Easy and Hard Ways Out (15 page)

“Oh, God,” she said, rushing at him. “I can't stand it when you say those professorial things. Oh, do it to me, Kenneth. Quickly.”

Brundage belched.

He flopped down on top of her on the bed and ran his trembling, briefcase-callused fingers up her skirt. Surprisingly, she was wearing a girdle of some sort, and as he began forcing his way under the powerful garment, he felt something give in his wrist. He was about to try an alternate approach when she sat up abruptly and listened intently.

“Oh. Oh, God. Oh, he's coming! Oh, Kenneth, quick! It's Tony! Quick!”

Brundage grabbed his coat and briefcase and ran into the foyer. Christine followed as a key turned in the lock and the door opened, letting in a thickly built, heavy-bellied man in a leather jacket.

“Oh, hi,” said Christine, going over and giving him a light kiss on the cheek. “Tony, this is Dr. Brundage, my supervisor. I worked late tonight, and he drove me home.”

Tony stared at Brundage hostilely. “How come he came upstairs?”

“Oh,” said Christine, “he, uh … he, oh, I told him I'd give him some guppies.”

She ran into the kitchen and came back with a jar that she dipped into the foyer tank and in which she imprisoned some small fish.

“I've always loved them,” said Brundage uneasily, taking the jar and heading for the door.

“I'll just see Dr. Brundage to the elevator,” said Christine, rushing to his side.

Tony eyed him suspiciously as Brundage slid by and out. Brundage could feel the man's gaze eating at the back of his skull, his neck. Halfway down the corridor, Christine stopped, and without facing him or moving her lips, whispered, “In two weeks he'll be on a cross-country trip.”

Brundage continued walking carefully toward the elevator.

“Hey!” yelled Tony.

Brundage froze solid. He pictured himself being beaten effortlessly to death, the man having been made incredibly tough and unreasonable by the years of low-quality, diner food.

“Hey, you know what the Knicks did today?”

“Sorry,” said Brundage, gratefully relaxing once again and oozing into the elevator, “I don't follow sports.”

He drove slowly, euphorically. Two weeks! Two weeks, and a sure thing! He passed a stop sign without stopping, rode down a one-way street the wrong way, missed turns and had to go back. He got lost, and didn't care. What an extraordinary thing was happening to him! What a marvelous, almost religious experience! His wrist hurt, but he didn't mind. After all, he'd sprained it in
her
girdle. He turned the words over in his mind.
Her
girdle. Her girdle.
In
her girdle.

He pulled up in front of his house finally, shut off the ignition, bounded inside, and gave his wife a long, deep kiss. Before retiring that evening he poured himself a glass of milk and listened with exceptional sympathy and understanding to her complaints. Overnight the temperature dipped into the teens, and on the front seat the guppies froze and died where he'd left them.

THE BRUNT

a. Motormouth

Henry Ardway dwelt behind a huge wooden desk bordered on two sides by horizontal steel files, so that he sat in the middle of a U-shaped enclave, vulnerable only to someone boring a hole through the wall at the rear, a possibility to which he'd been giving increasing attention over the years. He was a thin, taut-faced man, wiry-looking, with a head covered by a surging, frizzed crew cut, as if someone had sewn a million stitches into him with thread, then pulled the whole thing very tight and snipped off the ends. He was reading a technical journal now, skimming it really (it had been years since he actually read anything), and underlining certain crucial phrases with a red (vitally crucial) or orange pencil. The color of the underlinings, though important, didn't really matter, since they were later wiped out by a Xerox machine interested only in grays and blacks, so that the people who received the copies they immediately threw away never even noticed the difference.

