The Merchants' War

  He looked at me with real affection. “You know, Tarb,” he said, with kindness verging on sentimentality, “you remind me of myself when I was your age. A little. Well, listen, let’s get ourselves comfortable while we decide what you’d like to do for us now that you’re back. What’ll you have to drink?”

  “Oh, I think a Mokie-Koke, sir,” I said absently.

  The climate in the room took a swift change for the worse. The Old Man’s finger stopped over the call button that would have summoned his sec2, in charge of bringing in coffee and refreshments. “What did you say, Farb?” he gritted.

  I opened my mouth, but it was too late. He didn’t let me speak. “A Moke? Here in my office?” The expression went clear across the scale, from benevolence through shock to wrath. Livid, he stabbed down on a completely different button. “Emergency services!” he roared. “Get a medic in here right away—I’ve got a Moke-head in my office!”

  They got me out of the Old Man’s office fast as any leper ousted from the sight of Louis XIV. Treated me that way, too. While I was waiting for the results of my tests I sat in the common-clinic waiting room in Subbasement Three, but, although it was crowded, there were empty seats on both sides of me.

  At last, “Mr. Tennison Tarb,” crackled the voice from the overhead speaker. I got up and stumbled through the underbrush of hastily moved legs and pulled-aside ankles to the consultation room. It was like walking the Last Mile in those old prison movies, except that there were no mumbled words of encouragement from my fellow cons. There was the same expression on every face, and it said, Thank God it’s you, not me!

  I expected that past the sliding door would be the doctor who would prescribe my fate. Surprisingly there were two people there; one the doctor—you could tell by her ritual stethoscope around the neck—and the other, of all people, little Dan Dixmeister, grown all lank and gloomy. “Hey, there, Danny!” I greeted him, sticking out my hand for old time’s sake.

  And for the same sake, I guess—his version of it—he studied my hand for a moment before reluctantly putting out his own. It wasn’t a shake. It was more like his offering his hand for me to kiss—no grip, just a limp touch and withdrawal.

  Now, Danny Dixmeister had been my copy cub trainee half a dozen years earlier. I went to Venus. He stayed behind. Clearly he hadn’t wasted his time. He wore Deputy Department Head epaulettes and, on his sleeve, fifty-thousand-a-year stripes, and he looked at me as though I were the new apprentice and he the exec. “You really screwed up, Tarb,” he rasped joylessly. “Dr. Mosskristal will review your medical problem for you.” And the tone said bad news.

  Bad news it was. “What you’ve got,” said the doctor, “is a Campbellian addiction.” Her tone was neither kind nor unkind. It was the tone in which a doctor announces a white-blood-corpuscle count in a laboratory animal, and the look she turned on me was exactly the same look as Mitzi used to give a would-be returnee who might be recruited for her spy chains. “I suppose you could be reprogrammed,” she said, studying the results on the display before her. “Hardly worth the effort, I’d say. A very uninteresting chart.”

  I swallowed. It was hard for me to take in that it was my life they were talking about. “Tell me what I’m up against,” I begged. “Maybe if I understood what was wrong I could fix it.”

  “Fix it? Fix it? You mean overcome the programming by yourself? Oh-ho-ho-ho,” she laughed, glancing at Dixmeister and shaking her head humorously. “What strange notions you laymen have.”

  “But you said there was a cure—”

  “You mean reprogramming and detoxing,” she corrected. “I don’t think you want to go through that. Maybe ten years from now it might be worth a try, although there’s about a forty per cent mortality rate. But in the early stages, right after exposure—uh-uh.” She leaned back, pressing her fingertips together, and I got ready for the lecture. “What you have,” she explained, “is a Campbellian reflex. Named after Dr. H. J. Campbell. Famous pioneering psychologist in the old days, inventor of limbic-pleasure therapy.”

  “I never heard of limbic-pleasure therapy,” I said.

