The Forever War (The Forever War, #1) - Joe Haldeman Page 0,48

the unit for measuring the energy equivalent of food. But a person who eats 2,000 kilocalories of steak a day obviously has to pay more than a person eating the same amount of bread. So they instituted a sliding “ration factor,” so complicated that nobody could understand it. After a few weeks they were using the books again, but calling food kilocalories “calories” in an attempt to make things less confusing. Seemed to me they’d save a lot of trouble all around if they’d just call money dollars again, or rubles or sisterces or whatever…anything but kilocalories.

Food prices were astonishing, except for grains and legumes. I insisted on splurging on some good red meat: 1500 calories worth of ground beef, costing 1730k. The same amount of fakesteak, made from soy beans, would have cost 80k.

I also got a head of lettuce for 140k and a little bottle of olive oil for 175k. Mother said she had some vinegar. Started to buy some mushrooms but she said she had a neighbor who grew them and could trade something from her balcony garden.

At her apartment on the ninety-second floor, she apologized for the smallness of the place. It didn’t seem so little to me, but then she’d never lived on a spaceship.

Even this high up, there were bars on the windows. The door had four separate locks, one of which didn’t work because somebody had used a crowbar on it.

Mother went off to turn the ground beef into a meatloaf and I settled down with the evening ’fax. She pulled some carrots from her little garden and called the mushroom lady, whose son came over to make the trade. He had a riot gun slung under his arm.

“Mother, where’s the rest of the Star?” I called into the kitchen.

“As far as I know, it’s all there. What were you looking for?”

“Well…I found the classified section, but no ‘Help Wanted.’”

She laughed. “Son, there hasn’t been a ‘Help Wanted’ ad in ten years. The government takes care of jobs…well, most of them.”

“Everybody works for the government?”

“No, that’s not it.” She came in, wiping her hands on a frayed towel. “The government, they tell us, handles the distribution of all natural resources. And there aren’t many resources more valuable than empty jobs.”

“Well, I’ll go talk to them tomorrow.”

“Don’t bother, son. How much retirement pay you say you’re getting from the Force?”

“Twenty thousand k a month. Doesn’t look like it’ll go far.”

“No, it won’t. But your father’s pension gave me less than half that, and they wouldn’t give me a job. Jobs are assigned on a basis of need. And you’ve got to be living on rice and water before the Employment Board considers you needy.”

“Well, hell, it’s a bureaucracy—there must be somebody I can pay off, slip me into a good—”

“No. Sorry, that’s one part of the UN that’s absolutely incorruptible. The whole shebang is cybernetic, untouched by human souls. You can’t—”

“But you said you had a job!”

“I was getting to that. If you want a job badly enough, you can go to a dealer and sometimes get a hand-me-down.”

“Hand-me-down? Dealer?”

“Take my job as an example, son. A woman named Hailey Williams has a job in a hospital, running a machine that analyzes blood, a chromatography machine. She works six nights a week, for 12,000k a week. She gets tired of working, so she contacts a dealer and lets him know that her job is available.

“Some time before this, I’d given the dealer his initial fee of 50,000k to get on his list. He comes by and describes the job to me and I say fine, I’ll take it. He knew I would and already has fake identification and a uniform. He distributes small bribes to the various supervisors who might know Miss Williams by sight.

“Miss Williams shows me how to run the machine and quits. She still gets the weekly 12,000k credited to her account, but she pays me half. I pay the dealer ten percent and wind up with 5400k per week. This, added to the nine grand I get monthly from your father’s pension, makes me quite comfortable.

“Then it gets complicated. Finding myself with plenty of money and too little time, I contact the dealer again, offering to sublet half my job. The next day a girl shows up who also has ‘Hailey Williams’ identification. I show her how to run the machine, and she takes over Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Half of my real salary is 2700k, so she gets half that, 1350k, and