The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 320
Carson went to the wide, flat drawer built into the top of his triple filing cabinet and withdrew a large-scale drawing of Factory Three. As well as giving the positions of walls, partitions and storerooms it showed the power and lighting cable runs, high pressure air supplies, fire pumps and emergency exits. He studied it carefully for several minutes, looking for a good hiding place. His problem was complicated by the fact that he did not want to trap a man, just have a good look at him without the other realizing it. He replaced the drawing, looked at his watch, and began to compose a memo to the chief maintenance engineer.
In it he drew attention to the recent fire and suggested that the power, lighting and internal telephone lines in the section should be checked immediately for possible damage. He knew that if he waited until late afternoon before sending it the internal postal system would not deliver it until early next morning, so that the maintenance people could not send an electrician to check the area tonight. But the memo would have today's date on it and, if someone later became worried about lights flashing on and off all around them, it should stand up to a perfunctory investigation well enough to reassure the culprit.
The disquieting thought occurred to him that the man was not a culprit, a saboteur, or a wrong-doer of any kind. Instead he was on Carson's side, helping guard a secret so important that the chief security officer had not been made aware of it. With that thought came another which suggested that Carson had no business poking his nose into the affair and would be serving the best interests of his country and his company by letting it drop.
He did want to serve the best interests of his country, and of the company which entrusted him with its internal and external security. He knew that he was good at the job—conscientious, meticulous, exacting where even the relatively unimportant details were concerned, so much so that in certain quarters he was described as a fussy old woman. But was he considered good at his job by the people who really mattered, Carson asked himself suddenly, or merely as a nosey old woman whose curiosity about everyone and everything rendered his ability to keep his own mouth shut suspect? Was that the real reason he was being kept in the dark?
That was the most disquieting thought of all. Carson tried to force it out of his mind by concentrating on his paperwork. He was so successful in this that he could not afterwards remember the composition of the sandwiches he had had sent in at quitting time. But much later that evening, when he was sitting on a hard and very cold toolbox in Factory Three with only the top of his head showing above a nearby bench, the thought recurred. This time there was no way of avoiding it.
Either he was good at this job or he was not. If he was not then the company would have eased him out before now—they would not wait six years before deciding whether or not he was efficient. And if he was fulfilling his function as a security officer, then it could be argued that his duties included the protection of any and all secret work in which Hart-Ewing was engaged, that it was his duty to protect it even when he had no real idea what "it" was all about.
Carson sighed. Around him the metal benches and structural supports creaked and tinkled faintly as they gave up the heat of the working day. The night shift at the other end of the section contributed its quiet clangor and the kittens, who were the furry debris of the continuing population explosion among the factory cats, romped among the now safe and silent machinery.
Security and counter-espionage, so far as Carson was concerned, was far from being an exciting and glamorous job. Security meant checking fire extinguishers and hoses, checking lights and doors left on or open, checking safety precautions during aircraft refueling, checking pilfering when it began to assume the proportions of grand larceny, checking trespassers on other people's parking spaces, checking everything everywhere several times a day or week.
Counter-espionage did not, on the other hand, mean a constant war against industrial or foreign spies who were bending every effort to penetrate the company's security defenses with cuff-link cameras and sub-miniaturized electronic devices. Instead, it involved a constant round of checking doors, drawers and lock-up filing cabinets to make sure that classified material was returned to its proper place and not left lying around where any one of the cleaning or night maintenance staffs, decorators or telephone repairmen could see it. In short, Carson's job lay not so much in defending his company's secrets as to try to prevent their being given away.
He even had his own Index Expurgatoria of forbidden photographs and subjects which operated in reverse to keep over-enthusiastic Sales and Publicity people from rushing into print with classified material in the technical journals.
But security on this special project was tight and professional—the men concerned made none of the usual mistakes and Carson had had to go to a lot of trouble even to satisfy himself that a project actually existed. He was still not completely sure that it did exist. Their planning was superb and when they had to act openly they did so tracelessly by making use of someone like Pebbles, a nice, simple-minded obliging man who believed everything he was told.
Quite a lot of people seemed to have a use for Pebbles, Carson thought angrily. He was remembering how proud the man had looked when he said that he could do joined-up writing. Pebbles would have been fired on at least two occasions if someone with influence had not spoken for him. The thought that Pebbles had been kept in the company and used by these people as a sort of organic, unthinking tool did not make Carson feel as the same thought would have made Bill Savage, but it made him feel a moment of shame because he was considering making use of him as well, to help him find out something about the purposes of the people who were already using him ...
