The Merchant's War (26 page)

“Middling awful.” There had been a lot of throwing up, a lot of scrabbling around frantically to find something to cut my throat with. But I hadn’t succeeded in that, and I’d only had the convulsions twice. I dismissed it. “Mitzi,” I said, “I’ve got two important things to tell you.”

“Of course, Tenny, but this is the damnedest busiest time right now—”

I cut her off. “Mitzi. I want us to get married.”

Her hands clenched. Her body froze. Her eyes opened so wide that I feared her contacts would pop out.

I said, “I had plenty of time to think things over in the Detox Center. I mean it.”

From outside came Haseldyne’s peevish rumble: “Mitzi! Let’s get going!”

Silently, automatically, she came to life again, picking up her bag, opening the door, staring at me the whole while. “Come
on,”
barked Haseldyne.

“I’m coming,” she called; and to me, heading toward the lift, “Dear Tenny, I can’t talk now. I’ll call you.”

And then, two steps away, she turned and came back to me. And there, in the full view of God and everybody, she kissed me. Just before she disappeared into the descending lift she whispered, “I’d like that.”

But she didn’t call. She didn’t call me that day at all.

Since I had never proposed marriage to anybody before, I had no personal experience to tell me if that was a reasonable response. It didn’t feel like one. What it felt like was the way Mitzi herself had felt—well, not Mitzi herself; not
this
Mitzi, but the brassy other one back on Venus—the way
that
Mitzi had told me she felt when we first got it on together and I finished ahead of her, and she let me know that I’d damn well have to do better next time around or else … Anyway, it felt bad. I was left hanging.

And I hadn’t told her the other important thing.

Fortunately there was plenty to keep me busy. Dixmeister had kept things going as well as you could expect, but Dixmeister wasn’t me. I kept him late that night, reviewing his mistakes and ordering changes. He was looking shop-soiled and grumpy by the time I let him go home. As to me, I flipped a coin about where I would spend the time and lost. I holed up in a private-drawer hotel a few blocks from the office and got to work early the next morning. When I went to Mitzi’s office her sec
³
said her sec
²
had told her Ms. Ku would be out all morning, along with her sec
¹
. I spent my lunch hour—all twenty-five minutes of my lunch hour, because one day hadn’t been enough to get things turned around and moving right—sitting in Mitzi’s anteroom, using her sec
¹
‘s phone to keep Dixmeister on the hop. Mitzi didn’t show. The all-morning engagements had been protracted.

That night I went to Mitzi’s condo.

The door thing let me in, but Mitzi wasn’t there. She wasn’t there when I arrived at ten, nor at midnight, nor when I woke at six, and waited a while, and dressed, and went back to the office. Oh, yes, Mr. Tarb, her sec
³
told me, Ms. Ku had called in during the night to say that she’d been called out of town for an indefinite stay. She would be in touch with me herself. Soon.

But she wasn’t.

Part of my head filed that fact without comment and went on with what it was doing. That was to carry out the orders given. What Mitzi wanted me to do was to elect candidates.

It was already September and the “election” only weeks away. There was much to keep me busy, and that part of my head took advantage of every minute it had. It took advantage of every minute Dixmeister had, too, and everybody else in the Intangibles (Politics) department. When I stalked the halls people from other departments averted their eyes and stayed out of my path—for fear I’d draft them to twelve-hour days, I suppose.

The other part of my head, the new one that I’d seemed to discover at the Detox Center— that wasn’t doing so well. It was hurting—not just for Mitzi, but for the pain of that other thing it was carrying that I hadn’t told her. Then the interoffice mailperson darted into my office long enough to drop a flash-paper envelope on my desk and whisk away.

The note was from Mitzi. It said:

Dear Tenny, I like your idea. If we get through this alive I hope you’ll still want to, because I will, very much. But this isn’t a time to talk about love. I’m under revolutionary discipline, Tenny, and so are you. Please hold that thought …

With all the love I can only tell you about now—

Mitzi

Again it flared and scorched my fingers before I dropped it. But I didn’t mind. It was an answer!—and the right answer, too.

There remained the question of the other thing I needed to say.

So I kept badgering the sec
³
, and when at last she told me that yes, Ms. Ku was back in the city that morning but going directly to an urgent meeting elsewhere, I couldn’t wait.

