CHAPTER 4

JUNE




         Walking was a habit. Taking a bus meant learning the buses routes and that meant asking people for directions. He had given that up long ago. Most men seemed to triangulate their world by pubs. Faced with Allan's total lack of knowledge on that score they took off their caps, scratched their heads and were at a loss to know how to surmount such a culture barrier.
         And it was no use asking a woman. A woman would always turn and enlist the help of a passer-by, and HE would say ‘Aye ye catch a number nine at the corner by The Fiddler's Arms and get aff at MacLintock's Bar’. So Allan walked with a street-map in his pocket, keeping the dark secret of his pub-blindness, to himself.
         Within the span of his early childhood, Glasgow had wakened from a dosshouse demeanour and begun the task of recovering its self-respect. The process had been accompanied by a great deal of self-mockery and nostalgia for the camaraderie of poverty, but the effect had been a revelation. The tenement block where he had been brought up and where his sister Jean and Uncle Roddy still lived, once soot-grimed and dingy, was now spruce with the warm pink glow of clean sandstone. Years ago Uncle Roddy had explained to him that the gardens had been respectable, full of grass and flowers. That was before they had suffered the indignity of having their wrought-iron fencing removed during the Second World War. Allan's earliest memory was of small patches of bare earth surrounded by low sandstone walls like toothless gums, pock-marked with the stumps of old railings. Now the fences were restored and grass and flowers were recolonising.
         The hallway was a collector's piece. It was half-tiled in two shades of green with buff walls above. At the first landing there was a tall stained glass window with a MacIntosh-esque design. He could hear the noise of children's feet in the stairwell above him. His boyhood persona was slipping over him.
         He rang the bell with the old familiar da-di-da-da to tell them it was him and then let himself in with his own key. Jean was out and Uncle Roddy had been asleep. Roddy's bed was in the kitchen where there had once been an old box-bed. The blankets were leaden and rumpled. Allan had tried to tell him about the superior insulation properties of a downie and why it was wrong to put heavy blankets on top of it, but he had given up. The lightness of a downie made Roddy feel naked and scientific facts could not cure his psychological coldness.
         ‘It's yersel Allan lad!’ He was struggling to sit up.
         Allan put the bunch of flowers on the table and punched up Roddy's pillows. Although he had a great fondness for the old man he found conversation with him difficult. Roddy's lively, if untutored intelligence, had gone, and in its place was a jumbled collection of memories which mixed up generations and relived favourite events of his childhood like a sports TV program full of golden goals.
         At the bottom of the bed was a pile of newspapers and magazines - the People's Friend, the Sunday Post, last week's Oban Times. On a chair beside the bed was a pile of Time-Life magazines - a complete series on space which was at least twenty years out of date. Roddy liked space. He was fond of reading astounding facts out loud and as a boy Allan had found his astonishment infectious. ‘D'ye ken it takes three thousand million years for the light o' that galaxy to reach us - think on it - three thousand million years!’ Roddy did not read the magazines much these days. His universe had collapsed, bounded by the four walls around him except for what was visible through the time-warp window of the Sunday Post. He showed Allan a drawing of Dunvegan Castle on the front of the People's Friend. Dunvegan was his favourite castle. He also showed him a postcard from his sister in America. It had a picture of some people fishing on a lake set among fine mountains. He had shown Allan the same post card on his three previous visits. Allan asked how he was feeling.
         ‘A' hae wan foot in the grave son and that's a fact’.
         Then he asked Allan about his work. Computer theory was not the stuff of family conversation so Allan said he was fine, and tried to explain about the company, its world wide sales of computers and its head office in South America. ‘America!’ Roddy exclaimed. He said that Allan must be sure to look up his cousins in Seattle. Allan tried to explain that he didn't actually work in South America and that anyway it was a long way from South America to North America but Roddy patted his hand and said it didn't really matter.
         Jean returned while Allan was making a cup of tea, banging the outside door and swearing as she fumbled and dropped something with a bump in the hallway. She was small and wiry and exuded a kind of aggressive energy. She wore a navy raincoat and a dark red Paisley headscarf. She had a Marks and Spencers bag in one hand and with her other arm she was wrestling with a large package which might have been a small surf-board. Glaring at Allan, she propped the package against the wall, dumped the M&S bag on the table and said ‘So you've turned up’. She did not say ‘at last’ but the words hovered like birds of prey.
