A Calculated Risk, Katherine Neville [english novels for students txt] 📗

board at the entrance, with little gold, red, and green stars affixed—it was just like kindergarten. Each hour of the day, like clockwork, a shopping cart moved around the floor; as it passed we were to drop our coding sheets and punched cards to be sent for processing. We had two potty breaks a day and a half hour for lunch; any other absences resulted in docked pay.

Because I worked mostly in the field with clients, I managed to avoid much of that Dickensian atmosphere.

“Verity,” Alfie said when we were seated behind his glass wall, “I’m going to ask you to take on some new accounts.” He pulled out a lengthy list and passed it to me. I ran my eyes over it.

“But sir, I already have more clients than anyone else,” I said. “And some of these firms use different hardware and programming languages than the ones I’m familiar with. It may take some time—”

“There is no time,” he informed me, with what suspiciously resembled a trace of glee. “If you didn’t want to work hard, you shouldn’t have come to Monolith; there’s no place for idlers on our payroll. Half your colleagues out front would give anything to be in your place—and I’ll put them there, if you botch up. That will be all.”

I was over my head now—and I knew it. I had twice as many accounts to service as anyone in the office. Many of these were the most sophisticated of “users” as well as those with the heaviest back list of work to be done. They’d find me out in under a month.

By the end of that week, I was exhausted from working dawn till the wee hours; my desk was piled with things to take home and work on over the weekend. It was well after quitting time on Friday, when Alfie showed up with a forbidding pile of manuals. He dropped the load with a thud on my desk.

“Louis is going to bestow a great honor on you,” he informed me. Louis Findstone was Alfie’s boss—the division manager. “On Monday morning, crack of dawn, you’ll be presented to the board of directors of Transpacific Railroad—our largest client—as their new representative. You won’t be asked to say anything at the meeting, but I thought you might want to read up on Transpacific over the weekend, just in case you’re asked any questions.”

It certainly was a great honor, as I knew. Teckies were never brought out in public before a lofty group like that. But how on earth could I read all those books, and also get my other catching-up done?

As if he’d read my mind, Alfie added, “Frankly, I don’t agree with the choice of you for this assignment; you’re still wet behind the ears, and it seems to me you’ve been treading water, just trying to stay afloat with your daily work. But I leave it to Louis’s judgment.” And with that, he departed.

So I remained there that night, after everyone had left for the weekend, trying to wade through the books Alfie had left—too many and too heavy to carry home on the subway, since I certainly couldn’t afford a cab.

It didn’t take me long to understand that I was in real trouble; these books were like witches’ brew. The terms might have meant something to a person schooled in business, but I was a math major—I couldn’t even read a financial statement!

I decided to wander through the building, on the off chance that someone might have stayed late on Friday night. But as the elevator doors opened upon floor after floor of empty darkness, my hopes waned.

I went downstairs to the all-night data center, packing with me a heavy tome, thinking one of the night machine operators might be able to explain it.

“Looks like mumbo jumbo to me,” said the one I found there. “All the others are out having dinner, and I think the rest of the building’s shut down for the night—but let’s have a look.”

He went over to the building control panel and searched the floors. “Hmm—some juice is still running on twelve—maybe somebody who’s burning the midnight oil like you. I’d give it a try.”

When the elevator doors slid open on the twelfth floor, a few corridor lights were on—but the rest of the floor lay in complete darkness. I walked down the glassed-in corridors to each corner of the building, but indeed, all the offices were dark and empty.

“May I help you, little girl?” The soft voice was just behind me.

I nearly jumped out of my skin; I felt my lip trembling from the sudden fright as I swallowed and turned.

There stood the most amazing-looking man I’d ever seen. He was tall—perhaps five or six inches over six feet—and he stood bent forward with one ear cocked, as if accustomed to dealing with people far smaller than himself. He was as thin as he was tall, with pale skin, close-set intense eyes above a hawk-like nose and a narrow mouth. His hair was precisely the color of copper. Though his manner suggested he was older, he could not have been more than thirty. Something about him put me at ease at once; I later learned he did not have that disarming effect upon everyone.

There was something else about him, too—more difficult to explain, but still vivid in my memory after all these years. There was a sort of volatile energy, like a harnessed atom kept under control only through great restraint. Having seen this trait in just a few others during my lifetime, I’ve come to believe that it is, purely and simply, intelligence—but intelligence of such enormous quantity that it’s hard to imagine how it might all be used. Those who possess this rare quality seem to contain a huge explosive, whose trigger mechanism might go off with the slightest jar. Such people speak softly, move slowly, and seem to bear with infinite patience the traffic they must have with the outside world. But inside