Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

XIX

Rob sometimes got mail from other people who lived in this cut-off chunk of Maine. There were occasional fan letters. Flounders, he and his bandmates called those, from the line in Rocky and Bullwinkle: “Fan mail… from a flounder.” There were also occasional invitations to play, sometimes even offering money or other interesting inducements.

Mail from the rest of the United States came rarely enough to make him open his eyes wide when it did. The last time he’d heard from his father was the letter letting him know he had a new half-sister. Dad had never been one for Christmas or even birthday cards. Idle chatter wasn’t his style, any more than it was Rob’s.

But here was another letter in his small, neat script. Here at last: by the California postmark, it had been a month on the road. The Pony Express could have got it here faster—unless the ponies died of HPO trying to cross what had been the Great Plains and was now the Great Eruption Zone. The stamp said FOREVER + 2 and SUPERVOLCANO RELIEF. That didn’t mean it was good forever and two days. It meant you paid first-class postage plus two bucks, and the two did what they could to help the cleanup.

Dear Rob, the letter said, I have joined your club, and if it weren’t for the honor of the thing I would rather walk. A punk with an AK put a round through my shoulder. Not the arm I eat and write and shake it off with, but even so not a whole bunch of fun. The punk is dead, and I don’t miss him a bit.

“I bet you don’t!” Rob said. Dad had never been one for wasting sentiment on crooks—few cops were—and he really wouldn’t waste any on somebody who’d come too close to punching his ticket for good.

So I am on the shelf right now, his father continued. I stay home and I get in Kelly’s way and I read Deborah stories. I make sure she sits on my right side so she doesn’t jostle the other shoulder. It may not matter. I’ve got plenty of plaster and fiberglass armor. I mostly sleep on my back on the recliner in my work niche.

“Ouch!” Rob exclaimed. He hadn’t thought about how awkward a cast there would make lying down or rolling over.

When the cast comes off, I will start going to physical therapy, Dad wrote. That is supposed to be even less fun than going to the dentist (Kelly’s father would kill me if he read this). The dentist numbs you up first. With the physical therapist, it’s supposed to hurt. But I need to do it if I’m going to get any use out of the arm. Some would be good.

“No shit,” Rob agreed aloud. The drummer in—was it Def Leppard?—had lost an arm in a car crash or something. He’d fixed up his kit so he could do amazing things with foot pedals, but it wasn’t the same. You came equipped with a right and a left for good reason.

I may need more surgery, too. Whether I do, and how much I get back, will all figure in to when I go back to work—and if I go back, Dad finished. I have more than enough time served to retire if I want to. That would be one thing. Retiring because I have to would be something else, something I don’t like so much. But I may not have a choice. Hope you are doing well. If you get close to e-mail or if you find a camera and film for it, send me photos of Lindsey and little Colin. I already know what you look like. Love anyway, Dad.

Rob read through it again, shaking his head. It sure as hell sounded like his old man, all right. And, knowing his father, he feared he knew how much Dad wasn’t saying. How bad did the wound hurt? How worried was Dad that he wouldn’t get back much function in the arm? Both ways, probably more than he was letting on.

Lindsey was at the high school. How much use for chemistry kids here would ever have was another interesting question. But this technically was still part of the USA. They might move to some place where knowing such things mattered. And going to school got them out of their parents’ hair for a while.

Little Colin would have been in Rob’s hair right this minute, since he was playing househusband. But the kid was down for a nap, so Rob could make like a grownup. Only there wasn’t much to do. No TV. No radio, not when he was low on batteries. No Net. It was quiet quiet quiet. He was trying to get his hands on a spring-powered record player and some records to play on it. That would, or at least might, be better than nothing.

Meanwhile… Meanwhile, it was as nice a day as Guilford had seen since the eruption. The sun shone. Much of the snow had melted. Grass and even a few flowers were trying to grow. It was in the fifties—beach weather, the way things were these days. It probably wouldn’t get down to forty tonight, either.