         Allan had the tea-pot in his hand. As he hesitated in front of the kitchen shelves Jean, without saying a word, reached past him, grabbed the tea caddy and thrust it into his hand.
         ‘Allan's going to emigrate to America,’ said Roddy.
         Jean was taking off her shoes. She stopped and looked at Allan with venom in her eyes.
         ‘Not exactly Uncle Roddy’.
         Jean lit a cigarette, picked up the M&S bag and marched out closing the kitchen door with rather more force than was necessary. By the time she came back he was trying to clear the table to make room for the tea tray. A pile of school exercise jotters sprawled across it, He was specially careful with the one that was open, the one with the graffiti of red marks across a semi-literate pencil scrawl. And books of course. The flat was smothered in books - ‘Creative English for Grade III’, ‘Interpretation Exercises No 2’, and books by Fay Weldon, Germaine Greer and Dale Spender, a resentful literature which throughout his childhood had been a constant reproach to Allan reminding him that he was an oppressor, a scoundrel and a potential rapist. It was not any single one of them. It was the cumulative effect which eroded his self-confidence. And then there were the Scottish books, books with titles like ‘Scotland the Wealthy Nation’ and ‘A Vision of Scotland’, books with the same sense of grievance, the same finger of scorn, even if it was directed at another target. It did not help that he sympathised to an extent. If anything it made it worse because he could not then wear a mental suit of asbestos. The feminist thing hurt. It had driven him to the conclusion that only men liked sex. Intellectually he knew that that was nonsense but his gut told him otherwise and it was his gut that mattered when he was in a girl's company. Unless the girl took the initiative he was paralysed by inhibitions.
         Jean returned but would not sit down. She unpacked the parcel, brushing aside his offer of help. It was a new ironing board. She busied herself in the sink for a while and then went into the sittingroom and began to hoover the carpet. Later she came back and began loading the washing machine.
         ‘Can I help?’
         She paused, read the washing instruction on the label of a blouse and then looked up as though she had only just heard him.
         ‘No. You have your annual chat with Uncle Roddy’.
         She went on loading the machine and then started it up on its cycle. Roddy told him the story of the wee lassie who thought that God lived next door because she had overheard someone shouting ‘God! Are you not up yet!’. Allan laughed as though he had not heard it before. Later Roddy fell asleep with his spectacles on his nose. Allan went through to the sittingroom where Jean was ironing and watching a wild-life television programme with one eye.
         ‘Have you time to talk?’
         ‘Not really. I'm watching and recording this programme. It's for my class tomorrow’.
         ‘I thought there was a law against recording programmes for public performances’.
         She took a puff at a cigarette smoldering away in an ashtray at her side and then stubbed it out. Her voice was husky and her face was developing the deepening creases that suggested a lifetime of submersion in nicotine.
         ‘If I had enough textbooks to go round the class I wouldn't need to’.
         He sat down and watched the programme with her. When it was over she lifted a pile of freshly ironed clothes and went out of the room. He considered folding up the table for her but guessed that he would just get it folded when she would come back with another pile of clothes to iron. There was a big bundle of handbills on the sideboard. The heading said that it was THE MARYHILL CITIZEN but it was obviously a piece of SNP party political stuff purporting to be a local newspaper. He was reading a copy when she came back.
         ‘If you want to do something to help you can deliver these for me.’
         ‘Where to?’
         ‘All the houses in this street and as far as Canal Road’.
