“What’s she want?” Allen asked. Presumably, she had learned that Mavis was taking the Agency’s output, and that the Agency was relatively new. With a sinking dread he anticipated one of the Committee’s gloomy, protracted investigations. “Better have Doris block my incoming calls.” Doris was one of his secretaries. “You take over until Mrs. Frost and I are through talking.”
Luddy followed after him in a dance of prayer. “Good luck, Allen. I’ll hold the fort for you. If you want the books—”
“Yes, I’ll call you.” He opened the office door, and there was Sue Frost.
She was tall, and she was rather large-boned and muscular. Her suit was a simple hard weave, dark gray in color. She wore a flower in her hair, and she was altogether a strikingly handsome woman. At a guess, she was in her middle fifties. There was little or no softness to her, nothing of the fleshy and over-dressed motherliness that he saw in so many Committee women. Her legs were long, and, as she rose to her feet, her right hand lifted to welcome him in a forthright—almost masculine—handshake.
“Hello, Mr. Purcell,” she said. Her voice was not overly expressive. “I hope you don’t mind my showing up this way, unannounced.”
“Not at all,” he murmured. “Please sit down.”
She reseated herself, crossed her legs, contemplated him. Her eyes, he noticed, were an almost colorless straw. A strong kind of substance, and highly polished.
“Cigarette?” He extended his case, and she accepted a cigarette with a nod of thanks. He took one also, feeling like a gauche young man in the company of an older and more experienced woman.
He couldn’t help thinking that Sue Frost was the type of urbane career woman ultimately not proposed to by the hero of Blake-Moffet’s packets. There was an unsympathetic firmness about her. She was decidedly not the girl from next door.
“Undoubtedly,” Sue Frost began, “you recognize this.” She unraveled the winding of a manila folder and displayed a sheaf of script. On the cover of the sheaf was his Agency’s stamp; she had one of his packets, and she evidently had been reading it.
“Yes,” he admitted. “That’s one of ours.”
Sue Frost leafed through the packet, then laid it down on Allen’s desk. “Myron accepted this last month. Then he had qualms and he sent it along the line to me. I had a chance to go over it this weekend.”
Now the packet was turned so that Allen could catch the title. It was a high-quality piece he had personally participated in; as it stood it could have gone over any of T-M’s media.
“Qualms,” Allen said. “How do you mean?” He had a deep, cold sensation, as if he were involved in some eerie religious ritual. “If the packet won’t go, then turn it back to us. We’ll create a credit; we’ve done it before.”
“The packet is beautifully handled,” Mrs. Frost said, smoking. “No, Myron certainly didn’t want it back. Your theme concerns this man’s attempt to grow an apple tree on a colony planet. But the tree dies. The Morec of it is—” She again picked up the packet. “I’m not certain what the Morec is. Shouldn’t he have tried to grow it?”
“Not there,” Allen said.
“You mean it belonged on Earth?”
“I mean he should have been working for the good of society, not off somewhere nourishing a private enterprise. He saw the colony as an end in itself. But they’re means. This is the center.”
“Omphalos,” she agreed. “The navel of the universe. And the tree—”
“The tree symbolizes an Earth product that withers when it’s transplanted. His spiritual side died.”
“But he couldn’t have grown it here. There’s no room. It’s all city.”
“Symbolically,” he explained. “He should have put down his roots here.”
Sue Frost was silent for a moment, and he sat smoking uneasily, crossing and uncrossing his legs, feeling his tension grow, not diminish. Nearby, in another office, the switchboard buzzed. Doris’ typewriter clacked.
“You see,” Sue Frost said, “this conflicts with a fundamental. The Committee has put billions of dollars and years of work into outplanet agriculture. We’ve done everything possible to seed domestic plants in the colonies. They’re supposed to supply us with our food. People realize it’s a heartbreaking task, with endless disappointments…and you’re saying that the outplanet orchards will fail.”
Allen started to speak and then changed his mind. He felt absolutely defeated. Mrs. Frost was gazing at him searchingly, expecting him to defend himself in the usual fashion.
