Alien Accounts

by Sladek, John

  ‘Fine, sir.’

  ‘Here’s the set-up. We may have a new contract or two. Already we have a new contact or two. It’s the big chance. All the candy companies on the coast are changing over to dynamometers. They’ll need a lot of records and stuff switched over, too, and that’s where we come in. If we can handle the changeover for one company, we can do good. Then all the other companies will want us to do good for them, too. Get it? Then later on, when the armed forces change from telephones to radios, we’ll be set, see?

  ‘But we’ll need some extra help, and I’ll need your help. You could be my right hand, and it’ll mean a lot of extra money for the company, o.k.?’

  Section XI: The Mysterious Motto

  Henry remembered his motto, the words spoken to him by the boss the day he’d hired him. As they had occurred to him. Henry had added interpretations, until now the sheet was covered; but which had the boss actually said?

  If you work good, we’ll do good by you.

  If few work good, we’ll do good by you.

  If you were good, we’ll do good by you.

  If few were good, we’ll do good by you.

  If you work good weal, do good by you.

  If few work good weal, do good by you.

  If you were good weal, do good by you.

  If few were good weal, do good by you.

  In addition to these, there were the 24 combinations possible by replacing ‘good by you’ by ‘good buy you’, ‘goodbye, you’, and finally ‘good bayou’. Though it was unlikely that he said ‘If few were good weal, do good bayou,’ that possibility could not be overlooked, Henry thought as he shook hands and prepared to leave.

  ‘One thing, though,’ said Masterson, counting that thing on his forefinger. ‘Of course you’ll make a lot of dough eventually, after our contacts become contracts, but you’ll have to take a little pay cut for now, o.k.?’

  They shook hands once more, and Henry started to leave. The boss held up two fingers. ‘Secondly, now that you’re a boss, you’ll have to do a little informing on your pals. Remember, a boss has no real pals, and the great are always lonely.

  ‘So I want you to tell me who hates me and who likes me. Let me know everything they say about me, understand?’ He brought out another dart and threw it at the strange dart board.

  ‘When the time comes –’ the dart stuck weakly in the edge of the board and drooped. ‘You’ll get your reward.’ The dart fell quietly to the floor.

  ‘Especially I want to know what my father says about me. You eat with him, don’t you?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  Masterson wagged his fat forefinger. ‘I have my spies, I have my spies,’ he said archly. ‘But tell me, does he talk about me a lot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you lie to me! I know he talks about me all the time. All right, get out of here, then, and forget about that swell job.’

  Henry waited for a pink slip, but it never came. Indeed, he seemed to receive the promotion after all, for he took a pay cut.

  Section XII: A Hazard of New Fortunes

  All that week they worked on the bid. Masterson never left the aisle, but stamped, screamed, pounded on tables, and chewed to pieces dozens of dart-fins. He directed his father to hand out pink slips to anyone who got in his way, or to anyone who sneaked around behind him.

  MEMO: Is there life on other planets?

  This question is of the utmost importance to all of us, whether or not we are actually located in the aerospace industries, for it is a restatement of another, all-inclusive question: Are we alone in the universe? And if not, who else is there? These questions pose problems as yet unanswered; we can only wonder and hope and pray. But whether or not we ever find life on other planets, I feel confident that each and every one of us will want to give this question our full and careful consideration.

  – Masterson

  The first real crisis was paper. Masterson decided that ordinary tracing vellum was too expensive, and substituted newsprint. This rough, absorbent stuff made spiderwebs of ink lines and spiders of lettering. Masterson began to scream at the draughtsmen, sometimes with eloquence, sometimes wordlessly.

  ‘Why can’t you make neat, black lines and letters?’ he demanded, and held up a newspaper. Pointing to a story about Hurricane Patty Sue, he said: ‘Take a look at this. They don’t have any trouble making neat lines and letters. Just look at this neat work.’

  They tried again, again complaining of the paper, until Masterson, with a martyred smile, said, ‘All right, all right. I’ll get you some fancy, expensive paper. But then –’

  He left, and returned an hour later with what appeared to be a roll of wide, slick toilet paper. Along one border ran the tiny green words: ‘Deutsches Bundesbahn’.

