Steel Beach (32 page)

Within ten minutes the crowd was completely stag, and I was Queen of the May. I turned down a dozen dates, and half that many much more frank proposals. I feel it’s best not to leap right into bed with co-workers, not until you have had a chance to know them well enough to judge the possible scrapes and bruises you might get from such an encounter, and the tensions in the workplace that might ensue. I decided to stick with that rule even though I was about to quit my job.

And the thing was, I didn’t know these guys. Not well enough, anyway. I’d drunk with them, bullshitted with them, mailed a few of them home from bars, argued with them, even had fights with two of them. I’d seen them with women, knew a bit of how they could be expected to behave. But I didn’t really know them. I’d never looked at them with female eyes, and that can make one hell of a lot of difference. A guy who seemed an honest, reliable sensible fellow when he had no sexual designs on you could turn out to be the worst jerk in the world when he was trying to slip his hand under your skirt. You learn a lot about human nature when you Change. I feel sorry for those who don’t, or won’t.

And speaking of that…  

I kissed a few of the guys—a sisterly peck on the cheek, nothing more—squared my shoulders, and marched into the elevator to go beard the lion in his den. I had a feeling he was going to be hungry.

Nothing much happens at the
Nipple
without Walter hearing about it. It certainly isn’t his great personal insights that bring him the news; none of us are sure exactly how he does it, but the network of security cameras and microphones that lead to his desk can’t hurt. Still, he knows things he couldn’t have found out that way, and the general opinion is that he has a truly vast cabal of spies, probably well-paid. No one I know has ever admitted to snitching to Walter, and I can’t recall anyone ever being caught at it, but trying to find one is a perpetual office pastime. The usual method is to invent some false but plausible bit of employee scandal, tell one person about it, and see if it gets back to Walter. He never bites.

He glanced up from his reading as I entered the office, then looked back down. No surprise, and no comments about my new body, and of course I had expected that. He’d rather die, usually, than give you a compliment, or admit that anything had caught him unprepared. I took a seat, and waited for him to acknowledge me.

I’d given a lot of thought to the problem of Walter and I’d dressed accordingly. Since he was a natural, and from other clues I’d observed over the years of our association, I’d concluded he might be a breast fancier. With that in mind, I’d worn a blouse that bared my left one. With it I’d chosen a short skirt and black gloves that reached to the elbows. For the final touch I’d put on a ridiculous little hat with a huge plume that drooped down almost over my left eye and swooshed alarmingly through the air whenever I turned my head, a very nineteen-thirtyish thing complete with a black net veil for an air of mystery. The whole outfit was black, except for the red hose. It needed black needle-tipped high heels, but that far I was not prepared to go, and everything else I had in the closet looked awful with the hat, so I wore no shoes at all. I liked the effect. From the corner of my eye, I could tell Walter did, too, though he was unlikely to admit it.

My guesses about him had been confirmed at the water cooler by two co-workers who’d recently gone from male to female. Walter was mildly homophobic, not aware of it, had been baffled all his life by the very idea of changing sex, and was extremely uncomfortable to find a male employee showing up for work suddenly transformed into someone he could be sexually interested in. He would be very grouchy today and would stay that way for several months, until he managed to forget entirely that I had ever been male, at which time the approaches would start. My plan was to play up to that, to be as female as a person could be, to keep him on the defensive about it.

Not that I planned to have sex with him. I’d rather bed a Galapagos tortoise. My intention was to quit my job. I’d tried it before, maybe not with the determination I was feeling that day, but I’d tried, and I knew how persuasive he could be.

When he judged he’d kept me waiting a suitable time, he tossed the pages he’d been reading into a hopper, leaned back in his huge chair, and laced his fingers behind his neck.

“Nice hat,” he said, confounding me completely.

“Thanks.” Damn, I already felt on the defensive. Resigning was going to be harder if he was nice to me.

“Heard you went to the Darling outfit for the body work.”

“That’s right.”

“Heard he’s on the way out.”

