The Merchant's War (22 page)

Uncivilly he ignored my hand. “You look like hell,” he said unsympathetically. “Where’s this rathole you’re trying to sell us?”

“This way, please,” I said, usherlike, and bowed them in. I didn’t tell them to watch out for the dirt. They could see the dirt themselves. I didn’t apologize for it. or for the coughing, barking, sometimes machine-gun noise of the machines spitting out their million grommets an hour; or for Semmelweiss waving greasily to us from his cubicle; or for the smells; or for the neighborhood. Or for anything. It was their decision to make. I wasn’t going to beg.

Once we got upstairs it was a little better, anyway. Those ancient buildings were put together solidly; you could hear the machines below, but only as a distant and not unpleasant mutter. The lights were still flickering madly, and the dust made Mitzi wheeze and sneeze. But they didn’t seem to notice. They were more interested in the back stairs and the freight elevator and all the unused rat-holes marked Exit that no one had opened in decades. “Plenty of ways in and out, anyway,” said Desmond ungraciously. I nodded, but I hadn’t actually heard him. I was adrift in my own head. Funny. With Mitzi actually in the same room with me I seemed farther away from her than ever. I supposed I was just strung out. The pills were not without cost, and although my weight loss had slowed, it had not stopped, nor had my insomnia come to an end. And yet there was something very strange—

“Tarb!” Haseldyne called crossly. “Are you nodding off on us? I asked you about transportation.”

“Transportation?” I counted off on my fingers. “Let’s see, there’s two subway lines, all the north-south buses, the crosstown buses, the crosstown pedstrip. And pedicabs, of course.”

“And power availability?” Mitzi put in, sneezing.

“Sure, there’s power. That’s how they make the grommet machines go,” I explained.

“No, damn it, I mean is it
reliable?
No interruptions?”

I shrugged. I hadn’t really noticed. “I guess not,” I said.

I hadn’t realized she was more on edge than I. “You
guess?”
she flared. “God, Tenny, even for a Moke-head you’re—ah, ah—you’re pretty stupid—ah—”

When the
choo
came it was violent. She clapped her hands to her face. “Oh,
hell
!” she growled. Down on her hands and knees, scrabbling at the dusty floor, she looked up ferociously, and one of Mitzi’s blue eyes was brown.

I suppose that if I hadn’t been a Moke-head I would have figured it out long before. Eating salads. Contact lenses to hide her eye-color. Dodging the mother who desperately wanted to see her daughter. Calling me a “huck” when she got mad. A dozen different incongruous things.

And only one explanation to fit them all.

I suppose if I hadn’t been first a Moke-head, then a pill-popper, I would have reacted in a different way entirely. Called the cops, I guess. Or tried to, even though that might easily have cost me my life. But I’d been through the wringer. What she was doing might be terribly wrong. But I hadn’t anything left that I was sure was right.

I seemed to have all the time in the world. I pulled my notepad out of my pocket, wrote swiftly, then ripped out the page and folded it over. “Mitzi,” I said, stepping forward, careless of her lost contact lens, “you’re not Mitzi, are you?”

Freeze-frame. She stared up at me with one brown eye and one blue eye.

“You’re a fraud, aren’t you?” I asked. “A Veenie agent. A double for the real Mitzi Ku.” And Haseldyne exhaled a long, slow breath. I could feel him move toward me, tensing to act. “Read this!” I said, and shoved the note into his hand.

He almost didn’t stop, but then he glanced at it, frowned, looked startled and read it aloud: ” ‘To Whom It May Concern; I can’t face life as an addict any longer. Suicide’s the only way out.’ Signed, Tennison Tarb. What the hell’s this, Tarb?”

I said, “Use it if you want to get rid of me. Or let me help you. I’ll help the best I can, every way I can, whatever you’re doing. I don’t care what it is. I know you’re Veenies. It doesn’t matter.”

And I added:

“Please.”

