Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
On her fourth visit to H-Vector, Connie finally took all the correct ramps and made the turnoff, "You can't miss it", without taking a tour of downtown Boston. The downside of this achievement was that she found herself a half an hour early for the third monthly meeting, four months into the six month contract. Her status as a subcontractor relegated her to signing in and waiting for Al in the lobby, where she was careful not to touch the man-eating ashtrays. She barely had time to cross her legs before Al was out to greet her.
"Doctor Weinberger?" He made a show of looking at his wrist watch and affected a lack of recognition. "I believe you are an impostor, madam," he said dramatically, "I shall deny you admittance until you reveal something that only the true Doctor Weinberger would know."
"The ridership forecasts are nonsensical," she stated, playing along. "There's no way the train could be built without massive federal subsidies."
"True," Al answered, "But anyone could have figured that out from information in the public domain." He brushed some imaginary lint off of his sleeve, and assumed the pose of a bored patrician. "I am afraid I shall have to summon security," he sighed.
"Triple chocolate," she whispered behind her hand, as if exchanging a secret password.
"Why Connie," he acknowledged her, "You must forgive me. The shock of your arriving early must have numbed this old brain." The receptionist watched their playacting with disgust. Idiots, she said to herself. They go to college so they can act like kids, and I get stuck behind this damn desk doing all the work. She looked up without smiling as they went passed her into the main office, then went back to doing her nails.
"I can just wait in the conference room if you're busy," she offered. "I really don't mind."
"Nonsense," he grasped her upper arm firmly and guided her into his office. "I want to hear all about what happened at the meeting Tuesday." He dumped a pile of paper off his guest chair onto the floor, and nudged it under the desk with his foot. "Train stuff. There won't be a repeat performance, by the way," he confided. "We're happy to have an excuse to keep a low profile for the next few months. I wish I'd thought of it myself. Fredrick will be covering that in the meeting, of course."
"Well," she began, when she was sure he was finished, "We never really got started at all. First, there was a problem with the seating and the sound system, which they decided to bypass by using these battery powered bullhorns. Then there's a sort of tradition in the Five Colleges area, to try to imbue every event with a little bit of culture, so they had arranged for a poet and a food processor salesman as a sort of warm up act."
"Your boyfriend?"
"The poet," she answered. "The salesman is this guy they call 'Vegetable Dan.' Anyway, he started the show with a demonstration of how the food processor could grate turnips in one pass." She smiled at the recollection. If it hadn't blown up, she would have bought one for her mother. "He was a real entertainer. He tossed these turnips out to the audience, to prove that they weren't doctored, and he started juggling them when they were thrown back. Everything was going really well until this geek with a chessboard sticks his head in the room and say that there's a bomb in the building. Vegetable Dan lost his timing, and a bunch of turnips went into the food processor at the same time and blew it up. Everyone went outside where it was raining pretty bad, and the police said it would be a few hours before we could go back in, so the meeting was called off."
"Vegetable Dan is a cultural attraction?"
"Half the population up there seems to be vegetarian, and the other half is worried about its health," she explained. "Plus, he really is fun to watch."
"Is it O.K. to ask about the bomb threat?" he inquired solicitously.
"You just did," she caught him out, "But it's O.K. I doubt it made the papers out here, but Eric worked as a security guard at this place that burned down, and apparently there were a lot of illegal chemicals stored there. The police screwed up and arrested him, so some people automatically assumed that he was guilty. Then I guess they figured that he's mocking at them with his poetry, so there have been all kinds of threats."
"It did make the papers," Al informed her. "Not the bomb business, but the rest of the Wilkins story. The hazardous waste disposal company implicated, PDC, did most of their business at this end of the state. I hear from some friends in the state house that they've already turned up caches of the materials PDC was supposed to be disposing, stored in commercial warehouse space that they rented. DEP is seeking a court order to allow them to inspect all of the divorce motels in the state."
"Divorce motels?" Connie didn't see the connection.
"You know," Al explained, "Those temporary storage places that have sprung up all over the place. Cinder block walls, overhead garage doors, corrugated tin roof. Most of their business is from people who are selling a house and moving into a smaller place and have to put all their stuff in temporary storage. Divorce ranks up at the top of the list of reasons."
"I get it," she said, "And the DEP thinks that this company is renting space and storing hazardous waste in these places."
"Yup," he answered, "Pretty scary really. The people I talked with tell me that the DEP has been secretly lobbying for the right to perform spot searches of private storage facilities for years. They already have carte blanche on industrial sites, same as OSHA and the EPA, but they can't go into your garage without the local police and a warrant."