         There was no escape, not that he wanted to escape really, though he disliked politics. The economic management of a country, he had decided at an early age, was a task which outstripped the capabilities of mankind. The politicians may strut and proclaim their faith but the complexity of it was beyond them. Like the weather it had a will of its own and all they could hope to do was to modify it slightly. You might if you were lucky avoid long term disasters like global warming but you could not hope to predict and prevent anything specific. He had listened to interminable lectures from Jean and her cronies and developed deaf ears. But his cynical apathy had not prevented him from helping her with her ploys. Often and often she had had him, a lanky schoolboy, stumping the doorsteps with election literature. It was a way of earning her approval and though he did not accept her opinions he did value her approval. She bothered his conscience for she had been his mother as well as his sister. When his mother died he had been a toddler. His father had been dead since before he was born and so Uncle Roddy had stepped into the breach. Then when Uncle Roddy became infirm Jean shouldered the family burden. It was no wonder really that she was bitter. Her career had been sacrificed and romance blighted while Allan had been allowed to go to University. Only in later years when he had reached his teens and been able to fend for himself to an extent, had she been able to take up teaching as a 'mature' student. How she hated that description. Her response had been to pour her energy into Scottish politics. She was a political street fighter. Sometimes he had ridden shotgun for her when she was canvassing. It was a tough district but getting better.
         It took him an hour or so. He remembered the old trick. You went to the top of each stair and delivered on the way down. He encountered only one aggressive nutter. The man opened his door and came out on to the landing waving the paper which Allan had stuffed through his letter box. Obscenities echoed after him and the noise of ripping paper. Shreds of CITIZEN floated down the stairwell.
         Jean had supper on the table when he got back. As she directed he put some bits on a plate and mascerated it into the pulp which was all that Roddy's toothless gums could manage.
         ‘Fine son. That's grand,’ said the old man as he handed it to him and helped him sit up. Jean had softened a bit and even managed a smile. ‘So what's this about America,’ she said when they sat down.

         And so he explained. Jean considered him to be a traitor even for working for a multi-national company, especially one that was originally American. She did not like the real story any more than Roddy's version but the doorbell rang before she got into her stride about the iniquities of multi-nationals. It was Andrew Coltart so they retired to the sitting room and left Roddy watching his favourite soap on his personal TV set.
         Andrew had sparse hair, a round red face and a broad grin. His was a face well known on Scottish Television for he was often the SNP's spokeman on discussion programmes. He had also had a brief moment of glory when he won a famous by-election only to loose the seat a few months later at the General Election. He did not have the benefit of a University education but his command of legal matters and the way he could produce economic facts and figures like a conjuror often left his more sophistocated opponents punch drunk. He shook Allan's hand the way he handled the press, with a robust bonhomie that left you surrepticiously easing your fingers apart and straightening your knuckles.
         ‘So you're Allan,’ he said when Jean had gone off to the kitchen. ‘I've heard a lot about you. Jean is always telling us all that she has a young brother who is a genius.....No, no really ....,’ he went on when Allan spluttered his objections ‘..no, she does... she thinks the world of you ... and we need people like you ... when us old party hacks have won Scotland's independence we're going to need the technical experts like you if we are going to make Scotland into a modern industrial state’. His fat little index finger was jabbing the air in Allan's direction.
         Jean came back in time to hear that. ‘Is that you on your soap box again Andrew?’
         Andrew grinned but he held forth again. His current hate objects were businessmen who claimed that Scottish Independence would create 'instability' and be 'bad for business confidence'. In his vocabulary `stability' was an expletive.
         They began to talk about a demonstration. Allan remembered those demonstrations. He had a vivid memory of standing forlornly on Calton Hill in Edinburgh on a wet miserable gale-torn Sunday afternoon surrounded by people dressed in wet SNP tea-shirts and drookit bedraggled Scottish Saltire flags. As Allan went out through the door with a pile of dishes he heard Coltart say ‘Jean. Would you be able to organise a small demo for me?’
         He hovered outside the door and heard Jean reply ‘I've got a lot on at the moment Andrew. Term started last week.’
         As he returned Andrew was saying ‘I suppose I could ask Mike’.
         ‘Mike!’
         There was a pause and a meeting of eyes.
         ‘I suppose I could do it if you ask Mike to help me’.
         ‘Fine Jean. I knew I could rely on you.’
         And then Coltart was standing up and saying his goodbyes. ‘Cheerio Allan! Nice to have met you!’
         When he was gone and Jean had closed the door she turned and laughed at Allan's puzzled expression.
         ‘Just a little subterfuge,’ she said. ‘You've got to be very crafty these days.’
         ‘What's up Jean? Is he getting you involved in something?’
         ‘I am involved Allan. But don't worry I am not one of the front line troops’.
         Allan was still puzzled so she explained. Big sister telling a bedtime story.
