The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sales Talk, by H. F. Cente
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Title: Sales Talk
Author: H. F. Cente
Release Date: January 19, 2021 [eBook #64334]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SALES TALK ***
SALES TALK
By H. F. CENTE
_Bennett, the salesman, gave a lot of
thought to a world that was going to the
dogs. But he gave more thought to the Cosmic
salesman who could make it a reality._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories July 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
There are two things to know about a salesman, the first being that his
present job is just to tide him over until the position he is really
fitted for comes along.
Big Bill Bennett was no exception to this first rule.
Nor was he an exception to the second, of which more later.
Just back from the Moon on a block selling assignment, he lounged into
his branch office an hour late and told his boss that, though it hurt
his unmarred conscience to quit when the whole corporation would feel
the loss, this was it.
His boss, who knew that Bill was as indispensable to Always-Stitch
Sewing Machines as a bent needle, pretended great sorrow and wanted to
know what Bill was going to do.
"Well," said Bill, throwing it at him, "I'm going into the future. I've
inherited a time-machine."
"An alarm clock, no doubt?"
"Don't be funny," said Bill, emptying his pockets and dropping
half-used spools of thread, zipper feet, needles, tension disks and
stray parts of machinery on the desk. "You know that uncle of mine, the
one that died a few weeks ago--"
"Oh. Yeah. He hated your guts."
"Oh, no, he didn't. That was just a front. Deep down, he must have
admired my intelligence, even when I argued with him about his
screwball ideas."
Bill smiled modestly.
"He left everybody else nothing but money. Me he left the time-machine.
Molly and I and the foxes are going into the future about two million
years--_and we aren't coming back_."
That'll show him what I think of him and his stupid sewing machines.
The boss didn't believe the story about the time-machine. Still, no
harm in kidding the dope along.
"Aw, come on, Bill. The world isn't that much of a mess."
"_Not yet_," said Bill, with all the ominous portent he could muster.
"The planets are arsenals. Spaceships loaded with weapons and men.
Earth is liable to be blown off the map anytime. We're getting out, me,
Molly and the foxes."
The boss had never seen Bill so worked up, even after he'd muffed a
sale. "So the world is going to the dogs," he mused. Then he grinned.
"I bet you wish it would go to the dogs."
"Not a bad idea," said Bill morosely. "They'd do a heck of a lot better
than man ever did."
The boss said cautiously, "What does Molly think about this?"
"The wife?" Bill's eyes glazed. "Oh. She does anything I want her to."
The boss went through the amenities. He shook hands warmly. "I don't
know how we'll ever get a man to replace you--"
"Yeah, I realize that--"
"--I'd like to sell you on the idea of coming back--"
"_Nobody's_ enough of a salesman for that."
"--but maybe it'll all turn out for the best!"
"You're darn right. I'll never look at another sewing machine the rest
of my life."
* * * * *
Bill paled when Molly packed her featherweight sewing machine with
their belongings.
"Aw, honey!" he expostulated, cradling her beautiful blonde fluffy head
with one arm while his other gripped the yelping bundle of activity
that was his wire-haired fox-terrier, Is. "We won't need a sewing
machine where we're going. Somewhere in the next ten thousand years
we'll find a civilization where nobody does any work, where the whole
world is one great big lawn--"
"You're always so certain of yourself, Bill," said she, cocking a
pert blue adoring eye up at him. "And you're so certain of that
time-machine."
"Why not? Unk and I took a trip in it before he died. It works."
Was, the other fox-terrier, came rocketing red-tongued into the room,
stayed a moment, and plummeted madly out the open door.
"Oh, don't think for a minute that I don't think you know what you're
doing," said Molly. "It's just that I can't imagine why Unk was so nice
to you after those things you said--calling him a fussy old man who
couldn't even invent a good excuse to die--"
Bill interrupted hastily. "That was just one of our friendly
arguments," he protested. "Nope, Unk loved me like a son. Dope that I
am, now I can see it." His eyes watered. "I'm sorry he's dead--almost.
Anyway, the sewing machine is out. Where is Was?"
"He was here. He isn't. Is is. I wish you'd put her down, Bill. She's
clawing me. That'll give you two arms for me."
Bill hurriedly released Molly, holding the tongue-lolling dog against
his chest. Is licked his nose affectionately. Bill grinned.
