Presently Jonas Ackerman shrugged and said, ‘Well, that’s marriage these days. Legalized hate.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Oh, the overtones came through in that exchange; you could feel it in the air like the chill of death. There ought to be an ordinance that a man can’t work for the same outfit as his wife; hell, even in the same city.’ He smiled, his thin, youthful face all at once free of seriousness. ‘But she really is good, you know; Virgil gradually let go all his other antique collectors after Kathy started here … but of course she’s mentioned that to you.’
‘Many times.’ Almost every day, he reflected caustically.
‘Why don’t you two get divorced?’
Eric shrugged, a gesture designed to show a deep philosophical nature. He hoped it truly did so.
The gesture evidently fell short, because Jonas said, ‘Meaning that you like it?’
‘I mean,’ he said resignedly, ‘that I’ve been married before and it was no better, and if I divorce Kathy I’ll marry again – because as my brainbasher puts it I can’t find my identity outside the role of husband and daddy and big butter-and-egg-man wage earner – and the next damn one will be the same because that’s the kind I select. It’s rooted in my temperament.’ He raised his head and eyed Jonas with as good a show of masochistic defiance as he could manage. ‘What did you want, Jonas?’
‘Trip,’ Jonas Ackerman said brightly. ‘To Mars, for all of us, including you. Conference! You and I can nab seats a good long way from old Virgil so we won’t have to discuss company business and the war effort and Gino Molinari. And since we’re taking the big goat it’ll be six hours each way. And for God’s sake, let’s not find ourselves standing up all the way to Mars and back – let’s make sure we do get seats.’
‘How long will we be there?’ He frankly did not look forward to the trip; it would separate him from his work too long.
‘We’ll undoubtedly be back tomorrow or the day after. Listen; it’ll get you out of your wife’s path: Kathy’s staying here. It’s an irony, but I’ve noticed that when the old fellow’s actually at Wash-35 he never likes to have his antique experts around him … he likes to slide into the, ahem, magic of the place … more so all the time as he gets older. When you’re one hundred and thirty you’ll begin to understand – so will I, maybe. Meanwhile we have to put up with him.’ He added, somberly, ‘You probably know this, Eric, because you are his doctor. He never will die; he’ll never make the hard decision – as it’s called – no matter what fails and has to be replaced inside him. Sometimes I envy him for being – optimistic. For liking life that much; for thinking it’s so important. Now, we puny mortals; at our age—’ He eyed Eric. ‘At a miserable thirty or thirty-three—’
‘I’ve got plenty of vitality,’ Eric said. ‘I’m good for a long time. And life isn’t going to get the best of me.’ From his coat pocket he brought forth the bill which the robant collector had presented to him. ‘Think back. Did a package of Lucky Strike with the green show up at Wash-35 about three months ago? A contribution from Kathy?’
After a long pause Jonas Ackerman said, ‘You poor suspicious stupid creak. That’s all you can manage to brood about. Listen, doctor; if you can’t get your mind on your job, you’re finished; there’s twenty artiforg surgeons with applications in our personnel files just waiting to go to work for a man like Virgil, a man of his importance in the economy and war effort. You’re really just plain not all that good.’ His expression was both compassionate and disapproving, a strange mixture which had the effect of waking Eric Sweetscent abruptly. ‘Personally, if my heart gave out – which it no doubt will do one of these days – I wouldn’t particularly care to go to you. You’re too tangled in your own personal affairs. You live for yourself, not the planetary cause. My God, don’t you remember? We’re fighting a life-and-death war. And we’re losing. We’re being pulverized every goddam day!’
True, Eric realized. And we’ve got a sick, hypochondriacal, dispirited leader. And Tijuana Fur & Dye Corporation is one of those vast industrial props that maintain that sick leader, that manage just barely to keep the Mole in office. Without such warm, high-placed personal friendships as that of Virgil Ackerman, Gino Molinari would be out or dead or in an old folks’ rest home. I know it. And yet – individual life must go on. After all, he reflected, I didn’t choose to get entangled in my domestic life, my boxer’s clinch with Kathy. And if you think I did or do, it’s because you’re morbidly young. You’ve failed to pass from adolescent freedom into the land which I inhabit: married to a woman who is economically, intellectually, and even this, too, even erotically my superior.
