"C M Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl - The Space Merchants UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

you didn't mean that literally about resigning. I just gave Harvey the go-ahead on Shock. The first issue comes out in the fall, with a print order of twenty million. No-" He mercifully held up his hand to cut off my stammering try at an explanation. "I understood what you meant, Mitch. You were against cheap advertising. And so am I. Taunton is to me the epitome of everything that keeps advertising from finding its rightful place with the clergy, medicine, and the bar in our way of life. There isn't a shoddy trick he wouldn't pull, from bribing a judge to stealing an employee. And, Mitch, he's a man you'll have to watch."
"Why? I mean, why particularly?"
Schocken chuckled. "Because we stole Venus from him, that's why. I told you he was enterprising. He had the same idea I did. It wasn't easy to persuade the government that it should be our baby."
"I see," I said. And I did. Our representative government now is perhaps more representative than it has ever been before in history. It is not necessarily representative per capita, but it most surely is ad valorem. If you like philosophical problems, here is one for you: should each human being's vote register alike, as the lawbooks pretend and as some say the founders of our nation desired? Or should a vote be weighed according to the wisdom, the power, and the influence-that is, the money-of the voter? That is a philosophical problem for you, you understand; not for me. I am a prag-matist, and a pragmatist, moreover, on the payroll of Fowler Schocken.
One thing was bothering me. "Won't Taunton be likely to take- well, direct action?"
"Oh, he'll try to steal it back," Fowler said mildly.
"That's not what I mean. You remember what happened with Antarctic Exploitation."
"I was there. A hundred and forty casualties on our side. God knows what they lost."
"And that was only one continent. Taunton takes these things pretty personally. If he started a feud for a lousy frozen continent, what will he do for a whole planet?"
Fowler said patiently, "No, Mitch. He wouldn't dare. Feuds are expensive. Besides, we're not giving him grounds-not grounds that would stand up in court. And, in the third place . . . we'd whip his tail off."
"I guess so," I said, and felt reassured. Believe me, I am a loyal

employee of Fowler Schocken Associates. Ever since cadet days I have tried to live my life "for Company and for Sales." But industrial feuds, even in our profession, can be pretty messy. It was only a few decades ago that a small but effective agency in London filed a feud against the English branch of B.B.D. & O. and wiped it out to the man except for two Bartons and a single underage Osborn. And they say there are still bloodstains on the steps of the General Post Office where United Parcel and American Express fought it out for the mail contract.
Schocken was speaking again. "There's one thing you'll have to watch out for: the lunatic fringe. This is the kind of project that's bound to bring them out. Every crackpot organization on the list, from the Consies to the G.O.P., is going to come out for or against it. Make sure they're all for; they swing weight."
"Even the Consies?" I squeaked.
"Well, no. I didn't mean that; they'd be more of a liability." His white hair glinted as he nodded thoughtfully. "Mm. Maybe you could spread the word that spaceflight and Conservationism are diametrically opposed. It uses up too many raw materials, hurts the living standard-you know. Bring in the fact that the fuel uses organic material that the Consies think should be made into fertilizer-"
I like to watch an expert at work. Fowler Schocken laid down a whole subcampaign for me right there; all I had to do was fill in the details. The Conservationists were fair game, those wild-eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way "plundering" our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.
I had been exposed to Consie sentiment in my time, and the arguments had all come down to one thing: Nature's way of living was the right way of living. Silly. If "Nature" had intended us to eat fresh vegetables, it wouldn't have given us niacin or ascorbic acid.
I sat still for twenty minutes more of Fowler Schocken's inspirational talk, and came away with the discovery I had often made before; briefly and effectively, he had given me every fact and instruction I needed.
The details he left to me, but I knew my job:
We wanted Venus colonized by Americans. To accomplish this,

three things were needed: colonists; a way of getting them to Venus; and something for them to do when they got there.
The first was easy to handle through direct advertising. Schocken's TV commercial was the perfect model on which we could base the rest of that facet of our appeal. It is always easy to persuade a consumer that the grass is greener far away. I had already penciled in a tentative campaign with the budget well under a megabuck. More would have been extravagant.
The second was only partly our problem. The ships had been designed-by Republic Aviation, Bell Telephone Labs and U.S. Steel, I believe, under Defense Department contract. Our job wasn't to make the transportation to Venus possible but to make it palatable. When your wife found her burned-out toaster impossible to replace because its nichrome element was part of a Venus rocket's main drive jet, or when the inevitable disgruntled congressman for a small and frozen-out firm waved an appropriations sheet around his head and talked about government waste on wildcat schemes, our job began: We had to convince your wife that rockets are more important than toasters; we had to convince the congressman's constituent's firm that its tactics were unpopular and would cost it profits.
I thought briefly of an austerity campaign and vetoed it. Our other accounts would suffer. A religious movement, perhaps- something that would offer vicarious dedication to the eight hundred million who would not ride the rockets themselves. . . .
I tabled that; Bruner could help me there. And I went on to point three. There had to be something to keep the colonists busy on Venus.
This, I knew, was what Fowler Schocken had his eye on. The government money that would pay for the basic campaign was a nice addition to our year's billing, but Fowler Schocken was too big for one-shot accounts. What we wanted was the year-after-year reliability of a major industrial complex; what we wanted was the colonists, and their children, added to our complex of accounts. Fowler, of course, hoped to repeat on an enormously magnified scale our smashing success with Indiastries. His Boards and he had organized all of India into a single giant cartel, with every last woven basket and iridium ingot and caddy of opium it produced sold through Fowler Schocken advertising. Now he could do the same with Venus. Potentially this was worth as much as every dollar of value in exis-