Carson's mind froze suddenly in mid-thought. Someone was coming, a dim figure approaching his hiding place along the aisle between the storeroom outer wall and the ranks of silent machines. In the light which filtered across from the active side of the factory floor he could see that the man wore a cap and overalls. They were not white overalls nor were they the dark blue, green or brown shades worn by inspectors, laborers, apprentices or electricians, but some medium color which he could not identify in the darkness. He kept his eyes on the man while his hand went to the panel of light switches beside him.
One hundred yards away a group of roof lights blinked on and off several times and a few seconds later a section even farther away was erratically illuminated in similar fashion. The man had stopped dead when the first lights went on, but they were too far away to show Carson his face and in any case he was merely getting the man used to the idea that lights were being tested in the area. He watched the man hurry silently to the storeroom door and close it behind him.
An intermittent glow showed in the uncovered window as he used a flashlight, then disappeared as the sacking which had dropped from the window was replaced. Perhaps ten minutes later the man came out again.
This time Carson made sure that the lights which flicked on and off again were close enough to make identification positive.
The face revealed was that of Wayne Tillotson! He was wearing, not overalls, but a flying suit of pale grey which was almost the same shade as his face at that moment. Carson switched off the overhead lights and played with the other switches at random until Tillotson had gone.
In the storeroom a few minutes later he used his own flashlight to study the pile of ashes. The two scraps of oil-soaked paper which he had copied and replaced earlier had gone and a few of the ashes were again warm.
Tillotson had been one of the people who had used his influence to keep Pebbles from being fired, although why the company's chief test pilot should have concerned himself with the fate of a lavatory attendant was something which still required a full explanation. At that moment Carson decided quite definitely that he would get to know, cultivate, and as soon as possible use Pebbles. Everyone else seemed to be doing it.
He was still thinking about the best way of doing so as he went to the area telephone and began ringing around the gatehouses and patrol offices.
Chapter Five
The questions were too many and too general to arouse suspicion among his own patrolmen—he had used his fussy, chronic worrier's voice. But from them he discovered that some kind of meeting was going on in the office of the Chief of Design on the third floor of the Admin building and that the chief test pilot's unmistakable bone-shaker was parked outside.
Carson was there ten minutes later asking more fussy, seemingly unconnected questions.
"I don't know who is in there or how many, sir," the patrolman in charge told him. "When Briggs looked in during his early rounds he said the ashtrays were full and the wastebaskets empty. Maybe they are playing cards ..."
"Are you being sarcastic?" began Carson, but he was interrupted by Patrolman Briggs from the other side of the office.
"One of the men was Mr. Daniels, sir," he said quickly, while his eyes shouted, Shut up, you fool—can't you see he's in one of his moods tonight? He went on, "Mr. Daniels was writing on the blackboard. The others had their backs turned to me so I couldn't see who they were—except for Mr. Tillotson, of course, who left the meeting about half an hour ago and came back shortly before you arrived."
"Any idea of what they were doing?"
"No, sir. Mr. Daniels was talking while he wrote on the board but stopped when he saw me. He had been saying something about the major problems on a minus trip home being largely psychological. Yes, that was exactly what he said. The diagrams and math on the blackboard I couldn't understand at all."
Carson nodded approval. "At least you keep your eyes and ears open, even when there is nothing to see or hear."
"It's breaking up now, sir," Briggs said, jerking his thumb at the office window and the corridor beyond. "They're coming out of the elevator."
There were only six of them. Somehow Carson had been expecting more than that. But they were all top people: Tillotson, capless now and wearing a topcoat over his flying suit so that the blue-grey gabardine visible below it might easily have been ordinary sports slacks; Dreamy Daniels, the Design chief; the Head of Electronics George Reece; Brady and Soames from module production side and Reg Saunderson, the company chief accountant. It was Daniels who tossed the bunch of keys to Briggs and wished him good night. They did not appear to notice Carson, whose face was above the cone of light thrown out by the desk lamp.
As Briggs was returning the keys to their numbered peg Carson forestalled him. "I'll take them. It's time for rounds and I need some exercise."
Briggs nodded and moved to accompany him. He said, "That bunch are usually very good at switching off lights and locking doors and windows—we haven't caught them out in nearly three years."
"That's what I like to hear," said Carson. "But I can do without your company. You two make some coffee and talk about me behind my back until I get back. In case you've forgotten, I like it black with three lumps and ..."
"... Two plain biscuits," said Briggs, grinning.
Carson had chosen to walk up to the design office, not because he needed the exercise but because at this time of night the elevator could be heard all over the building and, if it was not heard while he was supposedly moving from floor to floor, the two patrol officers might wonder if something was wrong. As things were, they would be expecting him to check all the floors on foot and would not expect to hear the elevator until just before his return to the office. And if they needed him for something they, being somewhat elderly and beefy individuals, would come looking for him in the elevator, which would give plenty of warning of their approach.
He was intending to spend all of the available time in the design office.
