'But-'
'You may have their job,' said the man. 'Normally, you would be put to work in the lower echelons, but we believe in meting out justice wherever possible. The Raimces undoubtedly stumbled on your planet by accident and lured you into this position without -'
'How do you know I can do your job?'
'That moment of brilliance was an aptitude test. You passed. Well, do you accept?'
'What about our baby?' Martha Graham worriedly wanted to know.
'You will be allowed to keep it until it reaches the age of decision - about the time it will take the child to reach adult stature.'
'Then what?' insisted Martha Graham.
'The child will take its position in society - according to its ability.'
'Will we ever see our child after that?'
'Possibly.'
Ted Graham said, 'What's the joker in this?'
Again the cold, superior smile. 'You will receive conditioning similar to that which we gave the Raimces. And we will want to examine your memories to aid us in our search for your planet. It would be good to find a new inhabitable place.'
'Why did they trap us like this?' asked Martha Graham.
'It's lonely work,' the man explained. 'Your house is actually a type of space conveyance that travels along your collection route - and there is much travel to the job. And then - you will not have friends, nor time for much other than work. Our methods are necessarily severe at times.'
'Travel?' Martha Graham repeated in dismay.
'Almost constantly.'
Ted Graham felt his mind whirling. And behind him, he heard his wife sobbing.
* * * *
The Raimces sat in what had been the Grahams' trailer.
'For a few moments, I feared he would not succumb to the bait,' she said. 'I knew you could never overcome the mental compulsion enough to leave them there without them first agreeing.'
Raimce chuckled. 'Yes. And now I'm going to indulge in everything the Rojac never permitted. I'm going to write ballads and poems.'
'And I'm going to paint,' she said. 'Oh, the delicious freedom!'
'Greed won this for us,' he said. 'The long study of the Grahams paid off. They couldn't refuse to trade.'
'I knew they'd agree. The looks in their eyes when they saw the house! They both had ...' She broke off, a look of horror coming into her eyes. 'One of them did not agree I'
'They both did. You heard them.'
'The baby?'
He stared at his wife. 'But - but it is not at the age of decision.'
'In perhaps eighteen of this planet's years, it will be at the age of decision. What then?'
His shoulders sagged. He shuddered. 'I will not be able to fight it off. I will have to build a transmitter, call the Rojac and confess!'
'And they will collect another inhabitable place,' she said, her voice flat and toneless.
'I've spoiled it,' he said. 'I've spoiled it!'
* * * *
A-W-F Unlimited
By Frank Herbert, 1961
* * * *
The morning the space armor problem fell into the agency's lap, Gwen Everest had breakfast at her regular restaurant, an automated single-niche place catering to bachelor girls. Her order popped out of the slot onto her table, and immediately the tabletop projecta-menu switched to selling Interdorma's newest Interpretive Telelog.
'Your own private dream translator! The secret companion to every neurosis!'
Gwen stared at the inch-high words doing a skitter dance above her fried eggs. She had written that copy. Her food beneath the ad looked suddenly tasteless. She pushed the plate away.
Along the speedwalk into Manhattan a you-seeker, its roboflier senses programmed to her susceptibilities, flew beside her ear. It was selling a year's supply of Geramyl - 'the breakfast drink that helps you LIVE longer!'
In sudden anger, she turned on the roboflier, whispered a code phrase she had wheedled from an engineer who serviced the things. The roboflier darted upward in sudden erratic flight, crashed into the side of a building.
A small break in her control. A beginning.
Waiting for Gwen along the private corridor to the Single-master, Hucksting and Battlemont executive offices were displays from the recent Religion of the Month Club campaign. She ran a gamut of adecals, layouts, slogans, projos, quartersheets, skinnies. The works.
'Subscribe now and get these religions absolutely FREE! Complete text of the Black Mass plus Abridged Mysticism!'
She was forced to walk through an adecal announcing: 'Don't be Half Safe! Believe in Everything! Are you sure that African Bantu Witchcraft is not the True Way?'
At the turn of the corridor stood a male-female graphic with flesh-stimulant skinnies and supered voices, 'Find peace through Tantrism.'
The skinnies made her flesh crawl.
Gwen fled into her office, slumped into her desk chair. With mounting horror, she realized that she had either written or supervised the writing of every word, produced every selling idea along that corridor.
The interphon on her desk emitted its fluted 'Good morning.' She slapped the blackout switch to keep the instrument from producing an image. The last thing she wanted now was to see one of her co-workers.
'Who is it?' she barked.
'Gwen?' No mistaking that voice: Andre Battlement, bottom name on the agency totem.
'What do you want?' she demanded.
'Our Gwenny is feeling nasty this morning, isn't she?'