——————————————————————————–
Before leaving the building Dr Eric Sweetscent dropped by the Baths, wondering if Bruce Himmel had shown up. He had; there he stood, beside the huge reject-basket full of defective Lazy Brown Dogs.
‘Turn them back into groonk,’ Jonas said to Himmel, who grinned in his empty, disjointed fashion as the youngest of the Ackermans tossed him one of the defective spheres which rolled off TF&D’s assembly lines along with those suitable for wiring into the command guidance structure of interplanetary spacecraft. ‘You know,’ he said to Eric, ‘if you took a dozen of these control syndromes – and not the defective ones but the ones going into shipping cartons for the Army – you’d find that compared with a year ago or even six months ago their reaction time has slowed by several microseconds.’
‘By that you mean,’ Eric said, ‘our quality standards have dropped?’
It seemed impossible. TF&D’s product was too vital. The entire network of military operations depended on these head-sized spheres.
‘Exactly.’ It did not appear to bother Jonas. ‘Because we were rejecting too many units. We couldn’t show a profit.’
Himmel stammered, ‘S-sometimes I wish we were back in the Martian bat guano business.’
Once the corporation had collected the dung of the Martian flap bat, had made its first returns that way and so had been in position to underwrite the greater economic aspects of another non-terrestrial creature, the Martian print amoeba. This august unicellular organism survived by its ability to mimic other life forms – those of its own size, specifically – and although this ability had amused Terran astronauts and UN officials, no one had seen an industrial usage until Virgil Ackerman of bat guano fame had come upon the scene. Within a matter of hours he had presented a print amoeba with one of his’current mistress’s expensive furs; the print amoeba had faithfully mimicked it, whereupon, for all intents and purposes, between Virgil and the girl two mink stoles existed. However, the amoeba had at last grown tired of being a fur and had resumed its own form. This conclusion left something to be desired.
The answer, developed over a period of many months, consisted of killing the amoeba during its interval of mimicry and then subjecting the cadaver to a bath of fixing-chemicals which had the capacity to lock the amoeba in that final form; the amoeba did not decay and hence could not later on be distinguished from the original. It was not long before Virgil Ackerman had set up a receiving plant at Tijuana, Mexico, and was accepting shipments of ersatz furs of every variety from his industrial installations on Mars. And almost at once he had broken the natural fur market on Earth.
The war, however, had changed all that.
But, then, what hadn’t the war changed? And who had ever thought, when the Pact of Peace was signed with the ally, Lilistar, that things would go so badly? Because according to Lilistar and its Minister Freneksy this was the dominant military power in the galaxy; its enemy, the reegs, was inferior militarily and in every other way and the war would undoubtedly be a short one.
War itself was bad enough, Eric ruminated, but there was nothing quite like a losing war to make one stop and think, to try – futilely – to second-guess one’s past decisions – such as the Pact of Peace, to name one example, and an example which currently might have occurred to quite a number of Terrans had they been asked. But these days their opinions were not being solicited by the Mole or by the government of Lilistar itself. In fact it was universally believed – openly noised about at bars as well as in the privacy of living rooms – that even the Mole’s opinion was not being asked.
As soon as hostilities with the reegs had begun, Tijuana Fur & Dye had converted from the luxury trade of ersatz fur production to war work, as, of course, had all other industrial enterprises. Supernaturally accurate duplication of rocketship master syndromes, the ruling monad Lazy Brown Dog, was fatalistically natural for the type of operation which TF&D represented; conversion had been painless and rapid. So here now, meditatively, Eric Sweetscent faced this basket of rejects, wondering – as had everyone at one time or another in the corporation – how these sub-standard and yet still quite complex units could be put to some economic advantage. He picked one up and handled it; in terms of weight it resembled a baseball, in terms of size a grapefruit. Evidently nothing could be done with these failures which Himmel had rejected, and he turned to toss the sphere into the maw of the hopper, which would return the fixed plastic into its original organic cellular form.