The Merchants' War

  So I crept back to my office and my shamefaced S/Sgt Gert Martels. “Tenny,” she began in embarrassment.

  I snapped, “Lieutenant Tarb, Sergeant!” Her face flushed dark red and she came to a hard brace. “Yes, sir. I only want to offer to apologize to the lieutenant for my, uh, my—”

  “Your revolting behavior, you mean,” I lectured. “Sergeant, your conduct is shocking. You’d be a disgrace to the uniform even as—ah—as a private, but you’re a noncommissioned officer …” I stopped, because there was an echo in the room. Or in my head. I stared at her in silence for a moment, then collapsed heavily into my chair. “Aw, hell, Gert,” I said. “Forget it. We’re two of a kind.” The flush drained out of her face. She stood there uncertainly, shifting from foot to foot. Finally she said in a low voice, “I can explain about that business on the hill, Tenny—”

  “No, you can’t. I don’t need to hear it. Just get me a Moke.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Headley may have meant to keep an eye on me, but he only had two eyes. Redeployment took both of them. All the heavy limbic equipment was packed up and loaded onto transports and the assault troops marched into the bays after it and were gone. The returning transports weren’t empty, though. They were full of Services of Supply troops and, most of all, merchandise. And the merchandise melted like the snow. Every morning you’d see the Weegs lined up at the trading posts waiting for them to open, and staggering away to their yurts with their arms full of candy bars and food snacks and Thomas Jefferson Pure Simulated Silver amulets for the wives and kiddies. The operation had been a total triumph. You never saw such a dedicated bunch of consumers as the Eager Weegers, and I would have taken pride in my participation in the great crusade if my spirit had any pride left in it. But that commodity the Services of Supply could not provide.

  If I had had anything to do it might have been easier. The chaplain’s office was the quietest place on the Reservation. The old troops had nothing to come and complain about because they were on their way home anyway; the Supply forces were too busy. Gert Martels and I, without ever spelling it out, worked out an ad hoc division of labor. Each morning I would sit alone in the empty office, guzzling Mokes and wishing I were—anything—anything but what and where I was. Even dead. And in the afternoon she would take over and I would be off to the officers’ lounge in Urumqi, squabbling over what channels to watch on the Omni-V and waiting fruitless hours in my endless attempts to get a call through to Mitzi, or Haseldyne, or the Old Man … or God. I even dared the lieutenant colonel’s office a couple of times, trying to get myself turned loose. The time to go home a hero is before everybody forgets what you were being heroic about, and already the Gobi operation was disappearing from the Omni-V newscasts. No luck. And it kept on being hot. No matter how many Mokes I swilled I seemed to sweat them out faster than I could pour them down. I didn’t weigh myself any more, because the numbers that were coming up were beginning to be scary.

  Fridays were the worst, because we didn’t even try to keep the chaplain’s office open. I fought my way up to Urumqi through the masses of Weegs in their wagons and carts and bicycles, all with the consumer light glowing in their eyes as they headed for the bazaars of the big city, reserved a room, stocked up on Mokes, headed for the officers’ lounge and my unending squabbles about Omni-V and phone calls—

  But Gert Martels was waiting for me outside the lounge. “Tenny,” she said, glancing around to make sure no one was near enough to listen, “you look like hell. You need a weekend in Shanghai. So do I.”

  “Out of my pass authority,” I said gloomily. “Go try with Lieutenant Colonel Headley if you want to. He might let you go, maybe. Not me. I’m sure.” I stopped, because she held up two pass cards before my eyes. Over the magnetic striping was Headley’s signature.

  “There’s no use,” she said, “in being friends with the first sergeant if he can’t slip a couple of passes into the colonel’s signature box when he wants to. The plane leaves in forty minutes, Tenny. Want to be on it?”

