Easy and Hard Ways Out Read online

  “Dragon-one off target,” said Chaplin, the flatness in his voice ever so slightly strained.

  “You’ve got it, baby,” said Buchfarer over the intercom.

  “Okay,” said Kinsella, punching a final number into the computer that controlled the run.

  They swooped downward through the moist Asian air.

  b. Hanging On

  They were in the environmental test lab warming up the equipment. The ECM pod was already in the main oven being cooled. Wizer was preparing data sheets while Mills and Coletti heated bagels in the auxiliary ovens. Steinberg was rigid with fear near one corner. Chin-Tao Wong moved cautiously away from Lubell, who seemed about to ask him a question. Ardway underlined phrases in a quality control manual.

  “Everyone is disappearing,” said Brank to Blevin, who sat casually at a desk, his arms folded. “LoParino is gone, Dubrowolski is gone, and Pat is gone.” He sneezed.

  “Of course,” said Blevin. “When the pressure’s up, the people are down. That’s the way it always is with an inspection.”

  “Life is a disappointment,” said Brank, something tiny clicking into place in his brain. “That’s the message. Did you know the real inventor of the sign that revolves around the Times Building missed getting the patent by two hours?”

  “Bullshit,” said Blevin. “The thing probably doesn’t really work anyway.”

  At that moment, Pat walked in, looked around briefly (avoiding Brank’s gaze), and left. Steinberg followed. In the oven, liquid nitrogen bubbled out of an inlet pipe and metamorphosed instantly to super-cold subfreezing gas. The glass porthole was encrusted with a hundred thousand icy white crystals. Inside, the temperature plunged headlong toward the final value specified by the Air Force, minus seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit.

  “I wonder how fast your spit would freeze in there,” said Brank.

  The Rock had been thinking. If only he could piece it together. Something funny. Lights left on in the Accounting men’s room, soap disappearing; now blower-motor breaker tampered with, lights left on in the Personnel office. Something definitely was happening. And it wouldn’t be long before Murphy would blame it on him, accuse him of forgetting, the senile errors of an old man. He had to do something, take some action. He walked back to the Accounting men’s room and stepped inside. It was empty. He looked down the line of cubicles, then sank to his knees and pressed his head sideways to the floor to search for feet. Nothing. He stood in front of the circuit box and carefully opened each breaker, hearing the fan motors shut off, seeing the rows of fluorescents blink out one by one. When he left, the room was completely dark. He locked the door with a key, and began to letter a crude sign on a paper towel. OUT OF ORDER. He felt in his pocket for Scotch tape.

  Oddities pinwheeled through his mind, things out of place, disjointed: the strange sounds he sometimes heard—non-plumbing noises; the missing toilet handles, too many of them; the profuse, unusual graffiti. Imagination, he thought. The imagination of an old man. Still, if he could only piece it together …

  The inspection team was in the environmental test lab, watching as the techs took data.

  “Lot of advantages, Gene, working in a place like Auerbach,” said Rupp jovially, draping an arm over Colonel McGuinn’s shoulder. “The Labs ever found someone who could take charge, someone who knew all the right people in the services—hell, who knows what they’d be willing to fork over. Package deal might even include Mr. Redberry’s secretary.”

  Colonel McGuinn nodded sagely, a wise old bowling pin. “Wears too much black,” he said curtly. And then, “You need someone to get things off dead center.”

  Captain Cramer sat down at a small corner desk with Blevin. Before each were thick piles of paper labled “Acceptance Test Procedures” and “Mil Spec Handbook.” The men spoke in code.

  “We’ll want this to Mil-C-five-nine-three-two, class D, method four,” said Cramer.

  “Method four is preposterous,” countered Blevin. “We use Mil-C-five-oh-eight instead, sub-section three, paragraph nineteen, except with the word ‘ninety’ substituted for ‘seventy.’”

  Cramer shook his head. “This is something I don’t know,” he said.

  “But now you do know,” said Blevin.

  “I’ll have to get clearance,” insisted Cramer. “When I don’t know something I have to get clearance. This is something I don’t know.”

  In a small room adjacent to the lab, Pat and Steinberg sat at a table; next door, in a larger room, Redberry, Ardway, and the vice-presidents were going over some papers.

