We knew.
When I wasn’t doing jumps and jerks or having my head rebent I was eating—every ten minutes, it seemed. Plain food, healthy food, like Bredd and ReelMeet and Tangy-Joose, and no argument. I cleaned off my plate every time, or it was, you guessed it, another fifty push-ups for dessert. Not that fifty extra push-ups made that much difference. I was doing four or five hundred a day, plus squats and sit-ups and bendings-and-touchings, and forty laps a day in the pool strip. There was only room for three of us to swim abreast, and they handicapped us so we three were pretty even in skill—guess what the loser got? Of course he did. The forty of us dropped to thirty-one, to twenty-five, to twenty-two … The one that hit me hardest was Marie. She’d actually lost forty pounds or so, and was beginning to be able to eat her “meals”—vitamins and protein bars, and not much of them— without whimpering, when on the twelfth day, scrambling up the nets, she gasped and choked and rolled to the ground. She was dead. She wasn’t permanently dead, because they wheeled out the heart shocker and whisked her off in a pneumatic three-wheel ambulance, but she was too dead to come back to our group.
And all the time my nerves were crawling inside my skin, and what I wanted to do more than anything else was to conk the medication nurse over the skull, take away his keys and get into the locked cabinet of long green pills.
But I didn’t.
The funny thing was that, after two weeks, down to one quarter-strength cap a day, I actually began to feel a little bit better. Not good. Just less bad, less strung out, less Jesus-I’d-kill-for-a-cap. “False well-being,” Paleologue panted wisely when I said as much to him, just out of the pool, waiting to start our two-mile run. “You’ll hit these temporary plateaus, but they don’t mean anything. I’ve seen you Campbellian-syndrome people before.”
And I laughed at him. I knew better; it was my own body, wasn’t it? I could even spare time for thinking about something beyond long green pills—even got as far as the line for the one public phone, once, with every intention of calling Mitzi. And would have, too, if one of those nausea fits hadn’t driven me to the communijohn, and then there wasn’t time to sweat the line again.
And two more weeks passed, and it was the end of Phase One. The unpleasant part.
Silly me. I hadn’t asked our instructor what the second part was going to be like. I had happily, hopefully, assumed that if Phase One was described as unpleasant then Phase Two would be described best as something like at least okay.
That was before I encountered aversion therapy and final withdrawal, and found out that Phase Two certainly was not anything you would call unpleasant. It was way beyond unpleasant. The best term I can think of for it was just your ordinary plain hell.
I guess I don’t want to talk any more about Phase Two because, every time I do, I start to shake; but I got through it. As the poisons got out of my body they seemed to get out of my head, too. By the time the director shook my hand and put me on a rocket back to the world —conscious, this time—I felt—still not good— more sad than good—more angry than sad— but, for the first time maybe in my life, rational.
THE TRUE TENNISON TARB
I
You lose track of the seasons in Phase Two, because one is as bad as the next. When I got back to the city I was surprised to find that it was still summery, though the tree in Central Park had begun to turn. Sweat streamed down the back of my pedicab pusher. The ear-shattering traffic din of yells and squeals and crunches was underlaid with the pusher’s hacking, sooty cough. There was a smog alert, of course. Of course my pedaler wasn’t wearing a face-filter anyway, because you can’t get enough air through a filter to keep your speed up in heavy traffic. As we rounded the Circle into Broadway, a six-man armored bank van swerved right in front of us; dodging them, the pedaler slipped on the greasy fallout and for a moment I thought the whole rig was going over. She turned a scared face to me. ” ‘Scuse it, mister,” she panted. “Those damn trucks don’t give you a chance!”
“As a matter of fact,” I called, “it’s such a nice day that I’m thinking of walking the rest of the way anyway.” Of course she looked at me as though I were insane, especially when I ordered her to pace me empty in case I should change my mind about walking. When I paid her off with a big tip at the Haseldyne & Ku Building she was sure I was insane. She couldn’t wait to get away. But the sweat had dried on her back and she was hardly coughing at all.
I had never done anything like that before.
I waved absently at the colleagues I recognized as I entered the building. They were looking at me with varying degrees of astonishment, but I was busy being astonished at myself. Something had happened to me at the Detox Center. I had come back with more than the bruises from the jabs of vitamin spray and the distaste for long green pills. I had come back with some new accessories inside my head. What they were exactly I didn’t yet know, but one of them seemed to want to answer to the name “conscience.”
When I walked into my office Dixmeister was as pop-eyed as anyone. “Gosh, Mr. Tarb,” he marveled, “you look so healthy! That vacation sure must have done you a lot of good.”
I nodded. He was only telling me what the scales and the mirror had been telling me the last few mornings. I’d gained back twenty pounds. I didn’t shake. I didn’t even feel shaky; even the flashing commercials and glitter-bang posters hadn’t awakened any cravings on the way to the office. “Carry on,” I told him. “I’ve got to report to Mitzi Ku before I take over here.”
That was not easy. She wasn’t there the first time I tried. She wasn’t there the second, and when I caught her at last on the third round trip between her office and mine she was there all right, but just on the point of leaving. “Mr. Haseldyne’s waiting,” her sec3 warned, but Mitzi tarried. She closed the door. We kissed. Then she stood back.
She looked at me. I looked at her. She said to me with wistful surprise, “Tenny, you are looking fine. “
I said to her, “Mitzi, you are looking fine, too,” and added for truth’s sake, “to me.” For in fact Mitzi’s morning mirror would not have been as kind as mine. She was looking terribly worn, in fact, but the subjective fact behind those facts was that I didn’t care how she looked as long as she was there. With her complexion, the circles under her eyes were not emphatic. But they were there: she’d missed sleep, maybe even had missed some meals … and she still looked to me quite splendid. “Was it awful, Tenny?”
“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—t
he 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 sec3 said her sec2 had told her Ms. Ku would be out all morning, along with her sec1. 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 sec1‘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 sec3 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 sec3, 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.”