Short Fiction, Poul Anderson [simple e reader .TXT] 📗

buy the special equipment. They’ll come to me, and by the time the power outfit gets wise to itself, I’ll ’ve come in on the ground floor.”

“Thanks,” said Arch, a little shakily. “It makes me feel a lot better.”

If only everybody had that Yankee adaptability, he thought as he walked home. But he saw now, as he wished he had seen earlier, that society had gone too far. With rare exceptions, progress was no longer a matter of individual readjustments. It was a huge and clumsy economic system which had to make the transformation⁠ ⁠… a jerry-built system whose workings no one understood, even today.

He wanted to call up Gilmer and make what terms he could, but it was too late. The snowball was rolling.

He sighed his way into an armchair and picked up the paper.

Item: the bill before Congress to make capacitite a government monopoly like uranium, and to enforce all security restrictions on it, had been sent back to committee and would probably not pass. A few senators had had the nerve to point out that security was pointless when everybody could already make the stuff.

Item: the government was setting up a special laboratory to study the military applications. Arch could think of several for himself. Besides simplifying logistics, it could go into cheap and horrible weapons. A bomb loaded with several thousand coulombs, set to discharge instantaneously on striking⁠—

Item: a well-known labor leader had denounced the innovation as a case of business blundering which was going to take bread from the working man. A corporation spokesman declared that it was all a leftist trick designed to cripple the private enterprise system.

Item: Pravda announced that Soviet scientists had discovered capacitite ten years ago and that full-scale production had long been under way for peaceful purposes only, such as making the Red Army still more invincible.

Item: two more men in America electrocuted due to incautious experiments. Nevertheless, capacitite was being manufactured in thousands of homes and workshops. Bills in various state legislatures to ban vehicles so powered were meeting indignant opposition everywhere save in Texas.

Arch reflected wryly that he wasn’t getting paid for any of this. All he’d gotten out of it so far was trouble. Trouble with the authorities, with crank letters, with his own conscience. There were, to be sure, some royalties from Bob Culquhoun, who was becoming quite an entrepreneur and hiring adults to take over when school opened in fall.

Speaking of tigers by the tail⁠—

Autumn, the New England fall of rain and chill whistling wind, smoky days and flame-like leaves and the far wild honking of southbound geese. The crash came in late September: a reeling market hit bottom and stayed there. Gasoline sales were down twenty-five percent already, and the industry was laying men off by the hundreds of thousands. That cut out their purchasing power and hit the rest of the economy.

“It’s what you’d expect, laddie,” said Culquhoun. They were over at his house. Outside, a slow cold rain washed endlessly down the windows. “Over production⁠—over-capitalization⁠—I could have predicted all this.”

“Damn it to hell, it doesn’t make sense!” protested Arch. “A new energy source should make everything cheaper for everybody⁠—more production available for less work.” He felt a nervous tic beginning in one cheek.

“Production for use instead of for profit⁠—”

“Oh, dry up, will you? Any system is a profit system. It has to show a profit in some terms or other, or it would just be wasted effort. And the profit has to go to individuals, not to some mythical state. The state doesn’t eat⁠—people do.”

“Would you have the oil interests simply write off their investment?”

“No, of course not. Why couldn’t they⁠—Look. Gasoline can still run generators. Oil can still lubricate. Byproducts can still be synthesized. It’s a matter of shifting the emphasis of production, that’s all. All that’s needed is a little common sense.”

“Which is a rather scarce commodity.”

“There,” said Arch gloomily, “we find ourselves in agreement.”

“The trouble is,” said Bob earnestly, “we’re faced with a real situation, not a paper problem. It calls for a real solution. For an idea.”

“There aren’t any ideas,” said Elizabeth. “Not big sweeping ones to solve everything overnight. Man doesn’t work that way. What happens is that somebody solves his own immediate, personal problems, somebody else does the same, and eventually society as a whole fumbles its way out of the dilemma.”

Arch sighed. “This is getting over my head,” he admitted. “Thanks for small blessings: the thing has grown so big that I, personally, am becoming forgotten.”

He rose. “I’m kind of tired tonight,” he went on. “Maybe we better be running along. Thanks for the drinks and all.”

He and his wife slipped into their raincoats and galoshes for the short walk home. The street outside was dark, a rare lamp glowing off slick wet concrete. Rain misted his face and glasses, he had trouble seeing.

“Poor darling,” Elizabeth took his arm. “Don’t worry. We’ll get through all right.”

“I hope so,” he said fervently. No money had come in for some time now. Bob’s enterprise was levelling off as initial demand was filled, and a lurching industry wasn’t buying many electronic valves. The bank account was getting low.

He saw the figure ahead as a vague shadow against the night. It stood waiting till they came up, and then stepped in their path. The voice was unfamiliar: “Arch?”

“Yes⁠—”

He could see only that the face was heavy and unshaven, with something wild about the mouth. Then his eyes dropped to the revolver barrel protruding from the slicker. “What the devil⁠—”

“Don’t move, you.” It was a harsh, broken tone. “Right now I’m aiming at your wife. I’d as soon shoot her, too.”

Fear leaped crazily in Arch’s breast. He stood unable to stir, coldness crawling in his guts. He tried to speak, and couldn’t.

“Not a word, you⁠—. Not another word. You’ve said too goddam much already.” The gun poked forward, savagely. “I’m going to kill you. You did your best to kill me.”

Elizabeth’s face was white in the gloom. “What do you