The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Is it?” said Brightly. “Are you sure it’s Tazz we’re after? Tazz seems a politician to me. A rabble-rouser, albeit a secretive one. There may be other, nastier men who do his ugly thinking for him. Tazz, after all, probably has to stay clean.”

  “I can ferret them out, regardless of who they are,” said Hayes. “I just need…”

  “Need what?”

  “Need more rope,” said Hayes. “And I need to be on my own.”

  “On your own?” said Brightly merrily. “You mean without Miss Fairbanks?”

  “Yes. She’s not bad, but she’s… She’s slowing me down.”

  “Is she? From my perspective you’re doing better than you’ve ever done before. Rather than your usual erratic bursts of product, Hayes, you’re delivering small payloads of gold every day. Do you know that? Have you even been paying attention to what’s going on?”

  “Yes, I have. We’ve turned Securities into a sausage factory. We’re too timid.”

  “You mistake sloppiness for action,” said Brightly. “Miss Fairbanks, while lacking your formidable talents, is an invaluable compass for your investigation. And the little woman’s no fool herself, you know that. Do you know we’ve been allowing her to select your interview subjects for you for the past week? And you’ve been bringing home kills, each time. You’ve seen that, haven’t you?”

  “I haven’t,” said Hayes stubbornly. “I don’t know what happens when I report something. No one tells me anything anymore. And no one tells her, either. No one even told her what I could do.”

  “Time,” said Brightly, looking at his watch. He did another about-face and walked down the steps and up to the edge of the auditorium. Hayes watched him go, frowning, and began counting seconds for the third time.

  Whenever he spoke to Brightly, which was very rarely, the conversation was always conducted this way. That, or it was extremely short. Brightly was well aware of the limits of Hayes’s abilities, and he’d always been very careful to prevent Hayes from overhearing anything he shouldn’t. So every four minutes Brightly would interrupt their discussions to move outside Hayes’s vaguely defined range, and then wait a full minute to continue the conversation again. Yet for some reason Brightly never felt comfortable shouting across a large room. He felt it was improper, and refused to consider it. And so rather than their continuing the conversation as they marched across the large auditorium, Brightly would turn his back and pretend Hayes wasn’t there at all, and they’d both stand in silence while Hayes’s slippery grasp on his errant thoughts faded.

  Hayes didn’t like it, but he’d grown used to it. At least Brightly was kind enough to move himself, rather than making Hayes walk away. But still each time he met with Brightly he felt powerfully small, as though he were no more than a supplicating little creature forever trapped in Brightly’s shadow, and scrambling to keep up with the man’s heels as he steadily moved away.

  As Hayes counted he looked to his right at the large iron lamp on the pedestal. It must have been the subject of whatever summit Brightly had held there. Unlike that of other lamps, its glass chimney was extremely small, no more than three inches tall, and it was nestled within columns of complicated-looking wires and plumbing. Strangely enough, the little chimney seemed to be holding some sort of clear fluid.

  Hayes turned away from it as the minute ran out. He walked up to Brightly and saw that at the back of the auditorium where he stood there was another lantern on a pedestal, only this lantern was much smaller.

  Hayes ignored it. “So what am I supposed to do?” he asked.

  “Keep on doing what you’re doing,” said Brightly. “We’ll have everything planned out for you.”

  “And Sam?”

  “She’ll do what we plan for her as well. I don’t understand why there’s friction between you two, I understand she’s a lovely girl.”

  Hayes paused. “She doesn’t know about me. And no one plans to tell her.”

  Brightly shook his head. “She doesn’t need to know. It’d only trouble her. And besides, you’ve already turned her inside out, haven’t you? Read all the words written on the inside of her skull? What more could there be to protect?”

  Hayes did not answer. Brightly turned to look at the little iron lamp on the pedestal and cocked an eyebrow, thinking. “Here,” he said. “Here, Hayes. Do you want to know why we’re having you do this? Why we’re stressing security as much as we are, and making you do all these tasks?”

