WE PURCHASED PEOPLE
Jack Williamson and I have collaborated on eight or nine novels over the years. I've collaborated with a number of other writers, and so I know what I'm talking about when I proclaim that working with Jack, who is a wise and gentle human being, is as nearly painless as writing ever gets. Especially collaborative writing. Still, there are times when our interests diverge a little. As in all writing, there are occasions when one of us thinks up a scene or a situation that is too attractive to throw away but doesn't fit properly into the joint effort. When Jack and I were writing our novel Farthest Star, we each came up with one of those displaced bits. Jack's was a lovely sequence that dealt with an immense mountain called Knife in the Sky. The episode he had in mind did not fit into the novel, but he made it into a short story for Boy's Life. Mine was this one:
"We Purchased People. There are some themes that I seem to come back to over and over. The only way I realize that is by thinking the process over afterward, when it's history; I'm not usually conscious of it while I'm doing it. One of those themes is overpopulation- a theme on which, you will observe, I have played variations at least twice in this collection alone. Another is the idea of "possession. That appears not only in the two novels with Jack Williamson, Farthest Star and its sequel, Wall Around a Star, but in my solo novel Plague of Pythons (lately revised and rereleased as The Demon in the Skull) and several short stories- including this one. Why is this theme so permanently appealing to me over decades? I have a suspicion that there is a psychological basis for it. I wonder if it does not represent a metaphor for a deep-seated fear of manipulation from outside, of control by external forces that overrule our basic, instinctual decency and common sense.. . but I guess I will leave the resolution of that question to my shrink.
On the third of March the purchased person named Wayne Golden took part in trade talks in Washington as the representative of the dominant race of the Groom- bridge star. What he had to offer was the license of the basic patents on a device to convert nuclear power plant waste products into fuel cells. It was a good item, with a ready market. Since half of Idaho was already bubbling with radioactive wastes, the Americans were anxious to buy, and he sold for a credit of $100 million. On the following day he flew to Spain. He was allowed to sleep all the way, stretched out across two seats in the first class section of the Concorde, with the fastenings of a safety belt gouging into his side. On the fifth of the month he used up part of the trade credit in the purchase of fifteen Picasso oils on canvas, the videotape of a flamenco performance, and a fifteenth-century harpsichord, gilt with carved legs. He arranged for them to be preserved, crated, and shipped in bond to Orlando, Florida, after which the items would be launched from Cape Kennedy on a voyage through space that would take more than twelve thousand years. The Groombridgians were not in a hurry and thought big. The Saturn Five booster rocket cost $11 million in itself. It did not matter. There was plenty of money left in the Groombridge credit balance. On the fifth of the month Golden returned to the United States, made a close connection at Logan Airport in Boston, and arrived early at his home kennel in Chicago. He was then given eighty- five minutes of freedom.
I knew exactly what to do with my eighty-five minutes. I always know. See, when you're working for the people who own you, you don't have any choice about what you do, but up to a point you can think pretty much whatever you like. That thing you get in your head only controls you. It doesn't change you, or anyway I don't think it does. (Would I know if I were changed?)
My owners never lie to me. Never. I don't think they know what a lie is. If I ever needed anything to prove that they weren't human, that would be plenty, even if I didn't know they lived 86 zillion miles away, near some star that I can't even see. They don't tell me much, but they don't lie.
Not ever lying, that makes you wonder what they're like. I don't mean physically. I looked that up in the library once, when I had a couple of hours of free time. I don't remember where, maybe in Paris at the Bibliotheque Nationale, anyway I couldn't read what the language in the books said. But I saw the photographs and the holograms. I remember the physical appearance of my owners, all right. Jesus. The Altairians look kind of like spiders, and the Sirians are a little bit like crabs. But those folks from the Groombridge star, boy, they're something else. I felt bad about it for a long time, knowing I'd been sold to something that looked as much like a cluster of maggots on an open wound as anything else I'd ever seen. On the other hand, they're all those miles away, and all I ever have to do with them is receive their fast- radio commands and do what they tell me. No touching or anything. So what does it matter what they look like?
But what kind of freaky creature is it that never says anything that is not objectively the truth, never changes its mind, never makes a promise that it doesn't keep? They aren't machines, I know, but maybe they think I'm kind of a machine. You wouldn't bother to lie to a machine, would you? You wouldn't make it any promises. You wouldn't do it any favors, either, and they never do me any. They don't tell me that I can have eighty-five minutes off because I've done something they like, or because they want to sweeten me up because they want something from me. Everything considered, that's silly. What could they want? It isn't as if I had any choice. Ever. So they don't lie, or threaten, or bribe, or reward.
But for some reason they sometimes give me minutes or hours or days off, and this time I had eighty-five minutes. I started using it right away, the way I always do. The first thing was to check at the kennel location desk to see where Carolyn was. The locator clerk-he isn't owned, he works for a salary and treats us like shit- knows me by now. "Oh, hell, Wayne boy, he said with that imitation sympathy and lying friendliness that makes me want to kill him, "you just missed the lady friend. Saw her, let's see, Wednesday, was it? But she's gone. "Where to? I asked him. He pushed around the cards on the locator board for a while, he knows I don't have very much time ever so he uses it up for me, and said: "Nope, not on my board at all. Say, I wonder. Was she with that bunch that went to Peking? Or was that the other little fat broad with the big boobs? I didn't stop to kill him. If she wasn't on the board, she wasn't in eighty-five- minute transportation range, so my eighty-five minutes- seventy-nine minutes-wasn't going to get me near her.
I went to the men's room, jerked off quickly, and went out into the miserable biting March Chicago wind to use up my seventy-nine minutes. Seventy-one minutes. There's a nice Mexican kind of restaurant near the kennel, a couple of blocks away past Ohio. They know me there. They don't care who I am. Maybe the brass plate in my head doesn't bother them because they think it's great that the people from the other stars are doing such nice things for the world, or maybe it's because I tip big. (What else do I have to do with the money I get?) I stuck my head in, whistled at Terry, the bartender, and said: "The usual. I'll be back in ten minutes. Then I walked up to Michigan and bought a clean shirt and changed into it, leaving the smelly old one. Sixty-six minutes. In the drugstore on the corner I picked up a couple of porno paperbacks and stuck them in my pockets, bought some cigarettes, leaned over and kissed the hand of the cashier, who was slim and fair-complexioned and smelled good, left her startled behind me, and got back to the restaurant just as Alicia, the waitress, was putting the gazpacho and the two bottles of beer on my table. Fifty-nine minutes. I settled down to enjoy my time. I smoked, and I ate, and I drank the beer, smoking between bites, drinking between puffs. You really look forward to something like that when you're working, and not your own boss. I don't mean they don't let us eat when we're working. Of course they do, but we don't have any choice about what we eat or where we eat it. Pump fuel into the machine, keep it running. So I finished the guacamole and sent Alicia back for more of it when she brought the chocolate cake and American coffee, and ate the cake and the guacamole in alternate forkfuls. Eighteen minutes.