Easy and Hard Ways Out (6 page)

“I didn't put in any efforts,” said LoParino.

“Where's Rockefeller?” said Mavis from Accounting, crossing her legs and revealing the tops of her stockings to Plotsky, who happened to be scanning that area every two seconds.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are honored to have with us, representing the Air Force, Colonel Eugene McGuinn, the F24BZ program administrator. Colonel McGuinn has been kind enough to fly here today from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base just to join us in these ceremonies.”

“He's gorgeous,” said Carol, the beautiful, incompetent switchboard operator.

“The men who fly,” said Colonel McGuinn, “they—”

“The men who fly suck,” said Brennan.

“And in Nineteen-Thirty-four,” said Rocco Capobianco, last row in Maintenance green, speaking to no one in particular or to anyone who would listen, “in 'thirty-four I had a fruit stand over on Delancey. Now in them days, see, it wasn't like today owning a fruit stand.”

“… the electronic countermeasures and the radar are everything. You might say the radar is our eyes and the ECM is our ears.”

“You might say that if you had the imagination of a cardboard box,” said LoParino.

“I don't see Rockefeller yet, do you?” said Mavis.

“Thank you, Colonel McGuinn, and now, ladies and gentlemen, it is my most extreme pleasure to present to you your representative and mine, a man who's done so much for all of us, and particularly Auerbach Labs, our own Congressman, the honorable Jerold D. Schnerr.”

A short, bald man with a barracuda smile walked to the podium. His arms were raised above his head as if he were being held up. He seemed a bit surprised when the applause died down almost immediately.

“I hear he's a wild conservative,” said Dorfman, munching on some rare Portuguese nuts.

“Can I have one of your polly seeds?” asked Cohen, next to him.

“I voted for Connors,” whispered Rupp to Ardway, on the platform. “This guy is much too liberal.”

“This guy's a prick,” said Brennan.

“I love her,” said Plotsky, looking around. “I love her.”

“As many of you may know,” said Schnerr, “I've been interested for some time now in the role of technology in our society.”

“He's interested in our society,” said Brank.

“He's interested in roles,” said LoParino.

“You think they'll send Wagner maybe?” said Mavis.

“The award of this contract, so vital to the security of our nation, to a firm located in this state and employing the people therein, represents a great and sacred trust, which we are honored to accept and pledge to faithfully discharge.”

Several flashbulbs went off.

“Anyone see the Yankees last night?” said Coletti.

“How come he said ‘we'?” said LoParino. “He doesn't even work here.”

Sussman-Smollen, white-garbed, dapper head of Precision Assembly, leaned forward thoughtfully in his seat. “Garlic wards off vampires,” he explained to the man next to him, “not werewolves. Werewolves are warded off by wolfbane.”

When the applause had stopped, Redberry replaced Lingenfelter at the podium. “Firstly,” he said, “on behalf of Auerbach Laboratories, we'd like to thank Colonel McGuinn and his party, Congressman Schnerr, the representatives of General Aircraft, the—”

“So in 'thirty-six, I moved to Mott Street, see, because in them days—”

“And will you stop calling them polly seeds?”

“Although Dr. Auerbach himself could not be here personally, he's asked me to convey—”

“He was in this morning,” said Brank. “I wonder why—”

“Ford's curve was un-be-liev-able, I'm tellin' ya, un-be-liev-able.”

“I thought they'd at least have Wagner.”

“Governor Rockefeller has sent the following telegram, which I'd now like to read. Dear …”

They began filing back into the building.

“You know the history of this place,” said Elton Wizer to Brank as they walked side by side. “Anytime they've gotten a big contract, they've lost money, screwed things up. The stock rises and the company falls.”

“Tell me again about Ardway's magic powers,” said Brank.

“I told you,” said Wizer. “First he turned this guy into a dwarf and then he made him disappear.”

They walked up the stairs.

Brank worked late that evening, not departing till nearly eight-thirty. As he drove from the parking lot, he saw Rocco laboring doggedly by himself. The rest of the maintenance staff had apparently gone, and in the fading light, with the evening chill setting in, after all the speeches had been made and telegrams read and speculations uttered and comments passed and plans voiced, there was Rocco, an old man working alone on a vast, open, concrete plane, folding row after row of real wooden chairs and stacking them carefully in piles.