"What a fox," he exulted. "'A good lean head and a quick dark eye,' as
the poem goes."
"Well," Molly said, "I only hope it doesn't get cold where we're going.
I was thinking of making some special little jackets for Is and Was,
but--"
"Just a minute," said Bill, giving her a quick, severe little kiss.
"Who said we weren't going to take the machine? But keep it out of my
sight!"
Their possessions being meager, their bank account non-existent, the
Bennetts were able to load everything into a jallopy rocket-car that
took the curves at a meager seventy per hour.
When they arrived at the sagging Connecticut farm where Unk had
puttered around with mostly useless inventions the last few years of
his life, they immediately saw the reclining hulk of the spaceship in
the yard. It looked like a brown cigar with the end bitten raggedly off.
"Neat, huh?" said Bill. "The time-machine is hooked in with the
spaceship controls. We can move in space as well as time."
As soon as the car rocketed to a sputtering stop before the airlock
entrance, Was was a furry streak of black and white as he leaped from
the car. Is stayed, red tongue lolling, eyes bright. Bill laboriously
fished the ship combination slip out of his pocket. Then the Bennetts
and Is unloaded from the car, gathered up Was, and they went inside the
ship.
It was a good, solid ship, no question of that.
"And it's big," cried Molly. "There must be a dozen compartments. And
libraries, Bill!"
"Yeah," said Bill in awe. "Wonder what's the idea? Unk left enough
books to last anybody a lifetime. And here's a matter-converter!"
He stood over the matter-converter, fascinated. There was a large
filing cabinet giving the matrix combinations for making almost
anything. Even a combination-recipe for dog food!
"I did Unk dirt by treating him the way I did," Bill said hazily. "All
the while, he had nothing but affection for me."
"A deep freeze," yelled Molly from the galley. "Enough real meat to
last twenty years if we space it out with artificial proteins from the
converter. Why, Bill, we could live here the rest of our lives if we
wanted to--just in this spaceship."
The dogs skittered happily around his heels as he wandered dazedly
toward the sound of her voice and got a special arm-squeeze around her
special-made waist.
"We can go anywhere we want to," he marveled. "Up and down time, up
and down the Solar System. We could spend our lives in comfort. Unk's
supplied us with everything--record-player, tape-recorder, transcriber,
dictaphone, shaver. We're set, Molly! Let's unload the car and get into
the next century--for a starter."
* * * * *
"Hatches battened down," reported sailor Molly with a smart salute some
two hours later. "Main sail keel-hauled--or sumpin'."
Bill grinned, but it was a strained grin.
"Man the lifeboats," he quipped back, a bit too inappropriately,
because Molly paled. Bill squeezed her hand reassuringly, then turned
his attention to the chrono-controls. He threw in the power. A dark
vibration swept through the room, robbing the light of some of its
intensity.
"That's normal," Bill said hastily, but Molly said "Ooh!" and shuddered
against him, while Is and Was sat on their prize-winning hindquarters
and whined uncomfortably.
Bill was feeling goose pimples himself. He watched the tubes proceeding
through their changes of color. He set the pointer. When the tubes
glowed a full violet, he threw the contact-switch down hard.
What happened, he reflected later on when he woke up, shouldn't happen
even to the manager of a sewing machine branch office.
First, just before the universe turned hazy white and then quite black,
Bill saw one tiny tube on the panel explode in a flash of yellow.
Second, the pointer, which indicated years, centuries, and millenia
on an advancing logarithmic scale, snapped to its top position. This
meant that the ship was flinging into the future at some fantastic rate
measured in millions of years per ship-second.
When Bill staggered wildly erect it was because Was was running madly
around the room, tail pointed down, blocky wiry head sniffing along the
floor. Is was anxiously licking his face. The wall chronometer told
him thirty minutes had passed. Thirty times sixty is eighteen hundred.
Eighteen hundred times. He glanced at the pointer and mentally retched.
"Down Was," he ordered groggily. Was huddled to the deck, looking at
him with imploring wet eyes. Just then Molly sat up, rubbing her eyes
sleepily.
"Something's wrong!" she said.
"Now, now, now, don't worry," Bill chattered, helping her up. "I'll fix
it."
"That pointer says," said Molly, pointing while her eyes got wider and
wider.
