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  The sergeant rolled back against the escalator, nearly falling over. “You’re not in the Space Patrol anymore, hot-shot!” he screamed. I’m gonna teach you a lesson!” The sergeant locked his moto-boots and grabbed a wrench from the escalator cab.

  Javik hit him before he could swing the wrench. Two clean belly punches and a forearm across the face put the big man down, writhing in pain.

  “One of these days, hot-shot!” the sergeant moaned. I’ll get you!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Javik sneered. “Can’t you see I’m scared to death?” Javik activated his moto-boots, rolled toward a waiting autocar at the edge of the landing pad. “C’mon, Staf,” he said. “Let’s hit the baths.”

  General Munoz closed a manila file folder, added it to a large stack on the left side of his desk. He squirmed in his chair from sitting too long, rubbed the corner of one eye. Which one? he thought. Which one do I choose?

  He felt stiff, and stretched his arms straight out in front. There was a buzz in his left ear, and he picked at it, squinting one eye as he did so.

  “Over here, fleshcarrier!” a voice said. It seemed to come from the corner to Munoz’s left.

  “Huh?” Munoz said. He lowered both hands to the desktop, and slowly . . . ever so slowly . . . his jaw dropped, leaving his mouth agape. For as General Munoz looked at a small round trash can in the corner near a disconnected disposa-tube, he saw a banana peel fly out and hover in the air. A candy bar wrapper followed, then a paper cup and half a cheese sandwich—all remains of the General’s lunch. The items hovered for a moment, then began to spin rapidly in a ball.

  “What the hell?” Munoz cursed.

  Suddenly, the ball of garbage became a ball of fire. “Die, fleshcarrier, die!” a voice screeched. The fireball flew toward Munoz’s face at blinding speed, and it was all the frightened little general could do to duck out of the way. As he ducked under his desk, the fireball whizzed overhead, striking the wall behind his credenza.

  When Munoz looked back, terrified, he saw the ball of burning garbage drop to the credenza top and spark. The fire smoldered, and Munoz wrinkled his nose at the odor.

  “Not very pleasant, is it, fleshcarrier?” the voice said. This time, the voice came from the smoldering fireball. “I’m a sample of my big brother! You won’t be able to dodge him when he comes!”

  “Who are you?” Munoz asked, still cowering under his desk. “And why are you doing this?”

  “Listen, fleshcarrier, and listen carefully. For you don’t have much time. Sidney Malloy is the pilot you need.” The voice gave Sidney’s consumer identification number, then faded away.

  Munoz inched out from under the desk. He fell into the chair, fumbled for a pen and a sheet of paper. With shaky handwriting, Munoz scribbled Sidney’s name and I.D. number.

  Who is this guy? Munoz wondered, staring at the note. He reached for an unread stack of dossier files. Maybe we have something on him here. . . .

  About ten minutes before the afternoon envelope stuffing session, Sidney sat at his desk on the Job Station Beasley Floor, thinking about the violence he had seen on his way to work. It troubled him deeply, although he was sure he should not feel this way.

  Sidney stared at the five meter high metronome mounted on a high octagonal platform at the center of the department. Light from an overhead fluorescent fixture glinted off the metronome’s shiny brass surfaces. A simple plaque on each face of the platform bore this inscription:

  SHARING FOR PROSPERITY. Another way to share as we build a better future.

  Sidney had seen the plaque in other places, the axiom having been taken out of Quotations From Uncle Rosy. Both his motorboat and vacation condominium were owned on a time-share basis, with Sidney holding a one-fifty-second ownership in each. This gave him the use of each for one week out of the year.

  He mentoed a desk-mounted automatic thumb. It flipped through a thick stack of mail in front of him. A letter bearing the seal of the Presidential Bureau caught his eye. Stopping the thumb, he read the letter to himself in a low tone: “Mister Malloy: . . . We are making the following recommendations after reviewing the activity at your work station. As you know, energy management is a top priority of this administration, since energy expended outside a Bu-Health facility is not Job-Supportive. Our recommendations cover hazards which, if not remedied . . .”

