“What do you think, Dog?”
Dog looked at me with those bloodshot eyes, a piece of pink tongue showing, reminding me how much he ate.
“It does pay well.”
He nodded. I still had my doubts. We went home and I boned up on Jenson Displacement. I started with my paper. It could have been written in Serbo-Croatian. Technical material slips fast. The mathematical explanation of the technical material slips faster. By Wednesday night, I felt as if I was just starting.
Thursday morning, Dolores straightened my cravat and brushed the hair out of my eyes. I stepped back from her, displaying myself.
“How do I look?”
“Too good. They may have secretaries there.”
“I’ll bring one home.”
“She can help me pack my bags. Nervous?”
“Not particularly.” I had decided the job was too much of a long-shot to worry about. Few companies hire twenty-eight-year-old project engineers, especially engineers with only two years of unrelated experience. “I don’t even know why I’m going to the interview.”
Dolores reminded me of the salary.
Bernie had set up the appointment for eleven o’clock. I took the South Coast Mono to Newport Beach. Seal, Sunset and Huntington Beaches slid past below me. I began thinking about the interview, daydreaming and staring out across the Pacific at Catalina Island. I had as much chance of getting the job as walking to Catalina. Bin what if they did offer it to me? The prospect intimidated me. I had never bossed any organization more complicated than a Boy Scout patrol. I tried to imagine myself as the square-jawed, firm-handed master of a space station. I noticed my reflection in the mono window and laughed aloud. First I would have to get a square jaw. A middle-aged woman across the aisle peered at me—the attractive but sadly demented young man, laughing at nothing—then returned to her magazine viewer.
I got off at the Newport Center, convinced even a square jaw would not prevent me from wasting my morning. I would meet a personnel director like the one at Spieler. He would read my resume, smile weakly and thank me for dropping by.
The Merryweather Building towered behind the low Civic Center. In spite of its height, the building reinforced the spacious effect the city planners wanted. Some sort of optical illusion with the side of the building made it seem part of the sky. It only looked imposing when you stood on the broad entrance steps, craning, your square jaw pointing up, examining it. I craned. It imposed. A small brass plaque next to the wide glass doors read “Merryweather” in delicate script. Otherwise, the building was anonymous.
In the lobby, a blond receptionist showing a distracting length of thigh inquired my business, staring priggishly at me over the top of a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. I never saw her look at anything through the spectacles. I suspect she wore contacts, adding the spectacles for effect. I told her my name and was about to state my business—her expression said, state your business or get out—when her eyebrows went up.
“The Mr. Collins?”
What was I supposed to say to that? My father and uncle are the only other Mr. Collinses I know
Neither of them was present. I grinned. “None other.”
“Mr. Merryweather will see you in ten minutes.”
“Merry—” Slowly, my grin began to feel artificially affixed to my face. It faded.
“You may wait,” she said, looking past me over her spectacles, “by the rubber plant.”
“By the rubber plant.”
“Yes.”
The rubber plant was easy to find. It was the only plant next to a couch. I retreated to it with as steady a step as I could muster. By the time I sat down, the blond was busy at the phone, intently relaying the fact of the Mr. Collins’ arrival to someone on the screen. Butterflies? Yes. Sweaty palms? Yes. Bernie, that master of understatement, had indeed paved the way.
II
“Mr. Collins?”
“Mr. Merryweather?”
“No, Mr. Duff.”
“Oh.”
The man’s forehead, scowling, dominated his face. I stood up and shook hands. Though he was short, his air of disapproval engulfed me. I wondered what I had done wrong. I had neither pinched the receptionist nor poisoned the rubber plant. I concluded Duff must be annoyed at something else. He led me toward the elevator, grumbling as though I were fully con versant with his problems and more than half responsible for them.
