“I got quite a burst of applause.
“‘You seem pretty sure of that,’ he says, weakly.
“‘I ought to be,’ I told him. ‘I’m in the Street.’
“‘Then there is no point in me arguing,’ he said, and just walked out.
“Somebody poured me another drink, and we got to talking. He was a pleasant, portly chap, looking like a banker or a broker. I didn’t recognize him, but I believe in establishing contacts. ‘Let me introduce myself,’ he said. ‘My name is Thaddeus Johnson.’
“I told him mine.
“‘Well, Mr. Smith,’ he said, ‘you seem to have confidence in the future of our country.’
“I told him I certainly did.
“‘Confident enough to bet on it?’
“‘At any odds you want to name, money, marbles, or chalk.’
“‘Then I have a proposition that might interest you.’
“I pricked up my ears. ‘What is it?’ I said.
“‘Could you take a little joyride with me?’ he said. ‘Between the saxophones and those Charleston-crazy kids, a man can’t hear himself think.’ I didn’t mind—those things don’t break up until 3 P.M.; I knew I could stand a spell of fresh air. He had a long, low wicked-looking Hispano-Suiza. Class.
“I must have dozed off. I woke up when we stopped at his place. He took me in and fixed me a drink and told me about the stasis—only he called it a ‘level-entropy field.’ And he showed it to me. He did a lot of stunts with it, put a cat in it, left it in while we killed a drink. It was all right.
“‘But that isn’t the half of it,’ he said. ‘Watch.’ He took the cat and threw it, right through where the field would be if it was turned on. When the cat was right spang in the center of the area, he threw the switch. We waited again, a little longer this time. Then he released the switch. The cat came sailing out, just the way it was heading when we saw it last. It landed, spitting and swearing.
“‘That was just to convince you,’ he said, ‘that inside that field, time doesn’t exist—no increase of entropy. The cat never knew the field was turned on.’
“Then he changed his tack. ‘Jack,’ he says, ‘what will the country be like in twenty-five years?’
“I thought about it. ‘The same—only more so,’ I decided.
“‘Think A.T.&T. will still be a good investment?’
“‘Certainly!’
“‘Jack,’ he says softly, ‘would you enter that field for ten shares of A.T.&T.?’
“‘For how long?’
“‘Twenty-five years, Jack.’
“Naturally, it takes a little time to decide a thing like that. Ten of A.T.&T. didn’t tempt me; he added ten of U.S.Steel. And he laid ’em out on the table. I was as sure as I’m standing here that the stock would be worth a lot more in a quarter of a century, and a kid fresh out of college doesn’t get blue chips to play with very easily. But a quarter of a century! It was like dying.
“When he added ten of National City, I said, ‘Look Mr. Johnson, let me try it for five minutes. If it didn’t kill the cat, I ought to be able to hold my breath that long.’
“He had been filling out the assignments in my name, just to tempt me. He said, ‘Surely, Jack.’ I stepped to the proper spot on the floor while I still had my courage up. I saw him reach for the switch.
“That’s all I know.”
Hamilton Felix sat up suddenly. “Huh? How’s that?”
“That’s all I know,” repeated Smith. “I started to tell him to go ahead, when I realized he wasn’t there any more. The room was filled with strangers, it was a different room. I was here. I was now.”
“That,” said Hamilton, “deserves another drink.”
They drank it in silence.
“My real trouble is this,” said Smith. “I don’t understand this world at all. I’m a business man, I’d like to go into business here. (Mind you, I’ve got nothing against this world, this period. It seems okay, but I don’t understand it.) I can’t go into business. Damn it, nothing works the same. All they taught me in school, all I learned on the Street, seems utterly foreign to the way they do business now.”
“I should think that business would be much the same in any age—fabrication, buying, selling.”
“Yes and no. I’m a finance man—and, damn it, finance is cockeyed nowadays!”
“I admit that the details are a little involved,” Hamilton answered, “but the basic principles are evident enough. Say—I’ve a friend coming over who is the chief mathematician for the department of finance. He’ll straighten you out.”
Smith shook his head decisively. “I’ve been experted to death. They don’t speak my lingo.”
“Well,” said Hamilton, “I might tackle the problem myself.”
“Would you? Please?”
Hamilton thought about it. It was one thing to kid sober-sided Clifford about his “money-machine”; another matter entirely to explain the workings of finance economics to…to the hypothetical Man from Arcturus. “Suppose we start this way,” he said. “It’s basically a matter of costs and prices. A business man manufactures something. That costs him money—materials, wages, housing, and so forth. In order to stay in business he has to get his costs back in prices. Understand me?”
“That’s obvious.”
“Fine. He has put into circulation an amount of money exactly equal to his costs.”
“Say that again.”
“Eh? It’s a simple identity. The money he has had to spend, put into circulation, is his costs.”
“Oh…but how about his profit?”
“His profit is part of his cost. You don’t expect him to work for nothing.”
“But profits aren’t costs. They’re…they’re profits.”
Hamilton felt a little baffled. “Have it your own way. Costs—what you rail ‘costs’—plus profit must equal price. Costs and profits are available as purchasing power to buy the product at a price exactly equal to them. That’s how purchasing power comes into existence.”
