Ordeal by Terror. Lloyd Biggle jr.

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СКАЧАТЬ still keeping his voice low. “Granted the explanation is loony, too, but the building has been here for a long time, and looniness half-a-century old has a certain patina. Z-R Publications and its alleged books are unequivocally loony. Does anyone really care how many refrigerators were sold in Istanbul in 1981 or how many automobiles were sold in Algiers in this year or that?”

      “Manufacturers and exporters ought to.”

      Mondor shook his head. “No. They care about how many they can sell next year, which may have no connection whatsoever with 1981. And they have local contacts of their own who no doubt are capable of giving them all the past statistics and future prognostications they want. I figure Z-R Publications is going to sell a maximum fifty copies per book to the sales departments of giant corporations that can afford to buy things and not use them. Is it loony, or isn’t it?”

      “Loony or not, I’m going to take the money as long as it’s offered.”

      “Aren’t we all? But I prefer a job that makes sense. There’s something about this setup I can’t get a grip on. Loony isn’t quite the word for it. I’d ask Dolan for a better one, but he’d have to look it up. Try ‘sinister.’ The way Madam snoops around gives me the creeps. Does she go through your stuff during the noon hour?”

      “Is it Madam? I thought it might be my pet Goon 1. Is Goon 3 still spying on you?”

      “Goon 3 or Goon 4. I think they change off on me.”

      “On my first day here, I learned to take my purse when I go to lunch,” Adelle said.

      “Was anything missing?”

      “No. But things couldn’t have been stirred more thoroughly with an egg beater. That’s why I thought it was a man. Men think all women’s purses are miniature trash containers and any amount of pawing won’t be noticed. I keep mine organized.” She glanced at her watch. “You’re a fraud. You can’t hear clocks striking out here. It is now one minute after the lunch hour.”

      “I worked three minutes overtime this morning.” Mondor transferred his gaze to the fountain and resumed his speculation about looniness. “Would any sane management hire three such incompatible people as us? The girl you replaced was comparatively human. You’re just an accessory to your computer. And look at that slob Dolan. I got along fine with the writers that worked here before him.”

      “Were they vegetarians?” Adelle asked maliciously.

      “No, but they weren’t slobs. Each one lasted a week. Then they hired him. And then they hired you. A writing slob and a word machine.”

      “To work with a calculating cad,” Adelle suggested.

      “If you say so,” Mondor said imperturbably. “If we three had to occupy the same office, there’d be murder before the end of a week. We survive only because we work so far apart, but that’s another thing that’s loony. This setup would give an efficiency expert apoplexy.” He got to his feet resignedly and turned off the fountain. “I’ll call you about those figures.”

      She turned and went back into the building without waiting for him. Word machine, indeed! When she reached her office, the phone was ringing. She hurried to answer it.

      “Six, three,” Mondor said. “Did I muck up anything else?”

      She glanced over the next six pages and told him most of the figures were half legible.

      Craig Dolan came in a few minutes later, grinning broadly and waving some typewritten sheets of copy. Mondor had once said Dolan could pass for Santa Claus if the padding was moved from his head to his stomach, but this was an exaggeration on several counts. He was an inch or two taller than six feet and large framed, but thus far the beer that he drank had put very little fat on him—perhaps because he consumed so few calories from other sources. Adelle thought his twinkling blue eyes indicated malice rather than mischief, and if she had heard him exclaim, “Ho! Ho! Ho!” she would have looked quickly to see whose leg had just been broken. His blond beard was medium length and neatly trimmed, and he wore bushy sideburns and kept his hair long. His trousers and open sport shirt always looked in need of pressing and cleaning. With a protruding jaw, he could have posed in a museum’s Neanderthal exhibit. Give Neanderthal Man long hair, a beard, sideburns, and sloppy modern dress, and—presto! Craig Dolan.

      Gerald Wyman, the young man she had a date with, also had blond hair and blue eyes, and the contrast between him and Dolan had been a revelation to her. Because there had been so few men in her life, she was guilty of generalizing from insufficient evidence.

      Dolan flourished the copy he was carrying. “Madam lost it. Then she insisted I’d never done it. I found it on her desk under umpteen dozen other things including that suitcase she calls a purse.”

      “Handbag,” Adelle said. “I’ve never heard her call it a purse.”

      “It’s certainly a bag,” Dolan agreed. “Hand, overnight, weekend, nose—take your pick. For that matter, so is she. A bit unhinged, too. Have you talked with the nicotine fiend today?” Dolan, who didn’t smoke, enjoyed razzing Mondor about his noon hour indulgence in a cigarette or two.

      “Not willingly,” Adelle said.

      “No one talks with Mondor willingly. Did he give you his lecture about this setup being loony?”

      “He did. And it is, isn’t it?”

      “Of course, but it isn’t politic to say so. If he’s right, our rooms probably are bugged.”

      “In that case, we ought to do our work and shut up,” Adelle said politely. She took the copy from him. “I suppose this has to be done at once.”

      “It was supposed to be done yesterday, but I told Madam I didn’t think you could manage that. ‘Loony’ is far too mild a word, but Mondor is only a Researcher/Statistician. Probably it was the best he could do.”

      “As I remember it, he also mentioned ‘sinister.’”

      “Then he’s found a thesaurus since I talked with him. ‘Sinister’ comes closer. Why are we called researchers when none of us researches anything? Someone furnishes the figures Mondor does his statistical stuff on, and the notes I base my copy on, and when I need a stray fact I telephone Madam, and she calls me back and tells me. The goons must look things up for her in their spare time, of which they seem to have quite a lot. I’ll swear she couldn’t find a fact or anything else all by herself. But why call me a researcher, and pay me for it, when all I do is write? Why call you one when you don’t do anything but massage a computer keyboard?”

      “Future anticipation, maybe,” Adelle said. “Why are the three of us spread all over the building? Maybe each of these wings is going to be a separate department.”

      “I hope you’re right. A couple more weeks of this, and my paychecks will become a habit. The setup is loony and also sinister, and when I have time, I’ll teach Mondor a few new words. On the other hand, Z-R Publications does show indications of actually intending to publish something. Madam just asked me what I thought of some offset pages of one of your lovely printouts.”

      “Really?” Adelle exclaimed. “Do the goons have a press to play with?”

      “I think Madam had someone offset a few pages to see how your copy would look. It looks good. When you finish that stuff, СКАЧАТЬ