Once upon a time there was this man Mitchell Courtenay, the one half the streets on Venus seem to be named after. They think he is a hero, but when my grade school teacher told us about him in history class she spat his name with loathing. Like me, he was a star-class copysmith. Like me, he got caught up in a crisis of conscience that he never wanted and didn’t know how to handle.

Like me, he was a traitor.

That’s the kind of a word that you don’t want to hear, when it is you it is applied to. “Tennison Tarb,” I yelled at the top of my voice—into the thunder of the subway tunnel as I took the late local to my Bensonhurst flop, where no one could hear the word, not even me—“Tennison Tarb, you are a traitor to Sales!”

Not even an echo answered. Or if it did it was drowned in the subway roar. I felt no pain from the word, though I knew it was fair, and damning.

I suppose it was the long green pills that dulled that pain, along with all the other pains I didn’t feel any more. That was my good fortune; but if you flipped that coin, the other side was that I felt no joy at being an adman again, either. Up, down. Up, down. How long I would stay up this time I could not guess, but there I was. I would have exulted—if the world had not been so gray.

And, if the world had not been so gray, I might still have been shaking with fear, too, because it had been a very close thing, there in the loft over the grommet works. I could see the plans coming up, one after another, in Desmond Haseldyne’s card-sorter mind: Bash his head in and stick him in a grommet press to hide the evidence. Drug him and toss him out of a high window. Get some Moke extract and OD him—that would have been the easiest and surest of all. But he didn’t do it. Mitzi choked out that she wanted to give me my chance, and Haseldyne didn’t overrule her.

He also didn’t give me the “suicide” note back, though.

When I looked at the life ahead of me I could see two yawning chasms. On the one side, Haseldyne would, after all, use the suicide note and that would be the end of Tennison Tarb forever. On the other, discovery, arrest, brainburning. Between the two was a narrow knife-edge that I might hope to walk—leading to a future in which my name would forever be reviled by generations of schoolchildren to come.

It was a great blessing that I had the long green pills.

Since I was committed to the knife-edge, I went ahead with it. I shaved and pressed and spiffed up as far as I could manage on the money I had left and the facilities available in my Bensonhurst pad—when I could get past sleepwalking parents and cranky kids to get to them. The long, steamy subway ride soaked the new press out of my shorts and blew soot into my washed hair, but all the same I was reasonably presentable when I reported to the lobby of the Haseldyne & Ku building. There a Wackerhut cop checked my palm prints, pinned a temporary visitor’s magnetic badge on my collar and whisked me up to Mitzi’s office. To the door of Mitzi’s office, anyway, where her new sec
²
stopped me. He was a stranger to me. I was not to him, for he greeted me by name. I had certain formalities to go through. The sec
²
had Personnel all primed; an employee-contract fax was ready for my thumbprint, and as soon as I had officially signed on he presented me with a permanent Agency I.D. and a two-week salary advance.

So it was with money in my credit store that I finally made it through the door into Mitzi’s office. It was a first-class brainroom, as opulent and formidable as the Old Man’s at T., G. & S. It was furnished with desk and conference couch, with a wet bar and vidscreen, with
three
windows and
two
visitors’ chairs. What it wasn’t furnished with was Mitzi Ku. In her place Des Haseldyne sat glowering behind the desk, and he never looked bigger. “Mitzi’s busy; I’m handling this for her,” he announced.

I nodded, though being handled by Des Haseldyne was not among my dearest dreams. “Can we talk here?” I asked.

He sighed patiently and waved a hand at the windows. Sure enough, windows and door all sparkled with the faint glimmer of a privacy curtain; no electronic buggery would go out of this room while it was on. “Fine,” I said. “Put me to work.”

He was oddly hesitant. “We don’t really have a place for you,” he grumbled at last.

That was obvious enough. I hadn’t been any part of their calculations until I dumped myself on them. I didn’t think anything I might offer would seem like a good idea to him; he might listen to Mitzi, but never to me. Still, I tried to make the pill easier to swallow. “Mitzi mentioned Politics—I can sell the hell out of that,” I offered.