“I will tell you right now, Mr. Collins,” he said, letting me pass in front of him into the elevator, “I am dead set against continuing this folly. Norton is gone. Let it go with him.” He waved one hand at me as if to brush aside my protestations. “Oh, I know what Mr. Merryweather says. God, how I know! ‘An eye to the future is an eye to windward.’ Mr. Collins, I have both eyes”—he indicated them with two forked fingers—“on the present. The last quarterly report to the stockholders—thanks to Norton—looked as if they had ceased manufacturing black ink. It had more parentheses than Pan Am’s bankruptcy petition. Norton spent money like we were government-funded. I tell you, Mr. Collins, deficit spending is all right for a government—they have our pockets to dig deeper into—but it’s got a different name in private enterprise. A very ugly name.” He glared up at me, stabbing the button for the penthouse office. “Insolvency!”
I looked guilty. “Would a five help?”
He grunted. “Engineers. You people are all alike. Norton used to joke about money.” He began waving his hands, talking to the pushbuttons on the elevator panel. I suspected the joke had misfired. “Norton had no idea whatsoever about cost. Do you have any idea how much money Norton spent in a month?”
“No.”
“Neither did he, Mr. Collins. Neither did he. He threw more money down that orbiting rathole than”—he threw up his hands, unable to find the right analogy, then glared at me—“than you can imagine.” He returned to staring at the pushbuttons. My ears popped with the altitude.
“Norton had Mr. Merryweather’s ear,” said Duff, emphasizing the name to indicate that I would not only never get the ear, I would be lucky to get a lobe. “But Norton is gone now and if I have my way, Merryweather Enterprises will cut its losses—do you hear me?”
“Cut them.”
“We will look elsewhere for profit.”
The elevator slowed and stopped. The doors slid open, exposing a long, carpeted corridor. The object of Duff’s tirade, passionately felt as it was, eluded me. I still felt I should give some sort of intelligent response. Walking down the corridor next to him, noticing a series of abstracts on the wall—Picassos, Cavaliers—I gave what I thought passed for one.
“What would you suggest as an alternative?”
“A drone fleet, of course,” snapped Duff, implying by his tone of voice that my own sense of reality was as seriously in danger as the infamous Norton’s. Spieler Interstellar’s drone fleet had given its stock the most glamorous luster of the glamor stocks. Of course, a load of pig iron from across the stars, even if it cost a billion dollars to obtain, is still only pig iron. But one hundred thousand tons of high-grade niobium is worth the trip and then some. It has to be. Only one ship in five returns. Duff had a point. There was only one catch. If they eliminated the Merryweather Enterprize, they eliminated the job I wanted.
Duff led me down the corridor, past three secretaries—intent on their work—and into the office, a room only slightly larger than my living room and bedroom combined.
Mr. Merryweather stood at the glass wall, hands clasped behind his back. Surveying his empire? Perhaps, mentally. The closer we got to the office, the stupider I got. Once inside, I was close to a low-grade moron. My tongue felt like a whole plum in my mouth. Try talking with a plum in your mouth. Interviews seldom frighten me. I consider personnel directors as dwarf peers, stunted personalities but with enough power to make them equals. Mr. Merryweather, neither stunted nor equal, awed me.
Duff cleared his throat. “Mr. Merryweather.”
Mr. Merryweather answered without lo
oking around. “What is it, Phillip?”
“Mr. Collins is here.”
Mr. Merryweather turned from the window and brightened. “Mr. Collins.” He glanced at Duff. “Why didn’t you say so, Phillip?”
Before Duff could answer, Mr. Merryweather dropped down the two steps to the sunken well of the office floor with unexpected agility. A large-framed athletic man, he looked younger than sixty. He pumped my hand and guided me to a low black couch. It sighed under my weight, exuding the smell of leather. He plucked a single sheet of paper from his desktop and sat opposite me in an easy-chair. I sat, watching him, numb.
“Mr. Mitchel,” he said, perusing the sheet, “has said good things about you.”
Mr. Mitchel? Slowly, I remembered Bernie. I nodded.
Mr. Merryweather looked at me. “Carrot juice?”
“Pardon me?”