"Why are you so up on all of this Al?" she asked, "Or should I have checked if it was O.K. to ask first."
"Don't worry about me," he said blandly, "I'm an old pro. I'll bet you my Mercedes against that new Volvo you're driving that I could change the subject without you're even noticing."
"I don't have a new Volvo," she started to say, then grinned sheepishly.
"Gottcha!" he pounced, "That's an old Regan trick. Always make a mistake in your replies, because most people can't resist correcting a mistake. And everyone thought Ron was senile," he snorted.
"The question," Connie reminded him.
"Sure," Al answered, "I don't want to steal too much of Fredrick's thunder, because he has a regular speech planned, but the gist is that H-Vector is going Green. Environmental remediation, and all that."
"What does an applied magnetism company have to do with environmental remediation?" she blurted.
"Ahh," he smiled, "That's what Fredrick will be explaining, or perhaps I should say rationalizing." He sat back again, enjoying her confusion.
"C'mon Al, give," she wheedled.
He assumed a professorial attitude. "Tell me, Miss Weinberger," he snatched a ruler of his desk and pointed it at her. "What are the strengths of H-Vector Corporation, as you see them."
"Well," she hedged, "There's, uh, there's you," she ticked him off on a finger, "There's the copying machine," she doled out another finger, "Uh, has your daughter gone back to school?"
"Don't spare our feelings, now," he laughed, "If you inherited H-Vector tomorrow, and couldn't sell it," he paused, thinking, "or any of the office equipment. And," he piled on the conditions, "You had to keep all the same people, what would you do with it?"
"I don't know, Al," she tried to squirm out of giving an honest answer, "I'd come up with something I guess."
"Connie," he admonished, "I know what I do for a living. It's what I'm good at. Now what do you think H-Vectors strong suit is."
"Pushing paper," she gave in, "Or pushing 'paperless' paper. Writing proposals and getting government contracts. Writing proposals to get government contracts to write government contracts soliciting proposals. How am I do so far?"
"Bravo," he clapped, "Now that wasn't so very hard to figure out. The remediation business is essentially a paper game," he continued. "The majority of the money might go to digging dirt up in one place, and burying it somewhere else, but that's got as much to do with the business that were going into as farming has to do with food stamps."
"You've lost me again," she admitted.
"We're coming in at the top of the food chain," he told her. "Contract administration, new technology evaluation. If there's one thing every civil servant in a position of authority wants, it's someone to blame if things go wrong. We can be that someone," he concluded, a false light in his eyes, "All we have to do is ask."
"You're looking forward to this?" she squinched up her face.
"It sucks," Al answered truthfully, "But it's a living. Besides," he continued, "Most people are vain. They refuse to see themselves as parasites. After a while, when I'm buried in paperless paper, I'll forget I'm a parasite myself. I've been there before." He gave a drawn out sigh. "Let's go, time for the meeting."
Connie was so depressed for him that he had to help her out of the chair.
The conference room at H-Vector could have been a movie theater at one of the cinema chains that had magically divided two theaters into sixteen. The floor was sloped, and their were padded seats on either side of a central aisle, and the total seating capacity was sixty-eight. There were about thirty people there when they arrived, more then half of H-Vector's entire staff. The rest of the employees, with the exception of the aloof receptionist, trickled in over the next few minutes.
None of the figurehead officers attended, having better things to do with their days than sit around the little company they were purportedly running. Fredrick Hume was stuck running the show, both because it coincided with the regular monthly meeting of his MLT group, and as a penalty for having the nicest office. He positioned himself behind the rostrum and began to speak.
"Right." He surveyed his audience making brief eye contact with everyone there, which took nearly a full minute. "Right," he repeated again, for those who had missed it the first time. "Many of you have been with us for nearly a year," he began, triggering a collective groan. "And," he stressed, "And, we hope you will remain with us through the coming transition period." Everyone straightened in their seats and did their best to appear worthy.
"As all of you in my squad know, the first phase of the MLT contract will be completed in two months. We have been informed that phase two will not be awarded at this time." A groan from the MLT group. "We had high hopes for the Magnetohydrodynamics project," he paused to wait for the reaction, which wasn't forthcoming. "That's the MHD project," he fell back on the acronym. A groan from the MHD group. "But the entire national effort is being classified and channeled through the submarine shipyards."
