“No way, Nelson! You’re just going to have to work it out one way or another with the San Jacinto Mint.”
“Mint? Who said anything about the mint?” he demanded. “This is something brand new —take a look!” And he pulled out of his pocket a little scrap of a picture in a cheap plastic frame. “It’s the Frameable Treasury Secretary Lithographed Portrait Series on Banknote-Quality Paper!” he declared proudly. “They’re pure gold, and all I need’s a hundred to get my subscription started. Make it two hundred and I can get in on the charter subscriptions for Cabinet-Sized All-Metal Renderings of Famous American Suspension Bridges—” I left him still talking while I headed for the bathroom to spruce up. Tikli-Talc on my chin, LuvMe in my armpits—it had been a long time between dates. I figured I ought to bring something, so on the way I stopped to pick up a couple of six-packs of Moke. Naturally the supermarket was crowded. Naturally the checkout lines were interminable. I took the shortest one I could find, but it just didn’t move. I craned past the stout lady with the full cart in front of me and saw that the checkout person was deeply involved in endless computations of discount coupons, special offers, rainchecks, scratch-a-line lottery tickets and the like, and, worse than that, the matron before me had at least twice as many clutched in her plump little fist. I groaned, and she turned to me with sympathy. “Don’t you just hate standing in these lines? Gosh, me too! That’s why I never go to Ultimaximarts any more.” She waved proudly at the holosigns: Speedy Service! Ultrafast Checkouts! We do everything to make shopping with us a joy!
“The thing is,” I said, “I’ve got a date.”
“Aw,” she said sympathetically, “so you’re in a hurry, of course. Tell you what. You help me sort out these coupons, and it’ll go a lot faster when I get to the desk. The thing is, see, I’ve got this thirty cents off on Kelpy Krisps, but the coupon’s only valid if I buy a ten-ounce tube of Glow-Tooth Double-Duty Dentifricial Analgesics, but they only had the fourteen-ounce size. Do you think they’ll accept that?” They wouldn’t, of course. That was a T., G. & S. promotion, and I knew we would never have issued those coupons except when the ten-ounce size was being discontinued. I was spared having to tell her that, though. A red light flashed, a klaxon sounded to chase her out of the way, the barrier slammed shut in her face and a display lit up to say:
We regret this Speedy Service Ultrafast Checkout Line is now closed. Please take your purchases to another of our counters for prompt attention from our friendly cashiers.
“Oh, hell, “ I groaned, staring unbelievingly at the sign. That was a mistake. It wrecked my timing.
One of the slogans I’d come across on the Religion account was “the last shall be first.” In this case, my hesitation made it true enough. The whole long line behind me broke and scattered and I was caught staring. That’s when the finely honed consuming skills that you’ve developed over a lifetime meet their test. The split-second decisions come on you without warning: which line to jump to? You’ve got a dozen independent variables to weigh, and not just the obvious ones. There are things like the number of persons in line, the number of items for each, the factor for number of coupons per item—that’s what you learn while you’re still hanging on the end of Mom’s cart with your thumb in your mouth and the can of Sweetees you’ve bawled your lungs out for clutched in your grubby little fist. Then you’ve got to learn to read the individual consumer. You look for the nervous twitching of the fingers that suggests this one may be close to a credit overdraft, so the whole line will crash shut while the Wackerhuts come to take him away. Or that other one sneaked a magnetic pen through the detectors to try to change a bonus offer. You’ve got to assign a value to each and integrate them, and then there’s the physical stuff you’ve practiced, feinting to the wrong line, pretending not to notice a shopping cart left to save a place, use of elbows—all that is standard survival stuff, but my skills were rusty from the years on Venus. I wound up at the tail end of a line longer than ever, and even Miss Fourteen-Ounce had squeezed in ahead of me.
Something had to be done.
I peered over her shoulder to study the baskets in the line ahead and worked out my tactics. “Oh, darn, “ I said as though to myself— but loud enough for all to hear, “I forgot the Vita-Smax.” Nobody had any. They couldn’t have. The line had been discontinued even before I left for Venus—some trouble about heavy-metal poisoning. Three steps ahead of me, an old man with a full double-decker cart glanced at me, nibbling at the bait.