'Oh, Freud!' She slapped the disconnect, leaned forward with elbows on the desk, put her face in her hands. Let's face it, she thought, I'm 48, unmarried, and a prime mover in an industry that's strangling the universe. I'm a professional strangler.
'Good morning,' fluted the interphon.
She ignored it.
'A strangler,' she said.
Gwen recognized the basic problem here. She had known it since childhood. Her universe was a continual replaying of 'The Emperor's New Suit.' She saw the nakedness.
'Good morning' fluted the interphon.
She dropped her right hand away from her face, flicked the switch. 'Now what?'
'Did you cut me off, Gwen?'
'What if I did?'
'Gwen, please! We have a problem.'
'We always have problems.'
Battlemont's voice dropped one octave. 'Gwen. This is a Big problem.'
Uncanny the way he can speak capital letters, she thought. She said: 'Go away.'
'You've been leaving your Interdorma turned off!' accused Battlemont. 'You mustn't. Neurosis can creep up on you.'
'Is that why you called me?' she asked,
'Of course not.'
'Then go away.'
Battlemont did a thing then that everyone from Singlemaster on down knew was dangerous to try with Gwen Everest. He pushed the override to send his image dancing above her interphon.
* * * *
After the momentary flash of anger, Gwen correctly interpreted the act as one of desperation. She found herself intrigued. She stared at the round face, the pale eyes (definitely too small, those eyes), the pug nose and wide gash of mouth above almost no chin at all.
Plus the hairline in full retreat.
'Andre, you are a mess,' she said.
He ignored the insult. Still speaking in the urgency octave, he said: 'I have called a full staff meeting. You must attend at once.'
'Why?'
'There are two military people in there, Gwen.' He gulped. 'It's desperate. Either we solve their problem or they will ruin us. They will draft every man in the agency!'
'Even you?'
'Yes!'
She moved her right hand toward the interphon's emergency disconnect. 'Good-by, Andre.'
'Gwen! My God! You can't let me down at a time like this!'
'Why not?'
He spoke in breathless haste. 'We'll raise your salary. A bonus. A bigger office. More help.'
'You can't afford me now,' she said.
'I'm begging you,
Gwen. Must you abuse me?'
She closed her eyes, thought: The insects! The damned little insects with their crummy emotions! Why can't I tell them all to go to composite hell? She opened her eyes, said: 'What's the military's flap?'
Battlement mopped his forehead with a pastel blue handkerchief. 'It's the Space Service,' he said. 'The female branch. The WOMS. Enlistments have fallen to almost nothing.'
She was interested in spite of herself. 'What's happened?'
'Something to do with the space armor. I don't know. I'm so upset.'
'Why have they tossed it into our laps like this? The ultimatum, I mean.'
Battlemont glanced left and right, leaned forward. 'The grapevine has it they're testing a new theory that creative people work better under extreme stress.'
'The Psychological Branch again,' she said. 'Those jackasses!'
'But what can we do?'
'Hoist 'em,' she said. 'You run along to the conference.'
'And you'll be there, Gwen?'
'In a few minutes.'
'Don't delay too long, Gwen.' Again he mopped his forehead with the blue handkerchief. 'Gwen, I'm frightened.'
'And with good reason.' She squinted at him. 'I can see you now: Nothing on but a lead loincloth, dumping fuel into a radioactive furnace. Freud, what a picture!'
'This is no joke, Gwen!'
'I know.'
'You are going to help?'
'In my own peculiar way, Andre.' She hit the emergency disconnect.
* * * *
Andre Battlemont turned away from his interphon, crossed his office to a genuine Moslem prayer rug. He sat down on it facing the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked eastward across midtown Manhattan. This was the 1479th floor of the Stars of Space building, and it was quite a view out there whenever the clouds lifted. But the city remained hidden beneath a low ceiling this morning. Up here it was sunny, though - except in Battlement's mood. A fear-cycle ululated along his nerves.
What he was doing on the prayer rug was practicing Yoga breathing to calm those nerves. The military could wait. They had to wait. The fact that he faced the general direction of Mecca was left over from two months before. Yoga was a month old. There was always some carry-over.
Battlemont had joined the Religion of the Month Club almost a year ago - seduced by his own agency's deep motivation campaign plus the Brotherhood Council's seal of approval. This month it was the Reinspired Neo-Cult of St Freud. A test adecal superimposed itself on the cloud-floor view beneath him. It began playing the latest Gwen-Everest-inspired pitch of the IBMausoleum. Giant rainbow letters danced across the fleecy background.
'Make your advice immortal! Let us store your voice and thought patterns in everlasting electronic memory circuits! When you are gone, your loved ones may listen to your voice as you answer their questions exactly the way you would most likely have answered them in Life!'
Battlemont shook his head. The agency, fearful of its dependence on the live Gwen Everest, had secretly recorded her at a staff conference once. Very illegal. The unions were death on it. But the IBMausoleum had broken down with the first question put to Gwen's ghost-voice.
