Analog SFF, April 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “For the reasons I stated.”

  “Yeah, sure. But listen. That was really interesting. I took Ron here over there, too. People all over the place—and they were, you know, happy? They kind of wandered around with this puzzled look, as though this was a spot they'd been to before, but couldn't quite remember. And what it is, of course—it's Earth. It's like going back in time. You know what I mean: For a lot of us, Earth means going way, way back. And it's that association. It made people smile, that messed-up sky did.”

  “Ah,” I said. “That mischief maker, Eddy!”

  “Right,” said Ron Pierce. “And I suppose you got all over Grounds for not getting the paint off until halfway through the next day.”

  “They didn't? Well, I didn't know. How inefficient of me.” I wondered if I could write myself a reprimand.

  “Well, it's true, they didn't. And you know?” said Ron. “Grounds was a little reluctant to get started. People actually wanted it left up. But the trees, you see. The paint was compromising their light source.”

  “I still liked that look,” said Nick.

  “Right! So did I,” said Ron. “It was like walking into a park back on Earth, and the sky was a shadowed blue, like in late afternoon, early evening. Really sort of beautiful.”

  “Anyway,” said Nick to me, “after I dragged Ron to see, we had this idea. We could alter the field output on the generators and use just a touch of other lighting effects—and it's kind of funny, but we could actually turn the main dome sort of blue, without using paint. It wouldn't be the same as an Earth sky, but it wouldn't be any kind of Martian sky. It'd be blue. Wouldn't that be a trip? I know if we did it you'd be all over us, because it would mean our solar gain would slip, and we'd even be losing out on a bit of power generation, and really it's not the best idea because of what our various plantings need, all over Neuhight—and on top of that it would mean a bit more energy being pumped into our field generators than usual, to achieve the color. All around, not a good idea. But we thought it was a fun notion.”

  “You could do all that?”

  “Sure. Just a little set-up time. I mean, I can't do it. I'm too busy. I'm just here for a break—see? I'm following what you said and I'm taking fifteen minutes before working late tonight! But Pierce here, he could set it up, couldn't you, Pierce?”

  I tried to keep down my grin. “And it would cut back on energy gain and take extra power?”

  “Well, sure.”

  “Do it,” I said.

  “What?” said Nick.

  “Here. I'll give you a note from my office. I'll just write on it, that I promise not to get in your way. It's official now.”

  “But it's so—inefficient, is what it is!”

  “How do you know that without trying?”

  “You'll let us?” said Ron. “Both Nick and I have the demerits piled on pretty heavy from that last guy! And you know those demerits slow down raises. One of the damnedest things about our constitution is that power to dish out demerits from the Office of Efficiency! Ouch, do those hurt!”

  “I won't give you any.” I turned to go, to hide my pleasure at this turn of events—then looked back. “Say, you think you could have it up and going, noon Friday?”

  Ron thought for a moment. “If I go in just a little early that day—well, sure. I could have it up then. Just a test run. Might not be really sky-blue blue. But it'll be blue!”

  “A test run,” I said. “Maybe for the afternoon?”

  “You know, you advocate inefficiencies like this and you'll be talking yourself out of a job!”

  I laughed as though he had made a joke and vamoosed.

  * * * *

  I seemed to be laying down a pretty good trail of inefficiency there toward the end of the week, although I picked up a few danger signals that a few of my efforts might be backfiring. When I was walking to the lunchtime concert on Friday, the violinist's boss Gilda walked up and thanked me for making Diane take off from work. Gilda had felt obliged to keep pressing for the charts to be finished, even though she knew the girl was getting tense about not being as prepared as she might be for this concert. Then it turned out Diane's afternoon of practice went so well she went to work early the next day, before anyone else showed up—and finished her work in double time, having dispensed with her worries.

  Then Fred Amik, one of the supervisors in Grounds, came over and thanked me for not pressing the issue on that paint cleanup deal. Rhoda had hinted to him I would be knocking at his door about it, since I had been there in the park, scoping out the situation—and Fred knew exactly how that last Face of Efficiency would have handled it! Fred felt a few ouches from demerits, too, it turned out. So he said he liked my relaxed manner, and that his crew got the work done faster that next day than if they had been forced into overtime—because you know how people can get, Fred said to me, if work hours eat into their pub time.

  Sure, I said back to him, hoping my affable inefficiency would get noted somewhere, anyway—for not forcing the job to get done quickly ... although that had made a crew more cheerful and thus, darn it, more efficient about doing it.

  Whatever their reports, if Gilda and Fred made any, at least I had the automatic backups to all the notes I wrote—all my efforts at injecting a little inefficiency into the system. Among them was the note to Nick and Ron, setting off what I hoped would be my best effort—using more generating-power, cutting down on new power generation, reducing plant transpiration because of reduced light—and so on and so forth. To add to that, I would be setting a half dozen city departments behind schedule, for I had figured out which ones were least ready for the Summit: Would they ever be fighting mad! But I had remarked at frantic office work seeming a little high-pitched and insisted everyone show up for the lunchtime concert—for wasn't that what the concerts were for? To brighten their tedious days? To refresh their overheated minds?

