The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  Vandelmayne remained silent for a few seconds. Then he said, “Thank you. That is satisfactory.”

  “I take it there has been no change of plan, then, sir?”

  “None. Proceed as agreed.” Vandelmayne switched the unit off and returned it to his pocket. He slipped an arm lightly around his son’s shoulder as they resumed walking. “One of the realities of this world that you have to come to terms with, Edgar, is that…”

  In the house, Partridge returned a file to the safe in his office, next door to Vandelmayne’s. Although Vandelmayne was aware in a general sense of the significance of the package that had been sent to New York by courier a week previously, he was not acquainted with the specific details of the contents. And that, after all, was as it should be, Partridge reflected as he closed the safe. It was on occasions like this that intermediaries such as himself earned their not inconsiderable remuneration and other benefits.

  Some tasks were unbecoming of gentlemen to perform.

  CHAPTER 4

  “These are the plating baths and metallizing tanks,” Alan Dray, president of Platek Electrical Inc. said, gesturing, as he led his visitor from the chemicals storage area, with its vats of acids and solutions, up a short flight of steel stairs and through a doorway into a wide corridor. Windows on either side looked into bays where technicians in protective smocks and caps, some wearing respirators, attended baths of bubbling liquids, cluttered with pipes and gauges. The air smelled faintly vinegary. Dray was a solidly built man in his early forties, with a ruddy, rounded face and straight, yellow hair, combed flat. He walked with the kind of jerky, determined gait that seemed to seek obstacles as challenges. “Do you know anything about this land of thing, Mr. Shears? Do you have any technical background?”

  Melvin Shears shook his head, “Not really. I did do a few years of computer science back at university, before I decided to switch to law.”

  “Computers, eh? Where was that?”

  “West Florida, Pensacola—up on the panhandle. But these days I’m strictly a lawyer… or at least getting there, anyway.” His card described him as an associate at the small Boston law firm of Evron and Winthram. Approaching twenty-seven now, he was of medium height and slimly built, with dark, wavy hair and sensitive features that wore an expression of exaggerated seriousness just at that moment from trying to look as if the things around him made more sense than they did. His skin had the vaguely pinkish hue that went with good health and vigor, and despite his modest bulk, his firm, easy stride and the mobile contours beneath his suit hinted of a body that kept itself in good shape.

  They stopped to look into a bay where a woman in a pink smock was positioning a wire basket loaded with components in one of the baths. “That’s where we plate gold onto the contacts of printed circuits,” Dray said. “In the room next door, they’re putting silver and rhodium onto connector parts. Across the way there is one of our electroforming tanks—producing a shape by depositing metal on a former.”

  “That’s interesting. I didn’t know you could do that.”

  They resumed walking, and Dray went on, “All of these techniques follow from the same basic principle: the ability of electric current to reduce metal salts to metal. In the early days it helped make beautiful things. There were masters who learned how to coax attractive coatings from unpleasant solutions.”

  “You make it sound more like an art than a science.”

  “But it is… or maybe it’s both. You can’t exclude personality from this business. Is silver plating best done with one strike, or two, or three? I prefer one, but I’ve a friend in Chicago who swears by three. So are we talking about formulas or recipes?”

  At the end of the corridor they stopped to look through an open door into a noisier room filled with machinery and ducting. “The fumes and released gases from the processing rooms are drawn off and piped through to here for disposal,” Dray said. “This is what the trouble is all about. It began a long time ago. In my father’s time back in the sixties, they didn’t have any of this. The stuff was just blown out of the building by big fans. But things changed, and they were told they had to install washers to take out the acids and so forth.”

  “Not so unreasonable, maybe,” Shears commented.“The population was probably growing. And you’re not exactly next to the ocean here…”

  “You’re right; they probably had a point… So we put in several hundred thousand dollars worth of washers, and that was when everything started getting really stupid. You see, the first part of the process involved neutralizing the acidic fumes with sodium hydroxide. Do you know what you get when you treat acid with a strong base like sodium hydroxide?”

  “What?”

  “Salt water. We were simply going to run it through the main sewer into the bay. But the EPA, as it was back then, said we couldn’t. They wouldn’t let us dump salt water into the ocean.”

  “But the ocean is salt water.”

  “I know that, you know that, and any six-year-old kid knows that. But according to their regulations, it was from a toxic process, and therefore a toxic by-product. It had to be hauled away by truck to a certified dump. But since no one would certify any dumps anywhere near here, that meant New Jersey.”

  “You were trucking salt water from Boston to New Jersey.”

  “Right. It was so ridiculous that I got together with one of our engineers and a chemist that I know from MIT to figure out a better way.” Dray raised an arm to indicate the machinery room in front of them. “We decided to distill the water out and leave only the salts to be carted off—it’s no less ridiculous, but at least there’s a lot less of it.”

  Shears nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “You’d have thought so. But it’s been a long time since anything needed to make sense. This is a vacuum still. We chose a vacuum process because it doesn’t use heat for evaporation, and is therefore relatively cost-effective. But now the Compliance Board is telling us we have to tear it all out and put in a thermal still.” Dray shook his head and sighed wearily. He turned and steered Shears out of the door at the end of the corridor, onto a pathway running beside the loading dock outside.

