Damon Knight - Orbit 17

Leighton walked into his office bathroom at eight fifteen a.m. the next day and took a hundred milligrams of methylphenidate hydrochloride, five pale orange tablets. He predicted that he would be bristling at the nine a.m. meeting with Guglielmo, supra-alert, cranial wattage sizzling, ready to take on anything. If things get out of hand, there’s always the good old stomach pump and the emergency room, he thought, remembering a friend who was on eighty milligrams mood elevator dosage daily, yet still moped around narcoleptically. The man with the golden reticular network, he thought, that’s what I’m going to be—hell, this is a little like Jekyll and Hyde. He decided to dodge Brenda and go on to Guglielmo’s office early.

At nine seven a.m., Leighton felt the first signs: a dryness of the soft palate, a vague auditory hissing, barely above limen, and glimmerings of increased intracranial pressure. His pupils contracted, and his fingers and toes felt a bit cold. His blood pressure remained normal.

“I’ve given the fiscal problem a lot of thought, Vic,” he said slowly, knowing he should pace himself, do some coasting-type biofeedbacks. “I hope we can thrash it out.”

“It’s got me whipped,” Guglielmo said. “I think I put too much faith in the Price Waterhouse man. He came on like a twenty-four-karat expert.”

“He did the major audit?”

“Yes.” Deep in Leighton’s brain, classically reductionistic extirpation would have shown atomic shiftings of both sodium and chlorine. At the molecular level, catalytic iron activity increased. Enzymic regulators quivered in their nests, relays itching to be tripped, and a kind of vitaminic asymptote began to build.

“The P-W man is a hanger-on, right?” Sam asked, “put in by the old dean?”

“Right.”

“Dump him, today.” Amino acids simmered in labial invaginations, then the d-glutamics and 1-prolines flickered and surged. Synaptic junctures flared with the hot proline. Sam glanced at his watch: nine fifteen—eight fifteen in Bayou Dularge, he thought, seven fifteen in Socorro, and six fifteen in San Diego. The shadow of the sun is moving at four hundred mph, the equatorial circumference of the planet is twenty-five thousand miles, the spinning speed is point three miles per second, the orbital velocity is—

“I can’t dump old McClain,” Guglielmo said.

“He’s an alcoholic, a gambler, and he’s always on the golf course. Get Weisner in here, he’s deadly on the fiscal polemics.” Guglielmo had the Stenorette purring, but he wrote down: DUMP MCCLAIN—CALL WEISNER.

“Did McClain use cash flow or accrual amounts in figuring the deficits?”

“Cash flow.”

“Accrual figures are the basis for determining total capitalization?”

“Right.”

“Then demand accrual methods in all your accounting operations.”

“Miss Davis won’t like that.”

“She’s been in accounting since about nineteen two, hasn’t she?”

“Damn near.”

“Well, retire her, minimize her, neutralize her—make her a vice-president in charge of research or something.” Guglielmo made another note on his pad: SHIFT DAVIS—SWITCH TO ACCRUAL.

“How would the deficit have read using accrual figures?” Sam asked.

“I remember that, because it was at chance levels. With a twenty-seven percent overhead factor, the sampling error was forty-two percent.”

“Equal to the cost overrun in the new building.” Sam said it as if he were a computer. Specialized cells drew in supercharged energy, compression ratios edged near spontaneous combustion levels, violent little detonational novas flared, metaboles glowed, cindered, dispersed. Vic looked at the Stenorette, as if to make sure all this was getting recorded. He wrote: MCCLAIN’S SAMPLING ERROR = THE COST OVERRUN. He wanted to leave for the bank at that moment.

Leighton began to feel that he could select and modify sensory messages in the earliest stages of their trajectory. Prima-facie signals got cathected monitoring. He felt a marvelous cognitive economy. He reeled off information, corrected Guglielmo’s teleological jumps, crystallized fuzzy diction patterns into cogent packs, extrapolated data, wrenched out redundancies, set fresh contexts, and talked a kind of clarificatory metalanguage.