  In Austria, a fat Mercedes-Benz rolled on fat tyres into a filling station. The attendant saluted and began to fill the tank, while from behind the wheel a fat man rolled out, hitched up his belt and moved towards the toilet like a file of elephants going to the river. The sunlight gleamed on him, on his damp hair and his white shirt of miracle fibres. In one pocket of it was a leather liner containing a matching ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil and a steel scale, marked off both in centimetres and inches. In the other pocket was a package of Roth Handel cigarettes and a roll of hard candy liqueurs. The man stood a moment in the sun, gazing at four brown cows in the field nearby; in this town lived the engineer who designed the ovens at Dachau; the traveller thought of all this and then went in to shit. He, too, was an engineer. Once he had written to an American magazine, asking for the names of engineering firms, of the particular type which included the Masterson Engineering Company. Due to an oversight, however, the engineer did not receive that name.

  The draughtsmen tried again and again, but still their work did not satisfy Masterson. Finally, the eyes swelling behind his huge lenses, he screamed, ‘Stop! I want you to stop. Erase everything. I want you to erase everything.’

  For an hour, the only sound was the hum of electric erasers. One or two people erased holes in the fragile paper; they were given pink slips at once. Finally Masterson collected the twenty blank sheets, touched them up with an artgum eraser, wrapped them carefully and sent them out.

  ‘We’ve got the contract sewed up,’ he joyfully confided to the clerks. ‘No one else could turn out work as neat as that, ever. Not one single mistake!’

  Yet the next day, even while Rod and Bob were collecting money to buy flowers for the departed package, it came back. His thick hands fumbled at the bale of tattered tissue; Masterson read the accompanying letter aloud, and sobs hung quivering from his voice like drops of water from a tap.

  ‘Dear Sirs:

  Re yours of the thirteenth inst., we have no specific need for railroad station toilet tissue at present.

  Thank you for keeping us in mind.’

  Section XIII: All’s Well in the End

  Masterson removed his glasses and began cleaning them on a scrap of the tissue. He turned his back modestly so that no one could glimpse his naked eyes. As he settled the frames once more on his cheeks, he cleared his throat with an oddly familiar sound. Henry leaned over and asked Ed, ‘Will you tell me why you were declared officially dead?’

  Ed pretended not to hear, and gazed steadily at the boss, who moved now on ponderous tiptoes to Art’s desk. ‘Give yourself a pink slip,’ he sighed, and ran away to his office. The little old man nodded eagerly and began filling out a pink slip at once.

  The next day was payday, and all watched Art closely as he passed out the envelopes. Smirking as usual, he sat down to open his own. The money he’d sealed into it and the pink slip he’d signed slid out together, and Art’s face seemed to fold in thirds, like a business letter.

  Clark Markey, always the barometer of another’s mood, began to weep for him. Art himself merely sat there, staring at the slip lying flat on his desk.

  ‘Noo,’ he said in a small voice. ‘They can’t do this to me. Not
to old Art.’ He said it like a speech of condolence.

  ‘It isn’t fair,’ said Clark with feeling. ‘They can’t make a man fire himself.’

  Art walked slowly to the office, pounded on the placard, waited. The sound of darts within ceased.

  ‘Let me in,’ he cried. ‘You’ve got to talk to me, Mr. Masterson.’

  ‘Go away, Dad,’ said a muffled voice. Art trudged to the coat rack, slipped on his old, worn coat, and left.

  A moment or two later, the dart game resumed.

  PART THREE: THE DISMANTLING

  MEMO: My childhood.

  My father was a large cheque drawn on First National City Bank, and my mother was very tired.

  – Masterson

  Section I: Improvements

  Things were looking up. Business seemed much improved, for everyone took enormous pay cuts. Karl was promoted to Art’s old job. In addition to precision stapling, he now made out pink slips and took charge of office supplies. He began to detect and eliminate sources of waste.

  Bob and Rod were promoted to informers. They blamed Masterson’s father for everything, so their pay was not cut.