“Here’s a note,” she said. “You can read it. Myron’s note on this, when it came to me.”
The note was in pencil and went:
“Sue—
The same outfit again. Top-drawer, but too coy.
You decide.
M.”
“What’s he mean?” Allen said, now angered.
“He means the Morec doesn’t come across.” She leaned toward him. “Your Agency has been in this only three years. You started out very well. What do you currently gross?”
“I’d have to see the books.” He got to his feet. “May I get Luddy in here? I’d like him to see Myron’s note.”
“Certainly,” Mrs. Frost said.
Fred Luddy entered the office stiff-legged with apprehension. “Thanks,” he muttered, as Allen gave him the packet. He read the note, but his eyes showed no spark of consciousness. He seemed tuned to invisible vibrations; the meaning reached him through the tension of the air, rather than the pencilled words.
“Well,” he said finally, in a daze. “You can’t win them all.”
“We’ll take this packet back, naturally.” Allen began to strip the note from it, but Mrs. Frost said:
“Is that your only response? I told you we want it; I made that clear. But we can’t take it in the shape it’s in. I think you should know that it was my decision to give your Agency the go-ahead. There was some dispute, and I was brought in from the first.” From the manila folder she took a second packet, a familiar one. “Remember this? May, 2112. We argued for hours, Myron liked this, and I liked it. Nobody else did. Now Myron has cold feet.” She tossed the packet, the first the Agency had ever done, onto the desk.
After an interval Allen said: “Myron’s getting tired.”
“Very.” She nodded agreeably.
Hunched over, Fred Luddy said: “Maybe we’ve been going at it too fast.” He cleared his throat, cracked his knuckles and glanced at the ceiling. Drops of warm sweat sparkled in his hair and along his smoothly-shaved jowls. “We kind of got—excited.”
Speaking to Mrs. Frost, Allen said: “My position is simple. In that packet, we made the Morec that Earth is the center. That’s the real fundamental, and I believe it. If I didn’t believe it I couldn’t have developed the packet. I’ll withdraw the packet but I won’t change it. I’m not going to preach morality without practicing it.”
Quakily, in a spasm of agonized back-pedalling, Luddy muttered: “It’s not a moral question, Al. It’s a question of clarity. The Morec of that packet doesn’t come across.” His voice had a ragged, guilty edge; Luddy knew what he was doing and he was ashamed. “I—see Mrs. Frost’s point. Yes I do. It looks as if we’re scuttling the agricultural program, and naturally we don’t mean that. Isn’t that so, Al?”
“You’re fired,” Allen said.
They both stared at him. Neither of them grasped that he was serious, that he had really done it.
“Go tell Doris to make out your check.” Allen took the packet from the desk and held onto it. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Frost, but I’m the only person qualified to speak for the Agency. We’ll credit you for this packet and submit another. All right?”
She stubbed out her cigarette, rising, at the same time, to her feet. “It’s your decision.”
“Thanks,” he said, and felt a release of tension. Mrs. Frost understood his stand, and approved. And that was crucial.
“I’m sorry,” Luddy muttered, ashen. “That was a mistake on my p
art. The packet is fine. Perfectly sound as it now exists.” Plucking at Allen’s sleeve, he drew him off in the corner. “I admit I made a mistake.” His voice sank to a jumpy whisper. “Let’s discuss this further. I was simply trying to develop one possible viewpoint among many. You want me to express myself; I mean, it seems senseless to penalize me for working in the best interests of the Agency, as I see it.”
“I meant what I said,” Allen said.
“You did?” Luddy laughed. “Naturally you meant it. You’re the boss.” He was shaking. “You really weren’t kidding?”
Collecting her coat, Mrs. Frost moved toward the door. “I’d like to look over your Agency while I’m here. Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” Allen said. “I’d be glad to show it to you. I’m quite proud of it.” He opened the door for her, and the two of them walked out into the hall. Luddy remained in the office, a sick, erratic look on his face.
