They have survived. And that’s good for the real environment, for the evolutionary process. That’s what does it, from the trilobite on. He felt sick.
And then he thought, I’ve seen this malformity before.
In pictures. In reconstructions. The reconstructions, the guesses, were quite good, evidently. Perhaps they had been corrected through von Lessinger’s equipment. Stooped bodies, massive jaw, inability to eat meat because of a lack of incisor teeth, great difficulty speaking. ‘Molly,’ he said aloud, ‘you know what these are, these chuppers?’
She nodded.
Jim Planck said Neanderthal. They’re not radiation freaks; they’re throwbacks.’
The auto-cab crept on, through the chuppers’ town.
Searching in its blind, mechanical way for the nearby home of the world-famous concert pianist Richard Kongrosian.
9
The Theodoras Nitz commercial squeaked, ‘In the presence of strangers do you feel you don’t quite exist? Do they seem not to notice you, as if you were invisible? On a bus or spaceship do you sometimes look around you and discover that no one, absolutely no one, recognizes you or cares about you and quite possibly may even — ‘
With his carbon dioxide-powered pellet rifle, Maury Frauenzimmer carefully shot the Nitz commercial as it hung pressed against the far wall of his cluttered office. It had squeezed in during the night, had greeted him in the morning with its tinny harangue.
Broken, the commercial dropped to the floor. Maury crushed it with his solid, compacted weight and then returned the pellet rifle to its rack.
‘The mail,’ Chic Strikerock said. ‘Where’s today’s mail?’
He had been searching everywhere in the office since his arrival.
Maury noisily sipped coffee from his cup and said, ‘Look on top of the files. Under that rag we use to clean the keys of the typewriter.’ He bit into a breakfast doughnut, the sugarcovered type. He could see that Chic was behaving oddly and he wondered what it signified.
All at once Chic said, ‘Maury, I’ve got something I wrote out for you.’ He tossed a folded piece of paper on to the desk.
Without examining it Maury knew what it was.
‘I’m resigning,’ Chic said. He was pale.
‘Please don’t,’ Maury said. ‘Something will come along. I can keep the firm functioning.’ He did not open the letter; he left it where Chic had tossed it. ‘What would you do if you left here?’ Maury asked.
‘Emigrate to Mars.’
The intercom on the desk buzzed, and their secretary, Greta Trupe, said, ‘Mr Frauenzimmer, a Mr Garth McRae to see you with several other gentlemen, in a group.’
I wonder who they are, Maury wondered. ‘Don’t send them in yet,’ he said to Greta. ‘I’m in conference with Mr Strikerock.’
‘Go ahead and conduct your business,’ Chic said. ‘I’m going. I’ll leave my resignation letter there on your desk. Wish me luck.’
‘I wish you luck.’ Maury felt depressed and ill. He stared down at the desk until the door opened and closed and Chic had gone. What a hell of a way to begin the day, Maury thought. Picking up the letter he opened it, glanced at it, folded it once more. He pressed a button on the desk intercom and said, ‘Miss Trupe, send in — the name you said, McRae or whatever it was. And his party.’
‘Yes, Mr Frauenzimmer.’
The door from the outer office opened and Maury drew himself up to face what he recognized at once to be government officials; two of them wore the grey of the National Police, and the leader of the group, evidently McRae, had the bearing of a major official of the executive branch; in other words a highly-placed Ge.
Rising clumsily to his feet, Maury extended his hand and said, ‘Gentlemen, what can I do for you?’
Shaking hands with him, McRae said, ‘You’re Frauenzimmer?’
‘Correct,’ Maury answered. His heart laboured and he had difficulty breathing. Were they going to close him down? As they had moved in on the Vienna School of psychiatrists? ‘What have I done?’ he asked, and heard his voice waver with apprehension. It was one trouble after another.
McRae smiled. ‘Nothing, so far. We’re here to initiate discussion of the placing of an order with your firm. However, this involves knowledge of a Ge level. May I rip out your intercom?’
‘P-pardon?’ Maury said, taken aback.
Nodding to the NP men, McRae stepped aside; the police moved in and swiftly made the intercom inoperative. They then inspected the walls, the furniture; they examined scrupulously every inch of the room and its equipment and then they nodded to McRae to continue.