tence put together! A whole new planet, the size of Earth, in prospect as rich as Earth-and every micron, every milligram of it ours. I looked at my watch. About four, my date with Kathy was for seven. I just barely had time. I dialed Hester and had her get me space on the Washington jet while I put through a call to the name Fowler had given me. The name was Jack O'Shea; he was the only human being who had been to Venus-so far. His voice was young and cocky as he made a date to see me.
We were five extra minutes in the landing pattern over Washington, and then there was a hassle at the ramp. Brink's Express guards were swarming around our plane, and their lieutenant demanded identification from each emerging passenger. When it was my turn I asked what was going on. He looked at my low-number Social Security card thoughtfully and then saluted. "Sorry to bother you, Mr. Courtenay," he apologized. "It's the Consie bombing near Topeka. We got a tip that the man might be aboard the 4:05 New York jet. Seems to have been a lemon."
"What Consie bombing was this?"
"Du Pont Raw Materials Division-we're under contract for their plant protection, you know-was opening up a new coal vein under some cornland they own out there. They made a nice little ceremony of it, and just as the hydraulic mining machine started ramming through the topsoil somebody tossed a bomb from the crowd. Killed the machine operator, his helper, and a vice-president. Man slipped away in the crowd, but he was identified. We'll get him one of these days."
"Good luck, Lieutenant," I said, and hurried on to the jetport's main refreshment lounge. O'Shea was waiting in a window seat, visibly annoyed, but he grinned when I apologized.
"It could happen to anybody," he said, and swinging his short legs shrilled at a waiter. When we had placed our orders he leaned back and said: "Well?"
I looked down at him across the table and looked away through the window. Off to the south the gigantic pylon of the F.D.R. memorial blinked its marker signal; behind it lay the tiny, dulled dome of the old Capitol. I, a glib ad man, hardly knew where to start. And O'Shea was enjoying it. "Well?" he asked again, amusedly, and I knew he meant: "Now all of you have to come to me, and how do you like it for a change?"

I took the plunge. "What's on Venus?" I asked.
"Sand and smoke," he said promptly. "Didn't you read my report?"
"Certainly. I want to know more."
"Everything's in the report. Good Lord, they kept me in the interrogation room for three solid days when I got back. If I left anything out, it's gone permanently."
I said: "That's not what I mean, Jack. Who wants to spend his life reading reports? I have fifteen men in Research doing nothing but digesting reports for me so I don't have to read them. I want to know something more. I want to get the feel of the planet. There's only one place I can get it because only one man's been there."
"And sometimes I wish I hadn't," O'Shea said wearily. "Well, where do I start? You know how they picked me-the only midget in the world with a pilot's license. And you know all about the ship. And you saw the assay reports on the samples I brought back. Not that they mean much. I only touched down once, and five miles away the geology might be entirely different."
"I know all that. Look, Jack, put it this way. Suppose you wanted a lot of people to go to Venus. What would you tell them about it?"
He laughed. "I'd tell them a lot of damn big lies. Start from scratch, won't you? What's the deal?"
I gave him a fill-in on what Schocken Associates was up to, while his round little eyes stared at me from his round little face. There is an opaque quality, like porcelain, to the features of midgets: as though the destiny that had made them small at the same time made them more perfect and polished than ordinary men, to show that their lack of size did not mean lack of completion. He sipped his drink and I gulped mine between paragraphs.
When my pitch was finished I still didn't know whether he was on my side or not, and with him it mattered. He was no civil service puppet dancing to the strings that Fowler Schocken knew ways of pulling. Neither was he a civilian who could be bought with a tiny decimal of our appropriation. Fowler had helped him a little to capitalize on his fame via testimonials, books, and lectures, so he owed us a little gratitude . . . and no more.
He said: "I wish I could help," and that made things easier.
"You can," I told him. "That's what I'm here for. Tell me what Venus has to offer."