All over Guilford, people with vegetable plots and greenhouses would be cheering for the good weather to go on. The longer it did, the better the chance their vegetables had of maturing. Rob cheered for the good weather even though he didn’t have a plot. The more veggies there were, the better the odds of getting through the next grim winter would be.

When Maine north and west of the Interstate was just an amusing outlier, the rest of the country could afford to throw it a bone during the short stretch of time when the roads opened up. Now the whole Northeast was in trouble: the really densely populated part of the USA. Who would bother remembering the handful of people up here?

After a while, little Colin woke up. Rob changed his diaper. The fresh one, like the wet one it replaced, was cloth. Pampers didn’t get up here, nor had they for quite a while. He’d got pretty good with safety pins. He’d stuck himself a fair number of times, but the baby only once.

When his son was dry, Rob carried him and the letter over to the Trebor Mansion Inn. His bandmates had met his dad back in the days before the eruption, but all they would do now was make Oh, wow! noises. He hoped for more from Dick Barber. No guarantees, but he hoped. Dick was ex-military himself, and was within shouting distance of Rob’s father’s age. He reminded Rob of his dad, too, maybe more than Rob realized with the top part of his head.

He was chopping wood when Rob got there: chopping wood without a shirt on, as a matter of fact. “Showoff!” Rob called. It wasn’t all that warm. One of the Maine Coon cats the folks at the Inn bred also watched in disapproval—though more, Rob judged, from the scary noises than from the sight of a bare-chested Dick Barber. Dick was lean and fit these days. Most people around here were. Surplus calories didn’t grow on trees any more.

“As long as I keep working, it’s not bad,” Dick said. “Since I’m not…” He pulled on a sweatshirt. “What’s up?” Rob showed him the letter. Barber held it out at arm’s length to read it. “Good God! At least they got the bastard with the Kalashnikov.”

“Yeah. But that doesn’t do Dad a whole lot of good,” Rob said.

“True. At least it was an AK-47, not a more modern military piece with a small-caliber round and a really high muzzle velocity,” Barber said. “Some of those, the shock of a hit can kill even when the wound itself might not.”

“Happy day!” Rob exclaimed.

“I know.” Dick skimmed through the letter again. “Your dad sounds like someone with his head on tight. If he does have to retire, my guess would be that he’d be able to find something interesting to do with his time, not just sit around and wait to die of boredom.” He reached out and gently touched little Colin on the end of the nose with his right index finger. “Not easy to be bored when you’ve got a small child in the house, is it?”

“Now that you mention it,” Rob said, “no.”

“That should help,” Barber said. “If he were a certain kind of man, he might make some money by writing a book about what led to unmasking the South Bay Strangler. But, from things you’ve said, he’s not that kind of man, is he?”

“Now that you mention it,” Rob repeated, “no.” He got a chuckle from the proprietor of the Mansion Inn. His father was about as far from being that kind of man as anyone could get. If a person could be aggressively private, that was Dad. And Rob gave Dick Barber points for seeing as much.

“With the weather this good, you might want to think about going down to Newport or over to Bangor to see if you can find a working phone line and call California,” Dick said.

“There’s an idea.” It was one that hadn’t occurred to Rob. The twenty-first century, or some of it, was only a couple of days’ travel away. He would have to find a pay phone, of course, or someone whose cell he could borrow. Even if he could charge his old one, he hadn’t paid a bill for years. No cell-phone company would keep anybody on the books for that long. He wouldn’t have himself. “I may do that before it starts snowing again.”

“Bite your tongue,” Dick said, so Rob did. The older man laughed. Little Colin didn’t know what was funny, but he laughed, too. Rob sketched a salute and turned to go. Dick Barber returned it with, well, military precision.