  Shanghai! Jewel of the Orient! By ten o’clock that night we were in a floating bar along the Bund. I was getting down the tenth, or maybe it was the twentieth, well-spiked Moke, checking out the dark-haired little bar girls with their flapper haircuts, wondering if I ought to try connecting with one before I got too paralyzed to do anything about it. Gert was drinking straight GNS, and with every shot getting more and more upright and careful in her speech, and glassy-eyed. That was a funny thing about Gert Martels. She was not a bad-looking woman, not counting the scars that slashed down the left side of her face, from ear to jawbone. But I had never come on to her, nor she to me. A lot of it had to do, I guess, with the military code and the trouble you could get into fraternizing between officers and enlisted personnel, but lots of other Os and EPs had taken their chances and gotten away with it. And it had been a long, long time since Mitzi. “How come?” I asked, waving to the waitress.

  She hiccoughed in a ladylike fashion and turned her eyes on me. It took a second or two; she seemed to be having trouble focusing.

  “How come exactly what, Tennison?” she asked with careful articulation.

  I would have answered her question except that the waitress came by and I had to order another Moke-and-Djinn and a grain neutral spirits for the lady. It took a moment for me to remember. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “what I wanted to ask was how come you and I never made it.” She gave me a dignified smile. “If you want to, Tennison.”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t mean if I want to, I mean how come we’ve never, you know, sort of, like, emanated to each other.” She didn’t answer right away. The drinks came, and when I finished paying the waitress and handed the GNS to Gert I saw that she was crying.

  “Aw, listen,” I said, “I wasn’t pulling rank or anything. Was I?” I demanded, looking around the table for confirmation. I didn’t remember exactly how it had happened, but there seemed to be four or five other people who had joined us. They all smiled and shook their heads—meaning maybe no I wasn’t and maybe no, we don’t understand English. But one of them did, anyway. The civilian. He leaned across and shouted over the noise of the bar:

  “You let me buy next lound, okay?”

  “Why not?” I gave him a thank-you smile and turned back to Gert. “Excuse me, but what did you say?” I asked.

  She reflected over that for a moment, and the civilian leaned back to me:

  “You guys from Ooloomoochee, light?” It took me a moment to realize he was trying to say Urumqi, but then I admitted he was right. “Can always tell! You guys tops. I buy two lounds!” And the sailors from the Whangpoo River Patrol all grinned and applauded; that much English they knew too.

  “I guess,” said Gert reflectively, “I was going to tell you the story of my life.” She accepted the next drink, nodded courteously and knocked it back between sentences without missing a beat. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “we had a happy family. What Mom could do with Soya-tem and CelloWheet and a couple pinches of MSG! And then on Christmas we’d have TurrKee—real reconstituted meat, and cranberry-flavored Jellatine Dessert and all.”

  “Chlistmas!” cried the civilian in delight. “Oh, you guys tops with you Chlistmas!”

  She gave the man a polite but distant smile and reached out for the next drink. “When I was fifteen Daddy died. They said it was bronchio-something. He coughed himself to death.” She paused to swallow, and that gave the plump old civilian a chance.

  “You know I went to missionary school?” he demanded. “Had Chlistmas there, too. Oh, we owe you missionary guys big debt!”

  It was not easy for me to follow one life story, much less two. The bar had gotten a great deal noisier and more crowded and, although the old excursion steamer was moored tightly to the Bund pilings, I could have sworn it was swaying in the waves. “Go on,” I said in general.

  Gert was faster on the uptake. “Did you know, Tenny,” she asked, “that once factories had smoke-scrubbers in their stack
s? They scrubbed out the sulfur and fly ash. The air was clean, and the average life expectancy was eight years longer than it is today.”

  “Here, too!” cried the civilian. “When I young boy in missionary school—”

  But she rode right over him. “Do you know why they stopped? Death. They wanted more death. There’s big money in death. Partly it’s the insurance-company accounts—the actuaries figured out it cost less to pay off life policies than annuities. Then there’s all the dollar volume from hospitalization insurance, and a fifty-year-old who’s lived all his life in smog knows he’s going to spend a lot of time sick, so he has to buy—then, if he dies quickly, it’s nearly all profit. Of course, there’s the morticians, too. You wouldn’t believe the profits in burying the dead. But mostly—” she looked around the table, smiling gently—“mostly, well, hell. When a consumer gets to be past working age how much money does he have to buy things? Damn little. So who needs him?”