I grinned at him and called, “Remember those grand old Vita-Smax commercials? ‘The All-American Cheese, Bran and Honey Breakfast Treat’?”
Miss Fourteen-Ounce looked up from her frantic inventorying of coupons. ” ‘Keeps You Regular—Tantalizes Your Tongue—Builds Health, Health, Health in Every Bite!’ ” she quoted. “Gee! I haven’t had Vita-Smax in a long time! We used to call it the milk and honey cereal.” Besides the heavy metals, the simulated milk solids had caused liver damage and the synthetic sucrose syrup rotted the teeth, but naturally no one would remember a thing like that.
“Mom used to make them every morning,” said another woman dreamily.
I had them on the tip. I chuckled ruefully. “Mine too. I could kick myself for not picking up a box or two from the stack in Gourmet Foods.”
Heads turned. “I didn’t see any Vita-Smax there,” the old man argued querulously.
“Really? The big stack under the sign that said, ‘Buy 1 Get 1 Free’?” The line quivered. “With the special double-allowance coupon reintroductory offer?” I added, and that was what did it. They broke. Every one of them pulled carts out of line, racing for Gourmet Foods. Suddenly I was face to face with the checker. She’d been listening too, and I had to beg her to take my money before she ran after them.
All the same I was late. I almost trotted the last couple of blocks to Mitzi’s place. The smog and exertion had me gasping and sweating by the time I got there—good-by LuvMe.
When I got past the doorthing I was startled to see what kind of a pad Mitzi lived in. I don’t mean that it was fancy—I would have expected that, considering her current credit rating. On the contrary, what hit me in the eye when Mitzi let me in was its starkness.
It certainly was not poverty that made it so peculiarly bare. You don’t get a four-hundred-square-foot flat in a building with twenty-four-hour reflex-conditioned attack guards without paying through the nose for it—I would have known that even if I hadn’t known about all that Veenie damage money. The surprising thing was that splurging had stopped with the pad itself. No RotaBath. No tanks of tropical fish. No—well, no anything at all to show her status. She didn’t even have Nelson Rockwell’s pathetic busts or commemorative medallions. A few pieces of furniture, a small Omni-V set in a corner—that was about it. And the decor was peculiar. It was all hot reds and yellows, and on one wall there was a huge static mural—not even liquid crystal—which I puzzled over for a moment before I recognized it. Sure enough, it was a rendering of that famous scene in Venusian history when they put the first big Hilsch tube on top of the tallest mountain in the Freysa range, to blow the noxious gases out into orbit as they began reducing the atmosphere to something people could stand.
“Sorry I’m late,” I apologized, staring at the mural, “but there was a long line at the supermarket.” I held up the Mokie-Kokes as explanation.
“Aw, Tenny, we don’t need that swill.” Then she bit her lip. “Come on in the kitchen while I finish dinner, and you can tell me how things are going for you.”
To my surprise, she put me to work While I talked. To a surprise bigger still, the work was peeling potatoes! I mean, raw vegetable potatoes—some of them still had dirt on them! “Where’d you get these things?” I asked, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do to “peel” them.
“Money will get you anything,” she said, shredding some other raw unprocessed vegetables, orange and green colored ones this time. It wasn’t exactly an answer, since I hadn’t really wonde
red where, or even how, but why?
I was brought up polite, though. I really did eat quite a lot of her dinner, even the raw roots and leaves she called salad, and I didn’t say anything critical at all. Well, not critical. I did, after a while, when the conversation seemed to be limping along, ask if she really liked that stuff.
Mitzi was chomping away with a faraway look in her eyes, but she collected herself. “Like it? Of course I like it! It’s—” She paused, as though something had occurred to her. “It’s healthy, “ she said.
“I thought it must be,” I said politely.
“No, really! There are some new, uh, studies, not yet published, that show that. For example, did you know that processed foods may cause memory deficiencies?”