When Lindsey got back from the high school, Rob showed her the letter, too. She made horrified noises, which was reasonable enough. “Do you want to fly back and see him?” she asked. “The airport at Bangor should be open.”

“Umm…” he said.

“Oh,” his wife replied.

“Yeah.”

He could scrape together enough cash for a phone call. For airfare? Not likely, and the airlines didn’t run on barter. His credit cards were at least as expired as his cell phone. So was his driver’s license, come to that—and the clean-shaven guy on it bore little resemblance to the shaggy fellow he’d become. Even if he could have paid for a ticket, with that for an ID they might not have let him on the plane.

He shook his head, marveling. “I don’t belong to that world any more. Nobody in Guilford does, or in Dover-Foxcroft, or Greenville, or… anywhere up here. It is what it is, and we are what we are, and what we are is on the outside. If we got connected up again, the first thing the Feds would do was charge everybody with tax evasion. Most people would lose their houses, too—who’s sent mortgage money to Chase every month?”

“Nobody,” Lindsey said.

“You got that right,” Rob agreed. “Maybe over the weekend, though, I will hop on my bike and go to Newport and see if I can make like ET and phone home. Lord! I wonder if I still know the number!”

“If you think you can get back by six Monday morning, you should go,” Lindsey said. But it had started raining by the weekend, so he didn’t. He wrote a letter instead.

When Bryce Miller walked into his apartment, Susan pointed to a fat envelope on the kitchen table and said, “Looks like your article’s finally in print.”

“Woohoo!” he said, and tore the envelope open. Sure enough, inside were two copies of The Journal of Hellenic Studies with his comparative analysis of the prosody of three of Theocritus’ pastorals. One copy would go on the brag shelf that housed his and Susan’s scholarly publications and the little magazines that had printed a handful of his poems.

The other copy, he would send to his mother in California. She had a brag shelf of her own, one she used to impress her relatives and the neighbors. The article would be Greek to her in more ways than one. She wouldn’t care. It was a sign that Bryce was doing well for himself. She would care about that.

Bryce cared about that, too. Publishing articles was one of the hoops you had to jump through to win tenure. That this one made a Congressional budget report seem exciting by comparison, that perhaps three dozen scholars in the whole world would give a flying fuck about what he was saying… Next to jumping through the hoops, those were details.

“Anything else in the mail?” he asked.

“Utility bill.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Unh-unh. And it’ll get worse with fall coming on and winter right behind.”

“Yeah, I know. Well, we’re still here.” He’d walked away from a secure job at the Department of Water and Power to teach Latin at a Catholic high school in the San Fernando Valley for a lot less money. He’d left that job to teach at a college in rural Nebraska. If he’d worried about getting rich, he never would have spent so much time memorizing irregular Greek verbs.

Susan had encouraged him to bail from the DWP. She’d married him while he was getting on people’s cases—especially the ablative—teaching Latin. She’d come to Nebraska with him, and if that wasn’t love, what the hell would be? She’d finished her own thesis while she was here. She’d looked for a job of her own, and looked, and looked.

She was still looking. People cared no more about the Holy Roman Empire than they did about Hellenistic poetry. By all the signs, they cared even less.

Or maybe that wasn’t fair. Bryce had landed the Wayne State job by luck: good luck for him, bad luck for the previous holder. Professor Smetana, who had been teaching here, died of lung disease brought on by breathing crud from the supervolcano eruption. He’d been one of several hundred thousand—no, probably over a million by now. The list got longer every day, and would keep getting longer for years to come.

Do I want Susan to get a job enough that I want somebody to die so she can? Bryce wondered. Put that way, the answer had to be no. But if someone who held a job that Susan could land did die, he wanted her to land it. She wasn’t one to put on a big show when things bothered her, but living here and living here and not getting a job and not getting a job was wearing on her. Had worn on her, in fact.

“Honey?” he said.

“What?”

“Do you want to move back to L.A. at the end of the academic year?” There. He’d said it.

