Alternating Currents

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Alternating Currents

Frederik Pohl

No copyright 
 2013 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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CONTENTS

The Children of Night

The Ghost-Maker

Let the Ants Try

Pythias

The Mapmakers

Rafferty’s Reasons

Target One

Grandy Devil

The Tunnel Under the World

What To Do Until the Analyst Comes

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The Children of Night

1

‘We met before,’ I told Haber. ‘In 1988, when you were running the Des Moines office.’

He beamed and held out his hand. ‘Why, darn it, so we did! I remember now, Odin.’

‘I don’t like to be called Odin.’

‘No? All right. Mr Gunnarsen—’

‘Not “Mr Gunnarsen” either. Just “Gunner”.’

‘That’s right, Gunner; I’d almost forgotten.’

I said, ‘No, you hadn’t forgotten. You never knew my name in Des Moines. You didn’t even know I was alive, because you were too busy losing the state for our client. I pulled you out of that one, just like I’m going to pull you out now.’

The smile was a little cracked, but Haber had been with the company a long time and he wasn’t going to let me throw him. ‘What do you want me to say, Gunner? I’m grateful. Believe me, boy, I know I need help—’

‘And I’m not your boy. Haber, you were a fat cat then, and you’re a fat cat now. All I want from you is, first, a quick look around the shop here and, second, a conference of all department heads, including you, in thirty minutes. So tell your secretary to round them up, and let’s get started on the sightseeing.’

~ * ~

Coming in to Belport on the scatjet I had made a list of things to do. The top item was:

1. Fire Haber.

Still, in my experience that isn’t always the best way to put out a fire. Some warts you remove, some you just let wither away in obscurity. I am not paid by M&B to perform cosmetic surgery on their Habers, only to see that the work the Habers should have done gets accomplished.

As a public-relations branch manager he was a wart, but as a tourist guide he was fine, although he was perspiring. He led me all around the shop. He had taken a storefront on one of the main shopping malls, air-curtain door, windows draped tastefully in grey silk. It looked like the best of four funeral parlours in a run-down neighbourhood. In gilt letters on the window was the name of the game:

MOULTRIE AND BIGELOW

Public Relations

Northern Lake State Division

T. Wilson Haber, Division

Manager

‘Public relations,’ he informed me, ‘starts at home. They know we’re here, eh, Gunner?’

‘Reminds me of the Iowa office,’ I said, and he stumbled where there wasn’t even a sill. That was the presidential campaign of ‘88, where Haber had been trying to carry the state for the candidate who had retained us, and those twelve electoral votes came over at the last minute only because we sent Haber to Nassau to rest and I took over from him. I believe Haber’s wife had owned stock in the company.

His Belport layout was pretty good at that, though. Four pry booths, each with a Simplex 9090 and an operator-receptionist in the donor’s waiting room. You can’t tell from appearances, but the donors who were waiting for their interrogation looked like a good representative sample - a good mixture of sexes, ages, conditions of affluence - and with proper attention to weighing he should at least be getting a fair survey of opinions. Integration of the pry-scores was in a readout station in back - I recognized one of the programmers and nodded to him: good man - along with telefax equipment to the major research sources, the Britannica, Library of Congress, newswire services and so on. From the integration room the readout operator could construct a speech, a 3-V commercial, a space ad or anything else, with the research lines to feed him any data he needed, and test its appeal on his subjects. In the front of the building was a taping booth and studio. Everything was small and semi-portable, but good stuff. You could put together a 3-V interview or edit one as well here as you could on the lot in the Home Office.

‘An A-Number One setup, right, Gunner?’ said Haber. ‘Set it up myself to do the job.’

I said, ‘Then why aren’t you doing it?’ He tightened up. The eyes looked smaller and more intelligent, but he didn’t say anything directly. He took my elbow and turned me to the data-processing room.

‘Want you to meet someone,’ he said, opened the door, led me inside and left me.

A tall, slim girl looked up from a typer. ‘Why, hello, Gunner,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

I said, ‘Hello, Candace.’

Apparently Haber was not quite such a fat cat as he had seemed, for he had clearly found out a little something about my personal life before I showed up in his office. The rest of the list I had scribbled down in the scatjet was:

2.  Need ‘big lie’.

3.   Investigate Children.

4.  Investigate opponents’ proposition.

5.  Marry Candace Harmon?

This was a relatively small job for Moultrie & Bigelow, but it was for a very, very big account. It was important to win it. The client was the Arcturan Confederacy.

In the shop the word was that they had been turned down by three or four other PR agencies before we took them on. Nobody said why, exactly, but the reason was perfectly clear. It was just because they were the Arcturan Confederacy. There is nothing in any way illegal or immoral about a public-relations firm representing a foreign account. That is a matter of statute - as most people don’t take the trouble to know: the Smich-Macchioni Act of ‘71. And the courts held that it applied to extra-planetary ‘foreigners’ as well as to Terrestrials in 1985, back when the only ‘intelligent aliens’ were the mummies on Mars. Not that the mummies had ever hired anybody on Earth to do anything for them. But it was Moultrie & Bigelow’s law department that sued for the declaratory judgement, as a matter of fact. Just on the off chance. That’s how M&B operates.

Any public-relations man takes on the colour of his clients in the eyes of some people. That’s the nature of the beast. The same people wouldn’t think of blaming a surgeon because he dissolved a malignancy out of Public Enemy No 1, or even a lawyer for defending him. But when you are in charge of a client’s emotional image, and that image isn’t liked, some of the dislike rubs off on you.

At M&B there is enough in the paycheque at the end of every month so that we don’t mind that. M&B has a reputation for taking on the tough ones - the only surviving American cigarette manufacturer is ours. So is the exiled Castroite government of Cuba, that still thinks it might one day get the State Department to back up its claim for paying off on the bonds it printed for itself. However, for two reasons - as a simple matter of making things easy for ourselves; and because it’s better doctrine - we don’t flaunt our connexion with the unpopular clients. Especially when the job is going badly. One of the surest ways to get a bad public response to PR is to let the public know that some hotshot PR outfit is working on it.

So every last thing Haber had done was wrong.

In this town, it was too late for pry booths and M/R.

I had just five minutes left before the conference, and I spent it in the pry-booth section anyhow. I noticed a tri-D display of our client’s home planet in the reception room, where donors were sitting and waiting their turn. It was very attractive: the wide, calm seas with the vertical air-mount islets jutting out at intervals.

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I turned around and walked out fast, boiling mad.

A layman might not have seen just how many ways Haber had found to go wrong. The whole pry-booth project was probably a mistake anyway. To begin with, to get any good out of pry booths you need depth interviews, way deep-down M/R stuff. And for that you need paid donors, lots of them. And to get them you have to have a panel to pick from.

That means advertising in the papers and on the nets and interviewing twenty people for every one you hire. To get a satisfactory sample in a town the size of Belport you need to hire maybe fifty donors. And that means talking to a thousand people, every one of whom will go home and talk to his wife or her mother or their neighbours.

In a city like Chicago or Saskatoon you can get away with it. With good technique the donor never really knows what he’s being interviewed
for,
although of course a good newspaperman or private eye can interview a couple of donors and work backward from the sense-impulse stimuli with pretty fair accuracy. But not in Belport, not when we never had a branch here before, not when every living soul in town knew what we were doing because the rezoning ordinance was Topic One over every coffee table. In short, we had tipped our hand completely.