The Merchant's War (27 page)

I nodded, waiting to see if there was more. There wasn’t. Des Haseldyne led me to the door and escorted me through. Mitzi hadn’t spoken at all. At the foot of the stairs Haseldyne pushed me into another thieflock. Before he closed the door he snapped, “You looking for thanks? Forget it! We thanked you by letting you live.”

As I waited for the outer door to open I heard the furious rumbles and squeaks begin again as they went at it once more. What Haseldyne had said was true: they’d let me live. What was also true was that they could reverse that decision at any time. Could I prevent that? Yes, I decided, but in only one way: by doing such a good job for them that I would become indispensable … or more accurately, by making sure they
thought
I was.

Then the outside door opened.

Des Haseldyne must have been operating the controls. That lock had thrust-bar capacities too; the door behind me hurled me out into the street. I stumbled and fell, skidding across the sidewalk under the feet of hurrying pedestrians. “You all right, mister?” quavered one old consumer, gaping at me with alarm.

“I’m fine,” I snapped as I picked myself up. I don’t think I have ever told a bigger lie.

It is a bad and worrisome thing to have lined yourself up with a bunch of felons as accomplice to brainburning crimes. It’s a lot worse to realize that they’re inept. That circle of Venusian master spies and saboteurs might, among the lot of them, have summoned up enough skill and villainy to sneak a bunch of forged discount coupons past a supermarket checker. For the task of preserving their world against the might of Earth they simply were not up to it.

Dixmeister had an easy time of it that afternoon. When I limped back into my office I snarled at him to go about his business and leave me alone until ordered otherwise. Then I locked my door and thought.

Without Mokes or little green pills to hide behind, what I saw when I opened my eyes was naked reality. It was not an attractive sight, for it was full of problems—three in particular:

First, if I didn’t convince the Veenies that they needed me, and could even trust me, good old Haseldyne would know what to do about it. After that I wouldn’t have any worries at all.

Second, if I did as I was told the future looked bleak. I hadn’t been consulted in planning their great strategic campaign; the more I thought of it, the less sure I was that it would work.

Third and worst, if it didn’t work, then we were all cooked. We would spend the rest of our lives living in playpens, wearing diapers, spoon-fed by attendants who didn’t like us much and getting our chief intellectual stimulation from watching the pretty lights go by. All of us. Not just me. The woman I loved as well.

I didn’t want Mitzi Ku brainburned.

I didn’t want Tennison Tarb brainburned, either. My recently acquired clarity of thought soberly pointed out that there was a way out of that part of the fix, anyway. All I had to do was pick up the phone to the Fair Commercial Practices Commission and turn the Veenies in; I’d probably get off with the Polar Penal Colony, maybe even just reduction to consumer status. But that wouldn’t save Mitzi …

Just before the close of business Mitzi and Des called a top-level staff meeting in the boardroom. Mitzi didn’t speak, didn’t look at me, either. Des Haseldyne did all the talking. He said there were some, uh, unexpected expansion opportunities opening up and he and Mitzi would have to be out of the office to investigate them. Meanwhile, they had bought Val Dambois’s contract from T., G. & S. and he would be coming in as temporary general manager; Intangibles (Political) would be directed independently by Tennison Tarb, that was me, and he was sure we’d carry on with full efficiency.

It was not a convincing performance. It wasn’t received well, either. There were sidelong glances and worried looks in the audience. As we all got up to go I managed to get close to Mitzi long enough to whisper in her ear: “I’ll stay on at the condo, all right?” She didn’t answer that, either. She just looked at me and shrugged.

I didn’t have a chance to pursue it, because at that point Val Dambois came up from behind and grabbed my shoulder. “A word with you, Tenny,” he gritted, and led me to Mitzi’s office—his office now. He slammed the door, slapped the privacy screen on and said: “Don’t get too
independent,
Tarb. Remember I’ll be right here, watching you.” I didn’t need to be reminded of that. When I didn’t answer he looked at me closely: “Can you handle it?” he demanded. “Are you feeling all right?”

I said, in order, “I can handle it,” which was a lot more hope than conviction, and, “I feel like somebody who’s got two whole planets resting on his shoulders,” which was true.

