The Space Merchants (19 page)

I knew then who was out of touch with reality.

"Your horrible slanders against Taunton are crystal-clear to, ah, a person with some grasp of our unconscious drives. I was pleased to hear you voice them. They meant that you're halfway back to your real self. What is our central problem—the central problem of the real Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith? Lick the opposition! Crush the competing firms! Destroy them! Your fantasy about Taunton indicates to, ah, an informed person that you're struggling back to the real Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith. Veiled in symbols, obscured by ambivalent attitudes, the Taunton-fantasy is nevertheless clear. Your imagined encounter with the girl 'Hedy' might be a textbook example!"

"God damn it," I yelled, "look at my jaw! See that hole? It still hurts!"

He just smiled and said: "Let's be glad you did nothing worse to yourself, Mitch. The id, you see—"

"What about Kathy?" I asked hoarsely. "What about the complete data on the Consies I gave you? Grips, hailing signs, passwords, meeting places?"

"Mitch," he said earnestly, "as I say, I shouldn't be meddling, but they aren't real. Sexual hostility unleashed by the dissociation of your personality into 'Groby'-Courtenay identified your wife with a hate-and-fear object, the Consies. And 'Groby' carefully arranged things so that your Consie data is uncheckable and therefore unassailable. 'Groby' arranged for you—the
real
you—to withhold the imaginary 'data' until the Consies would have had a chance to change all that. 'Groby' was acting in self-defense. Courtenay was coming back and he knew it; 'Groby' felt himself being 'squeezed out.' Very well; he can bide his time. He arranged things so that he can make a comeback—"

"I'm not insane!"

"My analyst—!"

"You've got to believe me!"

"These unconscious conflicts—"

"I tell you Taunton has killers!"

"Do you know what convinced me, Mitch?"

"What?" I asked bitterly.

"The fantasy of a Consie cell embedded in Chicken Little. The symbolism—" he flushed a little, "well, it's quite unmistakable."

I gave up except on one point: "Do people still humor the insane, Mr. Schocken?"

"You're
not
insane at all, my boy. You need—help, like a lot of—"

"I'll be specific. Will you humor me in one respect?"

"Of course," he grinned, humoring me.

"Guard yourself and me too. Taunton has killers—all right; I think, or Groby thinks, or some damn body thinks that Taunton has killers. If you humor me to the extent of guarding yourself and me, I promise not to start swinging from the ceiling and gibbering. I'll even go to your analyst."

"All right," he smiled, humoring me.

Poor old Fowler. Who could blame him? His own dreamworld was under attack by every word I had to say. My story was blasphemy against the god of Sales. He couldn't believe it, and he couldn't believe that I—the real I—believed it. How could Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith, be sitting there and telling him such frightful things as:

The interests of producers and consumers are not identical;

Most of the world is unhappy;

Workmen don't automatically find the job they do best;

Entrepreneurs don't play a hard, fair game by the rules;

The Consies are sane, intelligent, and well organized.

They were hammer-blows at him, but Fowler Schocken was nothing if not resilient. The hammer bounced right off and the dents it made were ephemeral. There was an explanation for everything and Sales could do no wrong. Therefore, Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith, was not sitting there telling him these things. It was Mitchell Courtenay's wicked, untamed id or the diabolic 'George Groby' or somebody—anybody but Courtenay.

In a dissociated fashion that would have delighted Fowler Schocken and his analyst I said to myself: "You know, Mitch, you're talking like a Consie."

I answered: "Why, so I am. That's terrible."

"Well," I replied, "I don't know about that. Maybe . . ."

"Yeah," I said thoughtfully. "Maybe . . ."

It's an axiom of my trade that things are invisible except against a contrasting background. Like, for instance, the opinions and attitudes of Fowler Schocken.

Humor me, Fowler,
I thought.
Keep me guarded. I don't want to run into an ambivalent fantasy like Hedy again, ever. The symbolism may have been obvious, but she hurt me bad with her symbolic little needle.

Runstead wasn't there when our little procession arrived in executives' country of the Schocken Tower. There were Fowler, me, Jack O'Shea, secretaries—and the weapons squads I had demanded.

Runstead's secretary said he was down the hall, and we waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. After an hour I suggested that he wasn't coming back. After another hour word got to us that a body had been found smashed flat on the first setback of the Tower, hundreds of feet below. It was very, very difficult to identify.