'Some people have thought patterns that are too complex to permit accurate psyche-record,' the engineer explained.
Battlemont did not delude himself. The sole genius of the agency's three owners lay in recognizing the genius of Gwen Everest. She was the agency.
It was like riding the tiger to have such an employee. Singlemaster, Hucksting and Battlemont had ridden this tiger for 22 years. Battlemont closed his eyes, pitched her in his mind: a tall, lean woman, but with a certain grace. Her face was long, dominated by cold blue eyes, framed in waves of auburn hair. She had a wit that could slash you to ribbons, and that priceless commodity: the genius to pull selling sense out of utter confusion. Battlemont sighed.
He was in love with Gwen Everest. Had been for 22 years. It was the reason he had never married. His Interdorma explained that it was because he wanted to be dominated by a strong woman. But that only explained. It didn't help.
For a moment, he thought wistfully of Singlemaster and Hucksting both taking their annual three-month vacation at the geriatrics center on Oahu. Battlemont wondered if he dared ask Gwen to take her vacation with him. Just once.
No.
He realized what a pitiful figure he made on the prayer rug. Pudgy little man in a rather unattractive blue suit.
Tailors did things for him that they called 'improving your good points.' But except when he viewed himself in a Vesta-Mirror to see the sample clothes projected back onto his own idealized image, he could never pin down what those good points were.
Gwen would certainly turn him down.
He feared that more than anything. As long as there remained the possibility ...
Memory of the waiting Space Service deputation intruded. Battlemont trembled, broke the Yoga breathing pattern The exercise was having its usual effect: a feeling of vertigo. He heaved himself to his feet.
'One cannot run away from fate,' he muttered.
That was a carry-over from the Karma month.
* * * *
According to Gwen the agency's conference room had been copied from a Florentine bordello's Emperor Room. It was a gigantic space. The corners were all flossy curliques in heavy gilding an effect carried over into deep carvings on the wall panels. The ceiling was a mating of Cellini cupids with Dali landscapes.
Period stuff. Antique.
Into this baroque setting had been forced a one-piece table 6 feet wide and 42 feet long. It was an enlarged bit of Twentieth Century Wailstreetiana fenced in by heavy wooden chairs. Beanbag paper-weights and golden wheel ashtrays graced every place.
The air of the room was blue with the smoke of mood-cigs. ('It rhymes with Good Bigs!') The staff seated around the table was fighting off the depressant effect of the two Space Service generals, one male and one female, sealed in flanking positions beside Battlement's empty chair. There was a surprising lack of small talk and paper rustling.
All staff members had learned of the ultimatum via the office grapevine.
Battlemont slipped in his side door, crossed to his chair at the end of the table, dropped into it before his knees gave out. He stared from one frowning military face to the other.
No response.
He cleared his throat. 'Sorry I'm ... ah ... Pressing business. Unavoidable.' He cast a frantic glance around the table. No sign of Gwen. He smiled at one officer, the other.
No response.
On his right sat Brigadier General Sonnet Finnister of the WOMS (Women of Space). Battlemont had been appalled to see her walk. Drill-sergeant stride. No nonsense. She wore a self-designed uniform: straight pleated skirt to conceal bony hips, a loose blouse to camouflage lack of upper development, and a long cape to confuse the whole issue. Atop her head sat a duck-billed, flat-fronted cap that had been fashioned for the single purpose of hiding the Sonnet Finnister forehead, which went too high and too wide.
She seldom removed the hat.
(This particular hat, Battlement's hurried private investigations had revealed, looked hideous on every other member of the WOMS. To a woman, they called it 'the Sonnet Bonnet'. There had been the additional information that the general herself was referred to by underlings as 'Sinister Finnister' - partly because of the swirling cape.)
On Battlemont's left sat General Nathan Owling of the Space Engineers. Better known as 'Howling Owling' because of a characteristic evidenced when he became angry. He appeared to have been shaped in the officer caste's current mold of lean, blond athlete. The blue eyes reminded Battlemont of Gwen's eyes, except that the man's appeared colder.
If that were possible.
Beyond Owling sat Leo Prim, the agency's art director. He was a thin young man, thin to a point that vibrated across the edge of emaciation. His black hair, worn long, held a natural wave. He had a narrow Roman nose, soulful brown eyes, strong cleft in the chin, generous mouth with large li
ps. A mood-cig dangled from the lips.
If Battlemont could have chosen his own appearance, he would have liked to look like Leo Prim. Romantic. Battlemont caught Prim's attention, ventured a smile of camaraderie.
No response.
General Sonnet Finnister tapped a thin finger on the tabletop. It sounded to Battlemont like the slack drum of a death march.