“Preferably and, ah, yes.”
“You have a full manual license?” The blonde operated unseen keys
as she spoke.
“Yes.”
“Could I have personal data and account-checking data, please?”
Gray had extracted the card from his wallet while the exchange was
taking place. He inserted it into a slot set to one side of the
screen, and touched a key.
The blonde consulted other invisible oracles. “Okay,” she
pronounced. “Any other pilots?”
“One. A Dr. V. Hunt.”
“His personal data?”
Gray took Hunt’s already proffered card and substituted it for his
own. The ritual was repeated. The face then vanished to be replaced
by a screen of formatted text with entries completed in the boxes
provided.
“Would you verify and authorize, please?” said the disembodied
voice from the grille. “Charges are shown on the right.”
Gray cast his eye rapidly down the screen, grunted, and keyed in a
memorized sequence of digits that was not echoed on the display.
The word POSITIVE appeared in the box marked “Authorization.” Then
the clerk reappeared, still smiling.
“When would you want to collect, Mr. Gray?” she asked.
Gray turned toward Hunt.
“Do we want lunch at the airport first?”
Hunt grimaced. “Not after that party last night. Couldn’t face
anything.” His face took on an expression of acute distaste as he
moistened the inside of the equine rectum he had once called a
mouth. “Let’s eat tonight somewhere.”
“Make it round about eleven thirty hours,” Gray advised. “It’ll be
ready.”
“Thanks, Sue.”
“Thank you. Good-bye.”
“Bye now.”
Gray flipped a switch, unplugged the briefcase from the socket
built into the armrest of his seat, and coiled the connecting cord
back into the space provided in the lid. He closed the case and
stowed it behind his feet.
“Done,” he announced.
The scope was the latest in a long line of technological triumphs
in the Metadyne product range to be conceived and nurtured to
maturity by the Hunt-Gray partnership. Hunt was the ideas man,
leading something of a free-lance existence within the
organization, left to pursue whatever line of study or experiment
his personal whims or the demands of his researches dictated. His
title was somewhat misleading; in fact he was Theoretical Studies.
The position was one which he had contrived, quite deliberately, to
fall into no obvious place in the managerial hierarchy of Metadyne.
He acknowledged no superior, apart from the managing director, Sir
Francis Forsyth-Scott, and boasted no subordinates. On the
company’s organization charts, the box captioned “Theoretical
Studies” stood alone and disconnected near the inverted tree head R
& D, as if added as an afterthought. Inside it there appeared the
single entry Dr. Victor Hunt. This was the way he liked it-a
symbiotic relationship in which Metadyne provided him with the
equipment, facilities, services, and funds he needed for his work,
while he provided Metadyne with first, the prestige of retaining on
its payroll a world-acknowledged authority on nuclear
infrastructure theory, and second-but by no means least-a steady
supply of fallout.
Gray was the engineer. He was the sieve that the fallout fell on.
He had a genius for spotting the gems of raw ideas that had
application potential and transforming them into developed, tested,
marketable products and product enhancements. Like Hunt, he had
survived the mine field of the age of unreason and emerged safe and
single into his mid-thirties. With Hunt, he shared a passion for
work, a healthy partiality for most of the deadly sins to
counterbalance it, and his address book. All things considered,
they were a good team.
Gray bit his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe. He always bit
his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe when he was about to talk
shop.
“Figured it out yet?” he asked.
“This Borlan business?”
“Uh-huh.”
Hunt shook his head before lighting a cigarette. “Beats me.”
“I was thinking. . . Suppose Felix has dug up some hot sales
prospect for scopes-maybe one of his big Yank customers. He could
be setting up some super demo or something.”
Hunt shook his head again. “No. Felix wouldn’t go and screw up
Metadyne’s schedules for anything like that. Anyhow, it wouldn’t
make sense-the obvious thing to do would be to fly the people to