So no unexpected panics to worry about before his eleven-o’clock meeting.
No sooner had he thought it, when the chime sounded to announce an incoming call. He sighed and tapped a button to accept.
“Clifford.”
The screen showed a momentary frenzy of color, which stabilized almost immediately into the features of a thin, pale-faced individual with thinning hair and a hawkish nose. He looked mean. Clifford groaned inwardly as he recognized the expression of pained indignation. It was Wilbur Thompson, Deputy to the Deputy Financial Controller of Math-comps and self-appointed guardian of protocol, red tape, and all things subject to proper procedures.
“You might have told me.” The voice, shrill with outrage, grated on Clifford’s ears like a hacksaw on tungsten carbide. “There was absolutely no reason for you to keep quiet about it. I would have thought that the least somebody with my responsibilities could expect would be some kind of cooperation from you people. This kind of attitude doesn’t help anybody at all.”
“Told you what?”
“You know what. You requisitioned a whole list of category B equipment despite the fact that your section is way over budget on capital procurement for the quarter, and without an SP6 clearance. When I queried it, you let me go ahead and cancel without telling me you’d gotten a priority approval from Edwards. Now the whole thing’s a mess and I’ve got everybody screaming down my throat. That’s what.”
“You didn’t query it,” Clifford corrected matter-of-factly. “You just told me I couldn’t do it. Period.”
“But . . . You let me cancel.”
“You said you had no alternative. I took your word for it.”
“You knew damn well there’d be an exception approval on file.” Thompson’s eyes were bulging as if he were about to become hysterical. “Why didn’t you mention the fact, or give me an access reference to it? How was I supposed to know that the project director had personally given it a priority 1 status? What are you trying to do, make me look like some kind of idiot or something?”
“You manage that okay without me.”
“You listen to me, you smart-assed young bastard! Do you think this job isn’t tough enough already without you playing dummy? There was no reason why I should have checked for an exception approval against that requisition. Now I’m being bawled out because the whole project’s bottlenecked. What the hell made you think I’d want to check it out?”
“It’s your job,” Clifford said dryly, and cut off the screen.
He just had time to select some of the folders lying on his desk and to turn for the door, when the chime sounded again. He cursed aloud, turned back to the terminal, and pressed the Interrogate key to obtain a preview of the caller without closing the circuit that completed the two-way channel. As he had guessed, it was Thompson again. He looked apoplectic. Clifford released the key and sauntered out into the corridor. He collected coffee from the automat area, then proceeded on to one of the graphical presentation rooms which he had already reserved for the next two hours. Since the meeting demanded his presence at ACRE that day, he thought he might as well make the most of the opportunity presented to him.
An hour later Clifford was still sitting at the operator’s console in the darkened room, frowning with concentration as he studied the array of multidimensional tensor equations that glowed at him from the opposite wall. The room was one of several specifically built to facilitate the manipulation and display of large volumes of graphical data from ACRE’s computer complex. The wall that Clifford was looking at was, in effect, one huge display screen. In levels deep below the building, the machines busied themselves with a thousand other tasks while Clifford pondered the subtle implications contained in the patterns of symbols. At length, he turned his head slightly to direct his words at the microphone grille set into the console, but without taking his eyes off the display, and spoke slowly and clearly.
“Save current screen; name file Delta Two. Retain screen modules one, two, and three; erase remainder. Rotate symmetric unit phi-zero-seven. Quantize derivative I-vector using isospin matrix function. Accept I-coefficients from keyboard two; output on screen in normalized orthogonal format.”