Easy and Hard Ways Out Read online

  Subject: H. Brank

  Interviews with supervisory, engineering and drafting personnel indicate that the subject accused anonymously of the prank paging, one “Harvey Brank,” is held in low opinion by a sufficient number of people that charges against him could easily be the result of personal feuds. His supervisor, S. Steinberg, has characterized him as “O.K. technically, but a smart-aleck”; a colleague, S. Dorfman, has referred to him as [sic] “ten pounds of ordure in a five pound enclosure”; R. Gary Blevin has questioned [sic] “whether this supposed individual exists at all.” Observation of the subject over a two day period did not indicate any unusual phone activities. In view of the similarities between the handwriting on the unsigned notes and certain graffiti observed in one of the men’s rooms, our current working assumption is that the note-writer is the same person who’s been stealing soap from the lavatories for the past three months.

  Very truly yours,

  S. Brine

  SB:sb

  MATHEMATICAL PUZZLES

  At four thirty Monday afternoon, Dubrowolski was on the thirty-fourth line of an abstract, useless mathematical proof when the phone rang on his desk.

  “Microwaves—Dubrowolski,” said Dubrowolski obediently, using the required Labs phone-answering format.

  “Mr. Rupp would like to see you immediately,” said the voice.

  Dubrowolski tried to remember how she looked. Rupp’s secretary: vague impression of a heavy-lidded, gum-chewing girl with Brooklyn accent and white-blond hair, very obvious black roots.

  “I’m sorry, I haven’t got time right now,” he said. “I’m in the middle of a derivation.”

  “Well,” said the voice hesitantly, and Dubrowolski could smell the spearmint, picture the jaws working. “Mr. Rupp said immediately.”

  “I’m in the middle,” said Dubrowolski, and hung up.

  He shook his fountain pen slightly to get the ink flowing, and resumed writing on the white pad. He was the only person at Auerbach Labs who still used a fountain pen, and ink splotches and blobs continually appeared on various parts of his body and clothing. He’d gotten up to equation 39 when, glancing up, he saw Security Officer Brine in his brown suit looming over his desk.

  “You got a call from Mr. Rupp before?” asked Brine.

  “Oh. Well, no. It was his secretary.”

  “Don’t be cute. I have a gun.” He fingered an ominous bulge under his jacket.

  “You would really, you know, shoot me?” asked Dubrowolski, grinning widely.

  “Only if you gave me reason,” said Brine, unsmiling.

  Dubrowolski rose and capped his fountain pen. He followed Brine from the room, past the intense, curious stares of his colleagues and out into the corridor. Brine walked rapidly, and Dub, despite his greater height and stride, strained to keep up.

  “So what’s, uh, you know, going on?” he asked goodhumoredly.

  “Taking you to Mr. Rupp. Mr. Rupp says fetch, I fetch.”

  They followed the intricate turns and twists of the hallways, passing the lighted doorways, the ever-changing configurations of partitioned areas, the Authorized Personnel Only signs and Let’s All Strive for Zero Defects posters. Above, the network of rectangular heating ducts was interlaced with a grid of BX electrical conduit, itself enmeshed in a system of compressed-air and gas piping; below, a mile of green and white vinyl asbestos tiles muffled their footsteps. Dubrowolski stopped at a water fountain and took a long drink. For the first time he began to feel slightly afraid, although also happy and proud of the sudden attention (for whatever reason) from a higher-up. And annoyed. How the hell was he going to complete his derivation?

  “C’mon, c’mon,” said Brine. Dubrowolski gulped a last mouthful of water, and they continued walking. “You engineers,” said Brine. “You think everything is a joke. Work is a joke, security is a joke, everything is a joke. We’ll see. We’ll see how much of a joke it is.”

  They entered a corridor with carpeting and different, softer lighting. The green paint on the walls became walnut paneling. Brine opened the third door down and ushered Dubrowolski in.

  “This is Mr. Dubrowo,” he said to the girl at the desk. “I’ll be outside if Mr. Rupp needs me.”

  He patted Dub twice on the shoulder and left. Dub turned and faced the secretary.

  “You, uh”—(gum chew)—“go right ahead in, Mister, uh”—(gum chew)—“Dubrowo. Mr. Rupp is”—(gum chew plus stretch with tongue)—“expecting you.”

