“Helio,” he said, “do you know the F.D.R. range?”
“Mister, I do know them,” the Bleekman said. “I shun them. They are cold and empty and have no life.”
“Is it true,” Arnie said, “that you Bleekmen have an oracular rock that you go to when you want to know the future?”
“Yes, Mister. The uncivilized Bleekmen have that. But it is vain superstition. Dirty Knobby, the rock is called.”
“You never consult it, yourself.”
“No, Mister.”
“Could you find that rock, if necessary?”
“Yes, Mister.”
“I’ll give you a dollar,” Arnie said, “if you take a question to your goddamn Dirty Knobby rock for me.”
“Thank you, Mister, but I cannot do it.”
“Why not, Helio?”
“It would proclaim my ignorance, to consult with such fraudulency.”
“Christ,” Arnie said, disgusted. “Just as a game–can’t you do that? For a joke.”
The Bleekman said nothing, but his dark face was tight with resentment. He pretended to resume his reading of the manual.
“You fellows were stupid to give up your native religion,” Arnie said. “You showed how weak you are. I wouldn’t have. Tell me how to find Dirty Knobby and I’ll ask it myself. I know goddamn well that your religion teaches that you can foretell the future, and what’s so peculiar about that? We’ve got extra-Sensory individuals back Home, and some of them have precognition, can read the future. Of course we have to lock them up with the other nuts, because that’s a symptom of schizophrenia, if you happen to know what that means.”
“Yes, Mister,” Heliogabalus said. “I know schizophrenia; it is the savage within the man.”
“Sure, it’s the reversion to primitive ways of thought, but so what, if you can read the future? In those mental health camps back Home there must be hundreds of precogs–” And then a thought struck Arnie Kott. Maybe there’re a couple here on Mars, at Camp B-G.
The hell with Dirty Knobby rock, then, Arnie thought. I’ll drop by B-G one day before they close it and get me a precog nut; I’ll bail him out of the camp and put him on the payroll, right here in Lewistown.
Going to his telephone, he called the Union steward, Edward L. Goggins. “Eddy,” he said, when he had hold of the steward, “you trot over to our psychiatric clinic and collar those doctors, and you bring back a description of what a precog nut is like, I mean, what symptoms, and if they know one at Camp B-G we could nab.”
“O.K., Arnie. Will do.”
“Who’s the best psychiatrist on Mars, Eddy?”
“Gosh, Arnie, I’d have to check into it. The Truckers have a good one, Milton Glaub. Reason I know that is, my wife’s brother is a Trucker and got analysis from Glaub last year, plus naturally effective representation.”
“I suppose this Glaub knows B-G pretty good.”
“Oh, yeah, Arnie; he’s over there once a week, they all take turns. The Jews pay pretty good, they’ve got so much dough to spend. They get the dough from Israel back on Earth, you know.”
“Well, get hold of this Glaub and tell him to rustle up a precog schizophrenic for me as soon as possible. Put Glaub on the payroll, but only if you have to; most of those psychiatrists are aching for regular money, they see so little of it. Understand, Eddy?”
“Right, Arnie.” The steward rang off.
“You ever been psychoanalyzed, Helio?” Arnie said to him, feeling cheerful, now.
“No, Mister. Entire psychoanalysis is a vainglorious foolishness.”
“How zat, Helio?”
“Question they never deal with is, what to remold sick person like. There is no what, Mister.”
“I don’t get you, Helio.”
“Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning. There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them.”
“Kee-rist,” Arnie said, with derision, “you half-educated freak– I’ll bet if human civilization disappeared from Mars you’d be right back there among those savages in ten seconds flat, worshipping idols and all the rest of it. Why do you pretend you want to be like us? Why are you reading that manual?”
Heliogabalus said, “Human civilization will never leave Mars, Mister; that is why I study this book.”
“Out of that book,” Arnie said, “you better be able to tune up my goddamn harpsichord, or you will be back in the desert, whether human civilization stays on Mars or not.”
“Yes sir,” his tame Bleekman said.
Ever since he had lost his union card and could not then legally perform his job, Otto Zitte’s life had been a continual mess. With a card he would be by now a first-class repairman. It was his secret that he had once held such a card and had managed to lose it; even his employer, Norb Steiner, did not tnow it. For reasons he himself did not understand, Otto preferred others to believe he had simply failed the aptitude tests. Perhaps it was easier to think of himself as a failure; after all, the repair business was almost impossible to get into . . . and after having gotten into it, to be booted out–
It was his own fault. There he had been, three years ago, a paid-up member of the union in good standing, in other words a bona fide Goodmember. The future was wide open for him; he was young, he had a girl friend and his own ‘copter–the latter, leased; the former, although he had not known it at the time, shared–and what could hold him back? What, except possibly his own stupidity.
He had broken a union ruling which was a basic law. In his opinion it was a foolish ruling, but nonetheless . . . vengeance is mine, sayeth the Extraterrestrial Repairmen’s Union, Martian Branch. Wow, how he hated the bastards; his hatred had warped his life and he recognized that–and he did nothing about it: he wanted it to warp him. He wanted to keep on hating them, the vast monolithic structure, wherever it existed.
They had caught him for giving socialized repair.
And the hell of it was that it wasn’t actually socialized, because he expected to get back a profit. It was just a new way of charging his customers, and in a sense not so new, anyhow. It was actually the oldest way in the world, a barter system. But his revenue could not be divvied up so that the union got its cut. His trade had been with certain housewives living out in remote tracts, very lonely women whose husbands stayed in the city five days a week, coming home only on weekends. Otto, who was good-looking, slender, with long, combed-back black hair (in his account of himself, anyhow), had made time with one woman after another; and an outraged husband, on finding out, had, instead of shooting Otto to death, gone instead to the Union Hiring Hall and lodged a formal charge: repairs without compensation at scale.
Well, it certainly was not scale; he admitted that.
And so now this job with Norb Steiner, which meant that he had practically to live in the wastelands of the F.D.R. Mountains, alienated from society for weeks on end, growing more and more lonely, more embittered all the time. It had been his need for intimate personal contact that had gotten him into trouble in the first place, and now look at him. As he sat in the storage shed waiting for the next rocket to show up, he looked back on his life and reflected that even the Bleekmen wouldn’t be willing or able to live as he lived, cut off from everyone like this. If only his own black-market operations had succeeded! He, like Norb Steiner, had been able to swing around the planet daily, visiting one person after another. Was it his fault that the items he chose to import were hot enough to interest the big boys? His judgment had been too good; his line had sold too well.
He hated the big racketeers, too, same as he hated the big unions. He hated bigness per se; bigness had destroyed the American system of free enterprise, the small businessman had been ruined–in fact, he himself had been perhaps the last authentic small businessman in the solar system. That was his real crime: he had tried to live the American way of life, instead of just talking about it.
“Screw them,” he said to himself, seated on a crate, surrounded by boxes and cartons and packages and the workings of several dismantled rocketships which he had been revamping. Outside the shed window . . . silent, desolate rock hills, with only a few shrubs, dried up and dying, as far as the eye could see.