There was an unholy Friday restlessness upon Dewforth. To make matters
worse, it was the last Friday in March. Logically, perhaps, this
should not have made any difference because Dewforth worked in one of
a number of identical windowless rooms in a building from which all
natural rhythms had been rigorously excluded. From skylights high in
the ceilings of the drafting rooms came a light which had been
pasteurized and was timeless. It could have been artificial.
His work provided no refuge for his thought. It was demanding, but
only mechanically so. Strictly speaking, he did not know what he was
doing. No one did, apparently. He did not have the satisfaction of
knowing that what he did was real. He filled large sheets of plastic
with tracings of intricate, interconnected schematic hieroglyphs. But
he knew that in another place a template would be laid over his work.
An irregular portion like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle would be cut out
of it and the rest, perhaps more than half of his work, would be
destroyed.
It was even possible that all of it was destroyed.
Dewforth worked for a firm which made components. Of what, no one
said, no one asked. _Components, Inc._, the firm was called. He knew
that the finished products were small, heavy and very complicated.
Their names were mute combinations of letters and numbers, joined by
hyphens or separated by virgules. Some said that these components
performed no functions. Others said that they worked, but their
operations corresponded to no known human need. It was known that some
of the finished products themselves were destroyed. Some maintained
that they were dissolved in vats of hydrofluoric acid. Others argued
that they were encased in cement, then taken out to sea in speedboats
on moonless nights and jettisoned. The favorite rumor was that the
entire firm was a decoy to bewilder agents of foreign powers and
pre-empt their espionage efforts. There was neither proof of this nor
evidence to the contrary.
The penalty for circulating this last rumor was immediate dismissal
with prejudice.
In another place, another time, Dewforth might have spread the burden
of his mood by confiding in other workers, but not under the
circumstances so painstakingly arranged by _Components, Inc._ in the
interest of what was called _The Inter-loathing Index_, or I.I. It was
an axiom of modern industry that a high I.I. meant high productivity
and also tighter security. The latter was as much the measure of the
importance of an industry as what it made or how much. That there was
design in the egg-box compartmentation of workspaces, for example, was
obvious enough. Less overt were the lengths to which Personnel had
gone to discourage the exchange of information, or confidences, among
employees.
Under the guise of aptitude testing, the psychologists had been able
to select and organize teams consisting entirely of mutually
incompatible individuals. So well had they succeeded that most workers
could barely stand the sight of one another, and so were driven back
upon themselves and their work. Only by practicing an almost egg-like
self-containment could a draftsman or other worker hope to get through
the day without open conflict and disaster.
Latent antipathies among workers were further intensified by means of
the Annual Proficiency Competitions. At the conclusion of these tests
all employees save two were given Proficiency Stars. Of the remaining
two, one was invariably a person who had shown signs of becoming too
popular among his fellows. He was given a Leadership Star, and because
an affable man was usually less rather than more efficient than the
rest, this made of him a lonely little air-bubble in a sea of
resentment.
The second of the two workers was always discharged. Thus a dash of
anxiety was added to the proceedings.
* * * * *
The visible manifestations of high I.I. were hectic color, a
characteristic ferocity of eye and throbbing jaw-hinges. Often the
jaw-hinges of an entire team would be pulsating at once, sometimes
even in unison. This spectacle emanated an overwhelming feeling of
earnestness and purpose. Executives were fond of pointing out this
phenomenon to visiting dignitaries. "Observe their jaw-hinges," they
would say.
Another factor which isolated employees from one another was the
peculiarly virulent form of halitosis which afflicted all workers
without exception. The company cafeteria was the source of this
malady.
Thus, if Dewforth had been the only employee in that vast complex of
buildings, or in the world, he could not have been restlessness. Add
to this the fact that it had been his misfortune to win the Leadership
Star in the Proficiency Competitions only three days earlier. He did
not have to trace the bitter stream of his mood any farther back than
that to find the bile-source.
The object of the contest had been to draw a single line 28-5/8 inches
long and 1/15,000 of an inch thick, a feat which is starkly simple in
conception but only theoretically feasible. The draftsmen had spent
hours preparing the surfaces of paper, straining ink through filters,
honing drawing pens with emery and polishing them with rouge, drawing
practice lines and scrutinizing them with powerful bench microscopes.