  “No,” she admitted, “the secret was lost for many years.” She leaned forward, depressed an intercom button and called, “Maggie, bring in the Campbell. According to Dr. Campbell,” she resumed to me, “pleasure is the name we give to the feeling we experience when the limbic areas of our brain are electrically active. He was first led to this research, I believe, when he discovered that many of his students were deriving great pleasure from what was called rock music. Saturating the senses in this way stimulated the limbic area—thus pleasure—thus, he discovered a cheap and easy way of conditioning subjects in desirable ways. Ah, here we are.” The sec2 had brought in a transparent plastic box containing—of all things!—a book. Faded, tattered, hidden inside its plastic case, it was still about the best example I had ever seen of that quaint old art form. Instinctively I reached out for it, and Dr. Mosskristal snatched it away. “Don’t be silly,” she rapped.

  But I could read the title: The Pleasure Areas, by H. J. Campbell. “If I could just borrow it,” I pleaded. “I’ll bring it back within the week—”

  “You will, hell. You’ll read it here, if you read it at all, with my sec3 watching you and making sure you pump the nitrogen back in when you put it back in the box. But I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Laymen shouldn’t try to understand medical problems, they’re simply not equipped. Let’s just say that you’ve had your limbic areas stimulated; under the influence of that great upwelling of pleasure you’ve become conditioned to associate Mokie-Koke with joy, and there’s nothing to be done about it.” She glanced at her watch and stood up. “Now I’ve got a patient to visit,” she announced. “Dixmeister, you can use this room for your interview with the patient if you like—just so you’re out of here in twenty minutes.” And she flounced away, clutching her book.

  And leaving me with Danny Dixmeister. “Pity,” he said, shaking his head at the screen, which still displayed my test results. “You probably had a reasonably good future ahead of you at one time, Tarb, if you hadn’t got yourself hooked.”

  “But it’s not fair, Danny! I didn’t know—”

  He looked honestly perplexed. “Fair? True, campbelling is something new—I don’t suppose you were watchful enough. But the areas for limbic commercials are clearly marked.”

  “Clearly!” I sneered. “It’s a dirty, vicious trick and you know it! Certainly our own Agency would never do such a thing to move goods!”

  Dixmeister pursed his lips. “The question,” he said, “hasn’t come up, since the competition owns the patents. Now. Let’s talk about you. You realize, Tarb, that any kind of high-level position is out of the question for you now.”

  “Now hold on, Danny! I don’t see that at all. I just put in a lot of lousy years on Venus for this Agency!”

  “It’s a simple matter of security,” he explained. “You’re a Moke-head. You’d do anything for a Mokie-Koke, including betraying your grandmother—or even the Agency. So we just can’t take the chance of letting you work on any high-security area—not to mention,” he added bitchily, “that you’ve shown a certain lack of moral fiber in letting yourself get hooked in the first place.”

  “But I have seniority! Tenure! A record of—” He shook his head impatiently. “Oh, we’ll find something for you, of course. But not creative. How are your typing skills, Tarb? No? That’s a pity—well, that’s a problem for Personnel, after all.”

  I leveled a look at him for a moment. “Danny,” I said, “I must have given you a harder time than I realized when you were my stooge.”

  He didn’t answer. He only gave me a look that was both cryptic and long. I was out of that room, up the elevator to Personnel—General Service on the fifth floor, waiting my turn with the fresh, young college kids and the middle-aged semiemployables before I quite deciphered that look. It wasn’t dislike, or even triumph. It was pity.

  What Dr. Mosskristal did
n’t tell me about was one of the side effects of campbellization. Depression. She didn’t warn me, and when it happened I didn’t recognize it for what it was. I guess that’s what depression is. When you’re having it, it just seems like the way the world is. You never think of it as a problem, only a state of being.

  I had a lot to be depressed about. They found work for me, all right. Delivering art, carrying flowers to the stars of our commercials, dashing out into the street to flag and hold a pedi-cab for somebody from Executive Country, fetching soyaburgers and Coffiest for the secretaries—oh, I had a million things to do! I worked harder as a General Services dogsbody than I ever had as a star-class copysmith, but of course for that kind of work they don’t pay star-class money. I had to give up the sea-condo. I didn’t mind. What did I need such luxury for except to entertain, and who was there to entertain? Mitzi had moved herself up to a loftier sphere. All my old girl friends were transferred or married or promoted, and the new crop didn’t seem to want to get involved with somebody in the deep freeze.