He nodded. “Just remember,” he said, “if you have to let one of them drop, make sure it’s the right one.”

“Sure thing, Val,” I said. But which was the right one?

Since Mitzi hadn’t said I couldn’t stay at the condo, I did. I didn’t expect her to be there that first night, and she wasn’t. I wasn’t quite alone, though. Val Dambois made sure I had a certain amount of company. As I hailed a pedicab outside the office I noticed a muscular male type dawdling after me, and the same man was lounging around across from Mitzi’s condo when I left in the morning. I didn’t care. They left me alone in the office, although I might not have noticed if they hadn’t. I was
busy.
I wanted that weight of two worlds off my shoulders, and the only way to do it was to win their war for them … somehow.

There were a dozen major theme commercials to prepare for the election and only days to do them in. I turned Dixmeister loose on lining up channel time and riding herd on the production department. I took over talent and script completely.

Now, normally when a project head says he takes over talent and script, what he means is he has about half a dozen headhunters searching out talent for him and at least that many copysmiths generating the scripts; what he does is mostly kick tail to make sure they’re doing their jobs. With me it was a little different. I had the staff, and I kicked their tails. But I also had plans of my own. They weren’t very clear in my mind. They were a long way from satisfactory, even to me, And there wasn’t anybody I could bounce them off to see how high they climbed. But they were what kept me in the office for sixteen hours a day instead of the mere ten or twelve I might otherwise have spent. It wasn’t so bad; what else did I have to do with my time?

I knew what else I
wanted
to do with my time, but Mitzi was—was—what shall I say? Out of my reach? Not really; we bedded together every night she was in the city. Out of my grasp, though, because the bed was the only place I saw her, and not often there. I’d set the whole Veenie hive buzzing with my news, and they were zinging in all directions. When Mitzi was in the city she was at high-level, secret meetings every minute; when she wasn’t in meetings here, she was somewhere else in the world. Or off it, because for a solid week she was on the Moon, trading furtive, coded messages with a freight-forwarder in Port Kathy on Venus.

One night I’d given up hope of her and gone to sleep when, in the middle of a really rotten dream about a Fair Commercial Practices strong-arm man creeping into the bed next to me, I woke to find someone really was, and it was Mitzi.

It took me a long time to get wholly awake because of exhaustion, and when I accomplished it, Mitzi was already asleep. I could see by looking at her that she was a lot more exhausted than I. If I’d had any compassion at all I’d have put my arms around her silently and let the two of us sleep through the night. I couldn’t. I got up, and made some of that funny-tasting real coffee for her, and sat down on the edge of the bed until she smelled it and stirred. She didn’t want to wake up. She was burrowed down under the blanket with just the top of her head and enough of her nose for breathing still visible, and there was a warm smell of sweet sleeping woman to mingle with the aroma of the coffee. She tossed herself petulantly over to the other side of the bed, muttering something—all I could understand were some words about “changing fuses.” I waited. Then the rhythm of her breathing changed and I knew she was awake.

She opened her eyes. “Hello, Tenny,” she said.

“Hello, Mitzi.” I extended the coffee cup, but she ignored it for a moment, looking bleakly at me over it.

“Do you really want to get married?”

“You bet, if—”

She didn’t expect me to finish that sentence. She nodded. “So do I,” she said. “If.” She put herself up against the pillows and took the cup. “Well,” she said, postponing that subject for the duration, “how’s it going?”

I ventured, “I’ve got some pretty hot new commercial themes. Maybe I should check them out with you.”

“What for? You’re in charge.” That subject was dismissed too. I reached over and touched her shoulder. She didn’t move away, but she didn’t respond, either. There were a lot of other subjects I would have liked to discuss. Where we were going to live. Whether we wanted to have any kids, and what genders. What we would do for fun and, that subject always dear to the newly engaged, how much and in what particular ways we loved each other …

I didn’t say any of those things. Instead, I asked: “What did you mean about ‘changing fuses,’ Mitzi?”

She sat bolt upright, slopping coffee into the saucer, glaring at me. “What the hell are you asking, Tenn?” she snapped.

