A Handful of Time (12 page)

“Oh, come off it, Victor. Look, you worried about your son? I heard. I’ll get him in another school. He’ll straighten out. I remember when my boy‌—‌”

“I wasn’t thinking about Jerry.” It was true. He hadn’t been, consciously! But something had been driving him to work too hard and react too fast to everything.

“O.K. We’ll shelve that and get back to this Downgrading business. O.K. You’re not responsible and you don’t have to defend it Read me your copy.”

Victor unfolded a sheet of dirty, lined tablet paper. It looked like something a third grade child might carry around.

W
HEN YOU BUY
M
ANNEN WOOL SUITS YOU GET QUALITY WITHOUT THAT
“
TOO EXPENSIVE LOOK.
”
YOU CAN GO ANYWHERE IN THE
M
ANNEN SUIT WITHOUT FEAR THAT SOMEONE WILL SNICKER BEHIND YOUR BACK,
“
TOM
’
S UPGRADING TOO FAST.
”
M
ANNEN WOOL SUITS ARE WELL CUT, BUT NOT TOO WELL CUT.

There was a silence when Victor finished. “Well?” he asked.

Link said the last thing in the world anyone who knew him would expect him to say. And he said it with absolute seriousness.

“It’s dishonest,” Link said.

It broke Victor’s mood and he began to laugh unrestrainedly at the whole cockeyed world. He’d been pushed beyond the final point of irritation and all of a sudden, observing life from the fourth dimension, he saw that it was totally and irresponsibly
cute.

Link didn’t like being laughed at. Particularly when he didn’t know why.

“I mean,” Link went on, frowning and drawing on his desk with his eraser, “the assumption that everyone wants to be successful and enviable and good looking is honest. To give the impression that you want to downgrade yourself is sneaky.”

“It’s just a subterfuge for upgrading yourself,” Victor pointed out, still laughing and enjoying immensely his new knowledge about the world.

“Obviously,” Link said, making a mental note that something
had
to be done about Victor. Maybe the boy, Jerry, could be sent to live with his mother, “That’s why it’s sneaky. I don’t mind saying Glimmer tooth paste contains an ingredient that makes you a brilliant conversationalist. It’s a lie, of course. But the assumption it’s based on is true. And maybe our advertising really will give someone self-confidence and make him a brilliant conversationalist. But to say that Glimmer tooth paste makes you a little awkward at cocktail parties…”

“The basic assumption, as I said, remains the same.”

“Yes, but it’s buried so far down. We’ll be operating on all these different levels of appeal, Victor. We say, Use our product and be inferior so you can eventually be a success. I don’t like it. It’s too far from the basic human motive. And I don’t think basic human motives change.”

“Human motives? No, you wouldn’t think they’d change.”

There was a violent clicking sound from inside a canister marked, “Tea.”

LLon and Llona looked at each other.

Llona shivered. “Let’s give it up,” she said. “Now it’s on the map.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s on the map,” LLon said. “All it means is that it’s marked for checking. It’ll be four or five C’s before they send a mapping crew out to this area. By that time it’ll all be over. Except our share of a Public Energy Find. Which I think is one-fourth. Enough to keep you in grotelized force fields the rest of your life, darling. And all the spined ebees you can fit into an ebee room.”

“A lot of good that’ll do us in the Dark Exile!”

“There won’t be any Dark Exile. We haven’t done anything illegal. All we’ve done is honeymoon on a subgalactic planet and engage in simple commerce in native goods. What could be more innocent?”

“And they just happen to blow their planet, and possibly their entire solar system, to pieces just after we leave so we can claim discovery?”

“Exactly.”

Llona lowered her eating pesudopod into their tank of algae. She wasn’t hungry and the algae was tasteless, but she had trained herself to eat the stuff every seven hours, regardless.

LLon rolled over to the window to stare out at the bleak, alien landscape. It annoyed him intensely to watch women eat.

“And no one will be suspicious?” Llona asked, her thoughts a little muddled with the digestive process.

“Suppose they are? Suppose they put us in the Truth Room? We tell them the truth.”

“That we planned the destruction of a subcivilized planet?”

