Door Into Summer Page 10

"Not charity, Mr. Davis. A loan. A character loan, you might call it. Believe me, our losses have been negligible on such loans and we don't want you to walk out of here with your pockets empty."

  I thought that one over twice. I didn't even have the price of a haircut. On the other hand, borrowing money is like trying to swim with a brick in each hand... and a small loan is tougher to pay back than a million. "Mr. Doughty," I said slowly, "Dr. Albrecht said that I was entitled to four more days of beans and bed here."

  "I believe that is right-I'd have to consult your card. Not that we throw people out even when their contract time is up if they are not ready."

  "I didn't suppose that you did. But what are the rates on that room I had, as hospital room and board?"

  "Eh? But our rooms are not for rent in that way. We aren't a hospital; we simply maintain a recovery infirmary for our clients."

  "Yes, surely. But you must figure it, at least for cost accounting purposes."

  "Mmm... yes and no. The figures aren't allocated on that basis. The subheads are depreciation, overhead, operation, reserves, diet kitchen, personnel, and so forth. I suppose I could make an estimate."

  "Uh, don't bother. What would equivalent room and board in a hospital come to?"

  "That's a little out of my line. Still ... well, you could call it about one hundred dollars per day, I suppose."

  "I had four days coming. Will you lend me four hundred dollars?"

  He did not answer but spoke in a number code to his mechanical assistant. Then eight fifty-dollar bills were being counted into my hand. "Thanks," I said sincerely as I tucked it away. "I'll do my damnedest to see that this does not stay on the books too long. Six per cent? Or is money tight?"

  He shook his head. "It's not a loan. Since you put it as you did, I canceled it against your unused time."

  "Huh? Now, see here, Mr. Doughty, I didn't intend to twist your arm. Of course, I'm going to-"

  "Please. I told my assistant to enter the charge when I directed it to pay you. Do you want to give our auditors headaches all for a fiddling four hundred dollars? I was prepared to loan you much more than that."

  "Well-I can't argue it now. Say, Mr. Doughty, how much money is this? How are price levels flow?"

  "Mmmm... that is a complex question."

  "Just give me an idea? What does it cost to eat?"

  "Food is quite reasonable. For ten dollars you can get a very satisfactory dinner... if you are careful to select moderately priced restaurants."

  I thanked him and left with a really warm feeling. Mr. Doughty reminded me of a paymaster I used to have in the Army. Paymasters come in only two sizes: one sort shows you where the book says that you can't have what you've got coming to you; the second sort digs through the book until he finds a paragraph that lets you have what you need even if you don't rate it.

  Doughty was the second sort.

  The sanctuary faced on the Wilshire Ways. There were benches in front of it and bushes and flowers. I sat down on a bench to take stock and to decide whether to go east or west. I had kept a stiff lip with Mr. Doughty but, honestly, I was badly shaken, even though I had the price of a week's meals in my jeans.

  But the sun was warm and the drone of the Ways was pleasant and I was young (biologically at least) and I had two hands and my brain. Whistling "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," I opened the Times to the "Help Wanted" columns.

  I resisted the impulse to look through "Professional Engineers" and turned at once to "Unskilled."

  That classification was darned short. I almost couldn't find it.

  CHAPTER 6

  I got a job the second day, Friday, the fifteenth of December. I also had a mild run-in with the law and had repeated tangles with new ways of doing things, saying things, feeling about things. I discovered that "reorientation" by reading about it is like reading about sex-not the same thing.

  I suppose I would have had less trouble if I had been set down in Omsk, or Santiago, or Djakarta. In going to a strange city in a strange land you know that the customs are going to be different, but in Great Los Angeles I subconsciously expected things to be unchanged even though I could see that they were changed. Of course thirty years is nothing; anybody takes that much change and more in a lifetime. But it makes a difference to take it in one bite.

