by Gene Wolfe
“I can’t get this damn sound working,” Franklin said. “Just a minute.”
“What are they talking about?” Forlesen asked.
“Huh?”
“In the picture. What are they discussing?”
“Oh, I got it,” Franklin said. “Wait a minute. They’re talking about promoting creativity in the educational system.”
“Are they teachers?”
“No, they’re actors—let me alone for a minute, will you? I want to get this sound going.”
The sound came on, almost coinciding with the end of the picture; while Franklin was rewinding the film Forlesen said, “I suppose actors would have a better understanding of creativity than teachers would at that.”
“It’s a re-creation of an actual meeting of real teachers,” Franklin explained, “they photographed it and taped it, then had the actors reproduce the debate.”
Forlesen decided to go home for lunch. Lunch ours were one hundred twenty to one hundred forty-one—twenty-one ours should be enough, he thought, for him to drive there and return, and to eat. He kept the pedal down all the way, and discovered that the signs with HIDDEN DRIVES on their faces had SLOW CHILDREN on their backs.
The brick house was just as he remembered it. He parked the car on the spot where he had first seen it (there was a black oil stain there) and knocked at the door. Edna answered it, looking not quite as he remembered her. “What do you want?” she said.
“Lunch.”
“Are you crazy? If you’re selling something, we don’t want it.”
Forlesen said, “Don’t you know who I am?”
She looked at him more closely. He said, “I’m your husband Emanuel.”
She seemed uncertain, then smiled, kissed him, and said, “Yes you are, aren’t you. You look different. Tired.”
“I am tired,” he said, and realized that it was true.
“Is it lunchtime already? I don’t have a watch, you know. I haven’t been able to keep track. I thought it was only the middle of the morning.”
“It seemed long enough to me,” Forlesen said. He wondered where the children were, thinking that he would have liked to see them.
“What do you want for lunch?”
“Whatever you have.”
In the bedroom she got out bread and sliced meat, and plugged in the coffeepot. “How was work?”
“All right. Fine.”
“Did you get promoted? Or get a raise?”
He shook his head.
“After lunch,” she said. “You’ll get promoted after lunch.”
He laughed, thinking that she was joking.
“A woman knows.”
“Where are the kids?”
“At school. They eat their lunch at school. There’s a beautiful cafeteria—everything is stainless steel—and they have a dietician who thinks about the best possible lunch for each child and makes them eat it.”
“Did you see it?” he asked.
“No, I read about it. In here.” She tapped Food Preparation in the Home.
“Oh.”
“They’ll be home at one hundred and thirty—that’s what the book says. Here’s your sandwich.” She poured him a cup of coffee. “What time is it now?”
He looked at the watch she had given him. “A hundred and twenty-nine thirty.”
“Eat. You ought to be going back soon.”
He said, “I was hoping we might have time for more than this.”
“Tonight, maybe. You don’t want to be late.”
“All right.” The coffee was good, but tasted slightly oily; the sandwich meat salty and dry and flavorless. He unstrapped the watch from his wrist and handed it to her. “You keep this,” he said. “I’ve felt badly about wearing it all morning—it really belongs to you.”
“You need it more than I do,” she said.
“No I don’t; they have clocks all over, there. All I have to do is look at them.”
“You’ll be late getting back to work.”
“I’m going to drive as fast as I can anyway—I can’t go any faster than that no matter what a watch says. Besides, there’s a speaker that tells me things, and I’m sure it will tell me if I’m late.”
Reluctantly she accepted the watch. He chewed the last of his sandwich. “You’ll have to tell me when to go now,” he said, thinking that this would somehow cheer her.
“It’s time to go already,” she said.
“Wait a minute—I want to finish my coffee.”
“How was work?”
“Fine,” he said.
“You have a lot to do there?”
“Oh, God, yes.” He remembered the crowded desk that had been waiting for him when he had returned from the creativity meeting, the supervision of workers for whom he had been given responsibility without authority, the ours spent with Fields drawing up the plan which, just before he left, had been vetoed by Mr. Freeling. “I don’t think there’s any purpose in most of it,” he said, “but there’s plenty to do.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” his wife said, “You’ll lose your job.”
“I don’t, when I’m there.”
“I’ve got nothing to do,” she said. It was as though the words themselves had forced their way from between her lips.
He said, “That can’t be true.”
“I made the beds, and I dusted and swept, and it was all finished a couple of ours after you had gone. There’s nothing.”
“You could read,” he said.
“I can’t—I’m too nervous.”
“Well, you could have prepared a better lunch than this.”
“That’s nothing,” she said. “Just nothing.” She was suddenly angry, and it struck him, as he looked at her, that she was a stranger, that he knew Fields and Miss Fawn and even Mr. Freeling better than he knew her.
“The morning’s over,” he said. “I’m sorry I can’t give it back to you, but I can’t; what I did—that was nothing too.”
“Please,” she said, “won’t you go? Having you here makes me so nervous.”
He said, “Try and find something to do.”
“All right.”
He wiped his mouth on the paper she had given him and took a step toward the parlor; to his surprise she walked with him, not detaining him, but seeming to savor his company now that she had deprived herself of it. “Do you remember when we woke up?” she said. “You didn’t know at first that you were supposed to dress yourself.”