  “How come? Isn’t your system as good as a thermal still?” Shears asked.

  “It’s better” Dray replied. “But that’s the way things are now. They don’t just set the results you’re supposed to achieve; they have to specify every nut and bolt of how you’re supposed to achieve it—except that none of them know what they’re talking about. They have certified and approved thermal equipment, but not vacuum equipment. That’s what it’s all about. The real problem is that I’m either going to have to go way into the red or start laying people off to pay for it. And none of it will do anyone a penny’s worth of good. Not a penny’s worth.”

  They came back to the office building at the front of the plant and entered through the rear door. A flight of stairs covered by a worn carpet brought them to an office area where a half dozen or so people were working at desks and keyboard terminals. Dray led the way through to a short passageway on the far side where a row of doors opened into private offices, and entered an unostentatious one at the end, standing ajar, which was marked ALAN J. DRAY. PRESIDENT. In the outer room, his graying, middle-aged secretary handed him a thick folder full of papers and tied around with tape. “There’s a full set, with the letters from ACS,” she informed him.

  “Thanks, Ginnie,” Dray said, passing the folder to Shears.

  Dray and Shears went through into the inner office, and Dray sat down behind his desk. It was cluttered with pieces of mechanisms and electrical devices among the files and papers. A periodic table of the elements and various physical and engineering charts adorned the walls, as well as graphs of sales and production schedules. The shelves behind the desk carried as many volumes on chemistry, electricity, and metallurgy as on marketing and regulations. It was a “doer’s” office, not a showplace—an expression of a mind dedicated to knowledge and competence. Shears wondered
what the offices of the bureaucrats who wrote the regulations looked like.

  “Those are copies of all the relevant papers,” Dray said, nodding across the desk as Shears sat down in the chair on the far side of the desk and lifted his briefcase onto his knee to put the folder inside. “As I told Robert yesterday, there are some strong hints in there that the consultants hired by the Compliance Board as good as wrote the regulations into their report, and we’re pretty certain they were being paid by Kerring, too. Kerring’s Industrial Division makes a line of thermal stills, but they don’t make vacuum stills. Get the picture?”

  Shears nodded as he closed the lid of the briefcase. Robert Winthram was one of the senior partners of the law firm that Shears was from, and had handled Platek’s legal affairs for years. The Kerring Corporation’s Industrial Division was based in Springfield, and the parent group had strong political connections. Dray was alleging that the company had colluded with state officials to prevent its rivals from competing by having its own equipment effectively specified as a mandatory requirement by law. Shears had come to collect the evidence to begin assessing what kind of a case might be built against it. “Well, we’ll look into it,” he promised. He stood up and began putting on his coat. “Is there anything else?”

  Dray sat back and contemplated the things on his desk for a moment. “Just hope that the Constitutionals can get the twenty-eighth amendment passed,” he said, looking up finally.

  CHAPTER 5

  Winter had come early that year in Boston. There was snow on the streets when Melvin Shears came out of Platek’s front entrance, which a watery sun, strained through a layer of low overcast, had done little to soften after the previous night’s freeze, even by lunchtime. He turned up his overcoat collar and walked as briskly as he dared on the slippery sidewalks, heading westward from the waterfront area and crossing between the green-painted steel pillars supporting the elevated traffic jam misnamed the Fitzgerald Expressway, toward Quincy Market. Ahead, the towers of the downtown area looked shabby and weary of it all. The windows in some of the blocks still showed rows of neon lights inside, keeping up a face of business as usual, but others stared sightlessly out across the city. Several of what had originally been built as office buildings now resembled lower-grade apartment blocks, with cheap drapes and blinds and a sprinkling of crudely patched broken panes. They had been taken over by the government and converted into low rentals for dependent groups, who flocked in from all over the state because benefits in the city were better. Shears could see the lines of people waiting to collect checks, and the huddles of unemployed standing around in the forecourt outside the Government Center behind Faneuil Hall as he crossed Union Street.

  He turned the corner into Washington Street, where a couple of unkempt, bearded youths were pestering Asian tourists to buy handmade trinkets, probably from one of the folk-art communes across the Charles River. He wondered what induced Asians to take their vacation in a place like Boston in midwinter. Maybe it had something to do with Christmas and New Year’s, which were not far away. He could imagine the poster in the Tokyo travel agent’s window: WINTER IN AMERICA THIS YEAR—the season of ancient Western pageantry and celebrations. “You buy pletty beads? Velly good, velly cheap…”

  A few blocks farther on, he stopped at the post office to drop off a package to Philadelphia that needed to be on its way that afternoon. Predictably, since it was lunchtime and most of the customers could get away only during their break, most of the clerks had gone to lunch and the lines were long. Shears groaned inwardly as the overweight woman at the head of the line he had joined waddled purposefully up to the window, deposited a bulging purse on the counter, and only then began rummaging through its seemingly innumerable pockets and pouches while the clerk looked on indifferently. The lines on either side, of course, proceeded to rattle through like machine-gun ammunition. Shears opened his briefcase and took out the package to have it ready. Ahead, the woman was pushing a heap of papers and passbooks across the counter. Then she set the purse to one side and spread her elbows to settle herself for the coming fray.

