That should be about right.
When the car arrived, he waved the girl past him. “I’m going up,” he told her.
Promotion in the offing or not, he meant it.
* * *
The predicted few moments behind schedule, he emerged on the presidential floor. Synthetic grass hushed under his feet as he walked towards the group gathered alongside the swimming-pool. Four of the shapeliest of the company shiggies were disporting themselves nude in the water. He thought of the recurrent joke question—“Why doesn’t GT pioneer company codders?”—and had trouble masking his amusement as he was greeted by Old GT herself.
Merely by looking at Georgette Tallon Buckfast one could not have guessed she was both an extraordinary person and an extraordinary artifact. One had to be told that she was ninety. She looked at worst sixty: plump, well-favoured, crowned with enough of her own brown hair to belie the old charge that she was more male than female. True, close study of her bosom might reveal the inequality which betrayed her use of a cardiac pacemaker, but nowadays many people wore such accessories by the time they were seventy or even younger. Only intensive prying had led Norman to knowledge of the lung-tissue transplant, the plastic venous valves, the kidney graft, the pinned bones, the vocal cords replaced because of cancer.
According to reliable estimates she was somewhat richer than the British royal family. Wealth like that could buy health, even if only by instalments.
With her were Hamilcar Waterford, the company treasurer, much younger than Old GT but looking older; Rex Foster-Stern, senior VP in charge of projects and planning, a man of Norman’s own height and build who affected Dundreary whiskers and what the Children of X sneeringly termed a “non-partisan tan”; and an Afram whose features had a tantalisingly familiar cast, though he was not someone Norman had seen around the GT tower before—fiftyish, stocky, bald, Kenyatta beard, looking tired.
Norman considered a new explanation for his having been invited to this luncheon. Last time he had encountered a middle-aged stranger at such a function it had been a retired admiral GT was thinking of adding to the board for the sake of his service contacts. He had gone to a hovercraft manufacturer instead, so nothing had come of it. But if this was another of the same, Norman was going to be as insolent as he could manage without jeopardising his career. No kinky-knobbed Uncle Tom was going to be slotted into a high board chair above Norman House.
Then Old GT said, “Elihu, let me introduce Norman House, who’s our VP i/c personnel and recruitment,” and the world shifted to a different axis.
Elihu. Elihu Rodan Masters, career diplomat, U. S. Ambassador to Beninia. But whatinole could GT want with a snake’s-tongue scrap of land like that, stuck wedgewise into Africa with neither skills nor natural resources to be exploited?
There was no time for speculation, though. He put out his hand, cutting short GT’s introduction with the gesture. “No real need to introduce anyone to Mr. Masters, ma’am,” he said briskly. “Someone with his kind of personal distinction is environment-forming for all of us, and I feel I know him well though I never had the chance to shake with him before.”
In Old GT’s face—for a woman who had built herself both a giant corporation and a huge personal fortune, she was surprisingly bad at controlling her expression—Norman could see annoyance at being interrupted struggling with satisfaction at the prettiness of the compliment.
“Drink?” she said finally, the latter winning out.
“No thanks, ma’am,” Norman answered. “It’s against the word of the Prophet, you know.”
Beninia, hm? Something to do with opening an African market for MAMP? Over half a billion bucks tied up in that, and no place to sell the produce of the richest mineral strike since Siberia—it can’t go on. But Beninia can’t even afford to feed its own population from what I hear …
Plainly embarrassed at having forgotten or not known that one of her own VP’s was a Muslim, Old GT took refuge in testiness. The House style was proof against that. Pleased with the turn the talk was taking, extremely aware of Master’s eyes on him, Norman thoroughly enjoyed the ten minutes of conversation which preluded their adjournment to table. In fact he took it so much for granted that the buzz of the phone a minute or two after one o’clock was to herald the serving of the meal that he continued with the story he’d been telling—a mild anti-Afram joke suitable for mixed company, well salted with the derogatory term “brown-nose”—until GT shouted at him the second time.
“House! House! There’s trouble with a gang of visitors being shown over Shalmaneser! On your orbit, isn’t it?”
Preserving his exterior calm by reflex, Norman rose from his polychair.
If this is something they’ve laid on to screw me, I’ll give them dreck for dinner. I’ll—
“Forgive me, Mr. Masters,” he said in a slightly bored tone. “I’ll only be a minute or two, I’m sure.”
And headed for the elevator, seething.
tracking with closeups (2)
YONDERBOY
“Talk about launch windows all it means some pudding-hole zeck knotted his strings Shalmaneser-pizzleteaser whyinole waste the time come all this way to New York better weather even without a dome fit to freeze your cod off in here better shiggies wearing less and better pot to cap the lot eight today already here it is not yet one poppa-momma and hardly a heist in a haywagon”
* * *
Inside the vault housing Shalmaneser: cool. Waiting for the launch window, which is a decorative way of saying when the GT guide is good and ready to start, this fact has already decided several of the crowd one hundred nine strong (some of whom are tourists some of whom are genuine potential recruits lured by the handouts and TV plugs of the GT Corp. some of whom have seen themselves here so often in the personae of Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere that they couldn’t tell you why they bothered to make the visit in reality and some of whom are GT’s own plantees primed to speak up at the right moments and give the impression of Things Happening) that they aren’t going to be interested in what they’re shown. Cold! In May! Under the Manhattan Fuller Dome! And clad in Nydofoam sneakers, MasQ-Lines, Forlon&Morler skirtlets and dresslets; strung about with Japind Holocams with Biltin g’teed Norisk LazeeLaser monochrome lamps, instreplay SeeyanEar recorders; pocket-heavy with Japind Jettiguns, SeKure Stunnems, Karatands to be slipped on as easily as your grandmother drew on her glove.
Uneasy, watching their accidental companions on this guided tour.
Well-fed.
Shifty-eyed, slipping tranks into their chomp-chomp jaws.
Damned good-looking.
Thinking that any one of these crowding-near neighbours could be a mucker.
The New Poor of the happening world.
* * *
Stal Lucas didn’t like the way the guide looked over the party when he finally deigned to show. Someone looking over that many people wouldn’t notice Stal Lucas, individuaclass="underline" age twenty, height six, wearing SirFer S-Pad-Drills, Mogul slax and a freeflying Blood Onyx shirjack with real gold fastener tags.
He’d see, rather, a vaguely milling bunch of misfits, vagabonds and pseudos, out of which some subgroups could be separated. Like Stal and his sparewheels from California, in New York on a two-night-one-day Jettex Cursion for the lift and not getting any. The world shrunk so tight you couldn’t pull it on over your shoes and still this distancing effect between the coasts …
On the entire one hundred and nine, there were four shiggies to fine-focus: one orbiting, probably by now ignorant not only of what building she was in but of what astral plane she was inhabiting; two with codders they hung to the arms of undetachablike; one like she just blew in from RUNG with African hair and bilberry skin which it wouldn’t do for Stal to be seen counting down with.