Ardway's eyes moved in rapid, discreet hops, seeing everything, absorbing nothing. He'd long ago understood that he would never master the scientific aspects of engineering, and so he'd devoted himself to applying his birdlike, distracted energy toward other ends. Toward motivating people and writing memoranda. Toward saying everything possible about a subject in the hopes that a more powerful mind, though disdaining him, might nevertheless seize on a random phrase and solve the problem. Toward singling out minor trouble areas that these same powerful minds might think childishly trivial and ignore, but which were really important, such as determining where on the radar module to put the company emblem, or whether to capitalize all the words in the heading of a report. Toward making dozens of oaktag charts that hung on the walls of his office, charts that showed wavy black lines for goals and wavy red lines for achievements, with all the reds not only higher than all the blacks but increasing their distance, pulling away into a limitless production void. This, then, was what Ardway was good at; this, and talking very fast, faster than anyone else, more wpm than any stenographer alive. “Motormouth,” as the boys said. “The fastest mouth in the East.” “Smoke-tongue.” Sometimes, when talking to someone who spoke slowly, like Peretz or Steinberg, Ardway would fill in possible endings to their sentences after each word, often giving the speaker, at any point, as many as three choices.

Ardway was an intense, busy, forty-six-year-old man with a wife and children he told himself he loved dearly, especially for the few hours on Sunday when he got to see them. He'd married immediately on graduating from college and spent the next twenty-six years working overtime. From the first, wherever he went, he'd made the company interest his interest, its goals his, its problems his challenge, its profits his satisfaction. Always immersing himself in the activity, the nonstop, pounding, swept-up, headlong rush forward, the next job, the coming month's quota, the week's progress reports, achieving, achieving, motion for its own sake, make enough heat and pretty soon you'll get light. Let the academic geniuses sit in their little cubicles …

b. The Magi

They entered the office like sheep, three shlock wise men, one of whom was a woman. Instead of gifts they bore excuses.

“The Air Force is coming in two weeks,” said Ardway when the three behinds had expanded to fill the leatherette couch. “Are we all ready to show them something?”

He scanned the faces, but their eyes were staring carefully at nothing and their heads were tilted slightly down and away, their expressions that deft, subordinate neutral designed to indicate the absence of any mental activity whatsoever. He flashed a very rapid, toothy smile that was so quickly replaced by a scowl that the first gesture seemed an hallucination, an illusion. The gazes of the wise men remained focused on the carpet, the wall, a finger.

“Well?” said Ardway. “Somebody? Anybody? No?”

No.

“You've had four months,” said Ardway into the silence. “Four months ago I asked you for your worst possible delivery times and you told me a month ago. For absolute safety I added three weeks and now it's a week after that and we're still not ready. Is that a reasonable summary, so far?”

“Mmm,” said Pat.

“Right,” said Steinberg.

Brundage belched.

Ardway looked at him and saw his fly was open. Anyone else he might've signaled to, perhaps discreetly taken aside, but with Brundage such measures were pointless. The man was an insensate animal of the barnyard variety. How often had he seen Brundage's ripple-soled shoes squishy with fresh dog excrement? How many times had the man belched in his presence, passed wind, sucked on lollipops at high-level technical conferences? No, this type of person could have his shlong dangling near his cuff and never notice.

“Have the special attenuators been incorporated in the module yet, Ken?” asked Ardway.

“I don't deal with the module,” said Brundage.

A
stubborn
barnyard animal, thought Ardway.

“Pat,” he said, “have the attenuators been tested in the countermeasures module?”

“No, Mr. Ardway, they haven't,” said Pat. She looked at him steadily, and he detected, as always with her, the slightly superior air, the hint of patronizing courtesy.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because I haven't received them from Dr. Brundage.”

Ardway took a deep breath. “All right, Ken, let's start at the beginning. When will you have the attenuators?”

Brundage squinted at a chart on the wall and picked at a nostril with one finger. He wore an Ace bandage on his exquisitely sprained wrist. His whole life had changed literally overnight; there was nothing now that could really depress him. “Thursday,” he said jauntily.

“Pat, will that be okay?” said Ardway.

“I suppose so,” said Pat, sweeping her gaze from floor to ceiling. She thought of Lubell. Even if she helped him, she knew Lubell could not finish the logic in time. There would be an investigation, they'd find out about him despite anything she could do, they'd need a scapegoat, they'd … She'd have to put LoParino on it in addition to herself. Even then, they still might not make it.

“Yes,” she said carefully. “Provided I get the Yig filter by Monday. Wasn't I supposed to have the Yig by this time? Normally I'd need a few weeks after that to—”

An involuntary sigh slithered out through the space between Ardway's front teeth. He felt the blood hurry to his ears, the bridge of his nose, his cheeks. He felt like other people feel when they are unexpectedly fired; he glimpsed possibilities.