         ‘Look. The Police watch our every move and our phones are bugged.’ Allan opened his mouth to protest but she waved a hand to silence him. ‘There is absolutely no doubt about that Allan. If we make arrangements for a demo by phone the Police turn up in strength and film everyone there. When we want to surprise them we make arrangements for an imaginary demo by phone and then have our real demo somewhere else’.
         ‘Don't they get wise to that?’
         ‘Of course they do. So we sometimes use a double diversion. Diversion number one is a fictitious demo. Number two is a real demo with lots of people which is arranged without phone calls, but there are so many people involved the information is bound to reach the ears of the Polis especially if the person you ask to help with the organisation is a known police informer. The real demo involves a much smaller group of people.’
         ‘So the demo he was asking you to organise ...’
         ‘Is diversion number two’
         ‘Where is the real one?’
         ‘I don't know and if I did know I would not tell you’.
         ‘You'll land in prison Jean’.
         ‘That would be very awkward for you wouldn't it? You might have to give up your yuppie existence and do something about looking after Roddy, wouldn't you?’
         ‘That's not fair Jean’.
         ‘Why the bloody hell isn't it fair?’
         After supper she mellowed.
         ‘Tell me about this Telman woman then.’
         They were sitting on either side of the fire. Allan had washed up and Jean had taken off her slippers, tucked her feet up on to the arm chair and was cradling a small tot of pure malt in her cupped hands.
         ‘Rosa's brilliant. She knows the business of program correctness like no one else.’
         ‘And that's important to you. This computer correctness. What use is it. - really?’
         ‘Jean ...’ He groped for words. ‘There are computers everywhere. Not just in businesses and banks and whatever. Nowadays they fly aeroplanes and control nuclear power stations. And if one of those programs goes wrong it is not just an embarrassment - it's a disaster. And the problem is, that it is often not possible to test a program for every eventuality. It's not just that you can't foresee absolutely every possible event it is just that because you are working with time and an infinite variety of possible coincidences, the number of different combinations is virtually infinite. If you tried to test every one of them you would still be at it when the universe ran down.’
         ‘So that's where you come in is it?’
         ‘Aye. Well in a way. We can't do it properly yet. We are trying to prove that certain things cannot happen when a program runs and I mean prove like in mathematics. The way we do it is to assume the opposite - assume the accident can happen and then try to prove that that leads to a logical contradiction - like something being in two places at the same time. We can manage it at present with certain types of program and they have got to be written in a certain way. What Rosa and I have been trying to do is to show that the same techniques can be used for a wider range of programs. Really big programs that do some funny things and are not as well behaved as the little ones that people do it for at present. The real goal is to find a way of doing it automatically, because until we can do that, it is so laborious no one in his right mind would try to do it for a program of any size.’
         He paused, trying to think of an example.
         ‘There is a story going around at the moment,’ he said. ‘I don't know if it is true, but it might be. It seems there was an American fighter plane which was a fly-by-wire machine. Everything was under computer control. It had been tested and had been flying successfully for a long time but there was still a bug - a fault - in the control program. When the plane flew over the equator to the Southern Hemisphere one of the readings from the gyroscopic compass became negative and the plane instantly flipped on to its back. Someone had just forgotten to correct for negative readings.’
         ‘So you work with ... Rosa. Is anyone else involved?’
         ‘Well actually we are not doing that kind of work at all at the moment. We plan to but right now I am filling in for that guy who killed himself. It is just routine stuff so it's a bit boring, but when they get a replacement I'll be able to get back to the correctness proofs.’
         ‘Are you sure they're not just not taking advantage of you?’
         ‘No. Really. Rosa is as keen as I am to get back to it. She is fighting a battle with the boss. He's called Wensley Halpern - a very smooth operator. Rosa shouts at him over the phone every day. He wants to break the team up and disperse it to other plants.’
         ‘Why?’
         Allan shrugged. ‘I don't know. Maybe he just doesn't like Rosa. Jack - that's a pal at work - thinks he is afraid of her - frightened she might make some kind of break-through and upstage him. Jack might be right for all I know.’
         ‘So where does this Halpern guy want you to go?’
         ‘Well he hasn't said it exactly ...’
