Lightning Rods (15 page)

Well, Roy had happened to look at the
names
of the people who had been off sick in the last six months—this kind of thing comes as second nature to an old personnel hand—and one of the things he had noticed instantly was that Laura was not among them. Some people think that with all the hundreds of people in an organization there’s no way one man could keep track of them all. They’d be surprised. If you’ve been in the business long enough there’s precious little escapes you.

“Hi, Roy,” said Laura, not looking up from her screen.

“Hi, Laura,” said Roy. He noticed that Ed Wilson was not in his office. So much the better. “How’s every little thing?”

“Just fine, Roy,” said Laura. “I won’t stop if you don’t mind, I’m just finishing this off for Ed.”

“You go right ahead,” said Roy. “Care for an M&M?”

“I won’t just this minute, thanks,” said Laura.

You
see
? thought Roy.

“It’s good to see you looking so well,” said Roy. “It can take some time to adjust to the pressure of a job like this. Sometimes it takes people a while to settle down.”

“Well, I had a lot of health problems when I started out,” said Laura. “Which didn’t help. And I have to admit, looking back, there was a personality clash between Ed and myself, I was brought up in a certain way so there were some things about Ed’s behavior that according to the way I was brought up were inappropriate.”

Laura sent a document to print.

“I’ll have one of those M&M’s now,” she said. “This is really attractive, having all the blue ones in a bowl. Was that your idea to have a bowl of them in Reception? I always thought that was a nice touch. You know, when I was a little girl I used to wonder why they never had any blue ones, and then one day they brought them out. It was like, Somebody up there likes me!”

Well, thought Roy, there’s just no accounting for tastes. But a lifetime in personnel teaches you to take these things in your stride.

“Anyway,” said Laura, crunching an M&M, “my mother always told me as long as you respect yourself, sooner or later the message will get through. No matter what kind of upbringing someone has had, as long as
you
know the kind of behavior that is acceptable, sooner or later that fact is going to get across. It may take a little longer to communicate it to someone from a seriously disadvantaged background who doesn’t know any better, but eventually you’ll make your point.”

A good personnel officer knows there are times when you don’t know exactly how to respond. When those times come—and they come to the best of us—the best thing is to remain silent.

Roy ate an M&M.

“I have to admit I was getting pretty downhearted at the amount of time that had gone by with no apparent result,” said Laura. “And to be fair, it wasn’t just Ed, all of the team had an attitude that was not the easiest thing for someone from a different background to accept. But then one day it was the funniest thing. They just seemed to change overnight. I don’t know what brought about the change, but I presume it was just that the time had come. They realized
somebody
was going to have to change, and since I had demonstrated in no uncertain terms that it was not going to be I, they accepted that it was just going to have to be they.”

“And you can’t pinpoint some specific incident that might have triggered the improvement?” said Roy. Through no fault of her own, Laura was not in a position to see the larger picture. Whatever it was that the team had responded to seemed to have had that effect on everyone in the company. You can’t work in personnel without becoming something of a cynic, and Roy doubted that the ladylike comportment of their secretary had had such dramatic and far-reaching consequences.

“No, not really,” said Laura. “Although I remember they had all had appointments with a gentleman from a temporary agency who was investigating their requirements. It may be that he may have said something in passing which gave them that little additional insight into their behavior.”

This was the first that Roy had heard that the representative from the agency had talked to all the men on the team individually. This was highly unusual, and it would have really been more appropriate to clear it with personnel, but Roy couldn’t fault the agency. It had delivered some really first-class employees, girls Roy would have been happy to have offered a place on the team with no ifs, ands, or buts.

“Well, I’ll leave you in peace,” said Roy. “Keep up the good work!” Roy knew the value of an encouraging word even if some people didn’t.

He was no closer to the heart of the mystery than he had been when he started out. But that there
was
a mystery was something he didn’t doubt for one second.
Something
was afoot. The question was, what might that something be?

Roy was determined to leave no stone unturned until he got to the bottom of it.

Roy took the rest of the blue M&M’s to Reception.

At his size, he had to plan ahead. It was no good suddenly making the discovery that he urgently needed to go to the bathroom, since there was no way he could
get
to the bathroom in a hurry. So he decided to stop off on his way back to his office as a precautionary measure.

Roy sat on the disabled toilet, a prey to uncertainty. What
was
going on? There were no clues to speak of. What if the trail had gone cold?

He shook his head and sighed. He really should try to cut down. Three jumbo bags of peanut M&M’s per day just wasn’t healthy. Moderation in all things—that should be our watchword.

The thing was, though, that he
had
cut back at one point. He’d gotten down to one bag a day and he’d stuck to that religiously for a month. But by the end of the month he’d had to concede defeat. Because the problem was, it had impacted negatively on his performance. The human mind is a strange animal, no two alike, and for some reason the activity of going through the different colors of M&M was essential if his mind was to function at its best. And the job was such that a single bag just wasn’t adequate to see you through the manifold challenges that you were apt to meet in the course of a day. He had heard smokers make the same observation. Smoking is an unhealthy, anti-social activity that endangers everyone in the workplace, so the No Smoking policy was not up for negotiation, but Roy could understand their point of view, and he was not without sympathy for it.