They did Balinese finger exercises, Chinese body coordination
exercises, Hindu breathing exercises and Tibetan spiritual
calisthenics to dispel their incipient shakes. When the great moment
came, a solemn little group of executives entered the drafting room
and stood about in attitudes of grave ceremonial courtesy.
The draftsmen then drew their lines.
When it was over, the judges examined and graded the lines and the
scores were announced by Mr. Shrank, the foreman. The better scores
prompted little flutters of restrained applause from the executives.
This moist and muted sound had reminded Dewforth of a hippopotamus
venting its wind under water, and in a moment of thoughtless
exhilaration he had even thought of sharing this bizarre notion with
his wife. He never did so, as it happened.
* * * * *
Why had he ever told his wife about that wretched Leadership Star? Her
laughter persisted through his dreams, or through his dream. He only
had one. In this dream she was always a massive machine which ingested
songbirds between steel rollers and stamped them into pipe-flange
gaskets at a rate of one hundred and twenty per minute.
And the prize-winning line he had drawn--it revealed its true nature
in the perspective of days. There was no mistaking what it was. It was
The Abyss. It could widen and it could engulf. How much light would a
Leadership Star cast in that bottomless inkiness?
Acute restless had the effect of sending Dewforth frequently to the
lavatory, not so much for physiological reasons as because there was
no other place to go and he had to go somewhere when the white walls
of the drafting room threatened to crush him. He went as often as he
thought he could without attracting the attention of Mr. Shrank or
eliciting ponderous jocosities from the other workers. After several
visits, however, he did begin to question himself. What drew him to
that bleak refuge again and again? He was not aware of bladder
irritation. He had no infantile obsession about such facilities. Was
he driven by an aggregation of petty forces, each too small to make
sense by itself? Or was there one reason hiding behind a cloud of
small rationalizations? There was a difference in the air in the
lavatory, and in the sound--the undifferentiated background sound
which came from nowhere. Nowhere?
It came through a window.
He had been staring at a window--probably the only one in the
building--and it had failed to register on his mind at the time
because he had not expected it to be there. It was not part of the
habitual pattern. He had seen a window. He had, moreover, looked
through a window. What had he seen? He thought about this, and at the
same time he thought about being sick--administratively sick. He
succeeded in working up a palpable fever and a windy yawning beneath
the diaphragm. Before taking any action he would have to confirm what
he had seen through the window of the lavatory.
On his last trip to the lavatory he climbed up onto the slippery
washbasin and looked through the high window. His position there would
be impossible to explain, of course, if anyone should come in. He was
past caring about that. The unpasteurized air made him a little drunk
and the sound--the immense distant sighing groan like a giant's
whisper--filled his brain. It made him want to expand to meet it
somehow.
Only one immense skeleton foot was visible, but there was no question
about exactly what it was.
No conventional structure would curve upward in that way. There was no
point of reference by which to determine how far away it was, and the
air was blue with haze, giving everything an appearance of remoteness
and of unreality. He had never seen the city from that angle before,
but if what he saw was what he thought it was, how could it have been
so close without his knowing about it before this time? It was a thing
which belonged to vast distances--spatial distances and other kinds of
distance as well. Now it was close, or he was closer to it than he had
ever imagined he would be in his life.
It was accessible.
Dewforth left at half past three when the somnolence of afternoon was
heaviest on the heads of the other draftsmen. He did not speak to Mr.
Shrank about it. He did not clear with Miss Plock in the dispensary,
nor with Mr. Fert in Personnel, nor with Miss Yurt in Wage
Readjustment, nor with Miss Bort in Sick Leave Subdivision, nor with
Miss Vibe in Special Problems, nor with Mr. Pfister in Sick Claims,
nor with Miss Grope in Employee Grievances, nor with Miss Rupnick in
Company Grievances, nor with Miss Guggward in Allowance Reductions,
nor with Mr. Droon in Privilege Curtailment, nor with Miss Tremulo in
Psychological Counseling, nor with Dr. Schreck in Spiritual Aid
Subdiv.
He did not even trouble to see Miss Nosemilker who kept the time book.
He just left.