The Best of Gene Wolfe

by Gene Wolfe

  “If you’re in the red,” Peters remarked wisely, “three percent of nothing is zero.”

  “Oh, but we didn’t stay there, you know—not with that sort of money in view.”

  “Sounds as though they should have put you in charge long ago,” Peters said. It was one of his stock compliments.

  “They didn’t want it, you know.” Tredgold’s smile was broader than ever. “I daresay you think profit’s what they’re generally after, don’t you? Went to business school and they taught you that.”

  “Yes, they did,” Peters admitted. “Or I should say they taught us that the object of business management was to maximize the value of the stock—that was the definition we had to learn.”

  “Oh, son!”

  “I know in Britain”—Peters fumbled for words—“there’s more concern for, uh, social objectives, but still . . .” He stopped. Tredgold was laughing. “Well, what is it then?”

  “My dear chap . . . my dear old chap, look about you; haven’t you ever seen a firm where one of the salesmen started to do really well selling on commission? What do they do, eh? Fire him, take part of the territory from him, possibly make him sales manager—no commission there, you know—something of the kind. Yet he was making the firm a mint and now they haven’t got it. He was a mere salesperson, you see, and they’d sooner bankrupt the place than have him make too much. Let me tell you something: the big ones, the ones with offices and works of one sort or another all about, like yours and mine, can buy profits whenever they choose just by offering a thin bit of them to the chaps who do the work. But they don’t and they won’t, and who can blame them? I mean, what would they do with the bloody stuff?”

  “Build more plants, I suppose,” Peters said.

  “More problems for the big pots, and the government on them too and should one of those new works not go, their reputations suffer—so why risk it? None of them know the least about manufacturing anyway.”

  “Give it to the stockholders then.”

  “Just makes the blighters greedy. No, quite seriously now, Peters, y’know what saved me? Potty little Portugal has to be shown in a separate column in the annual report, and we balance out the limousine thing—so I’m permitted to feather my wee nest. Besides”—Tredgold winked—“there are fringes. Here, love.”

  A pretty dark-haired girl came on camera. Tredgold said, “Give us a kiss, love, and blow one to the Yank—I say, Peters, your chief is behind you; bet you didn’t know it.”

  Lowell Lewis was coming through the door from the large, chair-strewn room beyond. His face, heavy and unexceptional as ever, might have been a trifle drawn. Peters put Tredgold on Hold.

  “Can you get me Hastorf on that thing?” Lewis said. He named a steel company and, when Peters still hesitated, added, “Pittsburgh.” Peters keyed the number and got a secretary, who, seeing Lewis, touched a button by which she replaced her own face with the image of a white-haired man of fifty-five or sixty. Peters cleared his throat and slipped out of the console chair; the white-haired man said, “Hi, Lou.”

  Lewis nodded and said, “Phil.”

  The white-haired man smiled. “Just about to take myself home, but what can I do for you?”

  “I don’t want to hold you up,” Lewis said.

  “Any time.”

  Lewis smiled. “Pittsburgh quieter now?”

  “Oh, we’ve never had trouble out here, Lou. We’re twenty-five miles outside the city proper, you understand. What we say is, let them have the damn place for a while and wear themselves out on it. Employees who lived in the central city are free to bed down right here in the offices at night—of course, it’s a bit hard on them.”

  “What I wanted to know, Phil, was about the planes. I was just talking to General Virdon, and he stresses the importance of having air support.”

  “We’re guaranteeing fourteen fighter-bombers,” the other man said.

  “Good. Couldn’t scrape up a few more for us, could you?”

  Hastorf shook his head. “Not much in the way of ground crews left now, Lou. We’re sending some of our laboratory people over to the base to help out, but of course they’re mostly metallurgical specialties. Couldn’t spare a few technicians from your outfit, could you? Or some engineers?”

  “Would it get me more planes tonight?”

  Hastorf said, “I’ll talk to the boys.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. An engineer for every plane over the fifteen.”

