Easy and Hard Ways Out (23 page)

There was a sharp clapping sound behind the wall and then the door to
A
's office opened abruptly. Redberry came out, sidling, looking pale, shaken, head cocked at nearly ninety degrees. He turned slowly toward Rupp.

“He'll see you now.”

THE FLIGHT-PATH INTERCEPT METHOD

He was a genius.

His thought processes stood to other men's as theirs did to animals'.

These perceptions about himself occurred to Conrad Auerbach quite frequently during the course of a day and even more often at night when he grew lonesome and almost wished for company. He'd think then of what possible benefit it would be to have an inferior mind share the room with him, make “small talk,” aimless chatter, emit body heat, carbon dioxide, water vapor. No, he'd conclude, he himself was his best company, his most stimulating companion, sharpest adversary, most powerful ally. He himself. A genius. A closed, self-sufficient system.

It is past ten in the evening now, and the self-sufficient system sits hunched over a medium-sized steel desk in an office that is neither so large that everything isn't easily accessible nor so small that it is crowded. An optimum-size office. Of three bookcases lining the walls, two are crammed with technical reference works, one with notebooks. Each reference work has tiny, profuse, handwritten margin notes pointing out things that supposedly are wrong or misleading or, sometimes, just poorly expressed. The walls are covered with the artifacts of impersonal personal recognition, laminated plaques from scientific groups, honorary diplomas from universities, bronze medals with unreadable inscriptions on black velvet backgrounds. A side door of the office leads to a private bathroom that contains a shower with a special temperature regulator (of
A
's design) and a toilet bowl with a special float mechanism (of
A
's design). Of course, since
A
eats only optimum, low-residue foods to reduce time spent at defecation and urination, the float mechanism is not severely tested.

He sits now, writing a draft of a technological history article on white, lined paper, a sixty-three-year-old man who has put in a full day's work every day for forty-four years, Saturdays and Sundays not excepted, holidays ignored, family birthdays, anniversaries, funerals of relatives all but minor footnotes to the main text, his work. Forty-four years without a vacation. A remarkable man, say the speakers at the
IEEE
awards ceremonies when they hand
A
his plaques.

His hair is combed sideways across his head, gray on flesh; wispy, pasted strips. He wears a beige vest, formless brown pants, a pocket watch. He stops for a moment to think, and his eyes, behind his rimless spectacles, become defocused droplets of blue. His appearance, not surprisingly, is very much like that of the brainless actor who delivers in his name company-wide messages, except that the real
A
has more paunch and less hair, looks less pleasant, less approachable. He runs the first third of the article rapidly through his mind, sifts it to be sure the maximum information is being imparted in the minimum page area; that there are no waste words in the sentences; that there is optimal use of the medium. He has turned increasingly of late to these technological summaries, lead articles written at editors' invitations, a recasting and conceptualizing of scientific history. Somehow in these recastings, involving the development of radio, television, FM, radar, the contributions of others all become skewed; their understanding, no matter how brilliant their discoveries, still incomplete, flawed. Armstrong, Zworykin, Shannon, Shockley, all somehow miss crucial points, only to be set straight by
A
, who alone perceives the ultimate significance of their findings. His bibliography consists mostly of other articles written by himself; occasionally there is a “private communication” with another Great Man or the citing of an “unpublished master's thesis,” both excellent references since they are nearly impossible to check.

He begins again to write.
What Sarn off failed to recognize, of course, was that
—Suddenly he stops and leans forward, his attention drawn by a fly that has lighted on his leg. This fly does not belong here, he thinks. It is nearly winter; this fly should be dead; it is an anomaly. The fly hops to the arm of the chair. It must be a particularly vigorous and hardy representative of its species, thinks
A
. He decides he will kill it. Kill it optimally. Optimality is important in all things. He brings his hands close to the arm of the chair, poises them, then suddenly decides to postpone the execution. Instead, he rises, walks to the intercom on his desk, and clears his throat.

“Herb, can you come in here a minute?”

