foam allowed me to breathe, but it did not allow me to see, not anything at all. I stumbled around for a moment, bashing into chairs, bumping over desks.

Then I surrendered to the foam and just stood there, waiting. And while I waited, I thought.

By the time I heard someone approaching I had figured it out.

It was Mitzi and Haseldyne, spraying the foam with a dispersant chemical as they came —I could hear the hiss. “Tenn!” Mitzi cried. “What the hell are you doing here?”

I didn’t answer, not directly anyway. I wiped the last of the foam off my face and shoulders and grinned at her.

“I’m onto you,” I said.

What I said had a curious effect on them. Naturally they were startled to see me there. Mitzi was holding the dispersant spray like a weapon, and Haseldyne was fondling a heavy tape dispenser as though he’d brought it along to bash someone’s head in with it—not so very surprising, I suppose, since I had set off the burglar alarm and foam. But both of them went absolutely expressionless. It was as though their faces had become dead, and they kept that queer immobility for seconds.

Then Mitzi said, “I don’t know what you mean, Tennison.”

I chuckled. “It’s perfectly obvious. I saw the programs you’re running. You’re planning a takeover bid, aren’t you?”

Still no expression. “I mean,” I clarified, “the two of you, maybe Dambois too, are planning to take over control of the Agency with your investments. Isn’t that right?”

Slowly, glacially, expression returned to Haseldyne’s face, and then to Mitzi’s. “I’ll be darned,” rumbled Haseldyne. “He’s caught us fair and square, Mitzi.”

She swallowed, and then smiled. It was not a very good smile—too much tension in the jaw muscles, too much narrowing of the lips. “It certainly looks that way,” she said. “Well, Tenn, what are you going to do about it?”

I had not felt this good in a long time. Even Haseldyne looked like a harmless and friendly fat man to me, not a ravening monster. I said amiably, “Why, nothing you don’t want me to, Mitz. I’m your friend. All I want is a little friendliness from the two of you.” Haseldyne glanced at Mitzi. Mitzi looked at Haseldyne. Then both of them turned to me. “I guess,” said Haseldyne, choosing his words with care, “what we ought to do now is talk about just how friendly you want us to be, Tarb.”

“Gladly,” I said. “But first—have you got a Moke on you?”

The next day at the Agency the climate had thawed. By mid-afternoon it was downright tropical, because Mitzi Ku had smiled on me. What made Mitzi Ku so suddenly great a power no one exactly knew, but the watercooler gossip had made it clear that she was. There was no talk about putting me back on the pedicab run.

Even Val Dambois found me worthy of love. “Tenny, boy,” he boomed, making the long trek down to my little cubicle in Intangibles, “why’d you let them put you in a hole like this? Why the hell didn’t you
say
something?” I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t get past his sec
³
, was the answer, but there was no sense telling him what he already knew. Bygones could be bygones—for now, anyway. Forgiveness, no lingering grudges, a truly sales-fearing spirit, that was what Tennison Tarb was like these days. I grinned back at Dambois and let him throw his arm around me as he conducted me back to Executive Country. There would be a time, I knew, when his throat would be exposed to my fangs— until then it was forgive and forget.

They even, without saying a word about it, arranged to put a Moke dispenser in my office. There was no official ruling. It just appeared that afternoon.

And that made me do some hard thinking. Swigging Mokes was surely harmless enough —hell, I’d proved that!—but did it really suit the star-class image I ought to present to the world? It was such a consumer kind of thing to do—and a consumer, moreover, of a competing Agency’s account. I pondered over it all the way home in my company car. When I tipped the pedaler the thought crystallized, because I got a look at the black resentment in his eyes before he covered it up and touched his cap to me. Three days earlier, we’d shared the same tandem pedicab run. I could understand his resentment. What that resentment implied was that if I got cast down into the lower depths again, he and the other sharks would be waiting.

So I marched in and rapped on the sleeping tank. “Rockwell,” I shouted. “Wake up! I want to ask you something!”

He wasn’t a bad guy, old Nelson Rockwell. He had nearly six more hours coming to him in the tank before it was my turn, and every right in the world to bite my head off when I dragged him out of it. But when he heard what I wanted he was kindness itself. A little puzzled, maybe. “You want to go dry, Tenny?” he repeated, still half-asleep. “Well, sure, that’s the smart thing to do, you don’t want to screw up your big chance. But I don’t honestly see what it’s got to do with me.”

“What it’s got to do with you, Nels, is, didn’t you tell me once you were in ConsumAnon?”

“Yeah, sure. Years ago. Gave it up, though, because I didn’t need it once I straightened myself out and got into collectibles—oh!” he said, eyes lighting up. “I get it! You want me to tell you about ConsumAnon so you can decide if you want to try it.”

“What I want, Nels, is to go to ConsumAnon. And I want you to take me.”

He glanced wistfully at the warm, inviting sleep box. “Gosh, Tenny. It’s open to anyone. You don’t need to be taken.”

I shook my head. “I’d feel better if I went with someone,” I confessed. “Please? And soon? Tomorrow night, even, if there’s a meeting—”

He laughed at that. When he was through laughing, he patted my arm. “You’ve got a lot to learn, Tenny. There’s a meeting
every
night. That’s how it works. Now, if you’ll just hand me my socks …”

That’s the kind of guy Nels Rockwell was. All the time he was dressing I was thinking of ways to return the favor. I’d have to be moving out of this shared-time dump, of course. What was to stop me from, say, prepaying two or three months of my share and letting him have it, so he could pick his own time to sleep? I knew he had to take the lobster trick at the grommet works because of his sleep schedule; he could probably get a different shift, maybe even more money …