  Clark Markey had begun to study law. Too many questions of justice now tormented him. How could a dead man be rehired? How could a man be forced to fire himself? At lunch hour he sat hunched over a large volume of labour laws, dropping crumbs (larger than whole words of the fine print) from his cream cheese sandwich. He was not a lawyer, and many of the long paragraphs were unintelligible to him. He began to suspect that in these lay the very answers he was seeking.

  Masterson began looking fresh and fit. His death-colour skin took on a pink tinge, as if he daily gorged on blood. He bulged less, and began to walk around the office on new ripple-soled shoes, smacking his fist in his palm and saying, ‘Now that the dead wood is cleared away, we can really move.’ He made a progress chart.

  Karl moved to eliminate the shocking waste of forms around the office. ‘Look,’ he explained to the group. ‘We always have old, used forms around. Why don’t we just eradicate the ink from them and re-use them?’

  Section II: A Fast

  After Christmas, Harold Kelmscott began a fast. It was, he said, in protest of his not being repaid the ten dollars the boss had borrowed; it was a form of sitting in dharna. Karl, who handled the pay envelopes, knew better. Masterson had garnisheed all of Harold’s wages against the twenty he claimed Harold owed him.

  ‘You can have your pay,’ Karl explained, ‘when the boss gets his twenty back.’

  ‘Twenty! But I only borrowed ten, and that he had already borrowed from me.’

  ‘If he borrowed it from you, how come you had to borrow it back? Come on, Harold, don’t be a welsher. You’re too nice a guy. Pay him his twenty, will you?’

  ‘How can I, as long as I’m not getting paid myself? This is worse than debtor’s prison, isn’t it, Clark?’ Harold looked to the non-lawyer for sympathy.

  ‘What? Who knows? I’d have to check with English Civil Law,’ said Clark testily, not looking up from his perusal of the New York Code.

  Karl wagged his close-cropped head. ‘Harold, you’re a case, the worst I’ve ever seen. You know very well the boss isn’t trying to cheat you. In fact, I begged him – I begged him to fire you and haul you into court. God knows you deserve it.

  ‘But no, he said he wouldn’t even stop the money out of your wages. He said if you didn’t want to pay him, that was between you and your conscience. “I’m worried about Harold,” he said to me. “I think I’ll just garnishee his wages until he pays me back.”

  ‘You see, he knows you’ve got this shack-job in Boston, and he figures it ain’t doing your character any good. But by the time you get squared away on your debt, she’ll have forgotten all about you. Not only that, but you’ll get all your pay at once, a real pile.’

  ‘I’m starving,’ Harold announced humbly. ‘To death.’

  Karl continued counting paper clips. ‘You’re a real case,’ he muttered.

  Section III: Further Progress

  Having devised a method for rebending and re-using old paper clips, Karl saw a further short cut. Rather than eradicate the ink from old forms, he encouraged the others to use disappearing ink in the first place.

  Willard kept his knife in his hand at all times, now, and feared everyone who moved suddenly or talked loudly. He took up whittling, to give himself an excuse for holding a knife. One day Masterson, jogging by, asked him if he could make a table, since he was so clever with his hands.

  One week later, Willard presented him with a perfect matchbox-size Louis Quinze table, painted and gilded. Lifting it from his calloused palm, Willard set it carefully in the centre of the boss’s desk.

  ‘Idiot!’ Masterson screamed, and brought his fist down on it. ‘I meant a real table. A table of our progress.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Karl. ‘If he can do this, Willard here can make big tables for all the clerks. Then we could sell off all the desks.’

  Masterson had taken down and discarded the dart board, and now his walls were covered with charts. He and Karl planned many new charts and tables, and Harold executed them.

  There was a chart of business volume compared to paper-clip expenditure, one of volume of work versus man-hours, one of level of water in the water cooler versus work output and one of Mr. Masterson’s weight versus the strength of his grip. They were inversely proportional, so that, had his weight been zero, his grip would have been a thousand pounds.