McRae said, ‘All right. Frauenzimmer, we have specs with us for a sim we’d like constructed. Here.’ He held out a sealed envelope. ‘Go over this. We’ll wait.’
Opening the envelope, Maury studied its contents.
‘Can you do it?’ McRae asked, presently.
Raising his head, Maury said, ‘These specifications are for a der Alte.’
‘Correct.’ McRae nodded.
Then that’s it, Maury realized. That’s the piece of Ge knowledge; I’m now a Ge.
It’s happened in an instant. I’m on the inside. Too bad Chic left; poor goddam Chic, what bad timing, bad luck, on his part. If he had stayed five minutes longer …
‘It’s been true for fifty years,’ McRae said.
They were drawing him in. Making him as much a part of this as possible now.
‘Good grief,’ Maury said. ‘I never guessed, watching it perform on TV, making its speeches. And here I build the damn things myself.’ He was staggered.
‘Karp did a good job,’ McRae said. ‘Especially on the current one, Rudi Kalbfleisch. We wondered if you’d guessed.’
‘Never,’ Maury said. ‘Not one time.’ Not in a million years.
‘Can you do it? Build it?’
‘Sure.’ Maury nodded.
‘When will you start?’
‘Right away.’
‘Good. You realize, naturally, that initially NP men will have to be kept here, to ensure security maintenance.’
‘Okay,’ Maury murmured. ‘If you have to, you have to. Listen, excuse me a moment.’ He edged past them, to the door and through, to the outer office; taken by surprise they permitted him to go. ‘Miss Trupe, did you see what way Mr Strikerock went?’ he asked.
‘He just drove off, Mr Frauenzimmer. Towards the autobahn I guess he went back home to The Abraham Lincoln where he lives.’
You poor guy, Maury thought. He shook his head.
The Chic Strikerock luck; still functioning. Now he began to feel elated.
This changes everything, he realized. I’m back in business; I’m caterer to the king — or rather, I supply the White House. Same thing. Yes, it’s the same thing!
He returned to his office, where McRae and the others waited; they eyed him rather darkly. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was looking for my sales chief. I wanted to pull him back due to this. We won’t want to take any new orders for a while, so we can be free to concentrate on this.’ He hesitated. ‘As to the cost.’
‘We’ll sign a contract,’ Garth McRae said. ‘You’ll be guaranteed your costs plus forty per cent. The Rudi Kalbfleisch we acquired for a total net sum of one billion USEA dollars, plus of course the cost of perpetual maintenance and repair since the acquisition.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Maury agreed. ‘You wouldn’t want it to stop working in the middle of a speech.’ He tried to chuckle but found he could not.
‘How does that sound, roughly? Say between one bill and one-five.’
Maury said thickly, ‘Um, fine.’ His head felt as if it were about to roll off his shoulders and plunge to the floor.
Studying him, McRae said, ‘You’re a small firm, Frauenzimmer. You and I are both aware of that. Don’t get your hopes up. This will not make you a big firm, such as Karp und Sohnen Werke. However, it will guarantee your continued existence; obviously we’re prepared to underwrite you economically speaking for as long as is necessary.
We’ve gone exhaustively into your books — does that petrify you? — and we know that you’ve been operating in the red for months now.’
‘True,’ Maury said.
‘But your work is good,’ Garth McRae continued. ‘We’ve minutely inspected examples of it, both here and where it actually functions on Luna and Mars. You display authentic craftsmanship, more so, I feel, than the Karp Werke. That of course is why we’re here today instead of there with Anton and old Felix.’
‘I wondered,’ Maury said. So that was why the government had decided this time to let the contract to him, not Karp. He thought, did Karp build all the der Alte simulacra up to now? Good question. If this were so — what a radical departure in government procurement policy this was! But better not to ask.
‘Have a cigar,’ Garth McRae said, holding an Optimo admiral out to him. ‘Extra mild. Pure Florida leaf.’
‘Thank you.’ Maury gratefully — and fumblingly — accepted the big greenish cigar. Both he and Garth McRae lit up, gazing at one another in what all at once had become calm, assured silence.