Besides, I thought I knew where I could find her.

“Tarb,” cried Semmelweiss—“I mean, Mr. Tarb, good to see you! You’re looking really well!”

“Thanks,” I said, looking around the grommet factory. The presses were chugging and rattling and thumping out their millions of little round things. The noise was the same, the dirt was the same, but something was missing. “Where’s Rockwell?” I asked.

“Who? Oh,
Rockwell,”
he said. “Yeah, he used to be here. He got in some kind of accident. We had to let him go.” His grin got nervous as he saw my expression. “Well, he really wasn’t able to work any more, was he? Two broken legs, and then the way his face looked — Anyway, I guess you want to go upstairs? Go right ahead, Mr. Tarb! I guess they’re up there. You never know, with all those entrances and exits—still, I always say if they pay their rent right on time, who needs to ask questions?”

I left him there. There was nothing else to say about Nelson Rockwell, and nothing I cared to say to satisfy his curiosity about his tenants. Poor Rockwell! So the collection agency had finally not been willing to wait any more. I vowed I would have to do something about Nelson Rockwell as I pushed open the door—

And then I didn’t think about Nelson Rockwell for a while, because the door that once had opened into the dirty old loft now opened into a thieflock. Behind me the stair door slammed shut. Before me was a barred door; around me were steel walls. Light flooded over me. I could hear nothing, but I knew I was being observed.

A speaker over my head rumbled in Des Haseldyne’s voice, “You’d better have a damn good reason for this, Tarb.” The door before me slid open. The one behind me heaved me out of the cubicle with a thrust bar, and I was in a room full of people. They were all looking at me.

There’d been changes in the old loft. High-tech and luxury had come in. There was a telescreen monitor spitting out situation reports along one wall, and the other .walls were draped more handsomely than the Old Man’s office at T. G, & S. The center of the huge room was filled with an immense oval table—it looked like genuine wood veneer—and in armchairs around the table, each one with its own decanter and glass and scribe-screen and phone, were more than a dozen human beings, and what human beings they were! Not just Mitzi and Haseldyne and the Old Man. There were people there I’d never seen before except on the news screen, heads of Agencies from RussCorp and Indiastries and South America S.A.—German, English, African— half the might of the world’s advertising was creamed off and poured into this room. At every step I had been dazzled by the constant revelations of grander scope, greater power to the Veenie moles organization. Now I had taken the last step and penetrated its core. It felt an awful lot like one step too many.

Mitzi must have thought so. She jumped up, face working in shock: “Tenny! Damn you, Tenny, why did you come here?”

I said steadily, “I told you I have something you need to know. It affects you all, so it’s just as well I caught you. Your plan is down the tube. You don’t have time. There’s going to be a huck fleet heading for Venus any time now, with full Campbellian ordnance.”

There was a vacant chair near Mitzi at the head of the table. I plumped myself down in it and waited for the storm to break.

It came, all right. Half of them didn’t believe me. The other half might have had an opinion one way or the other on that, but the big thing on their minds was that I had entered into their most secret place. There was fury by the megaton in that loft, and it wasn’t all aimed at me. Mitzi got her share—more than her share, especially from Des Haseldyne: “I warned you to get
rid
of him,” he yelled. “Now there’s no choice!” The lady from S.A.
²
: “I theenk you have got big problem here!” The man from RussCorp, pounding the table with his fist, “Is no question, problem! Is only question, how do we solve? Your problem, Ku!” The man from Indiastries, palms together and fingers upthrust: “One wishes not to take life, to be sure, but in certain classes of predicaments one can scarcely find alternatives which—”

I had had enough. I stood up and leaned into the table. “Will you listen?” I asked. “I know your easy way out is to get rid of me and forget what I said. That means Venus is gone.”

“You be quiet!” grumped the woman from Germany, but she was alone. She looked around the table, a dozen human beings frozen in positions of rage, then said sulkily, “So tell then what you want, we will listen. A short time we will listen.”

