The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon

  PETE ALDRIN LOOKED THROUGH THE LATEST COMPANY DIRECTORY. So far the firings were still a mere trickle, not enough to raise media awareness, but at least half the names he knew weren’t on the list anymore. Soon word would begin to spread. Betty in Human Resources… took early retirement. Shirley in Accounting…

  The thing was, he had to make it look like he was helping Crenshaw, whatever he did. As long as he thought about opposing him, the knot of icy fear in Aldrin’s stomach kept him from doing anything. He didn’t dare go over Crenshaw’s head. He didn’t know if Crenshaw’s boss knew about the plan, too, or if it had all been Crenshaw’s idea. He didn’t dare confide in any of the autists; who knew if they could understand the importance of keeping a secret?

  He was sure Crenshaw hadn’t really checked this out with upstairs. Crenshaw wanted to be seen as a problem solver, a forward-thinking future executive, someone managing his own empire efficiently. He wouldn’t ask questions; he wouldn’t ask permission. This could be a nightmare of adverse publicity if it got out; someone higher up would have noticed that. But how far up? Crenshaw was counting on no publicity, no leaks, no gossip. That wasn’t reasonable, even if he did have a choke hold on everyone in his division.

  And if Crenshaw went down and Aldrin was perceived as his helper, he’d lose his job then, too.

  What would it take to convert Section A into a group of research subjects? They would have to have time off work: how much? Would they be expected to fold their vacation and sick leave time into it, or would the company provide leave? If extra leave was needed, what about pay? What about seniority? What about the accounting through his section—would they be paid out of this section’s operating funds or out of Research?

  Had Crenshaw already made deals with someone in HR, in Accounting, in Legal, in Research? What kind of deals? He didn’t want to use Crenshaw’s name at first; he wanted to see what reaction he got without it.

  Shirley was still in Accounting; Aldrin called her. “Remind me what kind of paperwork I need if someone’s being transferred to another section,” he said to start with. “Do I take it off my budget right away or what?”

  “Transfers are frozen,” Shirley said. “This new management—” He could hear her take a breath. “You didn’t get the memo?”

  “Don’t think so,” Aldrin said. “So—if we have an employee who wants to take part in a research protocol, we can’t just transfer their pay source to Research?”

  “Good grief, no!” Shirley said. “Tim McDonough—you know, head of Research—would have your hide tacked to the wall in no time.” After a moment, she said, “What research protocol?”

  “Some new drug thing,” he said.

  “Oh. Well, anyway, if you have an employee who wants to get on it, they’ll have to do it as a volunteer—stipend’s fifty dollars per day for protocols that require overnight clinic residence, twenty-five dollars per day for others, with a minimum of two hundred and fifty dollars. Of course, with clinic residence they also get bed and board and all necessary medical support. You wouldn’t get me to test drugs for that, but the ethics committee says there shouldn’t be a financial incentive.”

  “Well… would they still get paid their salary?”

  “Only if they’re working or it’s paid vacation time,” Shirley said. She chuckled. “It would save the company money if we could make everyone into a research subject and just pay the stipends, wouldn’t it? Lot simpler accounting—no PICA or FUCA or state withholding. Thank God they can’t.”

  “I guess so,” Aldrin said. So, he wondered, what was Crenshaw planning to do about pay and about research stipends? Who was funding this? And why hadn’t he thought of this before? “Thanks, Shirley,” he said belatedly.

  “Good luck,” she said.

  So, supposing the treatment would take, he realized he had no idea how long it might take. Was that in the stuff Crenshaw had given him? He looked it up and read it carefully, lips pursed. If Crenshaw hadn’t made some arrangement to have Research fund Section A’s salary, then he was converting technical staff with seniority to low-paid lab rats… and even if they were out of rehab in a month (the most optimistic estimate in the proposal) that would save… a lot of money. He ran the figures. It looked like a lot of money, but it wasn’t, compared to the legal risks the company would run.