“Carrot juice? Pineapple?”
“Plu—I mean pineapple,” I stammered, annoyed with myself for being intimidated. Merryweather was only human. A few billion dollars do nothing to change that.
“Relax, Mr. Collins.”
I tried. The body remained tense, the brain frozen. Somewhere inside me, my winning personality hid in fright.
Duff left to get the juice. Mr. Merryweather glanced over the sheet of paper, a copy of my resume. Bernie had thought of everything.
“Was your PhD dissertation published, Mr. Collins?”
Published? PhD? I cleared my throat, forming my answer carefully. My brain began to thaw. Thawing, it emitted steam, a persistent fog out of which I had to pull the relevant data and assemble as complete an answer as possible. I assembled the answer. I uttered it.
“No.”
“Too bad. We could use a copy. Could you get us one?”
One what? I had forgotten the title. I could look it up. Yes, that was possible. But the author—who remembers authors?
“Yes.”
“Practical Engineering Aspects of Controlled-Laser Fusion Reactors.”
Yes. That was it. Now I remembered.
“You spent time at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory?”
Livermore? “Yes.”
Duff returned with the pineapple juice. I took mine, thanked him and downed half of it. My head started to clear. Mr. Merryweather pointed to the resume, showing it to Duff. “Impressive.”
Duff scowled. I cringed. I wanted to explain. I only put the Alameda County Ping-Pong Championship in as a joke. I was angry, angry at Standard for forcing me to have a resume at all, angry, at all the personnel directors who wanted my life spread out neatly on a sheet of paper, angry at myself for submitting to them. I started to explain. Mr. Merryweather cut me off, reading.
“Practical Aspects of—” He glanced up and smiled. “You certainly like Practical Aspects in your titles.”
“It’s an escape if I miss something. Aspects aren’t the whole thing.”
He laughed. My voice cracked halfway through the sentence, but I got it out intact. A start. I felt better.
“Practical Aspects of Engineering Jenson Displacement Gates.” He lowered the resume.
“It was just a course paper,” I said, self-conscious, “that got published.”
“But it did get published. Frankly, Mr. Collins, you’re the first engineer I’ve talked to who even knows what a Controlled-Laser Reaction is, much less basic Gate principles. Did you see my model over there?” He nodded toward a waist-high mahogany cabinet against the wall. On it, a foot-diameter concrete doughnut rested on its edge next to an old analog minicomputer, its six-inch display panel dead. I shook my head no.
“Examine it.”
I got up and walked to the model. Moving calmed me. The concrete doughnut was connected to the computer by an inch-thick cable. Mr. Merryweather hoisted himself from his chair and joined me.
“Recognize it?”
“No.”
“It’s the original Jenson Gate model. One of our affiliates recovered it in Mexico.”
He touched the computer panel. It lit, feeding out data in each square of the display. A one-inch circle shimmered in the air at the center of the doughnut.
“Try it. It still works.” He handed me my resume. I rolled it into a half-inch tube and passed it through the shimmering air at the center of the doughnut. Jenson Gate parameters are a function of their size and power. This one had a range of two feet. Half my resume was in my hand and half floated two feet from the projection surface. I pushed the resume through. It fell on the cabinet and uncurled. Mr. Merryweather smiled.
“There’s beauty in it, Mr. Collins.”
I agreed. Even taking a commercial Gate to San Francisco, I am struck with its beauty. Walking to the portal, waiting for the girl to nod, stepping through. No sensation, just one step, a subnuclear dematerialization and reassembly, you’re in San Francisco. Simple.
We discussed Jenson Displacement. I tried not to sound like the texts I had just reviewed. By one o’clock, we were into the range limitation problems. My brain, long since defrosted, felt overheated. He glanced at his watch.
“That late. I’m afraid we’ll have to postpone the rest of this discussion, Mr. Collins. Would tomorrow morning interfere with your schedule?”
“Schedule? No, not at all.”
“Do you have any questions?”
“Just one.”
