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.”
My first thought was my worst thought. “A Fair Practices squadron?” I guessed. “They’re canceling the spots? They’ve got a counterinjunction—?”
He frowned. “Nothing like that, Mr. Tarb. Gosh! I’ve never seen such hourlies! Every one of the campaign spots is drawing optimum-plus-fifty responses, the March of Dollars is swamped with pledges—no, no, it’s not a bust.”
“Then what, Dixmeister?” I cried.
He said uncertainly, “It’s all those people. You’d better come up and see.”
And so I did, and from the second floor of the Agency building I could look out over the street, the square, the windows opposite. And every inch was packed with people.
The funny thing is that even so I couldn’t believe it at first. I thought they were a lynch mob—until I heard them cheering.
And the rest of the world? RussCorp, Indiastries, S.A.2—all of them? You begin to hear cheering there, too; and where it will end I know not. Old habits die hard for nations as well as individuals. Monoliths are hard to demolish.
But they’ve started unloading the shuttles in Arizona again, and the monolith has begun to crack.
Table of Contents
TENNISON TARB
I
II
III
TARB'S HOMECOMING
I
II
III
IV
V
TARB'S DOWNFALL
I
II
III
TARB IN PURGATORY
I
II
III
THE FALSE MITSUI KU
I
II
THE TRUE TENNISON TARB
I
II
III
Frederik Pohl, The Merchants' War
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