She looked at him. “And do what?”

“I don’t know. Whatever. I’d find something, and so would you. You’d be a lot happier than you are here.”

“Don’t be dumb. Don’t be dumber than you can help, anyhow,” Susan said. “I’ll be okay. And you’re only a couple of years away from tenure. You want to throw that away because I’ve got a case of the blahs?”

At least she admitted she had them, which probably meant she had them bad. Most of the time, she denied everything. “No, I don’t want to do that,” Bryce answered. “But I don’t want to come back from campus one day and find a note on the kitchen table and you gone, either. That’s more important, as far as I’m concerned. Colin had that happen to him about the time Vanessa didn’t want me around any more.”

“Well, I’m damn glad she didn’t, because I like having you around,” Susan said. “And I’m not going anywhere, thank you very much. Except to the bathroom.” When she came back, she asked, “How’s Colin doing, anyway?”

“Last time I talked to him was about a week ago.” Bryce was willing to change the subject. If Susan said she wasn’t going anywhere, she wasn’t. It was when she didn’t say anything that you had to worry. He went on, “He says they’ll take the cast off pretty soon. He’s righteously ready for them to do that. He says he hasn’t been able to scratch where it itches since he got shot.”

“I believe that,” Susan said. “I broke my wrist when I was, I dunno, eight or nine. Fell off my bike—lucky I didn’t break my neck. It was summer, and it was hot. The itching and the sweating drove me nuts.” After a moment, she added, “I guess he doesn’t need to worry about sweating so much, even in L.A.”

“No kidding!” Bryce had learned about the shooting in a laconic note. He won’t shoot anybody else, Colin wrote. No thanks to me, but he won’t. That was very much his style. You knew police officers could find themselves in danger, but you didn’t think it would ever happen to anyone you knew. In all the time Bryce knew him, Colin had never fired his gun in anger. From what he said about this, he had now, but it hadn’t done him any good.

Then Susan said, “Tell you what—let’s see where we are at the end of the year. Maybe we’ll talk about it some more. Or maybe I’ll find something. Or—what’s that line you use?—maybe the horse will learn to sing. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“That’s it,” Bryce agreed. “Huzzah for old Herodotus!” So things weren’t even slightly good, then. He liked teaching at a college. He liked being married, too. If he had to choose one or the other… He figured he could find another job a lot easier than he could find another woman crazy enough to put up with him.

“I wish I didn’t think I was casting notes into the void when I sent out applications,” Susan said. “It’s like everybody and her granny is after every job there is. And with the Northeast all screwed up, half the profs there are looking for slots in places that still have power most of the time. That only makes things worse.”

Bryce started to say there might be jobs in places like that. He swallowed it. For one thing, those universities were getting the hindest of hind tit. For another, the towns they were in were a lot worse off than Wayne, Nebraska. That BBC commentator had got it much too right. All the USA’s bills, social and economic, were coming due, and no one had anything to pay them with.

Marshall heard the car pull into the driveway. He used to take that sound for granted. Now it was something out of the ordinary. He turned to Deborah, who was building something out of the ordinary—just what, only she knew—from Duplos. “Your mom and dad are home,” he said.

She nodded. “Daddy gets his arm back today.”

“Is that what he said?”

Deborah nodded again. “That’s what he said.” By the way she answered, if Daddy said it, that made it so. There had been a good many years when Marshall was convinced that, if his father said it, that made it BS. He didn’t automatically believe that any more. He did believe his dad had a particular way of saying things. This sounded like him, all right.

The key turned in the lock. Kelly opened the door. She came in, followed by Colin Ferguson. He was out of the armor plating he’d worn since he got shot. “Do you have your arm back, Daddy?” Deborah yelled.

“Sort of,” he answered. It was in a sling. He waggled his fingers and thumb, just to show he could.

“Way to go, Dad.” Marshall meant it. Even with a long sleeve covering his father’s left arm, it looked thinner than the right. Well, fair enough—it hadn’t done anything for a while.