         ‘Where?’
         ‘South America.’
         ‘Christ!’ Jean put her head back on the chair and closed her eyes.
         ‘It's ok I'm not going.’
         ‘You might not have a choice.’ She kept her eyes shut for a while and spoke without opening them, ‘What's she like?’
         ‘Who?’
         ‘Rosa Telman.’
         ‘Oh... She's got dark hair.’
         ‘Very informative. I'm sure I would recognise her from that description.’
         ‘She's about forty. She's small and olive skinned and got a wee bit of a foreign accent.’
         ‘Is she married?’
         ‘Oh aye. Her husband is some kind of professor - or he was. They say he has taken early retirement and now he is some kind of consultant - accountancy I think.’
         ‘Any children?’
         ‘I didn't ask’
         ‘You're hopeless.’ She snorted but she was laughing. She sat up, leaning over to the table to pour a drop more into her glass. ‘Is she attractive?’
         Allan hesitated. He hadn't considered Rosa from that point of view.
         ‘Aye. I suppose she might be, in a way.’
         ‘Is there more than one way?’ She snuggled back into the chair.
         ‘I like her but I don't want to climb into bed with her.’
         ‘But you might if you were asked.’
         He looked disgusted. ‘Don't be daft. She's a lot older than I am.’
         ‘It's been known.’ Jean smiled at him over the top of her glass and then took a sip.
         ‘She's flying out to South America next week - with Halpern. It's some kind of head's meeting. It's an annual event but it's the first time Rosa's been invited along.’


*      *      *      *      *

         Rosa Telman sat erect and cool in a cream linen dress as she watched the Andes sliding by the windows of the executive jet. A wide brimmed hat lay by her side.
         On the other side of the cabin Wensley Halpern had no eyes for the scenery. Throughout the flight he had worked hard at his ‘portable office’ - a lap-held microcomputer workstation which stored his working papers and which could put him in direct satellite data-link connection with the computer in his office back in Scotland. He had the clean-cut, squash-playing image of an after-shave advert. His chin may have been a little on the large side with a tendency to fleshiness, but his flat stomach and deep tan spoke of long hours on the exercise bicycle under sun-ray lamps.
         Halpern bristled with electronic gadgets and executive toys. Rosa had found that the business of going through the airport checks in his company was acutely embarrassing. Everything had to be unloaded and examined before he could pass through the electronic screening device and the airport staff obviously found it difficult to keep their faces straight while he produced for inspection his radio scrambler telephone, his portable microcomputer office workstation, his miniature appointment diary-alarm databank, his solar-powered lapel-button kidnap-emergency location-homer transmitter, his office-contact bleeper and his domestic-contact bleeper (the ‘wife-alarm’ as some colleagues called it). He even carried a fountain pen in rolled gold which was quite useless as a writing implement but which housed in its cap a miniature electronic bug detector and sweeping device. He liked to demonstrate this at the commencement of important meetings to illustrate his attention to detail and his concern for security. But such was the arsenal of electronic gadgetry which he carried on his person that inevitably and inexorably it always homed in on himself.
         Rosa and Halpern shared the final leg of the journey with two others, Gunter Mach from Marsdon's German plant and Peter Tan from Taiwan. Gunter was a tall heavy man with a very long thin head and gold-rimmed spectacles who liked to crack jokes at Halpern's expense in slow, heavily accented but perfect English.
         ‘Well Halpern,’ he had said as they climbed aboard the jet. ‘I think perhaps now you are going to check the plane for bugs’.
         Rosa had met Mach before only a couple times, both of them formal occasions but she knew Peter well. They had been graduate students together at Berkeley. Peter had moved from research to management but he was still one of the few people in the Marsdon organisation for whom Rosa had respect and it was rumoured that the relationship between them might, at one time, have been more than just friendly.
         But the Andes stole the show - a changing pattern of peaks and ridges and deep V-shaped valleys gliding past. As they flew, the predominating colour changed from grey-green and white to rust-brown with an occasional purple outcrop. Then they swung away from the mountains and the greenery of the Ocean Springs complex glided into view.

