grin that goes with job satisfaction, perfect and pure. He was just killing time until the main event, but he was killing it in such exquisite ways. Time, and sometimes people.
SOMETIMES HE WAS called White, or Blanc, or Albus, or Chalky, or Weiss, or Snowy, or any one of a hundred other names. His skin was pale, his hair a faded blond, his eyes light gray. He was somewhere in his twenties at a casual glance, and a casual glance was all anyone ever gave him.
He was almost entirely unmemorable.
Unlike his two colleagues, he could never settle down in any one job for very long.
He had had all manner of interesting jobs in lots of interesting places.
(He had worked at the Chernobyl Power Station, and at Windscale, and at Three Mile Island, always in minor jobs that werenât very important.)
He had been a minor but valued member of a number of scientific research establishments.
(He had helped to design the petrol engine, and plastics, and the ring-pull can.)
He could turn his hand to anything.
Nobody really noticed him. He was unobtrusive; his presence was cumulative. If you thought about it carefully, you could figure out he had to have been doing something, had to have been somewhere. Maybe he even spoke to you. But he was easy to forget, was Mr. White.
At this time he was working as deckhand on an oil tanker, heading toward Tokyo.
The captain was drunk in his cabin. The first mate was in the head. The second mate was in the galley. That was pretty much it for the crew: the ship was almost completely automated. There wasnât much a person could do.
However, if a person just happened to press the EMERGENCY CARGO RELEASE switch on the bridge, the automatic systems would take care of releasing huge quantities of black sludge into the sea, millions of tons of crude oil, with devastating effect on the birds, fish, vegetation, animals, and humans of the region. Of course, there were dozens of fail-safe interlocks and foolproof safety backups but, what the hell, there always were.
Afterwards, there was a huge amount of argument as to exactly whose fault it was. In the end it was left unresolved: the blame was apportioned equally. Neither the captain, the first mate, nor the second mate ever worked again.
For some reason nobody gave much of a thought to Seaman White, who was already halfway to Indonesia on a tramp steamer piled high with rusting metal barrels of a particularly toxic weedkiller.
AND THERE WAS ANOTHER. He was in the square in Kumbolaland. And he was in the restaurants. And he was in the fish, and in the air, and in the barrels of weedkiller. He was on the roads, and in houses, and in palaces, and in hovels.
There was nowhere that he was a stranger, and there was no getting away from him. He was doing what he did best, and what he was doing was what he was.
He was not waiting. He was working.
HARRIET DOWLING returned home with her baby, which, on the advice of Sister Faith Prolix, who was more persuasive than Sister Mary, and with the telephonic agreement of her husband, she had named Warlock.
The Cultural Attaché returned home a week later, and pronounced the baby the spit of his side of the family. He also had his secretary advertise in The Lady for a nanny.
Crowley had seen Mary Poppins on television one Christmas (indeed, behind the scenes, Crowley had had a hand in most television; although it was on the invention of the game show that he truly prided himself). He toyed with the idea of a hurricane as an effective and incredibly stylish way of disposing of the queue of nannies that would certainly form, or possibly stack up in a holding pattern, outside the Cultural Attachéâs Regentâs Park residence.
He contented himself with a wildcat tube strike, and when the day came, only one nanny turned up.
She wore a knit tweed suit and discreet pearl earrings. Something about her might have said nanny, but it said it in an undertone of the sort employed by British butlers in a
SOMETIMES HE WAS called White, or Blanc, or Albus, or Chalky, or Weiss, or Snowy, or any one of a hundred other names. His skin was pale, his hair a faded blond, his eyes light gray. He was somewhere in his twenties at a casual glance, and a casual glance was all anyone ever gave him.
He was almost entirely unmemorable.
Unlike his two colleagues, he could never settle down in any one job for very long.
He had had all manner of interesting jobs in lots of interesting places.
(He had worked at the Chernobyl Power Station, and at Windscale, and at Three Mile Island, always in minor jobs that werenât very important.)
He had been a minor but valued member of a number of scientific research establishments.
(He had helped to design the petrol engine, and plastics, and the ring-pull can.)
He could turn his hand to anything.
Nobody really noticed him. He was unobtrusive; his presence was cumulative. If you thought about it carefully, you could figure out he had to have been doing something, had to have been somewhere. Maybe he even spoke to you. But he was easy to forget, was Mr. White.
At this time he was working as deckhand on an oil tanker, heading toward Tokyo.
The captain was drunk in his cabin. The first mate was in the head. The second mate was in the galley. That was pretty much it for the crew: the ship was almost completely automated. There wasnât much a person could do.
However, if a person just happened to press the EMERGENCY CARGO RELEASE switch on the bridge, the automatic systems would take care of releasing huge quantities of black sludge into the sea, millions of tons of crude oil, with devastating effect on the birds, fish, vegetation, animals, and humans of the region. Of course, there were dozens of fail-safe interlocks and foolproof safety backups but, what the hell, there always were.
Afterwards, there was a huge amount of argument as to exactly whose fault it was. In the end it was left unresolved: the blame was apportioned equally. Neither the captain, the first mate, nor the second mate ever worked again.
For some reason nobody gave much of a thought to Seaman White, who was already halfway to Indonesia on a tramp steamer piled high with rusting metal barrels of a particularly toxic weedkiller.
AND THERE WAS ANOTHER. He was in the square in Kumbolaland. And he was in the restaurants. And he was in the fish, and in the air, and in the barrels of weedkiller. He was on the roads, and in houses, and in palaces, and in hovels.
There was nowhere that he was a stranger, and there was no getting away from him. He was doing what he did best, and what he was doing was what he was.
He was not waiting. He was working.
HARRIET DOWLING returned home with her baby, which, on the advice of Sister Faith Prolix, who was more persuasive than Sister Mary, and with the telephonic agreement of her husband, she had named Warlock.
The Cultural Attaché returned home a week later, and pronounced the baby the spit of his side of the family. He also had his secretary advertise in The Lady for a nanny.
Crowley had seen Mary Poppins on television one Christmas (indeed, behind the scenes, Crowley had had a hand in most television; although it was on the invention of the game show that he truly prided himself). He toyed with the idea of a hurricane as an effective and incredibly stylish way of disposing of the queue of nannies that would certainly form, or possibly stack up in a holding pattern, outside the Cultural Attachéâs Regentâs Park residence.
He contented himself with a wildcat tube strike, and when the day came, only one nanny turned up.
She wore a knit tweed suit and discreet pearl earrings. Something about her might have said nanny, but it said it in an undertone of the sort employed by British butlers in a
Similar Books
