Small World (2 page)

Roger’s mother tut-tutted at the valuation. She tut-tutted quite a lot during the news. Roger didn’t pay any attention anymore. When somebody tuts the same for a famine as they do for an act of larceny, Roger refused to take their tutting seriously. He sat back, savoring the word ‘heist.’

Up to that point, he had thought of it as a caper. The truth of it was that the hardest part had been the shopping. It had taken two days to find the right shoes and handbag. A long-haired shoe-store clerk had been amused with his costume-party story and rummaged happily in the storeroom to find a pair of black patent-leather pumps that would fit Roger’s short, wide feet. The pocketbook had been a piece of luck, a treasure hidden underneath a heap of onsale, long-out-of-fashion handbags in a discount store.

His feet had hurt so much he couldn’t face trying the entire costume on all at once. While he had soaked his dogs and watched game shows, Roger had reflected on what he’d learned. Women were tougher than he ever imagined; they went out into the incredible chaos of the retail universe, got what they wanted, and made it back alive. Apparently they even
liked
it.

And then he had tried on his new wardrobe. Suddenly, seeing nimself in the mirror, he had known there was more to it, more than just clothes and make-up. There was a stance, a way of holding the body, the expression on the face, a way of moving. The whole idea of disguising himself as a woman was revealed as

dangerously complex.

He had felt hopelessly ignorant. Clothing had always been merely clothing, something to cover up the places where God’s taste had fallen down. And women, well, there was his mother, and that was the extent of his relations with the other half. Still, he had been pit-deep in the project, his
caper,
and onward he must go, driven by curiosity and perverse excitement.

When the news was over, Roger fled to his cellar hideaway. His mother had given over the cellar to him when he was fifteen. She had been downstairs but twice in the entire thirty years she’d lived in the house. The last time she peeked into the cellar it was a dank cement dungeon festooned with cobwebs and smelling of mildew and mouse poop. When Roger had asked for a place of his own, she took it to mean something in the nature of a clubhouse, crude and masculine and littered with comic books and overflowing ashtrays. She had been rather proud of her tolerant motherhood when she consented.

It had become much more than a rec room. The stairs were lit, as they always had been, by a single low-wattage bulb suspended by its own wiring from the ceiling. From the landing at the top of the stairs, the cellar looked much as it had fifteen years ago. Beyond the dim circle of light thrown by the dusty old fixture was a plywood partition. Roger had painted it a dingy brown to encourage the general impression of gloom and decay. He had hung a sturdy door at the darkest end and installed a good lock, to which he alone possessed the key. On the door, he had long ago hand-stenciled the legend
Fortress of Solitude.

Beyond that first partition, he had put up a second. One side was lined with unfinished floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. They held Roger’s collection of science fiction pulps, and his models of the
Enterprise
, a shuttlecraft, and a Klingon raider. Between the two partitions was the room that Roger thought of as his study.

He had furnished the room with ratty garage-sale furniture: a monstrous chair that leaked stuffing from the wounds in its tobacco-scented horsehair upholstery; a thickly painted and chipped end table; a standing lamp ugly enough to paralyze anyone foolish enough to look directly at it. His mother had contributed an orange hassock that she had once stored her confession magazines in. A melted patch of its vinyl skin had been scabbed over in adhesive tape after she absently rested a hot sheet of brownies on it while changing the television channel one day. Roger had put it to work storing the kind of books she didn’t know

he read.

Roger had constructed his workshop on the other side of the second partition. It was remarkably and curiously furnished, mostly at the unwitting expense of the taxpayer. There were a number of locked cupboards containing interesting items, including Roger’s contraband wardrobe.

Behind one door was Roger’s home-made computer, powered by a free and illegal tap into a neighborhood transformer, and connected by an equally illicit telephone patch to the bulk of the government’s computer network and to half the ba'nk computers in California. It would have been easy to tap the banks’ computers, but it was Roger’s conviction that it was also an easy way to get caught. It wasn’t conscience, but the odds, that made him prefer alternative financing for his researches.

He was not by profession a thief. It had been a surprise to discover that by nature, at least, he was not unequipped to be one. It made life interesting, and fun, as it had not been for a long time.

He settled down to work, suppressing the impulse to take out the painting and admire his own genius. A good beginning was only that: a point of departure. He was not about to slack off now. Not when he was just getting to the fun part.

Fun and work were much the same coin to Roger. He had earned his coin, all his adult life, working for the government. He had been employed in a series of projects of a classified nature. They were, in fact, but one project, several times sacrificed on the altars of minor democratic idols, only to rise again under new initials, with a deft shuffle of personnel and plant, as soon as it was politic.

As a consequence of these periodic shut-downs, Roger had experienced corresponding periods of unemployment. He suffered chiefly from the deprivation of the work that was his •‘•hole life. Unmarried and unencumbered, he was not as damaged as the family men and women, tossed into the ever-deepening storm of the private-sector economy. Still, he had more reason to be frightened, for he had no credentials and a record that would scare off any private employers.

Some anonymous higher-up in the government had looked past Roger’s sudden exit from graduate school, examined his rejected PhD thesis, and seen him, not for the crazy heretic his professors took him for, but as a man of practical talents. The government had taken him in from the cold and lei him get down to work. He hadn't ever asked them to make him respectable. It was enough to

be allowed to work.

His last assignment had been on the sixth floor of a project building known as ‘the kitchen.’ It was only metaphorically so. Real food was strictly forbidden there, a regulation Roger Tinker regularly violated. What Roger did there was a very exotic and inedible sort of ‘cooking,’ like the varnished food photographed for gourmet cooking magazines. It wasn’t exactly experimenting,
_:
because seven times out of ten, Roger got the results he predicted.