I gave them a big smile. “Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t feeling particularly brave. I knew that, among other things, I was on trial for my life. But my life no longer seemed all that valuable. It was not, for example, equal to the session at the detox farm; if ever I faced the need of that again, knowing now just what it was like, I would surely have Xed myself first. But I was fed up. I said:

“You’ve seen the news over the last few years, mopping up aboriginal areas to bring them into civilization. Have you noticed where the last few were? The Sudan. Arabia. The Gobi Desert. Does anything strike you about those places?” I looked around the table. It hadn’t; but I could see that it was beginning to. “Deserts,” I said. “Hot, dry deserts. Not as hot as Venus and not as dry—but the closest thing to Venus there is on the surface of the Earth, and so the best place to practice. That’s point one.”

I sat down, and made my voice conversational. “When they court-martialed me,” I said, “they kept me in Arizona for a couple of weeks. Another desert area. They had ten thousand troops there on maneuvers; as far as I could tell, they were the same troops they had had in Urumqi. And out in the boonies they had a fleet of rockets. Right next to the rockets were stockpiles: Campbell ordnance. Now, let’s see if we can figure it out. They’ve been practicing in simulated Venus conditions; they’ve got trained combat troops rehearsing invasion tactics now; they’ve got Campbell heavy weapons ready to be loaded into shuttles. Add it up. What do you come out with?”

Total silence in the room. Then, tentatively, the woman from S.A.
²
: “It ees true, we have been told of very many shuttles formerly based in Venezuela now transferred for some purpose. We had assumed perhaps Hyperion was the target.”

“Hyperion,” sneered RussCorp. “One shuttle alone—plenty for Hyperion!”

Haseldyne snapped, “Don’t get panicked by this pillhead! I’m sure he’s exaggerating. The hucks are a paper tiger. If we do our job they won’t have any time to worry about Venus— they’ll be too busy sucking their thumbs and wondering what went wrong with the Earth.”

“I am glad,” said RussCorp gloomily, “that you are sure. I myself have doubts. Have been many rumors, all reported to this council—all dismissed. Wrongly, I now think.”

“I personally suggest—” began the German, but Haseldyne cut her off.

“We’ll talk this over in private,” he said dangerously, and glared at me. “You! Outside! We’ll call you back when we want you!”

I gave them a shrug, and a smile, and went out the door the man from Indiastries held open for me. It was no surprise to me to find that it led only to a short stairway and to an outside door—which was locked. I sat on the steps and waited.

When at last the inner door opened again and Haseldyne called my name I didn’t try to read the expression on his face. I just politely slid past him and took the empty seat at the table. He didn’t like it much; his face was reddening and his expression lethal, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t have the right to. He wasn’t the person in charge.

The person in charge now was the Old Man himself. He looked up to study me, and the face looked the same as it always had, pink and plump and wool-framed, except that it wasn’t at all genial. The expression was bleak. And, wholly out of character for the Old Man I had known so long, he offered no small talk. He offered nothing at all for a long moment, just looked up at me, then back at his table-top screen, and his fingers busy tapping out new queries and getting bad answers. From the stairs I had heard a lot of noise—agitated rumbles and peremptory shrill squeals—but now they were silent. The stifling aroma of real tobacco came from the place where the RussCorp man was silently smoking his pipe. The SA
²
woman absently stroked something in her lap—a pet, I could see; possibly a kitten.

Then the Old Man slapped his board to clear his screen and said heavily, “Tarb, that’s not good news you brought us. But we have to assume it’s true.”

“Yes,
sir,”
I cried, out of old reflex.

“We have to act swiftly to meet this challenge,” he declared. His pomposity had not gone the way of his good humor. “You will understand, of course, that we can’t tell you our plans—”

“Of course not, sir!”

“—and you’ll understand, too, that you have not yet proved yourself. Mitzi Ku vouches for you,” he went on, his cold stare drifting across the table to focus on her. She was gazing at her fingertips and didn’t look up to meet it. “Provisionally, we are accepting her guarantee.” At that she winced, and I had a quick understanding of what the alternatives they had been discussing might be,
provisionally.

“I understand,” I said, and managed to omit the sir. “What do you want me to do?” .

“You are ordered to continue with your work. That is our major project and it can’t be stopped. Mitzi and the rest of us will now have to be doing—other things—so you’ll be on your own to some extent. Don’t let that make you sloppy.”