“I’m still not sure of it.”
“Oh, you know what I mean.”
“Yes,” he said, and he knew that he did, but that she did not.
The signs said NO TURN, and Forlesen wondered if he were really compelled to obey them, if the man in the blue car would come after him if he did not go back to Model Pattern Products. He suspected that he would, but that nothing he could do would be worse than M.P.P. itself. In front of the dog-food factory a shapeless brown object fluttered in the road, animated by the turbulence of each car that passed and seeming to attack it, throwing itself with desperate, toothless courage at the singing, invulnerable tires. He had almost run over it before he realized what it was—Abraham Beale’s hat.
The parking lot was more rutted than he had remembered; he drove slowly and carefully. The outbuilding had been torn down, and another car, startlingly shiny (Forlesen did not believe his own had ever been that well polished, not even when he had first looked out the window at it) had his old place; he was forced to take another, farther from the plant. Several other people, he noticed, seemed to have gone home for lunch as he had—some he knew, having shared meeting rooms with them. He had never punched out on the beige clock, and did not punch in.
There was a boy seated at his desk, piling new schoolbooks on it from a cardboard box on the floor. Forlesen said hello, and the boy said that his name was George Howe, and that he worked in Mr. Forlesen’s section.
Forlesen nodded, feeling that he understood. “Miss Fawn showed you to your desk?�
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The boy shook his head in bewilderment. “A lady named Mrs. Frost—she said she was Mr. Freeling’s secretary; she had glasses.”
“And a sharp nose.”
George Howe nodded.
Forlesen nodded in reply, and made his way to Fields’s old office. As he had expected, Fields was gone, and most of the items from his own desk had made their way to Fields’s—he wondered if Fields’s desk sometimes talked too, but before he could ask it Miss Fawn came in.
She wore two new rings and touched her hair often with her left hand to show them. Forlesen tried to imagine her pregnant or giving suck and found that he could not, but knew that this was a weakness in himself and not in her. “Ready for orientation?” Miss Fawn asked.
Forlesen ignored the question and asked what had happened to Fields.
“He passed on,” Miss Fawn said.
“You mean he died? He seemed too young for it; not much older than I am myself—certainly not as old as Mr. Freeling.”
“He was stout,” Miss Fawn said with a touch of righteous disdain. “He didn’t get much exercise and he smoked a great deal.”
“He worked very hard,” Forlesen said. “I don’t think he could have had much energy left for exercise.”
“I suppose not,” Miss Fawn conceded. She was leaning against the door, her left hand toying with the gold pencil she wore on a chain, and seemed to be signaling by her attitude that they were old friends, entitled to relax occasionally from the formality of business. “There was a thing—at one time—between Mr. Fields and myself. I don’t suppose you ever knew it.”
“No, I didn’t,” Forlesen said, and Miss Fawn looked pleased.
“Eddie and I—I called him Eddie, privately—were quite discreet. Or so I flatter myself now. I don’t mean, of course, that there was ever anything improper between us.”
“Naturally not.”
“A look and a few words. Elmer knows; I told him everything. You are ready to give that orientation, aren’t you?”
“I think I am now,” Forlesen said. “George Howe?”
Miss Fawn looked at a piece of paper. “No, Gordie Hilbert.”
As she was leaving, Forlesen asked impulsively where Fields was.
“Where he is buried, you mean? Right behind you.”
He looked at her blankly.
“There.” She gestured toward the picture behind Forlesen’s desk. “There’s a vault behind there—didn’t you know? Just a small one, of course; they’re cremated first.”
“Burned out.”
“Yes, burned up and then they put them behind the pictures—that’s what they’re for. The pictures, I mean. In a beautiful little cruet. It’s a company benefit, and you’d know if you’d read your own orientation material—of course, you can be buried at home if you like.”
“I think I’d prefer that,” Forlesen said.
“I thought so,” Miss Fawn told him. “You look the type. Anyway, Eddie bought the farm—that’s an expression the men have.”
At one hundred and twenty-five hours he was notified of his interdepartmental training transfer. His route to his new desk took him through the main lobby of the building, where he observed that a large medallion set into the floor bore the face (too solemn, but quite unmistakable) of Abraham Beale, though the name beneath it was that of Adam Bean, the founder of the company. Since he was accompanied by his chief-to-be, Mr. Fleer, he made no remark.
“It’s going to be a pleasure going down the fast slope with you,” Mr. Fleer said. “I trust you’ve got your wax ready and your boots laced.”
“My wax is ready and my boots are laced,” Forlesen said; it was automatic by now.
“But not too tight—wouldn’t want to break a leg.”
“But not too tight,” Forlesen agreed. “What do we do in this division?”
Mr. Fleer smiled and Forlesen could see that he had asked a good question. “Right now we’re right in the middle of a very successful crash program to develop a hardnosed understanding of the ins and outs of the real, realistic business world,” Mr. Fleer said, “with particular emphasis on marketing, finance, corporate developmental strategy, and risk appreciation. We’ve been playing a lot of Bet-Your-Life, the management-managing real-life pseudogame.”
