Opening the envelope, Maury studied its contents.
‘Can you do it?' McRae asked, presently.
Raising his head, Maury said, ‘These specifications are for a der Alte.'
‘Correct.' McRae nodded.
Then that's it, Maury realized. That's the piece of Ge knowledge; I'm now a Ge.
It's happened in an instant. I'm on the inside. Too bad Chic left; poor goddam Chic, what bad timing, bad luck, on his part. If he had stayed five minutes longer ...
‘It's been true for fifty years,' McRae said.
They were drawing him in. Making him as much a part of this as possible now.
‘Good grief,' Maury said. ‘I never guessed, watching it perform on TV, making its speeches. And here I build the damn things myself.' He was staggered.
‘Karp did a good job,' McRae said. ‘Especially on the current one, Rudi Kalbfleisch. We wondered if you'd guessed.'
‘Never,' Maury said. ‘Not one time.' Not in a million years.
‘Can you do it? Build it?'
‘Sure.' Maury nodded.
‘When will you start?'
‘Right away.'
‘Good. You realize, naturally, that initially NP men will have to be kept here, to ensure security maintenance.'
‘Okay,' Maury murmured. ‘If you have to, you have to. Listen, excuse me a moment.' He edged past them, to the door and through, to the outer office; taken by surprise they permitted him to go. ‘Miss Trupe, did you see what way Mr Strikerock went?' he asked.
‘He just drove off, Mr Frauenzimmer. Towards the autobahn I guess he went back home to The Abraham Lincoln where he lives.'
You poor guy, Maury thought. He shook his head.
The Chic Strikerock luck; still functioning. Now he began to feel elated.
This changes everything, he realized. I'm back in business; I'm caterer to the king -- or rather, I supply the White House. Same thing. Yes, it's the same thing!
He returned to his office, where McRae and the others waited; they eyed him rather darkly. ‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I was looking for my sales chief. I wanted to pull him back due to this. We won't want to take any new orders for a while, so we can be free to concentrate on this.' He hesitated. ‘As to the cost.'
‘We'll sign a contract,' Garth McRae said. ‘You'll be guaranteed your costs plus forty per cent. The Rudi Kalbfleisch we acquired for a total net sum of one billion USEA dollars, plus of course the cost of perpetual maintenance and repair since the acquisition.'
‘Oh yeah,' Maury agreed. ‘You wouldn't want it to stop working in the middle of a speech.' He tried to chuckle but found he could not.
‘How does that sound, roughly? Say between one bill and one-five.'
Maury said thickly, ‘Um, fine.' His head felt as if it were about to roll off his shoulders and plunge to the floor.
Studying him, McRae said, ‘You're a small firm, Frauenzimmer. You and I are both aware of that. Don't get your hopes up. This will not make you a big firm, such as Karp und Sohnen Werke. However, it will guarantee your continued existence; obviously we're prepared to underwrite you economically speaking for as long as is necessary.
We've gone exhaustively into your books -- does that petrify you? -- and we know that you've been operating in the red for months now.'
‘True,' Maury said.
‘But your work is good,' Garth McRae continued. ‘We've minutely inspected examples of it, both here and where it actually functions on Luna and Mars. You display authentic craftsmanship, more so, I feel, than the Karp Werke. That of course is why we're here today instead of there with Anton and old Felix.'
‘I wondered,' Maury said. So that was why the government had decided this time to let the contract to him, not Karp. He thought, did Karp build all the der Alte simulacra up to now? Good question. If this were so -- what a radical departure in government procurement policy this was! But better not to ask.
‘Have a cigar,' Garth McRae said, holding an Optimo admiral out to him. ‘Extra mild. Pure Florida leaf.'
‘Thank you.' Maury gratefully -- and fumblingly -- accepted the big greenish cigar. Both he and Garth McRae lit up, gazing at one another in what all at once had become calm, assured silence.
The news posted on The Abraham Lincoln's communal bulletin board that Duncan & Millar had been chosen by the talent scout to perform at the White House astounded Edgar Stone; he read the announcement again and again, searching for the joker in it and wondering how the little nervous, cringing man had managed to do it.
There's been cheating, Stone said to himself. Just as I passed him on his relpol tests ... he's got somebody else to falsify a few results for him along the talent line. He himself had heard the jugs; he had been present at that programme, and Duncan & Miller, Classical Jugs, simply were not that good. They were good, admittedly ... but intuitively he knew that more was involved.
Deep inside him he experienced anger, a resentment that he had ever falsified Duncan's test-score. I put him on the road to success, Stone realized; I saved him. And now he's on his way to the White House, out of here entirely.
No wonder Ian Duncan had done so poorly on his relpol test. He had been busy practising on his jug, obviously; Duncan had no time for the commonplace realities which the rest of humanity had to cope with. It must be terrific to be an artist, Stone thought with bitterness. You're exempt from all the rules and responsibilities; you can do just as you like.
He sure made a fool out of me, Stone said to himself.
Striding rapidly down the second-floor hall, Stone arrived at the office of the building skypilot; he rang the bell and the door opened, showing him the sight of the skypilot deep in work at his desk, his face wrinkled with fatigue. ‘Uh, father,' Stone said, ‘I'd like to confess. Can you spare a few minutes? It's very urgently on my mind, my sins I mean.'
Rubbing his forehead, Patrick Doyle nodded. ‘Jeez,' he murmured. ‘It either rains or it pours; I've had ten presidents in today so far, using the confessionator. Go ahead.'
He pointed wearily to the alcove which opened on to his office. ‘Sit down and plug yourself in. I'll be listening while I fill out these 4-10 forms from Berlin.'
Filled with righteous indignation, his hands trembling, Edgar Stone attached the electrodes of the confessionator to the correct spots of his scalp, and then, picking up the microphone, began to confess. The tapedrums of the machine turned slowly as he spoke. ‘Moved by a false type pity,' he said, ‘I infracted a rule of this building. But mainly I am concerned not with the act itself but with the motives behind it; the act is merely the outgrowth of a false attitude towards my fellow residents. This individual, my neighbour Mr Ian Duncan, did poorly on his recent relpol test and I foresaw him being evicted from The Abraham Lincoln. I identified with him because subconsciously I regard myself as a failure, both as a resident of this building and as a man, so I falsified his score to indicate that he had passed. Obviously a new relpol test will have to be given to Mr Ian Duncan and the one which I scored will have to be marked void.' He eyed the skypilot, but there was no evident reaction.
That will take care of Duncan and his Classic Jug, Stone said to himself.
By now the confessionator had analysed his confession; it popped a card out, and Doyle rose to his feet to receive it.
After a long, careful scrutiny he glanced keenly up. ‘Mr Stone,' he said, ‘the view expressed here is that your confession is no confession. What do you really have on your mind? Go back and begin all over; you haven't probed down deeply enough and brought up the genuine material And I suggest you start out by confessing that you misconfessed consciously and deliberately.'