Concessions had to be made; minor variations in opinion had to be permitted. Minor deviations from the party line had to be ignored if not actually winked at. These things were bad enough.
But what was worse was that propaganda, even internal propaganda, was impossible. Facts and figures, in speeches or in print, had to be honest. The Martians loved it when they found even the slightest misstatement or exaggeration, and told everybody.
How could you run a government that way?
6.
But the Capitalist warmongers were having their troubles too. Who wasn’t?
Take Ralph Blaise Wendell. Born at the turn of the century and now sixty-four years old. Tall but becoming a little stooped; slender, with thinning gray hair and tired gray eyes. Although it had not seemed a misfortune at the time, he had had the misfortune to have been elected President of the United States in 1960.
Now and until the November elections brought surcease he was president of a country that contained a hundred and eighty million people—and about sixty million Martians.
Now—now being an evening in early May, six weeks after the Coming—he sat alone in his big office, brooding. Completely alone; there wasn’t even a Martian present.
Such solitude was not unusual. Alone, or with only his secretary present, he had as good a chance as anyone else of not being bothered. The Martians haunted presidents and dictators no more than they haunted file clerks and baby sitters. They were no respecters of persons; they were no respecters of anything at all.
And now, at least for the moment, he was alone. The day’s work finished, but loath to move. Or too tired to move. Tired with the special weariness that comes from the combination of great responsibility and a feeling of utter inadequacy. Tired with defeat.
He thought back bitterly over the past six weeks and of the mess things had become. A depression that made the so-called Great Depression of the thirties look like prosperity beyond the dreams of avarice.
A depression that had started—not with a stock market crash, although that had followed quickly enough—with the sudden loss of employment of millions of people all at once. Almost everyone connected with entertainment; not only the entertainers but stagehands, ticket takers, scrubwomen. Everyone connected in any capacity with professional sports. Everyone connected with the movie industry in any capacity whatsoever. Everyone connected with radio and television except a few technicians to keep transmitters running and to handle the already filmed or already-taped replays. And a few, a very few, announcers and commentators.
Every orchestra and dance band musician. Shades of Petrillo!
Nobody had guessed how many millions of people had made their living in one way or another, directly or indirectly, from sports and entertainment. Not until they all lost their jobs at once.
And the fall to almost zero of entertainment stocks had set off the stock market crash.
And the depression had pyramided, and was still pyramiding. Automobile production down 87 per cent over the same month a year ago. People, even those who still had jobs and money, weren’t buying new cars. People were staying at home. Where was there to go? Sure, some of them had to drive to work and back but for that purpose the old car was plenty good. Who would be silly enough to buy a new one in a depression like this and especially with the used car market glutted with almost-new cars people had been forced to sell? The wonder was not that automobile production was down 87 per cent but that any new cars were being made at all.
And with cars being driven only when necessary—pleasure driving being no longer a pleasure—the oil fields and the refineries were hard hit too. More than half of the filling stations had closed.
Steel and rubber were hit. More unemployment.
Less construction because people had less money and they weren’t building. More unemployment.
And the jails! Jammed to overflowing, despite the almost complete disappearance of organized crime. But they’d become jammed before criminals had discovered that their trade was no longer practical. And what to do now with the thousands of people being arrested daily for crimes of violence or desperation?
What to do with the armed forces, with war no longer a possibility—disband them? And increase unemployment by several more million? Just that afternoon he had signed an order that would grant immediate release to any soldier or sailor who could prove that he had either a job waiting for him or sufficient capital to guarantee his not becoming a public charge. But a pitifully small percentage would be able to qualify.
The national debt—the budget—the make-work programs—the army—the budget—the national debt—
President Wendell dropped his head in his hands on the desk in front of him and groaned, feeling very old and very futile.
From a corner of the room came an echoing groan, a mocking one. “Hi, Mack,” said a voice. “Working overtime again? Want help?”
And a laugh. A nasty laugh.
7.
Not all business was bad.
Take the psychiatrists. Going crazy trying to keep other people from going crazy.
Take the morticians. With the death rate, due to the increase in deaths from suicide, violence and apoplexy, still several times normal, there was no depression among the coffin stuffers. They were doing big business, despite the increasing trend toward simple burial or cremation without anything that could really be called a funeral. (It was all too easy for Martians to make a farce out of a funeral, and they especially loved to kibitz a minister’s eulogy whenever it strayed from strict fact about the virtues of the deceased or glossed over any of his vices.
Whether from previous observation, from eavesdropping or from having read hidden letters or records, the Martians who attended funerals were always able to pounce gleefully on any deviation from the truth in a funeral oration. It wasn’t always safe even when the loved one was thought to have led a truly blameless life; all too often the mourners learned things about him that shocked them silly.)
Drugstores did a land-office business in the sale of aspirin tablets, sedatives and ear stopples.
But the biggest boom of all was in the industry in which you’d expect the biggest boom to be, the liquor industry.
Since time immemorial alcohol has been man’s favorite gateway of escape from the routine vicissitudes of everyday life. Now man’s everyday life had little green vicissitudes a thousand times worse than the routine ones had been. Now he really had something to escape from. Most drinking, of course, was done in homes.
But taverns were still open, and they were crowded in the afternoon and jammed in the evening. In most of them the backbar mirrors were broken as a result of people throwing glasses, bottles, ashtrays or what have you at Martians, and the mirrors weren’t replaced because if they were they’d be broken again the same way.
But the taverns still operated and people thronged to them. Sure, Martians thronged to them too, even though Martians didn’t drink. The owners and frequenters of taverns had found a partial answer—noise level. Jukeboxes were kept going at top volume and most taverns had at least two of them. Radios helped add to the din. People who talked had to yell in their neighbors’ ears.
Martians could only add to the volume of sound and the volume was already such that addition was practically superfluous.