Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

He slammed the door. He was shaking a little.

“It’ll take about an hour,” he said, “to clean the air in there. Even then I’ll have to spray the spot where I was working. That was mighty damned clumsy of me—not to say dangerous!”

“What was it?”

Jimmie chuckled uneasily. He walked close to the old man and separated his eyelids. “Didn’t get a whiff, did you?”

“Hell, no. I was a mile away. How about you?”

Jimmie bent his knees to bring his face level with that of the other man. “I don’t think so. Just take a look at the whites of my eyes. Still white?”

“Still white.”

“No greenish tinge?”

“No greenish tinge, Jimmie.”

“Thank God for that. On the rats it showed in their eyeballs in about twenty seconds. Maybe twenty-five. Made ’em greenish. In fifty seconds—no more rat. Just—rat carcass.”

“The devil!”

“If it proves to be stable enough, and portable, we’ll call it Corinthite.”

“We will not! No lousy poison gas is going to wear my name!”

“It won’t be a gas,” Jimmie answered, grinning. “Not when you drop it. It’ll be a liquid. A sort of a shower bath. It’ll turn into a gas later on—quite a bit later. At first it’ll be harmless. When it dries a bit—well, I wouldn’t send my worst enemy in that lab now.”

“You come over to my office,” the old man said, “and sit out the hour. Haven’t had a talk with you for ten days. I read your reports, of course, and I see by them that—for a man having fits—you’re doing pretty swell. Better than I figured. Much. That blitz training is red-hot! Wish I could send some more of my men abroad for a spell of it!” He chuckled and led the way into the shambles he called his office.

“You destroy my reports, don’t you?”

“I commit ’em to memory and I burn ’em on the floor here and I poke the ashes to dust. Except the ones Ben runs to Washington, naturally.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Jimmie. How goes the battle?”

“Oh, so-so. Dad and Mother haven’t had time to argue with me lately. They’re always thinking up some new fun for Biff, for one thing. For another, I’ve been reading your one-man history of the world every night.”

“Like it?”

“Lots.”

The old man grunted. “Whenever I think about what’s wrong with America, I think about how are the American people going to fix it. I don’t mean I think about that as a problem. I think about it as if I were reading the history of the future. Because they darned well will fix things! They’re that kind of folks—even if they do get mighty reluctant spells!”

“Guess you’re right.”

“Like this. Americans know darned well they’ve got to elect better people to the big jobs. Better senators and congressmen and governors and so on. They’re sure—positive, already, they’re doing wrong to put in a lot of nitwits, banjo players, grafters, good-humored poops, and so on. Americans understand that the problems of their government are too darned complicated, too scientific, too obscure, too numerous, for every darned citizen to comprehend. In the days of George Washington civilization was something pretty much every man knew pretty much all about. The fellow that made cart wheels understood the fellow that built schooners. And so on. But today, Americans realize, even a smart guy in Connecticut can’t say, offhand, what ought to be done about irrigation, soil erosion, and hydroelectric installations in New Mexico. Right?”

“Plenty right.”

“So—we know we gotta elect better people. Not just a pleasant guy with a loud mouth from the next county! So what? We’re sending more college men into politics.

That’s good. And more professional men. That’s good too. We’re electing more chaps like that. Someday the American people will get together and change the constitutional rules about the qualifications of public servants. Yes, sir, Jimmie. Someday you won’t even be allowed to run for the Senate, if you think New Guinea is in South America, or if you think a billion dollars is so much money nobody can imagine it, or if you believe that carrying a potato in your pocket cures rheumatism. Of course, a lot of college graduates regress fast, and a lot of ’em are saps, but passing a political-suitability examination will cut down the ratio of saps. The American people are going to demand basic information and sanity in their representatives, someday, just as they make people take exams for civil service or a medical license.”

Jimmie grinned. “I hope so. It would sure cut a swath in the politicians at work now!”

“Wouldn’t it just!” Mr. Corinth chuckled. “Then, another thing. You know why capitalists get so darned hot about Communism?”

Jimmie just laughed.

The older man shook his head. “That’s not why—not wholly. Not just because they’re afraid they’ll be ruined by it. They get frightened because, Jimmie, there’s something in it. Something to it.”

Jimmie nodded. “Everybody realizes that. People shouldn’t be jobless in a rich country like this, if they want jobs. People shouldn’t be undernourished at times when we have food surpluses. People shouldn’t have to work for marbles, long hours—”

“I don’t mean that. I mean, there’re two kinds of capital in this world. There’s the kind that comes from work. From labor. From manufacturing, and from invention, and from management, and from services, and from salesmanship. That kind. It’s earned. Competition is the driving force behind it; without competition, in my opinion, a man isn’t living. He’s a dead soul in a zombie body. Competition isn’t sociological or economic, Jimmie. It’s biological. It runs right straight through the whole history of evolution—and it’s the thing that made evolution. Not you, nor the Fascists, nor the Commies can outlaw it. If they try they get a zombie population. If the Germans aren’t zombies—and the Russkies—I’d like to know! Nope. Competition—fair and square, open and hard—is the heart of progress. And the money earned under it—is real money!

“But there’s another kind of capital in the world, Jimmie. The Commies have attacked it—and they make sense attacking it, I say. It’s what you’d call ‘luck’ capital. Money people get by luck, by chance, outside of creative competition. Money made by the usurious employment of money. Money made by gambling. Money made on long-range, irresponsible deals. Buckets of money, inherited. Money made by a man who buys a piece of land to farm, and then has oil spout up on it. The American people are starting, right now, to discriminate between earned money and lucky money. That’s what the SEC rules governing stock markets are really all about. That’s why we’ve got these whacking inheritance taxes.

“An American laborer doesn’t begrudge the money a man makes by producing something worth-while or doing a valuable service. But he sure does begrudge the money a man swipes, or wins by a market bet, or has handed to him by his daddy for nothing, or finds on the ground because he happened to buy the Jones farm instead of the Smith acreage. The Commies try to confuse the two. They want no Capitalism. But I can see what the Americans really want. They want everybody paid, and paid as much as the traffic will bear, for what he, personally, contributes to America. And they want nobody to be able to get rich from doing nothing. Seems fair to me.”

“You think,” Jimmie asked, “they’re really figuring the future out like that?”

“I know it! Americans, Jimmie, are the coming people. They’re born squabblers—but they’re also hell-bent to get things right. Worst crime here is to be wrong, or to be a wrong guy. Right now, they know what the issue is, but they haven’t got the words for it. Neither have I. That is, not a slogan. People—wide-awake ones, a few business men included—go around saying that the country has taken a ‘social’ slant, and will never let go of it. Then they look scared because they think you’ll assume they’re Communists. But that’s all they mean. The kind of capital that keeps men on their toes can never be abolished. If some nitwitted mob of Reds puts an end to it, then the generations that come afterward will have to invent it all over. If Hitler wins, and we get the super race, state socialism, long-range planning by which the Germans will live on the fat, and those of us who haven’t got the guts to die will work away our lives for a slum bed and soup kitchen food, why—it’ll have to be invented again for the Germans.”