  “My name is Dubrowolski,” said Dubrowolski.

  “Uh-huh,” said the girl. “Right.”

  Definite night-counter-waitress-at-Bickford’s material, thought Dubrowolski as he walked past her and through the inner door. The room he entered was about twenty feet long, with yellow carpeting and closed green draw drapes on the windows. The standard giant oval conference table dominated the room’s center; two couches and an end table with an ornate metal lamp were clustered near one side. A small bookcase stood in a corner. Apart from Dubrowolski, no one was there.

  He took a seat about midway along the table, scanned the ceremonial pictures of Rupp on the walls, and waited. Immediately after the secretary’s call he’d tried to imagine what Rupp might want with him, came up with absolutely nothing, and henceforth ceased to think about the subject. Clearly, Rupp worked in strange, unknowable ways; his disguises proved that. Dubrowolski leaned back in his chair and relaxed. He removed his fountain pen from his pocket and wrote equation 39 of his derivation on his hand. He was just beginning to consolidate terms for equation 40 when abruptly a door he’d assumed led to a closet opened on the rear wall and Rupp, carrying a manila folder, strode vigorously in and sat down at the head of the table.

  He flopped open the folder, scanned his eyes downward, then looked up. “Is it pronounced Dubrowo or Dubrowo?”

  Dubrowolski shook his head.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Rupp.

  “Oh. Nothing, nothing. I didn’t realize that door led to another room. I thought it was a closet.”

  Rupp nodded. “It is slightly smaller than the door you entered. Which is why nearly everyone thinks it’s a closet.”

  “Oh,” said Dubrowolski, smiling.

  “As a matter of fact, it is a closet.”

  “But—” said Dubrowolski.

  “I was in there. Watching you. There’s a tiny hole in the door. You can tell a lot about people by watching them through tiny holes when they think they’re alone. But let’s get back to your name.”

  Dubrowolski felt uncertain, disarmed. “It’s Dubrowolski, not Dubrowo. The Accounting Department computer chops any name longer than seven letters.”

  Rupp looked down at his folder again, turned a few pages. “Ah, yes, I see. This is your personnel file. I see your original application does read ‘Dubrowolski.’” He looked up again. “I tell ya, John, sometimes that Accounting Department just goes off the deep end, don’t you think? I mean that crazy computer and all?”

  Dubrowolski, though naïve, was also paranoid; he knew enough to realize that sudden casual familiarities from supervisors three levels above him were not casual at all. “I really don’t know anything about Accounting,” he said.

  Rupp looked at him, grinned slightly. “Good. A good, cautious, suspicious, noncommittal answer. But don’t bother yourself trying to find out my views on the subject so you can agree with them. I don’t have any views. I was just interested in your response, from which, despite your intent, I’ve learned a great deal about you.”

  Dubrowolski felt bewildered. What the hell did this guy want with him? What was he talking about?

  Rupp opened the folder again. “I see you’ve been with us nearly a year now, John.”

  Dubrowolski noted that since Rupp had learned how to pronounce his last name he hadn’t used it.

  “Well, how do you like it at the Labs? I’m sure you must’ve formed some opinions by now.”

  “Oh. Well, yes. I like it quite a bit,” said Dubrowolski.
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br />   “Uh-huh. I ask a vapid, foolish question and you answer in kind. It’s obvious to both of us that in view of our relative positions you wouldn’t dare say anything else, but we both play it out. That’s good. Half of being successful is catching on to rituals.”

  Dubrowolski smiled weakly. The man was having a peculiar effect on him. His aggressive honesty was sort of appealing, and yet it was aggressive. He was using it, playing some game, setting up responses only to knock them down. Dubrowolski almost liked him.

  “Tell me, John, what sort of things do you do when you’re not being an engineer? Have any hobbies?”

  “I do mathematical derivations.”

  “No, no, I mean something other than technical stuff.”

  “But that’s my hobby.”

  “Oh, there must be something else. Sports, chess? Come on.”

  “You mean like on the weekends?” said Dubrowolski. Screw this game, he thought.

  “Yes. Right.”

  “May I speak freely?” Inside, he smiled.

  “Of course,” said Rupp, leaning a bit closer.