"The balance of you, of course, are on the high temperature superconductor project that gave birth to our company." There was a faint rubbing sound as twenty-six employees crossed their fingers. "In a recent report to Congress, our superconductor group was called 'one of the most advanced efforts in the nation, an indispensable ingredient in the recipe for U.S. competitive success'." There was an outburst of applause accompanied by a few cries of pain from individuals who failed to untangle their fingers first.
"Unfortunately," he rushed through the words, "You aren't making any money. Sorry." He took a long break from speaking, actually turning away from the rostrum for a moment. The assembled employees sat in shocked silence, listening to Hume repeatedly counting to ten in an attempt to regain his composure.
"Right," he finally continued, "Numbers. Absolutely." Connie noticed that having gotten past the hatchet man part of his presentation, his usual clipped style of speaking immediately reasserted itself. "Trains first. Not a dead end, no. France, $8 Billion. Germany, $60 Billion by the end of the decade. Italy, $15 Billion. Japan, rolling out the track at $5 million a kilometer. Problem?" he asked rhetorically, "Yes," he answered himself, and read a sentence from an article clipping. "U.S. Congress is considering $29 million for a study next year." He let the clipping drop. "Small pie. Minute." He shook his head sadly.
"Come around, they will. Keep our hand in, send up the occasional trial balloon. Keep H-Vector in the trade pubs. Bright future." He surveyed the room, again seeking eye contact and a sense of solidarity. All he registered was different degrees of confusion, running the gamut from puzzled to panicked. Carrot, he thought, chuck the stick, dangle a carrot.
"Right. New direction then. Bigger pie, whole larder in fact." He drew a second clipping out of his breast pocket. "Higgily, figgily, Ah," he found his place. "U.S. Department of Energy budget for environmental cleanup is currently $6 Billion a year." He let the number sink in, while he scanned the article looking for the second figure. "Approximately four hundred thousand contaminated ground water sites in the continental U.S. Awful." He nodded sympathetically, then broke into a grin. "Awful enticing, I say."
"My group. Trains, out. More than enough work done to satisfy the contract. Onto your computers, get on the web, find contracts to bid. Anything sciency, we'll find resumes somewhere. Magnetohydrodynamics," he snapped his fingers in recollection, "Sorry, MHD. Move sea water with magnetic fields. Push a submarine. Very cold war, passé." Hume was positively bouncing on his toes now, all enthusiasm. "New direction. Groundwater. Big magnets. Clean it up."
"Excuse me, Fred," one of the senior scientists on the MHD team interrupted, "Bit of a jump, propulsion systems to groundwater remediation. I'm not sure the technology is applicable."
Hume froze him with an icy glare that made Connie shiver, three seats away. Then he replaced the stare with an even colder smile. "Knowledge," he intoned, "Is always applicable. New approaches are much easier to find then new jobs, yes?" The whole room muttered in assent. Hume accepted their rejection of the blasphemy, and regained his cheerleading spirit. "Superconductors," he favored them all with a thousand watt smile, "Witches brew, your alchemy. Yttrium, gallium, arsenic, indium. Nasty. Wouldn't want to spread them over the countryside, even if they worked. Time, perhaps, for a green superconductor. Hit DOE from two directions at once. Superconductors that are safe for the environment. Brilliant. Dug that out of the old suggestion box."
"Conclusions," he began his wrap up. "You know what you need to do. Payroll, not a problem. Not for three months," he qualified the assertion. "Team leaders, schedules, goals. My desk, Friday." He gave a final positive wag of his head. "Think positive. Big, big pie. Questions?" he concluded abruptly.
There was an uncomfortable stirring, but nobody spoke up. Hume was stepping away from the rostrum, when Connie came out of her daze and called, "Mr. Hume?"
He slid back behind the polished wooden stand like a giant snake, prepared to be friendly or deadly, whatever the situation called for.
"I'm a subcontractor on the MLT project," she stumbled over the acronym, "How does all this affect my contract."
"No change," he said generously, relieved that it wasn't another dose of dissension in the ranks. "Continue reporting to Al, use your judgment. Right?"
"Uh, right," she echoed, deciding that a public conversation at this point would be counterproductive. All of a sudden she flushed, ashamed she had even brought it up. All these people, most of whom she had never spoken to, had just been told to drum up some environmental work in the next three months or be out of a job. Even Al, who knew what was coming, seemed a little shell-shocked from hearing Hume put it so bluntly.
"I'll call you tomorrow, Al. O.K." she offered gently.
"Good idea," he concurred, "I'll have a lot of hands to hold this afternoon."
Connie headed out to the parking lot and started her car. She missed the turnpike ramp, and ended up driving out of Boston on Route #9. It wasn't like she needed to get back to work in a hurry.