  I said nervously, “Gert, honey, maybe we ought to get some fresh air.” The old civilian was grinning and bobbing his head; he’d had enough to drink himself that he didn’t care what anybody said. But one of the Whangpoo sailors was frowning as though he understood a little English after all. It didn’t seem to faze Gert.

  “If there was any fresh air,” she explained, “probably Daddy wouldn’t have died that way, would he?” She extended her empty glass with a sweet, little-girl smile. “Could I have just a little more, please?” she asked.

  God bless the old civilian. He had the waitress there with another round in a minute, and the Whangpoo sailor’s face relaxed as he got his refill.

  I was a long way from sober, but not so far that I didn’t realize Gert was in worse shape than I was. I made an effort to change the subject. “So you like the missionaries, eh?” I offered genially to our benefactor.

  “Oh, damn good guys, yes! Owe them plenty.”

  “For bringing Christianity to China, you mean?”

  He looked puzzled. “What Chlistianity? For Chlistmas. You know what Chlistmas mean? I tell you! My business—wholesale dless goods, all kinds—Chlistmas sales mean fi’ty-four percent annual letail volume, almost fi’ty-eight percent of net. That what Chlistmas mean! Buddha, Mao, they never give us anything like that!”

  Unfortunately he had set Gert off again. “Christmas,” she said dreamily, “wasn’t the same after Daddy died. Fortunately he had an old gun. So I’d go out in the garbage dumps— we were living in Baltimore at the time, down by the harbor—and I’d shoot seagulls and sneak them home. Of course, they weren’t like TurrKee, but Mom—”

  I almost spilled my drink. “Gert,” I cried, “I think we’d better go now!” But I was too late.

  “—Mom would cook up those seagulls so you’d think they were ReelMeet and we’d just eat ourselves sick, and—”

  She never finished. The Whangpoo sailor leaped to his feet, his face working in rage and disgust. I didn’t understand the words he said, but the meaning was clear enough. Animal eater. And that was when it all hit the fan.

  I don’t remember the fight very clearly, only the MPs pouring in along about the second time I pulled myself out from under the table. Adrenalin and panic had boiled a lot of the booze out of me, but I thought I was still drunk, hallucinatory drunk, DTs drunk, when I saw who was leading them. “Why, Colonel Heckscher!” I murmured. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  And that was when I passed out.

  Well, it was one way of getting home. Almost home. Arizona, anyway. That was where Colonel Heckscher was going and, as we were still nominally members of her command, she had no difficulty getting us transferred along with her for the court-martial.

  So I went from one dusty desert to another. It seemed like half the assault troops from Urumqi had gotten there before me. From my lonely room in the BOQ—Gert was in the stockade but, being an officer, I was just under house arrest—I could see their pop-ups in neat rows stretching to the horizon, and at the very edge of the camp a line of space shuttles. I didn’t spend much time looking at them. I spent most of my time with the law officer the court had assigned me for defense. Defense! She was no more than twenty, and her principal credential was that she’d served in the Copyright & Trade Mark Division of a minor Houston agency while waiting to be accepted to law school.

  But I had a powerful friend. The Chinese civilian didn’t forget his old drinking buddies. He wouldn’t testify against us, and it appeared he’d paid off the whole Whangpoo fleet, because when they were called on the person-to-person video for depositions they one and all testified that they didn’t speak English, didn’t know what if anything Gert or I had said, wasn’t even sure we were the Westerners who’d been in the bar that night. So all they could get me for was conduct unbecoming an officer and that meant no more than a dishonorable discharge.

  It meant no less, either. Colonel Heckscher saw to that. But I was lucky. Gert Martels got the same DD, but as she was enlisted personnel and a career noncom they had a long file on her; and just to make the dishonorable discharge a little nastier in her memory they gave her sixty days’ hard first.