  “Well, I have my own apartment, you know.”

  Rupp nodded.

  “I mean—just I live there. My parents live somewhere else.”

  Rupp nodded.

  “Well, on the weekends … are you sure I can, you know, say whatever I want?”

  “Of course,” said Rupp, turning up the volume control on the hidden tape-recorder microphone. “There’s no one else here.”

  “Well, on the weekends,” continued Dubrowolski, “I like to, you know, bring girls up to this, uh, apartment I have and, you know, fuck them. Young girls mainly.”

  “All right,” said Rupp. “That’s—”

  “After I fuck them, I usually go back to a derivation, but then I feel like it again so—”

  “That’s enough!” said Rupp sharply, though he was interested.

  “I suck them, too,” continued Dubrowolski in a cheerful verbal cascade. “I find the thing that excites me most is something odd or bizarre, although usually you’d need an older one for that. Maybe someone exceedingly thin or fat, overly hairy or balding, anything.”

  Rupp arose. “Will you—”

  “Could even be a limp, or a harelip. Even a cleft palate. I remember one, I had three orgasms in about twenty minutes, she was missing, you know, a leg.”

  “Enough!” bellowed Rupp. “Shut up! Just—” He sat back down and lowered his voice. “Stop. Please stop.”

  “You said you wanted to know what I did.”

  “I didn’t mean your personal life,” said Rupp. He thought of his daughter. “There are some things I just won’t hear. They’re sinful, depraved. I don’t hear things like that.”

  Dubrowolski wondered if he was going to be fired.

  “I think it’s about time we got down to the purpose of all this,” said Rupp, composure regained.

  At least, thought Dubrowolski, there would be no more games. He’d at least equalized that contest.

  “The reason you’re here has to do mainly with lying.”

  “What?”

  “Not your lying. No. Other people’s.” Rupp seemed to thrust out his chin and chest. His manner, never really suited for intimacy, became tutorial, oracular. “You see, that’s the way a company works. Any bureaucracy, in fact. There’s a built-in hierarchy of lies. I tell my supervisor what he wants to hear, whether or not it’s the truth, because I’m afraid of the consequences. He then does the same to his supervisor, and so on and so forth up the line until it gets to the president, ‘it’ being a rosy, distorted picture having no relation to reality.”

  Dubrowolski pushed a strand of blond hair from his right eye. He suppressed a yawn.

  “John,” said Rupp, leaning forward, “you’re held in high esteem by the management here. Very high. We think there’s a bright future for you at the Labs. I would say lab supervisor isn’t at all beyond your reach in the next few years. Not at all.”

  Dubrowolski tried to be serious, but couldn’t quite do it. He’d begun, finally (he was always so slow at these things), to get the drift of the conversation: Rupp wanted something from him. Probably some special extra work or something. Maybe putting in some Sundays or late Saturday nights. Something that might interfere with his personal life. Well, if they really needed it, if the vice-president himself was asking …

  “John,” said Rupp, very intently, “someone has been abusing the paging system at the Labs. Paging crazy names, people not here, dead people, and it’s reached the stage where it’s become disruptive. I want to know who it is.”

  Dubrowolski cupped a hand over his mouth and nose, and peered at Rupp above the fingers.

  “What makes you think I would know such a thing?” he said into the hand.

  “This type of amusing, deviant behavior gets around very rapidly in a work environment,” said Rupp. He thrust his head in the direction of his small bookcase. Dubrowolski saw Management Psychology, Executive’s Handbook of Labor Problems, and The Chronically Abusive Employee. “This has been going on long enough so that I’ll bet ninety percent of the engineers and techs know who it is. I think you’re more mature than that ninety percent, John. I think you realize this is no simple laughing matter.”

  “Gee, in all honesty, Mr. Rupp, I really don’t feel I’m that mature,” said Dubrowolski. “I feel I’m probably in the top forty percent maybe, but never the top ten for maturity. No sir.”

  “John,” said Rupp, leaning closer, “I think you should know we’ve discussed this with outside psychiatric consultants—several, in fact—and more than one has told us the individual might be seriously deranged. So you’re not helping anyone by not telling. You’re keeping a sick man from treatment, that’s all.”

  So it was confirmed, thought Dubrowolski. Officially proclaimed. Brank was crazy.

