Hot Sky at Midnight

2

carpenter’s window, on the thirtieth floor of the grimy old Manito Hotel in downtown Spokane, faced due east. In the year and a half he had lived there he had never opaqued it. The full blast of the rising sun through the clear pane, as it came rolling westward in all its terrible grandeur across the weary abraded surface of the North American continent, was his wake-up call every morning.

These days Carpenter earned his living as a desert jockey, a weather forecaster out here in this forlorn drought-stricken agricultural belt. His job involved calculating the odds for the farmers who were betting their livelihoods on trying to guess when the next rainstorm would turn up in eastern Washington—next month, next year, whenever. Inland Washington State was right on the cusp, situated as it was between the moist, fertile agricultural zone of southern Canada and the miserable, perpetually parched wasteland that was the upper west-central United States, and the precipitation was a very chancy thing. Sometimes there was rain and the farmers got fat, and sometimes the rain belt swung far away to the north and east and they all got killed. They depended on Carpenter to tell them weeks or even months in advance how things were going to go for them each season. Their soothsayer, their reader of the entrails.

He had been a lot of other things, too. Before being given the weather gig he had been a cargo dispatcher for one of Samurai Industries’ L-5 shuttles, and a chip-runner before that, and before that—well, he was starting to forget. Like a good salaryman Carpenter took whatever assignment was handed him, and made sure to master the skills that were required.

And one of these days, if he kept his nose clean, he’d be sitting in a corner office atop the Samurai pyramid in New Tokyo in Manitoba. That was the Samurai head office, just as New Kyoto down in Chile was the Level One zone of Samurai’s arch-competitor, the immense Kyocera-Merck combine. New Tokyo, New Kyoto, it made no difference. One name was simply the other one turned inside out. But you wanted to get yourself into Headquarters. That was the essential thing, to be taken into the Japs’ embrace, to become a Headquarters guy, an executiveman, one of their specially favored roundeyes. Once you were in there, you were there for life. It wasn’t much of a goal, as ideal visions went, but it was the only one available to him. You played the Company game, Carpenter knew, or else you didn’t play at all.

At half past six in the morning on this day in late spring, with the room already flooded with light and Carpenter beginning to wake up anyway, his Company communicator went beep and the visor opposite his bed lit up and a familiar contralto voice said, “On your toes, Salaryman Carpenter. Rise and sing the Samurai Industries anthem along with me. ‘Our hearts are pure, our minds are true, Our thoughts, our thoughts, are all for you, dear Companeee’—did I call too early, Salaryman Carpenter? Morning is well along on the West Coast, isn’t it? Are you awake? Are you alone? Turn on the visuals, Salaryman Carpenter! Let me see your shining smile. Your beloved Jeanne is calling you.”

“For Christ’s sake, show some mercy,” Carpenter murmured. “I don’t have my brain in gear yet.” He blinked at the visor. Jeanne Gabel’s broad Eurasian face, dark-eyed, strong-featured, looked back at him. A few small alterations around the jaw and the cheekbones and it could have been a man’s face. Carpenter and Jeanne had been good friends, never lovers, when they worked out of the same Samurai office in St. Louis. That had been four years back. Now she was in Paris and he was in Spokane: the Company kept you moving around. They talked every once in a while.

He activated the visuals at his end, letting her see the dingy room, the rumpled bed, his bleary eyes. “Is there trouble?” he asked.

“No more than usual. But there’s news.”

“Good or bad?”

“Depends on how you want to look at it. I’ve got a deal for you. But go and wash your face, first. Brush your teeth. Comb your hair a little. You look like a mess, you know?”

“You’re the one who called at the crack of dawn and then told me to turn on the visuals.”

“It’s the end of the day in Paris. I waited as long as I could to call. Go on, get yourself washed. I’ll sit tight.”

“Look the other way, then. I’m not decent.”

“Right,” she said, grinning, and continued to peer out of the visor at him.

