Easy and Hard Ways Out Read online

  Redberry pounces, too slow. The fly is up, gone.

  “Sorry, Dr. Auerbach.”

  Redberry sees it near the bookcase, walks slowly over, sets, pounces again. Again too slow.

  “Gee, we can’t seem—”

  Redberry’s face is alive with writhing, motile muscle; A is passive. He is satisfied, the satisfaction of positive feedback, of evoking the familiar, pressing a button and seeing the light go on. He has known Redberry for twenty-six years and has always considered him a servile, twitching ass. In business discussions Redberry never ventures an opinion until he thinks he knows A’s position, then agrees with it. Should A reverse himself, Redberry agrees with that too. In years past, A would often switch sides three or four times just to see if Redberry would follow—which he did, and didn’t even seem embarrassed. A’s model of Redberry is a thick, mealy fluid that oozes into the shape of its surroundings.

  Nevertheless, Redberry is a dedicated worker, if not an efficient one, and apparently (though A cannot understand why) he is able to inspire enough fear among second-level management (could it be the twitching, the imitation of the throat clearing?) to get things done. A watches him as he stands mute now, snapping his fingers, eyes following the fly. He almost never speaks, unless A asks him a question. He will stand this way for an hour until A says something. A knows this because he has let it happen. Several times.

  A has never made many friends. Actually, he has never made any. Acquaintances fall into two categories: those not intelligent enough to be considered companions, and those intelligent enough to be considered rivals. Though he socializes with dozens of politicians for business purposes, he considers them subhuman and never bothers to vote on election day. He relates poorly to women; he is overly courteous and formal with them, a result of his unease. Never highly sexed, by age forty-one he’d stopped all conjugal relations with his wife. Women were incapable of being analyzed, made unpredictable responses, were irrational. A would not have a female secretary. Too upsetting. Better Redberry than a woman. Redberry stands without moving, an obedient statue. A, despite his better judgment, feels like talking to someone. He clears his throat.

  “Who’s in tonight?” he says.

  Redberry looks at him alertly. “Oh. Well, uh, most of Engineering we think is still on O.T. Ardway, we guess. Blevin. Rupp is probably still here. Paint shop.”

  A thinks, No one interesting. It occurs to him that no matter who Redberry had mentioned, it still would’ve been, No one interesting. “All right, get Rupp here. Tell him.”

  Redberry leaves, returns a moment later.

  “Close the door.”

  Redberry closes the door.

  A leans back in his chair, finds his thoughts drifting, as they have lately, to death. He was going to die soon because the men who worked in the biological sciences were incompetents without vision. Seventy years average was the longest they could keep men alive. After all this time, seventy years. If only I had worked in medicine, he thinks now. What advances might have been made. After all, didn’t he hold over a hundred patents? (He ignores the fact that nearly all were for relatively minor improvements in existing devices.) Swiftly, he roughs in an approach to longevity: get rid of the excess baggage. Sever the lumbering body that pollutes the blood, gulps food and air, strains the heart; sever it and maintain only the head by artificial means; the small, efficient head with its eyes and ears and brain. What a loss to the world that he hadn’t gone into biology.

  He thinks of death from a personal point of view, tries to fathom it, closes his eyes and pictures the unconscious, eternal nullity of it, lying in the blackness, cut off without thought, not seeing what was going on, missing man’s voyages to the stars, missing everything, trapped forever in silent, inanimate slumber while mankind harnessed fusion, cured cancer, mastered telepathy. How small life seemed when compared with death; a mere interlude, a minor interruption. Only the mechanics of it are simple, A thinks. Your heart stops, your lungs fill with fluid, small blood vessels burst behind your eyes, and then men come. Put you in a bag, take you away, and the lawyers unsheathe their pens. As for him, since he is childless, nothing will be passed down, no immature traumas will result, no sweetly fanciful explanations need be concocted for grandchildren. The bulk of his wealth, over a million dollars, will go to his wife. Or more properly, for the care of his wife, a small, thin-lipped woman whose brain chemistry had changed in some subtle, irreversible way the night she returned from a shopping trip and found A reading in the living room, their two-year-old son upstairs in his crib, mouth open, strangled on his own mucus. But didn’t you hear something, didn’t you—He had married at nineteen, fallen out of love at twenty, stayed where he was from some combination of guilt and embarrassment. All these years. Of course, there was a peculiar sort of convenience.… The remainder of his estate will go to the IEEE and the American Physical Society. He has left instructions to be cremated. No muss, no fuss, no box, no hole. Ashes scattered. Optimum death.

