The Merchant's War (17 page)

Well, paradise it was not. Nights were still hell. “Regular” housing turned out to be foam pop-ups, with slit trenches. The only “air conditioning” they had were tiny solar-battery fans, and the foam walls soaked up every calorie of the Gobi’s blazing daytime sun to give back to us all night. There were also
bugs.
There was also the all-night braying of the animals in the stockades outside the walls. There were also the sleepless hours, miserably wondering what Mitzi was up to, who was taking over my job at Taunton, Gatchweiler and Schocken. There was also the fact that the desert heat was boiling the Mokes out of my body as fast as I could swallow them, and every day I got gaunter and shakier. On the second day Gert Martels looked at me in alarm. “The lieutenant,” she said, “is working too hard.” Palpable lie, of course; I had yet to see my first soldier coming in for solace or help. “I suggest the lieutenant write himself a pass and take the rest of the day off.”

“Pass to where in this hellhole?” I snarled, and brought myself up short. Hadn’t I had a conversation like this once before—on Venus —with Mitzi? “Well,” I said, reconsidering, “I suppose that ten years from now I’ll regret it if I don’t see whatever sights there are. Only you come along.”

So twenty minutes later we were sitting back-to-back on a sort of four-wheeled cart with an awning over our heads, clop-clopping along the white-dust road to the metropolis of Urumqi. Military trucks roared by, raising a six-foot wake of dust. What fun! Conversation was pretty nearly impossible, not only because we were facing away from each other but because we spent half our time coughing the dust out of our lungs until Gert produced some sort of white surgical masks to tie over our noses and mouths.

Fortunately Urumqi—they pronounced it “Oo-ROOM-chee,” which tells you a lot about the Uygurs—wasn’t far away. It also wasn’t much when you got there. The main street had real trees, a double row of them, but there was nothing but bare yellow dirt under the trees. No grass. No flowers. What there was was about a dozen Uygurs with gauze masks of their own, sweeping leaves off the bare ground. You’d think there was already enough dust in the air for any normal person, but, no, there the Weegs were, sweeping great clouds up in case we might run out. “I wish I had a Moke,” I gritted out, and Gert twisted around to say:

“Hang on, Lieutenant—”

“My name’s Tenny.”

“Hang on, Tenny, we’re almost there. See it down the block? Divisional R&R, and they’ve got all the Mokes you want.”

And so they did; and not only that, they had a bar, and an all-ranks coffee shop where you could get brand-name food, and an officers’ lounge with satellite Omni-V. And flush toilets! And—I’ll give you an idea of what heavenly luxury this was after my forty-eight hours in the field—it wasn’t until after I’d noticed all those things that I noticed that the whole building was air-conditioned. “How many passes can I give myself?” I demanded.

“All you want,” said Gert gratifyingly, and we headed first for the coffee shop. When I said it was my treat she looked amused but didn’t argue, and we washed down Turr-Kee salad sandwiches on real Bredd with half a dozen Mokes and sat comfortably at our windowside table, gazing disdainfully at the Weegs outside. “There’s worse duty than this, Tenny,” Gert announced, ordering another Coffiest.

I reached over and touched her ribbons. She didn’t draw back. “I guess you’ve seen some, right?” I offered.

Her expression clouded. “I guess Papua New Guinea was about the worst,” she said, as though the memory pained her.

I nodded. Everybody knew about Papua New Guinea, and the way hundreds of natives had died in the riots when the Coffiest and Reel-Meet ran out.

“It’s good work, Gert,” I said consolingly. “There aren’t many abo reservations left. Cleaning up the holdouts has to be done—a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.” She didn’t answer, just took a sip of her Coffiest without meeting my eyes. I said, “I know what I’ve done isn’t in the same league as you veterans. Still, I spent three years on Venus, you know.”

“Vice-consul and morale officer,” she nodded. She knew.

“Well, then you know that the Veenies aren’t really much better than these Weegs. Salesless, bigoted, antiprogress—why, take away a little superficial technology and they’d fit right in on this reservation!” I waved my hand at the street outside. A bunch of enlisted personnel were loafing around the hotel steps, trying to tempt the Uygurs with Mokes and pocket viewers and Nic-o-Chews, but the tribesmen just smiled and shook their heads and moved on. “I doubt most of these aboriginals even know that civilization exists. They haven’t changed for a thousand years.”