         ‘Ocean Springs’ was a misnomer. Not only was the Pacific fifty miles away but the nearest natural source of water was a salt swamp about half an hour's drive along the dusty desert road to Chimbero. At one time the place was called ‘Campo del Jose’ which means ‘Jose's Flats’. It was rumoured that the new name was thought up when the property development plan was still on the drawing board and the intended location was California. That was before financial arrangements fell through and the Marsdon Corporation declared an interest, offering to collaborate with ‘Sunrise Properties’. The location was switched to Chile where the tax laws were advantageous and the government docile, and the nature of the project changed from a purely speculative one to a well planned complex which was to become the new headquarters of the Marsdon Empire.
         But the name stuck. Perhaps the image makers thought that it brought a touch of cool freshness to a dust-brown place of shimmering heat, trapped in the plain between the Andes, the Pacific and the Atacama Desert. Anyone driving in from Chimbero or Copiapo would see the sign posts proclaiming ‘A new concept in urban environment for life and work’, but might well reflect on why no one had bothered to translate the message into Spanish. The ‘Springs’ bit of the name was not so wide of the mark. In that low lying area the water table was not far below the surface and modern boring equipment brought it up easily. The place became an oasis of greenery in a parched landscape. Avenues were tree-lined and lawns sprinkled among the residential properties so carefully and tastefully arranged beside an artificial lake. From the centre of the lake spumed a two hundred foot jet of water casting spray and rainbows.
         The lake was shaped like a padlock and the hotel and conference centre were on the island formed by its hasp. On the far side of the creek was the industrial complex holding Marsdon's main computer manufacturing plant and research centre. Other companies were there too but if you dug deep enough into their affairs, you would probably find a connection to Marsdon's lurking in their foundations. The buildings there were low-rise slabs of cream concrete and the Marsdon colour scheme was maintained by the brown plate glass which shut out the glare of the desert sun.
         The Marsdon Corporation was what is called a ‘holding’ company. But if Jason Confield of the ‘Financial Analyst’ was to believed, it was more of a holding, squeezing dry and devouring company. It held, owned and controlled many others and it was rumoured that it also owned several governments.
         Its founder and president was J. Norman Marsdon Jnr. Business admirers called him ‘Productivity Norm’ while sycophants and employees within earshot called him ‘Quality Norm’. He guided the fortunes of his empire with a quiet ruthlessness which terrified his competitors. When he decided to increase the Corporation's stake in computers, several small companies with big ideas were swallowed as a whale swallows krill and Marsdon Computers International (MCI) was born. Expertise was assimilated and brought to the Ocean Springs complex - ‘The New Technological Camelot’ as ‘Time Magazine’ called it. Businesses acquired around the world were either closed or sold off to management buy-out teams which were left with products having modest current sales but absolutely no future. New assembly plants were opened in other continents to take advantage of cheap labour and some of these were granted small research centres to make it possible for MCI to tap into whatever research expertise was available in these places. A residual presence remained in the United States concentrating mainly on marketing but Ocean Springs became the focal point of the empire. Whatever it lacked in amenity was brought, wholesale, vacuum packed and shrink wrapped from the States. Marsdon moved his personal office into the penthouse suit in the Conference Centre Building - the ‘Shower Tower’ as the locals called it because of the way the spray from the fountain drifted against it when the wind was in the South. Telecommunications antennae and dishes on the roof of the building, put him in direct touch with the outlying parts of his empire.
         A small satirical magazine once portrayed Marsdon on its front cover as a huge malevolent spider at the centre of a global web in which were caught up a number of flies each of which bore a striking resemblance to a well known political figure. Knowledgeable observers were not entirely surprised when the magazine went into liquidation shortly afterwards.



*      *      *      *      *

         Gunther Mach wore a poncho blanket and ornate boots with golden spurs the size of saucers. A sombrero hung on his back from its lanyard. He twirled a six-shooter clumsily on his finger and then pointed it. ‘Make my day,’ he said grinning.
         Shivering in the chill breeze which often blew across the flats before dawn, they had boarded the rotor-jets. The distant mountains were black silhouettes back-lit by a pink glow in the eastern sky. They had flown up a valley between dark cliffs while a hard edge of bright sunlight crept down the mountainside towards them. The rocks were bands of maroon and purple and huge slopes of dark red scree threatened them from above.
