Wetware by Craig Nova Page A

the best thing. He knew, and everyone else knew, that people would suffer. Unemployment would increase and businesses would fail, but there was nothing else to do. Blaine went through the list. He came to the difficult decision. The board listened. When he asked for the authority to do what had to be done, they voted by nodding: it was a gray, moving, quiet assent. They looked at him like vipers who have just injected a rat with venom. All but one.
    This was an industrialist, Harold Warren, a relatively new member of the board, tall and thin, with blue eyes and a beautifully made suit. There was not much he hadn’t seen, such as the strikes in South America in which thirty thousand people had been killed in one afternoon. He was one of the most ardent supporters of the action they had decided to take, and when it was approved, he said to Blaine, “Well. It’s not going to be easy.”
    “That’s not your worry,” said Blaine.
    “I know,” said Warren. “But perhaps you would like some assistance.”
    Blaine stiffened.
    “Assistance?” said Blaine. “No. I have my orders and, as I think you know, I am aware of what has to be done.”
    “But still,” said Warren, “perhaps there is something we can do. Maybe we can help you take the heat.”
    “My job is to take the heat, as you say,” said Blaine.
    “But—” said Warren.
    “For Christ’s sake, Warren,” said Evelyn Black, a woman who had made her money in the last dregs of coal. “He said he can take care of it. Why don’t you listen to him?”
    “Because, Evelyn, I think this is a hard decision.”
    “Don’t you think he knows that? Don’t we all?” she said.
    “Well, I just wanted him to know we are here for him,” Warren said.
    Black made a dismissive gesture with her hand and turned to look out the window.
    “Twaddle,” she said. “Our job is not to be here for him. Our job is to stay the hell out of his way.” The gray faces expanded and contracted with approval, as though their jowls were organs of respiration. “Now, if there is nothing else, let’s get out of here. It’s a beautiful day, for Christ’s sake. What’s done is done.” She shrugged again, her bulk moving in her black clothes. She turned to Blaine. “Good luck and Godspeed.”
    The members of the board filed out, bent, angry, somehow still voracious after all the years they had lived, and then Blaine was left alone. He knew that the most important thing was the timing of the announcement he was going to make. He went back to his office, waiting for the elevator as he stood under the angels in the dome, who looked down at him with their usual lofty and cool, gilt-winged indifference. Blaine picked a date, a Friday, to make the announcement and he had his staff, or the communications part of it, begin to work on the release. He spoke to other department heads.
    In the evening, Blaine went to a hotel, the Metropol, where he was going to meet Carr. A small fountain stood in the center of the lobby, surrounded by overstuffed leather chairs among some palm trees. At the rear of the room, musicians in black tie played music that was popular and yet old-fashioned, and Blaine sat there, on this evening, waiting for Carr and hearing, through the plash of the fountains, the sound of music from a hundred years before. A few more days and the announcement would be made, and that would be that.
    Across the room, Blaine saw that Harold Warren was sitting with a man who was the financial editor of an international business paper. Warren looked overwrought and he spoke quickly, sighing from time to time, and then speaking again. Blaine watched, hearing “Fascination,” a song he had always detested and that seemed to him to be somehow correct, as though this nightmare should have this music to go with it. He stood up and walked across the room. A number of people watched him as he went, their eyes following him as though they were seeing a wife or a husband with a secret