  Take one word I used all in innocence. A lady present was offended and only the fact that I was a Sleeper-which I hastily explained-kept her husband from giving me a mouthful of knuckles. I won't use the word here-oh yes, I will; why shouldn't I? I'm using it to explain something. Don't take my word for it that the word was in good usage when I was a kid; look it up in an old dictionary. Nobody scrawled it in chalk on sidewalks when I was a kid.

  The word was "kink."

  There were other words which I still do not use properly without stopping to think. Not taboo words necessarily, just ones with changed meanings. "Host" for example-"host" used to mean the man who took your coat and put it in the bedroom; it had nothing to do with the birth rate.

  But I got along. The job I found was crushing new ground limousines so that they could be shipped back to Pittsburgh as scrap. Cadillacs, Chryslers, Eisenhowers, Lincolns-all sorts of great, big, new powerful turbobuggies without a kilometer on their clocks. Drive `em between the jaws, then crunch! smash! Crash!-scrap iron for blast furnaces.

  It hurt me at first, since I was riding the Ways to work and didn't own so much as a gravJumper. I expressed my opinion of it and almost lost my job... until the shift boss remembered that I was a Sleeper and really didn't understand.

  "It's a simple matter of economics, son. These are surplus cars the government has accepted as security against price-support loans. They're two years old now and they can never be sold, so the government junks them and sells them back to the steel industry. You can't run a blast furnace just on ore; you have to have scrap iron as well. You ought to know that even if you are a Sleeper. Matter of fact, with high-grade ore so scarce, there's more and more demand for scrap. The steel industry needs these cars."

  "But why build them in the first place if they can't be sold? It seems wasteful."

  "It just seems wasteful. You want to throw people out of work? You want to run down the standard of living?"

  "Well, why not ship them abroad? It seems to me they could get more for them on the open market abroad than they are worth as Scrap."

  "What!-and ruin the export market? Besides, if we started dumping cars abroad we'd get everybody sore at us-Japan, France, Germany, Great Asia, everybody. What are you aiming to do? Start a war?" He sighed and went on in a fatherly tone. "You go down to the public library and draw out some books. You don't have any right to opinions on these things until you know something about them."

  So I shut up. I didn't tell him that I was spending all my off time at the public library or at U.C.L.A.'s library; I had avoided admitting that I was, or used to be, an engineer-to claim that I was now an engineer would be too much like walking up to du Pont's and saying, "Sirrah, I am an aichymiste. Hast need of art such as mine?"

  I raised the subject just once more because I noticed that very few of the price-support cars were really ready to run. The workmanship was sloppy and they often lacked essentials like instrument dials or air conditioners. But when one day I noticed from the way the teeth of the crusher came down on one that it lacked even a power plant, I spoke up about it.

  The shift boss just stared at me. "Great jumping Jupiter, son, surely you don't expect them to put their best workmanship into cars that are just surplus? These cars had price-support loans against them before they ever came off the assembly line."

  So that time I shut up and stayed shut. I had better stick to engineering; economics is too esoteric for me.

  But I had plenty of time to think. The job I had was not really a "job" at all in my book; all the work was done by Flexible Frank in his various disguises. Frank and his brothers ran the crusher, moved the cars into place, hauled away the scrap, kept count, and weighed
the loads; my job was to stand on a little platform (I wasn't allowed to sit) and hang onto a switch that could Stop the whole operation if something went wrong. Nothing ever did, but I soon found that I was expected to spot at least one failure in automation each shift, stop the job, and send for a trouble crew.

  Well, it paid twenty-one dollars a day and it kept me eating. First things first.

  After social security, guild dues, income tax, defense tax, medical plan, and the welfare mutual fund I took home about sixteen of it. Mr. Doughty was wrong about a dinner costing ten dollars; you could get a very decent plate dinner for three if you did not insist on real meat, and I would defy anyone to tell whether a hamburger steak started life in a tank or out on the open range. With the stories going around about bootleg meat that might give you radiation poisoning I was perfectly happy with surrogates.

