energy he was supposed to give the company and the amount he actually gave. "I mean the great advantage of a place like Knox is that you can sort of turn off your mind every morning at nine and leave it off all day, and nobody knows the difference."
More recently still, and particularly since moving to the country, he had taken to avoiding the whole topic whenever possible by replying, to the question of what he did for a living, that he didn't do anything, really; that he had the dullest job you could possibly imagine.
On the Monday morning after the end of the Laurel Players, he walked into the Knox Building like an automaton. The show windows were featuring a new display, bright cardboard images of thin, fashionable young women who grinned and pointed their pencils at emblazoned lists of product benefits—speed, accuracy, control—and beyond them, across the deep-carpeted expanse of the display floor, a generous sampling of the products themselves stood poised for demonstration. Some of them, the simpler ones, were much like the machines that had kindled his father's enthusiasm twenty years before, though the angular black designs of those days had all been modified to fit the globular "sculptured forms" of their new casings, which were the color of oyster meat; but there were others equipped to deal with the facts of business at speeds more lickety-split than anything Earl Wheeler could have dreamed of. These, ready to purr and blink with electronic mystery, grew more and more imposing across the floor until they culminated in the big inscrutable components of the Knox "500" Electronic Computer, a machine which, according to the museum card displayed at its base, could "perform the lifetime work of a man with a desk calculator in thirty minutes."
But Frank moved past the display room without a glance, and his actions on entering the lobby were absentmindedly expert: he obeyed the pointed finger of the elevator starter without quite being aware of it, nor did he notice which of the six elevator operators it was who sleepily made him welcome (he almost never did, unless it happened to be one of the two whose presence could be faintly oppressive: the very old man whose knees were so sprung that painfullooking bulges pressed against the backs of his trousers, or the enormous boy whom some glandular disorder had afflicted with the high hips of a woman and the downy head and beardless face of an infant). Pressed well back in the polite bondage of the car, he heard the sliding door clamp shut and the safety gate go rattling after it, and as the car began to rise he was surrounded by the dissonant conversations of his colleagues. He heard a deep, measured voice of the Great Plains, rich with distance and travel and the best accommodations (". . . course, we did hit a little bumpy weather comin' inta Chicawgo . . ."), sound out in counterpoint to the abrupt and sibilant accents of the city
(". . . so I siz 'Whaddya—kiddin'?' He siz 'No, listen, I'm not kiddin' . . .") while a softer medley of eight or ten voices, male and female, repeated their hushed morning courtesies under the buzz of the overhead fan; then it was time to begin the nodding, side-stepping ritual of making way for the people who edged toward the front with murmurs of "Out, please . . . Out, please" and to wait while the door slid open and shut, open and shut again. The eighth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the fourteenth . . .
At first glance, all the upper floors of the Knox Building looked alike. Each was a big open room, ablaze with fluorescent ceiling lights, that had been divided into a maze of aisles and cubicles by shoulder-high partitions. The upper panels of these dividers, waist to shoulder, were made of thick unframed plate glass that was slightly corrugated to achieve a blue-white semi-transparency; and the overall effect of this, to a man getting off the elevator and looking out across the room, was that of the wide indoor lake
More recently still, and particularly since moving to the country, he had taken to avoiding the whole topic whenever possible by replying, to the question of what he did for a living, that he didn't do anything, really; that he had the dullest job you could possibly imagine.
On the Monday morning after the end of the Laurel Players, he walked into the Knox Building like an automaton. The show windows were featuring a new display, bright cardboard images of thin, fashionable young women who grinned and pointed their pencils at emblazoned lists of product benefits—speed, accuracy, control—and beyond them, across the deep-carpeted expanse of the display floor, a generous sampling of the products themselves stood poised for demonstration. Some of them, the simpler ones, were much like the machines that had kindled his father's enthusiasm twenty years before, though the angular black designs of those days had all been modified to fit the globular "sculptured forms" of their new casings, which were the color of oyster meat; but there were others equipped to deal with the facts of business at speeds more lickety-split than anything Earl Wheeler could have dreamed of. These, ready to purr and blink with electronic mystery, grew more and more imposing across the floor until they culminated in the big inscrutable components of the Knox "500" Electronic Computer, a machine which, according to the museum card displayed at its base, could "perform the lifetime work of a man with a desk calculator in thirty minutes."
But Frank moved past the display room without a glance, and his actions on entering the lobby were absentmindedly expert: he obeyed the pointed finger of the elevator starter without quite being aware of it, nor did he notice which of the six elevator operators it was who sleepily made him welcome (he almost never did, unless it happened to be one of the two whose presence could be faintly oppressive: the very old man whose knees were so sprung that painfullooking bulges pressed against the backs of his trousers, or the enormous boy whom some glandular disorder had afflicted with the high hips of a woman and the downy head and beardless face of an infant). Pressed well back in the polite bondage of the car, he heard the sliding door clamp shut and the safety gate go rattling after it, and as the car began to rise he was surrounded by the dissonant conversations of his colleagues. He heard a deep, measured voice of the Great Plains, rich with distance and travel and the best accommodations (". . . course, we did hit a little bumpy weather comin' inta Chicawgo . . ."), sound out in counterpoint to the abrupt and sibilant accents of the city
(". . . so I siz 'Whaddya—kiddin'?' He siz 'No, listen, I'm not kiddin' . . .") while a softer medley of eight or ten voices, male and female, repeated their hushed morning courtesies under the buzz of the overhead fan; then it was time to begin the nodding, side-stepping ritual of making way for the people who edged toward the front with murmurs of "Out, please . . . Out, please" and to wait while the door slid open and shut, open and shut again. The eighth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the fourteenth . . .
At first glance, all the upper floors of the Knox Building looked alike. Each was a big open room, ablaze with fluorescent ceiling lights, that had been divided into a maze of aisles and cubicles by shoulder-high partitions. The upper panels of these dividers, waist to shoulder, were made of thick unframed plate glass that was slightly corrugated to achieve a blue-white semi-transparency; and the overall effect of this, to a man getting off the elevator and looking out across the room, was that of the wide indoor lake
Similar Books