         They landed on the flat valley floor in the midst of a sea of stones, rounded and bleached. Already the sun was uncomfortably bright. The river, a mere trickle which meandered through the middle of the stone desert, was fringed by blond grasses high as a man's head. Nearby was a ranch where horses were coralled behind wires fences supported by tall spindly poles. A girl called Randy met them. She had a Texan drawl and a side-kick, a boy called Chico who was dressed like a South American cowboy. Rosa had photographs of them. She reckoned they were too Hollywood to be real. At the ranch everyone was kitted out in new Levis and sombreros. There was much guffawing by the group as they caught sight of one another dressed up like film extras.
         It was the last day, the day of the excursion, the day of corporate togetherness, a day for `entering into the spirit'. But Rosa was not entering into any kind of spirit and she had never felt less `togetherness'. She was extremely angry ...


*      *      *      *      *

         The ‘Rainbow Room’ was on the tenth floor of the `Shower Tower'. Sliding glass doors ran the whole length of one wall and opened on to a veranda which was almost under the falling spray from the water plume. The air which wafted in was deliciously cool.
         They were about twenty in number, not counting the welcoming party and the supporting cast of hostesses in the company livery. A sleek young man with an improbable tan stood at a lectern on a slightly raised platform and did the master-of-ceremonies thing. Gunter was introduced to the group as the MD who had presided over the greatest rise in productivity, Peter Tan had captured the greatest increase in market share. Joe Delago of special contracts had landed the largest single order to supply computers for the new computerised electoral system which was to be installed in Europe. Willard Gerstone the South African MD had achieved the lowest manpower cost. Wensley Halpern got his pat on the back for highest quality standards. Each was the greatest this or the best at that - except for Rosa.
         At the sound of her own name she had risen, as had the others, to receive the applause, but she was described as being 'from Gairnock in Scotland'. Just that. Two claps which died on the wing, then deathly silence. She had sat down again, suddenly, spilling coffee on to her dress. A hostess had descended upon her solicitously offering sympathy and Kleenex but Rosa had had to repair to the women's room to dab out the stain and recover her composure. Moments earlier Sherman Olafsen her arch rival and head of the Ocean Springs research unit, was introduced as ‘the world authority on the theory of program correctness proofs for holistic programs.’
         Afterwards, when she was telling Allan about the trip, Rosa admitted that she had been shaken. But Allan was puzzled. Given that Rosa had a poor opinion of almost everyone in the higher management he could not understand why she would want praise from that quarter, but he supposed it was the suddenness - like being bitten by an unloved but docile family pet. Rosa was convinced that the whole thing was a set up and that Wensley Halpern had known about it in advance. Later, when the initial meeting was over, they had been split up into small groups for detailed discussion of reports and analyses of strategy. At one of these private sessions it was explained to Rosa and Halpern that Gairnock was not to be given the prestige development and verification of the new Labyrinth operating system. Instead Rosa's team would be given some routine work on quality testing software. Halpern had actually spoken in her defence but Rosa maintained that Halpern's weak protests were a sham, pre-arranged with the senior management and not intended to succeed. The real hurt was that the project she wanted would be given to Olafsen's team.
         She admitted that she had behaved badly. She had been shrill, she had not put her case well and the others present, all male, had exchanged glances. She reserved her most vitriolic comments for a man - she had never discovered his name - in tinted rimless octagonal spectacles who had sat at the elbow of Harvey Walsh the Vice President and fed him bits of paper from a black brief case. He it was who produced a copy of Rosa's terms of employment when she had talked about resignation. The terms stipulated that Rosa, on leaving MCI, could not work or publish in any topic on which she had worked with MCI. It was no empty threat. MCI had a history of vindictive legal suits against people who had broken their contracts.
         After that she had found it almost impossible to get a private word with anyone at the conference. Every minute of each day was scheduled in a round of working parties, discussion groups and panel talks interspersed by meal times and coffee breaks. She was excluded from most of the serious private sessions and she fretted away hours listening to discussions on marketing strategy. Marsdon himself put in an appearance at one of the buffet luncheons, to give them a platitudinous pep talk and to mingle with the troops for a few minutes with wine glass and diminutive sandwich in hand. She tried to button-hole Peter Tan at coffee but he would only talk about the weather.


