Read Online The Fearsome Particles by Trevor Cole - Free Book Online Page B

manager squinted and his face twitched a bit. He looked suddenly to the ground, and then seemed to gather Gerald with an arm and move him off to the side, as if to make their conversation more private, though there’d been no one close enough to hear. When he spoke, his voice was no more than a murmur. “I’m not an expert, sir, but it’s my understanding that when young people are in a state of …” He hesitated and Gerald watched Oberly’s mouth shape itself around a word. “… when they’re in a state of, uh, grieving –”
    “Grieving. Someone’s been –”
    Oberly talked over him. “When they’re in that state, sir, they can – sometimes – become, uh, erratic. In their behaviour.”
    “Erratic.”
    “In their thinking.”
    Gerald, with jet fuel perfuming the bright, wild air around him, tried to grip the two motes of information he’d just been given, erraticness, and the other. “Kyle,” he said, “is acting erratically.”
    Oberly nodded. “One thing, his work habits slipped. Tasks weren’t being completed. We’d find him in the kitchen tent playing cards for money, any hour of the day. We tried talking to him. Tried fining him. Didn’t work. He was a different kid. We gave it some time but after a while we thought it best to get him back to his family. This sort of thing, we’re not really equipped.”
    The large soldier high at the door banged the side of the stairs. “Mike?”
    Oberly signalled
come
with a wave. There was motion on the stairs above him and Gerald looked up as his son appeared.He was smiling. He seemed healthy. His hands were tied behind his back.
    Oberly jerked the zipper of his windbreaker as high as it could go and gave Gerald an apologetic look. “He went a little berserk on the plane.”

TWO

1
    F or a week, until she cornered him by the photocopier, Gerald had been tenacious in avoiding Sandy Beale. He had more than enough flux in his life at the moment and to him, since the aborted meeting in his office, Sandy Beale had come to represent “crazy change.” You could have asked Gerald to entertain all sorts of accelerated efforts and focused initiatives on behalf of Spent Materials and he would have been happy to do it, any hour of any day. But to “crazy change” Gerald said, “No thank you.”
    Then Sandy rounded the corner of the photocopier station and happened upon Gerald making copies of the latest Materials Girl column in
Sheet and Screen
, in which the Girl (actually a fifty-something woman wearing the sort of maniacally happy expression Gerald associated with bake sales) offered a helpful checklist of measures for combating humidity in metal fabrication systems. He had intended to deposit copies of the “Put the Clamp on Damp” article in the mail slots of his three shift supervisorswith an eye to minimizing the inventory losses that Spent suffered due to unchecked corrosion every summer, and then he planned a follow-up meeting featuring some fairly pointed questions a few days later. But all of that blew from Gerald’s head when Sandy stamped around the corner clutching a black folder and came to a sudden, hair-flying halt.
    “Well, hello there!”
    “Hi, Sandy, I’m just about done.” Gerald yanked out his copies and then, realizing there were only two, positioned a hand down by the output tray to receive the third. He had his body tilted forward, his face toward the hall, he was exit-ready. No one in Sandy’s position would think to waylay an executive so postured.
    “I’ve been hoping we’d meet.”
    Gerald was forced to glance up. “Have you?” By now the copy should have fallen into his hand. He should have been gone. By now.
    “I think it’s jammed,” said Sandy, as the copier gave a sigh.
    He straightened and looked at the panel of lights. Where all should have been green, one was yellow. “Well, it’s not important. I’ll get it later.” He started to leave.
    “Wait!”
    “Yes?”
    Her eyes ballooned at him.