Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  He turned to the next one.

  At 2:30 Forester came by and the two of them made their way between the jig-saw projections of maple and mahogany to the Conference Room.

  Fourteen men were involved in the conference, all from operating departments. They shuffled in over a five minute period, found seats, lit cigarettes, talked and joked with one another.

  When one of the assistants to the manager came in, they fell silent.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I think I’d better get right to the point today. The Construction Program in the Valley has now used up two bond issues. The voters aren’t going to approve a third one.”

  He paused for effect then continued briskly:

  “I see by the morning’s Times that the mayor is appointing a watch-dog commission. I guess you all saw it, too. The Department of Water and Power of the City of Los Angeles is going to be badly—and I mean badly—in the red at the end of the fiscal year.

  “We’re in hot water.

  “We do not seem to be getting through to the operating departments regarding the necessity for cost reduction. I have here last month’s breakdown on the Bunker Hill substation 115 KV installation. Most of you have seen it already, I think. I had it sent around. Now—”

  The analysis continued for some ten minutes to conclude with an explosion:

  “We’ve got to impose a ten per cent across the board cut on operating expenses.”

  One of the listeners, more alert than the rest, asked, “That go for salaries?”

  “For personnel making more than eight hundred dollars a month it does.”

  There was a moment of shocked silence.

  “You can’t make that stick,” one of the supervisors said. “Half my best men will be out tomorrow looking for better offers—and finding them, too.”

  “I’m just passing on what I was told.”

  The men in the room shuffled and muttered under their breaths.

  “O.K., that’s the way they want it,” one of the supervisors said.

  “I’ve brought along the notices for the affected personnel. Please see they’re distributed when you leave.”

  After the meeting, Forester walked with Eddie back to his desk.

  “You be in tomorrow, Eddie?”

  “I guess I will, Les. I really don’t know, yet.”

  “I’d hate to lose you.”

  “It’s going to make it pretty rough. A man’s fixed expenses don’t come down.”

  “I’ll see what I can do for you, maybe upgrade the classification—”

  “Thanks, Les.”

  Back at his desk, Eddie looked at his watch. Nearly time for the Safety Meeting. Lost-time injuries had been climbing for the last four months.

  While waiting, he signed a sixty-three page preliminary report recommending a program for the orderly replacement of all transmission and distribution cable installed prior to 1946. It was estimated that the savings, in the long run, would total some quarter of a billion dollars. The initial expense, however, was astronomical.

  After the Safety Meeting, Eddie prepared another memorandum indicating the acute need for a better training program and an increase in maintenance personnel. Shortage of qualified technicians was chronic.

  At four twenty-five, the night supervisor phoned in to say he was having engine trouble with his new car and would be delayed until about six o’clock. Eddie agreed to wait for him.

  Eddie dialed home to let his wife, Lois, know he would be late again. A modulated low-frequency note told him the home phone was out of order.

  Ray Morely, one of the night-shift engineers, came in with coffee. “You still here, Eddie?”

  “Yeah, until Wheeler makes it. His car’s down.”

  “Market hit a new high.”

  “Yeah. I guess you heard about the meeting today?”

  Ray sipped coffee. “Budget again? I missed the day crew. I got hung up in traffic and was a little late.”

  “A pay cut goes with it, this time.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Been by your desk yet?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not kidding. Ten per cent for those making above eight hundred.”

  “Nobody’s going to put up with that,” Ray said. “We’re in an engineering shortage. We’ve got ICBMs rusting in their silos all over the country because we can’t afford the engineering maintenance—that’s how bad it is. Everybody’ll quit.”

  “I don’t think they’ll make it stick. Ramon Lopez, one of the truck crew, was killed today hosing down a high-voltage pothead.”

  “No kidding?”

  Eddie told him about the accident.

  “That was a rough one to lose, wasn’t it?”

  The phone rang.

  Ray said, “I’ll get it.”

  He listened for a minute and hung up. “There’s an outage in the Silver Lake Area. The brakes on a bus failed and took out an overhead section.”

  Eddie sat back. “No sense in you going. With work traffic on the surface streets until the freeway gets fixed, they won’t get the truck there until 6:30 or so.”

  “Right.” Ray drank coffee reflectively. “You going looking?”

  “I’m an old-timer. I got a lot of seniority. How about you?”

  “I got bills. It’s going to cost me near a hundred a month—that’s a steep bite.”

  “I still think they’ll back off.”

  “They’ll have to,” Ray said. “If not right now, when the pressure gets on. You ask me, we’ve got them by the short hair.” He settled into the chair. “I see it as an organic phenomenon. When society gets as complex as ours, it has to grow more and more engineers. But there’s a feedback circuit in effect. The more engineers we grow, the more complex society becomes. Each new one creates the need for two more. I get a sort of feeling of—I don’t know—vitality, I guess, when I walk into, say, an automated factory. All that machinery and all that electronic gear is like a single cell in a living organism—an organism that’s growing every day, multiplying like bacteria. And it’s always sick, and we’re the doctors. That’s job security. We’re riding the wave of the future. I don’t think they’ll make a salary cut stick.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Eddie said.