She gazed out at the street, her expression hard to read. “More than that, Tenny. We’re not the first invaders they’ve seen. They’ve had the Manchus and the Mongols and the Hans and outlived them all.”

I coughed—it wasn’t dust in my throat.
“Invaders
isn’t exactly the word I would have chosen, Gert. We’re
civilizers,
you know. What we’re doing here is an important mission.”

“Important is right,” she snapped, and there was an edge to her voice that caught me unaware. “The last one before the big push, eh? Did you ever think that there’s a logical progression here, New Guinea, the Sudan, the Gobi? And then—” Suddenly she faltered and looked around the room, as though wondering who might have heard.

That I could understand, for she was saying things that would cost her if the wrong people were listening. I was sure she didn’t mean them. Not deep down inside, that is. The combat troops at the spearhead of civilization couldn’t be blamed if, now and then, strange ideas crossed their minds. Back in civilization that kind of talk could get you in a lot of trouble. Here—“Here,” I said kindly, “you’re under a strain, Gert. Have another Coffiest, it’ll soothe you.”

She looked at me in silence for a moment, then laughed. “All right, Tenny,” she said, beckoning to the Weeg waitress. “You know what? You’re going to make a
great
chaplain.” It took me a moment to respond to that— somehow it hadn’t sounded like a compliment. “Thank you,” I said at last.

“And in order to make you one,” she said, “I guess I’d better fill you in on your duties. Now, you’re going to get two kinds of people coming to you for help. The first kind will be the ones that are worried about something—they’ve received a Dear Jane letter or they think their mother’s sick or they’re convinced they’re going crazy. The way you handle them is to tell them not to worry and give them a twenty-four-hour pass. The second kind will be the foul-ups. They’re missing formations or oversleeping roll call or failing inspection. What you do with them is send a chit to the first sergeant cutting off their passes for a week, and you tell them they better
start
worrying. Now, sometimes there’ll be somebody with a real problem, and what you do—”

So I listened, and I nodded, and, actually, I was quite enjoying myself. I didn’t then know that there were two of those people with real problems in my company.

Or that both of them were sitting at my table.

Chaplaincy wasn’t arduous. It left me plenty of time for long, late lunches in the field officers’ mess and evening passes to Urumqi. It also left me time to wonder, rather frequently at first, just what I was doing there, because the operation that we’d all been hustled from hemisphere to hemisphere to perform didn’t seem to be happening … whatever it was that was supposed to happen. When I asked Gert Martels, she shrugged and said it was just the good old tradition of hurry up and wait, so I stopped worrying about it. I took what each day offered. The old Urumqi hotel that had been commandeered for divisional R&R became as familiar to me as my official pop-up sleeping tent—in fact, the hotel was where I spent nights when I could, not only because of the air conditioning but because each of the tatty old guest rooms had its own flush toilet and tub and shower. Often all three of them worked. And in the officers’ lounge there was the Omni-V.

That wasn’t all joy. For one thing, what I really wanted was news. In order to get it I had to fight off the civilization-starved officers, most of them with more rank than I had, who were desperate for sports, variety shows, sitcoms and commercials—mostly commercials. The kind of news I wanted wasn’t the usual thing—the goggling, blinking, grinning couple who’d won “Consumer of the Month” in Detroit, or the President’s speeches, or the story of six pedicabs destroyed, with loss of eleven lives, when the spire fell off the old Chrysler Building and flattened half a block of Forty-second Street: I mean the
real
news, the “World of Advertising” report and the daily lineage and spot-time charts. That news came on at six o’clock in the morning, because of the fact that we were halfway around the world, and so I had no hope of seeing it unless I pressed my luck and took yet one more night in the divisional R&R—and, of course, managed to wake myself up in time to get down to the lounge. That wasn’t easy. Every morning waking up got harder and harder. The only thing that could get me out of bed, finally, was to not have any Mokes in the room, so as soon as my eyes opened I had to get up and out to find one.

And then what I saw wasn’t all joy. There was a whole ten-minute spot, one morning, given to my ConsumAnon plan. It had been launched with a sixteen-megabuck promotion budget. It was a great success. But it wasn’t mine.

For that I was prepared. What I wasn’t prepared for was the commentator, with that sickly, covetous smile people get when somebody’s pulled off a coup, finishing up by giving credit to that dynamic new agency that came from nowhere to challenge the giants … Haseldyne and Ku.

