by Tom Holt
George was barking, wasn’t he? He had to be. A severe attack of Dr No syndrome, probably caused by spending too much time in those sorts of rooms in those sorts of buildings. But George, however unbearable he might be, had always been thoroughly, almost aggressively rational, and it was a fair bet that he hadn’t made all that money by investing in hare-brained schemes. Purely out of curiosity, he Googled multiverse theory, and read for about a quarter of an hour before his brain started to come loose from the sides of his skull. There was a bit about the Dutchman George had mentioned, Professor van Goyen; mostly it was about his weird and unexplained disappearance, and there was a lot of the usual conspiracy guff trying to link his vanishing act with the Very Very Large Hadron Collider debacle. Apparently, Van Goyen wasn’t the only researcher with that project who’d gone missing, though Maurice found that rather less mysterious than the authors of the articles did. If I’d just blown up a big chunk of Switzerland, he thought, I might just make myself hard to find too. Verdict: maybe there was something in it and maybe there wasn’t, but he was too tired and preoccupied with other stuff to feel inclined to fret about it. In all probability, George would spend a great deal of money, create a brief economic boom in Greenland, then get real, cut his losses and go and bother someone else.
Swan-liver terrine. Yes. Well.
He yawned. A rich, full day, one way and another. And tomorrow – his first day at Carbonec Industries; he never did find out what they actually did there, but no doubt that would become apparent in the fullness of time. Leroy Pecheur – the name rang a faint, faint bell, like a fairy getting its wings in the flat below.
“Hello, I’m Leroy – you must be Maurice.”
For a short man, he had a handshake like a junkyard crusher. He also had a huge, bald head, a short grey goatee beard, a voice so deep it seemed to well up out of the ground and a smile that took away the sins of the world. He’d winced as he stood up when Maurice entered the room; when he sat down again, he did so slowly and in stages, carefully folding his legs like a man dismantling delicate machinery. “So you’re Maurice Katz,” he said. “Welcome aboard.”
Earlier that morning, Maurice had reached a decision. No more inarticulate noises. Just say no to Um. Instead, he tried a polite half-smile, which he suspected made him look both feeble-minded and sinister at the same time. Try doing that on purpose and see how far you get.
“Well?” Mr Pecheur said.
There’s not saying Um, and there’s dumb insolence. “Er,” said Maurice. “It’s, um, nice to be here.”
Mr Pecheur smiled again. “Great to have you on the team. Now, I’d like for you to start here in Location, and then I thought we could try you out in Retrieval, see how you shape up; and then if that goes OK, you might enjoy a spell in Result Processing. How does that sound?”
Well, Maurice thought, it’s like this. Sooner or later I’m going to look a complete idiot. Why not do it now, just for once, rather than leave it and leave it? “Excuse me,” he said, “but what do you actually do here?”
Mr Pecheur blinked. Then he beamed, as if to say, This is my beloved newbie, with whom I am well pleased. “Good question, Grasshopper. Good question. Well, let’s see. Half the time we do what we think is what we ought to be doing. Of the remaining time, a quarter of it we do what we think they think we ought to be doing, another quarter what we think we ought to have done a month ago, another quarter what we shouldn’t be doing but what needs to be done, one eighth what definitely doesn’t need doing but what we think’ll make us look busy.” He paused and drew a breath. “And the last eighth we just sit around. Does that answer your question?”
“No.”
Mr Pecheur nodded. “Essentially we’re a data storage and retrieval service. It’s like your brain. Part of it thinks; the rest of it remembers. Our clients ask us to do the remembering for them, so that they can get on with the thinking. We…” He grinned happily. “We hardly ever think at all.”
“Ah.”
“So naturally,” Mr Pecheur went on, “as a junior administrative assistant, your role here will be vital to the smooth running of the entire operation. You see, we work on an inverse pyramid hierarchy system.”
“Oh.”
“Indeed. The difference between us and everybody else is, we’re quite open about it.”
