Prescription for Chaos (40 page)

Schwenck stared. "You can only mean the customer."

"Right. Now, anyone that important is going to have his interests looked after. And since this is your division, you will look after those interests! What do you mean, the quality-control inspector will do it? The quality-control inspector may check the thickness of metal or the finish on the enamel, but there's more to satisfying a customer than that! You can't delegate that job! That job is the most important job you've got! It is your personal responsibility to check that those products are right! The only way you can do that is to become a customer yourself! Mr. Chairman, I move that a special allowance be made to Mr. R. J. Schwenck, head of our Fuels Sciences Division, to enable him to immediately purchase, as a customer, one of our Superheat Solid-Fuel Converters—colloquially known as a 'stove,' preferably Model J616 or J617—and report to us at the next meeting on his personal installation and use of this device."

Madeleine Schwenck looked on in bafflement as her husband paid the deliverymen and eyed the massive bright-red object they had left. "Richie, what, pray tell, is that?"

Schwenck exhaled carefully.

"It's a—it's a stove, Hon."

"Where are you planning to put it?"

"Right here. Where I had them leave it."

"There?"

"Remember, we had the wood stove here."

"Richie, look, we agreed to get rid of the wood stove. And the chainsaw. And the pick-up truck. If you had to get another wood stove—"

"This is not a wood stove."

"That's true, you only said it's a stove. Well, then, what kind of stove is it?"

"It's a—ah—a solid-fuels converter. Of—h'm—fossil fuels."

"It's a what?"

"It's a coal stove."

She took a fresh look at him, then at the stove. Then she looked at him again.

He stood frowning at the curving bulk, and asked himself, exactly why did this thing look like a cross between an old-style fire truck and a juke box when the sketches and presentations had shown it as modern and cheerful. A 1930s aura radiated from it, along with a sense of stubborn intractability.

She said carefully, "Richie—"

He said, "Look, Madeleine, this is not necessarily permanent. I—uh—you might look on it as a sort of, well, company homework."

"Rich, please, I don't know what you have in mind, but please remember that I'm a lawyer, and we don't want another of those arguments where we both forget ourselves. And I can feel it starting to build up already. I do pay part of the costs—a good part of the costs—of this house, and I don't mind it, it's fair, but I like to be consulted about what we do and what we don't do. Now—"

He groaned, and told her about the directors' meeting.

"Well," she said, frowning, "I hear it, but I don't understand it. This was the idea of this stock swindler?"

"Hon," said Schwenck, "I may have put it too strong. This guy cuts things pretty close to the line, but it's not that line he cuts close to. He's opinionated, overbearing, and damned tricky; but he's not a swindler."

"Then you're saying he's a stock
operator?
"

"He sure is. The problem is, for some reason, he's down on this stove; but my whole division is set up to take advantage of an inevitable disruption in the oil industry—this business of upheavals in the Middle East gives us a chance to see what is bound to happen eventually. Now, we are presenting a whole line of these—these solid-fossil-fuel converters, based on products a branch of Superdee Equipment used to make—"

She said, "So what it boils down to is that the biggest shareholder in the company is on the board of directors, and everybody is afraid of him, and he is making you personally try out one of the products you're planning to sell?"

He said, "Yeah. I guess that is it."

She grinned.

He said aggrievedly, "Damn it, it all makes perfectly good sense! As a country, we're well supplied with coal. Oil, comparatively speaking, is scarce. If there should be a break in the oil supply, the demand for some other source of energy would be fierce. Natural gas can take up part of the slack, but not all. There's going to be a hole there, and something has to fill it. Now, wood stoves produce a lot of smoke; they don't generally burn very long before you have to reload them; there are complicated pollution-control requirements; wood is not a predictable fuel unless you make it into pellets, which costs money; there are environmental objections to the burning of wood on a really large scale; meantime, you have problems storing wood.

"The obvious answer is coal! There are only a comparatively few companies set up to produce coal stoves on anywhere near the basis that we are. And the others, as far as I know, are all asleep at the switch. And we've got our Combuster, a really effective pollution control device, which is a step ahead of everyone else in this business. If something unexpected happened to oil, we could make a mint! And don't tell me nothing could happen! We import a lot of our oil from a place that's a powder keg!"