“But…but he doesn’t buy from himself.”
“He’s a consumer, too. He uses his profits to pay for his own and other producers’ products.”
“But he owns his own products.”
“Now you’ve got me mixed up. Forget about him buying his own products. Suppose he buys what he needs for himself from other business men. It comes out the same in the long run. Let’s get on. Production puts into circulation the amount of money—exactly—needed to buy the product. But some of that money put into circulation is saved and invested in new production. There it is a cost charge against the new production, leaving a net shortage in necessary purchasing power. The government makes up that shortage by issuing new money.”
“That’s the point that bothers me,” said Smith. “It’s all right for the government to issue money, but it ought to be backed by something—gold, or government bonds.”
“Why, in the Name of the Egg, should a symbol represent anything but the thing it is supposed to accomplish?”
“But you talk as if money was simply an abstract symbol.”
“What else is it?”
Smith did not answer at once. They had reached an impasse of different concepts, totally different orientations. When he did speak it was to another point. “But the government simply gives away all this new money. That’s rank charity. It’s demoralizing. A man should work for what he gets. But forgetting that aspect for a moment, you can’t run a government that way. A government is just like a business. It can’t be all outgo and no income.”
“Why can’t it? There’s no parallel between a government and a business. They are for entirely different purposes.”
“But it’s not sound. It leads to bankruptcy. Read Adam Smith.”
“I don’t know this Adam Smith. Relative of yours?”
“No, he’s a—Oh, Lord!”
“Crave pardon?”
“It’s no use,” Smith said. “We don’t speak the same ling
o.”
“I am afraid that is the trouble, really. I think perhaps you should go to see a corrective semantician.”
“Anyhow,” Smith said, one drink later, “I didn’t come here to ask you to explain finance to me. I came for another purpose.”
“Yes?”
“Well, you see I had already decided that I couldn’t go into finance. But I want to get to work, make some money. Everybody here is rich—except me.”
“Rich?”
“They look rich to me. Everybody is expensively dressed. Everybody eats well—Hell! They give food away—it’s preposterous.”
“Why don’t you live on the dividend? Why worry about money?”
“I could, of course, but, shucks, I’m a working man. There are business chances all around. It drives me nuts not to do something about them. But I can’t—I don’t know the ropes. Look—there is just one thing else besides finance that I know well. I thought you might be able to show me how to capitalize on it.”
“What is it?”
“Football.”
“Football?”
“Football. I’m told that you are the big man in games. Games ‘tycoon’ they called you.” Hamilton conceded it wordlessly. “Now football is a game. There ought to be money in it, handled right.”
“What sort of a game? Tell me about it.”
Smith went into a long description of the sport. He drew diagrams of plays, describing tackling, blocking, forward passing. He described the crowds and spoke of gate receipts. “It sounds very colorful,” Hamilton admitted. “How many men get killed in an engagement?”
“Killed? You don’t hurt anybody—barring a broken collar bone, or so.”
“We can change that. Wouldn’t it be better if the men defending the ball handlers were armored? Otherwise we would have to replace them with every maneuver.”
“No, you don’t understand. It’s—well…”
“I suppose I don’t,” Hamilton agreed, “I’ve never seen the game played. It’s a little out of my line. My games are usually mechanicals—wagering machines.”
“Then you aren’t interested?”
Hamilton was not, very. But he looked at the youth’s disappointed face and decided to stretch a point. “I’m interested, but it isn’t my line. I’ll put you in touch with my agent. I think he could work something out of it. I’ll talk with him first.”
“Say, that’s white of you!”
“I take it that means approval. It’s no trouble to me, really.”
The annunciator warned of a visitor—Monroe-Alpha. Hamilton let him in, and warned him, sotto voce, to treat Smith as an armed equal. Some time was consumed in polite formalities, before Monroe-Alpha got around to his enthusiasm. “I understand that your background is urban industrial, sir.”
“I was mostly a city boy, if that’s what you, mean.”
“Yes, that was the implication. I was hoping that you would be able to tell me something of the brave simple life that was just dying out in your period.”
“What do you mean? Country life?”
Monroe-Alpha sketched a short glowing account of his notion of rustic paradise. Smith looked exceedingly puzzled. “Mr. Monroe,” he said, “somebody has been feeding you a lot of cock-and-bull, or else I’m very much mistaken. I don’t recognize anything familiar in the picture.”
Monroe-Alpha’s smile was just a little patronizing. “But you were an urban dweller. Naturally the life is unfamiliar to you.”
“What you describe may be unfamiliar, but the circumstances aren’t. I followed the harvest two summers, I’ve done a certain amount of camping, and I used to spend my summers and Christmases on a farm when I was a kid. If you think there is anything romantic, or desirable per se, in getting along without civilized comforts, well, you just ought to try tackling a two-holer on a frosty morning. Or try cooking a meal on a wood-burning range.”
“Surely those things would simply stimulate a man. It’s the primitive, basic struggle with nature.”
“Did you ever have a mule step on your foot?”