“That’s what he’s afraid of. But he’s been afraid of that for ten years.”

He shrugged. There were circles of sweat in the armpits of his rumpled white shirt, and a coffee stain on his blue tie. Once again I wondered where he found sex partners, and concluded he probably paid for them. I’d heard he’d been married for thirty years, but that had been sixty years ago.

“If that’s the kind of work he’s doing, maybe I heard wrong.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. I’d just worked out that what he’d said could be a compliment to me as well as Bobbie, which just threw me further off balance. Damn him.

“Reason I called you in here,” he said, completely ignoring the fact that it was I who had requested this meeting, “I wanted to let you know you did real good work on that Collapse story. I know I usually don’t bother to tell my reporters when they’ve done a good job. Maybe that’s a mistake. But you’re one of my best.” He shrugged again. “Okay.
The
best. Just thought I’d tell you that. There’s a bonus in your next paycheck, and I’m giving you a raise.”

“Thanks, Walter.” You son of a bitch.

“And that Invasion Bicentennial stuff. Really first-rate. It’s exactly the sort of stuff I was looking for. And you were wrong about it, too, Hildy. We got a good response from the first article, and the ratings have gone up every week since then.”

“Thanks again.” I was getting very tired of that word. “But I can’t take credit for it. Brenda’s been doing most of the work. I take what she’s done and do a little punching up, cut a few things here and there.”

“I know. And I appreciate it. That girl’s gonna be good at hard news one of these days. That’s why I paired you two up, so you could give her the benefit of your experience on the feature writing, show her the ropes. She’s learning fast, don’t you think?”

I had to agree that she was, and he went on about it for another minute or two, picking out items he’d particularly liked in her series. I was wondering when he’d get to the point. Hell, I was wondering when
I’d
get to the point.

So I drew a deep breath and spoke into one of his pauses.

“That’s why I’m here today, Walter. I want to be taken off the Invasion series.” Damn it. Somewhere between my brain and my mouth that sentence had been short-circuited; I’d meant to tell him I was leaving the pad entirely.

“Okay,” he said.

“Now don’t try to talk me into staying on,” I said, and then stopped. “What do you mean, okay?” I asked.

“I mean okay. You’re off the Invasion series. I’d appreciate it if you’d continue to give Brenda some help on it when she needs it, but only if it doesn’t get in the way of your other work.”

“I thought you said you liked the stuff I was doing.”

“Hildy, you can’t have it both ways. I
did
like it, and you didn’t like doing it. Fine, I’m letting you off. Do you want back on?”

“No…  is this some sort of trick?”

He just shook his head. I could see he was enjoying this, the bastard.

“You mentioned my other work. What would that be?” This had to be where the punch line came, but I was at a loss to envision any job he could want me to do that would require this much buttering up.

“You tell me,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I seem to be having trouble using the language today. I thought it was clear what I meant. What would you like to do? You want to switch to another department? You want to create your own department? Name it, Hildy.”

I suppose I was still feeling shaky from recent experiences, but I felt another anxiety attack coming on. I breathed deeply, in and out, several times. Where was the Walter I’d known and knew how to deal with?

“You’ve always talked about a column,” he was saying. “If you want it, it can be arranged, but frankly, Hildy, I think it’d be a mistake. You could do it, sure, but you’re not really cut out for it. You need work where you get out into the action more regularly. Columnists, hell, they run around for a few weeks or years, hunting stories, but they all get lazy sooner or later and wait for the stories to come to them. You don’t like government stuff and I don’t blame you; it’s boring. You don’t like straight gossip. My feeling is what you’re good at is rooting out the personality scandal, and getting on top of and
staying
on top of the big, breaking story. If you have an idea for a column, I’ll listen, but I’d hoped you’d go in another direction.”

Aha. Here it came.

“And what direction is that?”

“You tell me,” he said, blandly.

“Walter, frankly…  you caught me by surprise. I haven’t been thinking in those terms. What I came in here to do was quit.”

