“We’re a good team, Bill. I’m a chemist, but I don’t know a thing about people. You’re a psychologist. A real one; not one of these night-school boys. A juvenile psychologist, too. And what age-group spends the most money in this country for soft-drinks?”
Knowing the names of the syrup’s ingredients, and what their molecular structure was like, was only the beginning. Gallon after gallon of the School Board’s chemicals went down the laboratory sink; Fred Benson and Bill Myers almost lived in the fourth floor lab. Once or twice there were head-shaking warnings from the principal about the dangers of overwork. The watchmen, at all hours, would hear the occasional twanging of Benson’s guitar in the laboratory, and know that he had come to a dead end on something and was trying to think. Football season came and went; basketball season; the inevitable riot between McKinley and Eisenhower rooters; the Spring concerts. The term-end exams were only a month away when Benson and Myers finally did it, and stood solemnly, each with a beaker in either hand and took alternate sips of the original and the drink mixed from the syrup they had made.
“Not a bit of difference, Fred,” Myers said. “We have it!”
Benson picked up the guitar and began plunking on it.
“Hey!” Myers exclaimed. “Have you been finding time to take lessons on that thing? I never heard you play as well as that!”
They decided to go into business in St. Louis. It was centrally located, and, being behind more concentric circles of radar and counter-rocket defenses, it was in better shape than any other city in the country and most likely to stay that way. Getting started wasn’t hard; the first banker who tasted the new drink-named Evri-Flave, at Myers’ suggestion—couldn’t dig up the necessary money fast enough. Evri-Flave hit the market with a bang and became an instant success; soon the rainbow-tinted vending machines were everywhere, dispensing the slender, slightly flattened bottles and devouring quarters voraciously. In spite of high taxes and the difficulties of doing business in a consumers’ economy upon which a wartime economy had been superimposed, both Myers and Benson were rapidly becoming wealthy. The gregarious Myers installed himself in a luxurious apartment in the city; Benson bought a large tract of land down the river toward Carondelet and started building a home and landscaping the grounds.
The dreams began bothering him again, now that the urgency of getting Evri-Flave, Inc., started had eased. They were not dreams of the men he had killed in battle, or, except for one about a huge, hot-smelling tank with a red star on the turret, about the war. Generally, they were about a strange, beautiful, office-room, in which a young man in uniform killed an older man in a plum-brown coat and a vivid blue neck-scarf. Sometimes Benson identified himself with the killer; sometimes with the old man who was killed.
He talked to Myers about these dreams, but beyond generalities about delayed effects of combat fatigue and vague advice to relax, the psychologist, now head of Sales & Promotion of Evri-Flave, Inc., could give him no help.
The war ended three years after the new company was launched. There was a momentary faltering of the economy, and then the work of reconstruction was crying hungrily for all the labor and capital that had been idled by the end of destruction, and more. There was a new flood-tide of prosperity, and Evri-Flave rode the crest. The estate at Carondelet was finished—a beautiful place, surrounded with gardens, fragrant with flowers, full of the songs of birds and soft music from concealed record-players. It made him forget the ugliness of the war, and kept the dreams from returning so frequently. All the world ought to be like that, he thought; beautiful and quiet and peaceful. People surrounded with such beauty couldn’t think about war.
All the world could be like that, if only. …
The U.N. chose St. Louis for its new headquarters—many of its offices had been moved there after the second and most destructive bombing of New York—and when the city by the Mississippi began growing into a real World Capital, the flow of money into it almost squared overnight. Benson began to take an active part in politics in the new World Sovereignty party. He did not, however, allow his political activities to distract him from the work of expanding the company to which he owed his wealth and position. There were always things to worry about.
“I don’t know,” Myers said to him, one evening, as they sat over a bottle of rye in the psychologist’s apartment. “I could make almost as much money practicing as a psychiatrist, these days. The whole world seems to be going pure, unadulterated nuts! That affair in Munich, for instance.”
“Yes.” Benson grimaced as he thought of the affair in Munich—a Wagnerian concert which had terminated in an insane orgy of mass suicide. “Just a week after we started our free-sample campaign in South Germany, too. …”
He stopped short, downing his drink and coughing over it.
“Bill! You remember those sheets of onionskin in that envelope?”
“The foundation of our fortunes; I wonder where you really did get that. … Fred!” His eyes widened in horror. “That caution about ‘heightened psycho-physiological effects,’ that we were never able to understand!”
Benson nodded grimly. “And think of all the crazy cases of mass-hysteria—that baseball-game riot in Baltimore; the time everybody started tearing off each others’ clothes in Milwaukee; the sex-orgy in New Orleans. And the sharp uptrend in individual psychoneurotic and psychotic behavior. All in connection with music, too, and all after Evri-Flave got on the market.”
“We’ll have to stop it; pull Evri-Flave off the market,” Myers said. “We can’t be responsible for letting this go on.”
“We can’t stop, either. There’s at least a two months’ supply out in the hands of jobbers and distributors over whom we have no control. And we have all these contractual obligations, to buy the entire output of the companies that make
