“A good thought! We’ll act on it.”
We called in Barb and Ming Po, and explained the new program to them. I was surprised that they weren’t happier about the way we’d just octtippled their salaries, retroactively to last month, but they weren’t. It was like they actually didn’t care, one way or the other.
“One other thing,” I said. “Dress codes. Anybody working down below on the plant floor is expected to wear proper safety equipment, including safety glasses, steel tipped shoes, hard hats, and sturdy garments that completely cover them. People who might occasionally need to go down there shall wear safety glasses and hard hats, at least, when they do. And people who work in an office environment must wear shoes and other clothing that completely covers at least their torsos. Anyone dressing too sexy, in our opinion, will be sent home to change. This last is for our benefit, not yours. All play and no work doesn’t get the job done.”
“Yes, Tom.”
“Good. Now, let’s go meet the managers you’ve hired for us.”
As we walked past my new secretary, I noticed that she was now properly dressed in a skirt, blouse, and sensible shoes.
I decided right off that I would stay on a last name basis with the women who worked for me, in an attempt at keeping our relationships as businesslike as possible.
I told them that they could call me “sir.”
I later noticed Ian doing the same thing, I suppose for the same reason. Something had to be done, since every woman in the shop was as beautiful as any of the women at the palaces. By ordinary American standards, they were all knockouts, each as beautiful as any leading lady that Alfred Hichcock ever put on the screen.
I soon met the five key people I had working for me. There was Kowalski, my secretary. She was one of those extremely organized people who always knows where everything and everybody is. She had two other secretaries subordinate to her.
Preston was primarily a mathematician, although she got her Ph.D. in physics. I figured that we’d be working together a lot. My math has always been a bit poor, and up until then, I’d had to ask Ian’s help when I needed to get into anything beyond calculus. Preston didn’t have a solid place in our table of organization, and her name just appeared near the top boxed in with dotted lines that didn’t connect to anyone else, not even me. She had no subordinates, but she was sort of on call to anybody who needed theoretical or mathematical help.
As the weeks went by, she got to spending much of her time at the coffee bar located between engineering and the technician’s assembly area. When I asked her about that, she said that some people were hesitant about “bothering” her in her office, and she worked better on an informal basis, anyway. Later, she admitted that the biggest reason for her new location was the two hundred pounds of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee I had donated to the bar from my palace’s stores.
DuBoise was a solid electrical engineer, and was competent and disciplined, if not overly imaginative. She did everything exactly “by the book,” and kept copious notes on everything she did. Everyone was encouraged to keep a journal of the work they did, but DuBoise filled them up at the rate of three a month. She headed a team consisting of eight other engineers, two computer programmers, and nine draftsmen.
O’Mally was an engineer, too, but of a more practical bent than DuBoise. Like me, she was of the “make it work, and fill out the paperwork later, if you have time” school of thought. She headed up a group of eighteen assorted technicians.
Brown was in charge of purchasing and liaison work with both suppliers and customers. We didn’t have a sales or marketing group, since for the foreseeable future, all of our products would be used internally within our own greater company, KMH Industries, which consisted of the entire City of Morrow, and much else, besides. Not that we planned to let any of our temporal devices get off the island.
We didn’t have an advertising group, either, since everybody on the island already knew about us.
The accounting people reported to Brown, as well, as did the janitors, for a total of twenty-one subordinates. It seemed like an odd bag, but those functions had been grouped under her, and her under me, primarily to make the size of my group the same size as Ian’s group.
Which meant that when Barb had set it up, she was thinking more about a balanced harem than of an efficient work force.
Someday, I’m going to get ahead of that little girl.
Still and all, it was a day well spent. The six of us had gotten ourselves shaken down, then, in a four hour meeting with Ian and his people, we had figured out what we had to do, and had a schedule that said when we were going to do what.
* * *
Late that night, after four new ladies (two mechanical engineers, a draftsman and a machinist with a Ph.D.—a woman also strange in other ways) had come and gone, I was alone in bed with Barb.
“Barb, you’re awake, aren’t you?” I said quietly.
“Of course, Tom.”
“I should have asked you sooner, but is it inconvenient for you to lie beside me every night while I sleep? I mean, what with you not sleeping and all. Doesn’t it get boring?”
“Not really. My mind doesn’t need to sleep, but my body still needs to rest, and if I wasn’t by your side, I’d be lying down somewhere else, alone. I like being by you, and it gives me time to think.”
“What do you think about?”
“Nothing important, usually. I go over the events of the day, and sort of mull them over. I plan the things that I’ll be doing tomorrow. That sort of thing.”
“Hmm. Well, if I ever do something that you are not happy with, be sure and tell me about it, won’t you? I want you to be happy. You’ve become a very important person to me.”
“Thank you, Tom.”
“There’s another thing that I’ve been meaning to ask you about. It’s been more than a month since that first night we spent together. At the time, you said that there was a sixty percent chance that that you had conceived a child.”
“Yes?”
“Well, have you? I mean, a month has gone by and all. Did you miss a period? Are you pregnant?”
“I am not pregnant now, Tom.”
“Oh. Okay. To be honest, I don’t know if I’m disappointed or relieved. I mean, you’d be a wonderful mother and all, but at the same time, having a child is such a huge responsibility, and I’m not sure whether or not I’m ready for it. I doubt if any man is, until after it happens to him.”
“Not being a man, I couldn’t advise you on that one, Tom.”
“True. And what’s more, I find it good that you are not a man. Good night, Barb.”
“Good night, Tom.”
I fell asleep kicking myself, because once more I had lost my nerve. I had not asked this perfect little woman to marry me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Different Kinds of Power
Tuesday being a day when Ian’s people cooked our breakfast, I met him there in his Taj Mahal.
“Tom, I’ve been playing with an idea for a logo for our new company. M and K Temporal Engineering.”
Ian was already working on his usual stack of Famo Buckwheat pancakes with Vermont maple syrup. I’d gotten into the habit of asking to be surprised with something completely different each morning, and on that particular morning I was served some poached herring, English style, she said. It seemed like a strange thing to eat for breakfast, but it didn’t taste all that bad.
“Catchy name, and I guess it’s your turn to get your name first.”
“My thought exactly. Look at these.”
I looked over the sketches he had done up, and the truth was, they were better than the usual stuff you see plastered over the world’s billboards.
“They look good to me. Better, in fact, than anything I could come up with. Only, I’ve got this one nagging question.”
My breakfast waitress was wearing a loose top of some very flexible material that covered her to American television standards when she was vertical, but fell away and exposed her torso completely when she bent over to serve me. Thus, she was able to satisfy both Ian’s desire for decorum and my own desire for lechery at the same time. I thought it an interesting engineering solution to what was essentially a social problem.
Ian said, “Yeah?”
“Do we really have a company?”
“Well, of course we’ve got a bloody company! Just where did you think you spent all day yesterday, you silly twit?”