The Merchant's War (29 page)

When I peered out now and then I could see that my stalwart crew slept no better than I. They woke, startled, at odd noises—woke up fast and got back to sleep only slowly and uneasily, because they were having their bad dreams too. Not all of my dreams were nightmares. But none of them was really good. The last one I remembered was of Christmas, some improbable future Christmas spent with Mitzi. It was just like memories of childhood, with the sooty snow staining the windows and the Christmas tree chirping its messages of no-down-payment gifts … only Mitzi wouldn’t stop ripping the commercials off the tree and pouring the kiddy-drug sweets down the toilet, and I could hear a banging on the door that I knew was Santa Claus’s Helpers with guns drawn, ready to make a bust—

Part of it was true. Someone was indeed at the outer door.

If I had been of a wagering turn of mind, I would have bet that the first one banging on my door would have been the Old Man, because he would only have to come across town. I was wrong. The Old Man must have been in Rome with Mitzi and Des—more likely, already halfway back on the night rocket to put out this unexpected fire—because the first one was Val Dambois. Sneaky son of a gun! You couldn’t even trust him to stay tricked when you tricked him, because he’d obviously tricked me right back. “You didn’t get on the Moon ship after all,” I said stupidly. He gave me an evil look.

The look wasn’t half as evil as what he had in his hand. It wasn’t a stun-gun, or even a lethal. It was worse than either. It was a Campbellian sidearm, definitely illegal for civilians to own at all, even more illegal to be used anywhere outside a posted area. And the worst part of it was that Marie had been left alone in the office and she’d drowsed off on her cot. He was past the tangle-net at the door before anyone could stop him.

I was shaking. That’s surprising in itself, when you think about it, because I wouldn’t have believed it was possible for anything to frighten a person who had as much to fear already as I did. Wrong opinion. Looking at the flaring muzzle of the limbic projector turned my spine to jelly and my heart to ice. And he was pointing it in my direction. “Huck bastard!” he snarled. “I
knew
you were up to something, hustling me away like that. Good thing there’s always a Moke-head around the terminal you can bribe to take a free trip, so I could come back and wait to catch you in the act!”

He always talked too much, did Val Dambois. It gave me a chance to get my nerve back. I said, with all the courage I could find, forcing a grin, keeping the tone cool and assured—or so I hoped, though it didn’t sound that way to me—“You waited too long, Val. It’s all over. The commercials are on the air already.”

“You’ll never live to enjoy it!” he screamed, lifting the barrel of the Campbell.

I held the grin. “Val,” I said patiently, “you’re a fool. Don’t you know what’s going on?”

Faint waver of the gun; suspiciously, “What?”

“I had to get you out of the way,” I explained, “because you talk too much. Mitzi’s orders. She didn’t trust you.”

“Trust
me?”

“Because you’re a wimp, don’t you see? Don’t take my word for it—see for yourself. The next commercial will be Mitzi herself—” And I glanced at the wall screen—

And so did Val Dambois. He’d made mistakes before, but that one was terminal. He took his eyes off Marie. You can’t altogether blame him for that, considering the shape that Marie was obviously in, but he had cause to regret it.
Zunggg
went her stun-gun, and the limbic projector dropped out of Val’s hand, and Val dropped right after it.

A little late, the door to the storeroom flew open and the rest of my crew boiled in, wakened from their uneasy naps. Marie was propped on one elbow, grinning—her cot contained her mechanical heart and she couldn’t move away from it, but she had a hand free for the stun-gun when it was needed. “I got him for you, Tenny,” she said proudly.

“You surely did,” I agreed, and then to Gert Martels, “Help me lug him into the storeroom.”

So we tucked him into the room where once the engineers had dozed away their standby shifts, and left him to do the same. The limbic projector I turned over to Jimmy Paleologue. I couldn’t stand to touch the thing, but I thought he might consider it a valuable addition to our limited arsenal. Another wrong guess. He darted out into the hall with it, I heard the sound of running water from the communijohn, and he came back with it dripping. “That one will never work again,” he gritted, tossing it in a wastebasket. “What do you say, Tarb? Back to sleeping shifts?”

I shook my head. The sleeping room had now become a jail, and besides we were all good and wakeful. “Might as well enjoy the fun,” I said, and left them brewing Kaf to jolt the drowsies away. I wanted a look at
Advertising Age,
and I wanted it in the privacy of my own office.

