Damon Knight - Orbit 14

Forlesen knocked on the door to which the woman had led him. It was of metal painted to resemble wood, and had riveted to its front a small brass plaque which read “Mr. D’Andrea.”

“Come in!” someone called from inside the office.

Forlesen entered and saw a short, thickset, youngish man with close-cropped hair sitting at a metal desk. The office was extremely small and had no windows, but there was a large, brightly colored picture on each wall—two photographs in color (a beach with rocks and waves, and a snow-clad mountain) and two realistic landscapes (both of rolling green countryside dotted with cows and trees).

“Come in,” the youngish man said again. “Sit down. Listen, I want to tell you something—you don’t have to knock to come in this office. Not ever. My door—like they say—is always open. What I mean is, I may keep it shut to keep out the noise and so forth out in the hall, but it’s always open to you.”

“I think I understand,” Forlesen said. “Are you Mr. Fields?” The plaque had somewhat shaken his faith in the young woman with glasses.

“Right. Ed Fields at your service.”

“Then I’m going to be working for you. I’m Emanuel Forlesen.” Forlesen leaned forward and offered his hand, which Fields walked around the desk to take.

“Glad to meet you, Manny. Always happy to welcome a new face to the subdivision.” For an instant, as their eyes met, Forlesen felt himself weighed in invisible scales and, he thought, found slightly wanting. Then the moment passed, and a few seconds later he had difficulty believing it had ever been. “Remember what I told you when you came in—my door is always open,” Fields said. “Sit down.” Forlesen sat, and Fields resumed his place behind the desk.

“We’re a small outfit,” Fields said, “but we’re sharp.” He held up a clenched fist. “And I intend to make us the sharpest in the division. I need men who’ll back my play all the way, and maybe even run in front a little. Sharpies. That’s what I call ’em—sharpies. And you work with me, not for me.”

Forlesen nodded.

“We’re a team,” Fields continued, “and we’re going to function as a team. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a quarterback, and a coach”—he pointed toward the ceiling—“up there. It does mean that I expect every man to bat two-fifty or better, and the ones that don’t make three hundred had better be damn good field. See what I mean?”

Forlesen nodded again and asked, “What does our subdivision do? What’s our function?”

“We make money for the company,” Fields told him. “We do what needs to be done. You see this office? This desk, this chair?”

Forlesen nodded.

“There’s two kinds of guys that sit here—I mean all through the company. There’s the old has-been guys they stick in here because they’ve been through it all and seen everything, and there’s the young guys like me that get put here to get an education—you get me? Sometimes the young guys just never move out, then they turn into the old ones. That isn’t going to happen to me, and I want you to remember that the easiest way for you to move up yourself is to move into this spot right here. Someday this will all be yours— that’s the way to think of it. That’s what I tell every guy in the subdivision—someday this’ll all be yours.” Fields reached over his head to tap one of the realistic landscapes. “You get what I mean?” “I think so.”

“Okay, then let me show you your desk and where you’re gonna work.”

As they dodged along windowless, brightly lit corridors it struck Forlesen that though the building was certainly ventilated—some of the corridors, in fact, were actually windy—the system could not be working very well. A hundred odors, mostly foul, but some of a sickening sweetness, thronged the air; and though most of the hallways they traveled were so cold as to be uncomfortable, a few were as stuffy as tents left closed all day beneath a summer sun.

“What’s that noise?” Forlesen asked.

“That’s a jackhammer busting concrete. You’re going to be in the new wing.” Fields opened a green steel door and led the way down a narrow, low-ceilinged passage pungent with the burnt-metal smell of arc welding; the tiled floor was gritty with cement dust, and Forlesen wondered, looking at the unpainted walls, how they could have gotten so dirty when they were clearly so new. “In here,” Fields said.

It was a big room, and had been divided into cubicles with rippled glass partitions five feet high. The effect was one of privacy, but the cubicles had been laid out in such a way as to allow anyone looking through the glass panel in the office door to see into them all. The room’s windows were covered with splintering boards, and the floor was sufficiently uneven that it was possible to imagine it a petrified sea, though its streaked black and grey pattern was more suggestive of charred wood. “You’re in luck,” Fields said. “I’d forgotten, or I would have told you back in the office. You get a window desk. Right here. Sitting by the window makes it kind of dark, but you only got the one other guy on the side of you over there, that’s nice, and you know there’s always a certain prestige goes with the desk that’s next to the window.”

Forlesen asked, “Wouldn’t it be possible to take some of the glass out of these partitions and use it in the windows?”

“Hell, no. This stuff is partition glass—what you need for a window is window glass. I thought you were supposed to have a lot of science.”

“My duties are supposed to be supervisory and managerial,” Forlesen said.

“Don’t ever let anybody tell you management isn’t a science.” Fields thumped Forlesen’s new desk for emphasis and got a smudge of dust on his fist. “It’s an art, sure, but it’s a science too.”

Forlesen, who could not see how anything could be both, nodded.

Fields glanced at his watch. “Nearly oh seventy-one already, and I got an appointment. Listen, I’m gonna leave you to find your way around.”

Forlesen seated himself at his desk. “I was hoping you’d tell me what I’m supposed to do here before you left.”

Fields was already outside the cubicle. “You mean your responsibilities; there’s a list around somewhere.”

Forlesen had intended to protest further, but as he started to speak he noticed an optical illusion so astonishing that for the brief period it was visible he could only stare. As Fields passed behind one of the rippled glass partitions on his way to the door, the distortions in the glass caused his image to change from that of the somewhat dumpy and rumpled man with whom Forlesen was now slightly familiar; behind the glass he was taller, exceedingly neat, and blank-faced. And he wore glasses.

When he was gone Forlesen got up and examined the partitions carefully; they seemed ordinary enough, one surface rippled, the other smooth, the tops slightly dusty. He looked at his empty desk through the glass; it was a blur. He sat down again, and the telephone rang. “Cappy?”

“This is Emanuel Forlesen.” At the last moment it occurred to Forlesen that it might have been better to call himself “Manny” as Fields had—that it might seem more friendly and less fomal, particularly to someone who was looking for someone he addressed so casually; but, as the thought entered his mind, something else, not a thought but one of those deeper feelings from which our thoughts have perhaps evolved, contradicted it, so he repeated his name, bearing down on the first syllable: “ Ee-manuel Forlesen.”

“Isn’t Cappy Dillingham there?”

“He may be in this office,” Forlesen said, “that is, his desk may be here, but he’s not here himself, and this is my telephone—I just moved into the office.”