“Mphm. Um, what is a—?”
Mr Pecheur winced again and massaged his knee. “Take a pyramid,” he said. “Turn it upside down so it’s standing on its point. That’s us. The rule is, the further up the pyramid you go – that’s away from the point, towards the base – the less your level of activity. In other words, at the very top, you’ve got a great many people doing nothing at all. A bit lower down the pecking order, you’ve got a moderate number of people doing very little. Just up from the bottom, you’ve got a handful of people doing a bit now and then. And at the very bottom, you’ve got one poor bastard working his butt off.” He smiled. “That’ll be you.”
“Um.”
“And of course,” Mr Pecheur went on, “the same principle applies to prestige, privileges and remuneration. So, at the top you’ve got a bunch of folks who do nothing and get paid a fortune, in the middle there’s the ones who do a little and get paid a lot, and at the bottom—”
“Yes, I see. Thank you.”
“Your job in Location,” Mr Pecheur went on, “will be to find all the stuff we’ve put away somewhere and then forgotten where. In Retrieval, you’ll take the stuff you’ve found and put it somewhere else. Result Processing, you give the stuff to someone else. In due course,” he said encouragingly, “if you shape up and all goes well, you’ll be doing all three. Meanwhile, I’ll be watching you. The executive management subcommittee will be supervising me, the project management assessment team will be overseeing the executive management subcommittee and the board will be keeping an eye on the project management team, just to make sure everyone’s doing their job. Nobody watches the board, but so what, they’re not particularly interesting. Might as well watch paint dry.”
“Um.”
Mr Pecheur chuckled. “Maybe you’d like to see your office now.”
“That’d be nice, yes.”
“Tough.” Mr Pecheur shook his head. “You don’t have an office. You don’t even have a chair. What you do have is the whole of the sub-basement. Inverse pyramid, see?”
“Excuse me?”
“The board members,” Mr Pecheur explained, “have huge offices on the top six floors. Project management have large offices on the middle four floors. The executive management subcommittee guys have sensible-size offices on the ground floor. You get a coat-hook behind the sub-basement door. That’s the joy of this system: it’s completely logical, within its own terms of reference.”
“I see,” Maurice said. “So, um—”
“And now,” Mr Pecheur continued, “I expect you’d like someone to take you down there and show you what to do.”
Maurice nodded. “Yes, please.”
“Ah.” Mr Pecheur smiled sadly. “Wouldn’t it be nice if life was like that? Instead, you head on down there, and I’ll be along in a day or so to watch you figure it all out for yourself.” Suddenly his face lit up, and he laughed. “Of course, I’m exaggerating.”
“Ah.”
“Yup. It’s not really a coat-hook as such; actually it’s just a nail. Guy before last who had your job put it there, didn’t think to ask anyone first but we thought, what the hell? Actually, it’s not a bad idea. You see, Maurice, we encourage innovation and initiative here at Carbonec. Up to a point.”
Maurice waited for a moment or so, but Mr Pecheur just beamed at him. “Can I ask—?”
“Sure. Fire away.”
“Well,” Maurice said, “stuff like hours and lunchtimes and all that. Not that I’m—”
“Oh, that.” Mr Pecheur made a broad, generous gesture. “We figure, so long as all the work gets done on time and on budget, you can come and go as you please. At least, that’s not s
trictly company policy, but in practice, we on the upper floors don’t get down to the basement much, so if you aren’t there, who’s going to notice? Just so long as all the work gets done,” he added kindly, “and we don’t have to do it.”
“That’s very—”
“Yes.”
Maurice waited, but there didn’t seem to be any more, so he stood up, said, “Thank you,” and headed for the door. A split second before he could apply skin to doorknob, Mr Pecheur said, “Just one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Coffee and doughnuts,” Mr Pecheur said. “Ground floor, back office, eleven fifteen sharp. OK? You might want to write that down,” he added. “So you won’t forget.”