All the windows, filing cabinets and wastebaskets in Daniels' office were secured, locked and empty, respectively. No documents had chanced to fall behind or between the office furniture, no used sheets of carbon paper were lying balled-up and unnoticed in a corner, and there were no scratch pads lying around which showed indentations from the writing on preceeding pages. But on the long, baize-topped conference table near the freshly-cleaned blackboard there was a crisp, neatly folded drawing whose reference number and title were partially obscured by the overflow from an ashtray.
Three cigarette butts and a small quantity of ash had spilled on to the drawing and the baize. There seemed to be a strange hint of order to this untidiness, in the positioning of the butts, the ash and the angle made by the drawing against the edge of the table.
The cleaning staff for this particular building had long since gone home, so there would be nobody here to tidy up until tomorrow when Daniels unlocked his office.
Carson examined the drawing as closely as possible without touching it or allowing his breath to disturb the spilled ash, then he sat down carefully in one of the chairs to think.
He could not be absolutely sure that the drawing and ashtray setup was a trap, but his certainty was as close to one hundred percent as made no difference. That being the case, he had to decide whether the trap had been set merely as a precaution or because they thought someone—perhaps Carson himself—was on to them. Again he could not be sure, but he seriously doubted the latter possibility.
Having Sands question Pebbles about the transfer of the waste to the storeroom was the sort of thing expected of Carson, just as he was expected to fuss and ask questions about the fire for weeks afterwards. The unexpected things he had done—the long-term and heavily disguised inquiries, the business with the lights tonight when he had identified Tillotson, and his presence here in Daniels' office—were not yet known to them. The reason for the trap might simply be Tillotson's recent fright.
It would be interesting to see if they continued to set traps after they had an opportunity of seeing his memo to the electricians ...
All at once Carson felt an overwhelming, angry impatience with the whole stupid project. He knew there was something important going on and that it was his duty to know about it. He dearly wanted to question Daniels, Tillotson and the others directly—he was sure that he knew enough to stampede them into telling him the whole story. After all, a project of this importance needed a security officer.
Or did it ...?
The thought that somewhere in the company there was a shadow security officer, someone charged with the protection of the really valuable and important work, someone whose organization might take a very poor view of Carson prying into something which was not his concern made him feel frightened as well as angry and inadequate.
Who was the other security man and which organization did he represent? Certainly he was, if he existed at all, operating outside the security department Carson headed.
This was his business and whether they wanted it or not they would have his protection. Carson wriggled uncomfortably in the chair and began to consider the anatomy of a project, any project.
At the top were the men responsible for the original idea or for developing someone else's original idea. In the middle were the people who helped break down the idea into large numbers of detail drawings and the engineers who decided how best to convert these drawings into three dimensional metal on someone's bench. In this age of over-specialization it was not expected that the man who produced the detail hardware should understand, or even care about, the part his particular chunk of hardware played in the project as a whole.
But somewhere within the vast Hart-Ewing complex hardware for this ultra-secret project was being made, modified, re-made and sometimes scrapped—there were always teething troubles with a new project, even the relatively simple and non-secret ones. Carson did not think he would get very far questioning the men at the bottom—there were too many thousands of them. A better bet would be the middle men, the engineers and draftsmen who had to iron out the bugs and generally see that all the pieces fitted together. They should be able to help him, except that all the indications were that they also were unaware of what was really going on. There were too many middle men to keep a secret of this magnitude, so they were being used and subtly misdirected by the people at the top, just as Pebbles had been used, but on a more impersonal level.
The idea, he had already decided, was to use the people they were using to find out what they were using them for ...
As he was switching off the lights and relocking the doors, he had to remind himself again that Daniels and the others were not the Other Side. Neither were they careless. They did their own typing, they did not leave project paperwork lying around, and they went to a great deal of trouble to destroy that which they did not, for some reason, burn in the privacy of their homes. He wondered suddenly if the material was so sensitive that they dared not risk taking it off company limits because of the very slight possibility that one of them might have a car accident while carrying it.
Could it be as secret as that?
By the time he returned to the patrol office he felt so impatient that it was an effort to chat with his men while he drank their coffee. Outside the night was clear and cold and full of stars.
He wondered which one of them was Tau Ceti.
Chapter Six
"Waste," said Herbie Patterson, "sheer waste. Somebody gives somebody a bum figure and hundreds of the things are made before somebody else catches on. If I had a tenth of the money wasted in this place in a year I could live in luxury for the next fifty ..."
Carson doubted that but he nodded agreement anyway. Herbie Patterson was a very conscientious and able clerical supervisor who expected everyone else to be the same. The fact that they weren't had soured his disposition over the years until now he was the biggest sorehead in the company. But only his wife and a few people at Hart-Ewing knew about his heart condition and that he had more to gripe about than even he realized.