“Not”
The bark was loud, angry and definite. Now, why did that upset him so? I shrugged and tried again.

“There are other Intangibles—say, Religion. Or any kind of product—”

“Not our line of work,” he growled, the huge head shaking. He raised his hand to cut off any more useless suggestions from me. “It will have to be something a lot more significant than that,” he said definitely.

Enlightenment! “Ah,” I said, “I see. You want an overt act. You want me to put my neck on the line to prove loyalty. Commit an actual crime, right? So I can’t turn back again? What is it you want me to do, murder somebody?”

I said that so easily! Maybe it was the grayed-out numbing of everything the pills had given me, but once I took his meaning the words came out without a qualm. Haseldyne had been taking no pills, though. The huge face assembled itself into a granite look of total revulsion. “What the hell do you think we are?” he demanded, loathing me. I shrugged. “We’re not doing anything like that!” I waited for him to come down from the dudgeon. It took a while, because he seemed to be having trouble assembling his thoughts.

“There is one possibility,” he said at last. “You were part of the limbic forces in the Gobi action.”

“Chaplain, right,” I agreed. “They fired me out with a DD.”

“That’s easy enough to reverse,” he said impatiently. That was true enough, for somebody with the clout of an Agency partner. “Suppose we got you back in. Suppose we put you in a place where you had Campbellian equipment under your command—you do know how to use the stuff, I suppose.”

“Not thing one, Des,” I told him cheerfully. “That’s technician stuff. You don’t learn that, you hire it.”

He said stubbornly, “But you could direct the technicians?”

“Of course. Anybody could. For what purpose?”

If I had been in any doubt that he was improvising as he went along, and not very well, he dispelled it then. “To promote the Venusian cause!” he roared. “To make the damn hucks leave us alone!”

I looked at him in real astonishment. “Are you serious? Forget it!”

Rumble lower and more dangerous: “Why?”

“Ah, Des, I can see now that you had to be a Veenie agent, for you certainly aren’t an adman. Limbic stimulation isn’t a technique in itself. It’s only an intensifier. An expediter.”

“So?”

“So it has to obey the basic laws of all advertising. You can only make people
want
things, Des. You can train knee-jerk buying patterns into them or create hungers, but you can’t use advertising to make people
kind,
for God’s sake!” I’d put my finger on the truth. Advertising-wise, the man was an ignoramus. How he’d kept his ignorance secret for so long at a major Agency was a miracle—although what I had just said was true: You didn’t need to learn what you could hire from others. He glowered resentfully as I went on to explain, “For that kind of thing you need B-mod if you’re in a real hurry, and that’s out of the question except with small, captive audiences. You don’t really want advertising at all, Des.”

“I don’t?”

“Publicity,” I explained. “Word of mouth. You want to create an image. You start stories about the ‘good Veenies’ for openers. Get a couple of Veenie characters in sitcoms, and gradually change them from villainous clowns to sweet eccentrics. Do some tie-in commercials with a Venusian background— the ‘Venus Loves Cari-Os’ sort of thing.”

“Venus damn it to hell
doesn’t,”
he exploded.

“The exact details could be different, of course. Of course, you’d have to be supercareful of how you did it. You’re tampering with deep-down prejudices, you know, not to mention maybe even bending the law. But it can be done, given the money and the time. I’d say five or six years.”

“We don’t
have
five or six years!”

“I didn’t think you did, Des,” I grinned. It was funny, but I found myself enjoying his aggravation just as much as though the thorn tearing his flesh wasn’t me—and as though he didn’t have the easy and obvious way to remove it that my “suicide” note had given him. It came down to the fact that I simply didn’t care what happened to me. The whole thing was out of my hands. Mitzi was the only friend I had in the world. Either she would save me … or she wouldn’t.

I left the glowering Des Haseldyne feeling as close to at ease as I’d been in many months, and that night I went out and spent a big chunk of my credit balance on new clothes. I picked them out as happily and carefully as though I were confident of being alive to wear them.