“Power’s still working, right?” Dad asked. When Marshall nodded, his father went on, “Oh, good. First thing I need to do is scrub this poor hunk of dead meat with a wire brush. I’ve got all those weeks’ worth of dirt and sweat and dead skin under the cast. It’s grotty to the max. Past the max. So I’m heading for the shower.” He started upstairs, toward the bathroom off the master bedroom.

“Hang on to the banister,” Kelly said sternly.

Dad started to come back with something snarky. He started to, but he didn’t finish. Instead, he took a firm grip on the metal banister with his good hand. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and up he went. He would have sassed Marshall’s mother; Marshall was sure of it. How did Kelly get him to behave himself? However she managed, Marshall wondered whether they could bottle it. If they could, world peace would break out day after tomorrow.

The water in that upstairs bathroom started to run. When it stopped, Kelly said, “I’ll go up there and give him some help. He didn’t have an easy time putting on his shirt after they removed the cast. He can do things with his hand, but the arm isn’t much more than a deadweight. They said it would get better once he starts putting some strength in again.”

She hurried upstairs herself. By the way she talked, she was trying to convince herself along with Marshall. She wanted to believe everything would get back to the way it was before Dad got hurt.

People all over the country—hell, people all over the world—wanted to believe everything would get back to the way it was before the supervolcano erupted. And people in hell wanted mint juleps to drink. Satan wasn’t running the julep concession. The country and the world wouldn’t get back to normal for nobody knew how many years. Next to those two, the chances for Dad’s arm seemed pretty decent.

He and Kelly came down again. “Better?” Marshall asked.

“Better, yeah. Not good yet, but better,” Dad said. “It’s—a process. I scraped off the outer layers of crud, so the arm’s not as rank. Next time, I go after more of the onion.”

“You’ve got an onion on your arm, Daddy? Yuck!” Deborah said.

“I sure do, sweetie. I’ve got potatoes in my head, too,” Dad answered. That was what he called looking for a word but not being able to find it. He struck a pose, as well as he could with his bad arm back in the sling. “I’m a regular vegetable garden, I am.”

“You’re silly, you are,” his daughter said.

“Well, that, too.” He went over to her and ruffled her hair. When he looked up, he said, “Feels funny not having all that weight on my left side. I leaned away from it to keep my balance. Now I’m like this.” He mimed someone leaning back and to the right and about to topple over.

“Like not having your land legs after you’ve been at sea for a long time,” Marshall suggested.

“Just like that!” Dad sent him an admiring glance. He felt good—he didn’t win them that often. Dad went on, “You ought to be a writer or something.”

“Or something,” Marshall echoed. “Would be nice if I could make a living at it, or even come close. Janine’s making noises like I ought to get a real job.”

Playboy wandered into the front room. Here were a bunch of people who knew him. Obviously, they’d gathered together for no other purpose than stuffing him full of kitty treats. What else were humans good for? God had given them thumbs so they could open the packages He magically provided. Playboy stropped the ankles of each of them in turn. He purred like far-off thunder. The better his routine, the more he got fed.

Marshall petted Playboy but didn’t reach for the goodies. He wished they hadn’t named the cat after his big sale. Every time he saw the fuzzy beast, he got reminded he hadn’t made another big sale any time lately.

“Can I, Mommy?” Deborah asked.

“Okay, but only two,” Kelly said. Deborah fed Playboy. He inhaled the treats and then beat it. Now that the humans had done what he wanted, he didn’t need them any more. Till the next time.

“What kind of real job would you get?” Dad asked.

“She’s talking about something in, like, advertising,” Marshall said. “By now, I’ve sold enough stuff that I’ve got kind of a résumé.”

“Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you?” Dad said thoughtfully. When he looked at a problem, he eyeballed it carefully and from all sides. He looked at it like a cop working on a case, in other words. “Job market’s not what you’d call great, but selling a bunch of stories could make you stick out—and that’s what you want. Nothing wrong with a regular paycheck, either.”

“I know.” Marshall also knew he wouldn’t have passed his thirtieth birthday without ever getting one if not for the kindness of family and lover. Even so… “I’d rather go on doing what I’ve been doing.”

“If you’re gonna do that, you’ve got to find a way to make it pay more,” Dad said.

“We talked about novels a while ago,” Kelly said. “Novels pay better than short stories, huh?”

They had indeed talked about them. Marshall had thought about tackling one more than once, in fact. Every time he did, the amount of work involved, and the effort to keep all his balls in the air and make everything come out the way he wanted it to, scared him too much to let him keep going. So he said, “Yeah, they do,” and left it there.

“You’ve got some chops now,” Dad observed. “When you try to sell a novel, you can say you’ve had stories here and there and in Playboy. You’re not Joe Shmo who doesn’t necessarily know the alphabet all the way through.”

“I guess,” Marshall said. He’d still be trying to crawl out of the primordial slush pile. But his father had a point. He wouldn’t be bubbling up from the reeking ooze at the bottom of that pile.

“And,” Kelly said shrewdly, “if you can sell a novel or two, it may keep you from trying to write chewing-gum ads or whatever.”

Somebody had to write chewing-gum ads. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any. What would happen to chewing gum then? No one wanted to find out. But Marshall would have bet that whoever did write those ads didn’t come home from the office feeling proud of himself for having done something cool every day. More likely, the guy gulped a slug of Old Overshoes and figured Well, okay, two more weeks and we can afford to fix the roof.

Next to that existential—not despair, but resignation, which might have been worse—wasn’t the fear of jumping in over your head by starting a novel a small thing? Mm, not a small thing, but a smaller thing? “Mm, maybe,” Marshall said, as much to himself as to his father and stepmom.

When Vanessa got to the bus to head for another delightful day at the widget works, the driver handed her a small sheet of paper. He had a little pile of them near the fare box; he was giving one to everybody who boarded.

Vanessa sat down in the first empty seat and read hers. Due to budget constraints, the number of buses traveling each route on a daily basis must be reduced. Effective November 15, the following schedule for this route will be implemented. If this is impactful on your commute, the inconvenience is apologized for. Should more funding become available, we will attempt to facilitate a restoration of service.

Calling the writing wretched gave it the benefit of the doubt. The bureaucrat who’d cranked it out must have grown up without a native language. If Vanessa thought that was bad, she let out a yelp of pure horror when she looked at the new schedule. Seeing the Mummy or the Wolfman couldn’t have dismayed her nearly so much.

This bus got her to work about a quarter past eight, which was okay. After November 15, it would go the way of the dodo and of Yellowstone National Park, though less spectacularly than the latter. There would be one that got her to work a little before seven, and one that got her there going on ten. No happy medium.

“Man, this sucks!” That wasn’t her; it was the African-American woman who’d got on right after her. But she couldn’t have put it better herself.

Several people swore at the driver. “It ain’t my fault,” he said. “They gonna cut my pay, too, on account of I ain’t drivin’ as much.”

“That’s terrible! You ought to sue them,” Vanessa exclaimed. She leaped as passionately into causes as she did into everything else.

“Not me. I ain’t suin’ nobody.” The driver shook his head. “I got two little kids. Ain’t gonna do nothin’ to mess with my job, not when I got them rugrats to feed.” Vanessa had no answer to that. She thought children were a ball and chain, but she didn’t suppose the bus driver would want to hear her say so.

When she got to the widget works, she showed Mr. Gorczany the bus-schedule change sheet. “Can I change my hours so I can still ride in?” she asked. “Earlier or later—whichever you’d rather.”

Her boss pooched out his lower lip like a spoiled little boy. “That would be inconvenient, because you wouldn’t be interfacing with the rest of the staff as much,” he said.

