The item that appeared on the screen was a complete costume in black pliovel, from turkey-feathered hat to buckled sandals—gala clothing, designed to be worn once, on an important occasion, and to fall apart after. The price was Cr. 190.50.
Someone shouted, “Good for old Leggett!” A whisper of laughter swelled to a roar.
Only Leggett did not smile. He stared down with the faintest expression of boredom and disdain as the fat man, legs planted, bracing himself against the laughter that swept round his ears, raised his fists to the level of his scarlet jowls and then dashed them down again.
His expression did not change until the fat man, two tears of rage squeezed out of his eyes by the swelling of his cheeks, opened a shapeless mouth and bellowed : “Die of a disease, y’ rotted vice-eaten mud-lick’n dogson!”
The crowd’s voice died as if cold water had been flung in its collective face. With no more sound than the scrape of one shoe, it moved back radially in every direction.
Into the silence that followed Leggett’s voice dropped and burst
“A demon!”
Next instant, Leggett’s hand slapped the panel in front of him, and a fiendish clangor burst out to drown the crowd’s noises as it surged away in panic. Bass saw clumps of people go down at either end of the hall as force-screens sealed the doorways. He saw the fat man; fists still clenched at’ his sides, crouching a little, face all awry and as pale as a flour-sack. He saw the moon-faced boy, mouth open to howl.
Then came a crackle aft flash at the nearer doorway; and the crowd split; turning away in redoubled terror, as three horrid black-masked men came bounding across, truncheons in their fists, lightnings at their heels.
Bass turned his head aside automatically, as from a blow: The last thing he saw was a glimpse of the fat man between two uniformed backs, pale face upturned in a desperate question; before they bore him away.
IN A few moments came the rustle of turning bodies and the gathering murmur that meant the Guardsmen and their prisoners were gone. Bass turned to face the room again, and saw that the pulpit above him was vacant. Leggett had retired to make his report to the Guard.
The customers were clotting at four or five points where, apparently, people had fainted or been injured by the closing of the force-screens. A white-robed medic came in, made a circuit of the room and left. A few minutes later he was back with two assistants and an emergency cart, around which the crowd eddied briefly until the bodies were loaded aboard and carried out. The murmur of talk had increased to a loud, steady drone.
Someone at the back of the room began to sing a hymn. Others took it up, and it contended for a while with the crowd-noise but finally sank, defeated: More people were entering constantly from both doorways. The sluggish flow past the platform gradually stopped; there was no longer any room to move.
Bass felt a trifle sick. He had heard tales of demonic possession ever since he could remember; cases were reported almost daily on the news channels; but that was not the same thing as witnessing one.
Hearing that man curse a Salesman—and knowing that if his guardian angel had not been driven out, he could no more have uttered a word of that anathema than he could have committed murder—was like seeing an ordinary door suddenly flung open to show a coal-black fiend grinning and posturing inside..
What had gone wrong? Every Child, when he was four and again at ten, was taken to the Confirmation Chambers in the Store, where an angel entered his soul through the sacred machines; and from then on, whenever he stretched out his hand to do a wrong thing, the angel appeared to him; so that no man could sin. But sometimes the angels were driven out, and demons took their places.
Why? How did it begin?
And how did he feel—the man himself, not his possessing demon—knowing that he was cut off from all human joy, here and hereafter; an object of loathing and fear in this world, a sentient cinder in the next?
Bass shuddered.
The door behind the pulpit opened and Leggett stepped through. Bass stiffened his already rigid spine.
SILENCE rippled back from the platform to the farthest corners of the room. Here, Bass knew, was a ready-made opportunity for an impromptu sermon, one that nine out of ten Salesmen would have seized. He felt a flush of reluctant admiration, then, as Leggett simply stared down at the front row of the crowd and said dryly, “Next!”
It was more effective than an hour’s oratory. The incident had told its own story, pointed its own moral; there was nothing more to be said.
And every customer in the room, unwilling to admit that he had waited not to buy but to hear a lurid tale of hellfire, stood submissively till his turn came, then took without argument whatever Leggett chose to give him.
The code numbers Bass punched were all in the first-quality group now; not a garment among them that would not disintegrate after the fifth wearing. Again and again, he had to announce that a bemused customer’s credit card was sub-zeroed. By midafternoon he realized that Leggett was piling up a sales total unprecedented in the history of the clothing department.
At three o’clock, the hall still more than three-quarters filled, Leggett stopped in the middle of a sale and said crisply, “Bass.”
“Yes, Salesman Leggett.”
To Bass’s astonishment, Leggett turned his back, opened the door behind the pulpit and stepped through. Bass followed.
Leggett was waiting in the corridor a pace beyond the doorway. Bass shut the door behind him.
“Bass,” said the Salesman coldly, “you are ordered to report to the chambers of Personnel Manager Wooten, in Block Eighteen, Level Thirty-five, at exactly three-twenty. It is now three o’clock. Before you go, since I probably shall not have a further opportunity, I wish to inform you that your demeanor and deportment today have been unspeakable. Five times, in the past hour alone, I have had to wait for you to punch a code number. You have slumped. You have shuffled your feet. You have scratched yourself when you supposed that I could not see you.”
Stunned, Bass opened his mouth.
“I do not wish to hear your excuses, Bass,” said Leggett. “Attend me. If you still retain any ambition to become a Salesman—an office for which you are grossly unfitted—let me advise you to remember this: a Salesman is the direct representative of his Store’s President, who in turn represents his District Executive, and so by an unbroken chain of authority to the Chairman himself, who is the direct representative of the Infinite on this Earth. A Salesman is and must be the living symbol of rectitude, an example for others to follow to the measure of their abilities. Not a callow, fidgeting jackanapes.” He turned abruptly. “Onward, Bass.”
“Onward,” croaked Bass automatically. He choked, and found his voice. “Salesman Leggett—”
Leggett stopped at the door. ‘Well? Be quick.”
“They’re going to send someone to fill in for me, aren’t they? I mean, Salesman, if they don’t, you’ll lose your record.”
“That,” said Leggett acidly, “is no concern of yours,” and he showed Bass a rapidly diminishing strip of his back through the closing door.
After a dazed moment Bass walked slowly down the corridor to the robing room. It was empty, the long ranks of open closets dismally gaping. Unwillingly, Bass removed his stole and cap, folded them carefully and put them away. With equal deliberation he put on his surcoat, hat, pouch, wrist-bangles and rings. Then he walked forlornly out of the room and down the long echoing corridor to the stair.
Two levels below, he crossed a ramp into the Block Nine concourse and boarded the northbound slideway. It was not crowded; few people came to Store at this hour, for fear of using up their time before they ever got to a Salesman. And then there was Sunday dinner to be gotten over with in time to come back for evening services… . Bass caught himself. Already, he thought with a pang of bitterness, he was thinking like a Consumer again. He might as well begin unlearning his painfully-acquired Mercantile diction, too; it would not be appreciated in a factory, or on a farm …