“That we engaged in simple commerce in native fashion. What’s the difference what our intentions were? Intentions have no legal bearing. We supplied no galactic scientific information. We used no telepathic compulsion.”

“Didn’t we?”

“I
didn’t. Unless you forced your sewing circle to break up early by telepathic compulsion.”

“Don’t be silly. I mean you supplied this Downgrading idea that you think is going to have such a traumatic effect on this culture.”

“I merely suggested it in an advertisement. These creatures did the rest. They’re very suggestible. I mean if you know what to suggest and when to suggest it. I know what to suggest, Llona, because I’m an anthropologist. And it’s odd when you think of it, that we should have found this little out of the way, unexplored planet and that I was able to spot the possibilities.”

“Didn’t you honestly have some such thing in mind, LLon, when we started out on the trip?”

“Well, I… no… rather, to be truthful, I’ve always wondered whether you couldn’t get a world to blow itself up by some subtle means such as this. The perfect crime, so to speak. For many years I’ve studied a number of subcivilized, non-telepathic cultures and worked out various schemes… but I was always under government supervision… and then ideas spread slowly among non-telepathic creatures.”

“It seems to me ideas spread incredibly fast among these creatures. Look at that Organization suggestion. Togetherness. Group thinking. And look at that loose credit suggestion. Why, it’s contrary to everything in these peoples’ religious and moral background to run up all those personal debts. But all you do is throw out a suggestion and it spreads like joy mist in a windy creel.”

“Sure. These people are not telepathic by our definition. But they obviously have some means of spreading ideas fast. I’d call it a collective unconscious telepathy. They don’t seem to know it themselves. I don’t know why. I don’t know how else they account for their mob emotions. But I suppose it’s like any other self-conscious life form. It takes an outsider to see it whole. And they’ve never known an outsider.”

“Yet,” said Llona.

“Ever,” said LLon. “They’re about to run out of ‘yet.’
 
”

Bradley sat in his glassed-in office and thought uneasily that a fish needs the glass to hold the water in but all his glass did was prevent the free flow of cigarette smoke. It did not cut off the view of Jimmy bringing around those long, white envelopes, a name scrawled in ink on each one. The personal touch.

Bradley and Guy Baldwin caught each other in a covert glance. They both looked away quickly embarrassed by the grade school atmosphere, infuriated with themselves but both too full of inward thoughts to try to cover up.

Each envelope contained a letter which said
almost
the same thing. “This is to inform you that we are temporarily reducing our executive staff due to the Depression.” Then ten of them added, “It is solely for this reason that we regretfully suspend your services, with the hope that you will still be available when we are able to resume full production.”

Jimmy went into Guy’s office, a fan of letters in his hand. Bradley tried hard not to look. He sat and stared at an open file folder. A line of green letters. A line of red letters. But when his eyes flicked up to the top of the page, just to see what company’s letter he was reading, there he was with his eyes glued on Guy.

Guy was running his tongue over the sharp edge of his upper lip. He turned the envelope over, hesitated for a flicker of an instant, and stuck it in his inside coat pocket. Either way, Bradley could see, Guy couldn’t take it in public. He’d rather have the familiar torment of waiting.

Somehow watching Guy had made Bradley feel strong and sure of himself.

“Hi, Jimmy,” Bradley said. “How’s the wife?” It was absurd that Jimmy should be, married, but he was.

“Won’t speak to me.” Jimmy tossed the envelope on Bradley’s desk and drew his finger across his neck in a throat slitting gesture. Was that a reference to his wife? Or to the letters in general, in the unlikely case Bradley didn’t know what they were? Or did Jimmy, whose inside information was always appalling, know who was going to
get
which kind of letter?

Bradley grinned, ripped open the envelope, glanced through the letter, and dropped it into the waste basket.

Then he picked up the telephone. “Get me statistical,” he said, and drummed impatient fingers on the desk while he waited for the May production figures.

Link looked at both sides of four sheets of blank paper. He was not amused.

“What the hell?” he asked.

“You wanted to know what I came up with. That’s what I came up with.”

“Damn you, Victor, you know this is no time for jokes.”

“I wasn’t joking. That’s the way I operate. You want a report, I send you a report. Now I can think some more.”

“You’ve been thinking for two weeks.”

Victor shrugged. “Fire me.”