  “Because they’re sabotaging our factories, of course.”

  “Yes, yes, but there’s more than that.”

  Hayes just shrugged. “I just assumed it was for profit.”

  “Well, yes,” said Brightly, eyes glittering. “I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t. But there’s more. Much more. Here. I’ll show you.” He leaned over and hit a switch on the smaller lamp. It began humming very, very softly, a low hum that seemed to build but never grew truly loud. Once it was on he walked down to the stage, leaving Hayes behind once more.

  “Is this part of your minutes of silence?” Hayes called to him, but Brightly did not answer. Instead he switched on the larger lamp and stood back.

  “This may take a bit to warm up,” he called up from the stage. “They need time to recognize one another.”

  “Who?” said Hayes, but again Brightly said nothing.

  Eventually the lamp on the stage seemed to hit some threshold. Brightly smiled, walked to it, and called, “All right, now-watch.”

  “I’m watching,” said Hayes.

  “Are you watching closely, though?”

  “Damn it, yes.”

  Brightly adjusted some dials on its side. Then, glancing up at Hayes, he held one hand over the top of the lantern and pushed a button. Immediately the little glass chimney lit up, glowing with a soft blue light. At first Hayes was unimpressed, and he opened his mouth for a smart remark, but then he noticed the chimney in the lamp beside him had lit up as well. Brightly released whatever button he’d tapped, and the lights went out in both. Then he tapped it twice more. Both lamps flashed blue simultaneously. Then he began tapping out a little rhythm, each lamp flashing with the long and the short beats exactly.

  “What are they?” said Hayes.

  “They’re our newest prototype,” said Brightly. “And they’re going to revolutionize everything. And I do mean everything, Hayes.”

  “Just these… these lamps that light up?”

  “Not just light up. They light up instantaneously.”

  Hayes stared at him blankly. “So?”

  Brightly frowned and released the button. The lamps went dark. “They’re called the Siblings, or at least that’s what we’re calling them for now,” he began. “I rather like the name. Gives it a fraternal feel, like a family. Something the average man can appreciate. They’re crystals, Hayes, crystals that are paired together. Very, very small ones, just the size of molecules. But they’re remarkable, because if you split them up and put a minute charge through one of the crystals-just a very, very small one-then the other crystal immediately experiences symptoms of that same charge. Even if it’s not physically touching, which you can see as there’s one half floating in each lamp here. And they do it instantaneously. There’s no delay at all.”

  Hayes looked at the lamp beside him. “None?”

  “No,” said Brightly. He tapped out another rhythm on the lamp, and the other one flashed with it. “And usually everything has a delay. Radio waves. Electrical impulses. By God, even light has one,” he said, laughing. “But, as far as we can tell, these crystals don’t have any. They conduct the same tiny charge, no matter how far apart… to an extent.”

  “An extent?”

  “Yes,” said Brightly. “It’s mostly limited by proximity and duration. Depending on the machine that powers them, they can instantaneously conduct charges within a certain radius. With these it’s, say, half a mile. And, as you saw, it takes several seconds for them to recognize each other. They can only do it in pairs for
now… But can you see what use this would have, Hayes?”

  Hayes stared at the little lamp, thinking. “Communication,” he said.

  Brightly beamed. “Exactly. If you make chains of them, paired across the world, you can conduct messages with almost no delay at all. But even better, if we can get them powered so they broadcast far enough, we won’t even need chains-you’d be able to communicate with the other side of the globe, immediately. People could pick up the phone and call France if they’d like and hear a voice right away.”

  “And generals could communicate the movements of the enemy to their separated troops,” said Hayes.

  Brightly’s smile thinned. “What a nasty idea.”

  “Yet a lucrative one, isn’t it?”

  “Possibly,” said Brightly. “The military possibilities of the Siblings have not gone unacknowledged. But we can’t decide what people do with the things we make, can we? Is that burden for us to bear?” Somehow his smile became even more placid.

