Hot Sky at Midnight

“Boss says, Take a break. He wants to talk to you.”

“I’ve almost got it. I can see—fuck. Fuck!” He banged his fist against the edge of the desk. The intrusion had come like a bucket of icy water hurled in his face. It shattered everything and he was unable to see anything any more. The patterns on the visor became a meaningless dance of jiggling blotches. Carpenter glanced up, every nerve in his body twanging and humming. One of the office gofers was standing placidly at his elbow, a pale flimsy girl, Sandra Wong, Sandra Chen, some Chinese name or other, utterly indifferent to his irritation. “What the hell is it?” he asked her furiously.

“I told you,” the kid said. “Boss wants you.”

“What for?”

“Do I know? Tell Carpenter, Take a break, come over here, that’s all he said.”

Carpenter nodded and stood up. All around the room, people speeding as he had been on hyperdex were staring into their visors with lunatic fixity and babbling back at the computers as torrents of weather data flooded in from space. He wondered why they were so entranced. Their fanatical dedication to their task seemed alien and repugnant to him now. Two minutes ago nothing had mattered more in the universe to him than tracking that vicious cloud of atmospheric crud, but now he was completely out of it, utterly detached, wholly lacking in concern for the fate of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego.

He realized that he had passed into some outer realm of exhaustion without even noticing it. He was no longer speeded up. The hyperdex must have burned out hours ago and he had continued his vigil on sheer mental momentum, doing who knew what damage to his nervous system.

He went into the other room, to the big horseshoe-shaped desk of the department administrator.

“You wanted me?” Carpenter asked.

The office was run by a bleak-souled Salaryman Ten named Ross McCarthy, who despite his name had some slight tincture of Japanese blood in his veins. That had done McCarthy no good whatever in his quest for upward slope, perhaps even had contributed to his stymieing: he had been stuck at the tenth level for years and plainly was going no higher, and he was bitter about it. He was a stocky, flat-faced man with faintly greenish skin and straight, glossy black hair that was starting to thin out across the top.

There was a dispatch printout in his hands. McCarthy fingered it gingerly, as though it were radioactive.

“Carpenter, what the hell is this?” he said.

“How would I know?”

McCarthy made no attempt to let him see it. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the finish of your career that I have right here in my hands. It’s a transfer to some goddamn stupid iceberg ship, that’s what it is. Have you taken leave of your senses, Carpenter?”

“I don’t think that I have, no.” Carpenter reached for the printout. McCarthy held it back from him.

“This ship,” McCarthy said, “it’s an absolute dead end for you. You’ll go out into the middle of the Pacific for a couple of years and fry your ass doing stupid manual labor and when you come back you’ll find that everybody on your grade level has skipped on past you. Out of sight, off the charts, Carpenter, that’s the way things work. Do you follow me? Don’t do this to yourself. Take my advice. What you’ll do if you’re smart is stay right here. You’re needed here.”

“Apparently the Company thinks it needs me somewhere else,” Carpenter said. He was getting annoyed now.

“You stay here, you’re bound to move up slope in no time. I’ll be going on to a Nine pretty soon now. The word will come down from Yoshida-san any day, that’s what I hear. And when I do, you’ll slide right into my slot. Isn’t that better than hauling fucking icebergs around the ocean?”

McCarthy wasn’t going anywhere, Carpenter knew. He had committed some obscure breach of etiquette along the way, perhaps had tried unwisely to pressure some distant and barely acknowledged Japanese fifth cousin of his for promotion, and he was going to rot in Level Ten forever and ever. McCarthy knew that too. And wanted to keep everybody who worked for him trapped here in the same perpetual stasis that enfolded him.

“I think I’ve achieved as much as I can in weather forecasting,” Carpenter told him, controlling himself tautly. “Now I want to try something else.”

“An iceberg trawler. Shit, Carpenter. Shit! Turn it down.”

“I don’t think I will.” He took the transfer order from McCarthy and pocketed it without looking at it. “Oh, and you can start to call off your five-alarmer, by the way. The poison cloud is about to break up.”

McCarthy’s black-button eyes took on sudden feverish brightness.

“You sure of that?”

“Absolutely,” Carpenter said, amazed at his own audacity. “The entire system will be heading back east by Tuesday afternoon.” If he was wrong, the whole Spokane office would be taken out and shot as soon as the lawsuits began. To hell with them all, Carpenter thought. He would be a thousand miles from here before any trouble could start.

And in any case his forecast was right. He felt it in his bones.

“Show me on the charts,” McCarthy said, beginning to look a little suspicious.

Carpenter led him back to the data room. As never before it looked to him like a gaming center in a lunatic asylum, all the hyperdex-zonked crazies grinning fixedly into the bright streams of whorls and loops that were dancing across the faces of their visors. He stood in front of his own computer and pointed to the gaudy yellow- and-green patterns. They made no sense whatsoever to him now. Chimpanzee finger paintings, nothing more. “Here,” he told McCarthy, “these isobars here, they indicate the changing gradients.” He tapped the screen. “You see, here, along the Idaho border? Definite incipient weakening of the toxic flow. And a clear indication of a retro push coming from Canada, you see, like a giant hand shoving the whole mass the right way.” It was all bullshit, every syllable of it He had unquestionably seen something new taking shapebefore the girl broke in on him, but whatever it might have been was impossible for him to fathom, now.

McCarthy was staring thoughtfully at the computer visor.

He said, “It’ll be a fucking miracle if the damned thing just goes away, won’t it?”

“Won’t it be, though. But look, Ross—” Carpenter rarely presumed to use McCarthy’s first name. “Look here, here, here. And especially here. I know it looks locked tight as a constipated whale’s gut right this moment, but when I was clicked into the map a little while ago I could distinctly feel the whole flow shifting, shifting in our favor; definite indications of gradient transform all along the periphery. Look at this. And this.”

“Mmm.” McCarthy nodded. “Yes. Mmm.” He was faking it, Carpenter knew. On Level Ten you didn’t need technical ability except of the most superficial kind; you needed managerial skill. Which perhaps McCarthy might have had, once.

“You see?” Carpenter said. “I was flying on intuition, sure. But the substantiating data’s already beginning to turn up positive. That toxic mass is as good as out of here. You see that, don’t you, Ross?”

McCarthy was still nodding.

“Right. I like it. Right, right, right.” And then, abruptly: “Listen, Paul, turn down this transfer, won’t you? Stay here with us. We need your kind of mind.”

Carpenter had never heard McCarthy plead before. But the pleasure he drew from it was followed immediately by a desolate feeling of contempt.

“I can’t, Ross. I’ve got to move along. Surely you understand that.”

“But skipper of an iceberg ship—”

“Whatever. I take what I can get.” Carpenter felt dizzy, suddenly. His eyeballs were aching. “Hey, Ross, is it okay if I go home, now? I’m dead on my feet and not worth a damn any more here today. And the crisis is over. I swear to you, it’s over. Let me go, okay?”

“Yeah,” McCarthy said, absently. “Go on home, if you need to. But if things turn back the wrong way, we’ll have to call you back in, no matter what.”

“They won’t turn back, believe me. Believe me.”

“And come in tomorrow. We’ve got to start setting things up for your replacement. Whoever that is.”

“Right. Sure.”

Carpenter staggered out of the building, masking up in the vestibule, carefully fastening his face-lung in place to shield his throat and respiratory system from the customary ambient atmospheric garbage. The sky was