“Wouldn’t you just love that!” Link was tired of Victor. It was impossible to be around Victor for any length of time without feeling responsible for him. And Victor reacted instinctively to this by daring people to put him on their consciences. Furthermore he really wanted to be fired. He wanted some outside reason for those intense, pink-edged eyes and that tight, pale mouth.

“Look, Victor,” Link said, “If you weren’t worth a million dollars now and then, I
would
fire you.”

“I’m not worth anything now,” Victor said. “I don’t have
no
ideas. Take it or leave it.”

“You’re so damned irresponsible you think I have a choice. I don’t. Look. You came up with that Downgrading idea. It was terrific! Well, now we’re in a pinch. A
real
pinch. Everybody says the Depression is psychological. All Depressions are psychological.”

“Everything is psychological,” Victor said, blowing the words out with a puff of cigarette smoke.

The boy again?

Link cut the end off his cigar and lit it ceremoniously. “By the way,” he asked, “how is Jerry doing at St. Simon’s?”

“You’re so subtle,” Victor said. “I don’t know how he’s doing. He hasn’t written me.”

“Ah, well. No news is good news. He’ll write when he wants money. I remember when my boy…”

“I think he’d rather starve,” Victor said.

“Yeah? Well…” Why didn’t Victor ever
help
a conversation? “Look, Victor. We may all be starving soon. It’s getting as bad as it can get. Fast. The government’s cut off foreign aid and cut down defense spending and cut taxes and we’re all cutting each others’ throats and damn it, Victor, what are we going to
do
about it?”

“Vote Democratic?”

“Don’t be an ass. You and I know political parties have nothing to do with it. The economy’s sick, sick, sick and I think advertising can come up with a real answer. Appeal to something in people. Whatever makes them
spend.

“It was Downgrading, you know, that made them stop spending. First they bought things that just
looked
a little less obtrusive than their neighbors’ things. Then, when the idea got fashionable, they either bought things that really were cheap or they didn’t buy anything at all.”

“Downgrading was a terrific idea,” Link said staunchly. “It sold Glimmer tooth paste like mad.”

“You didn’t like the idea at first. You’ve got a good instinct, Link. You ought to have listened to it.”

“It didn’t sound like a good idea at first. But it worked.”

“It did, didn’t it,” Victor said.

“I don’t want to watch,” Llona said, crouching, for some primeval source of comfort, against the roughened walls of the interstellar vehicle.

“Don’t, then,” LLon snapped. He could see the bright sun and seven of the planets, like sparkles glittering on a royal cartilage. It was his experiment and he intended to watch it.

LLon decided, rather bitterly, that his honeymoon had been a failure‌—‌as a honeymoon, that is. Llona was narrow-minded and whiney and he knew she’d divorce him when they got back. He wondered how much she’d talk. Probably plenty. Well, he was legally safe and he’d be able to buy all the friends he needed.

Bradley pushed open the door with a shove of his shoulder. It always stuck in wet weather and he always meant to see what you could do about sticky doors, but somehow he never got around to it.

He grinned at his wife. The first grin of the day, really. “Gold bangles and satin dress and candles on the table!”

“And the children farmed out for the evening,” she said. “It… you’re hungry, aren’t you?”

Bradley nodded, answering the question she was really asking. “Still in at the semi-finals,” he said. He wished he could feel better about it. “Baldwin went this time.”

“Let’s not talk about that part just yet,” Mona said. “Sit down and I’ll get you a…”

“Have you been listening to the news today? About Russian planes over Europe? Since we had to withdraw foreign aid there’s…”

“Yes, dear. But why don’t you sit down and have your drink?”

But Bradley couldn’t sit down. “Go get the children,” he said. “There’s something about the world that’s… restless.”

Victor looked terrible. He looked old and tired and apart from things. It was grotesque to see him sitting in a pert little leatherette chair.

“I didn’t get you in here to ask for ideas.” Link said “For God’s sake, the Depression’s over and the war’s on. I got you in here to tell you to get the hell out and take a vacation. Half the staff’ll get drafted soon and there’ll be a terrific manpower shortage. I want you in good shape. And we’ve got a lull now. Why don’t you take your boy up to my lodge for a…”