At twelve twenty p.m., Guglielmo’s notes read:

1. DUMP MCCLAIN—CALL WEISNER

2. SHIFT DAVIS—SWITCH TO ACCRUAL

3. MCCLAIN’S SAMPLING ERROR = THE COST OVERRUN

4. PAYROLL OVERDRAW SPURIOUS

5. RADIOLOGY CAN BE MODIFIED TO SHOW 4000% PROFIT

6. PHARMACY CAN SHOW 900% PROFIT

7. RE-DO THE T.O. IN PENCIL, AND IN MANDALA FORM

8. REDUCE PURCHASING DEPARTMENT STAFF

9. ELIMINATE PAYROLL CHECKS—PUT VOUCHERS DIRECT IN BANK

10. ABOLISH PUBLIC RELATIONS (FIRE THE OLD DEAN’S SON-IN-LAW)

11. SAVE 27 THOU BY not REVISING THE PERSONNEL POLICY HANDBOOK

12. PUT THE LEAR JET IN COSMOLINE AND MOTHBALLS

13. WATCH NEPOTISM IN THE SECRETARIAL POOL (OF ALL PLACES!)

14. THE FEWER STAFF MEETINGS THE BETTER

15. GET AT LEAST ONE NEW, YOUNG, EAGER LAWYER

16. MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS ARE DISASTERS

17. HARRIS IS A BARRACUDA—DUMP HER

18. DAVIS IS CHARACTEROLOGICALLY DISTURBED—MOVE HIM

19. REDUCE BOARD OF REGENTS BY HALF

20. PHONE BILL IS 28% HIGH ($7000 MONTHLY LOSS)

21. DRUCKER IS WORTH HIS $2000 DAILY FEE

22 .BUCKY FULLER IS WORTH $5000 A DAY

23. BANKS ARE MERELY BOOKKEEPERS

24. MONEY IS A WAY OF STORING AND UTILIZING ENERGY

25. THE ENDS ARE IMPLICIT IN THE MEANS

26. JESUS H CHRIST—WHAT’S GOT INTO SAM?

Leighton sat low in the big leather chair. He looked at a wall photo of one of Vic’s antique cars, all brass and mohair and rosewood, double-cowled, nineteen-inch Denmans, Claxtons, Trippe lights, porcelain valve covers. He saw chamois lint on the fender, layers of wax, layers of blue paint, primer, sanded metal, washed, scoured, rubbed. His limbic system spread a mantle of diminution over the septal, hippocampal, and cingulate regions. Mind and matter, he thought, a dichotomy from four hundred b.c., where is my soul—my rational soul? Perhaps I have made a hundred-milligram epiphenomenon here today; but also something incorporeal, not something in visual space, but in virtual space. Whatever we know without inference is mental. I am a scientist, but my dualism fosters professional, intellectual, and conceptual isolation. I hope my neocortex is built into my chassis—

“You’ve been a top-flight logician, Sam, I feel a little awed.” Vic looked somehow relieved and concerned at the same moment. “In fact, I feel like sprinting over to the bank.”

“Good, good,” Sam said, “but listen now, don’t divert any of your mental energies to debunking me. I’m not after you or your job. I’ll do everything I can to make you look good.”

“I appreciate that, Sam. The sociometry—the medico-executive chess game around here is cutthroat enough.”

“You could do with a little charisma, too,” Sam said.

“I know—nobody loves a swarthy Corsican.”

“Shave your head, man, grow a Van Dyke, stop wearing floppy polka-dot bow ties, and get rid of your puce-colored Electra 225.”

“Thanks for the advice, but I think I’m too much of an old ethnic dog to learn that many new tricks—want to go to lunch?”

“No, I’m not the least bit hungry. If you don’t mind, I’ll sit here a few more minutes and unwind—I’ve been high this morning.”

“You’ve been superhuman—are you okay?”

“Just crackling at the synapses, I’ll wind down.”

“Stay as long as you like,” Vic said, reaching for his coat, “see you after lunch.”

Sam closed his eyes. It was one p.m. Avocado-green auroras shimmered across his proximal field. He tried for distal focus, feeling his eyes relax deliciously, somesthetically. I think I am a scientist, he said to himself, my brain shapes my perceptions as well as my comportment. I wait for teleological mechanisms to work it out. I am the exponential arrowhead, flirting with holistic field-forces, bogs of ambiguity and conceptual artifice—mindbrain, brain-mind, gossamer and lead monolith. Mind is an illusion—the hell it is! Sam felt the best of the enervation, as well as some good quiescence biofeedback. The concept of the mind is anthropomorphic, he thought. Ideas, not things, rule mankind. I am a scientist, but I am fundamentally and immeasurably ignorant. The dimensions of my field overwhelm me. Outside experience is not the whole, internal reality is beautiful, thermal and Heisenberg indeterminacies notwithstanding. Science is just an artifactually ordered way to think. I wonder how artists think . . . I wonder if Vic has gone to get the money . . . sure he has.