  “Fourteen,” Hastorf said.

  “I thought you said fifteen. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  For the first time Hastorf appeared to notice Peters. “Young man,” he said, “could we hear from you?”

  Peters said, “Fifteen.”

  Hastorf gave him a wry smile before turning back to Lewis. “I’ve only got fourteen, Lou.”

  “All right, damn it, an engineer for every plane above fourteen.”

  * * *

  Afterward he said to Peters, “Knew him in college. Hastorf.”

  Peters nodded.

  “Damn funny, isn’t it? He went with them, and of course I went with U.S., and hell, I don’t think—no, I bumped into him at some kind of trade show once. I remember having a drink with him. A machine tool show.”

  Peters said, “I guess you talked over old times.”

  “That’s right.” The old man turned and walked toward the door, then stopped. “Now here we are working together again.” He shook his head. “For thirty years he’s been with that steel outfit—a whole different world. Our senior year we were both on the dance committee. It’s like you were seeing somebody rise from the dead—you know what I mean, Pete?”

  Peters said, “I think so. Does—— [he named the steel corporation that employed Hastorf] have the air force now?”

  “Most of it’s with some oil outfit in Texas.”

  Lewis shut the door behind him, and Peters touched, for an instant, the spot toward which Tredgold’s dark girl had blown her kiss. Then Peters hit Release, wondering if Tredgold had bothered to wait. Tredgold said, “ ’Lo, Peters. Recovered from my revelations yet?”

  Peters smiled. “Not yet. Not quite.”

  “Redbrick—did I tell you? We like to put the knife in you toffs when we’ve the chance.”

  “I wanted to ask if you’d like to come—yourself—to the party tonight,” Peters said.

  Tredgold whistled. “The old chap—did he endorse this bold move?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll say I suggested you drop by to make sure your girls were on the ball.”

  “All right,” Tredgold said, “but I should tell you I’ve promised Mum I’ll be home before eight.”

  In the main room the first guests were already drifting in, staring at the wall screen on the east wall, talking in self-conscious groups; several of them carried newspapers. Clio was handing around cocktails, and Donovan was already deep in conversation with a man who looked so much like himself that he might almost be talking to a mirror. Watching them all, Peters had the sensation of having seen just this tableau of elaborate casualness and subdued, content-free speech before. It was only when a woman in a red dress—very obviously the secretary-mistress of the Danish shipbuilder whose arm she held—entered that Peters could place it: the operatic market scene into which, in a moment, one of the principal singers was sure to come, calling for the thrill of romance or (what is much the same thing) the defense of France. Surely, Peters thought, the curtains have just parted. He looked toward the west window and saw Clio moving toward the cord even as he formed the thought.

  The gray velvet rolled back to show tossing Atlantic waves. Peters wanted to incline his head toward them, a very slight bow, but someone took him by the arm and said, “You are one of the Americans?”

  “Oh, yes, and you are—” He tried, and failed, to attach a name, then a nationality, to the face. Oh, well, when in Rome . . . “Senhor . . .”

  “Solomos.”

  “Damn glad you could come
,” Peters said, taking his hand.

  “What is happening in your country is so interesting,” Solomos said. “Great art will come from it—have you thought of that? Great art. The blood of a great people is stirred by such things, and there will be so much of what was old blown away.”

  Someone put an old-fashioned into Peters’s hand, and he sipped it. He said, “I suppose.” He thought of the Italian industrialist who collected art, but he was reasonably sure Solomos was not he.

  “The armies—do they take pains to preserve such art as your country possesses?”

  “Armies?” Peters had never thought of the radicals as an army.

  “We soldiers like to loot,” Solomos said. “All, that is, except the soldiers of my own country—we regard any art save our own as an aberration.” He laughed.

  There was a cherry in the bottom of Peters’s glass, and he ate it. He said to Solomos, “You’re a soldier, then?”

  “Oh, no. No more.”