  He looks up, the tiniest bit startled, and sees Redberry still there, waiting. How long? He spots the fly walking rapidly on the arm of his chair, flitting to the surface of his desk.

  “Here,” he says. “You kill it by the flight-path intercept method.”

  Redberry, in a trance of his own, abruptly musters his attention.

  “Flies leap off a horizontal surface backwards,” says A. “So—” He cautiously places his palms two inches above his desk, slightly behind the doomed insect. The fly, sensing something, has stopped moving. “—you place your hands about like this, and—” The fly rubs one front leg against the other and cocks its head in what, for another species, might be deemed a quizzical expression. Briefly, for just an instant, A and Redberry see the same thing. The latter, of course, simply banishes the image from his mind.

  “—you clap!”

  A claps his hands loudly, then opens them, and the fly, having dutifully leapt off backward and died, leaves a tiny spot of blood next to “unpublished master’s thesis” on A’s paper.

  “Optimum death,” says A. “Send in Rupp.”

  GORGON

  Rupp has been in this room only twice in his twenty-four years at Auerbach Labs. It is unlit now, except for a small, dim floor lamp in a corner, and for a moment, as he steps inside, Rupp imagines the figure seated at the desk is asleep. Rupp closes the door gently behind him, makes no attempt to advance. The figure at the desk remains silent, although Rupp can now discern that its eyes are open. Rupp stands there waiting in the semidarkness, his heart a swollen knot of pounding muscle in a cellophane chest. It must be the F24. He knows. Oh, God, it’s no good, and he knows.

  “Uchm. Sit.”

  Rupp remains frozen.

  “Sit.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Have—a—seat.”

  “Oh. Thank you. Oh.”

  Rupp sits down on one of the leather chairs near the door. A, for an instant, wonders if he should’ve kept him standing as he did Redberry. An experiment. See how long he’d last. A says nothing, writes something on a sheet of paper. For a moment, Rupp imagines it is a confession that A will insist he sign. An admission of failure on the F24BZ. Acceptance of sole responsibility. A notice of resignation. A surrender to the government for criminal, treasonable negligence on a project vital to the defense of the United States. He hunches his shoulders forward, crosses his arms, and rubs his elbows. His stomach hurts, and he becomes aware that he is shivering. His ten-dollar tie is pinching his fleshy, executive neck. A looks up, clears his throat.

  “I’ve been thinking about death.”

  Rupp stops breathing. Death? Is that a metaphor for the depth of his ill feeling about the F24? An indication of the lengths he’s prepared to go to? Or a metaphor for something else? Something desperately, horribly important but completely obscure? Or not a metaphor at all?

  “I’ve been thinking that if only I’d worked in the biological sciences we might already be enjoying an extra ten, twenty years
of life.”

  Rupp thinks: What does this mean? God, God, what does this mean? What is he trying to tell me about that plane?

  “The key, as I see it, is to get rid of the excess baggage. Keep the head, throw away the rest. Any other approach is bound to fail.”

  Rupp stares, speechless, his mind a complete blank.

  “You must have some thoughts about dying, Saul. You’re a religious man, from what I remember. What’s your view of death?”

  A leans back, awaiting a reply. Rupp tries to push a coherent sentence out past his lips.

  “You mean what I … what I think about death? What I think about it?”

  A says nothing.

  “Death is—” Rupp begins to shake his head back and forth. “Well, it’s terrible, the worst. Death? I mean, who wants to die? It’s … you just lie there, your bones.”

  A rises from his chair, walks to a corner shelf, and examines (or pretends to) some books. “What about heaven?” His back is to Rupp.

