The water workers’ union capital city of Lewistown passed by, and then the monument to Alger Hiss, the first UN martyr; then open desert followed. Jack sat back and lit a cigarette. Under Mr. Yee’s prodding scrutiny, he had left without remembering to bring his thermos of coffee, and he now felt its lack. He felt sleepy. They won’t get me to work on the Public School, he said to himself, but with more anger than conviction. I’ll quit. But he knew he wouldn’t quit. He would go to the school, tinker with it for an hour or so, giving the impression of being busy repairing, and then Bob or Pete would show up and do the job; the firm’s reputation would be preserved, and they could go back to the office. Everyone would be satisfied, including Mr. Yee.
Several times he had visited the Public School with his son. That was different. David was at the top of his class, attending the most advanced teaching machines along the route. He stayed late, making the most of the tutorial system of which the UN was so proud. Looking at his watch, Jack saw that it was ten o’clock. At this moment, as he recalled from his visits and from his son’s accounts, David was with the Aristotle, learning the rudiments of science, philosophy, logic, grammar, poetics, and an archaic physics. Of all the teaching machines, David seemed to derive the most from the Aristotle, which was a relief; many of the children preferred the more dashing teachers at the School: Sir Francis Drake (English history, fundamentals of masculine civility) or Abraham Lincoln (United States history, basics of modern warfare and the contemporary state) or such grim personages as Julius Caesar and Winston Churchill. He himself had been born too soon to take advantage of the tutorial school system, he had gone to classes as a boy where he sat with sixty other children, and later, in high school, he had found himself listening and watching an instructor speaking over closedcircuit TV along with a class of a thousand. If, however, he had been allowed into the new school, he could readily have located his own favorite: on a visit with David, on the first parent-teacher day in fact, he had seen the Thomas Edison Teaching Machine, and that was enough for him. It took David almost an hour to drag his father away.
Below the ‘copter, the desert land gave way to sparse, prairie-like grassland. A barbed-wire fence marked the beginning of the McAuliff ranch, and with it the area administered by the State of Texas. McAuliff’s father had been a Texas oil millionaire, and had financed his own ships for the emigration to Mars; he had beaten even the plumbers’ union people. Jack put out his cigarette and began to lower the ‘copter, searching against the glare of the sun for the buildings of the ranch.
A small herd of cows panicked and galloped off at the noise of the ‘copter; he watched them scatter, hoping that McAuliff, who was a short, dour-faced Irishman with an obsessive attitude toward life, hadn’t noticed. McAuliff, for good reasons, had a hypochondriacal view of his cows; he suspected that all manner of Martian things were out to get them, to make them lean, sick, and fitful in their milk production.
Turning on his radio transmitter, Jack said into the microphone, “This is a Yee Company repairship. Jack Bohlen asking permission to land on the McAuliff strip, in answer to your call.”
He waited, and then there came the answer from the huge ranch. “O.K., Bohlen, all clear. No use asking what took you so long.” McAuliff’s resigned, grumpy voice.
“Be there any minute now,” Jack said, with a grimace.
Presently he made out the buildings ahead, white against the sand.
“We’ve got fifteen thousand gallons of milk here.” McAuliff’s voice came from the radio speaker. “And it’s all going to spoil unless you get this damned refrigeration unit going soon.”
“On the double,” Jack said. He put his thumbs in his ears and leered a grotesque, repudiating face at the radio speaker.
2
The ex-plumber, Supreme Goodmember Arnie Kott of the Water Workers’ Local, Fourth Planet Branch, rose from his bed at ten in the morning and as was his custom strolled directly to the steam bath.
“Hello, Gus.”
“Hi there, Arnie.”
Everybody called him by his first name, and that was good. Arnie Kott nodded to Bill and Eddy and Tom, and they all greeted him. The air, full of steam, condensed around his feet and drained off across the tiles, to be voided. That was a touch which pleased him: the baths had been constructed so as not to preserve the run-off. The water drained out onto the hot sand and disappeared forever. Who else could do that? He thought, Let’s see if those rich Jews up in New Israel have a steam bath that wastes water.
Placing himself under a shower, Arnie Kott said to the fellows around him, “I heard some rumor I want checked on soon as possible. You know that combine from California, those Portugees that originally held title on the F.D.R. Mountain Range, and they tried to extract iron ore there, but it was too low grade, and the cost was way out of line? I heard they sold their holdings.”
“Yeah, I heard that too.” All the boys nodded. “I wonder how much they lost. Must have taken a terrible beating.”
Arnie said, “No, I heard they found a buyer that was willing to put up more than they paid; they made a profit, after all these yars. So it paid them to hold out. I wonder who’s nuts enough to want that land. I got some mineral rights there, you know. I want you to check into who bought that land and what kind of operation they represent. I want to know what they’re doing over there.”
“Good to know those things.” Again everyone nodded, and one man–Fred, it looked like–detached himself from his shower and padded off to dress. “I’ll check into that, Arnie,” Fred said over his shoulder. “I’ll get to it right away.”
Addressing himself to the remaining men, Arnie soaped himself all over and said, “You know I got to protect my mineral rights; I can’t have some smoozer coming in here from Earth and making those mountains into like for instance a national park for picnickers. I tell you what I heard. I know that a bunch of Communist officials from Russia and Hungary, big boys, was over here around a week ago, no doubt looking around. You think because that collective of theirs failed last year they gave up? No. They got the brains of bugs, and like bugs they always come back. Those Reds are aching to establish a successful collective on Mars; it’s practically a wet dream of theirs back Home. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out that those Portugees from California sold to Communists, and pretty soon we’re seeing the name changed from the F.D.R. Mountains, which is right and proper, to something like the Joe Stalin Mountains.”
The men all laughed appreciatively.
“Now, I got a lot of business ahead of me today to conduct,” Arnie Kott said, washing the soapsuds from him with furious streams of hot water. “So I can’t devote myself to this matter any further; I’m relying on you to dig into it. For example, I have been traveling east where we got that melon experiment in progress, and it seems like we’re about to be entirely successful in inducing the New England type of melon into growing here in this environment. I know you all have been wondering about that, because everybody likes a good slice of cantaloupe in the morning for his breakfast, if it’s at all possible.”
“That’s true, Arnie,” the boys agreed.
“But,” Arnie said, “I got more on my mind than melons. We had one of those UN boys visiting us the other day protesting our regulations concerning the niggers. Or maybe I shouldn’t say that; maybe I should talk like the UN boys and say ‘indigenous population remnants,’ or just Bleekmen. What he had reference to was our licensing the mines owned by our settlement to use Bleekmen at below scale, I mean, below the minimum wage–because even those fairies at the UN don’t seriously propose we pay scale to Bleekmen figgers. However, we have this problem that .we can’t pay any minimum wage to the Bleekmen niggers because their work is so inconsistent that we’d go broke, and we have to use them in mining operations because they’re the only ones who can breathe down there, and we can’t get oxygen equipment in quantity transported over here at any price less than outrageous. Somebody’s making a lot of money back Home on those oxygen tanks and compressors and all that. It’s a racket, and we’re not going to get gouged, I can tell you.”