  Eddie checked out at 7:15, when the night supervisor finally arrived. As he left the building, he noted that a burglar alarm down the street had gone off; probably because of a short circuit. The clanking set his nerves on edge. Apprehensively he felt a rising wind against his cheeks.

  At home, he was greeted with a perfunctory kiss at the door.

  “Honey,” Lois told him, “you took the check book, and I didn’t have any money.”

  “Something come up? I’m sorry.”

  “We’re all out of milk. The milk man didn’t come today. Their homogenizing machinery broke down. I phoned the dairy about nine; and then, of course, the phone has been on the blink since about eleven or a little before, so I couldn’t ask you to bring some home.”

  “I kept trying to get you.”

  “I figured you had to work late again, when you weren’t here at six, and I knew you’d be here when you got here.”

  Eddie sat down and she sat on the chair arm beside him. “How did it go today?”

  He started to tell her about the wage cut and Ramon Lopez; but then he didn’t want to talk about it. “So-so,” he said. “There was an outage over in the Silver Lake Area just before I left.”

  “Fixed yet?”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “Probably a couple of more hours.”

  “Gee,” she said, “when I think of all that meat in the deep freezer . . .”

  “I wouldn’t stock so much,” he said. “I really wouldn’t.”

  She twisted away from him. “Honey. I’m jittery. Something’s . . . I don’t know. In the air, I guess.”

  The wind rattled the windows.

  While Lois was warming dinner, his son came in.

  “Hi, Eddie.”

&
nbsp; “Hi, Larry.”

  “Eddie, when we gonna get the TV fixed?”

  Eddie put down the newspaper. “We just don’t have a hundred dollars or so right now.” He searched for matches on the table by the chair. “Lois, oh, Lois, where’re the matches?”

  She came in. “They were all out Friday at the store, and I keep forgetting to lay in a supply. Use my lighter over there.”

  “About the TV—”

  Lois was wiping her hands on the paper towel she had brought with her. “Replacement parts are hard to find for the older sets,” she said. “Anyway. I read today Channel Three finally went off the air. That leaves only Two and Seven. And the programs aren’t any good, now, are they? All those commercials and all?”

  “They do use a lot of old stuff I’ve already seen,” the son admitted, “but every once in a while there’s something new.”

  “Let’s talk about it some other time, Larry, O.K.?” Eddie said. “How’s that? It’s almost your bed-time. Studies done?”

  “All but the Library report.”

  “Well, finish it, and—”

  “I got to read the book down there. Two classes assigned it and they don’t have the copies to let us check out. And I want to ask you about something, Eddie.”

  “Daddy’s tired. His dinner’s on. Come on, Eddie. I’ll set it right now. And Larry, you’ve already eaten . . .”

  After dinner, Eddie got back to the paper, the evening Times. It was down to eight pages, mostly advertising. There was a front-page editorial reluctantly announcing a price increase.

  “They raise the price once more, and we’ll just quit taking it,” Lois said. “You read about the airplane crash in Florida? Wasn’t that terrible? What do you think caused it?”

  “Metal fatigue, probably,” Eddie said. “It was a twenty-year-old jet.”

  “The company said it wasn’t that at all.”

  “They always do,” Eddie said.

  “I don’t guess the payroll check came today or you’d have mentioned it.”

  “Payroll’s still all balled up. Somebody pressed a wrong button on the new machine and some fifty thousand uncoded cards got scattered all over the office.”

  “Oh, no! What do the poor people, who don’t have bank accounts, do?”

  “Just wait, like we wait.”

  “You had a bad day,” Lois said. “I can tell.”

  “No . . .” Eddie said. “Not really, I guess.”

  “Still working on Saturday?”

  “I guess so. Nothing was said. Maybe it’ll get easier after the end of the month.”

  “You said it was all that new construction work in the Valley that’s making you so shorthanded.”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “They’re not scheduled to finish until . . . when, sometime next year, isn’t it?”

  “The end of ’81 right now.”

  “Eddie! Listen to me! I hardly ever see you any more. You’re not going to have to put in all this overtime for the next two years!”

  “Of course not,” Eddie said. “Maybe after this month, that’s all, and the work load will level off.”

  Larry, dressed for bed, came in. “Eddie?”

  “Your father’s tired.”

  “I want to ask him something.”

  “What is it, Larry?” Eddie asked.

  “Eddie, you know the little culture I was running for science class? Something’s wrong. Will you look at it?”

  “Daddy’s . . .”

  “I’ll look at it, Lois.” Eddie accompanied his son to his son’s room.

  “What do you think is wrong, Dad?”

  “Well, let’s see . . .”

  “What is it?” Larry asked. “What made it stop growing?”

  Eddie did not answer for a minute. Then: “You start with one or two . . . well, it’s like this, Larry. I’m afraid it’s dead. They grow exponentially. Figure out how much money you’d have at the end of a month if you started with just a penny and doubled your money every day. In just a little while, you’d have all the money in the world. Figure it out sometime. Things that grow exponentially, they just don’t know when to quit. And your culture, here, it grew until the environment could no longer support it and all at once the food was eaten up and it died.”