  “So,” said Pat, nodding, “I guess we come out on top again. Even when we lose, we win.”

  She was dressed uncharacteristically; tight white sweater, short brown skirt, black mesh stockings and high heels, pink iridescent lipstick. She’d dyed her hair red.

  Steinberg looked around furtively. “I don’t think we should talk about it now,” he said. “It’s not over yet. Someone could walk in.”

  He wondered about her dress, wondered what significance to attach to it, tried to pin down something else that was different about her.

  “Someone already has walked in, Stanley,” said Pat.

  He whipped about quickly, cursing his tunnel vision; he saw no one.

  “Years ago,” she added. “Years ago.”

  “Ah’m takin’ her up now,” said Wizer, cutting off the liquid nitrogen supply and turning on the heat. In fifteen minutes the temperature in the oven would far exceed that of boiling water.

  “Oven thermometer have a calibration sticker?” asked the young lieutenant.

  “Oh, yeah, they calibrated it,” said Wizer, pointing to a small yellow paper rectangle with a date on it pasted on the side of the oven.

  Inspected by J. Roth, thought Brank. “They calibrate everything here,” he said. Or rather, he thought, more accurately, they put calibration stickers on everything.

  “How about the people?” said the lieutenant. “They calibrate them?”

  What a strange and unmilitary question, thought Brank. He was exceptionally nervous and edgy. I could spill the beans, he thought. Right now, I could spill the beans to this guy here, and he looks like the right guy too.

  “People change too fast,” he said. “You think they’re one thing and they turn out another. Can’t calibrate people.”

  The lieutenant grinned faintly. “Oh, there’s some you can,” he said. “Soon’s you look at ’em.”

  He motioned with his chin in the direction of Brank’s badge, half hidden in a shirt pocket, neatly trimmed picture of a lion peering out.

  “My sticker,” said Brank sheepishly.

  Buchfarer was conscious of being a prisoner now in a screeching metal shell, his life totally dependent on machinery and electronic parts and invisible electromagnetic beams. “Dragon-two rolling in!” He felt the acceleration, felt himself pressured back into the seat, felt the wetness in his helmet. He searched the night intently for signs of anything—lights, the target, the flash of a ground-to-air missile—but saw only blackness and the dull red glow of his own instruments. The low ceiling had made visibility impossible. He felt a slight jolt an instant before the plane leveled off and began to climb.

  “Rockets away!” said Kinsella.

  The engines howled as they wrenched the plane upward in a steep ascent.

  “See anything?” said Kinsella. “You see any secondaries?”

  “I can’t see shit!” said Buchfarer. “Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

  “I’m not sure if I hit it,” said Kinsella.

  After several moments they began to level off, and Buchfarer retook control of the plane. “Dragon-two off target,” he radioed. Chaplin’s craft was a flickering silver dot in the distance when the flight leader’s voice came through the headphones.

  “Dragon flight, this is Dragon leader. Didn’t see any secondaries here, did you?”

  “Negative,” said Buchfarer.

  “All right, we’ll try bobbing for som
e more apples then. You keep us close company and jam those eyelids open.”

  “Okay.”

  Buchfarer didn’t feel like keeping anyone close company. He felt like sleeping. He wished he were home, in Seattle, on a brisk Saturday morning in autumn, lying under a soft quilt next to his sleeping wife, the day still ahead of him, big breakfast, the newspaper, a game of softball with the boys, standing hands on hips in a sunlit field and just breathing, inhaling the air.

  He saw Chaplin peel off.

  c. Going Out

  In the men’s room, Schneck paced back and forth. He was trapped. He had planned to show up at the inspection, then sneak back later, but now the plan was aborted—by a senile janitor. The irony! The plans of a doctorate in physics wiped out with elegant simplicity by a custodian. Schneck clenched and unclenched his hairy fists. He could not yell for fear he’d be discovered. He could not switch on the lights or the blowers for the same reason. The man was a genius, he thought. J. Edgar Hoover of the Maintenance Department. Schneck sat down heavily on a toilet seat. He began sketching a picture of a simian creature defecating from a tree on a shrinking letter A. There was nothing to do, after all, but sketch.

  Outside, security officer Brine put a meaty hand on Rocco’s shoulder. “Got you!” he said triumphantly.