“Great,” Forlesen said enthusiastically; he really felt enthusiastic, having been afraid that it would be more creativity.
“We’re in the center of the run,” Mr. Fleer assured him, “the snow is fast, and the wind is in our faces.”
Forlesen was tempted to comment that his boots were laced and his wax ready, but he contented himself at the last moment with nodding appreciatively and asking if he would get to play.
“You certainly will,” Mr. Fleer promised him. “You’ll be holding down Ffoulks’s chair. It’s an interesting position—he’s heavily committed to a line of plastic toys, but he has some military contracts for field rations and biological weapons to back him up. Also he’s big in aquarium supplies—that’s quite a small market altogether, but Ffoulks is big in it, if you get what I mean.”
“I can hardly wait to start,” Forlesen said. “I have a feeling that this may be the age of aquariums.” Fleer pondered this while they trudged up the stairs.
Bet-Your-Life, the management-managing real-life pseudogame, was played on a very large board laid out on a very big table in a very large meeting room. Scattered all over the board were markers and spinners and decks of cards, and birdcages holding eight-and twelve-sided dice. Scattered around the room, in chairs, were the players: two were arguing and one was asleep; five others were studying the board or making notes, or working out calculations on small hand-held machines that were something like abacuses and something like cash registers. “I’ll just give you the rule book, and have a look at my own stuff, and go,” Mr. Fleer said. “I’m late for the meeting now.” He took a brown pamphlet from a pile in one corner of the room and handed it to Forlesen, who (with some feeling of surprise) noticed that it was identical to one of the booklets he had found under his job assignment sheet upon awakening.
Mr. Fleer had scrawled a note on a small tablet marked with the Bet-Your-Life emblem. He tore the sheet off as Forlesen watched, and laid it in an empty square near the center of the board. It read: BID 17 ASK 18 1/4 SNOWMOBILE 5 1/2 UP 1/2 OPEN NEW TERRITORY SHUT DOWN COAL OIL SHOES FLEER. He left the room, and Forlesen, timing the remark in such a way that it might be supposed that he thought him out of earshot, said, “I’ll bet he’s a strong player.”
The man to his left, to whom the remark was nominally addressed, shook his head. “He’s overbought in sporting goods.”
“Sporting goods seem like a good investment to me,” Forlesen said. “Of course I don’t know the game.”
“Well, you won’t learn it reading that thing—it’ll only mix you up. The basic rule to remember is that no one has to move, but that anyone can move at any time if he wants to. Fleer hasn’t been here for ten ours—now he’s moved.”
“On the other hand,” a man in a red jacket said, “this part of the building is kept open at all times, and coffee and sandwiches are brought in every our—some people never leave. I’m the referee.”
A man with a bristling mustache, who had been arguing with the man in the red jacket a moment before, interjected, “The rules can be changed whenever a quorum agrees—we pull the staple out of the middle of the book, type up a new page, and slip it in. A quorum is three quarters of the players present but never seven or less.”
Forlesen said hesitantly, “It’s not likely three quarters of those present would be seven, is it?”
“No, it isn’t,” the referee agreed. “We rarely have that many.”
The man with the mustache said, “You’d better look over your holdings.”
Forlesen did so, and discovered that he held 100 percent of the stock of a company called International Toys and Foods. He wrote BID 34 ASK 32 FFOULKS on a slip and placed it in the center of the board. “You’ll never ge
t thirty-two for that stuff,” the man with the mustache said, “it isn’t worth near that.”
Forlesen pointed out that he had an offer to buy in at thirty-four but was finding no takers. The man with the mustache looked puzzled, and Forlesen used the time he had gained to examine the brown pamphlet. Opening it at random he read: “We’re a team,” Fields continued, “and we’re going to function as a team. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a quarterback, and a coach” he pointed toward the ceiling, “up there. It does mean that I expect every man to bat two fifty or better, and the ones that don’t make three hundred had better be damn good Fields. You see what I mean?”
“I buy five hundred, and I’m selling them to you.”
Forlesen nodded again and asked, “What does our subdivision do? What’s our function?”
“I said I’m going to buy five hundred shares, and then I’m going to sell them back to you.”
“Not so fast,” Forlesen said. “You don’t own any yet.”
“Well, I’m buying.” The man with the mustache rummaged among his playing materials and produced some bits of colored paper. Forlesen accepted the money and began to count it.
The man with the red jacket said: “Coffee. And sandwiches. Spam and Churkey.” The man with the mustache went over to get one, and Forlesen went out the door.
The corridor was deserted. There had been a feeling of airlessness in the game room, an atmosphere compounded of stale sweat and smoke and the cold, oily coffee left to stagnate in the bottom of the paper hotcups; the corridor was glacial by comparison, filled with quiet wind and the memory of ice. Forlesen stopped outside the door to savor it for a second, and was joined by the man with the mustache, munching a sandwich. “Nice to get out here for a minute, isn’t it?” he said.
Forlesen nodded.
“Not that I don’t enjoy the game,” the man with the mustache continued. “I do. I’m in Sales, you know.”
“I didn’t. I thought everyone was from our division.”