  “I . . . see . . . Something like that could just grow until it took over the whole world, couldn’t it?”

  Again Eddie was silent for a moment. Then he rumpled his son’s hair. “That’s science fiction, Larry.”

  Later, while they were listening to FM, there was a news break reporting a fire out of control in South Los Angeles.

  “That’s near Becky’s, I’ll bet,” she said. “I better phone.”

  The phone was still out of order.

  “I sure feel cut off without a phone.”

  After an interlude of music, Lois said, “Larry wants to be an engineer, now. I guess after what you said, maybe that’s a pretty good thing.”

  Eddie looked up from his cigarette. “Why this all of a sudden?”

  “One of his teachers told him what you said—there’s a growing engineering shortage.”

  “I thought he wanted to be an astronaut.”

  “You know Larry. That was last week. His teacher said we’re not going to start up the space program again. It’s too expensive. We just don’t have the technical man-power and materials to spare.”

  “We are in . . . But these kids, young kids they’re turning out—they aren’t getting the education today. And if anything, I sometimes think it almost makes our jobs even worse, correcting their mistakes. I sometimes wonder where it’s all going to stop.”

  There was more news from the fire front.

  Fire fighters were having a very difficult time. Two water mains had broken and the pressure was dropping. The fire was reported to have been caused by the explosion of a gas main. Rising winds did not promise to abate until dawn.

  “I sure wish I could get through to Beck,” Lois said. “Oh, I guess I told you, did I? Her sister has hypoglycemia, they found out. That’s why she’s been tired all the time.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Low blood sugar. It’s caused by an overactive gland on the pancreas. And treatment is just the opposite of what you’d think, too. I’ll bet you’d never guess. If you increase the amount of sugar in the diet, the gland becomes just that much more active to get rid of it and the hypoglycemia gets worse. It’s what I’ll bet you engineers call a feedback. Isn’t that what you call it? Well . . . the way doctors treat it is to reduce the amount of sugar you eat. And after a little bit, the pancreas gets back its normal function, and the patient gets well. I told you you’d never guess!”

  After a long time, Eddie said, very softly, “Oh.”

  Just after midnight, they went to bed.

  “I’ve been . . .” Lois began and then stopped. “I don’t know. Jumpy. The market was up again today. Another all-time high. Do you think there’ll be another Crash? Like ‘way back in 1929.”

  She could feel him lying tense beside her in the darkness. “No,” he said slowly, “I don’t think so. I don’t think there’ll be a Crash.”

  In spite of the warmth of the room, she could not suppress an involuntary shudder whose cause was nameless. Suddenly, she did not want to ask any more questions.

  The wind was rattling the windows.

  1964

  SHAMAR’S WAR

  He was Earth’s secret weapon, as deadly as a sword—and two-edged!

  I

  The year was 2346, and Earth, at the time, was a political democracy.

  The population was ruled by the Over-Council and, in order of decreasing importance, by Councils, and Local Councils. Each was composed of representatives duly apportioned by popular vote between the two contending parties. Executive direction was provided by a variety of Secretaries, selected by vote of the appropriate Councils. An independent Judiciary upheld the laws.

  A unified Earth sent colonist
s to the stars. Back came strange tales and improbable animals.

  Back, too, came word of a burgeoning technological civilization on the planet Itra, peopled by entirely humanoid aliens.

  Earth felt it would be wise for Itra to join in a Galactic Federation and accordingly, submitted the terms of such a mutually advantageous agreement.

  The Itraians declined . . .

  Space Captain Merle S. Shaeffer, the youngest and perhaps the most naive pilot for Trans-Universe Transport, was called unexpectedly to the New York office of the company.

  When Capt. Shaeffer entered the luxurious eightieth story suite, Old Tom Twilmaker, the President of TUT, greeted him. With an arm around his shoulder, Old Tom led Capt. Shaeffer to an immense inner office and introduced him to a General Reuter, identified as the Chairman of the Interscience Committee of the Over-Council.

  No one else was present. With the door closed, they were isolated in Olympian splendor above and beyond the affairs of men. Here judgments were final and impartial. Capt. Shaeffer, in the presence of two of the men highest in the ruling councils of Earth, was reduced to incoherent awe.

  General Reuter moved about restlessly. Old Tom was serene and beatific.

  When they were seated, Old Tom swiveled around and gazed long in silence across the spires of the City. Capt. Shaeffer waited respectfully. General Reuter fidgetted.

  “Some day,” Old Tom said at last, “I’m going to take my leave of this. Yes, gentle Jesus! Oh, when I think of all the souls still refusing to admit our precious Savior, what bitterness, oh, what sorrow is my wealth to me! Look down upon the teeming millions below us. How many know not the Lord? Yes, some morning, I will forsake all this and go out into the streets to spend my last days bringing the words of hope to the weary and oppressed. Are you a Christian, Merle?”

  General Reuter cracked his knuckles nervously while Capt. Shaeffer muttered an embarrassed affirmative.

  “I am a deeply religious man,” Old Tom continued. “I guess you’ve heard that, Merle?”

  “Yes sir,” Capt. Shaeffer said.

  “But did you know that the Lord has summoned you here today?” Old Tom asked.