her own cowardice the next morning, but she peeked around the corner before she went out her door. The last thing she wanted was a confrontation with her new neighbor, even if she did probably have to see him at work.
She got into her yellow VW, and crossing her fingers for luck, managed to crank it on the first try. She backed it out into the road and drove off, noticing with relief that the truck wasn’t in the other side of the driveway. He must already have left for work.
Sure enough, when she got to the MacFaber Corporation offices, the red-and-rust pickup was already there. Maureen went quickly into the building and to the office she shared with Mr. Blake, glancing nervously around. But her new neighbor was nowhere in sight, thank God.
Mr. Blake glanced up when she took him the mail, staring at her blankly.
“The mail, sir,” Maureen said, putting it in front of him on the cluttered desk.
“Yes, of course,” he murmured. He seemed to be looking through her, as he did when he was preoccupied.
“Is something wrong, Mr. Blake?” she asked worriedly.
“No, nothing at all,” he assured her, but he didn’t look terribly convincing. She knew that his brother-in-law had been out on sick leave ever since the disappointing trial run of the new Faber-jet design. Maybe he was worried about the older man.
“Is your brother-in-law getting better?” she asked.
He gave her a quick, suspicious look.
“I know you must be worried about him,” she said gently. “I hope he’s all right.”
“He’s much better, thank you, Maureen,” he said stiffly. “I expect he’ll be back at work before very long.” He moved uncomfortably, as if it bothered him to talk about personal subjects. “Get me the Radley file, if you please.”
“Yes, sir.” She smiled. She liked her boss, but he had seemed terribly unlike himself lately. He needed to rest more, she decided, and not worry so much. His brother-in-law, Mr. Jameson, was a much less regimented person, a mechanic with an easygoing temperament but a stubborn resistance to authority and new techniques. She smiled, thinking privately that Mr. Jameson and the new mechanic would probably butt heads pretty quickly. It disturbed her to think about her disagreeable new neighbor.
She took Mr. Blake the file and went back to her routine. She enjoyed her job, but it could get hectic, especially when there were visiting dignitaries or government inspectors around. There was a lot of concern about the disappointing first test flight of the corporation’s Faber jet, and perhaps that was at the root of Mr. Blake’s nervousness. Quality control was where the buck stopped when anything went wrong with new designs, especially when the design department could prove that they weren’t at fault. That put not only Maureen’s boss but the entire quality-control department on the firing line.
The design department had already proved itself blameless; they’d shown a computer-graphics presentation of the craft’s performance on paper. The plane should have flown perfectly. So now everybody was beginning to think that the flaw was much more likely the result of sabotage than a design defect. MacFaber had enemies. Most successful companies and executives did. One particular rival firm, Peters Aviation, had recently made a takeover bid for MacFaber’s corporation. But characteristically, old MacFaber had pulled his irons out of the fire just in time by gathering up proxies. He had three votes over what he needed to win the fight, and Peters had gone away fuming but empty-handed. But if the new design failed, and Peters got his design in ahead of time, the board of directors might vote a lack of faith in MacFaber and approve the takeover. It was a risky situation.
Maureen, like the rest of the staff, had wondered at the poor maiden performance of the renovated Faber jet. It didn’t seem possible that it had been sabotaged, but the evidence was beginning to point that way. How curious that Mr. MacFaber hadn’t been roaring around the place raising Cain over the difficulties. But perhaps the lady in Rio had him mesmerized.
“I’d like to mesmerize someone, just once,” she muttered as she pulled up the Faber-jet file on her computer and began to type the performance report Mr. Blake had given her.
The intercom buzzed, interrupting her thoughts. “Miss Harris.”
“Yes, Mr. Blake?”
“Please go down to Mr. MacFaber’s office and ask Charlene for the latest figures on the cost overrun on the Faber-jet modifications,” he said.
“I’ll go right now.”
She left the computer up and running and went down the hall to the huge office that Mr. MacFaber occupied when he was in residence. Charlene, a pretty blonde, was glaring at her computer monitor and grumbling.
“I hate computers,” she said, glaring at the screen. “I hate computers, I hate companies that use computers, I even hate people who make computers!”
“Shame on you,” Maureen said. “You’ll upset it and it will get sick.”
“Good. I hope it dies! It just ate a whole morning’s work and it won’t give it back!”
“Here. I’ll save you. Get up.” Maureen grinned at her, sat down, and within five minutes had pulled out the backup copy of the file, copied it, and put Charlene back in the chair.
Charlene stared at her suspiciously. “I don’t trust people who understand how to do things like that. What if you’re an enemy agent or something?”
“I can’t possibly be. I don’t even own a trench coat,” Maureen said reasonably. “Mr. Blake wants the latest cost-overrun figures on the Faber jet. I’d have asked for them on my terminal, but I imagined you having hysterics if you had to try to send it via your modem.”
Charlene’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t even know how to turn on the modem, if you want the truth. I never wanted this job in the first place. Computers, modems, electronic typewriters—if the pay wasn’t so good, I’d leave tomorrow. You try sitting here trying to explain to everybody short of God that Mr. MacFaber hasn’t set foot in the office for the past year. Just try. Then explain to all these people who keep calling him that he can’t be reached by phone because he’s sitting on the banks of the Amazon contemplating the ancient Incas or something!”
“I’m really sorry,” Maureen said. “But I do need the cost-overrun figures.”
Charlene sighed. “Okay.”
She got up and fumbled through her immaculate filing cabinets until she got what she was looking for and handed a file to Maureen. “Don’t lose it and don’t let it out of your sight. Mr. Johnston will kill me if it vanishes.”
“You know very well the vice president in charge of production worships the ground you walk on.”
Charlene smiled smugly. “Yes, I do know. If he doesn’t watch out, I’ll have him in front of a minister. He’s sexy.”
“I think so, too, but we can’t all look like you,” Maureen told her. “Some of us have to look like me.”
“I like your new hairdo and makeup,” Charlene said kindly.
“I’m still going home alone, though.” Maureen shrugged. “Maybe someday I’ll get lucky.” She glanced around the plush, carpeted office.