  McGuinn and the inspection team were in the large room with Blevin, Redberry, and the rest of the vice-presidents. Rupp, Ardway, Steinberg, and Pat were in the small room assembling the final data packages. The blue, crenulated Air Force approval stickers lay in a pile on a table in the larger room. All that remained was for the engineers to sign the data sheets.

  Lubell and Chin-Tao Wong went first, putting their signatures under those of the techs, Mills and Coletti. Pat signed next in the “supervisor” box, and then Ardway, as Chief Engineer. Lubell and Wong left. Ardway pointed to a spot on a new sheet, directly under a scrawled “Elton Wizer.” He held a pen out to Brank. Brank stared at it.

  “You have to sign, Harvey,” said Ardway.

  “Where’s LoParino?” asked Brank. His nose was totally stuffed. His head ached.

  “You know,” said Rupp in an avuncular tone, “that little petition was really spectacularly naïve. We knew about it faster than you feel the pain from a kick in the—” He grinned. “Palo Alto, about now,” he continued. “Your friend’s location, I mean. Taking advantage of a very fine arrangement we made for him with a vendor of ours out there. A truly unique position, at a unique salary. Fitted him perfectly.”

  Someone must’ve had an opening for a schizophrenic, thought Brank.

  “The need was immediate, the opportunity was there … and he took it. That’s where your friend is, Harvey. All of a sudden, he grew up.”

  Brank took the pen in his hand, fingered it absently. I have confidence in you, Joan had said.

  “The same type of opportunity could just as easily be yours,” said Rupp, his voice rising sonorously, filling the room. “Just evaluate things objectively, look at them as they are in the real world.”

  Personal integrity, thought Brank. Personal integrity. Or vanity. Unless one existed in a vacuum, the two were inseparable. He looked at Pat, saw instantly what Steinberg had missed. She was wearing contact lenses. Her expression was pained, but also remote, as if witnessing an ax murder in a movie. For the first time, Brank noticed she had tits.

  “Really,” said Ardway, “all it is is a formality.” He swiveled his head in a series of jerky, birdlike movements.

  Brank felt sorry for him.

  Brank looked down at the data sheet, noticed the last two columns duplicated exactly the third column. They should’ve changed them a little, he thought.

  “This isn’t even a good fake,” he said.

  “If you don’t sign,” said Rupp, his voice very calm and resigned now, “one of the other engineers will simply sign in your place, and your protest will have gone totally unnoticed. There’ll be no dramatic, martyr-type firing. Instead we’ll merely, ah, ‘re-evaluate’ your judgment and decision-making capabilities, probably give you tasks that are less challenging, perhaps assign you to work under other engineers, such as Lubell. Or have you help out in the Drafting Department. In six months, possibly a year, we’d quietly let you go. Actually, I’d hazard a guess that by that time the decision to leave would come from you, not us. After that, of course, things might be somewhat sticky. Your employment record and our references would probably rule out aerospace; teaching positions have ten applicants for every opening, and … But, I suppose you have savings.”

  “I could tell the Air Force right now,” said Brank. “I could tell that lieutenant.”

  “An embarrassment,” said Rupp, nodding. “Poor Wizer would have to swear the data was true, we’d invoke the Auerbach name, produce records of your work history to suggest an unreliable, disgruntled employee … in short, we’d have to talk ourselves blue for about ten minutes. But knowing Colonel McGuinn—and I do, quite well—I think we’d emerge reasonably unscarred. In those circumstances, of course, your termination would have to be instantaneous.”

  Steinberg sneezed. Brank remembered he had a cold, and also sneezed.

  “But why be so negative?” said Rupp. “We think you’ve done an excellent job. You’ve shown unusual conscientiousness. We’re aware of that, and we intend to reward it properly, just as we’ve done with LoParino. Now you’re not going to throw all that away, Harvey, for any reason, much less a pointless gesture. I know you’re not. You’ve worked too hard.”

  Brank felt like laughing. LoParino had shown unusual conscientiousness, they were telling him.

  “It’s only a formality, Harvey,” said Ardway. “It really doesn’t matter.”