“I don’t care for him,” Mrs. Frost said. “I think you’re better off without him.”
“That wasn’t any fun,” Allen said. But he was feeling better.
3
In the hall outside Myron Mavis’ office, the Telemedia workers were winding up their day. The T-M building formed a connected hollow square. The open area in the center was used for outdoor sets. Nothing was in process now, because it was five-thirty and everybody was leaving.
From a pay phone, Allen Purcell called his wife. “I’ll be late for dinner,” he said.
“Are—you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “But you go ahead and eat. Big doings, big crisis at the Agency. I’ll catch something down here.” He added, “I’m at Telemedia.”
“For very long?” Janet asked anxiously.
“Maybe for a long, long time,” he said, and hung up.
As he rejoined Sue Frost, she said to him, “How long did Luddy work for you?”
“Since I opened the Agency.” The realization was sobering: three years. Presently he added: “That’s the only person I’ve ever let go.”
At the back of the office, Myron Mavis was turning over duplicates of the day’s output to a bonded messenger of the Committee. The duplicates would be put on permanent file; in case of an investigation the material was there to examine.
To the formal young messenger, Mrs. Frost said: “Don’t leave. I’m going back; you can go with me.”
The young man retired discreetly with his armload of metal drums. His uniform was the drab khaki of the Cohorts of Major Streiter, a select body composed of male descendants of the founder of Morec.
“A cousin,” Mrs. Frost said. “A very distant cousin-in-law on my father’s side.” She nodded toward the young man, whose face was as expressionless as sand. “Ralf Hadler. I like to keep him around.” She raised her voice. “Ralf, go find the Getabout. It’s parked somewhere in back.”
The Cohorts, either singly or in bunches, made Allen uncomfortable; they were humorless, as devout as machines, and, for their small number, they seemed to be everywhere. His fantasy was that the Cohorts were always in motion; in the course of one day, like a foraging ant, a member of the Cohorts roamed hundreds of miles.
“You’ll come along,” Mrs. Frost said to Mavis.
“Naturally,” Mavis murmured. He began clearing his desk of unfinished work. Mavis was an ulcer-mongerer, a high-strung worrier with rumpled shirt and baggy, unpressed tweeds, who flew into fragments when things got over his head. Allen recalled tangled interviews that had ended with Mavis in despair and his staff scurrying. If Mavis was going to be along, the next few hours would be hectic.
“We’ll meet you at the Getabout,” Mrs. Frost said to him. “Finish up here, first. We’ll wait.”
As she and Allen walked down the hall, Allen observed: “This is a big place.” The idea of an organ—even a government organ—occupying an entire building struck him as grandiose. And much of it was underground. Telemedia, like cleanliness was next to God; after T-M came the secretaries and the Committee itself.
“It’s big,” Mrs. Frost agreed, striding along the hall and holding her manila folder against her chest with both hands. “But I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
Cryptically, she said: “Maybe it should be smaller. Remember what became of the giant reptiles.”
“You mean curtail its activities?” He tried to picture the vacuum that would be created. “And what instead?”
“Sometimes I toy with the idea of slicing T-M into a number of units, interacting, but separately run. I’m not sure one person can or should take responsibility for the whole.”
“Well,” Allen said, thinking of Mavis, “I suppose it cuts into his life-expectancy.”
“Myron has been Director of T-M for eight years. He’s forty-two and he looks eighty. He’s got only half a stomach. Someday I expect to phone and discover he’s holed up at the Health Resort, doing business from there. Or from Other World, as they call that sanitarium of theirs.”
“That’s a long way off,” Allen said. “Either place.”
They had come to the door leading out, and Mrs. Frost halted. “You’ve been in a position to watch T-M. What do you think of it? Be honest with me. Would you call it efficient?”
“The part I see is efficient.”
“What about the output? It buys your packets and it frames them for a medium. What’s your reaction to the end result? Is the Morec garbled along the line? Do you feel your ideas survive projection?”
