All the while I was thinking chiefly, What job’s he found now that’s so bad he won’t take it himself but offer it to me? It’d have to be pretty bad, for at last count Tom’s three jobs were grinding mirrors for leisure-time astronomers who hadn’t time to grind their own —that’s one—and selling retailers a brand of all-cornsilk cancer-free cigarets with the genuine coal-tar taste and the nicotine life—that’s two—and answering for a robot answering service whenever the decibel-rating of the caller’s voice began to indicate extreme rage. He still had the third job, at any rate, by the phone-rig hanging around his neck.
“Meaghan,” he beamed, “next to an all-girl squad of revivalist angels, there’s naught so wondrous as brother-love. I got something great for you. By the by, I have Number Four myself now—I travel in ladies’ glow-in-the-dark underthings.”
As Ma raised a cheer at that, I looked around for escape, but Whitey was squatting at the fridge and blocking the door to the outer world, as happy with his tinkering as a great-grandfather cockroach (one of which was walking up his leg) while Ma, cheering still but with a policeman’s eye on me, was taking a cup of coffee big and smoking as a volcano into the bed-closets—to fire Harry’s poetic genius, no doubt, or in lieu of that toss him on his lazy feet.
“Meaghan—” Tom began, but just then his neck phone rang and he twitched it on and I could hear a voice like angry wasps. Tom listened and his face grew pink—he takes after Ma hi that—and he said, “Certainly, madam. However—” and then his face grew purple and he began to bubble his mouth like a fish.
I leaned across the table and put my lips to the mouthpiece and shouted, “I love you dearly, unknown, indeed I do. I love you dearly, madam, brood upon that,” and I twitched the thing off.
“That won’t satisfy her,” Tom said when he got his right color back and his breath.
“It will for twenty minutes,” I told him, “and what in this world is good for any longer?” And then I added, reckless in my light-heartedness, “You were saying. ?”
“Meaghan,” Tom began again, “I know you had this trifling street-smiler’s job—”
“Not so trifling or little,” I defended, though I hadn’t intended to. “The sociologists decided people looked too tense and glum going back and forth to work and shopping and so on, so they hired folk like myself to mingle among ‘em and strike up talk, casual-like, to cheer ’em up. Not quite the worst idea in the world, either.” “Yes, but you went too far,” Tom reminded me. “You pried into people’s minds to find their real troubles and set ‘em straight. That’s psychers’ work, my lad, and you can’t blame that august profession for resenting your competition and having you terminated.”
“I helped the people I talked to,” I countered stubbornly. ‘1 couldn’t have talked to them at all, Tom, if I hadn’t something solid to say.“
“I love you dearly, madam, brood upon that,” Tom said. “Solid!”
“I don’t worry ‘em or push any of their desperation buttons, though I glimpsed banks of those,” I protested on. “I just encouraged ’em to widen their minds and feelings a little and get some of the comic side-wash of others’ troubles and cheer up naturally.”
“There you’ve hit the nub of it,” Tom asserted, wagging a ringer in my face. “You tried to deliver more than your job called for, instead of learning to do it with a minimum of effort and finding another job to go with it, to swell your income—and then another after that.”
He gave a quick look around—to make sure Ma hadn’t come back, I soon realized—and then, leaning forward, said with a confidential hush, “Oh, Meaghan, my boy, I’ve learned so much of the world since I got away from here and Ma’s no longer firing me with resentments and wild ambitions. The world’s a very tidy comfortable place if only you’ll remember there are three billion other lunatic climbers in it— and do no more than you’re told and watch the smiles and frowns of your superiors and keep your eyes open and your nostrils flared for flicker or scent of another chance to make money. Step fast, keep adding one little job to the next like beads on a necklace, and forget Ma and her wild dreams. Oh, and did I tell you my Katie’s got two jobs herself now too?—and never a one she’d have had with Ma around to hold her down.”
“Ma’s all right,” I told him sharply. “She’s got more courage and determination and vision than the four of us’ll ever have together. And such a fierce self-punishing drive I wonder she’s still alive. How would you ever have got out of here to a place of your own without Ma booting you?”
“True, true,” he agreed. “Nevertheless, Ma’s a hopeless romantic. She wants her four sons to be Dukes of the World, lording it over all.”
I couldn’t help chuckling at that. “When I was still street-smiling,” I confided, “a little man, who thought he was a great romantic, opened his mind to me wanting only to escape from the prison of his life and aim a flashing sword at other men and capture with love their women—and corral all the single girls going around loose, too. After we both looked at this stirring picture a while, we realized that what he really wanted was to have all women mother him and puff him up and lead him through life like a great bobbing red balloon.”
“That’s the way with all romantics, including Ma,” Tom said, taking advantage of me straightway. “She
wants her sons to be princes and kings, or board chairmen at all events, not realizing there’s a billion others starting up the success ladder with them—and not one with a genuine ion drive. Not realizing that the competition’s too stiff for any man to dream of being more than an eight-job statistic with his peers. Or ten at most.”
The TV now was sailing over a great pile of gently crumpled bedclothes, which struck me as most pleasant and unlikely. Then I realized it was orbiting the Earth high above the clouds and there low in the foreground were the backs of beautifully barbered heads and now a sign flashing across the clouds: “Vacation Jaunts through Space for Nine-Job Heroes of Democracy.”
“You’re right about the competition,” I agreed quickly with Tom. “I’m no enemy of democracy, I’m one of its darlingest friends, but there’s no question it’s upped the competition more than ever it was in Earth’s history. We’ve got more machines, more health, more freedom of movement, more education, more leisure, more time for making money in our spare time, more almost equal people, and more incentives, more quick showy rewards for the quickly successful—with the result that the competition burns us out fast enough to equalize all the longevity created by medical advance.”
“It doesn’t seem to be burning you out,” Tom observed.
“Now listen here, Tom my boy,” I continued, warming to my subject. “Isn’t there something altogether crazy about a world that wants to turn everyone into merchants no matter what their natural psychological class—a world that’s turned even scientists and poets and adventurers and soldiers and priests into merchants busy selling themselves—a world that’s feared so much that the machine would take away all jobs that it’s gone ape creating jobs and financial ventures by the billions. With each reduction in working hours paralleled by an equal or greater increase hi tune spent on a part-tune and sideline jobs—a world that’s so money-conscious that a man who takes his eyes off the dollar for a month or a day or even ten seconds—”
“Your eyes don’t look red with squinting at silver,” Tom observed like a lemon. “Besides, you’re deafening me.”