Connie Willis - Fire Watch

“I didn’t steal the project,” Brad said amiably. “I just sort of skyugled it away from her when she wasn’t looking. And I already got it back. I called Gail as soon as Lynn hung up and asked her to take Lynn’s name off the press releases before Old Man Mowen saw them. It was right lucky, Lynn missing her plane and all.”

Ulric put his down parka on over his sports coat.

“Are you heading for the press conference?” Brad said. “Wait till I rig myself out, and I’ll ride over with you.”

“I’m walking,” Ulric said, and opened the door.

The phone rang. Brad answered it. “No, I wasn’t watching the morning movie,” Brad said, “but I’d take it big if you’d let me gander a guess anyway. I’ll say the movie is Carolina Cannonball and the jackpot is six hundred and fifty-one dollars. That’s right? Well, bust my buttons. That was a right lucky guess.”

Ulric slammed the door behind him.

When Mr. Mowen still wasn’t in the office by ten, Janice called him at home. She got a busy signal. She sighed, waited a minute, and tried again. The line was still busy. Before she could hang up, the phone flashed an incoming call. She punched the button. “Mr. Mowen’s office,” she said.

“Hi,” the voice on the phone said. “This is Gail over in publicity. The press releases contain an inoperable statement. You haven’t sent any out, have you?”

I tried. Janice thought with a little sigh. “No,” she said.

“Good. I wanted to confirm nonrelease before I effected the deletion.”

“What deletion?” Janice said. She tried to call up the press release but got a picture of Ulric Henry instead.

“The release catalogs Lynn Saunders as co-designer of the project.”

“I thought she was co-designer.”

“Oh, no,” Gail said. “My fiance Brad McAfee designed the whole project. I’m glad the number of printouts is nonsignificant.”

After Gail hung up, Janice tried Mr. Mowen again. The line was still busy Janice called up the company directory on her terminal, got a resume on Ulric Henry instead, and called the Chugwater operator on the phone. The operator gave her Lynn Saunders’ number. Janice called Lynn and got her roommate.

“She’s not here,” the roommate said. “She had to leave for back east as soon as she was done with the waste emissions thing. Her mother was doing head trips on her. She was really bummed out by it.”

“Do you have a number where I could reach her?” Janice asked.

“I sure don’t,” the roommate said. “She wasn’t with it at all when she left. Her fiance might have a number.”

“Her fiancé?”

“Yeah. Brad McAfee.”

“I think if she calls you’d better have her call me. Priority.” Janice hung up the phone. She called up the company directory on her terminal again and got the press release for the new emissions project. Lynn’s name was nowhere on it. She sighed, an odd, angry sigh, and tried Mr. Mowen’s number again. It was still busy.

On Sally’s way past Ulric Henry’s housing unit, she noticed something fluttering high up in the dead cottonwood tree. The remains of a kite were tangled at the very top, and just out of reach, on the second lowest branch, there was a piece of white paper. She tried a couple of half hearted jumps, swiping at the paper with her hand, but she succeeded only in blowing the paper farther out of reach. If she could get the paper down, she could take it up to Ulric Henry’s apartment and ask him if it had fallen out of his window. She looked around for a stick and then stood still, feeling foolish. There was no more reason to go after the paper than to attempt to get the ruined kite down, she told herself, but even as she thought that, she was measuring the height of the branches to see if she could get a foot up and reach the paper from there. One branch wouldn’t do it, but two might. There was no one in the gardens. This is ridiculous, she told herself, and swung up into the crotch of the tree.

She climbed swiftly up to the third branch, stretched out across it, and reached for the paper. Her fingers did not quite reach, so she straightened up again, hanging onto the trunk to get her balance, and made a kind of down-sweeping lunge toward the piece of paper. She lost her balance and nearly missed the branch, and the wind she had created by her sudden movement blew the paper all the way to the end of the branch, where it teetered precariously but did not fall off.

Someone was coming across the curving bridge. She blew a couple of times on the paper and then stopped. She was going to have to go out on the branch. Maybe the paper is blank, she thought. I can hardly take a blank piece of paper to Ulric Henry, but she was already testing the weight of the branch with her hand. It seemed finn enough, and she began to edge out onto the dead branch, holding onto the trunk until the last possible moment and then dropping into an inching crawl that brought her directly over the sidewalk. From there she was able to reach the paper easily.

The paper was part of a printout from a computer, torn raggedly at an angle. It read, “Wanted: Young woman who can generate language. Ulric. H.” The ge in “language” was missing, but otherwise the message made perfect sense, which she would have thought was peculiar if she had not been so surprised at the message. Her area of special study was language generation. She had spent all last week in class doing it, using all the rules of linguistic change on existing words: generalization and specialization of meaning, change in part of speech, shortening, prepositional verb clustering, to create a new-sounding language. It had been almost impossible to do at first, but by the end of the week, she had greeted her professor with, “Good aft. I readed up my book taskings,” without even thinking about it. She could certainly do the same thing with Ulric Henry, whom she had been wanting to meet anyway.

She had forgotten about the man she had seen coming across the bridge. He was almost to the tree now. In approximately ten more steps he would look up and see her crouched there like an insane vulture. How will I explain this to my father if anyone sees me? she thought, and put a cautious foot behind her. She was still wondering when the branch gave way.

Mr. Mowen did not leave for the press conference until a quarter to eleven. He had still been on the phone with Charlotte when Sally left, and when he had asked Charlotte to wait a minute so he could tell Sally to wait and he’d drive her over, Charlotte had called him a sexist tyrant and accused him of stifling Sally’s dominant traits by repressive male psychological intimidation. Mr. Mowen had had no idea what she was talking about.

Sally had swept up the glass and put a new light bulb in the bathroom before she left, but Mr. Mowen had decided not to tempt fate. He had shaved with a disposable razor instead. Leaning over to get a piece of toilet paper to put on the cut on his chin, he had cracked his head on the medicine cabinet door. After that, he had sat very still on the edge of the tub for nearly half an hour, wishing Sally were home so she could help him get dressed.

At the end of the half hour, Mr. Mowen decided that stress was the cause of the series of coincidences that had plagued him all morning (Charlotte had spoken Biofeedback for a couple of weeks), and that if he just relaxed, everything would be all right. He took several deep, calming breaths and stood up. The medicine cabinet was still open.

By moving very carefully and looking for hazards everywhere, Mr. Mowen managed to get dressed and out to the car. He had not been able to find any socks that matched, and the elevator had taken him all the way to the roof, but Mr. Mowen breathed deeply and calmly each time, and he was even beginning to feel relaxed by the time he opened the door to the car.