Carpenter shrugged and clambered out of bed, naked, leaving the visuals on. Let her have a peek if she wants, he thought. Do her some good, maybe. He was a lean late-thirtyish man with shoulder-length yellow hair and a brown beard, boyishly proud of his body: long flat muscles, tight belly, hard butt. He padded across the room to the washzone and stuck his head under the sonic cleanser. The instrument purred and throbbed.

In a moment he felt clean and almost awake. The Screen injector was sitting on the toilet counter and he picked it up and gave himself his morning shot, automatically, without even thinking about it. You got out of bed, you washed and peed, and you gave yourself your shot of Screen: it was how everybody started the day. The sun was waiting for you out there in the killer haze of the angry white morning sky and you didn’t want to face its marvelous ferocity without your skin armor renewed against the daily onslaught.

Carpenter wrapped a towel around his waist and turned toward the visor. Jeanne was amiably watching him.

“That’s better,” she told him.

“All right,” he said. “You say you have a deal for me?”

“I might. It depends on you. Last time we talked, you said you were going crazy there in Spokane and couldn’t wait until you got moved on to another gig. Well, what about it, Paul? Are you still interested in a transfer out of Spokane?”

“What? Damned straight I am!” His heart rate began to climb. He hated being in Spokane. His weatherman gig in this forlorn isolated place seemed to him like a giant life detour.

“I can get you out, if you like. How would you like to be a sea captain?”

“A sea captain,” Carpenter repeated, with no expression whatever. “A sea captain.” But she had startled him. He hadn’t expected something like that. It was as if she had asked him how he would like to be a hippopotamus.

He wondered if Jeanne could just be fucking around with him for the fun of it. It was too early in the day for him to find that amusing. But it wouldn’t be like her, doing that.

“You’re serious?” he asked. “For Samurai, you mean?”

“Of course, for Samurai. A change of career track is something I can’t manage for you. But I can get you a transfer, if you want it. Iceberg trawler called the Tonopah Maru, getting ready to sail out of San Francisco, commanding officer needed, Salaryman Level Eleven. Came across the Personnel node this morning. You’re Level Eleven, aren’t you, Paul?”

Carpenter didn’t want to seem ungrateful. She was a dear woman and had his interests at heart. But he was baffled by all this.

“What the hell do I know about being commanding officer of an iceberg trawler, Jeanne?”

“What the hell did you know about being a weatherman, or a chip-runner, or all the other things you’ve done, until you did them? God will provide. God and Samurai Industries. They’ll teach you what you need to know. You know that. They give you the proper indoctrination cube, you jack it in, two hours later you’re as good a seaman as Columbus ever was. But if you don’t like the idea of being a sailor—”

“No. No. Tell me more. Is there grade slope to be had out of this?”

“Of course there’s slope. You put in eighteen months aboard your cramped little boat hauling icebergs and keeping your nasty but capable crew in line and you’ll make Level Ten for sure. Demonstration of managerial skills under adverse conditions. They’ll move you to Europe and stick you on the administrative track and you’ll be sitting pretty from then on, straight up the net to New Tokyo. I thought of you the moment this came across the node.”

“How come there’s a vacancy?” Carpenter asked. Usually any job that held the promise of grade improvement, no matter how disagreeable it might be, was snapped up in-house before it hit any of the general Company nodes. “Why didn’t someone in the trawler division take it right away?”

“Someone did,” Jeanne said. “Yesterday. Then his lottery number came up two hours later and he bugged out for one of the habitats, just like that, caught a shuttle without even stopping to pack. A job on Outback, I think it was, or maybe Commonplace. The company got caught short and Personnel was asked to fill in with an Eleven, fast. Five names surfaced on the first scoop. Yours was one of them. I thought I’d call you before I ran any checks on the other four.”

“Nice.”

“Am I wasting my breath?”

“I love you, Jeanne.”

“I know that. But do you want the gig?”

“Tell me the time frame?”