  Rupp, who believes in heaven about twenty-five percent (his belief in hell is about seventy percent), does not, for the moment, answer. An expert in the field himself, he understands that A is baiting him; he understands, too, suddenly and clearly, that these games are always won by the man higher on the organization chart, independent of answers.

  “If you believe in heaven, the thought can be comforting,” says Rupp.

  “Do you?” asks A, back still turned.

  He’s mocking me, thinks Rupp. Next he’ll ask where heaven is, how is one transported there, etcetera, etcetera, until I look thoroughly absurd.

  “I’m not sure,” says Rupp, cheeks flushing.

  “You’re not?” says A.

  A portion of Rupp’s fear slides into anger. “No.” And instantly back to fear.

  Suddenly, A turns half around. “Saul, is Engineering doing the job it should?”

  It’s happening, thinks Rupp. He knows. He knows everything. Everything. “I never expected it to take this much time,” says Rupp plaintively. “It’s a small boat. I didn’t think the steering system could be that complicated.”

  A hears, but ignores. He wants to discuss philosophy, a philosophical evaluation of the function of engineering, but instead the man is whining some infantile excuse, defending himself against an imagined attack. A tries again.

  “No, I mean is Engineering doing what it should, rather than simply what it can?”

  Rupp is submerged in a quivering blue funk. He tries to figure out what it is A knows, what horrible and humiliating facts he’s unearthed from Rupp’s past. The ladies’ rooms, he thinks in dismay. He knows that I can’t help glancing into ladies’ rooms when they open the door. Oh, sickness! Oh, grotesque depravity! (In fact, it had always been one of life’s keen disappointments that he’d never glimpsed any special secret female devices corresponding to urinals.) He is just about to speak, when he realizes the impossibility of it, of anyone ever knowing. No, he thinks, it’s something much more reasonable. Like his tapping the phones. A has found out that he listens in on phone conversations, can monitor any call from anyone in management. By now, thinks Rupp, he knows I used to tap my parents’ phone when I was in high school. Probably even knows I tap my own phone at home so I can record Maddy’s conversations. He must’ve found out exactly how I wired … Wait a minute, wait a minute. No, that’s impossible too. A would’ve never called him in then. He would simply have been fired without ceremony. No, it wasn’t the phones. It must be … the disguises. That’s it. The disguises. All right, bad enough, but not impossible. Certainly better than the ladies’ rooms.

  “Dr. Auerbach,” says Rupp sincerely, “I do what I do only so that I can more readily understand and evaluate the true attitudes of the men. I know it’s not a standard practice, the wigs and the makeup and particularly the false bellies and behinds, but I honestly feel that knowing one’s personnel is more—”

  Again, A shuts off reception. All right, the man is beneath philosophy. And apparently hiding a good deal too. And clearly quite upset about it—religious influence, no doubt—so that his guilt lies on the surface like scum on a pond. Still, A begins to lose interest. Guilt and fear were so commonplace.

  “For example, how’s the thin-film ferrite program doing?” A asks casually, lowering the abstraction level one notch in order to extract a coherent reply.

  The effect is exactly the opposite of what he’s intended; Rupp is simply incapable of accepting at face value a question about an obscure research project. He rises from his chair. Is it the stock manipulations? The time he ran into Odz at that porno film? His leaving two hours early last Wednesday? He tries to speak, can’t, forces out, “I’m not really—”

  A gives up. A waste. Only thing left is to resume work. “Oh, by the way, Saul. Before you go. Don’t forget to keep pounding away on that F24. I promised McNamara personally, you know, that he’d get ECM and radar systems ten years ahead of their time. I’d feel pretty bad if we let Mac down.”

  Rupp, still standing, has barely heard. After the phrase “before you go,” his senses have dimmed in euphoric relief. Before you go—He was getting out. Free. The F24 not a major concern in the Great Man’s mind. At least not yet. Rupp’s impulse is to flood the room with reassurances, guarantees they’ll meet the schedule, but he suppresses it. Over-affirmation would raise suspicions, even additional conversation would lead to questions, probing. And A was just about finished with him. Before you go. He walks to the door, opens it. A has turned back to perusing his bookshelves.