The secretary wept hysterically and opened Runstead's desk and safe. Eventually we found a diary covering the past few months of Runstead's life. Interspersed with details of his work, his amours, memos for future campaigns, notes on good out-of-the-way restaurants, and the like were entries that said: "He was here again last night. He told me to hit harder on the shock-appeal. He scares me . . . He says the Starrzelius campaign needed guts. He scares
hell
out of me. Understand he used to scare everybody in the old days when he was alive . . . GWH again last night . . .
Saw him by daylight
first time. Jumped and yelled but nobody noticed. Wish he'd go away . . . GWH teeth seem bigger, pointier today. I ought to get help . . . He said I'm no good, disgrace to profession . . ."

After a while we realized that "he" was the ghost of George Washington Hill, father of our profession, founder of the singing commercial, shock-value, and God knows what else.

"Poor fellow," said Schocken, white-faced. "Poor, poor fellow. If only I'd known. If only he'd come to me in time."

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
I
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 Security 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 10
¹³
shares. Of these, 3.5 X 10
¹³
+
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 10
¹³
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 10
¹²
shares. Top man around the Board table probably was Harvey Bruner. He was Schocken's oldest associate and had corralled .83 X 10
¹³
shares over the years. (Nominally this gave him the bulge on Fowler—but he knew, of course, that in a challenge those other 3.5 X 10
¹⁸
+
1 shares would come rolling in on carloads of proxies, all backing Fowler with a mysterious unanimity. Besides, he was loyal.) He seemed to think he was heir-apparent, and some of the more naive Research and Development people were already sucking up to him, more fools they. He was an utterly uncreative, utterly honest wheel horse. Under his heavy hand the delicate thing that was Fowler Schocken Associates would disintegrate in a year.

If I were gambling, I would have given odds on Sillery, the Media chief, for copping the Schocken bloc and on down in descending order to myself, on whom I would have taken odds—long, long odds. That obviously was the way most of them felt, except the infatuated Bruner and a few dopes. You could tell. Sillery was surrounded by a respectful little court that doubtless remembered such remarks from Fowler as: "Media, gentlemen, is basic-basic!" and: "Media for brains, copysmiths for talent!" I was practically a leper at the end of the table, with my guards silently eyeing the goings-on. Sillery glanced at them once, and I could read him like a book:
"That's
been going on long enough; we'll knock off that eccentric first thing."

What we had been waiting for came about at last. "The gentlemen from the American Arbitration Association, Probate Section, are here, gentlemen."

They were of the funereal type, according to tradition. Through case-hardening or deficient senses of humor they refrained from giggling while Sillery gave them a measured little speech of welcome about their sad duty and how we wished we could meet them under happier circumstances and so on.

They read the will in a rapid mumble and passed copies around. The part I read first said: "To my dear friend and associate Mitchell Courtenay I bequeath and devise my ivory-inlaid oak finger-ring (inventory number 56,987) and my seventy-five shares of Sponsors' Stock in the Institute for the Diffusion of Psychoanalytic Knowledge, a New York Non-Profit Corporation, with the injunction that he devote his leisure hours to active participation in this organization and the furtherance of its noble aim." Well, Mitch, I told myself, you're through. I tossed the copy on the table and leaned back to take a swift rough inventory of my liquid assets.

"Hard lines, Mr. Courtenay," a brave and sympathetic research man I hardly knew told me. "Mr. Sillery seems pleased with himself."

I glanced at the bequest to Sillery—paragraph one. Sure enough, he got Fowler's personal shares and huge chunks of stock in Managerial Investment Syndicate, Underwriters Holding Corporation and a couple of others.

The research man studied my copy of the will. "If you don't mind my saying so, Mr. Courtenay," he told me, "the old man could have treated you better. I never heard of this outfit and I'm pretty familiar with the psychoanalytic field."

I seemed to hear Fowler chuckling nearby, and sat bolt upright. "Why the old so-and-so!" I gasped. It fitted like lock and key, with his bizarre sense of humor to oil the movement.

Sillery was clearing his throat and an instant silence descended on the Board room.

The great man spoke. "It's a trifle crowded here, gentlemen. I wish somebody would move that all persons other than Board members be asked to leave—"

I got up and said: "I'll save you the trouble, Sillery. Come on, boys. Sillery, I may be back." I and my guard left.