"Look," implored Bill feverishly. "Why don't you go ahead and get your
sewing room set up. Take Is. Take Was. I'll fix it!"
Molly stepped to the port. "Oh!" she said, stepping back. "It's--it's
shimmery violet. Nothing else. Bill--I'm sick--"
He caught her, holding her helplessly. He should let her drop and fix
the time-machine. Instead he carried her to the bedroom, got her under
the covers, chafed her wrists. Her eyes opened.
"I'll fix it!" he said desperately. He went back to the instrument
room. He didn't dare look through the port, as Molly had. He tried to
put the mechanism in reverse, but the pointer stayed where it was. He
rustled around in the parts cabinet and found a tube to replace the
exploded one. It promptly blew out. The pointer stayed where it was,
millions of years per second. How many millions of years? It didn't say.
He'd only wanted to go a hundred years into the future. He'd wanted to
play safe. And then a tube blew out.
The truth came slowly. Then he sat back from the machine, staring at
it. Then he started giggling. He was still giggling when he went into
the bedroom and woke Molly up.
"Molly," he shouted. "It's Unk. Don't you get it? This is his way
of getting back at me. He _was_ nuts. He geared the machine so the
control tube blew out. We can't go back. All we can do is keep going
ahead--toward the heat-death!"
Is jumped lightly onto the bed, bracing her stiff-furred paws on
Molly's chest. Was tore into the room, looked around and--was. Molly
affectionately patted Is on her well-placed shoulders, put the other
hand firmly over Bill's mouth to shut him up.
"Well, why not?" she said reasonably. "We can live on this ship the
rest of our lives. Eternity's a long time, Bill. Just you, me, the dogs
and--" she broke into a grin--"a pup or two!"
* * * * *
It didn't turn out so bad at that. Molly had always been a
self-sufficient, perky little blonde, well able to live with herself.
Bill's dislike of civilization turned out to be a built-in part of his
personality. He didn't miss people. He didn't miss shows. He didn't
miss phony excitement. It was quite a discovery that he was perfectly
content reading, puttering, making love to Molly, taking care of the
foxes.
He did have a couple heart-qualms when he dared to think about the
condition of the universe. Not that there was much to be seen outside
the ship. Apparently they were accelerating into time at an enormous
rate, so fast, indeed, that individual celestial bodies could not be
observed.
Relative to the ship, the universe was vibrating fast enough to
produce sensations of color. It started at violet. At present it was
a shattering yellow that hurt the eyes to look at. When these color
effects moved down the scale to infra-red--?
Maximum entropy? The heat-death of the universe? He wondered.
"So what?" he asked Molly when his mood became lighter. "By this
time Earth and all the planets and the Sun and every other star and
constellation and galaxy is dust. Less than dust, maybe. Maybe we're
near the end of time, when all the matter in the universe is broken
down into nothing but pulses of energy. Maybe the pulses will get to
the place where there isn't even any pulse anymore. When all energy is
distributed equally over all of space. When there's no motion at all.
What are you doing, Molly?"
Molly was smiling to herself. She was on her knees, fitting a fancy
frilled checked-wool jacket over Is. Bill stared thunderstruck while
she buttoned it down the length of Is's spine.
"There!" said Molly, standing back and giggling. "I made it on the
sewing machine. Is gets so cold sometimes she shivers. She drags
around. I think she's going to have pups."
Bill grinned broadly. He fell to his knees, crooning at the bright-eyed
dog. "Pups!" he exulted. "She sure is."
Was scampered into the room, his tail set high. He examined Is with
considerable disapproval, then, being a highly sensitive dog, tried to
make his getaway. "Oh, no you don't!" yelled Molly, diving for him. She
caught him by the hind leg and hauled out her tape measure. Personally
Bill commiserated with Was, but, knowing Molly, he gave up, went for
the refrigerator, and threw Is a bone with plenty of meat on it.
* * * * *
"Bill!"
Molly was in a nightmare. She screamed Bill's name. He was out of bed
in zero time, had her in his arms.
"Honey, what's the matter? You screamed!"
She clutched at him. Her heart was beating rapidly. He could feel it
pounding away through her silk nightgown. For a moment all she did was
moan, then she relaxed, breathing unevenly.