Roy was about to pull himself to his feet when he heard a funny kind of click. A panel had slid open in the wall beside him. Roy stared. In the hole revealed by the panel were the soles of two bare feet pointing downward. While he watched, some kind of mechanism must have been operating, because gradually the feet moved out into the room. Bare calves came into view. Bare thighs. Bare—Holy
mackerel
.

He was looking at the naked lower portion of a woman. The mechanism had stopped. He couldn’t see anything above the waist. As it was he could see plenty. And then some.

I don’t believe I’m seeing this, he thought.

This wasn’t some casual sexual liaison among the staff. Someone had had to build this contraption and put a hole in the wall. How many people were involved? What would the shareholders think? Was it even
legal
?

Nothing happened.

I gotta get outta here, thought Roy.

He stood up, did up his pants and buckled his belt. He flushed the toilet.

The naked rear end of the woman hadn’t moved.

Jesus, thought Roy.

Roy had never had a girlfriend, and though he had been on a couple of dates when he was younger and thinner he had always been shy. This kind of thing was
way
out of his league.

I’m getting too old for this job, he thought. Roy had had to deal with a couple of unsavory incidents in his time. But what the dickens was he supposed to do about this? Who would he even tell? What was he supposed to say? He tried to imagine telling someone, Steve Jackson for example, about the naked lower portion of a woman.

I just can’t do it, he thought. A man from the younger generation would probably have taken something like this in his stride. Roy just couldn’t deal with it. He couldn’t even think of words he could bring himself to speak in the presence of another person. But how could he just walk away from it? It would be irresponsible to bury his head in the sand and pretend it hadn’t happened. But what the
hell
was he supposed to
do
?

Besides, there was another problem. How was he going to get out of here? What if he opened the door and there was someone out there? What if somebody
saw
? They’d think he had been involved in this. If you’ve been in personnel long enough you know how stories get around. There was no way somebody was going to keep something like that to himself. The story would get around, and everyone in the building would think there was something in it.

Somehow he was going to have to persuade the woman to take herself off.

Was there some kind of speaker or something somewhere so he could tell her to go away?

Roy looked around the cubicle, but he couldn’t see anything. Unless maybe this thingamajig by the toilet roll was some kind of communication device? He jiggled at it. An unopened condom fell out onto the floor.

Roy picked up the condom and tried to squeeze it back up inside the thing it had fallen out of. Three more fell out on the floor.

He considered trying to shove the four condoms back in, but the way things were going he’d just end up with a whole stream of the darned things piling up on the floor. He stuffed them into the inside pocket of his jacket.

There seemed to be absolutely nothing in the cubicle that would allow above-the-waist communication.

Well, maybe if he just kind of pushed on her legs she would get the message?

But what if she got the wrong idea?

Roy hesitated. This could be really embarrassing.

He had thought that things couldn’t possibly get any worse. Suddenly he realized just how lucky he had been when all he had to worry about was how to get rid of the visitor.

The handle of the cubicle turned just a fraction.

Someone was trying to get in.

THE HUMAN STALLION

Sometimes life forces you to learn things about yourself that you would rather not know.

Ed had always known he had drive. He just didn’t realize how
much
drive. But after the facility had been in place a month many guys actually found they weren’t making that much use of it, whether because of being in a relationship or whatever. So they would send screen messages offering their disability for a bottle of Scotch or whatever, and Ed started picking up extras. Soon he was using it five, six times a day.

Previously he had always thought the female staff unduly sensitive. Now he realized maybe it was not all their fault. They were working with a stallion in their midst, someone who could only work off his energies by using the DF an unrealistic number of times a day. Now that he had the outlet he knew he was a nicer person as a result of it. People had even commented on it.

So he had to give a lot of credit to the people who had devised the program for their insight into the workings of people with drive. It was kind of like going to a gym and working out on a punchbag. Instead of taking whatever it might be out on whoever happened to be standing by, you took it out on someone who was paid to have stuff taken out on them.

Anyway, once he had recognized that he had a problem he made a point of using the facility regularly even on the rare occasions when he didn’t feel like it.

Today a message from Mike had flashed up on his screen and he’d been in the middle of something, but he thought Might as well get it out of the way, so he clicked Yes to show he was coming. He had a big fax he wanted to get out, he could give that to one of the girls on his way over. Laura wasn’t at her desk, so he stopped off in the next department. Elaine was just standing up from her desk when he came by. He explained that he had an urgent fax that had to go out
now
and he handed it over.

Elaine seemed about to object.

“Look, I don’t have time for this,” said Ed. “Put it on the machine. Wait for it to go through. Put it in my In tray
with
the confirmation. Any problems, take an aspirin and call me in the morning.”

He strode off. He had just reached the door to the Men’s when he remembered he’d promised to call someone at two. It was now 2:05.

The lightning rod could wait. It was what she was paid for, after all. He headed back to his office and picked up the phone.

Elaine put the fax on the machine but it kept jamming on autofeed so she finally had to feed it in manually herself. The whole time she was there she was conscious of time passing. Finally the last sheet went through. Then the machine dialed the number but the number was busy. It dialed three times and then it just printed out a sheet saying it couldn’t get through so she had to feed all the pages again. This time she got a connection. She left the document on the fax machine and hurried to the Ladies. She was
way
too late.