Finger would like to meet with him. When Oxnard reminded her that they had met eighteen: months earlier, the woman had merely smiled on the phone screen and suggested that the future of her career depended on getting him into Finger’s office. Oxnard reluctantly agreed to a date and time.
“All right, then,” Finger went on. “A less loyal man would make some heads roll in a situation like this. I haven’t fired anybody. I haven’t panicked. You still have your jobs. I hope you appreciate that.”
They both bobbed their heads.
“After lunch, the New York people, will want to see what we’ve got. Take him,” Finger barely glanced in Oxnard’s direction, “back to the studio and make sure all this fancy gadgetry is working when I arrive there.”
“With it, B.F.,” Montpelier said as he struggled up out of his waterchair.
The woman got to her feet and Oxnard did the same. Finger swivelled his chair slightly and started talking into the phone screen. They were dismissed.
It took exactly twenty-eight paces through the foot-smothering carpet to get to the office door. Les Montpelier swung it open gingerly and they,stepped into the receptionist’s area.
“One good thing about fiightweight doors,” Montpelier muttered. “You can’t slam them.”
The Titanic Tower was built to earthquake specificstions of course. Which meant that it was constructed like an oversized rocket booster, all aluminum or lighter metals, with a good deal of plastics. If the sensors in the subbasement detected an earth movement beyond the designed tolerances, rocket engines built into the pods along the building’s sides roared to life and hurtled the entire tower, along with its occupants, safely out to a splashdown in the Pacific, beyond the line of oil rigs.
The whole system had been thoroughly tested by NASA; even though a few diehard conservative engineers thought that the tests weren’t extensive enough, the City of Los Angeles decided that it couldn’t grow laterally any more—all the land had been used up. So skyscrapers were the next step. Earthquake-proof skyscrapers.
There hadn’t been an earthquake severe enough to really test the rocket towers, although the Tishman Tower had been blasted off by a gang of pranksters who tinkered with the seismographic equipment in its basement. The building arched beautifully out to sea, with no injuries to its occupants beyond the sorts of bruises and broken bones you’d expect from bouncing off the foam plastic walls, floors and ceilings. A few heart attacks, of course, but that was to be expected. The pedestrians who happened to be strolling on the walkways around the Tower were, unfortunately, rather badly singed by the rocket exhaust. A few of them eventually died, including eighty-four in a sightseeing bus that was illegally parked in front of the Tower. Most of them were foreign visitors, though, and Korean missionaries at that.
As they walked down the corridor toward the studio, Oxnard noted how the foam plastic flooring absorbed the sounds of their footfalls, even without carpeting. It was a great building for sneaking up behind people.
“Why did you let Finger yell at you like that?” Oxnard wondered aloud. “Les, you brought me up here to see him a year and a half ago.”
Montpelier glanced at the woman, who answered: “We’ve learned that it’s best to let B.F. have his little tantrums, Dr. Oxnard. It’s a survival technique. “
Her voice was low, throaty, the kind that would be unbearably exotic if it had just the faintest trace of a foreign accent. But her pronunciation was flat Southern California uninspired. Over the phone she had managed to sound warm and inviting. But not now.
“I don’t have a Doctorate, Miz… uh…” Oxnard grimaced inwardly. He could remember equations, but not names.
“Impanema.” She flashed a meaningless smile, like a reflex that went along with stating her name. “Brenda Impanema.”
“Oh.” For the first time, Oxnard consciously overrode his inherent shyness and really looked at her. Something about her name reminded him of an old song and a girl in an old-fashioned covered-top swimsuit. But Brenda didn’t look like that at all. She seemed to be that indeterminate age between twenty and forty, when women used style and cosmetics before resorting to surgery and Vitaform Processing. She had the slight, slim body of the standard corporate executive female who spent most of her money on whatever style of clothing was fashionable that week and got most of her nutrition on dates with overeager young stallions. Good legs, though. Flat chested, probably: it was difficult to tell through all the ribbons and flouncy stuff on her blouse. But she had good legs and the good sense to wear a miniskirt, even though it wasn’t in style this week.
Behind those overlarge green glasses, her face was knotted into a frown of concentrated worry.
“Don’t get upset,” Oxnard said generously. “The laser system works like a charm. Finger and his New York bankers will be completely impressed. You won’t lose your jobs.”
Montpelier laughed nasally. “Oh, B.F. could never fire us. We’ve been too close for too many years.”
“What he means,” Brenda said, “is that we know too much about him.”
Pointing a lean finger at her, Montpelier added, “And he knows too much about us. We’re married to him— for better or for worse.”
Oxnard wondered how far the marriage went. But he kept silent as they reached the elevator, stepped in and dropped downward.
“It must make for a nerve-wracking life,” Oxnard said.
“Oh, no… the elevator’s completely safe,” Montpelier said over the whistling of the slipstream outside their shuddering, plummeting compartment.
“I didn’t mean that,” Oxnard said. “I mean… well, working for a man like Finger. He treats you like dirt.”
Brenda shrugged. “It only hurts if you let him get to you.”
Montpelier scratched at his beard. “Listen. I’ll tell you about B.F. There’s a lot more to him than you think. Like that time he kicked me down the elevator shaft…”
“He
“It was an accident,” Brenda said quickly.
“Sure,” Montpelier agreed. “We were discussing something in the hallway; my memory’s a little hazy…”
“The chess show,” said Brenda.
“Oh, yes.” Montpelier’s eyes gleamed with the memory of his idea. “I had this
“And the final survivor gets a million dollars,” Brenda said.
“And the Hospital Trust gets the losers… which we would then use on our ‘Medical Miracles’ show!”
Oxnard felt a little dizzy. “But chess isn’t…”
Brenda touched him with the fingertips of one hand. “It doesn’t matter. Listen to what happened.” She was smiling. Oxnard felt himself grin back at her.
Montpelier went on, “Well, B.F. and I went round and round on this idea. He didn’t like it, for some reason. The more I argued for it, the madder he got. Finally we were at the end of the hallway, waiting for the elevator and he got so mad he
“You know how flimsy the doors around here are,” Brenda quipped.
Before Oxnard could say anything, Montpelier resumed:
“I went bum-over-tea-kettle right down the elevator shaft!”
“Geez…”
“Luckily, the elevator was on its way up the shaft, so I only fell twenty or thirty floors. They had me fixed up in less than a year.”
“Les was the star of ‘Medical Miracles’ for a whole week… although he didn’t know it at the time.”
“And Bernard Finger,” said Montpelier, his voice almost trembling, “personally paid every quarter Of my expenses, over and above the company insurance. When I finally regained consciousness, he was right there, crying over me like he was my father.”
Oxnard thought he saw the glint Of a tear in Montpelier’s right eye.
“That’s the kind of man B.F. is,” Montpelier concluded.
“Cruel but fair,” Brenda said, trying to keep a straight face.