It wasn’t reassuring. They were transmitting nothing but bulletins now, with headlines like:

FCC Head Vows Full Prosecution

and

Brainburn Seen Likely in H & K Case

I rubbed the back of my neck uneasily, wondering what it felt like to be a vegetable.

I didn’t have long to spend on that unenjoyable task, because I guess Mitzi had caught the night rocket after all. There was a rattle and a squeal and a bunch of relieved guffaws, and when I got my door open there she was. Stuck in Gert Martels’ tangle-net. “What’ll we do with this one?” asked Nels Rockwell through his bandages. “There’s still plenty of room in the storeroom.”

I shook my head. “Not her. She can come in my office.”

When Marie turned off the juice in the net, Mitzi stumbled and half fell. She caught herself, glaring up at me. “You fool, Tenn!” she spat. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I helped her up. “You shouldn’t have given me the cure, Mitzi. It cured me.”

Her jaw dropped. She let me take her arm and lead her into my office. She sat down heavily, staring at me. “Tenny,” she said, “do you know what you’ve
done
? I couldn’t believe it when they told me what you were putting on the air for political commercials—it’s unheard of!”

“People telling the truth, yes,” I nodded. “Never been done, as far as I know.”

“Oh, Tenny! ‘Truth.’ Grow up!” she flared. “How can we win with
truth?”

I said gently, “When I was being detoxed I had to do a lot of soul-searching—it was better than cutting my throat, you see. So I asked questions. Let me ask you one of them: In what way is what we’re doing right?”

“Tenny!” She was shocked. “Are you defending the hucks? They’ve despoiled their own planet, now they want to do the same thing to Venus!”

“No,” I said, shaking my head, “you’re not answering the question. I didn’t ask you why they were wrong, because I know why they were wrong. I wanted to know if we were right.”

“Compared to the hucks—”

“No, that won’t do, either. Not ‘compared to.’ You see, it isn’t enough to be less bad. Less bad is still bad.”

“I never heard such pious claptrap—” she began, and then paused, listening. Sudden sounds of a squabble from the anteroom: a man’s furious bellow—Haseldyne’s?; clipped orders in a higher voice—Gert Martels?; the sound of a door closing. She stared at me, wonderingly. “You’ll never get away with it,” she whispered.

“That’s possible. Still,” I explained, “I picked this place because it’s next to the comm room. All Agency communications go through here, so the building’s shut off, and the Wackerhuts have orders to let staff in, not out.”

“No, Tenny,” she sobbed, “I don’t mean right now, I mean later. Do you know what they’ll
do
to you?”

The flesh at the back of my neck crawled, because I did. “Brainbuming, maybe. Or just kill me,” I acknowledged. “But that’s only if I fail, Mits. There are twenty-two separate commercials going out. Would you like to see some?” I turned to the monitor, but she stopped me.

“I’ve seen! That fat cripple you’ve got out there, whining about how she was made to eat junk food—the aboriginal that says his people’s life-styles were destroyed—”

“Marie, yes. And the Sudanese.” Finding him had been a bit of luck—Gert Martels had done it, once I bailed her out of the stockade and told her what I wanted. “That’s only two of them, love. There’s a real good one with Jimmy Paleologue about how Campbellian techniques work—on people like me as well as the natives. Nels Rockwell’s good, too—”

“I’ve seen them, I tell you! Oh, Tenny, I thought you were on our side.”

“Neither for you nor against you, Mits.” She sneered, “A real prescription for inaction.” But I didn’t have to say anything to that; inaction wasn’t what I was guilty of, and she knew it as soon as she said the words. “You’ll fail, Tenny. You can’t defeat evil with namby-pamby piety!”

“Maybe not. Maybe you can’t defeat evil at all. Maybe the world’s social ills are too far along and evil’s going to win. But you don’t have to be an
accomplice
to it, Mitzi. And you don’t have to give up, like your hero Mitch Courtenay.”

“Tenny!” She wasn’t angry now, just shocked at blasphemy.

“But that’s what he did, Mitzi. He didn’t solve the problem. He ran away from it.”

“We’re not running away!”

I nodded, “Right, you’re fighting. And using the same weapons. And coming out with the same end results! The hucks turned the planet into ten billion mindless mouths—what you want to do is starve the mouths, just so you can be left alone! So I’m not on the huck side, I’m not on the Veenie side. I’m opting out! I’m trying something different.”