  Two packing meckies appeared at a recently vacated desk in the next aisle, carrying cardboard cartons. Short and squat, they had blinking red and yellow lights and tin can heads. One eye was centrally positioned. No mouth, ears or nose. The meckies emptied the contents of the drawers on top of the desk, then lifted one end of the desk, causing the items to slide neatly into waiting boxes. They worked quickly and efficiently, and soon rolled away with their loads in the direction of the elevator bank.

  Sidney heard a familiar voice, turned his head to the left and glanced at Malcolm Penny, the owlish Second Assistant to the Assistant Administrator. Penny was conducting a departmental tour, and a group of G.W. eight hundred trainees rolled along behind him, hanging on every word.

  “The Presidential Bureau has seventy-nine departments,” Penny explained in his high-pitched voice, “one of which is Central Forms. Job Station Beasley is one of the authorized jobs in Central Forms.” He waved an expansive arm, added, “This station takes up an entire floor.” The group rolled slowly by Sidney’s desk, made a right turn onto the main aisle.

  Someone sneezed at a nearby desk.

  “May Rosenbloom bless you,” a woman said.

  “Beasley Station has twenty-six sections,” Penny continued. “Each section has five item counters, two projection-graph operators, three trash can auditors, one manual sergeant and one attendance monitor. All draw up reports, in exquisite detail, of course. Comprehensive reports are the life blood of the government.”

  The trainees nodded in agreement.

  Sidney looked back at his letter from the President, read its first recommendation: “On numerous occasions, you were observed bailing up pieces of paper and hurling them into the waste receptacle. Papers should not be balled up, and should be slipped into the waste receptacle with a minimum expenditure of energy. . . . ” Sidney yawned and looked around the room.

  From his desk near the metronome, he could barely make out a row of red, yellow and blue alpha-numeric charts along a distant wall directly ahead of him. That was the file department. A double swinging door in the wall led to the departmental archives. Along an equally distant side wall were the committee rooms, and along the other side were the managerial offices and supervisorial cubicles. The tiny figure of Administrator Nelson could be seen approaching from his office. The KWAK! KWAK! of automatic name-date stampers rang from all around, accompanied by the sounds of auto-staplers and collators and the punctuating squeaks of autocarts as they stopped at each worktable to pick up paper. It was warm in the room, and the ever-present, gelatinous purr of Harmak forced Sidney to fight drowsiness.

  Sidney shook his head to clear it, turned around to face Melinda Brown, a yellow-haired G.W. seven-five-oh at the desk behind his. As she slipped a green plastic paper clip onto a file, the paper clip broke. Smiling winsomely, she reached into a dispenser for a replacement.

  “Plastic is fantastic!” Sidney intoned.

  “Yes,” she agreed. Still smiling, she placed a new, orange paper clip on the file. “Every break is a new task.”

  The noise of machinery and buzz of conversation gradually slowed and stopped. Sidney turned to watch Administrator Nelson ride a lift to the top of the metronome base. It was nearly time for the afternoon envelope stuffing session, and every employee had a stack of form-change announcement cards and a stack of white envelopes in an automatic stuffing tray. Sidney glanced at the large red button on his desktop near the base of the stuffing tray. He placed the forefinger of his right hand over the button.

  Administrator Nelson was a small man with a friendly, elf-like face. Tiny eyes peered from under a translucent green viso
r that nearly covered the upper part of his face. He cleared his throat, amplified his melodic voice with a tiny silver microphone clipped to his tie: “Good afternoon, employees of Job Station Beasley! Before getting on with the important task at hand, I would like to take this opportunity to give thanks to our gracious benefactor, Willard R. Rosenbloom.”

  Murmuring their lines on cue, the employees intoned: “Thank Uncle Rosy. We are all employed.”

  Administrator Nelson continued: “Uncle Rosy is proud of each of you. Every person in this room holds a share of the Sacred Job that was created for our benefit.”

  And the employees murmured: “Praise be to Uncle Rosy. He loves us all.”

  Nelson touched a heat switch on the metronome, setting the device into operation. Click . . . click . . . click . . . click. The pendulum swung back and forth, a passage every fifteen seconds. Sidney pressed his red button with each metronome click, activating his envelope stuffer at the rate of four per minute.