  He didn’t know anybody high on the tree in Research, just Marcus over in Data Support. Back to Human Resources… with Betty gone, he tried to remember other names. Paul. Debra. Paul was on the list; Debra wasn’t.

  “Make it snappy,” Paul said. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “Leaving?”

  “One of the famous ten percent,” Paul said. Aldrin could hear the anger in his voice. “No, the company’s not losing money, no, the company’s not cutting personnel; they just happen to be no longer in need of my services.”

  Icy fingers ran down his back. This could be himself next month. No, today, if Crenshaw realized what he was doing.

  “Buy you coffee,” Aldrin said.

  “Yeah, like I need something to keep me awake nights,” Paul said.

  “Paul, listen. I need to talk to you, and not on the phone.”

  A long silence, then, “Oh. You, too?”

  “Not yet. Coffee?”

  “Sure. Ten-thirty, snack bar?”

  “No, early lunch. Eleven-thirty,” Aldrin said, and hung up. His palms were sweaty.

  “So, WHAT’S THE BIG SECRET?” PAUL ASKED. His FACE SHOWED nothing; he sat hunched over a table near the middle of the snack bar.

  Aldrin would have chosen a table in the corner, but now—seeing Paul out in the middle—he remembered a spy thriller he’d seen. Corner tables might be monitored. For all he knew, Paul was wearing a… a wire, they called it. He felt sick.

  “C’mon, I’m not recording anything,” Paul said. He sipped his coffee. “It will be more conspicuous if you stand there gaping at me or pat me down. You must have one helluva secret.”

  Aldrin sat, his coffee slopping over the edge of his mug. “You know my new division head is one of the new brooms—”

  “Join the club,” Paul said, with an intonation of get on with it.

  “Crenshaw,” Aldrin said.

  “Lucky bastard,” Paul said. “He’s got quite a reputation, our Mr. Crenshaw.”

  “Yeah, well, remember Section A?”

  “The autistics, sure.” Paul’s expression sharpened. “Is he taking after them?

  Aldrin nodded.

  “That’s stupid,” Paul said. “Not that he’s not, but—that’s really stupid. Our Section Six-fourteen-point-eleven tax break depends on ’em. Your division is marginal anyway for Six-fourteen-point-eleven employees, and they’re worth one-point-five credits each. Besides, the publicity…”

  “I know,” Aldrin said. “But he’s not listening. He says they’re too expensive.”

  “He thinks everyone but himself is too expensive,” Paul said. “He thinks he’s underpaid, if you can believe it.” He sipped his coffee again. Aldrin noticed he didn’t say what Crenshaw was paid, even now. “We had a time with him when he came through our office—he knows every benefit and tax trick in the book.”

  “I’m sure,” Aldrin said.

  “So what’s he want to do, fire them? Dock their pay?”

  “Threaten them into volunteering for a human-trials research protocol,” Aldrin said.

  Paul’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding! He can’t do that!”

  “He is.” Aldrin paused, then went on. “He says there’s not a law the company can’t get around.”

  “Well, that may be true, but—we can’t just ignore the laws. We have to subvert them. And human trials—what is it, a drug?”

  “A treatment for adult autistics,” Aldrin said. “Supposed to make them normal. It supposedly worked on an ape.”

  “You can’t be serious.” Paul stared at him. “You are serious. Crenshaw’s trying to bully Category Six-fourteen-point-eleven employees into stage-
one human trials on something like that? It’s asking for a publicity nightmare; it could cost the company billions—”

  “You know that and I know that, but Crenshaw… has his own way of looking at things.”

  “So—who signed off on it upstairs?”

  “Nobody that I know of,” Aldrin said, crossing mental fingers. That was the literal truth, because he hadn’t asked.

  Paul no longer looked sour and sulky. “That power-mad idiot,” he said. “He thinks he can pull this off and gain ground on Samuelson.”

  “Samuelson?”

  “Another one of the new brooms. Don’t you keep up with what’s going on?”

  “No,” Aldrin said. “I’m not any good at that sort of thing.”