His wife nodded. "OK, you go ahead and get it ready. Are the stovepipes black, like for our wood stove?"

"They're enameled red. A red stove with black pipes—our market research indicated people wouldn't go for that."

"Richie, that is quite a vivid shade of red."

"Yeah, I know. I just noticed that. The color in the sketches looked darker. And the first stoves we made didn't look like this to me. This has an electric effect."

"It jumps back and forth when you look at it."

He swallowed, and said nothing. He had just noticed that the stove was not properly centered in front of the flue opening. It would have to be moved, or the stovepipe would be crooked. And the thing weighed, at a conservative estimate, around four hundred pounds, since the dealer had conned him into getting the big model while he was at it.

His wife sighed.

"I'll put the frozen glop in the microwave. You set up the fossil-fuel converter. That doesn't have an oven in it?"

"No, it's got a HydraFlame Combuster to, among other things, fully burn the gases given off in initial combustion of the solid hydrocarbons."

She said irreverently, "You can't eat that," and went out to the kitchen. He stood, eyes squinted against the electric effect of the red outer metal jacket seen against the pale-green walls of the room. Damn it, how was he going to move this thing?

W. W. Sanson eyed the trio of blocky-looking objects, and silently asked himself, "These slabs are what we saw the sketches of? What the hell happened?" Aloud, he said, "These are the Cartwright stoves I phoned about?"

The salesman said, "Yes, sir. As a matter of fact, these are a lot like the standard old Superdee coal stoves we used to carry. Only this model has a tricky gimmick in it that's supposed to turn the coal into gas, and burn it up atomically, with nuclear destruction of the pollution."

Sanson got a feeling of chills and fever. With that description, the customer could get nervous and look around for another make.

"H'm, yes," he said, peering into the dark interior.

The salesman said, "Run you about three thousand for the biggest model. You could heat a church with that one."

"I wasn't thinking I needed anything that big." Sanson reminded himself he was, after all, paying for the thing, out of a totally natural irritation with Ravagger. Damn it, he asked himself, why should we go out and buy these things when the market research people had handed in their assessment, and everything was going according to plan? On the other hand, he had already discovered that the design, in reality, had all the appeal of a claw-foot bathtub turned inside-out and stood on end. The price, met in reality, not in a report on paper, gave him a fiercely possessive grip on his checkbook. If it did that to him, it was going to hit other customers the same way. And the pale-blue enamel on this batch of stoves was way too light, as if he were looking at several monster chunks of blue cheese.

The salesman was saying, "The middle-sized one is $2,200. The little one is $1,600. You can knock half-a-buck or so off all these prices."

Sanson moodily considered that there went all the crafty calculation of laying out a price line-up of $2998.49, $2198.59, and $1598.69.

"I'll take the small one," he said.

The salesman shook his head. "I wouldn't. That spare buoy they stuck in the center to eat the pollution takes too much space. Even in the old Superdees, that little model wouldn't hold a fire overnight unless you damped it way down. Then the fire stays warm, but you freeze. What's the point?"

Sanson stared at him. If the damned thing wouldn't hold a fire overnight, what was the point? Why sell it? He said, "The little Superdee wouldn't hold a fire? Since when?"

"Not if you wanted heat out of it on a cold night, it wouldn't. What you had to do was get up in the middle of the night and load her up again."

Sanson grunted. "You ever tell the company about that?"

"Why waste breath? They were happy. It sold because it was cheap. They were well made, those old Superdees."

"How about this job? What is it for quality?"

"Same as the old Superdees. I'll give them that. They didn't skimp on the metal.—As you'll find when you come to move it."

Sanson squinted at the salesman. "I'll take the midsize one."