Within seconds the door has opened, closed, and Redberry is standing stiffly in front of it, head cocked as usual, grinning in apparent shyness.

“Herb, there's a fly in here that's disturbing me. See it? There. Maybe you can kill it for me.”

“Well. Well, we'll certainly try, Dr. Auerbach.”

Although Redberry has known
A
for twenty-six years, he still calls him “Dr. Auerbach,” as does everyone else. There is the impression that even the most fanatic terrorists, the most degenerate perverts, the most inhuman murderers, were they to encounter
A
, would somehow automatically address him as “Dr. Auerbach.” Redberry hovers over the fly, places a hand directly above it, moves the hand slowly, imperceptibly downward. The fly is motionless.

Redberry pounces, too slow. The fly is up, gone.

“Sorry, Dr. Auerbach.”

Redberry sees it near the bookcase, walks slowly over, sets, pounces again. Again too slow.

“Gee, we can't seem—”

Redberry's face is alive with writhing, motile muscle;
A
is passive. He is satisfied, the satisfaction of positive feedback, of evoking the familiar, pressing a button and seeing the light go on. He has known Redberry for twenty-six years and has always considered him a servile, twitching ass. In business discussions Redberry never ventures an opinion until he thinks he knows
A
's position, then agrees with it. Should
A
reverse himself, Redberry agrees with that too. In years past,
A
would often switch sides three or four times just to see if Redberry would follow—which he did, and didn't even seem embarrassed.
A
's model of Redberry is a thick, mealy fluid that oozes into the shape of its surroundings.

Nevertheless, Redberry is a dedicated worker, if not an efficient one, and apparently (though
A
cannot understand why) he is able to inspire enough fear among second-level management (could it be the twitching, the imitation of the throat clearing?) to get things done.
A
watches him as he stands mute now, snapping his fingers, eyes following the fly. He almost never speaks, unless
A
asks him a question. He will stand this way for an hour until
A
says something.
A
knows this because he has let it happen. Several times.

A
has never made many friends. Actually, he has never made any. Acquaintances fall into two categories: those not intelligent enough to be considered companions, and those intelligent enough to be considered rivals. Though he socializes with dozens of politicians for business purposes, he considers them subhuman and never bothers to vote on election day. He relates poorly to women; he is overly courteous and formal with them, a result of his unease. Never highly sexed, by age forty-one he'd stopped all conjugal relations with his wife. Women were incapable of being analyzed, made unpredictable responses, were irrational.
A
would not have a female secretary. Too upsetting. Better Redberry than a woman. Redberry stands without moving, an obedient statue.
A
, despite his better judgment, feels like talking to someone. He clears his throat.

“Who's in tonight?” he says.

Redberry looks at him alertly. “Oh. Well, uh, most of Engineering we think is still on O.T. Ardway, we guess. Blevin. Rupp is probably still here. Paint shop.”

A
thinks,
No one interesting
. It occurs to him that no matter who Redberry had mentioned, it still would've been,
No one interesting
. “All right, get Rupp here. Tell him.”

Redberry leaves, returns a moment later.

“Close the door.”

Redberry closes the door.

A
leans back in his chair, finds his thoughts drifting, as they have lately, to death. He was going to die soon because the men who worked in the biological sciences were incompetents without vision. Seventy years average was the longest they could keep men alive. After all this time, seventy years. If only I had worked in medicine, he thinks now. What advances might have been made. After all, didn't he hold over a hundred patents? (He ignores the fact that nearly all were for relatively minor improvements in existing devices.) Swiftly, he roughs in an approach to longevity: get rid of the excess baggage. Sever the lumbering body that pollutes the blood, gulps food and air, strains the heart; sever it and maintain only the head by artificial means; the small, efficient head with its eyes and ears and brain. What a loss to the world that he hadn't gone into biology.

