And facing the door, black masks, crossed spears, two drums, and a brazier of a type only the initiates of the Leopard Claw Brand might see without its disguise of leopard’s fur.
Mr. President took a deep breath. He walked to the low table, picked up the Koran, and methodically shredded each of its pages into confetti. Last, he ripped the leather binding down the spine.
He turned on his heel, removed the crucifix from its peg, and snapped it across. The crucified one fell to the floor and he ground the doll-shape underfoot.
He dragged from the wall each in turn of the masks. He tore away the coloured straw hair from them, poked out the jewelled eyes, broke loose the ivory teeth. He stabbed through the sounding heads of both the drums with one of the spears.
The task complete, he turned off the light, left and locked the room, and at the first disposall chute he came to throw away the one and only key.
context (2)
EDITORIAL SLOT
Stock cue VISUAL: cliptage, wholescreen, atmospheric-type, orchestrated, first favouring copter views and MCU’s New Jersey Turnpike Jam 1977 (¾ million cars o/w 16,000-odd had to be crushed in situ) intercut w crush-hour shots Fifth Ave., Oxford St., Red Sq.; later favouring cretins, morons, phocomeli.
Live cue SOUND: “Today we congratulate Puerto Rico on the defeat it’s inflicted on the baby-farming lobby. People who have celebrated their twenty-first find it hard to believe that a mere thirty years ago highways and cities were choked to strangulation point with masses of allegedly moving metal that got in each other’s way so much we finally saw sense. Why worry about two tons of complicated steel gadgetry you won’t need when you get where you’re going—that won’t even get you there in reasonable time? Worse yet—which measurably shortens your life through cancer or bronchitis thanks to the stench it emits!
“Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don’t want the same to happen to us. That’s why we have eugenic legislation. Praise the J-but-O State for joining the majority of us who have seen the danger coming and resolved to put up with the minor inconveniences it entails when we decide to control the human elements of the big scene we inhabit.
“This has been a Greater New York Times editorial slot.”
continuity (1)
THE GUILT-EDGED SECURITY
Everything about Norman Niblock House was measured: as measured as a foot-rule, as measured as time. Item the degree to which he allowed himself to lighten his skin and straighten the kinks in his hair and beard, so that he could exploit the guilt-reaction of his colleagues while still managing to get next to the shiggies who did most for his cod. Item the soupçon of eccentricity he manifested in his behaviour, as much as could ordinarily be tolerated in a junior VP of a big corporation and that much over the limit which said he was not a man to trifle with. Item the amount and nature of the work he arranged to have channelled to his office, selected so the visits of other zecks found him engaged in vastly important transactions.
* * *
He had been recruited to the company under the provisions of the Equal Opportunity Act which bound corporations like General Technics to employ the same ratio of whites to Aframs as was found in the country at large, plus or minus five per cent. Unlike some of his intake, he’d been welcome with a sigh of relief by the then vice-president in charge of personnel and recruitment, who had almost given up hope of finding enough Aframs willing to accept the standards of their host society. (A doctorate? What’s a doctorate? A piece of paleass’s toilet-paper.)
Norman N. House, D.Sc., was a prize. Knowing that, he’d made the race to win him long and hard.
Perceptive for the third time in his life (the first time: picking his parents; the second: sideswiping the only other contender for the post he now held down), the VP noticed that his new subordinate had a talent for impressing his personality on people he had never met before and was unlikely to meet again. They said later that he had House style. It meant that while he could bear to forget others he hated the idea that they should forget him.
The VP, envying this talent, took to cultivating Norman House in the hope that some of it might rub off on him. The hope was unfounded. Either a man is born with the gift or he learns it by conscious application over twenty years. Norman was then twenty-six and had been applying himself for the requisite two decades.
But the VP was tossed a few glib, helpful snippets.
“What I think of him? Well, his papers are good” (spoken judiciously, willing to make allowances) “but to my mind the man who has to wear MasQ-Lines is basically unsure of his own competence. They pad the frontal area, you know.”
The VP, who had six pairs, never wore them again.
“What do I think of her? Well, she profiles okay on the testing sheet, but to my mind any girl who wears a Forlon&Morler Maxess top over a pair of impervious slax is the type who won’t go through with what she starts.”
The VP, who had invited her to dinner and expected to be paid in the current contemporary coin, excused himself on grounds of imaginary illness and went grumpily home to his wife for the night.
“What I think of the annual report? Well, the graphing is up on last year’s, but the noise level generated by this operation suggests it could be fifteen to eighteen per cent higher than it is. I’m wondering if it’ll last.”
The VP, who had been dithering, decided to retire at fifty with the Grade One bonus stock issue instead of hanging on to collect the Grade Three entitlement, double the size, due at sixty. He sold the stock as soon as he acquired it and chewed his nails while he watched its value creep up month by month. Eventually he shot himself.
It was his suspicion that the rise of GT stock might be due to his own replacement by Norman which killed him.
* * *
Norman walked briskly towards the general elevator. He declined to use the one that led directly from street-level to the wall behind his desk: “It’s ludicrous for someone who deals with people not to mingle with the people he’s dealing with, isn’t it?”
At least one of the senior VP’s had lately stopped using his private elevator too.
But in any case, he was going up.
Waiting, there was one of the company shiggies. She smiled at him, not because they were acquainted—he preferred to let it be felt that someone who relied on the firm to get him shiggies was less of a man than Norman House—but because the time and effort he invested in trifles like not using a private elevator paid off in the common belief that of all the twenty VP’s in the company the most approachable and sociable was Mr. House. Stockboys toting crates in GT’s West Virginia electronics plant shared the opinion, never having set eyes on him.
The smile he automatically returned was forced. He was edgy. An invitation to take lunch on the presidential floor with the senior zecks might be accounted for in two main ways: there might be promotion in the offing, although the grapevine he assiduously cultivated had brought him no hint of it; or, far more likely, they might be planning yet another review of the staffing system. He had endured two such since inheriting his present job, but they were a nuisance, and sometimes he could not hang on to people he had schemed for months to slot into influential posts.
The hole! I can cope with these paleasses. I did it before.
The descending light of the elevator showed and a soft chime rang out. Norman returned his attention to the here and now. A clock over the door, keyed like all those in the GT tower to the famous critonium master clock, indicated 12–44 poppa-momma. If he let the shiggy take the car down, he’d be a measured minute late for lunch with the Highly Important Personages.