  After several minutes, the metronome automatically slowed, making a click every twenty seconds. Then it slowed again, to a thirty-second click. Sidney’s eyelids grew increasingly heavy. He dozed off. Then, half awake, he tried to catch up by pushing the button several times in rapid succession.

  “No, no Malloy!” a voice said. “You’re going too fast!”

  Startled, Sidney looked tip to see the scowling face of Malcolm Penny staring down at him through round spectacles perched on the end of a disapproving nose.

  “Oh!” Sidney said, sitting up straight. “I’m terribly sorry!”

  Penny shook his head disapprovingly, set his jaw. “And your desk, Malloy . . . it’s not organized according to standard!”

  “But I thought it—”

  “Your day calendar and auto-staple remover, man! Don’t you ever look at the manual?”

  Sidney heard a metronome click, pushed the stuffing tray button. “I’m sorry, Mr. Penny,” he said. “I’ll correct it right away.”

  The Second Assistant to the Assistant Manager straightened, still shaking his head. “See that you do,” he snipped. Then he rolled down the aisle to look for other violators.

  * * *

  Still angry over his encounter with the base sergeant an hour before, Javik stepped out of a Bu-Health surge-pool. Smelling the back of his hand, he shook his head and thought: Still a trace odor of that god-damned garbage. The skit permeates every pore in my body—

  Javik shivered as he walked dripping wet across the blue Italian tile of the main bathhouse toward a line of naked men and women waiting to get into Tanning Room Five. His leg and arm muscles ached from the weight exercises he had completed fifteen minutes earlier.

  “This old body can’t take it anymore,” he muttered.

  Finding a place in line, Javik looked around and motioned to a towel monitor standing nearby. A dark-haired young man wearing the silver and gold leotard of Bu-Health moto-shoed over, draped a long white towel over Javik’s shoulders.

  “Sign here,” the young man instructed, thrusting a Tele-Charge board under Javik’s nose. Javik unsnapped a transmitting pen from the board, squiggled his name across the tiny screen. A green imprint of Javik’s signature appeared on the screen as he wrote, and as he finished, his consumer identification number and the amount of purchase appeared. All this faded quickly, being replaced by a flashing orange “Thank You.” The young man retrieved his Tele-Charge board and rolled back to his post.

  Javik pulled the towel around his shivering body and felt its warmth take hold. The line moved quickly. Soon he had signed another Tele-Charge board and was in the warm, brightly lit tanning room. It was a high-ceilinged room, with eighty-eight levels of tanning slabs stretching upward, connected by steel ramps and clanking conveyor lifts. Harmak played “Dreamer’s Lullaby,” one of the new restful background tunes. The smell of perspiring bodies wafted across his nostrils.

  “Hey Tom!” the voice came from above. Javik looked up, saw the goggled, ruddy face of Brent Stafford smiling down over the edge of a thud-level tanning slab. “I saved you a place!” Stafford motioned for Javik to come up.

  Javik stepped onto the clanking conveyor lift, rode it to a third level ramp. From there it was only a few short steps to the tanning slab beside Stafford. Javik removed his towel, donned a pair of goggles and dropped face down onto the warm, clear glass of the slab. Heat lamps all around warmed his body, soaking into every aching muscle. “Ah!” Javik sighed. “That feels good!”

  Stafford turned to face Javik, peering through his goggles as he asked, “When’s the big reunion?”

  “Saturday night.” Javik focused upon body smells carried by a downdraft.

  “Twentieth, isn’t it?”

  “Uh huh. Old PS. five-oh-two. Be nice to see the bunch again . . . Charlie, Bob, Sidney. . . . Hey, I wonder if Sidney ever permied up with Carla. . . .”

  Stafford sat up, sprayed water over his body with a passing porta-shower. “You know, Tom,” he said, measuring his words carefully, “You’d do well to watch that temper. With good behavior, I’ve heard it said you can get another commission.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.” Javik shifted on his belly, turned his face away from Stafford.

  “Could have been worse, buddy. You might have been court-martialed and shot for that . . . but they took your war record into account.”