*      *      *      *      *

         Rosa stood apart from the others. She felt ridiculous in Levi's and sombrero. She watched, smoldering, while, to much applause, Chico lassoed horses in the coral with a lariat made of plaited leather. Horse flesh was slapped and there was talk of girths and withers. The horses were saddled up in South American style with huge wooden stirrups like clogs and one by one each of the visitors was eased up on to the back of a patient horse.
         The power of the sun increased with the hour and Rosa discovered that the sombreros were not ornaments. Because of the dust on the trail, the old bandit trick with a handkerchief round nose and mouth was also a sensible protection. As they climbed a narrow trail diagonally up the flank of the valley and the higher hills came into view, the blackness of her mood dissolved.
         They lunched in a high alp and here Rosa was at last able to corner Peter Tan in a secluded spot. He was sitting with his back to a large boulder some distance away from the main party. With his lean jaw and oriental eyes she reckoned the cowboy outfit suited him rather better than the rest of them. He looked somehow just right and the appearance was not deceptive. Peter was very adaptable as well as being intelligent. He was a survivor and if somehow they had been thrown into this life for real Rosa reckoned that Peter would have emerged as the natural leader, able to turn his hand to roping horses and handling a gun. Peter was the kind of person you would want to have on your side in a tight corner.
         ‘What's going on Peter?’
         She sat down beside him like a little girl, for once dependent, subdued. She offered him a drink from her water bottle. Peter went on gazing at the high snow-clad hills framed by the purple slopes at the end of their valley. He sighed.
         ‘Rosa’, he said, ‘you are one of the most intelligent people I have ever known - probably - ’ He looked round at her and then back to the distant hills. ‘Probably THE most intelligent. But when it comes to office politics you're a babe in arms.’
         ‘What's it all about Peter? Tell me.’
         ‘It's not personal Rosa. They do not underestimate you. They know very well that you would do a better job on the operating system than Sherman's mob but they want it for themselves Rosa. You are clever and therefore you are dangerous.’
         ‘Dangerous?’
         ‘The whole company is geared now to the new Labyrinth chip. It will be the central technology for the next twenty years. The operating system is a strategic bit of that technology and the proof of its correctness even more so. It would be dangerous to put that into the hands of someone who was not totally their man. That little charade in the Rainbow room, the way they insulted you, that was just a warning shot across the bows of anyone else who might have felt disposed to come to your aid.’
         ‘So what shall I do?’
         ‘Do nothing Rosa. You can't get them to change their minds by protesting. The more you protest the more they will be certain their judgement was correct. Find something else to do which will give you a focus for your talents Rosa. You are still young.’ He turned round to her met her eyes and with a quiet smile took the water bottle out of her hand. ‘It would be a waste to eat out your heart on this’.
         She watched his Adam's apple jumping as he drank. He screwed the top back on the bottle and said, ‘There's another reason why you can't win Rosa when it comes to office politics. You actually want the job to be done well. The people who win political battles don't care about that. They only care about being in charge of the job. So they concentrate on advocating whatever will get them promoted, no matter what that is.’
         There was a long pause.
         ‘What a beautiful place this is’, he said suddenly as he handed the bottle back. He dropped his voice. ‘Just watch what you say Rosa and who you say it to. This place has more bugs than a hobo's underpants’.

         They had got back to the ranch late in the evening. Everyone was walking about stiffly with bandy legs. They hefted saddles and saddle bags on to the low wooden counter for Randy to collect and pack away.
         ‘Ah John,’ said Gunter in a basso profundo, ‘are you not going to check me out for bugs?’
         There was a glint in Halpern's eye. He produced his gold-topped pen and began to scan Gunter's person minutely - in his ears, up his trowser legs, until the others began to giggle and Gunter began to get annoyed. Then he waved the pen about the room. As the pen swung across in front of Rosa the small red light on the tip of the pen lit up. He paused, puzzled, and swung it back towards Rosa. His smile was gone. At that moment Randy took Rosa's sombrero from her and carried it off, but as Rosa handed it over she saw or thought she saw that the bauble on the end of her hat string had a set of little perforations in its base.