It was more of an orderly progression of random combinations, akin to naming all the names of God.

Roger had been working on one particular
name
for several weeks. He had done a lot of interesting things with it, and had, at last, achieved a degree of intimacy with its attributes. He was beginning to grasp certain basic information about it.

His belly had spoken to him, and he had answered, as was his custom. He had leaned over the computer console, watching a patteraon a graph. With a penknife in his left hand, he had peeled an apple in his right. He had become, inevitably, more interested in the graph than in the peeling of the apple. TTie tip of the knife had slipped into his thumb.

‘Goddamn shit piss fuck!’ exclaimed Roger, less in anger than in astonishment, as his blood had dripped onto the keys of the console. Dropping the knife and the apple, he had stuck his thumb into his mouth. For a moment, he had resumed his babyhood, j some thirty-two years and two-hundred pounds in his past. He had shut his eyes tightly, for he not only hated the sight of blood but retained a childish certainty that not looking at it contributed to its quick coagulation.

Moaning around his throbbing thumb, he’d opened his eyes. It had been several seconds before the change of the graph registered. The moan had become a gag as he had involuntarily sucked his thumb down his throat. He’d pulled it out, the hurt utterly forgotten. The gouge had continued to bleed for several more seconds at an ever-decreasing rate. Small drops had been scattered by Roger’s movements—all over the computer console and in delicate polka dots on his white lab overalls.

It had been two days later that the cut again claimed his attention. He had been sitting in his car in the parking lot after work, his pay envelope and its contents on his lap: a green check and a delicate blue tissue dismissal slip mated to it—the government’s sweet regrets. The thumb had begun to throb in counterpoint to the beat of his temples. Roger had stared at the

red welt, swollen and clearly infected, and the numbness in his brain had changed into anger.

He had thought if he spoke out now they would take over his discovery. If they believed him. It was possible they would not; he would be perceived as a fantasist, forever beyond the pale. It might be months before he had his proof.

Roger had worked another six weeks on the project before the blue slip turned pink. During that period, most of his thought and effort had gone into stealing an assortment of equipment. Every bit could have been purchased commercially from the same sources the government bought from (probably cheaper), but there would be records of purchase. He told himself it didn’t matter; he had stolen from the government before to build gadgets in his cellar and this time it was halfway legitimate. His work was an underground extension of the project; in due time, the government would get the good of it. In fact, he was looking forward to presenting the completed project to his former superiors.

The first device had been the size of a wardrobe. The second one, four months later, had been the size of a color television set. The third, completed in a six-week frenzy, had been a little smaller than a hand-held instant camera.

It was exhaustively tested. Over three weeks, Roger had used up two dozen mice, bought in pairs in a dozen shopping-center pet stores. The neighborhood experienced a puzzling series of petnappings. The Lutzes missed their two tomcats; after a couple of weeks, it appeared they had moved on to softer suckers. The Treats’ miniature poodle disappeared from his sunporch basket. Eunice Gold’s bob-tailed kitten, last seen wearing Baby Wet ’n’ Dry
^s
T-shirt and the bracelet Eunice’s grandmother had given her that spelled out E-U-N-I-C-E (for the tea party Eunice was running that afternoon), was among the missing. Andy Stevens’s r'eagle Gilligan, fat and wobbly at six years, failed to turn up for supper three nights running. His mom tried not to hear Andy trying in his closet.

It has been a busy, satisfying time for Roger. The organic residue was rather amusing. Roger played with it for hours before, reluctantly, flushing it down the toilet.

The exhilaration had passed soon enough.
What next
time was at -.ind. With sudden certainty, Roger knew the project was over, not just his part in it, or his secret project in the cellar, but the project, period. The government wasn’t going to call again. And if they weren’t going to rehire him, he was finished as a working scientist. He knew what it was like in the private sector for guys
with
papers. With his background, he would be invisible.

If he didn’t turn over the device, what was he going to do with it? It had never been his job to decide to what ends a specific piece of work might be turned. Could he use it for himself, and if so, how? It was a relief to go back to the device. It had been his past for so long, it was inconceivable it should not be his future. It was his, by all that’s just.

Coming to that conclusion hadn’t solved the
what’s next
problem. He couldn’t go on making the device smaller. Sooner or later he would have to do something with it.

His mother had brought home the answer in a box of out-dated magazines, the old ones from the gynecologist’s office in which she worked as a receptionist. She did this every month, when all the new copies had come in. It was mildly embarrassing to Roger, but his mother was frequently mildly embarrassing to him.

It was embarrassing to drop her off or pick her up, as it meant going into an office full of women on the most intimate of errands, and the staff all cheerfully unembarrassed about their work. He might encounter the gynecologist himself, a small, gray-haired man with a twinkle in his eye, seemingly always taking off or putting on a pair of rubber gloves. Then Roger would have to decide whether to offer to shake hands with the good doctor. He couldn’t help wondering if the doctor liked his work, and then if the doctor suspected Roger of so wondering.

Since he had been out of work, Roger was sure his mother’s coworkers, those relentlessly clean-scrubbed, smiling women, thought he was a lazy good-for-nothing, content to live off his mother and read their old secondhand magazines. It was true enough, but they spent little time discussing Roger and his sins. His mother’s endless repetitions of the platitudes and the dullest details of her own life fell on their ears, as they did on Roger’s, as background noise, rain on a tin roof. Roger’s mom was liked for her good humor and kindliness, but nobody took her seriously.

Still, he’d been delighted when he’d turned up a back issue of
VIP
in the box. It was not that old, the end of the month. He’d recognized the woman on the cover right away, Leyna Shaw, his favorite lady newscaster. She was very tall in heels that looked lethal, and she was bending over to interview a man in a car.