“Quit?” He looked at me dubiously, then chuckled. “You’ll never quit, Hildy. Oh, maybe in twenty, thirty more years. There’s still things you like about this job, no matter how you bitch about it.”

“I won’t deny that. But the other parts are wearing me down.”

“I’ve heard that before. It’s just a bad phase you’re going through; you’ll bounce back when you get used to your new role here.”

“And what is that?”

“I told you, I want to hear your ideas on that.”

I sat quietly for some time, staring at him. He just gazed placidly back at me. I went over it again and again, looking for mousetraps. Of course, there was nothing to guarantee he’d keep his word, but if he didn’t, I could always quit then. Is that what he was counting on? Was he fighting a delaying action, knowing he could always bring his powers of persuasion to bear again at a later date, after he’d screwed me and I started to howl?

One thought kept coming back to me. It almost seemed as if he’d known when I walked into his office that I’d planned to quit. Otherwise why the stroking, why the sugarplums?

Did he really think I was that good? I
knew
I was good—it was part of my problem, being so proficient at something so frequently vile—but was I
that
good? I’d never seen any signs that Walter thought so.

The main fact, though, I thought sourly, was that he’d hooked me. I was interested in staying on at the
Nipple
—or maybe at the better-respected
Daily Cream
—if I could make a stab at re-defining my job. But thoughts like that had been the farthest thing from my mind today. He was offering me what I wanted, and I had no idea what that was.

Once again, he seemed to read my thoughts.

“Why don’t you take a week or so to think this over?” he said. “No sense trying to come up with an outline for the next ten, twenty years right here and now.”

“All right.”

“While you’re doing that…  ” I leaned forward, ready for him to jerk all this away from me. This was the obvious place to reveal his
real
intentions, now that he’d set the hook firmly.

“All right, Walter, let’s see your hole card.”

He looked at me innocently, with just a trace of hurt. Worse and worse, I thought. I’d seen that same expression just before he sent me out to cover the assassination of the President of Pluto. Three gees all the way, and the story was essentially over by the time I arrived.

“The Flacks had a press release this morning,” he said. “Seems they’re going to canonize a new Gigastar tomorrow morning.”

I turned it over and over, looking for the catch. I didn’t see one.

“Why me? Why not send the religion editor?”

“Because she’ll be happy to pick up all the free material and come right back home and let them write the story for her. You know the Flacks; this thing is going to be
prepared
. I want you there, see if you can get a different angle on it.”

“What possible new angle could there be on the Flacks?”

For the first time he showed a little impatience.

“That’s what I pay
you
to find. Will you go?”

If this was some sort of Walterian trick, I couldn’t see it. I nodded, got up, and started for the door.

“Take Brenda with you.”

I turned, thought about protesting, realized it would have been just a reflexive move, and nodded. I turned once more. He waited for the traditional moment every movie fan knows, when I’d just pulled the door open.

“And Hildy.” I turned again. “I’d appreciate it if you’d cover yourself up when you come in here. Out of respect for my idiosyncrasies.”

This was more like it. I’d begun to think Walter had been kidnapped by mind-eaters from Alpha, and a blander substitute left in his place. I brought up some of the considerable psychic artillery I had marshalled for this little foray, though it was sort of like nuking a flea.

“I’ll wear what I please, where I please,” I said, coldly. “And if you have a complaint about how I dress, check with my union.” I liked the line, but it should have had a gesture to go with it. Something like ripping off my blouse. But everything I thought of would have made me look sillier than him, and then the moment was gone, so I just left.

In the elevator on my way out of the building I said “CC, on line.”

“I’m at your service.”

“Did you tell Walter I’ve been suicidal?”

There was, for the CC, a long pause, long enough that, had he been human, I’d have suspected him of preparing a lie. But I’d come to feel that the CC’s pauses could conceal something a lot trickier than that.

“I’m afraid you have engendered a programming conflict in me,” he said. “Because of a situation with Walter which I am not at liberty to discuss or even hint at with you, most of my conversations with him are strictly under the rose.”