“Aw, come on, Mitzi,” I grinned. “Nobody would sell consumers things that did them harm.”
She gave me a quizzical look. “Well, not on purpose,” she said, “maybe. But these are new studies. Tell you what. Let’s test it out!”
“Test what out?”
“Test out whether your diet has screwed up your memory, damn it,” she flared. “We’ll try a little experiment to see how much you remember about something and, uh, I’ll tape it so we can check it over.”
It did not sound like a very fun game to me, but I was still trying to be polite. “Why not?”
I said. “Let’s see. Suppose I give you the annual billings of the Agency for the past fifteen years, broken down for—”
“No, nothing that dull,” she complained. “I know! Let’s see how much you remember about what was going on in the Embassy on Venus. Some particular aspect—I don’t know —sure! Let’s hear everything you remember about the spy ring I was running.”
“Ah, but that’s not fair!” I protested. “You were doing the actual running, all I know is bits and pieces.”
“We’ll make allowances for that,” she promised, and I shrugged.
“All right. Well, for a starter, you had twenty-three active agents and about a hundred and fifty free lancers and part-timers— most of them weren’t actual agents, at least they didn’t know who they were working for.”
“Names, Tenny!”
I looked at her in surprise—she was taking this pretty seriously. “Well, there was Glenda Pattison in the Park Department, she was the one who got the defective parts in the new powerplant. Al Tischler, from Learoyd City— I don’t know what he did, but I remember him because he was so short for a Veenie. Margaret Tucsnak, the doctor that put anticonception pills in with the aspirins. Mike Vaccaro, the prison guard from the Pole—say, should I count Hamid or not?”
“Hamid?”
“The grek,” I explained. “The one that I tricked old Harriman into taking as a bona-fide political refugee. Of course, you left before he got to make contact, so I don’t know whether I should include him on the list. But I’m surprised you don’t remember him.” I grinned. “You’ll be saying you don’t remember Hay next,” I ventured. Bafflingly, she looked puzzled even at that. “Jesus Maria Lopez, for God’s sake,” I said, exasperated, and she looked at me opaquely for a moment.
Then she said, “That’s all back on Venus, Tenny. He’s there. We’re here.”
“That a girl!” Things were looking up. I moved closer to her, and she looked at me almost invitingly. But there was still the ghost of a scowl on her face. I reached up and touched her frown lines; they seemed actually sculpted into her brow. “Mitzi,” I said tenderly, “you’re working too hard.”
She flinched away almost angrily from my hand, but I persisted. “No, really. You’re—I don’t know. More tired. More mellow, too.” She was; my brassy lady was bronze now. Even her voice was deeper and softer.
And, as a matter of fact, I liked her better that way. She said, “Keep going with the names, please?” But she smiled when she said it.
“Why not? Theiller, Weeks, Storz, the Yurkewitch brothers—how’m I doing so far?” She was biting her lip—vexed, I thought, because my memory was pretty good after all. “Just go on,” she said. “There’s plenty more.” So I did. Actually I only remembered about a dozen names, but she agreed to accept my remembering some of the agents just by where they worked and what they did for her, and when I wasn’t just sure of something she helped out by asking questions until I got it straight. But it went on so long! “Let’s try something else,” I offered. “For instance, let’s see which of us can remember more about the last night we spent together.”
She smiled absently. “In a minute, Tenn, but first, this person from Myers-White who spoiled the wheat crop—”
I laughed out loud. “Mitzi dear,” I said, “the Myers-White agent was growing rice; it was at Nevindale that they messed up the wheat crop! See? If diet messes up memory, maybe you ought to switch to Kelpy Crisps!”
She was biting her lip again, and for a moment her expression was not friendly at all. Funny. I’d never thought of Mitzi as a sore loser. Then she smiled and surrendered, clicking off the recorder. “I guess you’ve proved your point, dear,” she said, and patted the couch beside her. “Why don’t you come over here and collect your winnings?” And so it turned out that we had a nice time after all.