  “How many does the government have now?” asked Hayes flatly.

  “Oh, none. These are prototypes, and crude ones at that. We’re experiencing some mathematical problems. Theoretically, they shouldn’t be limited at all, by either time or duration, and we still haven’t increased the range as much as we’d like… but we’re still figuring it out. We won’t be ready to go into production for a year, at least.”

  “And what does that take?” asked Hayes.

  “Well, that’s a bit more complicated,” said Brightly, turning off his lamp. “Apparently it involves some very hot temperatures, some high-speed collisions of some very small things, and some very tricky math. Of a sort.”

  “Of a sort?”

  “Yes. You see, they had to make up a new kind.”

  “A new kind of what?”

  “Of math,” said Brightly simply.

  “Of math?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “How did they do that?”

  “Come now, Hayes,” said Brightly. “Surely you can’t have forgotten our patron saint?”

  Hayes thought, then rolled his eyes. “Kulahee, again.”

  “Yes. The man spent hours and hours toying with equations. Making numbers do things they’d never done before. It’s taken years to decode some of his scribbling, but we did it. And now we can stand on the shoulders of his giant figure, and move the very stars.”

  “Very nice, Brightly,” said Hayes. “You ought to write that down.”

  Brightly glowered at him. He marched up the stairs and said, “Turn off that one and come with me.”

  “Right, right,” said Hayes as he left. He turned to the little lamp and examined it. It had several knobs and buttons and switches on it, all of them pretty incomprehensible to him. He stuck his tongue in the corner of his mouth and leaned in, peering through the panels.

  … messenger…

  Hayes snapped back and stood up. He looked around, but found the room was empty.

  “Hello?” he said. But, of course, there was no one there.

  He blinked. He knew that sensation. It was the feeling he got when someone came close and a lone thought slipped from their mind to his. That one had just been one word, just “messenger.” Yet there seemed to be no one near.

  He looked around again, curious. Then, shrugging, he turned the Sibling off and followed the path Brightly had taken. Hayes found him in a large side room off the corridor, this one much more industrial. As usual, the second he walked through the door Brightly checked his watch and marked the time.

  But Hayes barely noticed. There in the center of the room was a Sibling, like the ones he’d just seen, but it was enormous, the size of a cathedral bell. Cables the size of his arm coiled through the many columns, and there nestled in the center was the same little glass chimney, no larger than the ones from the previous lamps. Hayes whistled as he looked the device over.

  “Yes,” said Brightly. “This was for an experiment. We loaded this one’s paired Sibling onto a tanker ship, timed a team of watches down to the nanosecond, and floated it out into the middle of the Pacific. Then, at the exact agreed-upon moment, they recorded themselves tapping out a signal on it, and we recorded the reception on our end. When they returned to shore, we compared the two recordings. They were exact. The only delay involved was basic human reaction time. Even though there were countless storms in the way.

  “When we first made the airships we thought oceans and seas didn’t matter. We could cross them without thought. But that was just a passing fancy. Now we know better. Now those great distances are truly immaterial. We’re going to make a new age, Hayes. In the next few years, the world will get smaller and smaller. Do you see?”

  “I see,” said Hayes.

  “Now do you understand why your task is so important?”

  “Just for the Siblings?”

  “Not just for them. This is but an example. One that may truly revolutionize the world.”

  Hayes thought, then shrugged. “I still don’t see why I can’t go after Tazz.”

  Brightly’s smile shivered a bit. He stiffly shook his head. “By God, sometimes you are the most useless fool I’ve ever met,” he said through his grin. Then he pushed open the doors and walked out.

  Hayes smiled after him. He’d never gotten him to do that before. He turned to look at the massive Sibling and scratched his nose. He saluted it, though he didn’t know why, and then walked toward the door.

  … messenger… from afar…

  He stopped short and whirled around. “Hello?” he called out. “Who’s there?”

