The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth Page B

his two-handed slicer by him at all times, and often idly sleeked its edge with a hone. He was a man I had to know. He was a man with money—he must have money after ten years—and I needed it.
    The pattern of the B labor contract had become quite clear. You never got out of debt. Easy credit was part of the system, and so were irritants that forced you to exercise it. If I fell behind ten dollars a week I would owe one thousand one hundred dollars to Chlorella at the end of my contract, and would have to work until the debt was wiped out. And while I worked, a new debt would accumulate.
    I needed Herrera's money to buy my way out of Chlorella and back to New York: Kathy, my wife; Venus Section; my job. Runstead was doing things I didn't like to Venus Section. And God alone knew what Kathy was doing, under the impression that she was a widow. I tried not to think of one particular thing: Jack O'Shea and Kathy. The little man had been getting back at womankind for their years of contempt. Until the age of twenty-five he had been a laughable sixty-pound midget, with a touch of grotesquerie in the fact that he had doggedly made himself a test pilot. At the age of twenty-six he found himself the world's number one celebrity, the first man to land a ship on Venus, an immortal barely out of his teens. He had a lot of loving to catch up on. The story was that he'd been setting records on his lecture tours. I didn't like the story. I didn't like the way he liked Kathy or the way Kathy liked him.
    And so I went through another day, up at dawn, breakfast, coveralls and goggles, cargo net, skimming and slinging for blazing hour after hour, dinner and the dayroom and, if I could manage it, a chat with Herrera.
    "Fine edge on that slicer, Gus. There's only two kinds of people in the world: the ones who don't take care of their tools and the smart ones."
    Suspicious look from under his Aztec brows. "Pays to do things right. You're the crumb, ain't you?"
    "Yeah. First time here. Think I ought to stay?"
    He didn't get it. "You gotta stay. Contract." And he went to the magazine rack.
    Tomorrow's another day.
    "Hello, Gus. Tired?"
    "Hi, George. Yeah, a little. Ten hours swinging the slicer. It gets you in the arms."
    "I can imagine. Skimming's easy, but you don't need brains for it."
    "Well, maybe some day you get upgraded. I think I'll trance."
    And another:
    "Hi, George. How's it going?"
    "Can't complain, Gus. At least I'm getting a sun-tan."
    "You sure are. Soon you be dark like me. Haw-haw! How'd you like that?"
    "Porque no, amigo?"
    "Hey, tu hablas espanol! Cuando aprmdiste la lengua?"
    "Not so fast, Gus! Just a few words here and there. I wish I knew more. Some day when I get a few bucks ahead I'm going to town and see the girls."
    "Oh, they all speak English, kind of. If you get a nice steady li'l girl it would be nice to speak a li'l Spanish. She would appreciate it. But most of them know 'Gimmy-gimmy' and the li'l English poem about what you get for one buck. Haw-haw!"
    And another day—an astonishing day.
    I'd been paid again, and my debt had increased by eight dollars. I'd tormented myself by wondering where the money went, but I knew. I came off shift dehydrated, as they wanted me to be. I got a squirt of Popsie from the fountain by punching my combination— twenty-five cents checked off my payroll. The squirt wasn't quite enough so I had another—fifty cents. Dinner was drab as usual; I couldn't face more than a bite or two of Chicken Little. Later I was hungry and there was the canteen where I got Crunchies on easy credit. The Crunchies kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could be quelled only by another two squirts of Popsie from the fountain. And Popsie kicked off withdrawal symptoms that could only be quelled by smoking Starr cigarettes, which made you hungry for Crunchies . . . Had Fowler Schocken thought of it in these terms when he organized Starrzelius Verily, the first spherical trust? Popsie to Crunchies to Stairs to