  Stand up to those … fucks, Joan had said. Brank leaned over the data sheet. For an instant he understood, sensed really, why his son ripped to shreds the things he made. You’ll find something. I have confidence in you. Brank shook his head. I won’t, he thought.

  And signed.

  “It was entirely cowardly,” Brank admitted to Schneck later, in the Accounting men’s room. “A rotten, craven, pusillanimous, mean-spirited act.”

  Schneck perched on the top railing of a partition separating commodes. “Oh, it’s not that bad. I think you could leave out ‘mean-spirited.’ I mean, look at my disaster. Besides, after all that happened, I think your signing LoParino’s name is a kind of poetic … injustice.”

  “The Air Force team didn’t seem to pick it up,” said Brank forlornly. “But at least maybe Rupp sweated a bit. A vein did pop out in his forehead when he saw it. Just like he was having a difficult bowel movement, same look, same vein. Ah, but of course it had no practical value, accomplished nothing.”

  “Always an accomplishment to pop management veins,” said Schneck. “Naturally, they’re going to fire you. Naturally.”

  “I don’t know,” said Brank. “After all, I did sign.”

  “You could live here,” said Schneck hopefully, his hirsute fingers curling tightly around the metal rod. “I could show you things, we could build another gun, it’s really quite comfortable actually.”

  “Thank you,” said Brank. “I don’t think so. But thank you anyway.”

  “What will you do then?”

  In the end, Brank thought, there aren’t many sensible alternatives to living in the men’s room. “Same as always,” he said. “Try to keep my weight off the foot that’s about to step in the crap.”

  They were just ready to shake hands when the outer door opened and Schneck quickly slid from view. Brank left, mumbling a greeting to Lubell, who was casually entering one of the cubicles. Brank felt simultaneously relieved and sick, a familiar sensation, one he’d learned to tolerate. He went to a phone and dialed “O.”

  “Please page Larry Lubell to call Mr. Redberry. It’s extremely urgent.”

  He was a third of the way down the corridor when the page came, and he barely noticed an anxious Lubell bursting from the men’s room, eyes wide, wet hands holding u
p his pants. At least they don’t have my name, thought Brank, as Lubell scrambled toward the phone.

  Buchfarer’s eyes were still on Chaplin when he heard Kinsella’s high-pitched scream in his ears.

  “SAM! SAM! SAM! SAM!”

  He looked down to his left and saw them coming, three telephone poles whooshing up above the clouds, two headed directly at him, one veering off in a flat arc and beginning to wobble erratically. The latter was probably trying to home in on Chaplin, who was already diving, the standard evasive maneuver. For Buchfarer, it was too late for evasive maneuvers; the low ceiling had prevented them from spotting the SAM launching flashes in time. His instruments made the rhythmic pulsing sound that indicated the SAMs had locked on to his plane. He flicked his break-lock switch, banked sharply right, and looked back to see them whiz by. Instead, they turned with him, drawing closer—slim, vicious, robot cylinders that could not be shaken, terrifyingly fast, twin dots converging on the center of his radar screen. He put the aircraft into a dive and yelled into the intercom.

  “Kinny, did you actuate your break-lock? Kinny!”

  Inside the metal container that held the electronic counter-measures gear, inside a separate aluminum chassis, a microscopic polished black sphere, having fallen off its mounting rod, rolled freely in a small stainless steel cavity.

  “Not working!” shouted Kinsella.

  Almost subliminally then, Buchfarer perceived the tiny black clouds of exploding anti-aircraft shells, quiet, deadly pffs seen in watery slow motion off to one side. Eighty-five millimeter, he recorded distantly, and one second afterward a jagged, exploding chunk of white-hot metal tore him neatly in half, just below the waist.

  Months later, Buchfarer’s wife would claim that the instant before his death she’d received a telepathed message—“I love you”—from her husband. She found the thought comforting, and under the circumstances, no one was inclined to dispute her. In fact, however, there’d been no more time for messages than there’d been to eject. Buchfarer’s last set of nervous impulses were involuntary and chaotic, an ebbing wave radiating hysterically across the surface of his cerebrum, a final, conscious burst of dream: He is seated at a table on a summer day, nibbling plums from a large red bowl. The juice runs down the corners of his mouth. It is sunny out, but not too hot, and the plums are unbearably sweet.