He wiggled his toes and looked at the clock again. I was not ten-thirty yet and it was really early. Perhaps he should change his mind – perhaps he should dress again and go for a moonlight stroll. For there was a moon; he could see it through the window.
Damn old fool, he told himself, whuffling out his whiskers.
But he took his feet down off the desk and paddled toward the bedroom.
He chuckled as he went, planning exactly how he was going to skin Pickering to within an inch of that collector’s parsimonious life.
He was bending at the mirror, trying to make his tie track, when the doorbell set up a clamor.
If it was Pickering, he thought, he’d throw the damn fool out. Imagine turning up at this time of night to do a piece of business that could better wait till morning.
It wasn’t Pickering.
The man’s card said he was W. Frederick Hazlitt and that he was president of the Hazlitt Suppliers Corporation.
“Well, Mr. Hazlitt?”
“I’d like to talk to you a minute,” Hazlitt said, peering furtively around. “You’re sure that we’re alone here?”
“Quite alone,” said Packer.
“This is a matter of some delicacy,” Hazlitt told him, “and of some alarm as well. I came to you rather than Mr. Anton Camper because I know of you by reputation as a man of proven business sagacity. I feel you could understand the problem where Mr. Camper -”
“Fire away,” invited Packer cordially.
He had a feeling that he was going to enjoy this. The man was obviously upset and scared to death as well.
Hazlitt hunched forward in his chair and his voice dropped almost to a whisper.
“Mr. Packer,” he confided in stricken horror, “I am becoming honest!”
“That’s too bad,” said Packer sympathetically.
“Yes, it is,” said Hazlitt soberly. “A man in my position – in any business connection – simply can’t be honest. Mr. Packer, I’ll tell you confidentially that I lost out on one of the biggest deals in all my business life just last week because I had grown honest.”
“Maybe,” Packer suggested, “if you persevered, if you set your heart on it, you could remain at least partially dishonest.”
Hazlitt shook his head dolefully. “I tell you, sir, can’t. I’ve tried. You don’t know how hard I’ve tried. And no matter how I try, I find myself telling the truth about everything. I find that I cannot take unfair advantage of anyone, not even of a customer. I even found myself the other day engaged in cutting my profit margins down to a more realistic figure -”
“Why, that’s horrible!” cried Packer.
“And it’s all your fault,” yelled Hazlitt.
“My fault,” protested ‘Packer, whuffling out his whiskers. “Upon my word, Mr. Hazlitt, I can’t see how you can say a thing like that. I haven’t had a thing to do with it.”
“It’s your Efficiency units,” howled Hazlitt. “They’re the cause of it.”
“The Efficiency units have nothing to do with you, declared Packer angrily. “All they do…”
He stopped.
Good Lord, he thought, they could!
He’d been feeling better than he’d felt for years an he didn’t need his nap of an afternoon and here he was dressing to go out in the middle of the night!
“How long has this been going on?” he asked in growing horror.
“For a month at least,” said Hazlitt. “I think I first noticed it a month or six weeks ago.”
“Why didn’t you simply heave the unit out?” “I did,” yelled Hazlitt, “but it did no good.”
“I don’t understand. If you threw it out that should be the end of it.”
“That’s what I thought at the time, myself. But I was wrong. That yellow stuffs still there. It’s growing in the
cracks and floating in the air and you can’t get rid of it. Once you have it, you are stuck with it.”
Packer clucked in sympathy.
“You could move, perhaps.”
“Do you realize what that would cost me, Packer? And besides, as far as I’m concerned, it simply is no good. The stuff’s inside of me!”
He pounded at his chest. “I can feel it here, inside of me – turning me honest, making a good man out of me, making me orderly and efficient, just like it made our files. And I don’t want to be a good man, Packer – I want to make a lot of money!”
“There’s one consolation,” Packer told him. “Whatever is happening to you undoubtedly also is happening to your competitors.”
“But even if that were the case,” protested Hazlitt, “it would be no fun. What do you think a man goes into business for? To render service, to become identified with the commercial community, to make money only? No, sir, I tell you – it’s the thrill of skinning a competitor, of running the risk of losing your own shirt, of -”
“Amen,” Packer said loudly.
Hazlitt stared at him. “You, too…”
“Not a chance,” said Packer proudly. “I’m every bit as big a rascal as I ever was.”
Hazlitt settled back into his chair. His voice took on an edge, grew a trifle cold.
“I had considered exposing you, warning the world, and then I saw I couldn’t…”
“Of course you can’t,” said Packer gruffly. “You don’t enjoy being laughed at. You are the kind of man who can’t stand the thought of being laughed at.”
“What’s your game, Packer?”
“My game?”
“You introduced the stuff. You must have known what it would do. And yet you say you are unaffected by it. What are you shooting at – gobbling up the entire planet?”
Packer whuffled. “I hadn’t thought of it,” he said. “But it’s a capital idea.”
He rose stiffly to his feet. “Little old for it,” he said, “but I have a few years yet. And I’m in the best of fettle. Haven’t felt -”
“You were going out,” said Hazlitt, rising. “I’ll not detain you.”
“I thank you, sir,” said Packer. “I noticed that there was a moon and I was going for a stroll. You wouldn’t join me, would you?”
“I have more important things to do, Packer, than strolling in the moonlight.”
“I have no doubt of that,” said Packer, bowing slightly. “You would, of course, an upright, honest businessman like you.”
Hazlitt slammed the door as he went out.
Packer padded back to the bedroom, took up the tie again.
Hazlitt an honest man, he thought. And how many other honest men this night? And a year from now – how many honest men in the whole wide world just one year from now? How long before the entire Earth would be an honest Earth? With spores lurking in the cracks and floating in the air and running with the rivers, it might not take so long.
Maybe that was the reason Tony hadn’t skinned him yet. Maybe Tony was getting honest, too. Too bad, thought Packer, gravely. Tony wouldn’t be half as interesting if he should happen to turn honest.
And the Government? A Government that had come begging for the spores – begging to be honest, although to be completely fair one must admit the Government as yet did not know about the honesty.
That was a hot one, Packer told himself. An honest Government! And it would serve those stinkers right! He could see the looks upon their faces.
He gave up the business of the tie and sat down on the bed and shook for minutes with rumbling belly laughter.
At last he wiped the tears out of his eyes and finished with the tie.
Tomorrow morning, bright and early, he’d get in touch with Griffin and arrange the package deal for the stamp material. He’d act greedy and drive a hard bargain and then, in the end, pay a bit more than the price agreed upon for a long-term arrangement. An honest Government, he told himself, would be too honest to rescind such an agreement even if, in the light of its new honesty, it should realize the wrongness of it. For, happily, one of the tenets of honesty was to stay stuck with a bad bargain, no matter how arrived at.
He shucked into his jacket and went into the living room. He stopped at the desk and opened the drawer. Reaching in, he lifted the lid of the box of leaf. He took a pinch and had it halfway to his mouth when the thought struck him suddenly and he stood for a moment frozen while all the gears came together, meshing, and the pieces fell into a pattern and he knew, without even asking, why he was the only genuine dishonest man left on the entire Earth.
_I profetick and wach ahed for you!_
He put the leaf into his mouth and felt the comfort of it.
_Antidote_, he thought, and knew that he was right.
But how could Pug have known – how could he have foreseen the long, twisting tangle of many circumstances which must inevitably crystallize into this very moment?