  “Now tell me, John, who is it?”

  “May I speak freely?” said Dubrowolski.

  “John, of course.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rupp’s lips dissolved to two thin lines. He again opened the folder before him. “I see those draft people are really after your carcass,” he said. “We’ve gotten four questionnaires about you already this year. Of course, we keep telling them you’re essential to the F24BZ project, but they keep asking if you’re still working on it. Persistent son-of-a-guns, though, aren’t they?” Rupp smiled.

  Dubrowolski thought he might try running away to Canada. He could live in the Yukon and teach the Eskimos complex variables, he could scribble proofs on walrus hides, do degenerate things on weekends with the toothless Eskimo women. He looked up. “I’m, you know, sorry.”

  Rupp gave him one quick, puissant look, then rose.

  Dubrowolski also rose, dispirited, tipping over his chair in the process. “Sorry again,” he said, stooping to pick it up and sidling clumsily toward the door.

  “Mr. Brine will escort you back,” said Rupp crisply.

  Dubrowolski winced as Rupp bent the edge of the manila folder. As he opened the door, Rupp said, “By the way, what’s the chances that Yig filter will be ready by the end of the week?”

  Dubrowolski grinned despite himself. “The week? You mean the month, don’t you? That thing’ll take at least four weeks, probably six.”

  “Oh, really?” said Rupp, his voice unusually deep and silky. “You sure?”

  “Oh, pos—” said Dubrowolski, catching sight of Mills sitting in the outer office. And suddenly realizing, intuiting, that the entire purpose of the conversation, the whole elaborate buildup and straining for familiarity, the implied threats and promises, the paging business, all had been but a skewed framework from which to dangle those last two questions and extract without suspicion the answers. And he’d given them, blurted them innocently, and now, no doubt, they’d be used to hang someone. Brank, perhaps, or Steinberg, or Ardway, or all three. Someone. Using the troops to ensnare the officers, first him, and now Mills. He felt light-headed, bewild
ered, a loser’s feeling of disorientation. He began to appreciate the almost geometric precision of it, the progression and diversions, the coiling logic tightening off-center. He glanced backward into the room and saw Rupp disappear into the closet. Was it a closet?

  PROGRESS

  Progress Report—Job 6145—H. Brank—12/1

  With J. Dubrowolski, evaluating DuPont R-119, as recommended by L. Fong, Structures Department. Epoxy still maintaining integrity after 2 temperature cycles from –60 to +150 degrees C. although linewidth of Yig spheres beginning to degrade. Proceeding with further tests.

  Progress reports had to be constructed like the rest of American technical writing, all traces removed of anything recognizably human, implications given of concentrated, energetic efficiency, majestically derived theories always substantiated in the end by laboratory data with slight, explainable, experimental errors. They were ritualistic rather than descriptive, and reminded Brank of travelogue movie shorts featuring shots of squinting Norwegian craftsmen meticulously carving wood, followed by scenes of five women at electric typewriters. “Although the old skills are still handed down from father to son, the bustling world of modern business has made a great impact on life in Novosvenske.”

  Brank sat at his desk and worked out irrelevant derivations on white pads. Sometimes he drew schematic circuit diagrams next to the derivations, and sometimes he drew pictures of Steinberg, and sometimes he connected parts of circuits to parts of Steinberg to create a smoothly functioning unit. He took jump shots with the crumpled sheets into a corner wastebasket, hitting about three out of five on average. Dorfman began taking set shots, connecting on only twenty percent, but continuing long after Brank had stopped. At the nearest bench, Dubrowolski watched as Wizer sat on a high stool and performed measurements. Steinberg made little wheezing noises in his cubicle. Knobs turned, meters moved, circular traces whirled over oscilloscope screens. The air was heavy and still, men looked thoughtful, wrote things, observed. A light blinked twice. This was engineering.

  Progress Report—Job 6145—H. Brank—12/2

  With J. Dubrowolski, continuing to evaluate DuPont R-119. Although epoxy has maintained integrity after 5 temperature cycles, it has raised the effective sphere linewidth to 1.1 oersteds. Will try to determine cause of degradation and calculate whether tighter coupling can provide an acceptable loss-bandwidth tradeoff.