  Where to live had been somewhat of a problem. Since Los Angeles had not been treated to the one-second slum-clearance plan in the Six Weeks War, an amazing number of refugees had gone there (I suppose I was one of them, although I hadn't thought of myself as such at the time) and apparently none of them had ever gone home, even those that had homes left to go back to. The city-if you can call Great Los Angeles a city; it is more of a condition-had been choked when I went to sleep; now it was as jammed as a lady's purse. It may have been a mistake to get rid of the smog; back in the `60s a few people used to leave each year because of sinusitis.

  Now apparently nobody left, ever.

  The day I checked out of the sanctuary I had had several things on my mind, principally (1) find a job, (2) find a place to sleep, (3) catch up in engineering, (4) find Ricky, (5) get back into engineering-on my own if humanly possible, (6) find Belle and Miles and settle their hash-without going to jail for it, and (7) a slug of things, like looking up the original patent on Eager Beaver and checking my strong hunch that it was really Flexible Frank (not that it mattered now, just curiosity), and looking up the corporate history of Hired Girl, Inc., etc., etc.

  I have listed the above in order of priority, as I had found out years ago (through almost flunking my freshman year in engineering) that if you didn't use priorities, when the music stopped you were left standing. Some of these priorities ran concurrently, of course; I expected to search out Ricky and probably Belle & Co. as well, while I was boning engineering. But first things first and second things second; finding a job came even ahead of hunting

  for a sack because dollars are the key to everything else... when you haven't got them.

  After getting turned down six times in town I had chased an ad clear out to San Bernardino Borough, only to get there ten minutes too late. I should have rented a flop at once; instead I played it real smart and went back downtown, intending to find a room, then get up very early and be first in line for some job listed in the early edition.

  How was I to know? I got my name on four rooming-house waiting lists and wound up in the park. I stayed there, walking to keep warm, until almost midnight, then gave up-Great Los Angeles winters are subtropical only if you accent the "sub." I then took refuge in a station of Wilshire Ways... and about two in the morning they rounded me up with the rest of the vagrants.

  Jails have improved. This one was warm and I think they required the cockroaches to wipe their feet.

  I was charged with barracking. The judge was a young fellow who didn't even look up from his newspaper but simply said, "These all first offenders?"

  "Yes, your honor."

  "Thirty days, or take a labor-company parole. Next."

  They started to march US Out but I didn't budge. "Just a minute, Judge."

  "Eh? Something troubling you? Are you guilty or not guilty?"

  "Uh, I really don't know because I don't know what it is I have done. You see-"

  "Do you want a public defender? If you do you can be locked up until one can handle your case. I understand they are running about six days late right now... but it's your privilege."

  "Uh, I still don't know. Maybe what I want is a labor-company parole, though I'm not sure what it is. What I really want is some advice from the Court, if the Court pleases."

  The judge said to the bailiff, "Take the others out." He turned back to me. "Spill it. But I'll warrant you won't like my advice. I've been on this job long enough to have heard every phony story and to have acquired a deep disgust toward most of them."

  "Yes, sir. Mine isn't phony; it's easily checked. You see, I just got out of the Long Sleep yesterday and-"

  But he did look disgusted. "One of those, eh? I've often wondered what made our grandparents think they could dump their riffraff on us. The last thing on earth this city needs is more people especially ones who couldn't get along in their own time. I wish I could boot you back to whatever year you came from with a message to everybody there that the future they're dreaming about is not, repeat not, paved with gold." He sighed. "But it wouldn't do any good, I'm sure. Well, what do you expect me to do? Give you another chance? Then have you pop up here again a week from now?"

  "Judge, I don't think I'm likely to. I've got enough money to live until I find a job and-"

  "Eh? If you've got money, what were you doing barracking?"

  "Judge, I don't even know what that word means." This time he let me explain. When I came to how I had been swindled by Master Insurance Company his whole manner changed.

