The last entry said raggedly: “Told me I’m no good. I know I’m no good. Unworthy of the profession. They all know it. Can see it in their faces. Everybody knows it. He told them. Damn him. Damn him and his teeth. Damn-” “Poor, poor fellow,” said Schocken, almost sobbing. He turned to me and said: “You see? The overwhelming strains of our profession . . .” Sure I saw. A prefabricated diary and an unidentifiable splash of protoplasm. It might have been 180 pounds of Chicken Little down there on the first setback. But I would have been wasting my breath. I nodded soberly, humoring him. I was restored to my job at the top of Venus Section. I saw Fowler’s analyst daily. And I kept my armed guard. In tearful sessions the old man would say: “You must relinquish this symbol. It’s all that stands between you and reality now, Mitch. Dr. Lawler tells me-” Dr. Lawler told Fowler Schocken what I told Dr. Lawler. And that was the slow progress of my “integration.” I hired a medical student to work out traumas for me backwards from the assumption that my time as a consumer had been a psychotic fugue, and he came up with some honeys. A few I had to veto as not quite consistent with my dignity, but there were enough left to make Dr. Lawler drop his pencil every once in a while. One by one we dug them up, and I have never been so bored in my life. But one thing I would not surrender, and that was my insistence that my life and Fowler Schocken’s life were in danger. Fowler and I got closer and closer-a thing I’ve seen before. He thought he had made a convert. I was ashamed to string him along. He was being very good to me. But it was a matter of life or death. The rest was side show. The day came when Fowler Schocken said gently: “Mitch, I’m afraid heroic measures are in order. I don’t ask you to dispense with this fence of yours against reality. But / am going to dismiss my guards.” “They’ll kill you, Fowler!” burst from me. He shook his head gently. “You’ll see. I’m not afraid.” Argument was quite useless. After a bit of it, acting on sound psychological principles, he told the lieutenant of his office squad: “I won’t be needing you any more. Please report with your men to Plant Secu-
rity Pool for reassignment. Thank you very much for your loyalty and attention to detail during these weeks.” The lieutenant saluted, but he and his men looked sick. They were going from an easy job in executives’ country to lobby patrol or night detail or mail guard or messenger service at ungodly hours. They filed out, and I knew Fowler Schocken’s hours were numbered. That night he was garroted on his way home by somebody who had slugged his chauffeur and substituted himself at the pedals of the Fowler Schocken Cadillac. The killer, apparently a near-moron, resisted arrest and was clubbed to death, giggling. His tattoo had been torn off; he was quite unidentifiable. You can easily imagine how much work was done in the office the next day. There was a memorial Board meeting held and resolutions passed saying it was a dirty shame and a great profession never would forget and so on. Messages of condolence were sent by the other agencies, including Taunton’s. I got some odd looks when I crumpled the Taunton message in my fist and used some very bad language. Commercial rivalry, after all, goes just so far. We’re all gentlemen here, of course. A hard, clean fight and may the best agency win. But no Board member paid it much mind. They all were thinking of just one thing: the Schocken block of voting shares. Fowler Schocken Associates was capitalized at 7 X 1013 shares. Of these, 3.5 X 1013 + 1 shares were purchasable only by employees holding AAAA labor contracts or better-roughly speaking, star class. The remaining shares by SEC order had been sold on the open market in order to clothe Fowler Schocken Associates with public interest. As customary, Fowler Schocken himself had through dummies snapped these up at the obscure stock exchanges where they had been put on sale. In his own name he held a modest .75 X 1013 shares and distributed the rest with a lavish hand. I myself, relatively junior in spite of holding perhaps the number two job in the organization, had accumulated via bonuses and incentive pay only about .857 X 1012 shares. Top man around the Board table probably was Harvey Bruner. He was Schocken’s oldest associate and had corralled .83 X 1013 shares over the years. (Nominally this gave him the bulge on Fowler-but he knew, of course, that in a challenge those other