“A few weeks,” he said. “A few weeks. The Air Force will be here for final source inspection in
two
weeks. Two. T-w-o. The whole F24 is at stake here. Can't any of you seem to understand that? And where are we? Where in the goddamn hell—” He became conscious that he was shouting. He rather liked the idea of his shouting, especially to this group, and he continued. “—are we! And why didn't all of this show up in the progress reports? Why didn't you come to me before? Do you know what Rupp will say when he hears this? And Redberry?” The mention of the two names suddenly made him lower his voice. “Do you know what will happen? What they'll do?” He noticed his index finger was outstretched, pointing in the air, and he retracted it. He focused his attention on Steinberg, the only one of the three who was feigning contriteness. “All right, Stan,” snapped Ardway. “Where's the Yig?”

Steinberg's body jerked in involuntary spasm. “Oh, well,” he said. “Well, we discovered a little problem with it. We just discovered it.” He turned slightly and gave an enigmatic-apologetic smile to Brundage and Pat. Brundage was picking at a scab on his arm.

“A little problem?” said Ardway. “How little?”

Steinberg made an impulsive, tentative gesture with a thumb and forefinger, holding them up separated by an inch, then croaked, “Very little, Mr. Ardway. Really not big at all. Tiny, you might say.” He groped in his pocket for a tissue.

“Tinier than two weeks?” asked Ardway. “Than one?”

Steinberg began to shrink the distance between his fingers. Something childlike in his mind told him that if he could cut the gap to about a quarter inch Ardway would suddenly relax, breathe easier. He focused his tube of vision on Ardway's tie.

“I don't hear anything, Stanley,” said Ardway.

“I, uh, I'm trying to—”

“To come up with a date?”

“To, uh, to—”

“To explain something? To elaborate on the difficulty?”

“To give, you know, some kind of a, uh—”

“Positive commitment? A warning? A summary? God, Stanley, Stanley!”

Steinberg felt his breathing become difficult, knew his bronchi must be clogging, choking off. He was ruining himself in here, stammering away his chances of getting anywhere. If only Ardway would open a window … “—a, uh, an estimate, of, uh, when, you know, when I could, uh—”

Ardway rose from his seat with his palms out, gripping, exploding with boundless impatience, and tried to literally pull the words from the man, then snapped and raised his arms to the ceiling. “God! God! Oh, God!
SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!
Oh, God!
SHIT!
All of you, shit!
SHIT!”

In the Microwave lab down the hall, Elton Wizer cocked his head slightly as he peered at a dancing blue line on an oscilloscope. “Ah believe Ah hear an Ardway bird,” he said softly to Dubrowolski. “Ah think we're gonna have another chapter coming up.”

In Drafting, Potamos said to Plotsky, “What I like about the man is his subtlety.”

In Precision Assembly, Sussman-Smollen said to nobody, “If he has to shit, let him go to the men's room. Why bother me about it?”

In his office, Ardway breathed deeply and sat down. On the public address system, Eleanor paged, “Kafka. Mr. Franz Kafka.” Ardway shook his head and spoke calmly. “What is the difficulty exactly?”

“The glue,” whispered Steinberg, half choking. “The glue's no good under temperature.”

“What glue?” said Ardway. “What glue are you talking about?”

“The glue that holds the spheres onto the rods,” gasped Steinberg. “Brank found it. He's the engineer on it. It was his fault. He's trying to fix it. God, it really is warm in here, Mr. Ardway.”

“That's a stupid problem,” said Ardway. “We're working in the forefront of science here, and you can't find some half-assed paste? That's silly. Isn't that silly?” He zinged a fast-ball smile across his lips before collapsing back into his scowl.

“It's a special cement,” mumbled Steinberg.

“
IT'S STUPID!
” yelled Ardway. “
A STUPID PROBLEM! STUPID! STUPID!
”

“I know,” said Steinberg. “I know it is. That's just what I told Brank, Mr. Ardway. It's a very unintelligent and backward problem to have.”