“Course we’re not at 1863 strength, nowhere near, but everything’s as close to the same as it can be. Check out that shell jacket-identical down to the thread count. Just there’s no bullets and no horses, excepting the colonel’s.”
“And they gave you all this stuff?”
“Gave? You have to buy it off the sutler.”
“What’s that?”
“Like a store, but in a tent.”
“How much?”
“Eleven hundred.”
“Dollars?”
“Plus tax.”
“You were carrying that kind of cash?”
“Don’t be dumb, Roy. They take Visa.”
“The official card of the Civil War?” Roy said; wouldn’t ordinarily have said that aloud, but he wasn’t dumb.
Gordo looked at him from the corner of his eye, then laughed. “I’ll have to pass that on.”
“To who?”
“The boys in the unit. They’ve got a good sense of humor about all this.”
“Does Brenda?”
“She doesn’t exactly know yet.”
Gordo didn’t look quite so cheerful anymore. Roy knew Gordo couldn’t afford that kind of money for funny- looking clothes and a reproduction musket. No more than he could. They worked the same job, made the same money: $42,975 a year. Roy tried to figure in his head what percentage 1,100 was of 42,975. That kind of thing didn’t come naturally to him, but it was good practice. He’d noticed that people who got promoted at work always had a head for figures. Traffic started moving. Gordo picked that moment to honk in frustration, so it must have been at Brenda, or something like that. Roy came up with a figure around four percent, but that didn’t seem right.
Their building appeared in the northwest, just off the connector. It was a shiny brass-colored tower, not unlike the color of the sky at that moment, with the word Chemerica in red letters at the top. Except this morning, when all it said was: hem.
“What’s going on?” Gordo said.
“Putting up bigger letters,” Roy said.
They parked in the employee lot in sublevel five under the building, got into an elevator containing two execs. “Up five-eighths already and it’s only-” one was saying. He stopped when he saw Roy and Gordo. Roy noticed that the execs had their weight on the balls of their feet, like sprinters. The elevator couldn’t go fast enough for them.
Roy and Gordo got off at sublevel one. A right turn led to shipping, left to receiving. Roy and Gordo turned right. No actual shipping or receiving took place in the Chemerica building; nothing went in or out but product orders, the weights, volumes, packaging protocols, routes, carriers, tariffs, handling instructions, and state, federal, and internationally mandated warnings, all coded in digital transmissions. Roy and Gordo worked in the Asia/Oceania section, a cluster of a dozen cubicles in the far corner of the floor. A sign overhung their section from one of the strip lights: the irregulars. The sign had been slung up at a Christmas party several years before by a shipper fired not long after. The name remained.
6:59. Roy entered his cubicle, B27. It had shoulder-high padded walls, a chair, a desk, a monitor, a keyboard, a shelf holding the reg books- tariffs, carriers, customs, rates, routes, safety-and a framed photo of Rhett in his Pop Warner uniform. Next to it was an empty rectangle of unfaded wall padding. Marcia’s picture lay in the bottom drawer of Roy’s desk.
Roy checked his screen. He had a ton of KOH from Mobile due at their subsidiary in Osaka in a week; calcium carbonate, amount unspecified, to Karachi, P. of O. unspecified, date unspecified; two ounces of radioactive uranyl acetate to the Ministry of Science and Engineering in Singapore; three forty-footers and one twenty-footer of “Gentlemen?”
Roy looked up; got up, since you couldn’t see over the wall sitting down. Cubicles worked against you coming and going. Curtis was standing in the open area between Asia/Oceania and Central/South America (except Mexico). The shippers from the two departments, all men, all white, were looking at him over their walls. Curtis wore a wireless headset so he could communicate at all times with whomever he communicated with, a charcoal-gray suit, a navy shirt with white collar and cuffs, a deep crimson tie. He was probably the best-dressed employee in the building, including the ones in seventeenth-floor corner offices. That bothered a lot of the guys, but not Roy. Roy liked Curtis.
“Morning,” Curtis said. “There’s been a little-”
P.J., B33, two cubicles behind Roy’s, came hurrying in late from the elevator, knotting his tie-they all wore ties, a Chemerica rule-saw there was some kind of meeting, slowed down, tried to look inconspicuous, not easy at his size. Roy noticed that P.J. had a shaving cut too, worse than Gordo’s.
“-screwup,” Curtis continued, not even glancing at P.J. “Email on this was supposed to go out from New York last week, with activation set for next week, but A didn’t happen and B seems to be happening ahead of schedule. Like today. Anyone see anything different on the way in?”
No one had.
“No one noticed the company name descending?”
Roy had, of course: he just hadn’t known that was what Curtis was after. He’d been too busy listening to the way Curtis talked; long sentences and big words just rolling out of him, like he should have been a preacher.
“Fact is,” Curtis said, “as of today, there is no Chemerica.”
Roy saw something flash across the computer screens, looked down at his, saw that Chemerica had been replaced by Globax.
“Welcome, gentlemen, to Globax.” Curtis paused, appeared to be listening to something. “A new name, more in tune with the reality of our position in the world economy. Everything else stays the same.” He looked around. “Any questions?”
“This mean raises all around?” said DeLoach, B30.
“You won’t believe how big,” said Curtis.
No one laughed.
“And in the real world,” Curtis said, “the stock was up a couple ticks in the overnight.”
No one said anything about that. Roy himself owned no shares of Chemerica, Globax, or anything else.
“New ID tags’ll be down by three.” Curtis turned to go, paused. “And P.J.?”
“Yeah.”
“Stop the bleeding.”
Curtis walked away toward his office, a big glass-walled room built on a sort of square dais in the center of the vast space. As he did, he spotted something on the wall of Gordo’s cubicle. It affected his stride for a moment, as though one leg had gone fleetingly numb. After he was gone, Roy stood up to look. Gordo had stuck a tiny flag on his wall, the red flag with the crossing blue bars and the white stars.
“Stop the bleeding?” said P.J. when they were all back in their cubicles. He spoke in a low voice, but Roy could hear him. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve got a shaving cut,” Roy said, not looking up from his screen. Three freight cars of ammonium nitrate had gone missing somewhere between Shanghai and Chongqing. He clicked on Maps.
Voices rose over the padded walls.
“And your ass is on the line,” said DeLoach.
“Fuck you,” said P.J. “And that’s pretty funny, what with him taking a shot at New York. Curtis is New York’s blue-eyed boy.”
One weird way of putting it, even if true. There was a long silence. Then Gordo spoke, almost inaudible. “Ain’t going to be no jobs for nobody.”
“What are you talking about?” said DeLoach.
“Globax,” said Gordo. “Can’t you see what’s happening?”