“You’d have a five-week transition. Enough time to work up the weatherman specs for your successor in Spokane, get down to Frisco for your indoctrination jacking, and maybe even fit in a few days over here in Paris for fine dining and riotous living, if you could stand it.”

Jeanne’s face bore the usual ironic glint but there was, it seemed to Carpenter, some wistfulness in it also. When they worked together in St. Louis they had always been flirtatious with each other, and whenever they were with other people they had liked to play at giving the impression that they were sleeping together. But all it was was play. Someone had done some damage to her, emotional, not physical, long ago— Carpenter had never asked for the details—and so far as he knew she was completely asexual. A pity, because he wasn’t.

He said, “I’d like that. A few days in Paris. The Seine. The Place de la Concorde. The restaurant on the top of the Eiffel Tower. The Louvre on a rainy day.”

“It’s always a rainy day here,” she said.

“All the better. Water falling from the sky, just dropping right down on your head—it seems like a goddamned miracle to me, Jeanne. I would take off my clothes and dance naked in it, right down the Champs-Elysees.”

“Stop showing off. They’d arrest you in two seconds, anyway. There’s a cop on every corner here. Androids, very strict. ‘Mon Dieu, monsieur—s’il vous plait, vos vêtements!’ ”

“I’ll tell him that I don’t speak French. Would you dance with me?”

“No. Not naked down the Champs-Elysees.”

“In the grand ballroom of the Georges Cinq, then.”

“But of course,” she said. “The Georges Cinq.”

“I love you, Jeanne.” He would never see her in Paris, he was sure of that. By the time he was through with the iceberg boat they would have reassigned her to Tierra del Fuego or Hong Kong or Kansas City.

“I love you,” she told him. “Keep dry, Paul.”

“Not a problem, here,” Carpenter said.

The morning that his transfer finally came through—it took about ten days; he was just beginning to doubt that Jeanne had been able to swing it at all—Carpenter had just clocked nineteen straight hours of work at the Samurai Weather Service office in Spokane. Everybody there was working like that these days. A five-alarm toxic emergency had been declared, the worst one in three or four years, and the whole meteorological staff had gone on double overtime, tracking the unusual upper-air movements that might be putting the entire West Coast at risk.

What was going on was that there was a big high-pressure zone sitting over Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. That was not exactly news in itself—there was always a high-pressure zone sitting on those states, which was why it almost never rained there any more—but this time the entire great mass of heavy dead air had developed a powerful counterclockwise rotation and was starting to pull streams of greenhouse gases out of the blighted Midwest. All the vile poisonous airborne goo—methane, nitrous oxides, and other such things— that was normally salted through the atmosphere over Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis was being sucked around the top end of Nebraska and Wyoming and into Idaho.

Ordinarily that would have been no great cause for alarm. It happened once in a while, a river of foul atmospheric bile streaming into the Mountain States and getting whipped right around through the Southwest and back to where it came from. But this time the orbital sensors were showing a line of secondary atmospheric eddy currents along the western edge of the high-pressure zone, currents that had the capacity to peel away the toxic crud as it made its turn southward into Utah and send it drifting toward the Pacific Northwest. Where it would smother Seattle and Portland for a few eye-stinging days, after which the normal north-south winds would catch hold of it and shove it down the coast to torment San Francisco and then Los Angeles and San Diego.

The coast cities had enough toxins of their own to deal with as it was: if a load of extraneous airborne shit got shipped in from the Midwest it would push things well above the tolerance levels as they were now defined. It would hit like a blast of dragon’s breath. People would be dropping dead in the streets. They would choke on the sulfurous reek The deadly smog would excoriate their nostrils and claw at their lungs and blacken their blood. Warnings to stay indoors would have to be issued; industrial production would need to be shut down, maybe for weeks, as would nonessential ground transportation, to avoid aggravating the situation. The economy of the entire region was bound to suffer a terrific short-run setback, and there would probably be long-term environmental damage too, increased uptakes of arsenic, cadmium, and mercury in the water supply, continued infrastructure degradation, severe havoc done to what was left of the West Coast flora and fauna. Redwood trees couldn’t go indoors when a five-alarm toxic cloud came drifting westward.

