The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories by Connie Willis Page A

just as sure that he had had no need to. It was a lucky coincidence that Lynn’s mother was getting a divorce just now, and lucky coincidences were Brad’s specialty. How else could he have kept three fiancées from ever meeting each other in the small confinesof Chugwater and Mowen Chemical?
    “Lynn?” Ulric said. “Which one is that? The redhead in programming?”
    “Nope, that’s Sue. Lynn’s little and yellow-haired and smart as a whip about chemical engineering. Kind of a dodunk about everythin’ else.”
    “Dodunk,” Ulric said to himself. He should make a note to look that up. It probably meant “one so foolish as to associate with Brad McAfee.” That definitelyincluded him. He had agreed to room with Brad because he was so surprised at being hired that it had not occurred to him to ask for an apartment of his own.
    He had graduated with an English degree that everyone had told him was worse than useless in Wyoming, and which he very soon found out was. In desperation, he had applied for a factory job at Mowen Chemical and been hired on as company linguistat an amazing salary for reasons that had not yet become clear, though he had been at Mowen for over three months. What had become clear was that Brad McAfee was, to use his own colorful language, a thimblerigger, a pigeon plucker, a hornswoggler. He was steadily working his way toward the boss’s daughter and the ownership of Mowen Chemical, leaving a trail of young women behind him who allapparently believed that a man who pronounced fiancée ‘fee-an-see’ couldn’t possibly have more than one. It was an interesting linguistic phenomenon.
    At first Ulric had been taken in by Brad’s homespun talk, too, even though it didn’t seem to match his sophisticated abilities on the computer. Then one day he had gotten up early and caught Brad working on a program called Project Sally.
    “I’mgonna be the president of Mowen Chemical in two shakes of a sheep’s tail,” Brad had said. “This little dingclinker is my master plan. What do you think of it?”
    What Ulric thought of it could not be expressed in words. It outlined a plan for getting close to Sally Mowen and impressing her father based almost entirely on the seduction and abandonment of young women in key positions at Mowen Chemical.Three-quarters of the way down he had seen Lynn’s name.
    “What if Mr. Mowen gets hold of this program?” Ulric had said finally.
    “Not alook-in chance that that’d happen. I got this program locked up tighter than a hog’s eye. And if anybody else tried to copy it, they’d be sorrier than a coon romancin’ a polecat.”
    Since then Ulric had put in six requests for an apartment, all of which had beenturned down “due to restrictive areal housing availability,” which Ulric supposed meant there weren’t any empty apartments in Chugwater. All of the turndowns were initialed by Mr. Mowen’s secretary, and there were moments when Ulric thought that Mr. Mowen knew about Project Sally after all and had hired Ulric to keep Brad away from his daughter.
    “According to my program, it’s time to go to workon Sally,” Brad said now. “Tomorrow at this press conference. I’m enough of a rumbustigator with this waste emissions project to dazzlefy Old Man Mowen. Sally’s going to be there. I got my fiancée Gail in publicity to invite her.”
    “I’m going to be there, too,” Ulric said belligerently.
    “Now, that’s right lucky,” Brad said. “You can do a little honeyfuggling for me. Work on old Sally while Igive Pappy Mowen the glad hand. Do you know what she looks like?”
    “I have no intention of honeyfuggling Sally Mowen for you,” Ulric said, and wondered again where Brad managed to pick up all these slang expressions. He had caught Brad watching Judy Canova movies on TV a couple of times, but some of these words weren’t even in Mencken. He probably had a computer program that generated them. “Infact, I intend to tell her you’re