The Merchant's War Read Online Free PDF

That was no big treat. Veenies are almost all grossly tall—even taller than Mitzi, usually—and they seem to take pride in their fishbelly-white skins. Of course, they never get any sun. But they could use UV lamps like we do—all of us —even Mitzi, who doesn’t need tanning to have that nice velvet-brass skin.
    “Watch your mouth,” Mitzi whispered nervously. The Veenie family just in front of us— Daddy, Mommy and four (yes, I said four!) kids—were half-turning their heads to get a look at us, and their expressions weren’t friendly. Veenies don’t like us much. They think we’re city slickers trying to gobble them up. That’s a laugh, because what have they got worth gobbling? And if we’re taking an interest in their affairs, obviously it’s for their own good—they’re just not intelligent enough to realize it.
    Fortunately we had entered the tunnel that goes through the ring of peaks around Russian Hills. Everybody began getting ready to get out. As I started to rise, Mitzi nudged me, and I saw a grossly tall he-Veenie, green eyes and red hair with that ugly dead-white skin, giving me a bad look. I took Mitzi’s hint. I gave the Veenie my sweetest forgive-me-for-my-blunders smile and slipped past him out the door. While I stopped to buy a souvenir booklet, Mitzi was standing behind me, gazing after the man with the traffic-light head. “Look at this,” I said, opening the guide book, but Mitzi wasn’t listening.
    “Do you know,” she said, “I think I’ve seen him before. Day before yesterday. When they were demonstrating.”
    “Come on, Mitz! There were five hundred Veenies out there!” And so there had been— maybe more—at the time, I could have sworn half of Venus was silently parading around our Embassy with their stupid signs—“No Advertising!” and “Take Your Filth Back Where It Belongs!” I didn’t mind the picketing so much—but, oh, the pathetic amateurishness of their slogan writers! “They’re crazy,” I said —a complicated shorthand that didn’t mean “crazy” for thinking we would use advertising techniques on them, but “crazy” because they were getting upset about it—as though there were any possibility that, given a chance, we wouldn’t.
    I also meant crazy in the specific context of incompetent copysmithing, and that was what I wanted to show Mitzi. I glanced around the noisy car barn—another was just rattling up toward the switching point for the return trip to Port Kathy. No Veenies were within earshot. “Look here,” I said, opening to the page marked Facilities—Food and Drink. It said:
    If for any reason you do not want to bring your own refreshments while visiting Russian Hills, some items like hamburgers, hot dogs and soy sandwiches are available in the Venera Lounge. They’re inspected by the Planetary Health Service, but the quality is mediocre. Beer and other drinks can also be purchased, at about twice the cost of the same things in town.
    “Pathetic?” I groaned.
    She said absently, “Well, they’re honest.”
    I raised my eyebrows. What did honesty have to do with moving product? And this place was a copysmith’s dream! They had a captive clientèle, one. They had a theme to hang the copy on, two. And they had customers who were in a holiday mood, ready to buy anything that was for sale, three, and most important of all! All they had to do was call their hot dogs “Genuine Odessa Wurst” and the hamburgers “Komsomol Burgers” to give the consumers an excuse to buy—but instead they talked them right out of it! Consumers didn’t expect to get what advertising promised. They just wanted that one tiny moment of hope before the “Sleep-Tite Super-Soft” mattress stuck a spring into their bottoms and the “Nature-Fresh Golden-Tropical-Fruit Elixir” turned out to taste of tar. “Well,” I said, “we’ve come this far. Let’s go look at their damn space probe.”
    Venus was a garbage planet to start out. The air was