On the other hand, the toxic cloud could still turn around at any minute and go away without doing any harm. Broadcasting premature warning of an oncoming peril that wasn’t actually coming could lead to needless factory closings and panic among the civilians: very likely a massive flight of people from the area, which would choke the highways and have environmental consequences of its own. After which would come a bunch of lawsuits demanding damages because the threatened disaster had failed to materialize. People would want to be paid for emotional stress, unnecessary expenses incurred, interruption of trade, any damned thing. Samurai Industries hated being entangled in lawsuits. They had pretty much the deepest pockets around, and everyone knew it.

So the whole situation needed to be monitored in the finest possible detail, minute by minute, and everybody in the Spokane Weather Service office had been placed on round-the-clock duty until the emergency was over. Carpenter, who was considered to have an almost psychic knack for predicting large-scale air movements, was particularly on the spot. He had tanked up on hyperdex and spent the night in front of the computer in a welter of sweat and drug-induced intensity of perception, staring at shifting yellow-and-green patterns of bars and dots, internalizing the dancing data as fast as it arrived in the hope that he would arrive at some mystic sense of the cosmic order of events, some wild gestalt insight that would allow him to see into the future. The night went by like the blink of an eye. And he had grasped it: he had. He was peering around the corner of time into the day after tomorrow, and he saw the deadly stream of toxic atmospherics moving— moving—cutting down past Coeur d’Alene—turning ever so slightly southward and eastward—eastward, really?—yes— maybe—yes—

“Carpenter.”

—yes, a shift, a definite shift in the air movement, coming on Tuesday a little after three in the afternoon—

“Carpenter?”

A voice out of the void: thin, high-pitched, annoying. Carpenter waved his hand angrily without looking around. “Fuck off, will you?” He struggled to hold his concentration.

“Boss says, Take a break. He wants to talk to you.”

“I’ve almost got it. I can see—fuck. Fuck!” He banged his fist against the edge of the desk. The intrusion had come like a bucket of icy water hurled in his face. It shattered everything and he was unable to see anything any more. The patterns on the visor became a meaningless dance of jiggling blotches. Carpenter glanced up, every nerve in his body twanging and humming. One of the office gofers was standing placidly at his elbow, a pale flimsy girl, Sandra Wong, Sandra Chen, some Chinese name or other, utterly indifferent to his irritation. “What the hell is it?” he asked her furiously.

“I told you,” the kid said. “Boss wants you.”

“What for?”

“Do I know? Tell Carpenter, Take a break, come over here, that’s all he said.”

Carpenter nodded and stood up. All around the room, people speeding as he had been on hyperdex were staring into their visors with lunatic fixity and babbling back at the computers as torrents of weather data flooded in from space. He wondered why they were so entranced. Their fanatical dedication to their task seemed alien and repugnant to him now. Two minutes ago nothing had mattered more in the universe to him than tracking that vicious cloud of atmospheric crud, but now he was completely out of it, utterly detached, wholly lacking in concern for the fate of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego.

He realized that he had passed into some outer realm of exhaustion without even noticing it. He was no longer speeded up. The hyperdex must have burned out hours ago and he had continued his vigil on sheer mental momentum, doing who knew what damage to his nervous system.

He went into the other room, to the big horseshoe-shaped desk of the department administrator.

“You wanted me?” Carpenter asked.

The office was run by a bleak-souled Salaryman Ten named Ross McCarthy, who despite his name had some slight tincture of Japanese blood in his veins. That had done McCarthy no good whatever in his quest for upward slope, perhaps even had contributed to his stymieing: he had been stuck at the tenth level for years and plainly was going no higher, and he was bitter about it. He was a stocky, flat-faced man with faintly greenish skin and straight, glossy black hair that was starting to thin out across the top.

There was a dispatch printout in his hands. McCarthy fingered it gingerly, as though it were radioactive.