  Paul nodded. “I used to think I was, but this pink slip proves I’m not. But anyway, Samuelson and Crenshaw came in as rivals. Samuelson’s cut manufacturing costs without raising a ripple in the press— though that’s going to change soon, I think. Anyway, Crenshaw must think he can pull a triple play—get some volunteers who’ll be too scared for their jobs to complain about it if something goes wrong, push it through all on his own without letting anyone else know, and then take the credit. And you’ll go down with him, Pete, if you don’t do something.”

  “He’ll fire me in a second if I do,” Aldrin said.

  “There’s always the ombudsman. They haven’t cut that position yet, though Laurie’s feeling pretty shaky.”

  “I can’t trust it,” Aldrin said, but he filed it away. Meanwhile he had other questions. “Look—I don’t know how he’s going to account for their time, if they do this. I was hoping to find out more about the law—can he make them put their sick leave and vacation time into it? What’s the rule for special employees?”

  “Well, basically, what he’s proposing is illegal as hell. First off, if Research gets a whiff that they’re not genuine volunteers, they’ll stomp all over it. They have to report to NIH, and they don’t want the feds down on them for half a dozen breaches of medical ethics and the fair employment laws. Then, if it’ll put ’em out of the office more than thirty days—will it?” Aldrin nodded and Paul went on. “Then it can’t be classed as vacation time, and there are special rules for leave and sabbatical, especially regarding special-category employees. They can’t be made to lose seniority. Or salary for that matter.” He ran his finger around the rim of his mug. “Which is not going to make Accounting happy. Except for senior scientists on sabbatical in other institutions, we have no accounting category for employees not actually on the job who are receiving full salary. Oh, and it’ll shoot your productivity to hell and gone, too.”

  “I thought of that,” Aldrin murmured.

  Paul’s mouth quirked. “You can really nail this guy,” he said. “I know I can’t get my job back, not the way things are, but… I’ll enjoy knowing what’s going on.”

  “I’d like to do it subtly,” Aldrin said. “I mean—of course I’m worried about my job, but that’s not all of it. He thinks I’m stupid and cowardly and lazy, except when I lick his boots, and then he only thinks I’m a natural-born bootlicker. I thought of sort of blundering along, trying to help in a way that exposes him—”

  Paul shrugged. “Not my style. I’d stand up and yell, myself. But you’re you, and if that’s what rocks your boat…”

  “So—who can I talk to in Human Resources to arrange leave time for them? And what about Legal?”

  “That’s awfully roundabout. It’ll take longer. Why not talk to the ombudsman while we have one or, if you’re feeling heroic, go make an appointment with the top guns? Bring all your little retards or whatever they are along; make it really dramatic.”

  “They aren’t retards,” Aldrin said automatically. “They’re autists. And I don’t know what would happen if they had a clue how illegal this all was. They should know, by rights, but what if they called a reporter or something? Then the shit really would be in the fire.”

  “So go by yourself. You might even like the rarefied heights of the managerial pyramid.” Paul laughed a little too loudly, and Aldrin wondered if Paul had put something in his coffee.

  “I dunno,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll let me get far enough up. Crenshaw would find out I was making an appointment, and you remember that memo about chain of command.”

  “ ’Swhat we get for hiring a retired general as CEO,” Paul said.

  But now the lunch crowd was thinning out, and Aldrin knew he had to go.

  HE WASN’T SURE WHAT TO DO NEXT, WHICH APPROACH WOULD be most fruitful. He still wished that maybe Research would put the lid back on the box and he wouldn’t have to do anything.

  Crenshaw disposed of that idea in late afternoon. “Okay, here’s the research protocol,” he said, slamming a data cube and some printouts on Aldrin’s desk. “I do not understand why they need all these preliminary tests—PET scans, for God’s sake, and MRIs and all the rest of it—but they say they do, and I don’t run Research.” The yet of Crenshaw’s ambition did not have to be spoken to be heard.

  “Get your people scheduled in for the meetings, and liaise with Bart in Research about the test schedules.”

  “Test schedules?” Aldrin asked. “What about when tests conflict with normal working hours?”

