—
The National Employment Office had never had a new building designed for it, but had from its beginnings been housed in a century-old structure whose masonry and vaulted ceilings clashed curiously with the ultramodern computer equipment that had been more recently installed. Charley had noticed the contrast on his last visit here—but he hadn't expected the janitorial equipment to match the buildings age. The sweepers, waxers, and one genuine monstrosity of a floor buffer were older than they had any right to be. Pushing them around every night was harder work than he would have guessed, and he quickly learned why these jobs changed hands so often.
The soreness generated in Charley's muscles by two nights on the job would be short-lived, though. His supervisor had already made it clear that Charley's first three-day weekend on the job would be his last. No reason aside from "unsatisfactory performance" was given, but Charley could see Director Pines's hand behind it. With the high turnover rate, Charley wouldn't have had to stick with the job more than a month or so to work his way up to field boss—a position that would give him keys to the private as well as public areas of the building. After their last encounter, Charley couldn't blame the director for not wanting that to happen. And that meant that Charley's move had to be made tonight.
"Hey, Addison," a voice came faintly over the floor buffer's roar, breaking into Charley's train of thought. Flipping the buffer off, he turned as Lanthrop, his field boss, sauntered up behind him "I hear this's your last night," Lanthrop continued when the machine's big motor had ground down far enough to permit normal conversation.
"Yep. Back on the lottery tomorrow, I guess," Charley said.
"Too bad. You're a better worker than we mostly get here. Haupt's crazy to send you back."
Charley shrugged. "That's life."
"Yeah. Hey, what say we all go out at break time; treat you to a bottle of the good stuff or something. You know, give you a proper send-off."
"Fine—but we won't have to go anywhere. I figured you guys've been such a big help to me that I owed you one. I won a bottle of the really good stuff in a bet the other day, and I brought it along tonight."
Lanthrop's eyes lit up. "Hey, that sounds great. Matter of fact, it sounds so great that I declare it to be break time right now. C'mon, let's get the others."
"I'll do that," Charley volunteered. "Why don't you go on and—um—make sure the stuffs up to your standards. It's in my locker." With a wide grin, Lanthrop winked. "Damn, but I'm gonna hate to lose you."
Charley took his time collecting the other seven custodial workers, and when they arrived downstairs they discovered Lanthrop was well ahead of them. "Great stuff, Addison—got a real kick to it!" he called cheerfully, his speech already beginning to slur.
"Sure does," Charley agreed as they all sat down around the table. It ought to, he thought wryly; the bottle had been only two-thirds full of bourbon before he'd filled it up with straight ethanol.
The other workers joined into the spirit of the occasion with remarkable speed. Passing the bottle around the circle—a method that allowed Charley to keep his own consumption to practically zero—they were soon laughing and talking boisterously, wishing Charley good luck in the days ahead. Charley joined in the laughter, and kept the bottle moving.
Lanthrop had a reasonable capacity, but with his head start he was roaring drunk before anyone else was even close, and by the time someone suggested it was time to return upstairs he was sprawled in his chair, slumbering peacefully. Assuring the others he would take care of the boss, Charley waited until they had staggered out, and then set to work. Setting Lanthrop into a more comfortable position, he relieved the field boss of his master keys, replacing them with his own public-area set to keep the loss from being too obvious. His next task took him to the main file room, where the employment records and resumes of every worker in the nation were stored on huge reels of holo-magnetic tape. This was the riskiest part of his plan—the file room connected directly to the main computer room, and the dozen or so operators on duty had a fair chance of knowing that Charley wasn't authorized in there. Fortunately, the reels he wanted were "low-use" ones stored in the racks farthest from the computer itself, and he was able to pull the three he wanted without being seen. Back out in the hall, he hid the tapes in the bottom of the garbage container on his wheeled cleaning-supplies cart and, heart pounding painfully, pushed it down the hall as casually as his shaking knees would permit.
Now came the waiting. From conversations with others, he knew that Director Pines invariably arrived early on Monday mornings, usually before the night shift was due to check out. If Charley's luck held, this would be one of those mornings.
—
It was.
Pines was four steps into his office before he noticed Charley sitting quietly by the wall. "Who are you?" he asked, stopping abruptly, apparently too startled for the moment to be angry.
Charley remained seated. "I'm Charles Addison. We met a couple of weeks ago."
The mental wheels visibly clicked into place. "Why, you—you—" he sputtered. "Get the hell out of my office—you hear me? Now!" He stepped forward menacingly.
"Before you do anything drastic," Charley suggested, "you ought to take a look over there in the corner."
Pines came to an abrupt halt. "My tapes!" he exclaimed, the first hint of uneasiness creeping through his anger. "What are you doing with them?"
"Engaging in an old custom called blackmail," Charley told him, glancing at the pile. It was an unusual sight, he had to admit: three tape reels—minus their protective casings—stacked neatly beneath the old floor buffer. "Magnetic tapes have come a long way in fifty years, especially in storage density, but they still have an unavoidable weakness: they're susceptible to strong electromagnetic fields. That thing on top is an old electric floor buffer. It packs a huge electric motor."
Pines understood, all right. Already his eyes were flickering between the tapes and Charley, clearly wondering whether he could beat Charley to the buffer's switch. He was bracing himself to charge when Charley raised his hand, showing the director that he held the machine's plug. "The buffer's switched on already," he explained. "All I have to do is plug it in. You can't possibly reach either the tapes or me before they're ruined, so you might as well sit down and relax."
"You're insane," Pines muttered as he sank into a nearby chair. "You can get twenty years for sabotaging government property like this."
"So far nothing's been damaged," Charley assured him. "You're right, of course, I'll be in big trouble if I plug this in. But have you considered what'll happen to you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Your security's gotten pretty lax. I got into the file room without any trouble, picked up these tapes, and just walked out with them. That's going to make your department look pretty bad."
"You couldn't have taken them out of the building, though—there's an alarm- trigger built into each of the reels."
"Oh? I didn't know that. But that hasn't prevented me from threatening them here in the building itself. I wonder what your bosses at the Labor Department are going to say."
Pines was beginning to look worried, but he still had plenty of fight left in him. "They won't say much. The tapes you've got can be reconstructed, surely. No security system is perfect—they know that. You're the one in trouble, not me."
"I'm sure most tapes would be easy to reconstruct," Charley nodded. "With the job market shifting so often, I imagine ninety percent of your master tapes are duplicated at any given time in the thousands of temporary bubble storages you've got in the local offices around the country. But I'll bet that some of the files on these three aren't. Don't you want to know which tapes I've got here?"