She hadn’t thought anyone used that stupid piece of jargon any more. She’d underestimated him. “I don’t think I’ll be the only one the new schedule affects,” she answered. Try as she might, she couldn’t make herself say impacts, much less impactful.

“Well, let’s examine some alternative choices,” Nick Gorczany said redundantly. “Could you drive in?”

That was straightforward enough. It was also more than clueless enough. “Could you double my pay?” Vanessa blurted. He still tooled around in his BMW. Did he think everybody else was made of money, too?

“No,” he said, which was also straightforward enough. “Could you ride a bicycle? Most people seem to have bicycles these days.”

“I have a bike. I could ride it in, I guess, but it would be a pain,” Vanessa said. “I don’t live real close to here. That’s why I take the bus.”

“Well, let’s see what we can work out. I don’t want to inconvenience you too much, but I don’t want to impair our efficiency, either,” he said. The haggle that followed would have made a secondhand-parts dealer in Lagos jealous. They finally agreed she would ride her bike Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of one week and Tuesday and Thursday of the next, taking the bus and coming in early on the days when she didn’t ride. It was a fifty-fifty split between what she wanted and what he wanted, in other words.

She supposed she ought to thank her lucky stars she’d got that much. She thought about asking him if she could adjust things when it rained, but decided not to. If she walked in dripping wet one morning, that might flick his conscience—assuming he owned such a critter.

Back at her desk, she worked out some of her anger at the transit district and at Nick Gorczany by eviscerating a proposal the company was getting ready to submit. She had a red pen run dry in the middle of her edit. She pulled out another one and kept on cutting. The engineers who’d drooled the first draft onto paper would turn fourteen different shades of puce. She didn’t care. This was what Mr. Gorczany paid her—not enough—to do.

If they wanted to take it to the boss, she also didn’t care. If he backed them and the widget works blew the contract as a result, she didn’t care much about that, either.

Or maybe she did. Because if that happened, what would they do? Blame her for not editing well enough. Of course they would—otherwise they’d have to blame themselves, and what were the odds of that?

The power was on, which was good. She took the edited draft to the copier and made a set for herself. Only after she’d preserved (and stashed) a record of what she’d done did she return the draft to the engineers who’d produced it. Sure enough, they bleated like sheep being sheared.

“If you’d written it in English the first time, it wouldn’t look like this now,” she said.

“Did you have to do all that?” one of them asked unhappily.

“No. I could have left it alone,” she answered. “The agency with the funding would have laughed its ass off if I had, but why worry about things like that?”

She hoped they would try to argue grammar with her. They’d grown leery of trying that; she won easily but not graciously. One of them plucked up his courage if not his common sense and asked, “What’s wrong with this? The spellchecker didn’t mind it.”

“That’s because the spellchecker is a moron.” Vanessa didn’t say and so are you, but the suggestion was there. “You wrote ‘We are lead to propose the following goals and objectives.’ Never mind the passive. Never mind the clunky structure. The present tense of the verb is l-e-a-d, pronounced leed. The past tense is l-e-d, pronounced led. L-e-a-d, pronounced led, is the metal that anyone who thinks it’s the past tense of l-e-a-d, pronounced leed, has between his ears instead of brains.”

“You’re not a good team player.” If the engineer couldn’t come down on her for being wrong, he’d come down on her for being right.

“If I were playing on a good team, I would be,” she answered, and walked away. If they fixed things, fine. If not, tough titty.

An hour or so later, Nick Gorczany stopped at her desk. “Try to work on your attitude,” he said. “Try.”

“When they defend the indefensible, it pisses me off,” she answered.

“Try anyway,” Mr. Gorczany said. “You know the old saying about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

“I was trying to get rid of the flies,” Vanessa answered. Her boss rolled his eyes and went off to share old sayings with somebody else. That suited her fine.