  "Those swine! My mother got taken by them after she had paid premiums for twenty years. Why didn't you tell me this in the first place?" He took out a card, wrote something on it, and said, "Take this to the hiring office at the Surplus & Salvage Authority. If you don't get a job come back and see me this afternoon. But no more barracking. Not only does it breed crime and vice, but you yourself are running a terrible risk of meeting up with a zombie recruiter."

  That's how I got a job smashing up brand-new ground cars. But I still think I made no mistake in logic in deciding to job-hunt first. Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account-the cops leave him alone.

  I found a decent room, too, within my budget, in a part of West Los Angeles which had not yet been changed over to New Plan. I think it had formerly been a coat closet.

  I would not want anyone to think I disliked the year 2000, as compared with 1970. I liked it and I liked 2001 when it rolled around a couple of weeks after they wakened me. In spite of recurrent spasms of almost unbearable homesickness, I thought that Great Los Angeles at the dawn of the Third Millennium was odds-on the most wonderful place I had ever seen. It was fast and clean and very exciting, even if it was too crowded... and even that was being coped with on a mammoth, venturesome scale. The New Plan parts of town were a joy to an engineer's heart. If the city government had had the sovereign power to stop immigration for ten years, they could have licked the housing problem. Since they did not have that power, they just had to do their best with the swarms that kept rolling over the Sierras-and their best was spectacular beyond belief and even the failures were colossal.

  It was worth sleeping thirty years just to wake up in a time when they had licked the common cold and nobody had a postnasal drip. That meant more to me than the research colony on Venus.

  Two things impressed me most, one big, one little. The big one was NullGrav, of course. Back in 1970 I had known about the Babson Institute gravitation research but I had not expected anything to come of it-and nothing had; the basic field theory on which NullGrav is based was developed at the University of Edinburgh. But I had been taught in school that gravitation was something that nobody could ever do anything about, because it was inherent in the very shape of space.

  So they changed the shape of space, naturally. Only temporarily and locally, to be sure, but that's all that's needed in moving a heavy object. It still has to stay in field relation with Mother Terra, so it's useless for space ships-or it is in 2001; I've quit making bets about the future. I learned that to make a lift it was still necessary to expend power to overcome the gravity potential, and conversely, to lower
something you had to have a power pack to store all those foot-pounds in, or something would go Phzzt!Spung! But just to transport something horizontally, say from San Francisco to Great Los Angeles, just lift it once, then float along, no power at all, like an ice skater riding a long edge.

  Lovely!

  I tried to study the theory of it, but the math starts in where tensor calculus leaves off; it's not for me. But an engineer is rarely a mathematical physicist and he does not have to be; he simply has to savvy the skinny of a thing well enough to know what it can do in practical applications-know the working parameters. I could learn those.

  The "little thing" I mentioned was the changes in female styles made possible by the Sticktite fabrics. I was not startled by mere skin on bathing beaches; you could see that coming in 1970. But the weird things that the ladies could do with Sticktite made my Jaw sag.

  My grandpappy was born in 1890; I suppose that some of the sights in 1970 would have affected him the same way.

  But I liked the fast new world and would have been happy in it if I had not been so bitterly lonely so much of the time. I was out of joint. There were times (in the middle of the night, usually) when I would gladly have swapped it all for one beat-up tomcat, or for a chance to spend an afternoon taking little Ricky to the zoo... or for the comradeship Miles and I had shared when all we had was hard work and hope.

  It was still early in 2001 and I wasn't halfway caught up on my homework, when I began to itch to leave my feather-bedded job and get back to the old drawing board. There were so many, many things possible under current art which had been impossible in 1970; 1 wanted to get busy and design a few dozen.

  For example I had expected that there would be automatic secretaries in use-I mean a machine you could dictate to and get back a business letter, spelling, punctuation, and format all perfect, without a human being in the sequence. But there weren't any. Oh, somebody had invented a machine which could type, but it was suited only to a phonetic language like Esperanto and was useless in a language in which you could say: "Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through."