“No, but—”
“Try it some time. Honest—I don’t wish to seem impertinent, but you have your wires crossed. The simple life is all right for a few days vacation, but day in and day out it’s just so much dirty back-breaking drudgery. Romantic? Hell, man, there’s no time to be romantic about it, and damned little incentive.”
Monroe-Alpha’s smile was a little bit forced. “Perhaps we aren’t talking about the same thing. After all, you came from a period when the natural life had already been sullied by over-emphasis on machines. Your evaluations were already distorted.”
Smith himself was beginning to get a little heated. “I hate to tell you, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. Country life in my day, miserable as it was, was tolerable in direct proportion to the extent to which it was backed by industrialization. They may not have had electric light and running water, but they had Sears Roebuck, and everything that implies.”
“Had what?” asked Hamilton.
Smith took time out to explain mail order shopping. “But what you’re talking about means giving up all that—just the noble primitive, simple and self-sufficient. He’s going to chop down a tree—who sold him the ax? He wants to shoot a deer—who made his gun? No, mister, I know what I’m talking about—I’ve studied economics.” (That to Monroe-Alpha, thought Hamilton, with a repressed grin.) “There never was and there never could be a noble simple creature such as you described. He’d be an ignorant savage, with dirt on his skin and lice in his hair. He would work sixteen hours a day to stay alive at all. He’d sleep in a filthy hut on a dirt floor. And his point of view and his mental processes would be just two jumps above an animal.”
Hamilton was relieved when the discussion was broken into by another chime from the annunciator. It was just as well—Cliff was getting a little white around the lips. He couldn’t take it. But, damn it, he had it coming to him. He wondered how a man could be as brilliant as Monroe-Alpha undoubtedly was—about figures—and be such a fool about human affairs.
The plate showed McFee Norbert. Hamilton would have liked not to have admitted him, but it was not politic. The worm had the annoying habit of dropping in on his underlings, which Hamilton resented, but was helpless to do anything about—as yet.
McFee behaved well enough, for McFee. He was visibly impressed by Monroe-Alpha, whose name and position he knew, but tried not to show it. Toward Smith he was patronizingly supercilious. “So you’re the man from out of the past? Well, well—how amusing! You did not time it very well.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ah, that would be telling! But ten years from now might have been a better time—eh, Hamilton?” He laughed.
“Perhaps,” Hamilton answered shortly, and tried to turn attention away from Smith. “You might talk to Monroe-Alpha about it. He thinks we could improve things.” He regretted the remark at once, for McFee turned to Monroe-Alpha with immediate interest.
“Interested in social matters, sir?”
“Yes—in a way.”
“So am I. Perhaps we can get together and talk.”
“It would be a pleasure, I’m sure, Felix, I must leave you now.”
“So must I,” McFee said promptly. “May I drop you off?”
“Don’t trouble.”
Hamilton broke in. “Did you wish to see me, McFee?”
“Nothing important. I hope to see you at the Club tonight.”
Hamilton understood the circumlocution. It was a direct order to report—at McFee’s convenience. McFee turned back to Monroe-Alpha, adding, “No trouble at all. Right on my way.”
Hamilton watched them leave together with vague discomfort.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Burn him down at once—”
LONGCOURT PHYLLIS showed up for a moment in the waiting room of the development center and spoke to Hamilton. “Hello, Filthy.”
“H’lo, Phil.”
“Be w
ith you in a moment. I’ve got to change.” She was dressed in complete coveralls, with helmet. An inhaler dangled loose about her neck.
“Okay.”
She returned promptly, dressed in more conventional and entirely feminine clothes. She was unarmed. He looked her over approvingly. “That’s better,” he said. “What was the masquerade?”
“Hmm? Oh, you mean the aseptic uniform. I’m on a new assignment—control naturals. You have to be terrifically careful in handling them. Poor little beggars!”
“Why?”
“You know why. They’re subject to infections. We don’t dare let them roll around in the dirt with the others. One little scratch, and anything can happen. We even have to sterilize their food.”
“Why bother? Why not let the weak ones die out?”
She looked annoyed. “I could answer that conventionally by saying that the control naturals are an invaluable reference plane for genetics—but I won’t. The real point is that they are human beings. They are just as precious to their parents as you were to yours, Filthy.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know my parents.”
She looked suddenly regretful. “Oh—Felix, I forgot!”
“No matter. I never could see,” he continued, “why you want to bury yourself in that cage of monkeys. It must be deadly.”
“Huh uh. Babies are fun. And they’re not much trouble. Feed ’em occasionally, help them when they need it, and love them a lot. That’s all there is to it.”
“I’ve always favored the bunghole theory myself.”
“The what?”
“You take the child at an early age and place it in a barrel. You feed it through the bunghole. At the age of seventeen, you drive in the bung.”
She grinned at him. “Filthy, for a nice man you have a nasty sense of humor. Seriously, your method leaves out the most essential part of a child’s rearing—the petting he gets from his nurses.”
“I don’t seem to recall much of it. I thought the basic idea was to take care of its physical needs and otherwise leave it strictly alone.”