III
The nice time didn’t get repeated very rapidly, though. Mitzi didn’t leave any more messages for me. I called her a few times—she was friendly enough, to be sure—she was also, she explained, really busy, and maybe some time next week, Tenn, dear, or anyway right after the first of the month—
Of course, I had plenty to keep me busy. I was doing very well on the Religion account, and even Desmond Haseldyne was flattering. But I wanted to see Mitzi. Not just for the sake of, well, you know, the things for the sake of which I’d got interested in her in the first place. There were other things.
A couple of times when I went into Haseldyne’s office, he was making mysterious private calls, and I had the funny idea that some of them were to Mitzi. And I saw him, along with Val Dambois and Mitzi and the Old Man himself, in a huddle in a fast-food place a long way from the Agency. It wasn’t a place where executives went for dinner. It wasn’t even a place where junior copy trainees like me went for dinner very often, but it happened to be near Columbia Advertising & Promotion University. When they saw me it obviously shook them up. They were all in on something together. I didn’t know what. None of my business, maybe—but it hurt me that Mitzi didn’t tell me what it was. I went on to my Columbia class—that was the creative writing one—and that whole evening I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention.
That was the best of the courses I was taking, too. Creative writing is really—well—creative. At the beginning of the course the professor told us that it was only in our time that the subject had been taught in a reasonable way. In the old days, she said, creative-writing students would just sort of make things up themselves, and the teachers would have to try to distinguish how much of what was good, or bad, about a paper was the idea or how the ideas were expressed. And yet, she said, they had the example of art courses for hundreds of years to show them the right way to do it. Aspiring artists had always been set to copy the works of Cezanne and Rembrandt and Warhol in order to learn their craft, while all aspiring writers were urged to create was their own blather. Handy word-processors changed all that, and so the first assignment she gave us was to rewrite A Midsummer Night’s Dream in modern English. And I got an A.
Well, from then on I was teacher’s pet, and she let me do all sorts of extracredit themes. There was a good chance, she said, that I would pass her course with the highest mark ever attained, and you know that sort of thing can do you nothing but good when it comes time to add up your degree credits. So I took on some pretty ambitious projects. The hardest one, I guess, was to rewrite all of The Remembrance of Things Past in the style of Ernest Hemingway, changing the locale to Germany in the time of Hitler and presenting it as a one-act play.
That sort of thing was well beyond the capacity of any equipment I had in my little shared-time condo, no
t to mention that my roomies were likely to interrupt me, so I took to staying after work now and then to use the big machines in the copy consoles. I had set sentence length for not more than six words, dialed introspection down to 5 percent and programmed playscript format, and I was just getting set to run the program when I ran out of Mokes. The soft-drink machine had nothing but our own Agency brands in it, of course. I had tried them before; they didn’t satisfy the craving. I had the idea that I’d seen a Mokie-Koke bottle in the wastebasket in Desmond Haseldyne’s office once—I suppose it was jus my imagination—so I wandered over in that direction.
Somebody was in his office. I could hear voices; the lights were on; the data processors had their hoods off and were running some sort of financial programs. I would have turned quietly away and gone back to my copy console, except that one of the voices was Mitzi’s.
Curiosity was my undoing.
I paused to look at the programs running on the machines. At first I thought it was a projection for some sort of investment plan, for it was all about stock holdings and percentages of total shares outstanding. But it seemed to make a pattern. I stood up, deciding to get out of there—
And made the mistake of trying to leave inconspicuously through the darkened offices on the other side of the processors. They had been locked for the night. Nothing kept me from entering, but the break-in trap had been set. I heard a great, hollow hissing, like the sound of the Hilsch tubes around Port Kathy, and a huge cloud of white blew up around me. I’d been foamed! I could see nothing at all. The foam allowed me to breathe, but it did not allow me to see, not anything at all. I stumbled around for a moment, bashing into chairs, bumping over desks.
Then I surrendered to the foam and just stood there, waiting. And while I waited, I thought.
By the time I heard someone approaching I had figured it out.