  One of the great mysteries of life that Shears had never fathomed was knowing what went on at the front of all the lines he stood in. The elbows planted themselves solidly along the edge of the counter to provide a solid fire-base, and her obscene behind quivered from the recoil as she delivered her return salvo to the clerk s ranging shots. Papers were scrutinized; figures were pointed at. Then the clerk hoisted down from a shelf a tome the size of the Domesday Book, turned pages, and then froze slowly into catatonia as the realization dawned that he was going to have to make a decision. He chickened at the last moment, and went to consult a supervisor.

  The supervisor, however, was engaged in a dispute involving a clerk at another window, a mail carrier, and a frail woman in a green coat. “We aren’t general delivery. I can’t hand you your mail,” the clerk said.

  “But I haven’t seen any for almost a week. Why aren’t you delivering it?” the woman in the green coat asked.

  “I told you, there’s a problem with unshoveled snow on the sidewalks around Pearl Street,” the carrier said. “We’re not required to deliver through snow.”

  “But, I don’t understand… It’s an apartment house. The sidewalk in front is clear. Could you look and see if I have any mail?”

  “Yes, you have,” the clerk informed her.

  “But I’m expecting a check. It’s important. Can’t I have it?”

  “No. It has to be delivered.”

  The woman in the green coat looked confused. “But you’ve just said you won’t deliver it. What am I supposed to do?”

  “I guess you’re going to have to clear your street,” the supervisor told her.

  “It is clear. I’ve already told you.”

  “If it was clear, we’d have delivered your mail,” the supervisor replied.

  The carrier interjected, “The problem there is farther along the street.”

  “So no mail can be delivered on that street,” the supervisor said.

  “You mean I can’t get my mail?” the woman asked again.

  “Sure. You can get it anytime you can get the city or your landlord to clean the street.”

  As he came out after finally consigning his package to Philadelphia, Shears thought about the crowds of unemployed that he had seen outside the Government Center. A city that couldn’t clear its streets was paying thousands of able-bodied people for doing nothing. He wondered why it was better to be unemployed and not getting seven dollars an hour, which was the minimum, even for casual work, than to be employed and getting five. And with people employed at five dollars, the bottom rungs of the employment ladders wouldn’t have been sawn off. And people would be able to get their mail, too. Another of life’s mysteries, which only a bureaucrat could understand.

  • • •

  After stopping for a coffee and sandwich in a steamy snack bar around the corner, Shears reached the offices of Evron and Winthram a little after one-thirty, located in the maze of backstreets and alleys behind Tremont Street, across from Boston Common. The premises stood behind a dignified door of polished oak with a brass sign, atop stone steps flanked by wrought iron railings that raised it above the mundane world of the sidewalk’s scurrying anonymities. Ascending those steps from the street always gave him a mild feeling of entering a higher, more rarefied, plane of existence—probably the reason why so many houses of the previous century had been built that way.

  Ursula, the firm’s receptionist, treated him to a smile from behind her desk in the entrance hall. She was tall and lean, dusky-skinned with high-cheeked features that hinted of a trace of Amerind, and had her long hair braided in a pigtail that day. “Hi, Mel. Is it any warmer out there yet?”

  “Not that you’d notice. I have the suspicion it’s going to be one hell of a winter.”

  “You’ve got these messages, and Robert had to go out.” Ursula handed across a sheaf of slips of paper. “He said to leave
the papers from Platek with Carol.”

  “Uh-huh.” Shears glanced through the messages briefly. “Anything else?”

  Ursula rested her chin in her hands to stare at him. The look in her dark eyes, their lashes heavy with mascara, was shamelessly frank. “Well, now that the election is over and you’ve won, we could have that date to celebrate.” Gentle subtlety had never been Ursula’s forte. She was definitely the kind that mothers warned their sons not to get mixed up with, and which every son went through life praying that he would.

  Shears smiled. As an active supporter of the Constitutional party, all his spare time had been devoted to campaign work in the lead-up to the November election. For months he had been promising playfully that they would paint the town together when it was over if the Constitutionals won. “I still have to tidy up the loose ends.”

  Ursula sighed. “Do you know, I sometimes get the feeling that you’re not really sincere about this.”

  “You’re just too suspicious. It comes from working with lawyers.”

  He went upstairs and delivered the dossier from Platek to Robert Winthram’s secretary, Carol. Then he continued to his own office, which he shared with another associate, Chris Rhodes. Chris had his coat on and was sorting through papers when Shears entered.

  “Going out?” Shears said unnecessarily as he tossed his briefcase down on the desk and peeled off his gloves.

  “Framingham,” Chris muttered.

  “Snead versus Rawlinson, I presume.”

  “How’d you guess?”

  Shears took off his coat and hung it on the rack beside the door. “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, we need to move fast. They’re trying to oppose any pretrial discovery in the case. The usual procedural motions: bury the plaintiff in paper; move to dismiss; ask for a change of venue; ask for a summary judgment. Whatever they can think of to tie us up.”