NO IFS

They sat at the giant oval table in Rupp's effusively carpeted office and tried to decide What To Do. Around them, on the paneled walls, was Rupp's collection of community service pictures, scenes showing him speaking earnestly to a minister on the steps of a church, smilingly patting the floppy hair of a nine-year-old Little Leaguer, exposing his forearm to a Red Cross nurse. Rupp stood augustly near the blackboard, chalk in hand, as he addressed himself to Ardway's last comment.

“Then we're fucked,” said the graying community leader, writing the word neatly on the blackboard. “Is that a good summary of what you're telling me, Henry?”

Ardway, who always took copious notes at conferences, wrote on his pad, “I. Prototype system acceptance tests—fucked.” He delayed looking up as long as he could, feeling Rupp's acid stare eating into the top of his wire-haired head, feeling his Adam's apple expanding in his throat.

“Well, Saul, it's just that at this moment in time—”

“We can't deliver,” filled in Rupp.

Ardway began to look around the room, his gaze flitting, birdlike, coming to rest only on the doors, the doorknobs. The third man in the room spoke.

“I think, Saul, that a better way, a su-pe-ri-or way to phrase that would be, or might be, that we can't deliver with the present effort or the present time-money allotment.”

The man was Vincent Marchese, Vice-President of Manufacturing, theoretically equal on the organizational level to Rupp, and above Ardway. Marchese had a large, cascading belly that slurped over the top of his slacks like a runaway glacier. He wore heavy brown pants with cuffs that gently lapped at the laces of size 13
EEE
shoes. He kept his thumbs hooked inside anachronistic suspenders and smiled self-satisfiedly. He was a big, churlish, self-important, self-made, long-winded, vain, and pompous bullshit artist who'd never quite graduated from high school and had been able to advance to where he was only through the unusual and unscrupulous route of being the best at his business. He delighted in executive conferences, his greatest enjoyment being to talk very slowly, come to an apparent end of thought, and then, when others began to speak, saying with feigned exasperation, “Do you mind if I finish, please?”

Rupp, who'd been staring at his row of industrial psychology books, walked listlessly over to the one-way mirror behind a picture of himself at a mental institution ground-breaking ceremony. He stared at his secretary in the outer office, hoping for a spontaneous thigh-revealing stocking adjustment, or at least a period of nonworking reverie that he could catch her at, but the girl was typing diligently. He turned back to Ardway.

“Henry, three months ago I asked you for your worst-case delivery time, and the date you gave me was last week. For ultimate safety, I added two weeks to your own worst time, and now you're sitting here and telling me we won't be able to meet even that.”

“Well, it's still possible,” said Ardway. “I mean, it's just not probable. I mean, we've had these setbacks, you know, that—”

“Mr. Redberry isn't interested in setbacks,” bellowed Rupp, moving away from the mirror. “And neither is
A
. I'm going to have to explain this to them, you know.” He pounded his fist on the table. “Jesus! How the hell am I going to explain this? And what do we tell that Colonel McGuinn when he comes, huh? What do we tell McGuinn?”

“Did you ever notice,” said Marchese, speaking in low tones, “that McGuinn has a pear-shaped head?”

“That's an interesting concept, Vince,” said Ardway quickly. “I really think you're right about that.”

“Vince,” said Rupp, “let's stick to the issues here. Pear-shaped head or not, the guy will want to see what the Air Force bought. And we can't show it to him.”

“That's true, Saul,” said Ardway. “Very true. We certainly can't show it to him.”

“And his aide, what's-his-name, Cramer or Kreemer or something,” said Marchese. “Did you ever observe that he has no chin, or the absence of a definable chin feature?”

“You know,” said Ardway, “I think you've hit it dead on again, Vince. Remarkable perception there.”

“Vince,” said Rupp, “we have to come up with a plan as to what to tell
A
and Redberry.”