“Carpenter, what the hell is this?” he said.

“How would I know?”

McCarthy made no attempt to let him see it. “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the finish of your career that I have right here in my hands. It’s a transfer to some goddamn stupid iceberg ship, that’s what it is. Have you taken leave of your senses, Carpenter?”

“I don’t think that I have, no.” Carpenter reached for the printout. McCarthy held it back from him.

“This ship,” McCarthy said, “it’s an absolute dead end for you. You’ll go out into the middle of the Pacific for a couple of years and fry your ass doing stupid manual labor and when you come back you’ll find that everybody on your grade level has skipped on past you. Out of sight, off the charts, Carpenter, that’s the way things work. Do you follow me? Don’t do this to yourself. Take my advice. What you’ll do if you’re smart is stay right here. You’re needed here.”

“Apparently the Company thinks it needs me somewhere else,” Carpenter said. He was getting annoyed now.

“You stay here, you’re bound to move up slope in no time. I’ll be going on to a Nine pretty soon now. The word will come down from Yoshida-san any day, that’s what I hear. And when I do, you’ll slide right into my slot. Isn’t that better than hauling fucking icebergs around the ocean?”

McCarthy wasn’t going anywhere, Carpenter knew. He had committed some obscure breach of etiquette along the way, perhaps had tried unwisely to pressure some distant and barely acknowledged Japanese fifth cousin of his for promotion, and he was going to rot in Level Ten forever and ever. McCarthy knew that too. And wanted to keep everybody who worked for him trapped here in the same perpetual stasis that enfolded him.

“I think I’ve achieved as much as I can in weather forecasting,” Carpenter told him, controlling himself tautly. “Now I want to try something else.”

“An iceberg trawler. Shit, Carpenter. Shit! Turn it down.”

“I don’t think I will.” He took the transfer order from McCarthy and pocketed it without looking at it. “Oh, and you can start to call off your five-alarmer, by the way. The poison cloud is about to break up.”

McCarthy’s black-button eyes took on sudden feverish brightness.

“You sure of that?”

“Absolutely,” Carpenter said, amazed at his own audacity. “The entire system will be heading back east by Tuesday afternoon.” If he was wrong, the whole Spokane office would be taken out and shot as soon as the lawsuits began. To hell with them all, Carpenter thought. He would be a thousand miles from here before any trouble could start.

And in any case his forecast was right. He felt it in his bones.

“Show me on the charts,” McCarthy said, beginning to look a little suspicious.

Carpenter led him back to the data room. As never before it looked to him like a gaming center in a lunatic asylum, all the hyperdex-zonked crazies grinning fixedly into the bright streams of whorls and loops that were dancing across the faces of their visors. He stood in front of his own computer and pointed to the gaudy yellow-and-green patterns. They made no sense whatsoever to him now. Chimpanzee finger paintings, nothing more. “Here,” he told McCarthy, “these isobars here, they indicate the changing gradients.” He tapped the screen. “You see, here, along the Idaho border? Definite incipient weakening of the toxic flow. And a clear indication of a retro push coming from Canada, you see, like a giant hand shoving the whole mass the right way.” It was all bullshit, every syllable of it He had unquestionably seen something new taking shapebefore the girl broke in on him, but whatever it might have been was impossible for him to fathom, now.

McCarthy was staring thoughtfully at the computer visor.

He said, “It’ll be a fucking miracle if the damned thing just goes away, won’t it?”

“Won’t it be, though. But look, Ross—” Carpenter rarely presumed to use McCarthy’s first name. “Look here, here, here. And especially here. I know it looks locked tight as a constipated whale’s gut right this moment, but when I was clicked into the map a little while ago I could distinctly feel the whole flow shifting, shifting in our favor; definite indications of gradient transform all along the periphery. Look at this. And this.”

“Mmm.” McCarthy nodded. “Yes. Mmm.” He was faking it, Carpenter knew. On Level Ten you didn’t need technical ability except of the most superficial kind; you needed managerial skill. Which perhaps McCarthy might have had, once.