He thinks of death from a personal point of view, tries to fathom it, closes his eyes and pictures the unconscious, eternal nullity of it, lying in the blackness, cut off without thought, not seeing what was going on, missing man's voyages to the stars, missing everything, trapped forever in silent, inanimate slumber while mankind harnessed fusion, cured cancer, mastered telepathy. How small life seemed when compared with death; a mere interlude, a minor interruption. Only the mechanics of it are simple,
A
thinks. Your heart stops, your lungs fill with fluid, small blood vessels burst behind your eyes, and then men come. Put you in a bag, take you away, and the lawyers unsheathe their pens. As for him, since he is childless, nothing will be passed down, no immature traumas will result, no sweetly fanciful explanations need be concocted for grandchildren. The bulk of his wealth, over a million dollars, will go to his wife. Or more properly, for the care of his wife, a small, thin-lipped woman whose brain chemistry had changed in some subtle, irreversible way the night she returned from a shopping trip and found
A
reading in the living room, their two-year-old son upstairs in his crib, mouth open, strangled on his own mucus.
But didn't you hear something, didn't you
—He had married at nineteen, fallen out of love at twenty, stayed where he was from some combination of guilt and embarrassment. All these years. Of course, there was a peculiar sort of convenience.… The remainder of his estate will go to the
IEEE
and the American Physical Society. He has left instructions to be cremated. No muss, no fuss, no box, no hole. Ashes scattered. Optimum death.

He looks up, the tiniest bit startled, and sees Redberry still there, waiting. How long? He spots the fly walking rapidly on the arm of his chair, flitting to the surface of his desk.

“Here,” he says. “You kill it by the flight-path intercept method.”

Redberry, in a trance of his own, abruptly musters his attention.

“Flies leap off a horizontal surface backwards,” says
A
. “So—” He cautiously places his palms two inches above his desk, slightly behind the doomed insect. The fly, sensing something, has stopped moving. “—you place your hands about like this, and—” The fly rubs one front leg against the other and cocks its head in what, for another species, might be deemed a quizzical expression. Briefly, for just an instant,
A
and Redberry see the same thing. The latter, of course, simply banishes the image from his mind.

“—you clap!”

A
claps his hands loudly, then opens them, and the fly, having dutifully leapt off backward and died, leaves a tiny spot of blood next to “unpublished master's thesis” on
A
's paper.

“Optimum death,” says
A
. “Send in Rupp.”

GORGON

Rupp has been in this room only twice in his twenty-four years at Auerbach Labs. It is unlit now, except for a small, dim floor lamp in a corner, and for a moment, as he steps inside, Rupp imagines the figure seated at the desk is asleep. Rupp closes the door gently behind him, makes no attempt to advance. The figure at the desk remains silent, although Rupp can now discern that its eyes are open. Rupp stands there waiting in the semidarkness, his heart a swollen knot of pounding muscle in a cellophane chest.
It must be the F24. He knows. Oh, God, it's no good, and he knows
.

“Uchm. Sit.”

Rupp remains frozen.

“Sit.”

“Pardon me?”

“Have—a—seat.”

“Oh. Thank you. Oh.”

Rupp sits down on one of the leather chairs near the door.
A
, for an instant, wonders if he should've kept him standing as he did Redberry. An experiment. See how long he'd last.
A
says nothing, writes something on a sheet of paper. For a moment, Rupp imagines it is a confession that
A
will insist he sign. An admission of failure on the F24BZ. Acceptance of sole responsibility. A notice of resignation. A surrender to the government for criminal, treasonable negligence on a project vital to the defense of the United States. He hunches his shoulders forward, crosses his arms, and rubs his elbows. His stomach hurts, and he becomes aware that he is shivering. His ten-dollar tie is pinching his fleshy, executive neck.
A
looks up, clears his throat.

“I've been thinking about death.”

Rupp stops breathing.
Death? Is that a metaphor for the depth
of his ill feeling about the F24? An indication of the lengths he's prepared to go to? Or a metaphor for something else? Something desperately, horribly important but completely obscure? Or not a metaphor at all?

“I've been thinking that if only I'd worked in the biological sciences we might already be enjoying an extra ten, twenty years of life.”