  There was no answer. Only the low thrum of the Sibling. He checked behind it but could find no one hiding there. Then he stared at the device and moved closer, holding his hands out as though trying to feel any effects.

  Had the Sibling spoken to him? Was it even possible for him to overhear a machine? He’d certainly never experienced anything like it before. Perhaps it was a transmission he’d overheard, somehow… But wasn’t this one a prototype, built only to see how far they could transmit? Or could someone else have somehow been sending messages through it?

  He shook himself. It was a silly idea. It was much more likely there was someone on the floor above or below and Hayes had just happened to get close to them.

  Hayes left and caught up to Brightly, who was standing with his hands behind his back at the end of the hall. He was wearing his traveling coat and his hat now, and he’d shed the smile for a dour glare. Yet no matter how angry he was, the second Hayes came near he checked his pocket watch and marked the time. Hayes would forever be a tool to Brightly, he knew, one that came with liabilities that required careful use. Every second Brightly allowed was one with a purpose, however hidden.

  “I hope this has not been a waste of my very valuable time,” he said. “Has it, Hayes? Please tell me you’ve learned something useful?”

  Hayes was silent. He gave Brightly a piercing look, then nodded slightly.

  “I hope so,” said Brightly. “I honestly do. Some days I’m not sure why I’ve kept you on. We ask for you to do one thing, one little task, and we set the bar so low for you, and still somehow you find the need to buck us. But pay attention, now, because I’m going to keep this simple-if you don’t do these little, tiny, easy tasks we’ve set for you, you’ll be out. Out right away. No exceptions.”

  “I just want to do my job. To get after Tazz.”

  “No, Mr. Hayes,” said Brightly. “You are a man of addictions. And some of your addictions go far beyond any chemical or bottle. You want to chase Tazz the same way a drunkard needs his tankard. It’s simply another exciting little diversion for you, isn’t it?”

  When Hayes did not answer, Brightly nodded. “Then it’s as I thought. Let’s hope this is one compulsion you can overcome, for your sake. Good day,” he said, and pushed through the doors and walked out to the street.

  CHAPTER NINE

  On her fifth week on the job, Samantha began to feel disappointment creeping i
n on her. She still organized rigorously and kept both herself and Hayes to the plans laid out for them, but the days went by more slowly. Looking back on the past weeks, it was difficult to say what they had accomplished. Her work had become condensed to mere paperwork and research, just facts and figures to feed Hayes before each interview. Conversations about violence and horrible suspicions drifted by, and she wrote them down without any expectation of redress. It became difficult to remember that often there were fortunes at stake when the day seemed to repeat itself again and again, with no hint of progress gained.

  Hayes seemed to feel similarly. Each day he swept into the room, his eyes alight with a mad, dancing spark as he did his little performance, and then when he was done he shambled out, little and tired again. They did not speak much beyond work. They nodded hello and went about their business and then parted. Each time she reflected that she really knew very little about the man she was paid to assist.

  So it came as a surprise one day when, as they packed up and prepared to leave, Hayes turned to her and said, “Well, Sam, I believe that went rather well, didn’t it?”

  “I would say so, yes,” she said.

  “Care for some dinner?”

  She thought about it, wondering if it was some ploy. “If you’re sure.”

  “Of course I’m sure,” he said. “Bit of food would do us both good.”

  They ate boiled beef and cabbage at a bar across the street, a dim and murky place built of weeping wood. They sat at a scarred table in the corner, and she had a glass of stale tea and he a porter, telling her offhandedly that she was not to tell anyone about that as he was supposed to be bone-dry, you know, but every once in a while a man has to put a toe out of line. They exchanged curt comments about the food or about work, and Hayes drank beer until his lips were a thin black-brown and his cheeks gained color. Eventually he asked her where she was staying, and when she said Newton he cried, “My God. You’re practically living among royalty. How did you land that?”

  “Mr. Evans arranged it for me, actually. It is quite nice,” she said haltingly.