  “Am I supposed to thank them for that? Hell, they should thank me . . . and you too . . . for what we did.”

  “You’ve got to see their point of view.”

  “Their point of view?” Javik felt rage rising inside. “I belted that wet-behind-the-ears gay major after you and I were almost shot down by an Atheist fighter squadron!”

  “They don’t see any justification for hitting an officer, Tom. You know that.”

  “We saved two base ships with a little initiative, and that armchair fairy read us out for not getting the proper authorizations!”

  “I know, I know.” Stafford sounded sleepy.

  “Now it’s happening again, Staf. That damned garbage shuttle’s driving me crazy.”

  Stafford turned to his back. “You’re right. I can’t argue with a word. But we’ve got to use our brains . . . you know, play their silly games a little.”

  “We bust our asses and what do we get? Some creep spouting off about rules and procedures! Well for Christ’s sake! I’m a Star Class Captain, not a stinking garbage shuttle pilot!” Javik paused, breathing hard, turned to face Stafford. “Get the hell off my case, will ya, Staf ?”

  “Damn you!” Stafford said. His creased face stiffened. “I’m trying to help you, you hothead! Can’t you see that?”

  “I don’t need your help!”

  “Yeah? Then get the hell away from me!”

  Javik rose with his towel. “You’re a little old lady, Staf. Always telling me the safest things to do, aren’t you? Well, I’ve had enough! DO YOU HEAR ME? ENOUGH!”

  “Everybody in the place hears you,” Stafford sneered.

  Javik turned without another word and stalked off. Pleasure domes, he thought. Maybe a forest maiden will calm me. . . .

  Sidney did not have to look at his watch to know it was time for the second afternoon coffee break. He was already nearing the elevator bank when the bell rang. Carla waited in the elevator as usual, holding the door open. Sidney rolled on without a word.

  “Perfect timing again,” Carla said as the doors whooshed shut. She placed both hands in the pockets of her carmine red pantsuit and mentoed: Sub-nine-sixty-six, Presidential override. Code twenty-four.

  “That Presidential override is nice,” Sidney said, knowing what she had done. “Our car used to stop at every floor before you got it.”

  “Just don’t tell anyone about it,” she said focusing on Sidney’s receding hairline and high forehead. “I had to pull strings to get it.”

  “How did you manage it?”

  Carla smiled. “Leave a girl some secrets, Sidney.” She thought of Chief of Staff Billie Birdbrig
ht. Billie likes me enough to give me an override. But when will he get around to asking me out?

  The car dropped quickly and silently, depositing them at the entrance to the Cave Coffee Shop. It was an immense, dimly lit restaurant, dotted with hundreds of tiny tables. Each of the four perimeter glassite walls looked out upon one of the iridescent bat caves that honeycombed the ground beneath New City.

  “You’re quiet today,” Carla said as they took a seat at their usual window booth overlooking an underground waterfall. She looked at his soft-featured face, with its familiar pug nose and wing-like ears at the sides. “You aren’t worried about a comet coming, are you?” She laughed.

  “No. The doomies are crazy. I was just thinking about my job again . . . and wishing to Uncle Rosy I’d taken a physical for the Space Patrol twenty years ago.”

  “But your . . . “—Carla looked around, whispered—” . . . disability. It would have shown up.” She touched a tiny dice cage mounted on the table, looked at him intently with understanding in her eyes.

  “Maybe not.” Sidney watched people beginning to stream into the coffee shop. “The incorto dispenser my father implanted . . . in place of my appendix . . . has an x-ray scrambler. It takes special equipment to detect it.”

  “Your father was a great surgeon,” she said, looking at him tenderly. “You seem so unhappy in Central Forms. Could it be that you would prefer life on a therapy orbiter?”

  “With the exception of missing you, it might be more interesting.” He laughed nervously. “Look at me, Carla. I want so desperately to be a gallant captain at the controls of a space cruiser, on a great mission to the outer reaches of the galaxy. And here I am . . . hundreds of floors underground!” He fell silent, gazed out into the cave as a flurry of large butterfly bats passed in front of the waterfall, then disappeared behind a blue and white stalagmite formation.