The place was crowded. Pomrath walked to the center of the marble floor, and stood for a moment enjoying the buzz and clamor of the machine. To his left was Bank Red, for job transfers. Pomrath had no dealings there; you needed to have a job before you could start negotiating for a transfer. Straight ahead of him was Bank Green, for members of the hard-core unemployed like himself. To his right was Bank Blue, where new members of the labor force filed applications for work. Each of the three banks had a long line in wait. Kids to the right; a bunch of eager-beaver Class Tens to the left, looking for advancement; straight ahead, the dismal legions of the jobless. Pomrath joined the line at Bank Green.
It moved swiftly. No one spoke to him. Wrapped in a cocoon of privacy in the midst of this crowd, Pomrath wondered, as he often did, where his life had been derailed. He had a high I.Q., he knew. Good reflexes. Determination and ambition and flexibility. Why, he could have been Class Eight by now, if the breaks had gone his way.
They hadn’t. They never would. He had trained as a medical technician, thinking that illness was a constant even in a well-ordered world, and so there would always be a job for him. Unfortunately, many other young men of his generation had arrived at the same conclusion. As in the arthropod races, Pomrath thought. You picked your favorite lobster with care, judging his abilities and aggressiveness with all the shrewdness at your command. The factors were there to be assessed. The trouble was a lot of other men were just as shrewd as you; if you could isolate a really superior racer, so could they, and the odds had a way of being 11-10 or worse when you got your bet down. If you won, you were just about breaking even. The secret was to find the 50-to-1 shot who could win. But if he could win, he would not carry such fat odds. The universe, thought Pomrath, is not unfair; it simply is not interested.
He had backed the sure thing, and so his reward had been correspondingly slim: a few weeks of work, many months of unemployment. Pomrath was a good technician. He had his skills, and they were at least the equal of those of a genuine doctor of a few centuries ago. Today, real doctors—there weren’t many of them—rated Class Three, just below the lower echelon of the High Government. Pomrath, though, as a mere technician, was bogged down in Class Fourteen and all the attendant discomforts, and the only way he could gain slope on the rating curve was to add to his work-experience rating, but there was no work. Or not very much.
What irony, he thought. Joe Quellen, with no skills at all, is a big-deal Class Seven. Private apartment, no less. And here I am twice as far down the curve. But Quellen was a member of the government—not the High Government, of course, not the policy-making group, just the government— and so Quellen had to have status. They had to put Quellenin one of the higher classes simply so he’d be able to enforce his authority. Pomrath chewed at a ragged fingernail and wondered why he had not had the good sense to think of going into government service.
Then he answered himself: the odds were even worse there. Quellen had had luck. Maybe a little ability too, Pomrath conceded grudgingly. If I had gone into government instead of becoming a medic, I’d probably be a Class Fourteen clerk today, with regular work but no other advantages that I don’t have at the present. The universe is not unfair. But it can be terribly consistent sometimes.
Pomrath was at the head of the line, now.
He was confronted by a blank aluminum plate, some two feet square, in the center of whose shiny surface was mounted a circular scanning shield made of pebbled glass. The shield glowed green and Pomrath clasped his hand over it in the old, familiar ritual.
It was not necessary to talk to the job machine. The job machine knew why Pomrath had come, and who he was, and what fate was in store for him. Nevertheless, Pomrath said in his deep, husky voice, “How about a little work, maybe?” and punched the activating stud.
He got his answer speedily.
Something in the wall behind the shiny aluminum plate made a whirring, chittering sound. Probably strictly for effect, Pomrath thought. To make the prolets believe that that machine is really doing something. A little slot opened in the plate and a minislip came rolling out. Pomrath ripped it off and studied it without much interest.
It bore his name, his job classification rating, and the rest of the identifying gibberish that had accreted to him in his journey through the world. Below that in neat block letters was the verdict:
EMPLOYMENT PROGNOSIS CURRENTLY UNFAVORABLE. WE WILL INFORM YOU AS OPPORTUNITIES FOR GAINFUL EMPLOY DEVELOP. WE URGE PATIENCE AND UNDERSTANDING. TEMPORARY PRESSURES PREVENT THE ATTAINMENT OF THE HIGH GOVERNMENT’S FULL EMPLOYMENT QUOTA.
“Too bad,” Pomrath murmured. “My sympathy to the High Government.”
He placed the minislip in the disposal slot and turned away, shouldering a path through the swarm of emotionless men waiting to get their share of the bad news. So much for the visit to the job machine.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Half past sixteen,” said his earwatch.
“I think I’ll drop in at my friendly sniffer palace. Do you think that’s a good idea?”
The earwatch wasn’t programmed for such responses. For twice the money, you could get one that would really talk to you, would tell you things other than the time.
Pomrath did not think he rated such a luxury in these troubled times. He was also not so hungry for companionship that he yearned for the conversation of an earwatch. Still, he knew, there were those who took consolation from such things.
He stepped outside, into the pale sunlight of the spring afternoon.
The sniffer palace he particularly favored was four blocks away. There were plenty of them, dozens within a ten-block radius of the job-machine building, but Pomrath always went to the same one. Why not? They dispensed the same poisons at each one, so the only commodity that distinguished one from the next was personal service. Even an unemployed Class Fourteen likes to know that he’s a valued regular client of something, if only a sniffer palace.
Pomrath walked quickly. The streets were crowded; pedestrianism was in fashion again lately. The short, heavyset Pomrath had little patience for the obstacles in his way. In fifteen minutes he was at the sniffer palace. It was on the fortieth underlevel of a commercial tank building; by law, all such places of illusion-peddling had to be underground, so that impressionable children at street level would not be prematurely corrupted. Pomrath entered the tank and took the express drop-shaft. With great dignity he descended five hundred feet. The tank had eighty levels, terminating in an undertract that linked it to several adjoining buildings, but Pomrath had never been down that deep to see. He left such subterranean adventures to the members of the High Government, and had no wish to come face to face with Danton somewhere in the depths of the earth.
The sniffer palace had gaudy, somewhat defective argon lights out front. Most such establishments were all mechanical, but this one had human attendants. That was why Pomrath liked it. He walked in, and there was good old Jerry just within the door, scanning him out of authentic, bloodshot human eyes.
“Norm. Good to see.”
“I’m not so sure about that. Business?”
“Lousy. Have a mask.”
“Glad to,” Pomrath said. “The wife? You got her pregnant yet?”
The plump man behind the counter smiled. “Would I do a crazy thing like that? In Class Fourteen, do I need a house full of kids? I took the Sterility Pledge, Norm. You forget that?”
“I guess I did,” Pomrath said. “Well, okay. There are times I wish I’d done the same. Give me the mask.”