“I would say we re-quire some-thing that em-pha-sizes the pos-i-tive ac-com-plish-ments, some-thing con-struct-ive—”

“Right, something—”

“Do you mind, Saul? I mean, I don't interrupt you, now do I?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Do I?”

“You just did.”

“Then we're even. As I was saying, something con-struct-ive that em-pha-sizes that what hap-pened was be-yond con-trol.”

“That we were misled by others,” said Rupp.

“That certain subordinates purposely mis-stated or mis-repre-sent-ed their de facto sit-u-a-tions.”

“To enhance their own personal ambitions,” said Rupp, brightening, looking at Ardway. “Yes, I think that's good. Constructive. Very constructive, since that way Mr. Redberry and
A
will clearly see whose fault it was and can take steps to separate them out.”

Ardway, growing increasingly panicky, brought a fat manila folder from the floor to the desk. He pictured himself amidst a group of workers being whirled in a giant centrifuge,
A
at the controls. Finally, he and two section heads are pinned in agony to the outer wall, “separated out” as dead weight while the rest of the group, hard workers, laugh and joke near the center. He wondered what he would tell his wife. “I have memos,” he said. “Things that happened.” He opened the folder. “Here. Brundage not delivering his thin films … I point this out in my memo of the twenty-fourth. Steinberg's lateness because of absenteeism … my memo dated the eighth. Transistor manufacturer's problem … my memo of the nineteenth. Pat's failure to bring through the leveling module when she promised … my memo of the thirtieth. You see? Here it is. It's not me. These show everything clearly. Clearly. It's documented. I'm covered completely. It wasn't me, these show it.”

He nudged the folder over to Rupp, who pushed it away. “Mr. Redberry and
A
are businessmen, Henry. They don't care about folders.”

“But it wasn't my fault!” said Ardway. “You should see the reports the engineers give me. You should see how they leave out their umlauts, their commas, how they don't leave sufficient margins. How could I accept reports like that? The next thing you know they won't be numbering their equations. And then we've had this problem with the stealing, and with the paging maniac. Believe me, Saul, it wasn't my fault.”

He clutched spasmodically at the memo-filled manila envelope.

“Henry,” said Rupp, “the buck's gotta stop somewhere.”

“Yes,” said Ardway, “but why here? What's the difference if it stops a little lower?”

“Maybe,” said Marchese, “it doesn't have to stop at all. Maybe it could just, sort of, slide a bit.”

“Vince,” said Rupp.

“What I mean is, that is, the essence of my thought here is that maybe Henry would be willing to tell us
from this point
what we have to do to meet the deadline, if, in fact, we can, by extra work, meet it.”

“I say we leave things as is,” said Rupp.

“No, wait,” said Ardway. “Wait, I think Vince has an excellent concept there. Just give me till tomorrow. I guarantee you an estimate.”

“We don't want estimates,” said Rupp.

“I mean an exact estimate,” said Ardway.

“Then it's not an estimate,” said Rupp.

“All right then, it's not an estimate, it's a, a—”

“A prediction,” said Marchese.

“We don't want predictions,” said Rupp.

“No, no,” said Ardway. “Not a prediction. No, sir. Not a prediction. A, uh, uh—” He daubed the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. “A, uh, uh—”

“A commitment,” said Rupp. “A do-or-die one.”

Ardway stood up. “I just have to check with my staff,” he said, and then, muttering, “and this time, they'd better …”

“First tell us if you can do it, and then what effort you need,” said Marchese.

Ardway walked to the door.

“As far as the ‘can do it' part,” said Rupp, “I think you'd better leave out the ‘if.'”

“I will,” said Ardway. “I will.” And on his pad he wrote
“NO ‘IFS.'”

AUERBACH LABORATORIES

Inter-Office Memorandum
11/19/66

From: Pythagoras

To: W. Murphy

cc: V. Fish, H. Ardway, S. Rupp,
A
.

Subject: Bathroom tissue quality

To put it bluntly, the toilet paper now being stocked in the Mens' rooms is the excessively thin, institutional kind that breaks off in one's rectum after even minor stress. As this is not conducive to high-quality work output, particularly for those of us who are somewhat constipated, your cooperation is requested in rectifying this situation.