“The
truth
.”

“The truth, Mitzi,” I declared, “is the only weapon there is that doesn’t cut both sides!” And then I stopped. I was working myself up to a grand speech, and heaven knows what heights of oratory I might have reached for my one-woman audience. But the best parts of it I had already said, and I had them on tape. I fumbled on my keyboard to call up my own commercial and paused with my finger on the Execute button. “Look, Mits,” I said, “there are twenty-two commercials altogether, three each for the seven people I’m using—”

“What seven?” she demanded suspiciously. “I only saw four out there.”

“Two of them were kids, and I sent the Sudanese off with them to keep them out of trouble. Pay attention, Mits! Those first twenty-one are just to prepare the audience for the twenty-second. That’s mine. At least, that’s me delivering it—but it’s really for you.”

I hit the button. The screen jumped alive. There I was, looking serious and trouble-worn, with a stock shot of Port Kathy matted into the background. “My name,” my recorded voice told us, and the professional part of my mind thought,
not bad, not too pompous, talking a little too fast, though,
“my name is Tennison Tarb. I’m a star-class copysmith, and what you see behind me is one of the cities on Venus. See the people? They look just like us, don’t they? But they’re different from us in one way. They don’t like having their minds bent by advertising. Unfortunately that’s made things bad all around, because now they have their minds bent in a different way. They’ve come to hate us. They call us ‘hucks.’ They think we’re out to conquer them and force our advertising down their throats. This has made them as mean as any agency man, and the terrible part is that their suspicions are right. We sneak spies into their government. We send in teams of terrorists to sabotage their economy. And right now we’re planning to invade them with Campbellian limbic weaponry, the exact same way I saw us do just a little while ago in the Gobi Desert …”

“Oh, Tenny,” whispered Mitzi. “They’ll brainburn you.”

I nodded. “Yes, that’s what they’ll do, all right, if we fail.”

“But you’re bound to fail!”

Old habits die hard; much though I wanted to get straight with Mitzi, I couldn’t help casting a regretful glance at the screen—I was just getting into the best parts! But I said, “We’ll find that out pretty soon, Mits. Let’s see what they’re saying.” And, leaving the screen to run through the rest of my spot unnoticed, I punched up the headlines on my desk screen. The first half dozen were nothing but dire threats and sinister portents, just as before— but then there was one that made my heart leap:

City Stunned, Crowds Gather

And just below it:

Brinks Head Says Demonstration “Out of Control”

I didn’t bother with the text. I threw open the door to the outer office, where my trusty four were gathered around their desks. “What is it?” I called. “Are we getting a play? Check the news channels, will you?”

“A play! What do you think we’re looking at?” called Gert Martels, grinning. As the new wall panels flashed into life I saw what she was grinning about. The local stations had knocked themselves out with remotes to get reaction shots—and the reaction was huge.

“Jeez, Tenny,” Rockwell shouted, “it’s gridlock!” It just about was. The cameras of the news stations were roving from intersection to intersection—Times Square, Wall Street, Central Park Mall, Riverspace—and every one looked the same. It was morning run time, but traffic had come almost to a standstill while the city’s teeming millions listened on portables or watched the building-wall displays, and every one of them was listening to one of our commercials.

I could hardly breathe with excitement.

“The nets!” I called. “What’s going on in the rest of the country?”

“The same thing, Tenny,” said Gert Martels, and added, “Do you see what’s happening there, in the corner?”

We were looking at Union Square, and, yes, in the far right corner, there was a group that wasn’t just standing still with its jaws hanging. They were very busy indeed. They were methodically, brutally, ripping down a display screen.

“They’re tearing down our commercials,” I gasped.

“No, no, Tenny! That was a Kelpy-Crisp! And look over there—the limbic area? They’ve wrecked the projector!”

I felt Mitzi’s hand creep into mine as I stood there, and when I turned she was smiling mistily. “At least you’re getting an audience,” she said; and from the door a new voice said solemnly, “The biggest audience ever, Mr. Tarb.”

It was Dixmeister. Gert Martels had already drawn a stun-gun and it was leveled right at his head. He didn’t even look at her. His hands were empty. He said, “You’d better come upstairs, Mr. Tarb.”