  “I’m right on top of it, Dr. Auerbach,” says Rupp, and then, compulsively, and with great relief blurts out, “Oh, incidentally, I’m replacing all those company envelopes I’ve used for my personal mailings.”

  He slowly closes the door, but just before he does he glances back, and there, caught in the shaft of light from the outer office, is A, full-face and unsmiling, staring at him horribly with remote, detached curiosity.

  AUERBACH LABORATORIES

  Inter-Office Memorandum 12/3/66

  From: EPICAC

  To: W. Murphy

  cc: N. Klapholtz, binary file

  Subject: Paper towel expenditures, toilet paper expenditures

  The accounting department monthly expense audit has, for the past three periods, shown an approximately exponential increase in funds appropriated for both paper towels and toilet paper to stock the lavatories. This month’s spending was sufficient to actuate the predanger-level warning loop, the programming of which has resulted in this memorandum. Since none of us want to risk the consequences of an actual danger alert, kindly restrain expenditures in the areas indicated.

  Sincerely,

  EPICAC

  E: terminal

  ADVICE

  a. A Minor Technicality

  Tuesday morning, a rare day—Klein was in, and his news from the outside spread rapidly through the lab. “Sanders hiring Grade-Two wiremen. Hazeltine letting go draftsmen, but taking on senior lab techs. Grumman laying off three hundred, all engineers. And vacation is only a hundred seventy-eight days distant.” At that Klein smiled, then complained of a tickling sensation near the back of his throat.

  In his cubicle, Steinberg sat and let the words reverberate in his skull: three hundred, all engineers. Today Grumman, tomorrow … And then where would he be? Where would both of them be? He thought of Rose, his mannish, once powerful wife, reduced to a wheelchair by arthritis. He let his mind dwell fondly on that time she’d replaced their hot water heater in the basement, done all the plumbing and gas piping herself. “It’s enough you have to work every day,” she’d said. “You just leave the rest to me.” His dear, sweet Rose, his strength, how she used to set up the vaporizer for him every night, how firm yet gentle she was on top of him in bed, how patiently she held back until he’d reached orgasm. Rose, imprisoned now in a wheelchair, steel-band arms barely able to move. And Dennis trying to batter his way out of Montana Law School, his sixth year, complaining about the requir
ed courses in Livestock Easements and Landmark Ranching Decisions. (High school guidance counselor: “You can’t tell with a thing like intelligence, Mr. Steinberg. Your son may just be a late bloomer.”) Yeah, thought Steinberg now. A late bloomer. Like his Dad.

  His decision was made without question; no need for votes here, or democratic processes, or agonizing reappraisals. Abstract principles would not keep him employed. He summoned Brank to the office.

  “There’s just a little tiny point I’d like to clear up before the inspection,” he said.

  Brank stared at him impassively, and Steinberg felt a nostril suddenly go dead, air supply cut to zero by a draining sinus.

  “The acceptance test sheet,” he continued, “has data columns for five temperature cycles.”

  Brank’s eyes grew liquid; Steinberg seemed to shimmer.

  “We’re only doing three, so we’ll just duplicate the third column of numbers in the remaining two columns.”

  Brank nodded, and spoke slowly. His head felt immensely heavy. “There are five columns—because the actual spec is five cycles. Is that right?”

  Steinberg turned sideways, excluding Brank from his tube of vision. In the far corner of the room, he saw Dorfman doing deep knee bends.

  “We were told it was three,” said Brank softly, “but it was always five, wasn’t it?”

  Steinberg nodded, head turned away.

  “The inspector will never agree,” said Brank.

  Steinberg blew his nose. “He won’t actually witness all the tests. He’ll see a few, and take our report on the rest.”

  “Blevin will never buy this,” said Brank.

  “Don’t worry about Blevin.”

  Brank slouched against the glass. “They must be applying incredible pressure to make someone like yourself agree to this, Stan.”

  Steinberg turned back to him, ignoring the sarcasm. “We’ve all got to agree. This is just a minor, nit-picking technicality that can ruin the entire project. We’ll fix it later when we get the right epoxy, but we can’t let this whole thing go under, and us with it, because of ten cents’ worth of cement.”