“I am lost.” It was strange seeing her face again, he was so used to her as nothing but a voice on the radio. Nice. One of Val’s galley gang. You could see how much she laughed right there in the look on her face. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I know ASL will never rehire me, and so—I’m fucked, I guess.”
She nodded. “You sure are if you have to depend on ASL. But listen, their contract is up for renewal, right? And some of us have been talking about making a bid ourselves.”
“What’s this?”
“Go talk to Joyce, she’ll tell you all about it.”
She shooed him off to the BFC and he hurried over there, remembering as he went that Joyce had mentioned something about this when he had dropped by to say good-bye before leaving for Mohn Basin. He had been so distracted by his distress over Val that he hadn’t really listened; and at that point he was committed anyway, and didn’t want to listen. But now he did. Joyce would give him another tongue-lashing for sure, but he didn’t care. Whatever it took.
Up into the BFC offices.
“Hi, Joyce. I’m back.”
“Yeah, I saw you at the meeting at the Chalet.”
“Oh yeah. What did you think of that?”
“Interesting.” She was staring at him hard. “You want back in, don’t you.”
He dropped onto a chair, held up a palm to forestall her. “Yes, I do, and I know I’m fucked.”
“Yes, you are.”
“But Randi reminded me of this bid thing you tried to tell me about last time. I know I wasn’t listening that time. I’m sorry about that. This time I am, though, so tell me again.”
She nodded, accepting his apology. “NSF makes ASL give subcontracts to some potential competitors, so they’ll know enough to be able to make competitive bids when the contract comes up for renewal. It’s the same system ASL used to beat out ASA last time. And they’ll be getting strong challenges from PetHelo and GE for the general contract, and I wouldn’t be surprised if PetHelo beats them out, because you know ASL, they’re so efficient that everyone hates their guts, even NSF if the truth be known. In fact there’s a rumor that NSF is trying to get ASA to come back again for a bid, now they see what a good thing they had. Anyway a group of us thought we’d try to form a co-op and make a bid for the coms and BFC subcontract.”
“Really?” X said, feeling his heartbeat accelerate.
“Yes, really.” She laughed at his expression. “I take it you’re interested this time.”
“Oh God.”
She laughed again. “Right. And you’re our big social theory guy. So there are some people on the fence I think it might be safe to try you on. You can explain the theories behind what we’re doing to some people I’ll direct you to.”
“I sure the hell can! Just let me at ’em.”
“Okay, okay. But beyond them you should mellow out, X, I don’t want you going too far, okay? Don’t do a Mr. Smith on people, please God. We don’t want to scare anyone or it’ll just reduce our chances to win the bid. But we’ve got a lot of people already, and in coms and field services it’s really experience that matters. ASL has always threatened us by saying they can hire new people to take our place, which they can, but if we all walk at once and make a bid, then we’re the ones with the on-site experience, and ASL will only have their Seattle experience and a bunch of fingies to show the NSF. The actual people NSF has been working with the last few years will mostly be on our side. So it might work. And the more the better.”
“Oh sure, it makes sense,” X said. “NSF is just hiring a group to run their own infrastructure. So it removes the problem of competing with the old company’s capital, to an extent.”
“Right.”
“This is great,” X exclaimed. “Why didn’t I hear anything about this? Why didn’t you tell me until I was already on my way out of here?”
“Well, you know. It’s not the kind of thing that GFAs are usually let in on.” She shrugged. “That’s just the way it is. It’s been kind of touchy talking about it, since we’re all still ASL employees at this point. Mutiny, you know. Breach of contract. People were afraid of getting singled out and fired. So we only talked about it among people we trusted, which meant we had to know them real well. So, you were coming along, people were talking about asking you in on it, because we knew you were into that kind of thing. But then you were gone. We figured you’d gotten fed up with ASL too fast, and in bad with Val, and that was that.”
“But now I’m back.”
“Now you’re back. So tell you what, why don’t you go talk to Nancy, and Spec, and Harold, and George … I know there’s a few more—oh yeah, Mac; see him first, he’ll tell you what we’ve got worked up, and then you can talk to the others about joining. Tell them about co-ops and how great they are, and see if you can get them to commit. They say they’re thinking it over, but I think they’ll join if it’s put to them right. And if we get all the people we want to get, I think we’ve got a really good chance.”
“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll try to think who else would be good to have.”
She nodded, patted his arm. “Check with me first on that. Remember to stay calm, X. This is business. It’s going to take a lot of planning and hard work, and it’ll be a while before we know anything.”
“Oh yeah, sure. Very calm. Total business.”
He grinned at her and she had to laugh. And then he was off.
Sleep was forgotten, although in fact he hadn’t tried to remember. They were all fried for that matter, firing around McMurdo like droplets of water on a hot griddle, insomniac to the point of insanity; but when had it ever been any different? Mac Town was a hyper place in the summers. X went to the galley to stuff himself yet again, to fuel himself for the next lap of wakefulness. While in there he spotted Spec and Harold, and he went over and ate with them, and at the end of the meal he brought up the co-op idea, which they had heard of. They had feelings both ways. So they talked it over for a while, X arguing for employee ownership as a general principle, not bothering to talk about the particulars of their situation in McMurdo, which these two knew a lot better than he did. After that he was off to make his rounds, visiting all the offices that he had visited before as a Good For Anything, talking to the people Joyce had mentioned and others he had liked, asking them to think about joining.
A lot of people shook their heads as they listened to him, and he began to understand that because of his rants in the past, and his recent disappearance, he was regarded as a crank—or, more accurately, as an innocent. Of course what he said was true, the old iceheads’ looks said, of course they’re screwing us, but to think there could be a change in the system was silly. The current method of business, the hierarchy of employer and employees, was all part of the Bad Design of Reality, their looks said; it was unfixable, there would always be owners and workers, no matter how vehemently one denounced them. Certain people owned the businesses, the capital, the governments, the laws, the armies; and that was all it took to back the present system up, no matter how bad it was. This was what their looks said, X decided as he walked from office to shop, looks fond and indulgent or irritated and contemptuous though they otherwise might be. A lot of the old iceheads thought he was full of shit. Or, at best, a dreamer hopelessly out to lunch.
X nodded at this judgment and learned as he went. He tried to get more particular, to stick to the specifics of what they could change right there on Hut Point. He described the other co-op complexes he knew about, usually the Basque town of Mondragon, where everything was a co-op. He enjoyed these conversations more, but they were hard, too. He was fomenting revolution, and saving his chance at having a country, and a home, and it was incredibly exciting and all that, but the devil was in the details…. So. He had to describe the co-op that would come to be, a co-op of people who had had years and years of Antarctic experience and expertise, using that expertise to organize a better way of running things in field service; they could be competitive with ordinary companies; NSF would have to agree they were the best even according to NSF criteria; and then they would keep it among themselves, not go public with stock, arrange for profit-sharing without being greedy, thus allowing them to make a low bid and still make a living, because not paying a big profit to shareholders in the world would save money for them and their needs.