  It sounded almost sensible, what I was making them do, but it also seemed a good bit less than fully efficient, given their tight schedule.

  I looked around the park, from my spot at the edge, and beamed. A crowd had turned out—bigger than Dena MacLaren had told me was typical for these affairs. Although everyone thought the concerts were a good idea, no one seemed to have time for them. I noticed a few grumpy faces, making my heart feel lighter. I figured there would be more such, as the noon hour wore on and people started checking their watches.

  Then the sky changed, with white streaks crossing the reddish-orange noon sky. I wanted to clap my hands for Nick and Ron. Although I heard a few gasps and plenty of murmuring, I heard no alarm. Nick and Ron seem to have just let people know to check the sky, at noon Friday, without letting on exactly what would happen.

  The sky color shifted again, with the remaining oranges, reds, and dark pinks fading away. More whitish streaks appeared, along with waves and then patches of blue. It was by no means Earth-sky blue—but not totally unlike it. This sky had shades of purple and even green, here and there among the different blues. I knew it would be a variable effect—partly because the electric lines creating the magnetic shield were such a complicated array, partly because the area being covered was so huge, and partly because the topology of the dome's upper surface was not even remotely like an evenly rounded hemisphere, but more like an irregular hump surrounded by smaller ones, or like a large, weathered volcanic cone surrounded by smaller, irregular, rolling hills.

  After the hubbub died down and everyone uncrinked their necks from gazing upward, the music started. The quartet started with a short capriccio by Martian composer Langetti, to be followed by some considerably older fare, with Schubert and a bit of Bartok. Listening to the Langetti, I could easily imagine why young Diane had worried so; her part, as first-chair violin, called for a lot of speedy dexterity. The up-tempo virtuosity worked everyone up. People clapped with enthusiasm at the end.

  A good time to leave, I figured. Many in the audience would be itching to get back to work on the Summit, pretty soon
. It might be good for me to be elsewhere—however much the Schubert's opening measures made me want nothing else but to linger and listen.

  I was in a good mood, anyway, and decided to walk around the city aimlessly, enjoying how it looked beneath the patchy blue sky, and relishing the notion that every second the generating fields were operating in this mode, the city's overall efficiency was going down, down, down ... and in several important areas, too. What a fine day! I had arrived from Earth hardly more than a week before, and here I almost felt myself back there, beneath wide Midwestern skies.

  I took my sweet time, finding a few avenues I had not yet explored. I spotted a few others to investigate another day—maybe when I was unemployed and had nothing better to do than just this. I looked around speculatively. Were any lichens growing in the cracks in these sidewalks or walls?

  Past my usual quitting hour I returned to my office door, and turned around the “OUT” sign on its hook. The timing was good, though: Now I could run over some of the early efficiency charts being automatically generated by the city hub-comp.

  I grinned at what I saw: The magnetic fields were markedly higher in energy consumption, for the afternoon—with no increase in efficacy at ionized-particle deflection. Another chart showed inside-dome energy production, which provided a fair fraction of daily needs. Down, too!

  So I pulled up other charts coming in; supervisor reports, and the like. These troubled me a little. No notes about falling behind ... in fact, I found some opposite indications. Puzzling. “Morale: up!” two said. Then I checked reports from the departments behind in preparations for the Summit. Five out of the six had nearly caught up on their work!

  In puzzling over this I barely heard the knock.

  “Working late?” said a woman, sticking her head in the door. She looked like someone I should know, although I failed to place her.

  “Just a sign of my inefficiency!” I said, trying to score one last point against myself for the day.

  “Nonsense, Jay! I'm glad someone in your office finally has a sense of proportion. Jay, I'm Janice Kawabata, mayor of Dometown 26, Neuhight, and I've been meaning to come over and meet you. I was a little hesitant at first, given that our two offices have been at loggerheads so often in the past—because as you know the town constitution gives you the power to act almost at random and almost without check! And it hasn't worked!”

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said, although pleased to hear my activities fell within so fine a tradition. I would be kicked out of this office in no time.

  “But you, Jay! I'm impressed. I needed to come over right away after seeing what happened with those commissions getting ready for the Summit. Do you know I think we have an ethic of overwork here in the dome? And you spotted that right off. It actually hinders people from getting work done. And that blue sky stunt! I heard rumors about it and thought there'd be trouble brewing between you and those crazy mag-field guys—but then I saw you were involved, yourself! And then the reaction! Why, people were smiling at me who have been grumbling for ten months straight ... and suddenly there's all this fresh energy in the offices! And do you know we're almost completely back on schedule in our preparations? People are full of vim and vigor! It's weird, seeing everything happening so quickly and things humming along so smoothly. You're fresh from Earth, so you probably don't know how seeing that blue sky felt! But—wow!

  “So now I'm thinking,” Mayor Kawabata said. “What if we did this blue sky afternoon regularly? Maybe once a week? Just because ... well, maybe there's something to the idea. We humans evolved beneath a blue sky, right? Maybe our brains need a regular dose!”

