Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

The clerk laughed. Mklikluln smiled. Speaking was fun. For one thing, you could lie. An art his people had never learned to cultivate.

“Profession?”

“Salesman.”

“Really, Mr. Redford? What do you sell?”

Mklikluln shrugged, practicing looking mildly embarrassed. “Doghouses,” he said.

Royce Jacobsen pulled open the front door of his swelteringly hot house and sighed. A salesman.

“We don’t want any,” he said.

“Yes you do,” said the man, smiling.

Royce was a little startled. Salesmen usually didn’t argue with potential customers—they usually whined. And those that did argue rarely did it with such calm self-assurance. The man was an ass, Royce decided. He looked at the sample case. On the side were the letters spelling out: “Doghouses Unlimited.”

“We don’t got a dog,” Royce said.

“But you do have a very warm house, I believe,” the salesman said.

“Yeah. Hotter’n Hades, as the preachers say. Ha.” The laugh would have been bigger than one Ha, but Royce was hot and tired and it was only a salesman.

“But you have an air conditioner.”

“Yeah,” Royce said. “What I don’t have is a permit for more than a hundred bucks worth of power from the damnpowercompany. So if I run the air conditioner more than one day a month, I get the refrigerator shut down, or the stove, or some other such thing.”

The salesman looked sympathetic.

“It’s guys like me,” Royce went on, “who always get the short end of the stick. You can bet your boots that the mayor gets all the air conditioning he wants. You can bet your boots and your overalls, as the farmers say, ha ha, that the president of the damnpowercompany takes three hot showers a day and three cold showers a night and leaves his windows open in the winter, too, you can bet on it.”

“Right,” said the salesman. “The power companies own this whole country. They own the whole world, you know? Think it’s any different in England? In Japan? They got the gas, and so they get the gold.”

“Yeah,” Royce agreed. “You’re my kind of guy. You come right in. House is hot as Hades, as the preachers say, ha ha ha, but it sure beats standing in the sun.”

They sat on a beat-up looking couch and Royce explained exactly what was wrong with the damnpowercompany and what he thought of the damnpowercompany’s executives and in what part of their anatomy they should shove their quotas, bills, rates, and periods of maximum and minimum use. “I’m sick to death of having to take a shower at 2:00 A.M!” Royce shouted.

“Then do something about it!” the salesman rejoindered.

“Sure. Like what?”

“Like buy a doghouse from me.”

Royce thought that was funny. He laughed for a good long while.

But then the salesman started talking very quietly, showing him pictures and diagrams and cost analysis papers that proved—what?

“That the solar energy utilizer built into this doghouse can power your entire house, all day every day, with four times as much power as you could use if you turned on all your home appliances all day every day, for exactly zero once you pay me this simple one-time fee.”

Royce shook his head, though he coveted the doghouse. “Can’t. Illegal. I think they passed a law against solar energy thingies back in ’85 or ’86, to protect the power companies.”

The salesman laughed. “How much protection do the power companies need?” “Sure,” Royce answered, “it’s me that needs protection. But the meter reader—if I stop using power, he’ll report me, they’ll investigate—”

“That’s why we don’t put your whole house on it. We just put the big power users on it, and gradually take more off the regular current until you’re paying what, maybe fifteen dollars a month. Right? Only instead of fifteen dollars a month and cooking over a fire and sweating to death in a hot house, you’ve got the air conditioner running all day, the heater running all day in the winter, showers whenever you want them, and you can open the refrigerator as often as you like.” Royce still wasn’t sure.

“What’ve you got to lose?” the salesman asked.

“My sweat,” Royce answered. “You hear that? My sweat. Ha ha ha ha.” “That’s why we build them into doghouses—so that nobody’ll suspect anything.” “Sure, why not?” Royce asked. “Do it. I’m game. I didn’t vote for the damncongressman who voted in that stupid law anyway.”

The air conditioner hummed as the guests came in. Royce and his wife, Junie, ushered them into the living room. The television was on in the family room and the osterizer was running in the kitchen. Royce carelessly flipped on a light. One of the women gasped. A man whispered to his wife. Royce and Junie carelessly began their conversation—as Royce left the door open.

A guest noticed it—Mr. Detweiler from the bowling team. He said, “Hey!” and leaped from the chair toward the door.

Royce stopped him, saying, “Never mind, never mind, I’ll get it in a minute. Here, have some peanuts.” And the guests all watched the door in agony as Royce passed the peanuts around, then (finally!) went to the door to close it.

“Beautiful day outside,” Royce said, holding the door open a few minutes longer.

Somebody in the living room mentioned a name of the deity. Somebody else countered with a one word discussion of defecation. Royce was satisfied that the point had been made. He shut the door.

“Oh, by the way,” he said. “I’d like you to meet a friend to mine. His name is Robert Redford.”

Gasp, gasp, of course you’re joking, Robert Redford, what a laugh, sure.

“Actually, his name is Robert Redford, but he isn’t, of course, the all time greatest star of stage, screen, and the Friday Night Movie, as the disc jockeys say, ha ha. He is, in short, my friends, a doghouse salesman.”

Mklikluln came in then, and shook hands all around.

“He looks like an Arab,” a woman whispered.

“Or a Jew,” her husband whispered back. “Who can tell?”

Royce beamed at Mklikluln and patted him on the back. “Redford here is the best salesman I ever met.”

“Must be, if he sold you a doghouse, and you not even got a dog,” said Mr. Detweiler of the bowling league, who could sound patronizing because he was the only one in the bowling league who had ever had a perfect game.

“Neverthemore, as the raven said, ha ha ha, I want you all to see my doghouse.” And so Royce led the way past a kitchen where all the lights were on, where the refrigerator was standing open (“Royce, the fridge is open!” “Oh, I guess one of the kids left it that way.” “I’d kill one of my kids that did something like that!”), where the stove and microwave and osterizer and hot water were all running at once. Some of the women looked faint.

And as the guests tried to rush through the back door all at once, to conserve energy, Royce said, “Slow down, slow down, what’s the panic, the house on fire? Ha ha ha.” But the guests still hurried through.

On the way out to the doghouse, which was located in the dead center of the backyard, Detweiler took Royce aside.

“Hey, Royce, old buddy. Who’s your touch with the damnpowercompany? How’d you get your quota upped?”

Royce only smiled, shaking his head. “Quota’s the same as ever, Detweiler.” And then, raising his voice just a bit so that everybody in the backyard could hear, he said, “I only pay fifteen bucks a month for power as it is.”

“Woof woof,” said a small dog chained to the hook on the doghouse.

“Where’d the dog come from?” Royce whispered to Mklikluln.

“Neighbor was going to drown ’im,” Mklikluln answered. “Besides, if you don’t have a dog the power company’s going to get suspicious. It’s cover.”