  A third man joined them; he was tall, and had a mustache. He said, “You are Mr. Peters, I take it. Where do you feel the sympathies of the American people lie, Mr. Peters?”

  Peters said, “With the government, unquestionably.”

  “But since May,” the tall man began, “there has been so little government left, and so little of the will to rule in what is left—”

  “One knows what he intends,” Solomos said.

  A fat man who had been talking to another group turned (it was a little, Peters thought, like watching a globe revolve in a library) and said, “In the science of realpolitik the sympathies of the population do not matter except insofar as they are nationalistic sympathies. In the event of a civil war the concept of nationalistic sympathy is inapplicable because to the popular mind the nation claiming allegiance is perceived to have vanished. A charismatic leader—”

  Peters said, “In the Civil War regional sympathies—”

  “Wait,” the tall man said. “Something is happening.”

  Peters turned around and saw that Lowell Lewis was now standing facing the dark screen and rapping (though the sound was inaudible over the hum of talk) with a long pointer on the glass surface.

  “He should shoot off a gun, hahaha,” Solomos said. “That would quiet them.” Peters said, “I think he’s afraid of guns,” then realized he should not have, then that no one had heard him anyway. A beautiful dark-haired girl in an evening gown, one of Tredgold’s girls, gave him a martini.

  The fifteen-by-thirty-five-foot screen behind Lewis flashed with light, showing Lewis’s own face, immensely magnified so that every pore could be seen as though through a microscope. It glowered at them, all eyes and nose and mouth, the forehead and chin lost in ceiling and carpet; so magnified it assumed a new quality, like the giants in fairy tales, who are not merely big men but monsters. “Gentlemen,” Lewis said. “Your attention, please.”

  The room fell silent.

  “I’m afraid we are not quite all here yet, but we have a definite appointment with General Virdon, and it would be best if I began your orientation now.”

  Someone said, “Will there be a period for questions?”

  The giant answered, “There will be all evening for questions—I want that understood. You may interrupt any speaker—including myself—whenever you have questions. We’re not trying to sell you a pig in a poke.”

  “If the attack tonight succeeds, what benefits do you anticipate?”

  “I should think the benefits are obvious.”

  “I will put it in another way,” the questioner continued. “Do you not feel that the real struggle is taking place on your coasts? That they are the important theaters of operations?”

  From beside Peters the tall man called, “Some believe we have been brought here to witness a show victory—a Potemkin village of war.” Peters had been trying to guess the tall man’s nationality, thus far without success.

  Lewis disappeared, replaced by a map of America. The real Lewis, seeming suddenly diminutive, tapped Detroit with his wand. “This city may not be known to many of you,” he said, “as it is not a cosmopolitan city, but it is a manufacturing center of great importance. Please observe that it is virtually impossible to isolate it without infringing upon Canadian sovereignty.”

  The man with the mustache said, “Canada cannot allow the passage of war matériel.”

  “I am speaking of industrial goods, whose passage Canada has guaranteed— machine tools and electronics. Not supplies for the troops in the east. Our aim in this campaign is to restore American productivity.”

  Someone near Peters said, “And American credit.” There was a ripple of laughter.

  “Precisely.” Lewis’s flat voice came loudly, cutting through the amusement. “Credit, as you know, is a matter of confidence, of trust. Ours is still a country of great natural resources, with a wonderful supply of skilled labor and unmatched management know-how. I don’t have to tell any of you gentlemen that U.S. is one of the world’s leading manufacturers, or that we are trying to obtain, currently, financing overseas, but—”

  The man standing next to Peters said, “You are having difficulties. What is it you call management if you have such difficulties?”

  Peters turned, expecting to see Solomos, but it was a man he had not met, a short, fat man of fifty or so. Peters said, “We mean business management. Maximizing the return on invested capital.”

  “Management,” the fat man said firmly, “is management.”

  Peters turned back to listen to Lewis.

  “End,” the fat man continued, “you do not any longer have these resources you speak of, not so much more as other peoples.”