  “But the inefficiency,” I said, with a voice sounding weak and mousy even to my own ears. “There's less light intake and—”

  The mayor waved her hand dismissively. “I think we can make up for minor downsides of that sort, Jay. Now, I'm sorry I've got to run—but I had to stop by! Thank you so much!”

  I stood there in my office dumbfounded. I looked back at my desk. Suddenly it looked much less attractive, the idea of inspecting any more efficiency reports that might be rolling in. I shut everything off, closed the door, and went out.

  On the street the first person I saw was the tall, awkward form of Dena MacLaren. I smiled immediately, for here was the stated foe of the F.o.E. She would see to it that my inefficiencies would not slip by unnoticed. She would see me reprimanded and fired!

  “Oh, Jay!” she said. “You disappeared from that concert this afternoon. I was looking around to thank you for what you've done! I've been at war with the Office of Efficiency since my first day here because the chiefs before you have mostly wanted to shut down our concerts—and I can't tell you how wonderful it is to have your office on our side for a change!”

  She ran off, almost bouncing. Dazed, I wandered over to the park and took a seat. So thoroughly absorbed in my debacle—here I was, being mistaken for efficient, and in a pleasant way!—that I failed to notice the bench was already occupied.

  “And here he is, the Face of Efficiency,” said Eddy, looking over at me and nodding his old, unshaven face. “Yes, sir.”

  At least Eddy knew the truth. I had to take consolation where I could. He saw through this facade of efficiency, down to my real nature. Surely it takes one bum to recognize another.

  “Yes, sir,” said Eddy again. “You know I've been here in Dometown 26 for nearly fifty years, and those are Earth years, Mr. Wirth, and I've said since day one that what Dometown 26 needs is a blue sky, just to make people a little more cheerful. That's all. And it doesn't cost much, does it? My paint sure didn't. But fifty years, I said this. And here you are, there with your nice shirt and pressed pants and you're the Face of Efficiency, and what do you do? No one else could do it, not in fifty years, but you did it in a week! And look how people were just happy this afternoon, and they really didn't know why! But it was the sky. That's all. Just that blue sky.”

  I opened my mouth to say something. Nothing came out.

  “Yes, sir,” said Eddy, “and you don't have to thank me, but I think you're doing fine and you'll be the first to hold that job of yours for more than a few weeks. First in quite a while—yes, sir! I'm an idler, but I can tell that sort of thing, about people who aren't!”

  I sat there feeling depressed.

  “You know, Eddy,” I said to him, “if it's the way you say, then you seem to have gotten a lot done, for an idler. But this was all due to you. You and your paint!”

  “'I have been an idle fellow all my life.’ You know who said that? It was Dr. Johnson.”

  “Dr. Johnson?”

  “That's Samuel Johnson. ‘I have been an idle fellow all my life,’ he said, and if he was talking tongue-in-cheek it was because his cheeks were so very large. He was a big man, you know. Big in more ways than one. He could contain within himself the busiest fellow in the Western world, because you know he wrote a dictionary of the English language. Think that's easy? You try! But at the same time he could be an idle fellow. And you know?” said Eddy. “I like that.”

  The next day I sat in my office going over old documents. Old Claude had it right, for his day and age, in insisting upon the Office of Efficiency. This was Mars, after all. Conditions were such, back then, that keeping human life going was a precarious and miserable proposition, what with mining operations barely in their infancy, raw materials exorbitant in real costs, and most manufactured goods and foods needing to be shipped in, across daunting distances. So there needed to be an Office of Efficiency, double-checking every dometown operation, making sure every manager and supervisor and worker was doing her and his absolute best to use every ounce of raw material and every spark of energy in the best way possible.

  Those were the days, yes, but here we were in a new day, when a dometown on Mars was growing maple trees, and a worker could retire to idle away a morning on a park bench.

  Maybe those early Offices of Efficiency did their work too well. Now this ethic of overwork prevai
led, as the Mayor had said—and the Office of Efficiency had kept on overseeing this overwork, encouraging it and making it worse, year after year, decade after decade—installing overwork as the official state of normalcy.

  A mistake ... from which the previous chiefs of the Office of Efficiency seem not to have learned.

  And as for me?

  The sign on my door I mostly left alone. I had to maintain appearances, after all, if it were to transpire that I would keep this job. I called over a new friend from Grounds, though, to have her change the place where the hook was.

  I hoped someday I could just hang my “OUT” sign there for good. In the meantime, though, with the hook now off to the side, in front of that “of,” folks might get an idea of where I really stood, when I was...

  Office

  of

  IN Efficiency.

  Copyright © 2009 Mark Rich

  [Back to Table of Contents]

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  In decades of reading commentary on SF and attending conventions, I've encountered endless discussions of how modern science fiction is different from the works of the Golden Age. Indeed it is. We now have protagonists of both of the usual sexes and a couple of new ones, and they're as complex, angst-ridden, and—in some cases—kinky as anything in mainstream literature or psychiatric textbooks. Our futures not only have nuts and bolts, but warts, blemishes, and cracks, and nowadays our generals need to file environmental impact statements before unleashing death rays on invading alien insects.