When Cyril came looking for him to him the Directors desired his presence, it was dark and Shaffery felt like hell.
Coomray Hill was no taller than a small office building, but it got the mirror away from most of the sea-level dampness. The observatory sat on top of the hill like a mound of pistachio ice cream, hemispheric green copper roof and circular walls of green-painted plaster. Inside, the pedestal of the telescope took up the center of the floor. The instrument itself was traversed as low as it would go any more, clearing enough space for the Directors and their gear. They were all there, looking at him with silent distaste as he came in.
The inner sphere of the dome was painted (by Cyril’s talented half-sister) with a large map of Mars, showing Schiaparelli’s famous canals in resolute detail; a view of the Bay of Naples from the Vomero, with Vesuvius gently steaming in the background; and an illuminated drawing of the constellation Scorpius, which happened to be the sign of the constellation under which the Chairman of the Board had been born. A row of card tables had been lined up and covered with a green cloth. There were six places set, each with ashtray, note pad, three sharpened pencils, ice, glass, and bottle of John Begg. Another row of tables against the wall held the antipasto, replenished by Cyril after the depredations of the night before, but now seriously depleted by the people for whom it was intended. Six cigars were going and a couple of others were smoldering in the trays. Shaffery tried not to breathe. Even with the door open and the observing aperture in the dome wide, the inside air was faintly blue. At one time Shaffery had mentioned diffidently what the deposit of cigar smoke did to the polished surface of the 22-inch mirror. That was at his first annual meeting. The Chairman hadn’t said a word, just stared at him. Then he nodded to his right-hand man, a Mr. DiFirenzo, who had taken a packet of Kleenex out of his pocket and tossed it to Shaffery. “So wipe the goddamn thing off,” he had said. “Then you could dump these ashtrays for us, okay?”
Shaffery did his best to smile at his Directors. Behind him he was conscious of the presence of their assistants, who were patrolling the outside of the observatory in loose elliptical orbits, perigeeing at the screen door to peer inside. They had studied Shaffery carefully as he came across the crunching shell of the parking lot, and under their scrutiny he had decided against detouring by way of the staff toilet, which he now regretted.
“Okay, Shaffery,” said Mr. DiFirenzo, after glancing at the Chairman of the Board. “Now we come to you.”
Shaffery clasped his hands behind him in his Einstein pose and said brightly, “Well, it has been a particularly productive year for the observatory. No doubt you’ve seen my reports on the Leonid meteorite count and—”
“Right,” said Mr. DiFirenzo, “but what we been talking about here is the space shots. Mr. Nuccio has expressed his views that this is a kind of strategic location, like how they shoot the rockets from Cape Kennedy. They have to go right over us, and we want a piece of that.”
Shaffery shifted his weight uneasily. “I discussed that in my report last year—”
“No, Shaffery. This year, Shaffery. Why can’t we get some of that federal money, like for tracking, for instance?”
“But the position hasn’t changed, Mr. DiFirenzo. We don’t have the equipment, and besides NASA has its own—”
“No good, Shaffery. You know how much you got out of us for equipment last year? I got the figures right here. And now you tell us you don’t have what we need to make a couple bucks?”
“Well, Mr. DiFirenzo, you see, the equipment we have is for purely scientific purposes. For this sort of work you need quite different instruments, and actually—”
“I don’t want to hear.” DiFirenzo glanced at the Chairman and then went on. “Next thing, what about that comet you said you were going to discover?”
Shaffery smiled forgivingly. “Really, I can’t be held accountable for that. I didn’t actually say we’d find one. I merely said that the continuing search for comets was part of our basic program. Of course, I’ve done my very best to—”
“Not good enough, Shaffery. Besides your boy here told Mr. Nuccio that if you did find a comet you wouldn’t name it the Mr. Carmine J. Nuccio Comet like Mr. Nuccio wanted.”
Shaffery was going all hollow inside, but he said bravely, “It’s not wholly up to me. There’s an astronomical convention that the discoverer’s name goes on—”
“We don’t like that convention, Shaffery. Three, now we come to some really bad things, that I’m sorry to hear you’ve got yourself into, Shaffery. We hear you been talking over the private affairs of this institution and Mr. Nuccio with that dickhead Nesbit. Shut, Shaffery,” the man said warningly as Shaffery started to open his mouth. “We know all about it. This Nesbit is getting himself into big trouble. He has said some very racist things about Mr. Nuccio on that sideshow of his on the TV, which is going to cost him quite a bundle when Mr. Nuccio’s lawyers get through with him. That is very bad, Shaffery, and also, four, there is this thing.”
He lifted up what had seemed like a crumpled napkin in front of his place. It turned out that it was covering what looked like a large transistor radio.
Shaffery identified it after a moment’s thought; he had seen it before, in Larry Nesbit’s possession. “It’s a tape recorder,” he said.
“Right on, Shaffery. Now the question is, who put it in here? I don’t mean just left it here like you could leave your rubbers or something, Shaffery. I mean left it here with one of those trick switches, so it was going when a couple of our associates checked the place out and found it under the table.”
Shaffery swallowed very hard, but even so his voice sounded unfamiliar to him when he was able to speak. “I—I assure you, Mr. DiFirenzo! I had nothing to do with it.”
“No, Shaffery, I know you didn’t, because you are not that smart. Mr. Nuccio was quite upset about this illegal bugging, and he has already made some phone calls and talked to some people, and we have a pretty good idea of who put it there, and he isn’t going to have what he thinks he’s going to have to play on his TV show. So here it is, Shaffery. Mr. Nuccio doesn’t find your work satisfactory here, and he is letting you go. We got somebody else coming down to take over. We’d appreciate it if you could be out by tomorrow.”
There are situations in which there is not much scope for dignity. A man in his middle fifties who has just lost the worst job he ever had has few opportunities for making the sort of terminal remark that one would like to furnish one’s biographers.
Shaffery discovered that he was worse off than that; he was frankly sick. The turmoil in his belly grew. The little saliva pumps under his tongue were flooding his mouth faster than he could swallow, and he knew that if he didn’t get back to the staff toilet very quickly he would have another embarrassment to add to what was already an overwhelming load. He turned and walked away. Then marched. Then ran. When he had emptied himself of everything in belly, bladder and gut he sat on the edge of the toilet seat and thought of the things he could have said: “Look, Nuccio, you don’t know anything about science.” “Nuccio, Schiaparelli was all wrong about the canals on Mars.” It was too late to say them. It was too late to ask the questions that his wife would be sure to ask, about severance pay, pension, all the things that he had been putting off getting in writing. (“Don’t worry about that stuff, Shaffery, Mr. Nuccio always takes care of his friends but he don’t like to be aggravated.”) He tried to make a plan for his future, and failed. He tried even to make a plan for his present. Surely he should at least call Larry Nesbit, to demand, to complain, and to warn (“Hist! The tape recorder has been discovered! All is lost! Flee!”), but he could not trust himself so far from the toilet. Not at that exact moment. And a moment later it was too late. Half an hour later, when one of the orbiting guards snapped the little lock and peered inside, the man who might have been Einstein was lying on the floor with his trousers around his knees, undignified, uncaring and dead.