"Good choice. You just give me your address, and we'll send her around. You pick out where you want it put, and get it right the first time. You don't want to have to move it. Now, you're going to want some other stuff to go with it, and we have to work out the details. Where's the flue opening? How much pipe you want? How far from the wall? What—"

Sanson gave a grunt of disgust. He had come in here out of a sense of defiance. After all, what could be wrong? And before the stove had even been delivered, he was already fed up with it. Who approved this guy to be a dealer, anyway?

Cyrus Cartwright II looked thoughtfully at the display. Well, there they were. Of course, there was no sense of urgency, no crowd around, no background of an oil crisis. What stood out now was the dowdy style and the price. But why had the style seemed attractive and the price reasonable in the plans?

A salesman materialized at Cartwright's elbow. "Interested in a stove, sir?"

The board of directors settled grumpily into their seats, and under the wary guidance of Cyrus Cartwright II, who held one hand in his lap while he kept a cautious eye on Ravagger, the meeting proceeded in routine boredom until Cartwright glanced coolly at Schwenck.

"Mr. Schwenck, I believe you have a report on one of our—ah—solid-fuels converters?"

Schwenck, a strip of woven cotton protruding from under the cuff of his left sleeve, growled, "Yes, I do, Mr. Cartwright."

"Perhaps," said Cartwright, his own bandaged right hand, clenched into a fist, coming briefly into view, "you will be kind enough to briefly summarize for us your personal impressions regarding this solid-fuels converter?"

Schwenck clamped his jaw. "Yes, I will."

"Please do," said Cartwright.

Down the table, Ravagger, glancing at Schwenck's wrist and Cartwright's hand, for the first time showed a perceptible facial expression—a quickly suppressed grin.

Schwenck took a deep breath.

"The stove stinks. That's as brief as I can summarize it."

A murmur went around the table. Schwenck said angrily, "If we have another oil shortage, we'll be able to sell these damned things to a lot of people, because it will be either that or freeze to death. But as it stands right now, nobody in his right mind will ever buy a second one."

Cartwright let his breath out in a hiss, and nodded agreeably. "All right. Now perhaps you could give the board, and Mr. Ravagger in particular, since checking on this was his idea, a few of the more specific details."

"The stove," said Schwenck, "to start with, is too heavy; if you need to move it, you're up the creek without a seven-foot crowbar. Even then, it's damned near impossible to insinuate the end of the bar between the floor and the lower extension of the sheet-metal outer jacket. Worse yet, there isn't enough room between the inner stove itself, and this enameled metal jacket. If the fire overheats, the jacket can give you a nasty burn. A child could get seared on the part of the jacket near the firepot. Just incidentally, you can see what that means in terms of liability.

"Then, the feed door doesn't open wide enough; when you try to load the stove, the door swings shut on you. The feed door, by the way, is hot. You can get burned on it, too.

"The ash pit is too small, so you are everlastingly carrying out the ash pan, which is likely to be overfull and ready to dump. The ash shaker gets stuck when coal or clinkers jam in the grate, so to get it free you have to push hard on the handle; the handle then gives way all of a sudden and your knuckles slam into the knife-edged frame of the ash door.

"All this is bad enough, but for irritation, the worst is the so-called Combuster. This chunk of metal takes up space, and gets in the way every time you try to put a shovel of coal in.

"Finally, for good measure, the mount for the optional fan vibrates inside the sheet-metal lining of the stove so that the fan itself rattles and clanks against the cast-iron inner body of the stove. It doesn't always do this. It does it now and then, in certain unpredictable, non-reproducible-at-will conditions of heat and related stress possibly determined by the phases of the Moon.

"In the small model, which I tried out after using the big one, this list of defects makes the stove frankly worthless. As a matter of fact, we ought to pay the customers to take it off our hands."

Schwenck's recital, delivered with venomous conviction, left a stunned silence. Finally, Grissom, the treasurer, sat up, and said, "Frankness is a virtue, Mr. Schwenck, but hasn't our solid-fuel converter got any good features at all?"

Schwenck looked as if he were thinking earnestly. "If it has one, I can't think of it."

"But wasn't this device your responsibility?"

"It was, Mr. Grissom, and if you are suggesting I ought to be fired for that reason—"