Maurice turned and looked at him. “Doughnuts?”
“Oh yes.”
“Ah,” he said.
Mr Pecheur nodded. “See you then,” he said. “Don’t be late, you hear? Be there, or…” He drew a forefinger across his throat. “Stairs to the basement, second on your right.”
“Thanks.”
“Theo Bernstein, whereabouts of: any ideas? Pet theories, startling new insights?”
“Um, no.”
“No problem. May the Inertia be with you.”
Maurice opened the door, stepped into the doorway, then for some reason hesitated and looked back. Under Mr Pecheur’s chair, a few inches away from his left heel, was a small pool of blood.
The basement was huge. It was also square, and in the exact centre of the ceiling hung a single unshaded forty-watt bulb. Such light as leaked out of it illuminated row upon row of steel shelves, all a uniform eight feet high, on which sat an infinity of cardboard boxes. On each box was a label, handwritten, in tiny semi-legible script.
Someone at some stage had clearly done his best to organise it all. To the near end of the first row of shelves, his anonymous predecessor had Sellotaped the ripped-off end of a cardboard box, on which he’d written, in black marker pen:
STUFF
And on the corresponding point of the second row, another that read:
MORE STUFF
And on the third row:
YET MORE STUFF
And on the fourth:
LOTS MORE STUFF
At which point he’d run out of enthusiasm, cardboard or both. He’d also put two elderly shoe-boxes on the floor close to the doorway, one marked In, the other Out. In was stuffed full of pink, yellow and blue forms. Out was empty apart from the screwed-up wrapper of a Snickers bar. The colourful forms in In proved on closer examination to be lodging manifests, schedule dockets (filing) and release mandates. All three had lots of little boxes filled with numbers, dates, ticks and signatures, none of which appeared to relate to anything else. There was, of course, a computer terminal. It was tucked away in the far left-hand corner. It had a flex with a plug on the end, but no socket to plug it into. The floor, however, was scrupulously clean.
Maurice found a blue school exercise book on top of the computer. He opened it, but all the pages were blank.
Ah, but Man’s reach must exceed Man’s grasp, or what’s a Heaven for? He spent the rest of the morning walking slowly down the first row, copying whatever he could read from the labels on the boxes into the exercise book. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. One label read XPK36/7AE/00006445/DDX/NORWICH; the next said SANDERSON; the one after that, 885PP FRAGILE; the next one was completely illegible and the next one was blank. He called to mind something that Mr Pecheur had said: we encourage innovation and initiative here at Carbonec. He thought about that for a while, then picked a box at random and, using the edge of a coin to cut the packing tape, opened it. It was empty.
Immediately, a siren went off. Maurice jumped three feet in the air, landed awkwardly, scrabbled to his feet and looked round desperately for some kind of Off switch. There didn’t seem to be one, and the siren was piercingly loud. He rammed fingers in his ears and thought, Well, I don’t think I’d have liked this job anyway. The siren stopped after two minutes. Nobody came. He put the box back where he’d got it from.
The next hour he spent copying down labels, letting his mind wander, drifting away into that form of boredom that is the true death of Self. Might be nice, he thought, to go to the pictures, if there’s anything on, not that he had anyone to go with. He looked up Now Showing on his phone; not promising. Spiderman XXVIII, a couple of new romcoms and, of course, the latest Carrion offering; not really his cup of tea. BAFTA-nominated director Tuxie Goss had won a string of awards for his uniquely quirky blend of spatterfest zombie horror and traditional British slapstick-and-innuendo comedy, but Maurice wasn’t keen. Carrion Nurse had been all right, and he’d quite enjoyed Carrion Camping and Carrion Up the Khyber, but he felt that the franchise had now reached the point where it had nothing left to say. He looked around for a ladder or something so he could get at the boxes on the high shelves, but there wasn’t one.