"What a horrible dream! But--but Bill, it didn't seem like a dream. I
dreamed I heard a voice--a skittering, ghastly voice, the voice of an
old crotchety man trying to talk fast--like Unk--"
_Like Unk._
Bill's throat grew something big in it. Fear. He whispered huskily,
"_Was_ it Unk? Are you sure it was a dream?"
She eased back against the pillow. "I haven't been feeling good," she
sighed. "Maybe--I don't know what to think. Bill, lie down beside me.
Let's listen together."
Listen. Listen to Unk? But Unk was dead. Maybe Unk's ghost....
It couldn't be Unk. So what was there out here beyond the ship in a
pointless universe? He lay down with her, goose pimples all over his
big body.
Then he heard it, and every square inch of his skin got the blue
chills. His body seemed to lose identity and floated buoyantly in a sea
of horror. A voice. A voice, gnarled with age, high and angry, spoken
so fast, like a speeding phonograph record, that the words could not be
made out.
That ghostly running stream of inarticulated words came from nowhere,
blatted in from everywhere. Birthed inside their heads, grew in
demanding volume from outside the ship. A voice that pervaded space,
that pulsed like a yammering animal gone mad, that hooted sometimes
like a locomotive lost on a whirling track.
"It's Unk," Bill chattered. "I know it's Unk. Somehow he's followed us
here. He's after me, Molly. After all the dirt I did him. His ghost."
"Silly." She put her cold palm on his mouth. Is came running down the
corridor. She jumped into Bill's arm, shivering. She was frightened.
Bill almost sobbed.
"Darn that Unk! If he makes Is lose her pups--"
After awhile he lay down again, drawing the covers over him, Is under
one arm, Molly warm under the other. In the darkness somewhere, Was
sniffed rather unconcernedly around the room.
All night they listened to the Voice's peevish mutter.
Molly gripped his hand under the covers.
"It's slowing down. I made out a word then. It sounded like--like dogs.
Bill, it's not Unk. I'm sure of that."
Bill went nuts. "That makes it worse," he yelled, jumping out of bed.
"If it isn't Unk, who is it? There isn't anybody out here. There aren't
any suns, any planets, any nothing. Who would be out here?" He paced
the room, pulling at his hair. Then abruptly he climbed back in bed,
shivering and mortally scared. And listening....
On bumbled the Voice. Speeding. Slowing. Sometimes seeming to catch up
with their thought processes, then going past.
"He's trying to synchronize," said Molly quietly. "He's going nuts
doing it. He's getting madder and madder. This is liable to go on for
days. I'm going to get up and fix breakfast."
After she left, Bill mentally told the Voice to go to hell, and fell
asleep. Was climbed all over him a half hour later to let him know
breakfast was ready.
The Voice had stopped.
* * * * *
"What a coupla mutts we were," Bill told Molly. "Letting our
imaginations run haywire."
"Oh, I agree with you," said Molly, being agreeable as usual. "We
imagined it all, didn't we, Is?" Is wagged her prize-winning tail in
agreement.
Bill squirmed. "Well," he protested, "Is was just cold. We imagined she
was scared. Just like I imagined it was Unk. My guilty conscience. And
you weren't feeling so good in the first place. Nice setup for a fancy
group hallucination."
Molly was pressing a house-dress energetically and just smiled at him.
Bill muttered about the obstinacy of the female mind and ladled out
a generous helping of artificial dog food he'd synthetized from the
matter-converter. Is stuck her pink tongue greedily into the mess.
Was looked idly on. Not having any unborn pups to feed, Was wasn't
hungry. But suddenly Was looked up at Bill and barked once, sharply.
At the same time, Is's beautiful dark eyes became anxious. She started
to shiver. She cowered. Bill blanched. He scooped up Is, holding her
against his chest. Molly stopped ironing.
"What is it, Bill?"
"Don't get scared," he chattered. "It's coming back. The dogs heard
it. Maybe they're tuned a little higher than we are. Honey, it wasn't
imagination. HERE IT COMES!"
It came. A blatting, vocalized anger that trembled the ship. Molly
was somehow in Bill's arms, Is for once forgotten. And the Voice came
clear, the angry, peevish muttering of an old man.
"Stupid bits of living matter. Eons have I tried to reach their low
thinking level. They are incapable of responding. Best to destroy them."
"Bill! Answer him!"
Bill ran his tongue around the inside of his parched mouth. "Uh--" he
said. "Wait a minute, Unk. I mean Voice. We hear you."