  Speaking of deep freeze, the thing I had mostly forgotten about home was what it was like to be cold. I mean capital-K-cold. Cold to where the pedicab-pullers’ breath steamed out around their faces, and they’d slip and stumble on the icy streets. Cold to where I could almost wish to change places with them for the exercise instead of sitting in the hard, bare seat with my teeth hurting from the wintry New York air—well, I said “almost.” Even being a messenger boy was better than pulling a cab.

  Especially now that it was getting cold. Those six years on Venus had thinned my blood. Even if I could have afforded to go out very often, the desire wasn’t there. So I spent my days in the messenger pool, and my evenings at home, watching commercials on the Omni-V, talking with my new roommates when they were around—sitting. Mostly just sitting. And it was quite a surprise when the buzzer sounded, and I had a visitor, and the visitor was Mitzi.

  If she had come to be nice to me, she had a funny idea about how to do it. She looked around with her nose wrinkled and her lips clamped shut, as though the place smelled of decay. She seemed to wear the twin frown lines between her brows all the time now. “Tenn,” she said sternly, “you’ve got to pull yourself out of this! Look at you! Look at this dump! Look at what a shambles you’ve made of your life!”

  I looked around the room, trying to see what she meant. Of course, when I couldn’t afford the sea-condo payments any more I had to make other arrangements. It wasn’t easy. Getting out of the contract cost me most of my saved-up pay, and this shared-time condo was about all I could afford. It was true that my roommates were pretty sloppy. One was into junk food, the other had gotten himself into one of those interminable collections of Nearly Silver Miniature Presidential Busts from the San Jacinto Mint. But still! “It’s not so bad,” I said defensively.

  “It’s filthy. Don’t you ever throw out those old Moke bottles? Tenn, I know it’s hard, but there are people who successfully take the cold turkey cure every year—”

  I laughed. I was actually sorry for her, because she simply didn’t understand how it was, having never been hooked. “Mitzi,” I said, “is that why you came here, to tell me what a shambles I’m making of my life?” She looked at me silently for a moment. “Well, I suppose the cure’s pretty dangerous,” she admitted, looking around for a place to sit. I cleared some of Nelson Rockwell’s Hittite Emperors and a few of Charlie Bergholm’s taco wrappers off the second chair. “I’m not really sure just why I did come here,” she said, inspecting the seat carefully before sitting down.

  I said bitterly, “If it was for a roll in the hay, forget it.” I pointed to the closed bed box, where Rockwell, my two-to-ten roomie, was taking his share of sack time.

  She—I was about to say flushed, but I guess darkened is a better word. “I guess in some way I feel a little responsible,” she said.

  “For not telling me about the damage suit? For letting me go broke while you collect millions? For some little things like that?”

  She shrugged. “Something of the sort, maybe. Tenny? All right, I accept that you can’t rise very high in the Agency again while you’re a Moke-head, but there are plenty of other things you can do! Why not go back to school? Learn a new skill, start over in some other profession, I don’t know, doctor, lawyer—”

  I looked at her in amazement. “And give up advertising?”

  “Oh, God! What’s so holy about advertising?”

  Well, that one took me back. All I could find to say was, “You’ve sure changed a lot, Mitzi.” And I meant it as a reproof.

  She said morosely, “Maybe I made a mistake coming here.” Then her face brightened. “I know! What would you say to Intangibles? I think I could get you in there—not right away, of course, but when there’s a vacancy—”

  “Intangibles!” I sneered. “Mitzi, I’m a product person. I sell goods. Intangibles is for the has-beens and the never-wases—and, anyway, what makes you think you could do it?”

  She hesitated, then said, “Oh, I just think I could. I mean—well, you might as well know, although it’s a company secret for a while. I’ve taken my damage money and they’ve let me buy into the Agency.”

  “Buy in! You mean a stockholder?”

  “Sure, a stockholder.” She seemed apologetic about it—as though there were any reason for that! To be a stockholder in the Agency was about the next thing to being God. It had simply never occurred to me that anybody I knew would ever have the capital to do something like that.

  But I shook my head. “I’m Product,” I said proudly.

  “Really,” she flashed, “do you have any better offers?”

  And of course I hadn’t.

