Not under the New Way.
It as half an hour before Rafferty opened his books again, before he dipped his pens in the red ink and the black ink and wrote down the figures. If Rafferty was capable of pride he was proud of the way he kept the Project's books. Machines had taught him how to keep books, and even Mudgins granted that machines were useful for that sort of thing. The dark fever inside him slowly receded, and the artist that lived in Rafferty, the creator inside of every man, admired the cool, neat numbers that he made.
He lived with the cool numbers all the long afternoon. (Vote for Mudgins and the Ten-Hour Day! the slogans said.) And they calmed him. But when the end of the day came and fat John Girty came out of his office and took down his black hat and walked out, without a smile, without a word—
Then it was that the black heat inside Rafferty surged up again, and the smoke of it bit his nostrils. Not for ten minutes did he get up to leave himself, not until all the others had gone and no one was there to see him tremble as he walked out with a look of utter desperation in his eyes.
Rafferty walked past the lines of tables, walked up the slideway, and to the far corner of the balcony before he put down his tray. All by himself he sat there, as far as he could get from the other people who were eating their Evening Issue meal. He sat down and ate what was before him, not caring what it was or how it tasted, for everything tasted alike to Rafferty. All bitter with the bitterness that is the taste of hatred.
"I hate him," Rafferty said woodenly. "I would like very much to kill him. I think it would be nice to kill him. Fat Girty, some day I will kill you."
Rafferty talked to himself, hardly making a sound, never moving his lips. It wasn't thinking out loud, because it wasn't thinking, only talking, and it was not out loud. Wherever he was, Rafferty talked to himself. No one heard him, no one was meant to hear him.
"I hate your lousy guts," Rafferty would say, and the man beside him would smile and bob his head and never know that Rafferty had said anything at all.
He would talk to people who weren't there. When he first went on the Projects, Rafferty thought that some day he would say those things to people. Now he knew that he would never say them to anyone but himself.
"You are a cow," Rafferty said. He was talking to Girty, who wasn't anywhere near the New Way cafeteria where the Projects personnel ate. "You say I'm a troublemaker, when I only want them to leave me alone. You think I make mistakes with the numbers in the books. I don't. I never make mistakes when I write down numbers and add them. But you think I do."
If Girty had been there, he would have denied it—because how could Rafferty make mistakes after the machines had taught him? But Girty wasn't there, and the rest of the people around Rafferty in the cafeteria went on eating and talking and reading, except for a few as silent and solitary as Rafferty himself. None of them heard him.
Rafferty picked up the big dish and put it away from him, picked up a smaller dish and put it down in front of him, touched a fork to the soggy but vitamin-rich and expertly synthesized pie.
"Your secretary," said Rafferty in his silent voice, "she makes mistakes, though. Perhaps I should kill her too, cow."
Rafferty finished the pie and went down the stairs.
"You blame me for everything," Rafferty said, pushing silently through the crowd at the coffee-beverage um. He put a Project-slug in the slot and held the lever down while his cup filled with three streams of fluid, one black, one white, one colorless. "You don't treat me right, cow," he said, and turned away.
A man jostled him and scalding pain ran up Rafferty's wrist as the hot drink slopped over.
Rafferty turned to him slowly. "You are a filthy pig," he said voicelessly, smiling. "Your mother walked the streets."
The man muttered, "Sorry," over his shoulder.
Rafferty sat down at another table with a party of three young Project girls who never looked at him, but talked loudly among themselves.
"I'll kill you, Girty," Rafferty said, as he stirred the coffee-beverage and drank it.
"Ill kill you, Girty," he said, and went home to his dormitory bed.
John Girty said peevishly: "I want you all to try to act like human beings this morning. We have an important visitor from Phase Four."
The Project nodded respectfully and buckled down to work and when the important visitor arrived and stood with Girty, looking over the busy room, not even Rafferty looked up.
But the visitor looked at Rafferty, and said something in an undertone to Girty. "Oh, well, of course," said Girty. "We get all kinds here. That one has a bad record. He was some kind of an artist, or picture painter, or something like that under the Old Way. They take a lot of work, those marginal ones, and, as you see, they're likely to turn out sullen."
The visitor said something again and Girty laughed. "He might not like it," he said with heavy, angry humor. "Heaven help us all if we ran this Project the way he likes. But come on into my private office. You'll be interested in our overtime schedule—"
They were gone, and Girty was right, Rafferty did not resent the way they talked about him, no more than St. Lawrence, roasting on his grid, would have resented a sneering word from his torturers. Rafferty hadn't the scope left to resent small injuries.
The electronic call-me-up whispered on old Miss Sandburg's desk, and she limped into Girty's office, clutching her stenographer's pad as though it might bite. She was a sour one too, for all she was second in command of the Project office. She had been a wife and a mother once, and they said that she didn't really want to work. But she worked, of course.
Rafferty sat hunched over his books, looking at John Girty's door without turning his head. He saw old Ellen Sandburg go in, and saw her come out again ten minutes later, with the spiderweb lines sharper around her eyes, and the white lips pressed hard together. "You are a slave," Rafferty said without a sound. "You let him bully you because you like to be a slave. But I don't."
But he was working with the cool numbers then, and he lost himself. The zeroes and fives and decimals moved in orderly progression, and there was no hate in them, nothing but chill straightness that never changed.
Only at three o'clock in the afternoon when he had to take the Saturday payroll into fat John Girty's office to be checked and verified, did the coolness fall away and leave him burning. "I won't kiss your foot," said Rafferty, and opened the door without knocking. "I'm as good as you are, cow," said Rafferty, and dumped the carton of pay envelopes silently on Girty's desk.
But Girty hardly looked at him, only grunted with his fat, angry cow's grunt and thumbed irritably through the envelopes. But when Rafferty went back to his desk the numbers would not go right. They were hot red and smoldering black, and they swirled and bloated before his stinging eyes. He sat there and watched them swirl and swell as fat as fat John Girty. He just sat there, Rafferty did, holding his pen over the ledger, moving his fingers as though he were writing, but never touching pen to paper until five o'clock, early Saturday quitting time.
Then fat John Girty came out of his office and dumped the pay envelopes on Rafferty's desk again, and took his hat and left. The clerks and the girls put away their papers, and took their coats from where they had hidden them behind the sheeted bookkeeping machines and lined up before Rafferty's desk to get their pay.
"The Project pays you to work, not to collect money." That was what Girty said. "On the Project's time you work. You get paid on your own time. You get off early on Saturdays anyhow."