The Voice, who most assuredly could not be Unk, went wild. It
skittered, it slid, it throbbed with unholy excitement. Then it came
back, roaring, "Why did you not answer me, insignificant creatures?"
"Uh--" said Bill, sweating.
"Answer me! Do you dare to ignore me, the Supreme, the Only
Intelligence in the universe?"
"Well," said Bill, glassy-eyed. "That is, there doesn't seem to be much
to say--"
"NOT MUCH TO SAY!"
The Supreme Intelligence went into a spin.
"I shall destroy you, do you understand me, you insignificant
accretions of matter? How dare you exist? Know you that matter
disappeared billions of years ago. You do not belong in this universe!"
Bill blinked. He met Molly's anxious glance. Then something made him
grin. His lips moved. "He's as crotchety as Unk was. I can handle him."
Molly's lips smiled tremulously in agreement.
Bill said brazenly to the Voice, "I am, therefore I am--if you've read
your Descartes. In other words, we're here, so we belong. Sell me
something else." He waited for the lightning bolt. It didn't come.
"Descartes? Sell? Speak plainly, stupid creature. Or are you incapable
of true thought? That would be the final irony. After slowing my
thought-rate down over eons of time. To find that you cannot think!
Yet, what else could I expect of your intelligence, hampered by its
envelope of living matter?"
"We can think, Voice," Bill offered. "What did you--?"
"SILENCE!" The word roared out furiously. "How dare you question me,
the Pervader of all, the Only Entity? Do you wish to be destroyed?"
"You're going at this wrong," Bill said doggedly. "You're trying to
sell me something. First of all, you get the customer's confidence,
after a manner of speaking. You sell yourself first, see?"
Molly nodded vigorously, her hand over her mouth, her eyes sparkling
with repressed glee. _You're going at it right, Bill._ Bill's shoulders
went back. He was still scared stiff but he threw himself in full blast.
"Just let me give you a hint, Voice," he said. "We're a couple
cooperative pieces of matter. But you ain't said nuthin' that makes us
like you. Sell us."
* * * * *
"Speak," said the Voice sternly. "Where are your thoughts? They have
faded. Or is it that my strength is failing so that I cannot pick up
your lower-order vibrations? Speak, I command you!"
Bill darted a flurried look at Molly. He repeated himself to the
Voice, shouting. Back came the Voice, outraged.
"Your thoughts buzz. You are seeking to evade me. I shall destroy you!"
Bill looked desperately around. "Something's wrong!" he told Molly.
"Where's Was?"
"He was," said Molly, looking under tables.
"Get him back!" Bill sweated. "Hurry. We still haven't got the Voice
where we want him. He's liable to get mean." Distractedly, he started
aft, holding the unhappy Is close to his chest. Molly fell into running
step beside him.
"But why?" she asked anxiously. "What's Was got to do with it?"
"Speak," cried the Supreme Intelligence. "Your time is short unless you
continue communication. You dare--" Vituperation. Outrage. Bill broke
into a run.
"It's the dogs," he yelled at Molly. "I can't think of any other reason
we'd break contact. Dogs have a high psychic sense. The way they can
find their way home. The way they howl when somebody dies. Intuition.
Sumpin'. I don't know. But they sensed the Voice coming back before
we ever did. Our thoughts are heterodyning through their telepathic
level. Like a radio beam. When Was went out, half the power of the beam
failed. Get it?"
"Oh, sure," Molly yelled back. "And you throw algebra at me when we're
on the brink of death!" She darted ahead, pleading for Was to come
out from wherever he was. Was came out readily enough and jumped into
Molly's arms and apparently was perfectly willing to continue as part
of the hookup.
"All right, Voice," Bill said unsteadily. "We're back." He held his
breath. Maybe he was right. Maybe he was wrong. But the Voice came in,
drenching them with anger, but with ample evidence that communication
had been reestablished.
"Once more," it said sternly, "and you shall be obliterated for having
so impolitely intruded upon my meditation."
"_We_ intruded on _him_," Bill muttered.
"Now, matter, let me speak of myself. Know you that I am the only
entity that exists, if I exclude your puny selves. I am thought. I am
intelligence. I was born unuttered ages ago, when thinking life first
appeared.