  I surrendered. “Have a Mokie-Koke,” I said, “and let’s talk it over.”

  So I went to bed that night, even if alone, nevertheless with something I hadn’t had before: hope. As I drifted off to sleep I was thinking impossible dreams: back to school, get that Master of Advertising Philosophy degree I’d planned for when I was a kid, learn some additional skills, do some research into Intangibles … kick the Moke habit.

  They all seemed like good ideas. Whether anything would have been left of them in the cold light of dawn I do not know, but I had a powerful reinforcement. I woke up with a banging on the bed lid and the growly, grumbly voice of Nelson Rockwell, my two-to-ten roomie, telling me that he switched turns with Bergholm and it was time for his turn.

  Sleepy as I was, I saw at once that he was looking really bad, bruise like a crushed grape stain over his right cheekbone, limping as he backed away to let me get out of the bed box. “What happened, Nelson?”

  He looked as though I’d accused him of a crime. “Little misunderstanding,” he muttered.

  “It looks like a damn big misunderstanding to me. You’ve been beaten up, man!”

  He shrugged, and winced as his muscles objected to the movement. “I got a little behind in my payments, so San Jacinto sent a couple of collectors around to the grommet works. Say, Tenn, you couldn’t let me have fifty till payday, could you? Because they said next time it’s my kneecaps.”

  “I don’t have fifty,” I said—nearly true, too. “Why don’t you sell some of your figurines?”

  “Sell them? Sell some of my stuff? Why, Tenn,” he cried, “that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of! These here are investment-grade collectibles! All I have to do is hold onto them for market appreciation—and then, boy, wait’ll you see! They’re all limited editions! Twenty years from now I’ll have my place in the Everglades, taking it easy, and they’re what’s going to pay for it … only,” he added sadly, “if I don’t get caught up on the payments they’re gonna repossess. And kneecap me.”

  I fled down the hall to the bathroom because I couldn’t stand hearing any more of that. Limited-edition collectibles! Good lord, that was one of the first accounts I ever worked on— limited edition to as many copies as we could sell, fifty thousand anyway; collectible meaning that once you had them ther
e was nothing you could do with them but collect them.

  So I cleaned up quick and got out of the room fast, and by seven A.M. I was up on the campus of Columbia A&P University, poring through the catalog readout and signing up for courses. There were plenty of electives that would count for credit toward the master’s; I picked a sampling of the most interesting. History. Mathematics—that’s sampling techniques, mostly. Even creative writing. I figured that that might be an easy credit, mostly, but I also had it in the back of my mind that if the copy job in Intangibles didn’t come through there might be some use to it. If I weren’t going to be allowed to write anything real, at least I could bang out a few novels. Admittedly, there’s no big bucks there. But there’s always a market, because there’s always a few misfits in the world who can’t get it together enough to watch sports or follow the stories on Omni-V, so they can’t think of anything better to do than read. I’d tried it myself, a time or two, calling up some of the old classics on the tube. It’s a little flaky, but the market is there and it’s no disgrace to pick up some loose change catering to it.

  That’s the other funny thing about depression. When you’re sunk in the middle of it everything looks so hard and there are so many things to worry about that it’s pretty nearly impossible to make a move. But as soon as you take the first step, the second gets easier, and the third—in fact, that very day I decided I would have to do something about the Mokes I was swigging. Not quit cold turkey. Not even cut down right away. The first thing to do was to analyze the problem. So I began noting the time of every Moke. I kept it up for a week and, my God, do you know, I was averaging forty of the damn things a day! And not enjoying them all that much, either.

  I decided to deal with it. I didn’t want to kick the habit, because actually each Mokie-Koke in itself was a pretty good thing. They’re actually rather a taste-tingling blend of really good chocolate-type flavoring, along with synthetic coffee extract and some of those cocaine analogues to give it zip. Makes a nice drink. The thing was not to stop, but only to cut down. Put that way, it was a simple problem in schedule making and logistics, like when you schedule an optimal mix of consumer impacts for your advertising spots. Forty Mokes a day was ridiculous. About eight, I reckoned, would be just enough. I’d keep that little lift you get every time, but I wouldn’t jade my taste buds.