  Crenshaw scowled, then shrugged. “Hell, we’ll be generous—they don’t have to make up the time.”

  “And what about the accounting end? Whose budget—?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Pete, just take care of it!” Crenshaw had turned an ugly puce. “Get your thumb out and start solving problems, not finding them. Run it past me; I’ll sign off on it; in the meantime use the authorization code on those.” He nodded at the pile of paper.

  “Right, sir,” Aldrin said. He couldn’t back away—he was standing behind his desk—but after a moment Crenshaw turned and went back to his own office.

  Solve problems. He would solve problems, but they wouldn’t be Crenshaw’s problems.

  I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I CAN UNDERSTAND AND WHAT I MISUNDERSTAND while thinking I understand it. I look up the lowest-level text in neurobiology that I can find on the ’net, looking first at the glossary. I do not like to waste time linking to definitions if I can learn them first. The glossary is full of words I never saw before, hundreds of them. I do not understand the definitions, either.

  I need to start further back, find light from a star further away, deeper in the past.

  A text on biology for high school students: that might be at my level. I glance at the glossary: I know these words, though I have not seen some of them in years. Only perhaps a tenth are new to me.

  When I start the first chapter, it makes sense, though some of it is different than I remember. I expect that. It does not bother me. I finish the book before midnight.

  The next night, I do not watch my usual show. I look up a college text. It is too simple; it must have been written for college students who had not studied biology in high school. I move on to the next level, guessing at what I need. The biochemistry text confuses me; I need to know organic chemistry. I look up organic chemistry on the Internet and download the first chapters of a text. I read late into the night again and before and after work on Friday and while I am doing my laundry.

  On Saturday we have the meeting at the campus; I want to stay home and read, but I must not. The book fizzes in my head as I drive; little jumbled molecules wriggle in patterns I can’t quite grasp yet. I have never been to the campus on a weekend; I did not know that it would be almost as busy as on a weekday.

  Cameron’s and Bailey’s cars are there when I arrive; the others haven’t come yet. I find my way to the designated meeting room. It has walls paneled in fake wood, with a green carpet. There are two rows of chairs with metal legs and padded seats and backs covered with rose-colored fabric with little flecks of green in it facing one end of the room. Someone I don’t know, a young woman, stands by the door. She is holding a pasteboard box with name tags in it. She has a list with little
photographs, and she looks at me, then says my name. “Here’s yours,” she says, handing me a name tag. It has a little metal clip on it. I hold it in my hand. “Put it on,” she says. I do not like this kind of clip; it makes my shirt pull. I clip it on anyway and go in.

  The others are sitting in chairs; each empty chair has a folder with a name on it, one for each of us. I find my seat. I do not like it; I am in the front row on the right-hand side. It might not be polite to move. I glance along the row and see that we have been put in alphabetical order, from the point of view of a speaker facing us.

  I am seven minutes early. If I had brought a printout of the text I have been reading, I could read now. Instead, I think about what I have read. So far everything makes sense.

  When all of us are in the room, we sit in silence, waiting, for two minutes and forty seconds. Then I hear Mr. Aldrin’s voice. “Are they all here?” he asks the woman at the door. She says yes.

  He comes in. He looks tired but otherwise normal. He is wearing a knit shirt and tan slacks and loafers. He smiles at us, but it is not a whole smile.

  “I’m glad to see you all here,” he says. “In just a few minutes, Dr. Ransome will explain to prospective volunteers what this project is about. In your folders are questionnaires about your general health history; please fill those out while you’re waiting. And sign the nondisclosure agreement.”

  The questionnaires are simple, multiple-choice rather than fill-in-the-blank. I am almost finished with mine (it takes little time to check the “no” box for heart disease, chest pain, shortness of breath, kidney disease, difficulty in urination…) when the door opens and a man in a white coat comes in. His coat has Dr. Ransome embroidered on the pocket. He has curly gray hair and bright blue eyes; his face looks too young to have gray hair. He, too, smiles at us, with eyes and mouth both.