Martian Time Slip

Ever since he had lost his union card and could not then legally perform his job, Otto Zitte's life had been a continual mess. With a card he would be by now a first-class repairman. It was his secret that he had once held such a card and had managed to lose it; even his employer, Norb Steiner, did not tnow it. For reasons he himself did not understand, Otto preferred others to believe he had simply failed the aptitude tests. Perhaps it was easier to think of himself as a failure; after all, the repair business was almost impossible to get into... and after having gotten into it, to be booted out--

It was his own fault. There he had been, three years ago, a paid-up member of the union in good standing, in other words a bona fide Goodmember. The future was wide open for him; he was young, he had a girl friend and his own 'copter--the latter, leased; the former, although he had not known it at the time, shared--and what could hold him back? What, except possibly his own stupidity.

He had broken a union ruling which was a basic law. In his opinion it was a foolish ruling, but nonetheless... vengeance is mine, sayeth the Extraterrestrial Repairmen's Union, Martian Branch. Wow, how he hated the bastards; his hatred had warped his life and he recognized that--and he did nothing about it: he wanted it to warp him. He wanted to keep on hating them, the vast monolithic structure, wherever it existed.

They had caught him for giving socialized repair.

And the hell of it was that it wasn't actually socialized, because he expected to get back a profit. It was just a new way of charging his customers, and in a sense not so new, anyhow. It was actually the oldest way in the world, a barter system. But his revenue could not be divvied up so that the union got its cut. His trade had been with certain housewives living out in remote tracts, very lonely women whose husbands stayed in the city five days a week, coming home only on weekends. Otto, who was good-looking, slender, with long, combed-back black hair (in his account of himself, anyhow), had made time with one woman after another; and an outraged husband, on finding out, had, instead of shooting Otto to death, gone instead to the Union Hiring Hall and lodged a formal charge: repairs without compensation at scale.

Well, it certainly was not scale; he admitted that.

And so now this job with Norb Steiner, which meant that he had practically to live in the wastelands of the F.D.R. Mountains, alienated from society for weeks on end, growing more and more lonely, more embittered all the time. It had been his need for intimate personal contact that had gotten him into trouble in the first place, and now look at him. As he sat in the storage shed waiting for the next rocket to show up, he looked back on his life and reflected that even the Bleekmen wouldn't be willing or able to live as he lived, cut off from everyone like this. If only his own black-market operations had succeeded! He, like Norb Steiner, had been able to swing around the planet daily, visiting one person after another. Was it his fault that the items he chose to import were hot enough to interest the big boys? His judgment had been too good; his line had sold too well.

He hated the big racketeers, too, same as he hated the big unions. He hated bigness per se; bigness had destroyed the American system of free enterprise, the small businessman had been ruined--in fact, he himself had been perhaps the last authentic small businessman in the solar system. That was his real crime: he had tried to live the American way of life, instead of just talking about it.

"Screw them," he said to himself, seated on a crate, surrounded by boxes and cartons and packages and the workings of several dismantled rocketships which he had been revamping. Outside the shed window... silent, desolate rock hills, with only a few shrubs, dried up and dying, as far as the eye could see.

And where was Norb Steiner right now? No doubt ensconced in some bar or restaurant or some woman's cheery living room, prattling his line, handing over tins of smoked salmon and getting in return--

"Screw them all," Otto mumbled, getting up to pace back and forth. "If that's what they want, let 'em have it. Bunch of animals."

Those Israeli girls... that's where Steiner was, with a kibbutzful of them, those hot, black-eyed, heavy-lipped, bigbreasted, sexy ones who got tanned working out in the fields in shorts and cotton shirts clinging to them, no bras, just those big solid breasts--you could actually see their nipples, because the damp fabric stuck to them.

That's why he wouldn't let me go with him, Otto decided.