“You see?” Carpenter said. “I was flying on intuition, sure. But the substantiating data’s already beginning to turn up positive. That toxic mass is as good as out of here. You see that, don’t you, Ross?”

McCarthy was still nodding.

“Right. I like it. Right, right, right.” And then, abruptly: “Listen, Paul, turn down this transfer, won’t you? Stay here with us. We need your kind of mind.”

Carpenter had never heard McCarthy plead before. But the pleasure he drew from it was followed immediately by a desolate feeling of contempt.

“I can’t, Ross. I’ve got to move along. Surely you understand that.”

“But skipper of an iceberg ship—”

“Whatever. I take what I can get.” Carpenter felt dizzy, suddenly. His eyeballs were aching. “Hey, Ross, is it okay if I go home, now? I’m dead on my feet and not worth a damn any more here today. And the crisis is over. I swear to you, it’s over. Let me go, okay?”

“Yeah,” McCarthy said, absently. “Go on home, if you need to. But if things turn back the wrong way, we’ll have to call you back in, no matter what.”

“They won’t turn back, believe me. Believe me.”

“And come in tomorrow. We’ve got to start setting things up for your replacement. Whoever that is.”

“Right. Sure.”

Carpenter staggered out of the building, masking up in the vestibule, carefully fastening his face-lung in place to shield his throat and respiratory system from the customary ambient atmospheric garbage. The sky was green and black with broad sickening stripes of dismal crud surrounding the great ugly staring eye of the sun, and the air, hot and moist, clung to the streets like a heavy furry blanket. Even through the mask, Carpenter could feel the pungent atmosphere tickling his nostrils like a fine wire probing upward. He was relieved to see a bubble-bus pull up almost immediately. Quickly Carpenter jumped aboard, shouldering in hard among the other masked figures to make a place for himself, and in ten minutes he was back in his hotel room.

He tossed his face-lung aside and threw himself down fully clothed on his bed, too wound up to go to sleep.

Some world out there, he thought. A kitchen sink full of ecological disasters falling on us for a hundred years, falling and falling and falling. Eutrophication. Red tide. Spontaneous diebacks. Outbursts of mutagenesis, just as spontaneous. Drowned coastlines. Mysterious whirlwinds and thermal upheavals. Fermenting acres of dead vegetation, killed by heatstroke and pickling now under the merciless sun. Insect hordes on the march across whole continents, gobbling everything in their way, leaving great scars across the land as the mark of their passage. A host of random environmental effects popping out all over the globe, effects whose causes were not immediately apparent any more, were in fact essentially discontinuities. The underlying damage had been well and thoroughly done a long time ago. The seeds of a continuing and constantly exfoliating disaster had been planted. And now the crop was coming up everywhere.

It was worst in the middle latitudes, the temperate zone, once so fertile. Rain almost never fell at all there now. The dying forests, the new grasslands taking over, deserts where even the grass couldn’t make it, the polar ice packs crumbling, the washed-out bright white hazy sky striped with the gaudy stains of the greenhouse pollutants, the lowlands drowning everywhere, crumbling dead buildings sticking up out of the sea. And of course there were other places where the problem was too much rain instead of not enough. Carpenter thought of that as the revenge of the rain forest: the conquest of places that once had had pleasant warm climates by unending rainfall and stifling wet heat that turned them into humidity-choked jungles, vines sprouting on freeways, monkeys and alligators migrating northward, weird tropical diseases getting loose in the cities.

It occurred to him that if he had been kidding himself about the upcoming movements of the toxic cloud and Seattle and Portland wound up getting trashed next week, McCarthy would have his neck in the noose in two minutes. A scapegoat would be needed and he would be it. And instead of moving up to the iceberg job he’d be sliding downward to some sort of menial crap in a part of the world so dreary it would make Spokane seem like a paradise.