"I could be called pure life-force--theta. But that theta was trapped
by matter, enturbulated by it. As matter disappeared, Theta was freed
from its entrapment, and I, the Supreme Entity, came into greater and
greater ego-awareness."
The Voice ebbed abruptly, then came back with a frightened roar.
"My strength is being drained! The millions, the billions of years are
passing. I am aging! How hard it is to maintain communication with your
low order of intelligence.
"But I must speak, and I must receive your answers, even
though--fury--your own voices are like growls and whines, and even
though the psychons of my being are inevitably disintegrating. Know
you, matter, that once this disintegration is complete I shall--die."
"Sympathy gag," Bill's lips formed for Molly's benefit. "If we don't
watch our step from now on, this guy can sell us anything."
To the Intelligence he said cautiously, "Now maybe you're getting to
the point. What's your product? What are you trying to sell?"
"Product? Sell?" Then the Voice swelled up. "The UNIVERSE! That is my
product, that is what you shall buy--or be destroyed!
"Now listen well. I shall not be able to repeat. When I die--" the
Voice dwelt on the words with an exquisite sadness that would have
wrenched the heart of anybody but a hardened salesman "--the universe
will have come to that state you know as the heat-death.
"No motion--and no source of motion! For eons I have brooded on this
sadness. And now I have discovered YOU!
"You, matter, shall resurrect the universe."
Is was lying still, Bill's strong fingers rubbing her absently behind
the fluffy ears. Something churned abruptly in Bill's stomach.
_Resurrection. Turn back the universe, and give me yesterday...._ He
paled. Atom bombs, space fleets bristling with men for slaughter and
weapons for slaughtering. Poverty. Misery. Kids in tenements without
lawns.
"What do you mean by resurrection, Voice?" The question came from the
very bottom of Bill. "Would the old universe come back? Our planet
Earth? The other planets?"
"Yes, yes! I would arrange it. A matrix sheeted four-dimensionally
about the universe--which is myself. A matrix through which all
re-created motion would pass. Your Earth would be remade--"
"With all human emotions," said Bill casually.
"Exactly! You shall aid in resurrecting the universe. I have had your
answer!" Delirious joy flamed through the Voice's being. "Now I shall
tell you how the marvellous occurrence can be brought about!"
Molly was looking at Bill with tears in her eyes.
"Don't you want it, Bill?" she whispered. "The way it was? Some of it
was beautiful."
"Some of it," said Bill grimly. "You--and Is--and Was--are the only
beautiful things I ever got out of it. But let him talk."
* * * * *
The Voice was already talking at a furious, excited pace. Bill would
wait until the time-machine carried them to the very end of entropy. To
the heat-death of the universe where all particles were in a state of
absolute rest.
"Do you not see it? It is only necessary to recreate motion. Start the
process over again. How? You have atom-powered motors aboard your ship.
The jets of your ship will spew out what are, in comparison with the
particles of my composition, solid particles. Gamma rays. Gravitons.
Protons. Electrons. Neutrons.
"When you have exhausted your fuel, you will convert more in your
matter-converter. You will strip the ship, if necessary. Everything
must go to supply the necessary energy of motion.
"Motion," went on the Voice deliriously. "The universe will once again
surge with the motion you have created. Around the loosed particles
atoms and molecules will form. They will grow--eventually, as you speed
through time, turn into hot suns, flaming nebulae. Planets will be born
as the billions of years pass. One of them will be Earth! And Earth
will again result in life. Your kind of life. And your kind of life
will be master of all other life.
"And of course," the Intelligence added as an apologetic afterthought,
"it will result in myself."
Bill sat up, mouth falling open. "So that's it!" he yelled. He gaped at
Molly. "_That's_ what he's been beating around the bush for. To bring
about his own resurrection after he dies!"
He burst out laughing. "So you want the same cycle to start all over
again, Voice. Because, you, as _theta_, as the life-force, will be born
again, and eventually will come to full resurrection as the universe
again dies.
"Reincarnation!
"But I'm not sold, see? Get a better sales argument. Molly and I are
happy here. We can spend our whole lives on this spaceship and get
along famously."
The Voice moaned like an animal in pain. Indeed, its energy of life,
whatever that was, seemed to be fading.
"Dying," said the Voice hollowly. "I am dying. To know that one's self
will exist no more, not even in a future life. And it would be so easy
for you!"
A note of cunning, like an old man hatching schemes to outwit hard
youth.