He was just starting to think about an overarching strategy for sneaking out for some lunch when the door flew open. He spun round, and found himself face to face with a tall, dark woman in a severe charcoal-grey suit. She was maybe five years older than him and had the most amazing green eyes.
“You’re Maurice Katz.”
Everyone said it like they were disappointed. “Yes, that’s me.”
“You missed coffee and doughnuts.”
She was accusing rather than commiserating. Thanks to the label-induced boredom trance he’d forgotten what Mr Pecheur had said, even though the finger-across-the-throat gesture had made quite an impression on him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was—”
“Hell of a way to make a good impression on your first day, don’t you think?”
Her voice was deep, Irish and familiar. “You’re the lady I spoke to on the phone,” he said without thinking. “Ms—”
“Blanchemains, call me Isolda,” she snapped. “You’re in trouble, you are. They’re up there waiting for you. Been there half an hour.”
She was quite right; hell of a way to make a good impression. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realise—”
“They’re busy people, you know. Time is money.”
“Yes, right. I’ll just—”
She made an exasperated hissing noise, grabbed him by the wrist, twisted his arm neatly and horribly efficiently behind his back and propelled him towards the door. “I’ll tell them you got lost looking for the toilet and got yourself trapped in the closed file store. They’ll believe that; we lost two trainees in there last year. Just don’t expect me to lie for you again, all right?”
“Um, thanks,” he said, as she launched him at the stairs. “Do you think I might have my arm back?”
“Not till I get you safely past Reception.”
Well, fair enough. “So,” she went on, invisible behind him, “what do they call you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your name, stupid. What are you called? We discussed it on the phone, remember?”
“Maurice.”
“Nobody’s called Maurice. Is it Morrie, Moz or Mo-Mo? They’ll want to know, upstairs.”
“Maurice.”
She sighed. “Be like that, see if I care.” They’d reached the top of the stairs. She let go of his arm. “Now remember,” she hissed. “The lock on the file store door jammed. You yelled, I let you out. Capisce?”
Before he could reply, she barged past him, opened a door dead ahead and bundled him through it. “Hello, everyone,” she sang out, as he stumbled over the threshold. “Look who’s here at last.”
There were about forty people in the room, standing around a long, mirror-polished burr walnut table, on which stood jugs of coffee and plates piled high with doughnuts. The men were all wearing navy-blue chalkstripe suits, and the women were all in charcoal grey, as though the War Between the States was being refought on gender lines. Everyone looked up and stared at him.
“Maurice Katz, everyone,” she announced.
There was a fugue-like chorus of greeting; hello, Morrie
, how’s it going, Moz, pleased to meet you, Mo. At the back of the crowd, Mr Pecheur gave him a scowl that nearly stopped his heart.
“Maurice got himself stuck in the closed file store,” Isolda went on, her voice high and brittle. “Just as well I went looking for him, eh?”
Everyone laughed except Mr Pecheur. Mr Nacien surged forward and slapped him on the back. “I got stuck down there, my first week in the job,” he said. “We really ought to do something about that lock.”
A low rumble of approval, like the distant roar of the sea. A nice middle-aged lady gave him a hug, and a very old man with huge glasses said he’d been caught out by that damned door back in 1957. A thickset man with a grey ponytail and an eyepatch handed him a cup of black coffee and told him to help himself to doughnuts.
“Thanks,” he said, “but I—”
The man had gone. Nobody was looking at him anymore; they were chatting to each other, laughing, arguing, and nobody seemed the slightest bit interested in him. He backed carefully away until he reached the wall and looked down at the cup in his hand. The smell of coffee was having its effect on him, but he couldn’t drink the stuff without milk, because it gave him a headache. He looked around for a jug, bottle or carton on the table, but there didn’t seem to be one. Mr Pecheur was having an animated conversation with Mr Nacien, while Isolda was standing very close to a tall, blond man, looking up at him and laughing at his jokes. Maurice realised he was the youngest person in the room by at least five years.