“What’s that?”
“What’s the job?”
He smiled. “I thought Mr. Mitchel explained that to you.”
“He just gave me your job sheet.”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow. In the meantime, Phillip will give you transcripts of Norton’s progress reports. They should explain most of it. They are accurate up to two weeks ago, just before poor Norton passed away.”
“Dead?”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“I was under the impression—” paused, unsure whether to raise the subject.
“You were under what impression?”
“I thought you had, ah, terminated him for spending too much.” Mr. Merryweather laughed. “You’ve been talking to Phillip, I see. No, Mr. Collins, development is expensive, but I am in business. The essence of business is risk. I take risks with capital. I take risks on people. In both situations, it is expensive. Sometimes I win, sometimes not. But once committed, I remain committed. I trust my judgment. I enjoy finding new fish in deep water, Mr. Collins. That the fish are sometimes rare and valuable lets me continue the search. To put the matter into a more conventional platitude, you must spend money to get money. The idea frightens Phillip.”
“Mr. Merryweather—” protested Duff.
Mr. Merryweather waved him aside, standing and shaking my hand. “Make sure Mr. Collins gets Norton’s reports, Phillip.”
Outside the office, Duff loaded me up with Norton’s reports, a three-inch stack of thin paper. He accompanied me down the elevator, silent, disapproving. Listening to the interview, Duff had evidently become convinced the project would continue. No drone fleet. No profits. I noticed the bags under his eyes. Duff probably slept poorly.
In the lobby, I asked him what happened to Norton.
“He died.”
“So I gathered. What of?”
“Egomania, probably.”
The look he gave me indicated my own ego was being scrutinized. I held up my thumb and forefinger, spacing them a half-inch apart
“My ego’s minuscule.”
“I certainly hope so.”
He left me. Had I made an enemy?
The receptionist beamed at me on the way out.
“Ciao; Mr. Collins.”
And a friend?
Dolores found me in her closet when she got home.
“How’d it go?”
I looked up from one of Norton’s progress reports and rubbed my eyes. The more I read, the more convinced I became of Norton’s right to egomania. The man was brilliant. He knew more about Jenson Displacement than Jenson. In fourteen months on the Merryweather Enterprize, orbit
ing the Sun in the asteroid belt, Norton had solved problems I only dimly knew existed. The texts I read had never heard of them. Phase shift at the interface, for one. I looked at Dolores, groggy from thought.
“Pardon me?”
“How’d it go?”
“What?”
“Your interview, silly.”
“Oh, that”
I told her. She listened, intent, puckering.
“It sounds like Merryweather Enterprises has a new project engineer. What’s all that junk on my desk?”
“What?”
“That stuff on my desk, what is it?”
“No. I meant what was that about project engineer?”
“You, of course.”
“Me?” Until that moment, the possibility of actually getting the job had never seemed real. Somehow, hearing it from Dolores embodied it.
“I—”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I—”
“Bobby?”
“I—”
“Do you want some water or something? You look absolutely white.”
“Ah—”
“Just a minute.”
She went out and returned with a glass of water. I drank some.
“Now, what’s the problem?” she asked.
“Me.”
“I agree. You’re a problem.”
“It could be me.”
Fortunately, Bernie called at that moment. Otherwise, I might have hurt myself with the water glass. I went into the living room to take the call.
He grinned out of the screen at me. “Hi, boss.”
I must have looked blank.
“You do realize you’re going to be my boss.”
First Dolores. Now Bernie. I appreciate the confidence people have in me. I just find it misplaced.
“You’re a little premature.”
“What happened?”
I told him. He nodded, listening.
“That squares with the grapevine, except they got your age wrong. They said you were middle-aged.” He grinned again, enjoying it.
“I feel middle-aged. I’ve been reading Norton’s progress reports. If they’re ticketing me for that genius’ job, they’ve got the wrong train on the wrong track. That guy makes Leonardo da Vinci look like a draftsman.”
Stargate Page 2