I said, “It kind of sounds to me as though you’re talking about sabotaging equipment. Campbellian projectors, right? You’re probably infiltrating people into the limbic units to screw up the machinery?”

“Shut up, Tenn.”

“Because if you are,” I went on reasonably, “I don’t think that will work. See, they’ve got a long flight to Venus and there’ll be standby crews kept awake in rotating shifts. They won’t have anything to do but to keep checking and rechecking the equipment. Anything you bust, they’ll have plenty of time to fix.” That shook her. She set the cup down by the side of the bed, staring at me.

“The other thing that worries me about that,” I continued, “is that when they find out there’s been sabotage they’ll start looking for who did it. Sure, the huck intelligence services are fat, dumb and happy—they haven’t had anything to worry about for a long time. But you just might wake them up.”

“Tenny,” she flared,
“butt out.
You do your own damn job. Let us worry about security!”

So I did what I should have done in the first place. I turned the light off and slipped into bed beside her and took her in my arms. We didn’t talk any more. As I was drifting off to sleep I realized that she was weeping. I wasn’t surprised. It was a hell of a way for a newly engaged couple to be spending their time, but it was the only way we had. We simply couldn’t talk easily, for she had her secrets that she was obliged to protect.

And I had mine.

On the sixteenth of October the statutory ten-week-warning Christmas decorations appeared in the store windows. Election Day was getting very close.

It’s the last ten days of a campaign that count. I was ready for them. I had done everything I had thought to do and done it real well. I was real well all over these days, barring a slight tendency to get the shakes when a can of Moke was in the room (that was aversion therapy for you), and a considerable loss of weight. People stopped telling me how well I looked. They didn’t have to; I was looking as well as anybody could be expected to look when every night’s sleep was maimed by dreams about brainburning. Dixmeister danced in and out of my office, thrilled by his new responsibilities, awed by the new themes I was unveiling. “They’re really powerful stuff, Mr. Tarb,” he told me uneasily, “but are you sure you’re not going too far?”

“If I were,” I smiled at him, “don’t you think Ms. Ku would have stopped them?” Maybe she would have, if I had told her what they were. But the moment for that had passed. I was committed.

I stopped him as he turned to hurry out. “Dixmeister,” I said, “I’ve had some complaints from the networks about degraded signals on our transmissions.”

“Transmission fade? Gosh, Mr. Tarb, I haven’t seen any memos—”

“They’re coming along later. I got this head-to-head with the net people. So I want to check this out. Get me a wiring diagram of this building; I want to see where every signal goes from point of origin to the phone company mains outside.”

“Right, Mr. Tarb! You mean just the commercial transmissions, of course?”

“I of course don’t. I want everything. And I want it now.”

“That’ll take hours, Mr. Tarb,” he wailed. He had a family, and he was thinking of what his wife would say when he didn’t get home for First Gift Night.

“You’ve got hours,” I told him. He did. And I didn’t want him spending those hours looking for incoming memos that didn’t exist or chattering with somebody else’s staff about what Mr. Tarb was doing now. When he had the entire electronics circuitry displayed for me I froze a hard copy, jammed it in my pocket and made him join me on a physical inspection of the place where all the lines came together, the comm room in the basement.

“I’ve never
been
in the basement, Mr. Tarb,” he whimpered. “Can’t we leave that for the phone company?”

“Not if we ever want to get promoted again, Dixmeister,” I told him kindly, and so the two of us took the lift down as far as it would go and then a freight elevator two more stories below that. The basement was damp, dirty, dim-lit, dingy—it was a lot of things beginning with
d
including deserted. There were hundreds of square yards of space here, but too nasty to rent out even to night-dwellers. It was just what I wanted.

The comm room was at the end of a long corridor, choked with dust. Next to it were three rooms of stored microfiles, mostly urgent FCC and Department of Commerce directives that, of course, had never been opened. I looked into every storeroom carefully, then stood at the door of the comm room and gave it one quick glance around. Every phone call, data-link message, facsimile and video transmission the Agency originated went through that room. Of course it was wholly automatic and electronic at that: nothing moved or flashed or clicked. There were manual override terminals for rerouting messages around a bad circuit—or cutting them off entirely—but there was no reason to man them. “Looks all right to me,” I said.