Creature Read Free

“All I want for him is the best. And there isn’t any reason why he shouldn’t have it.”
    Then he left for the office and Sharon was alone in the house. She began doing the breakfast dishes. With Mark gone for the day, Chivas shifted his attention to her, nuzzling at her hand until she reached down and scratched his ears.
    “Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it, Chivas? Bet you thought there was going to be a big fight and you were going to have to protect Mark from his dad, didn’t you? Well, you were wrong. Blake loves Mark just as much as you do.” She smiled sadly. “He just doesn’t understand him quite as well, that’s all.”
    Almost as if he understood her words, Chivas trotted out of the kitchen and curled up on the floor at Mark’s bedroom door, where he would wait patiently for the rest of the day.
    It was nearly four o’clock that afternoon when Blake’s secretary, Rosalie Adams, appeared in the doorway of his office. “All set for the big meeting?”
    Blake shrugged. He and Rosalie had been trying to figure out what was going on all day, but so far neither of them had come up with an answer as to why Ted Thornton might want to talk to Blake. Thornton, after all, was the CEO of TarrenTech, and though Blake’s own position as Marketing Manager of the Digital Division was hardly low on the totem pole, everything at TarrenTech was done according to the chain of command. If John Ripley, who was Blake’s immediate superior, was in trouble, it would have been Ripley’s boss—the Executive Vice President of the division—who would have summoned Blake to tell him he was replacing John. But as far as both Blake and Rosalie could determine(and Rosalie had spent most of the morning on the secretaries’ network, gathering gossip), John Ripley was in no trouble at all. Besides, since it was Thornton himself who wanted to see Blake, the “poor old Ripley’s out” scenario had never really made much sense. There were a lot of other people Thornton would have informed long before getting down the chain as far as Blake Tanner.
    “No late bulletins?” Blake asked Rosalie as he got up and straightened his tie. He almost reached for his briefcase, but stopped himself in time, remembering that there had been no instructions for him to bring any files with him.
    That, too, seemed unusual.
    “Nothing,” Rosalie replied. “Nobody seems to be in trouble, and if you’ve been a bad boy, either what you did was so awful no one’s telling me, or you covered your tracks so well you haven’t been caught. So go on in, and take good notes—I want to hear every detail of what the great man has to say.”
    And “great man,” Blake reflected as he walked toward the large suite of offices at the far end of the corridor that housed Ted Thornton and his staff, was precisely the phrase that applied to TarrenTech’s Chief Executive Officer. For it was Thornton who had begun the company a little more than a decade ago, and built it from a minor supplier of computer software into the giant high-tech conglomerate it had become. Though software was still one of TarrenTech’s major product lines, Thornton had recognized the volatility of the computer industry and launched a program of expansion and diversification. Now TarrenTech produced all kinds of electronics—from television sets to abstruse gadgets involved in the space program—and had gone into consumer goods and services as well.
    When Thornton had decided the company needed its own fleet of airplanes, he had simply bought an airline, then another and another. That had led to hotels, car rentals, and a string of other travel-related companies.
    Next, as Thornton had recognized the aging population ofAmerica, came the hospitals, nursing homes, and pharmaceutical companies. By now the Digital Division had become only a minor cog in the whole great machine, but Ted Thornton, partly out of a sense of nostalgia, and partly as a way of appearing a lot more humble than