  TARB IN PURGATORY

  I

  When I went to Taunton, Gatchweiler & Schocken to ask about getting my old job back I was afraid Val Dambois wouldn’t even see me. I was wrong about that. He saw me. He was glad to. He laughed all the way through the interview. “You poor fool,” he said, “you poor, shaking, demoralized wreck. What makes you think we need pedicab pushers bad enough to take you on?”

  I said, “My tenure—”

  “Your tenure, Tarb,” he said with pleasure, “ended with your dishonorable discharge. Terminated for cause. Get lost. Better still, kill yourself.” And, walking down forty-three flights of stairs to the back exit—Dambois hadn’t seen fit to give me an elevator pass—I wondered how long it would be before that seemed a logical option.

  There was a body of opinion which said that was what I was doing already, for at my final separation physical from the service the medic had read her dials and gauges with an increasingly worried look until she punched up my discharge papers and saw I was a DD. “Ah, well,” she said then, “I guess it doesn’t matter. But I’d say you’re headed for total physical and mental collapse in the next six months.” And she scribed in great red letters across the long list of my deteriorating physical traits the legend Not Service Connectedso that not even the Veterans Administration was likely to take an interest in what became of Tennison Tarb. Would Mitzi? Pride kept me from asking—for five days. Then I sent her a message, bright and positive, how about a drink for old time’s sake? She didn’t answer that. She also didn’t answer the less bright and far from positive messages of the tenth day, the twelfth, the fifteenth …

  Tennison Tarb didn’t have any friends any more, it seemed.

  Tennison Tarb didn’t have a whole lot of money any more, either. Dishonorable discharge included forfeiture of all pay and allowances, which meant, among other things, that all my bar bills from the officers’ lounge in Urumqi got passed on to a collection agency. The rest of the world had forgotten I was alive, but the knee-breakers had no trouble finding me and what remained of my bank account. By the time they went away with the amount due plus interest plus collection fees plus tax—plus tip!—because they explained that customers always tipped the collectors, swinging their hard-rubber batons as they explained—there wasn’t much more left of Tennison Tarb financially than in any other way.

  And yet I still had my bright, original, creative mind! (Or had my mind so deteriorated with the rest of me that trivial insights and dumb ideas seemed brilliant?) I read Advertising Age every time I got a chance to pick an Omni-V channel, waiting in some hiring hall for interviews for jobs I never got. I nodded approvingly over some campaigns, frowned with disgust at others—I could have done them so much better!

  But nobody would give me the chance. The word was out; I was blacklisted.

  Even the cheapest shared-time rental was more than I co
uld afford, so I took a futon with a consumer family in Bensonhurst. They’d advertised space to share and the price was right. I took the long subway ride, found the building, climbed down the steps to the third sublevel and knocked on the door. “Hello,” I said to the tired, worried-looking woman who answered, “I’m Tennison Tarb,” and at the end of the sentence I took a breath. Oh, wow! I had forgotten! I had forgotten how consumers lived, and most of all I had forgotten what a consumer diet turned into in the digestive system. It is true that textured vegetable protein does resemble meat—a little like meat— like the ReelMeet from the cell cultures, anyway—but even if the taste buds are deceived the intestinal flora are not. They know what to do with the stuff. Get rid of it—a lot of it as gas. The best way I can describe the atmosphere of that suburban consumer household is like when you’re caught short in a bottom-class neighborhood and have to use the communijohn, and it’s in the last half hour before the morning or evening flush. Only now I had to live in it.

  They weren’t all that happy to see me, either, because my little shoulder bag of Moke containers added a new worry to the lines on the woman’s face. But they needed the money, and I needed the space to sleep. “You can have meals with us, too,” she said hospitably, “just eat right with the family, and it wouldn’t cost you much.”

  “Maybe later,” I said. They’d already put the kids to sleep in their over-the-sink cribs. With their help I tugged the furniture around to make space to roll out my futon, and as I fell asleep, my bright, original, creative mind was finding inspiration even in adversity. A new product! Antigas deodorizers to put in the food. The chemists could cook something up in no time—whether it actually worked or not, of course, mattered very little, just so we had a strong theme campaign and a good brand name …