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 among 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 windows were covered with splintering boards, and the floor sufficiently uneven that it was possible to imagine it a petrified sea, though its streaked black and gray 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 vague 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 formal, 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: “
“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.”
“Take a message for him, will you? Tell him the Creativity Group meeting is moved up to oh seventy-eight sharp. I’m sorry it had to be so early, but Gene Fine has got a bunch of other stuff and we couldn’t figure out anything else to do short of canceling. And we couldn’t get a room, so we’re meeting in the hall outside the drilling and boring shop. There’s definitely going to be a film. Have you got that?”
“I think so,” Forlesen said. “Oh seventy-eight, hall outside the drill room, movie.” He heard someone behind him