  Peters said, “There is a great deal left.”

  “Not so much for each person as Western Europe. Different, yes, but not so much.”

  Lewis had a map of Detroit on the screen now, stabbed by arrows from the south and west.

  On the other side of Peters someone asked, “Do you have a master plan for retaking the country?” And the tall man with the mustache said, “They surely must, but I doubt if this young man knows it, or could confide in us if he did.”

  Peters recalled a conversation he had had with Lewis earlier in which he had asked much the same question. Lewis had said, “Top management knows what it’s doing,” and Peters had felt better until he remembered that Lewis was top management. One of Tredgold’s girls brushed against Peters, her back arched, her hands and a tray of hors d’oeuvres above her head; he was acutely conscious of the momentary warmth and pressure of her hips; General Virdon was talking on the wall-sized screen, a gray-haired, square-faced man whose hard jaw was betrayed by nervous eyes. Peters had seen the face before, the face of a frightened middle-management man whose career had topped out in his forties, driving his subordinates from habit and his fear of his many-faced, ever-shifting superiors. Donovan edged up to Peters and said, “He looks like old Charlie Taylor, doesn’t he? Runs the Duluth plant.”

  Peters nodded. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  “I was out there two years ago,” Donovan continued. “You know, go around, see what the boys back home were doing. . . .”

  Mentally Peters tuned him out. Someone new, a major, was on the screen. He said, “I regret that Colonel Hopkins was unable to return as scheduled to address this group. He left our headquarters here at fourteen hundred hours and was due back quite some time ago. I don’t know just what he had intended to tell you, but I’ll answer your questions as well as I can.” The major wore paratrooper wings; they went well with his impassive, almost Indian, face.

  Someone asked, “If your colonel does not return, will you direct the attack?”

  “If you mean Force Wolverine,” the major said, “I’ll lead it. General Virdon will direct it.”

  From another part of the room: “Isn’t it true that you have put clerks and cooks into the fighting ranks?”

  “Not as much as I’d like to.” Unexpectedly the major smiled, the boyish smile
of a man who has gotten his way when he did not expect it. “They’re usually the most able-bodied soldiers we’ve got, especially the clerks. Now that the government’s out and the companies have taken over, all the goofballs with political connections can’t write their damn letters anymore.”

  “Don’t you find it difficult to get recruits when you cannot pay?”

  “Hell, that would be impossible,” the major said. “But we can pay something— the companies have bankrolled us to some extent, and they buy up some of the stuff we liberate.”

  Lowell Lewis said, “May I add a bit of explanation of my own there, Major? Thank you. Gentlemen, this is, of course, one of the most important reasons for the loans we are trying to secure here—we feel an obligation to deal fairly with the men who are directing these vital operations in our own country. They are going to win, they will win, and we are in a position to secure those loans with the solidest possible collateral—victory.”

  “A question for you, Mr. Lewis. This officer takes order from General Veerdon—”

  “Virdon,” the major said.

  “Thank you. General Veerdon. But from whom does General Veerdon take order?”

  There was a long pause. At last Lewis said, “At present General Virdon can’t be said to be getting orders from anyone. America feels that as one of its finest commanders he is competent, during this emergency, to exercise his own judgment.”

  “But he consults with you?”

  Lewis nodded. “About finances and supplies, and to a certain extent concerning priorities among objectives.” Peters saw Clio Morris hand Lewis a note.

  “And General Marteen, at Boston, with who—”

  “Excuse me,” Lewis said, “but word had just been flashed to us that the troops are jumping off for the attack, and I don’t think any of you will want to miss that.”

  Down an eight-lane highway dotted with the carcasses of burned-out auto-mobiles (casualties of the June fighting that had lost the city) men in green and brown and blue were advancing ahead of three light tanks. Some of the men wore helmets; others did not, and Peters noticed one group in the flat-brimmed campaign hats of state police. The short, fat man called out, “Ees Force Wolpereen?”