The Company offered you lifetime employment if you toed the line, but any hint of irresponsibility, of nihilistic deviation from proper practice, and you were done for. You didn’t get fired, no: firings were very, very rare. But you lost your upward momentum, and once you did that you almost never regained it. So he had gone out on a limb a little, here. A smart slope-seeker would never have been so definite about proclaiming that a favorable shift in air patterns was in the cards: he had completely neglected to cover his ass, he realized.

But what the hell. He had faith in his prediction. You just had to go with your intuitions, sometimes.

Even so, when Carpenter turned up at the office the next day, after lying atop the bed like an off-duty zombie for twelve hours, it was with a certain apocalyptic feeling that he was going to find everybody gathered grim-faced in the doorway, waiting to truss and bind him for execution the moment he walked in. He was wrong. McCarthy was beaming from ear to ear. His eyes were aglow. He absolutely radiated warmth and pride.

“So?” Carpenter asked.

“All’s well! You were right on the target, Paul. A direct hit. A genius is what you are, man. A fucking genius, you old son of a whore! Christ, we’re going to miss you around here, aren’t we, guys? Aren’t we?”

It seemed that the weather charts had confirmed Carpenter’s intuitive conclusions. Normal cyclonic processes had finally reasserted themselves during the night and all the diabolical Midwestern sky-garbage that had been poisoning the air over the Mountain States was about to be swept back across the Continental Divide to its point of origin. McCarthy couldn’t have been happier. He said so in five or six different ways.

But there was no celebration, no champagne. McCarthy wasn’t capable of a lot of benevolence; and all too obviously he had had to work himself up with significant effort in order to manage this hearty little display of quasi-paternal delight. Almost at once the warmth drained out of him and Carpenter could see the cold anger that lay just behind it. Was it the envious anger of a stalemated and fucked-up failure over the triumphant achievement of a brilliant underling? Or just his annoyance over the defection of a valuable employee? Whatever it was, McCarthy switched modes quickly, turning chilly and brusque, and the party was over before it had begun.

Time to get back to business as usual, now.

A replacement for him, Carpenter was told, was coming in next week from Australia. Carpenter would have to do up a complete outplacement document, fully outlining the parameters of his official responsibilities here, before he would be free to make the changeover to his new job.

Fine. Fine. One outplacement document, coming right up. He set to work.

Later in the day, when McCarthy was on his lunch break, Carpenter made his first contact with the trawler-division people who were taking him on. A woman named Sanborn, Salaryman Nine at the Samurai Headquarters Pyramid in Manitoba. She had the calm, easy voice of a home-office roundeyes who knew that she had it made: quite a contrast to Ross McCarthy’s sour bilious gloom, Carpenter thought.

“You’ll have an outstanding crew,” Sanborn told him. “And the Tonopah Maru’s a fine ship, really up-to-date. She’s down in Los Angeles right now undergoing refitting at the San Pedro yards, but they’ll be bringing her up the coast around ten days from now, two weeks at the latest. What we want you to do is go down to San Francisco as soon as you’ve wrapped up everything in Spokane, do your indoctrination course, and then just hang out down there until the ship turns up. Is that all right with you?”

“I can handle it,” Carpenter said.

A few weeks of paid idleness in San Francisco? Why not? He had grown up in Los Angeles, but he had always been fond of the cooler, smaller northern city. The sea breezes, the fog, the bridges, the lovely little old buildings, the glittering blue bay—sure. Sure. He’d be glad to. Especially after Spokane. There were people he knew in Frisco, old friends, good old friends. It would be great to see them again.

An exhilarating sense of new beginnings swept through Carpenter like a cooling wind. God bless Jeannie Gabel, he thought. I owe her one, for steering me toward this gig. His first shore leave he would head off to Paris and treat her to the best dinner money could buy. Or the best he could afford, anyway.

The surge didn’t last long. Such upbeat feelings rarely did. But Carpenter relished them while they were passing through. You took what joy you could find wherever you found it. It was a tough world and getting tougher all the time.

Getting tougher all the time, yes. Ain’t it the truth.