The captain who came into the lounge just then, swinging his weights and all ready for his morning setting-up exercises, didn’t know how lucky he was. I let him live. If I hadn’t startled him so with my blast of rage when he tried to change the channel he would surely have had me in for conduct unbecoming an officer, but I don’t think he’d ever seen so much violence on a face. I clung to that channel selector. I didn’t even look around when he slunk away, his weights hanging straight at his side. I was spinning that dial, hunting for news, starving for crumbs of information. With two hundred and fifty channels coming down from the satellites it was like looking for the winning boxtop in a trash can. I didn’t care about the odds. Flick, and I was getting a Korean weather report; flick, a commercial jockey; flick, a kiddyporn audience-participation show; flick—I flicked on. I caught the tail end of the BBC’s late-night wrap-up and Russ-Corp’s early morning newscast from Vladivostok. I didn’t get the whole story. I was not sure all the pieces fit together. But Haseldyne and Ku was news worldwide, and the outline was clear. Dambois hadn’t told me all the truth. Mitzi and Desmond Haseldyne had taken their profits and started their own agency, right enough. But they hadn’t taken just money. They’d taken the whole Intangibles department from T., G. & S. with them— raided the staff—pirated the accounts—

Stolen my idea.

The next time I knew what I was doing I was halfway back to headquarters along that mean, hot, dusty road, and I was walking.

I have never felt such fury. It was the next thing to madness—close enough, really, because what other than insanity would have gotten me walking through that inferno, where even the Weegs let their donkeys or yaks carry them from place to place? I was thirsty, too. I’d been hitting the Mokes hard— not just plain Mokie-Kokes, but spiking them with anything alcoholic the officers’ lounge could supply. But it had all boiled out of me along the way, and the residue that was left was concentrated, crystalline rage.

How could I get back to civilization?—get back and get justice; get what I was owed from Mitzi Ku! There had to be a way. I was a chaplain. Could I give myself compassionate leave? If I couldn’t do that, could I fake a nervous breakdown or get some friendly medic to supply me with heart-palpitation pills? If I couldn’t do any of those, what were the chances of stowing away on the return flight of the next cargo plane that landed? If I couldn’t do that—

And, of course, I couldn’t do any of them. I’d seen what happened to the whimpering feebs who’d come into my office, with their cock-and-bull stories of errant wives or intolerable lower-back pain; there were no compassionate leaves given out from the Reservation, and no chance of stowing away.

I was stuck.

I was also beginning to feel really bad. Heavy drinking and sleepless nights hadn’t done a thing to help my Moke-raddled body. The sun was merciless, and every time a vehicle went by I thought I’d cough my lungs out. There were plenty of vehicles, too, because the word was that our operation was going to come off at last. Any time now. The heavy attack pieces were in place. The troops had been given their designated assault targets. The support logistics were operational.

I stopped dead in the middle of the road, swaying dizzily as I tried to collect my thoughts. There was a meaning there, a hope … of course! Once the operation was complete we’d all be rotated back to civilization! I’d still be in the service, sure, but in some stateside camp where I could easily wangle a forty-eight-hour pass, long enough to get back to New York to confront Mitzi and her nasty sidekick—

“Tenny!” cried a voice. “Oh, Tenny, thank heaven I found you—and, boy, are you in trouble!”

I squinted through the blinding dust and glare. A two-wheel Uygur “taxi” was pulling up alongside me, and Gert Martels was hopping off, the lean, scarred face worried. “The colonel’s on the warpath! We have to get you cleaned up before she finds you!”

I staggered toward the sound of her voice. “Hell with the colonel,” I croaked.

“Aw, please, Tenny,” she begged. “Get on the taxi. Scrunch down so if any MPs come by they won’t see you.”

“Let them see me!” The funny thing about S/Sgt Martels was that she kept
blurring.
Part of the time she was a foggy figure of black smoke, opaque against the blinding sky. Part of the time she was in sharp focus, and I could even read the expression on her face—worry; revulsion; then, curiously, relief.

“You’ve got
heatstroke!”
she cried. “Thank heaven! The colonel can’t argue with
heatstroke!
Driver! You savvy Army hospital, yes? You go there quick-quick, yes?” And I found myself being dragged aboard the cart by Gert Martels’s strong arms.