Пол Андерсон - Orbit 1

Alerted by the first ill-tempered syllable, Godwin was on his feet, ready to perform again the most humiliating of all Liaison duties. He groaned inwardly, and then froze.

The bundle held so gingerly by the Exec was the diplomatic pouch, traditionally untouchable by anyone other than accredited Liaison Agents. Top secret, inviolable, the papers he had awaited for two long weeks — and Harms actually appeared to be about to hurl the entire packet at the green-clad civilian!

The Exec’s grip was too disdainful for a clean pitch, and he fumbled it. The unwieldy packet began to fall. With more spite than grace, Harms crooked his scarlet knee and drop-kicked the packet at an angle that took it underneath a portable drafting table.

The draftsman promptly kicked it out again. Godwin stared in horror as his holy of holies slithered back and forth across the floor. The draftsman’s suddenly pink face appeared alongside the angled desk and he said, “Jostling makes the little lines crooked. If I am not jostled, I never draw the little lines crooked, and that is why I occupy this desk. If I am jostled again, I will resign this desk.. sir.”

The Exec glared. “What the hell do you want, Tawmison — a cubicle out of my personal stores, hey?”

Wystan Godwin threw off his paralysis and moved to intercept the slightly battered package before one of Harms’ aides might think to hand it back to the Exec. Jack-knifed, one hand firmly on the Liaison packet, he intervened in the dispute. In a tone of voice trained to cut through hysterical screeching, he said, “Is this necessary?”

The question was intentionally so phrased as to allow everyone to choose his own referent.

“Necessary?” The draftsman talked more to his board and to his colleagues than to the Liaison man, but he was talking loud enough to make sure he drowned out the Exec. Therefore, rapport was re-established. “Necessary? Man, it’s crucial. A desk conscript has got the right to work unharassed in any way, or he has got the right to resign, and choose another complex.”

Good — the windier the verbalization of the root grievance, the faster the grief leached out. Tawmison was already smiling.

Godwin smiled back and nodded equably. However, he stayed on one knee; and when he turned the top of his head to the Exec’s wrath, he carefully kept his face averted.

Harms seemed to be unable to take pride in the rigid dispute protocol that put him always last because his was the more powerful side of any argument. He had fallen into the habit of saying everything at least twice in crises. Tawmison’s brevity left him sputtering. “Necessary?” he mumbled for the fourth time, and then cranked up the gain to the full Harms bellow. “Necessary nonsense!”

Godwin nodded, cutting him short. He stood up and spoke into a point in the middle air between the two disputants. “The Exec apologizes, being clearly in the wrong. You will not be jostled again, Tawmison. By the Exec’s order, witnessed by all here present, as he himself in the heat of argument so suitably proposed, if any person should jostle you, a cubicle shall be supplied from the Exec’s personal supplies for your working protection.”

His inner composure restored by having caught the Exec in his own net, Godwin ran through the opposite formula — ritual words pretending abject sorrow on Tawmison’s part for having let his temper flare under work stress — for the Exec’s public satisfaction and, Godwin hoped, further disgruntlement.

He tightened his already firm grip on the Liaison packet: amazingly thick, disgracefully shabby, two weeks overdue, and welcome. Incredible that a mere civilian had delivered these papers. Incredible? — it was a thundering breach of protocol that Harms had tried to prevent delivery and (if Godwin had heard correctly) this was not the first time.

Godwin formally concluded his intervention in the dispute by stepping back into his cubicle. He could not get that packet open fast enough, but the topmost page, a white one, stopped him cold. In big block letters, it said:

Leaping largely, we return. Hearing droops

at [?] so great and grasper [?]

from emptiness.

The Liaison Agent massaged his eyebrows. Sometimes it did not pay to get right at the heart of a problem. He ran gingerly through the blue sheets accompanying the document.

Just the same, he thought, sometimes one could skip the blue sheets entirely. Routine, routine, everything was routine question and answer or refusal to answer on grounds of protocol. What a mess!

The beginnings of nausea swirled a warning and subsided as he quickly, conscientiously, changed his formulation: what a mass of information! (He was so used to his pollyanna-prod that he gave himself a hearty little Liaison speech automatically: Yes, sir, he was really going to have to work from the white sheets on this one.)

… If he could find them. There did not seem to be any flagged white sections, after that peculiar first one, in the entire accumulation of blue worksheets, although there should have been a dozen. He thumbed more slowly through the file again, until renewed altercation forced his attention outside the cubicle. The rasping shout was familiar and unmistakable. A crash, the sound of something brittle smashing.

Godwin gathered up his precious papers and stepped out of his cubicle again, restraining a wild impulse to say, “Sixteen twenty. Cuckoo, cuckoo.”

In Harms’ hand was the jagged-edged base of a bottle, a real glass bottle, and in the civilian’s eyes there were tears.

“Hobby horses!” The Exec was, of course, repeating himself. “Intuition where a little force is all that’s needed! Nonsense, everywhere I turn!”

“Please, sir,” said the little civ to Godwin. “I was sent here to talk to you. I’ve got to talk to you. I can’t deal with him. And he broke my very best specimen, for no reason at all!”

“Yes,” said Godwin. He quite understood. But — while it was not necessary for people to drop to one knee in their presence or to walk away backward when they left — both he and Harms had the status of kings in the old days. Protocol’s requirements were strict. “The Exec apologizes for having caused you stress, and he regrets having broken your specimen.”

Harms spun away from the openly weeping civ and strode toward Godwin. “Regrets! Apologizes!” He made an inarticulate sound and pulled himself together. “On the contrary, the Exec requires that this errand boy should get his stinking person off the premises of Communications Complex immediately. And he can take this message back to the Liaison Agent out there: the unauthorized Liaison encampment must be broken up and removed to a distance of. . uhm… at least two miles within twenty-four hours.” He looked at his wrist, sought among the dial faces there, and continued. “At 1700 hours precisely, I will — I am — it will not be safe for any human beings to be in the vicinity of that ship.”

Godwin felt for the first time that Harms was speaking directly to him instead of to the invisible web of restraints and evasions in which the Exec had netted him since his arrival. “Such a threat,” he said smoothly, “cannot be transmitted without the nature of the danger being made more clear.”

“Sir,” said Harms, “the grave menace imperiling the peace of this planet warrants the use of force. Extreme force!”

The Liaison man felt the blood mounting in his forehead. In a curious detached fashion, he felt it mounting higher than he thought his forehead could possibly go, remembered that he was back in “civilization” again and hairless almost to the crown. He longed momentarily for the lamasery in the Himalayas, and spoke very softly to the sneering officer. “Statutory warning and advice noted. But-”