Allen tried to recall when he had last sat through a T-M concoction. His Agency monitored as a matter of routine, collecting its own duplicates of the items based on its packets. “Last week,” he said, “I watched a television show.”
The woman’s gray eyebrows lifted mockingly. “Half hour? Or entire hour?”
“The program was an hour but we saw only a portion of it. At a friend’s apartment. Janet and I were over playing Juggle, and we were taking a break.”
“You don’t mean you don’t own a television set.”
“The people downstairs are domino for my block. They tumble the rest of us. Apparently the packets are getting over.”
They walked outside and got into the parked Getabout. Allen calculated that this zone, in terms of leasing, was in the lowest possible range: between 1 and 14. It was not crowded.
“Do you approve of the domino method?” Mrs. Frost asked as they waited for Mavis.
“It’s certainly economical.”
“But you have reservations.”
“The domino method operates on the assumption that people believe what their group believes, no more and no less. One unique individual would foul it up. One man who originated his own idea, instead of getting it from his block domino.”
Mrs. Frost said: “How interesting. An idea out of nothing.”
“Out of the individual human mind,” Allen said, aware that he wasn’t being politic, but feeling, at the same time, that Mrs. Frost respected him and really wanted to hear what he had to offer. “A rare situation,” he admitted. “But it could occur.”
There was a stir outside the car. Myron Mavis, a bulging briefcase under his arm, and the Cohort of Major Streiter, his young face stern and his messenger parcel chained to his belt, had arrived.
“I forgot about you,” Mrs. Frost said to her cousin, as the two men got in. The Getabout was small, and there was barely room for all of them. Hadler was to drive. He started up the motor—powered by pile-driven steam—and the car moved cautiously along the lane. Along the route to the Committee building, they passed only three other Getabouts.
“Mr. Purcell has a criticism of the domino method,” Mrs. Frost said to Myron Mavis.
Mavis grunted unintelligibly, then blinked bloodshot eyes and roused himself. “Uhuh,” he muttered. “Fine.” He began pawing through a pocketful of papers. “Let’s go back to five-minute spots. Hit ’em, hit ’em.”
Behind the tiller, young Hadler sat very straight and rigid, his chin out-jutti
ng. He gripped the tiller as a person walked across the lane ahead. The Getabout had reached a speed of twenty miles an hour, and all four of them were uneasy.
“We should either fly,” Mavis grated, “or walk. Not this halfway business. All we need now is a couple of bottles of beer, and we’re back in the old days.”
“Mr. Purcell believes in the unique individual,” Mrs. Frost said.
Mavis favored Allen with a glance. “The Resort has that on its mind, too. An obsession, day and night.”
“I always assumed that was window dressing,” Mrs. Frost said. “To lure people into going over.”
“People go over because they’re noose,” Mavis declared. Noose was a derisive term contracted from neuro-psychiatric. Allen disliked it. It had a blind, savage quality that made him think of the old hate terms, nigger and kike. “They’re weak, they’re misfits, they can’t take it. They haven’t got the moral fiber to stick it out here; like babies, they want pleasure. They want candy and bottled pop. Comic books from mama Health Resort.”
On his face was an expression of great bitterness. The bitterness was like a solvent that had eaten through the wasted folds of flesh, exposing the bone. Allen had never seen Mavis so weary and discouraged.
“Well,” Mrs. Frost said, also noticing, “we don’t want them anyway. It’s better they should go over.”
“I sometimes wonder what they do with all those people,” Allen said. Nobody had accurate figures on the number of renegades who had fled to the Resort; because of the onus, the relatives preferred to state that the missing individual had gone to the colonies. Colonists were, after all, only failures; a noose was a voluntary expatriate who had declared himself an enemy of moral civilization.
“I’ve heard,” Mrs. Frost said conversationally, “that incoming supplicants are set to work in vast slave-labor camps. Or was that the Communists who did that?”
“Both,” Allen said. “And with the revenue, the Resort is building a vast empire in outer space to dominate the universe. Huge robot armies, too. Women supplicants are—” He concluded briefly: “Ill-used.”