Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [34]
"Oh? That's good."
"Yup. Means we'll need more help. As of the first, you're Assistant General Manager, if you want the job."
"Oh, I want it. Thank you." She smiled flickeringly (like a flashbulb, on and off almost before you saw it) and turned back to the desk calculator.
"I knew you would. That's why I had the decorators in. They're turning that room next to mine into a new office for you. I've told them to consult you after they do the preliminaries." Corrigan lowered his weight onto the corner of her desk. "There. I was keeping it for a surprise. Now what's your secret?"
"I've forgotten," Eileen said. "And I do have to get these estimates done so you can take them to Bakersfield with you."
"Okay," Corrigan said. He went back to his office, defeated.
If he knew, Eileen thought. She had an urge to giggle, but she held it back. She wasn't really trying to tease Corrigan. She had been thinking: Well, I did it. And Robin was nice. Not the world's greatest lover, but he didn't pretend to be either. The way he'd suggested a rematch: "Lovers need practice," he'd said. "The second time is always better than the first."
They'd left it vague. Maybe, just maybe, she'd take him up on it sometime; but probably not. He'd also told her definitely that he was married; she'd only suspected it before.
Never had there been any suggestion that business had anything to do with their private lives. But he'd signed up with Corrigan's Plumbing Supplies for a very large deal—and she felt funny about that, and wondered if she'd have been as careless about finding out Robin's marital status if the deal hadn't been pending. But he'd signed up.
So here she was, adding up numbers, pushing papers around, and suddenly she'd asked herself: What does this have to do with plumbing? I don't make pipe. I don't lay pipe. I don't ream it out, or tell people where to put it. What I do is push paper around.
It was an important job. Measure it by the chaos she could create with one random mistake or one malicious error: Thousands of tons of supplies might be sent to the ends of the Earth by a slip of her pen. But what she did had no more to do with creation, with making the things that held a civilization together, than income tax, or being the fireman on a diesel train.
Mr. Corrigan would probably spend the whole day wondering why she'd suddenly burst into sparkling laughter, and there was no way she could tell him. It had just come to her, unexpected and irresistible: What she had done with Robin Geston on the night before last was the closest she had ever come to any activity actually connected with plumbing.
The car wouldn't be reported stolen for hours. Alim Nassor was pretty sure of that, sure enough that he would sit in it for another ten minutes. Alim Nassor had been a great man. When he had made himself great again, he would have to hide what he was doing now.
Before he was great he had been George Washington Carver Davis. His mother had been proud of that name. She'd said the family was named for Jefferson Davis. That honky had been a tough dude, but it was a loser's name, no power in it. He'd had a lot of street names since. His mother hadn't liked those. When she threw him out he took his own.
Alim Nassor meant wise conqueror in both Arabic and Swahili. Not many knew what it meant, and so what? The name had power. Alim Nassor had a hell of a lot more power than George Washington Carver ever did. You could read about Alim Nassor in the newspapers. And he could still walk into City Hall and get in to see people. He'd been able to do that ever since he broke up a riot with his switchblade and the razor blades in his shoes and the chain he carried around his waist. There was all that