Small World Read Free Page A

suffered chiefly from the deprivation of the work that was his •‘•hole life. Unmarried and unencumbered, he was not as damaged as the family men and women, tossed into the ever-deepening storm of the private-sector economy. Still, he had more reason to be frightened, for he had no credentials and a record that would scare off any private employers.
    Some anonymous higher-up in the government had looked past Roger’s sudden exit from graduate school, examined his rejected PhD thesis, and seen him, not for the crazy heretic his professors took him for, but as a man of practical talents. The government had taken him in from the cold and lei him get down to work. He hadn't ever asked them to make him respectable. It was enough to
    be allowed to work.
    His last assignment had been on the sixth floor of a project building known as ‘the kitchen.’ It was only metaphorically so. Real food was strictly forbidden there, a regulation Roger Tinker regularly violated. What Roger did there was a very exotic and inedible sort of ‘cooking,’ like the varnished food photographed for gourmet cooking magazines. It wasn’t exactly experimenting, : because seven times out of ten, Roger got the results he predicted.
    It was more of an orderly progression of random combinations, akin to naming all the names of God.
    Roger had been working on one particular name for several weeks. He had done a lot of interesting things with it, and had, at last, achieved a degree of intimacy with its attributes. He was beginning to grasp certain basic information about it.
    His belly had spoken to him, and he had answered, as was his custom. He had leaned over the computer console, watching a patteraon a graph. With a penknife in his left hand, he had peeled an apple in his right. He had become, inevitably, more interested in the graph than in the peeling of the apple. TTie tip of the knife had slipped into his thumb.
    ‘Goddamn shit piss fuck!’ exclaimed Roger, less in anger than in astonishment, as his blood had dripped onto the keys of the console. Dropping the knife and the apple, he had stuck his thumb into his mouth. For a moment, he had resumed his babyhood, j some thirty-two years and two-hundred pounds in his past. He had shut his eyes tightly, for he not only hated the sight of blood but retained a childish certainty that not looking at it contributed to its quick coagulation.
    Moaning around his throbbing thumb, he’d opened his eyes. It had been several seconds before the change of the graph registered. The moan had become a gag as he had involuntarily sucked his thumb down his throat. He’d pulled it out, the hurt utterly forgotten. The gouge had continued to bleed for several more seconds at an ever-decreasing rate. Small drops had been scattered by Roger’s movements—all over the computer console and in delicate polka dots on his white lab overalls.
    It had been two days later that the cut again claimed his attention. He had been sitting in his car in the parking lot after work, his pay envelope and its contents on his lap: a green check and a delicate blue tissue dismissal slip mated to it—the government’s sweet regrets. The thumb had begun to throb in counterpoint to the beat of his temples. Roger had stared at the
    red welt, swollen and clearly infected, and the numbness in his brain had changed into anger.
    He had thought if he spoke out now they would take over his discovery. If they believed him. It was possible they would not; he would be perceived as a fantasist, forever beyond the pale. It might be months before he had his proof.
    Roger had worked another six weeks on the project before the blue slip turned pink. During that period, most of his thought and effort had gone into stealing an assortment of equipment. Every bit could have been purchased commercially from the same sources the government bought from (probably cheaper), but there would be records of purchase. He told himself it didn’t matter; he had stolen