  Three times a day he lifted weights in his office, rising on the toes and exploding breath through clenched teeth. At lunch hour, he ran three laps around the block, showered and gulped quantities of natural foods. Most mornings he came in with skinned knuckles and stories of brawls that frightened Willard. Masterson was no longer a shapeless bulgy man of indeterminate age, but a handsome, powerful man of about twenty-five.

  ‘He’s getting in shape to die,’ Ed ‘opined.’

  Masterson had Harold post charts of his progress. There were graphs of his biceps and triceps, and a phrenological chart of his head. The boss began to talk about what great shape the company was in, squeezing grip developers as he talked.

  ‘As soon as we trim off a little fat here and there, as soon as we fire the draughtsmen, we’ll be in great shape.’ He fired the draughtsmen next day, en masse, owing them three weeks’ wages, and Henry complained to Clark about it.

  Clark was getting jowly and near-sighted from cream cheese and law, and his temper was noticeably shorter. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he said. ‘Caveat emptor. Why come to me with your problems? All I want is to be left alone with Law.’

  Henry scooped up some dirty, tattered forms from the floor and began filling them out, in invisible ink. For several weeks, no work had left the office. Messengers who called to pick up work were sent out to get more natural foods for Mr. Masterson. Karl sent them on errands for invisible carbon paper, or to sell the desks that were slowly being replaced by Willard’s tables.

  Great bales of papers piled up, collecting dust. They grew greasy and black from handling, and Henry grew greasy and black from handling them. He washed and brushed his teeth often, but one cannot hold in the heart what is not bred in the bone: he stank.

  Bob and Rod organised a clean-up campaign. They collected all the dirty forms in the office and laundered them. Karl was so pleased with their efforts that he even permitted them to sew patches on worn-out forms, though common practice did not permit this. Even so, after the windows came out, they could not keep up with the dirt.

  No one but Henry and Ed and Eddie were working full-time on clerical duties. Clark was reading law fulltime now, and Masterson had come to approve this. ‘You never can tell when you’ll need a good mouthpiece,’ he said, and began calling Clark ‘the mouthpiece’. The mouthpiece never spoke to anyone.

  Harold was making charts of the company and of Mr. Masterson full time. They overflowed the walls of his office and began to cover the corridor.
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br />   There was a chart showing the chain of command and another showing the flow of work. There was a chart showing weight of forms handled per clerk per day; a chart showing all the muscles of Mr. Masterson’s body (with the Latin labels lettered by Harold in half-uncials); a chart of company work-output vs. world population, and a fishing map of Northern Minnesota, which Mr. Masterson planned to visit some day. There was a graph showing the monthly number of accidents, fatal, and accidents, non-fatal, per clerk.

  Karl’s job included researching the data for all of these. He counted paper clips, measured the level of water in the cooler, taped Mr. Masterson’s biceps, weighed forms, and estimated the world population. His estimates, Harold chuckled, were not conservative enough.

  But Masterson pointed out how efficient Karl was. Who else would have realized the wasteful duplication in using both pink and blue copies of the same form? Karl had purchased a new single form printed on litmus paper, which was either blue or pink, depending on the weather. Ed seemed to grow a beard, which had the appearance of frightening Masterson. Clark wore rimless glasses..

  The janitor service was cut off because the rent had not been paid. Karl had estimated the company could survive one year without it, saving several thousand dollars.

  On the stage of a nearby theatre, two girls, one dressed as a man, were singing a song about making little gifts. One of the girls was sincere, but it was never clear which. Bob and Rod explained to the boss his father had sabotaged the janitor service.

  ‘He sees what a good thing the company is getting to be,’ one of them said. ‘He wants to muscle in on you.’

  ‘Well, I’m ready for him,’ said Masterson. ‘Let him try something.’ Grinning, he flexed his forearm and watched the sinew lumps move in it as characters move about on a stage. Rod and Bob, or as they preferred being called, Dob and Rob, began doing janitor work around the office. They refused service to anyone who would not contribute to their list of charities: CORE, CARE, KKK, CCC, the Better Business Bureau, AAA and Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. Only Harold did not give.