"Matter, I would tell you how to repair your time-mechanism so that you
could control your forward flight."
"No sale!" snapped Bill.
"You could stop at whatever point on the newly created Earth you chose.
Think of it! I offer you variety, when there might well be monotony!"
"We'll get along," said Bill wearily. "You haven't even got your foot
in the door."
Molly tugged imploringly at his arm. "Bill, you might really like it
better in the long run. I wish--"
The Voice roared in with new energy, now that it was being backed up.
"Yes!" it roared. "Your mate--your mate--ah!"
Silence, seething with unuttered thought, as if that dying mind were
skittering about the ship, exploring, discovering great wonders with
its strange senses. The feeling of privacy being invaded was so strong
with Bill that he broke loose.
"No!" he yelled. "And that's final. GET OUT OF HERE!"
But then the Voice started laughing. Crotchety, giggly laughter. Then
it spoke again, with unholy cunning.
"Matter," it whispered mockingly, "you _shall_ buy my product, to use
your own lower-level method of communicating. For, matter, what are you
going to do for green grass on this spaceship? For trees? For Sunday
schools? For bones buried in soft loam to be dug up later? For big ice
cream cones and long runs in the woods after rabbits? For the thrill of
snow on your paws and football games and Boy Scout hikes and the sheer
joy of howling at the Moon at night?"
"Huh?"
"Matter," said the Voice cunningly, "your mate is going to have pups!"
Bill darted an amazed glance at Molly. Molly's was looking back at him
just as amazedly.
"I'm not, Bill," she said. "I know I'm not. He's crazy. He doesn't know
what he's--"
Then she clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with sudden
hysterical amusement. "Don't you get it, Bill," she choked. "He's mixed
up. Is is going to have the pups!"
* * * * *
Bill got it. Suddenly everything clicked into place. The sheer insanity
of it. The senility of it. And the utter beauty of it! He began to
grin, the grin turned into a laugh, the laugh into something that was
momentarily hysterical. Then he quieted.
"Molly," he said, "put Was down."
Molly dropped the dog. Was departed the room in a flash.
"The Intelligence can't hear us now," Bill explained.
Then he stood over Molly, gently clasping her shoulders in his big
hands, and shaking her a little, with affection.
"Sweet Molly," he said wryly. "You really want the world back, don't
you? But Molly, it's no good, it's no good the way it was. We can't
have it that way again.
"But we can have a different order of things. And I'll stake my life
that it'll be a better way.
"The Intelligence tipped us off, of course, when he said _you_ were
going to have the pups. But, actually, _the Intelligence isn't talking
to us_!"
Molly nodded gravely. "I know, Bill. That's the way it seems, doesn't
it? Our thoughts are going through the dogs' heads."
"Yeah." Bill was almost musing to himself. "He's talking to the
dogs--and thinks the dogs are talking back to him. He's old, Molly.
He's crotchety and self-centered and probably senile. I doubt if he can
really see us--only sense us--"
From somewhere the Voice was coming in, querulous, demanding
communication, but with fright dominant in its thought-tones. Molly and
Bill paid no attention.
"The Intelligence made an easy mistake, for him. After all, in this
ship are two sets of beings. Both with four legs. Both wearing
clothes--those things you made for Is and Was." He grimaced amusedly.
"And remember how he complained that our thought-voices seemed like
growls and whines?
"Well, he's mixed up. He's mistaken the dogs for the intelligences
aboard this ship. His conception of material life is some weird
combination of human and dog characteristics--but mostly dog.
"Therefore he's offered to arrange this matrix-thing he talks about
so that dogs will evolve on the new Earth as the dominant, mastering
life-form.
"How about it, Molly? Should we throw the universe to the dogs?"
Molly gave him one pointed look, then she stood on tiptoe and kissed
him. "I always want what you want, Bill," she said tenderly. "I always
do, somehow." Then she went aft, coaxed Was out from wherever he was,
and came back with him licking her ear. The communication beam was in
operation again.
"I cannot hear you," the Voice moaned weakly. "To lose contact, after I
dissipate my life energy and go even nearer to death--"
Bill slipped his arm around Molly's waist. "We're here, Voice," he said
gently. "You set up the matrix, the way you planned.
"You've made a deal."
The second thing to know about a salesman? He's a fall guy for a good
sales talk.
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