Аврам Дэвидсон - Ellery Queen’s Double Dozen

Her second piece of bread was served at the same time as his steak. She had never smelled a real steak before. She could feel saliva gather on her tongue.

The man was looking at her. “Like a bite?”

Never, never talk to a strange man in a dive, but...

“Could I? Just one little bite?”

“Why not?” Even his smile was tantalizingly familiar. Still she couldn’t place him.

She chewed the morsel of steak, closing her eyes in ecstasy.

He was still smiling when she opened her eyes. “Why didn’t you order steak yourself?”

“I don’t have two thousand dollars.”

“Then we must share this.”

“That wouldn’t be fair to you.”

“Oh, come on! You’re a pretty girl. I like you.” His voice was almost a drawl, lazy, reassuring. Ella hesitated. Then he, too, noticed her wedding ring. “Married?”

“Yes. To a good man. He’s never been in a speakeasy in his life.”

“Unemployed?”

“Of course. He has no scientific aptitude and machine-minding jobs are so scarce. He’s been on the waiting list for years. But he’ll never get one. It doesn’t bother him any more — not since we went on Full Automation; he gets paid a full salary for consuming instead of working.”

“How does he spend his time when he isn’t consuming?”

“He bowls and plays pool on alternate days. Then he comes home and drinks neo-beer with his Tasteegood Teevee dinner, and watches commercials and goes to sleep. He believes everything he sees and hears on commercials.”

“But you don’t?”

“No. I think they’re bunk.” The steak and bread and butter together had gone to her head. She had forgotten the old adage: Never mix foods.

“Tom consumes everything that is advertised on TV,” she went on. “Everything from underarm deodorants for football players to the kind of cigs mountain climbers smoke on cliff tops. And as for food! Tom loves every synthetic that General Nourishment puts out — even the laboratory-tested, artificial eggs with the chemical formula stamped on the edible, plastic shell. He consumes about five thousand calories a day and then, when he gets overweight, he goes on General Nourishment’s Reducto Wafers to get himself back into shape for consuming again.”

“How is he on clothes?”

“The best consumer that General Garments ever had! You should see his sports shirts. When they vaporize themselves at the end of three months, he goes right out and buys more. After all, as he says, ‘That’s what I’m paid my salary for — for consuming.’ ”

“I suppose most people are like Tom,” mused the stranger. “Perfectly willing to consume anything they are told to as long as everybody else is doing the same thing. People like you and me are deviates, sports of nature. Lucky there are so few of us.”

“Why?”

He looked at her surprised, almost shocked. “Surely you realize that an Expanding Economy Under Full Automation will collapse unless everyone consumes as much of the same things as possible; and these things must be the cheapest things possible — which means they must be synthetics. We should do everything we can to support General Nourishment, General Transportation, General Buildings, General Communications, General Entertainment — all the General Organizations. They’ve brought plenty to everyone.”

“Plenty of what?”

“Food, cars, houses, TV sets — everything that makes life worth living.”

“But all synthetic,” said Ella. “All mass-produced and all exactly alike.”

“They have to be. Otherwise there wouldn’t be enough to go round and still make a profit under Full Automation. Can you imagine how wasteful and downright wicked it was in the old days? Think of the human labor and time, the capital and raw materials invested in just one pot roast made of real meat and real vegetables. Absolutely uneconomic and inefficient! Today General Nourishment’s automated food laboratories can turn out in less than three minutes as many as five hundred thousand synthetic pot roasts, frozen and imperishable, at a cost of less than one-tenth of one cent each.”

“I suppose so, but...” Ella frowned. “Once you’ve tasted real food, you just can’t enjoy synthetics. Why don’t we do as the English do? Let addicts buy a little real food once in a while on a doctor’s prescription? Then there wouldn’t be all this bootlegging and crime.”

“You’ll be saying next that you approve of the French system — medically inspected, government-licensed restaurants where real food is sold openly.”

“You think that’s bad?”

“I know it is. For one thing, the medical inspectors are underpaid and careless. The indigestion rate in France is appalling, and it increases every year.”

“It’s hard to realize that in our great-grandparents’ day everybody ate real food and no one thought of it as a crime.”

“Their death rate was higher than ours.”

“But they had more fun while they were alive.”

He grinned. “You really are subversive, aren’t you?”

“I don’t see why something that was normal for our great-grandparents has to be abnormal for us.”

“A few hundred thousand years ago primitive man thought sexual promiscuity was normal, but for us it would—”

His voice was drowned by the shriek of an alarm bell.

“RAID!” shouted the counterman.

The fat man with the smooth face made his voice carry without shouting. “Keep your seats, everybody! Be calm — we’ll handle this!”

The stranger’s face was grim. “I musn’t be found here.”

Ella’s lips tightened. “Maybe — if we could phone a lawyer—”

“You forget the telephone’s on full automation, too. Besides, we’d never have time to dial the complete area-code number.”

The waiters moved like lightning. In a few moments every trace of food had vanished from the room and Ella could hear the grinding noise of an old-fashioned garbage disposal unit in the kitchen. Roulette wheels were placed on some of the tables, dice and cards on others. And just in time. Only a few moments later an ax crashed through the door and a dozen uniformed policemen poured into the room.

One officer turned to a man in a resplendent uniform. “Must have been a false tip, Chief. Nothing going on here — nothing but a little gambling.”

“Wait.” The Chief of Police held up his hand. “Do I, or don’t I, smell freshly baked bread?”

The fat man moved forward, a smile on his smooth face. “Not one crumb of bread in the place, Chief. Take my word for it.” As he spoke his hand went out. Ella thought she saw something pass from one man to the other. She was almost sure that the Chief of Police put his hand in his pocket immediately afterward. He was smiling now. “Guess it was a phony tip at that Carry on, folks! If I wasn’t on duty, I’d join in the blackjack game.”

“He didn’t even look in the kitchen,” whispered Ella.

“He was paid off. Didn’t you notice?”

“How awful!” She rose. “I must go now. Goodbye and — I don’t know how to thank you for the steak.”

“It was a pleasure. I’ll walk with you to the end of the street. This neighborhood isn’t safe for a young woman alone.”

They went down the greasy stairs together, out into the cold windy night. The shadowy figure of the boy on guard had vanished from the doorway. In the moon’s light the street seemed empty — as empty as a lunar landscape.

I hope he’s not going to kiss me, thought Ella, just because he met me in a speakeasy.

She halted with a gasp. She was looking across the street to a car parked at the curb, a black car with white letters on one side — the dread letters A.E.P.

“That car!” Ella’s voice shook. “You know what those letters mean?”