Sunday, December 5 (cont'd)

Brew was at his desk, reading, making notes on a yellow legal pad. Del was at the base, with a customer.

Rhino came in with a cup of coffee in his hand and sat at Del's desk.

He and Brew talked about people they knew in common.

"I thought you was retarded," Brew said.

"I was," Rhino said, "but Traci lured me back. She made me an offer I could not refuse. I held out for a four-day week and more money than you would believe. My customer insisted she hire me. Or he'd give the work to a competitor."

Actually, he named the competitor. It was a beltway bandit with three letters in its name.

The two other contractors Brew worked for both had three letters in their name. Like A/C/T.

CRC. IMI.

In the 15 years Brew had been gone, some offices got bigger, some got smaller, some failed, and some were bought up by bigger firms and renamed.

The civil servants at the base spread the work around.

When they got ready to retire from civil service, a contractor would hire them, for their contacts, back at the base. Double-dippers.

Sometimes, when people retired from the military, they got civil service jobs. Double-dippers.

Brew knew one man who had been in the Navy Reserve while he was a civil servant. He got a civil service pension, a military retirement, and a salary from a contractor, too. He was a triple-dipper.

He used to use Brew's project charge numbers, when Brew ran a word processing shop-all he did was work on proposals, and they didn't want to charge his work to overhead-and he would go through money like a drunken sailor.

Now Brew was on social security and earning wages, too. Was that a double-dipper? Was Brew a double-dipper?

Not in the way Rhino was. Rhino was selling influence. All Brew had to sell was his labor.

Every time Rhino made a career move he came out better, not worse. He had his eye on the career, like the old Suent Scientific hands, waiting for a package, looking at their options on a spreadsheet. Making the company pay them to leave. Then hire them back to do their old jobs as a consultant.

Brew just waited and got laid off. It always blindsided him.

Most of the people Brew had worked with before had risen in the ranks. They were either group managers, like his old cube-mate, or site managers, like the Retread Mafia who had managed Brew and his cube-mate, before.

Here Brew was, back at square one. Technical Communicator I.

Rhino asked Brew what he had been up to.

He told him that after he left A/C/T for CRC, then IMI, he got laid off, in a recession, and went tango uniform. They lost their house. He declared bankruptcy.

"Itai," Rhino said.

A lot of ex-GIs use Japanese phrases.

Itai means ouch.

"Then I got a tech writing job out of town and moved to Atlanta for six years."

Rhino said he had a grandbaby in Peachtree City, and went to Atlanta most weekends, with his wife, to see it.

He had a 4 x 4 Ford pickup truck that was bigger than Traci's SUV.

It was huge, and plush, and impractical, and ostentatious.

Tango uniform means tits-up.

Brew told Rhino when Suent Scientific laid him off, he had ten weeks of separation pay, 26 weeks of unemployment, and one 13-week extension. He took a sabbatical year to fix up Brenda's old home place and work on a novel.

Brew didn't tell Rhino he wrote 24 novels, and posted them on the worldwide web.

For one thing, he didn't want anyone at Actaeon to know, and for another, who would believe something like that?

Once before, at A/C/T, he had given a copy of Screed to a co-worker, who worked in word processing. He didn't know she was seeing a group manager, on the sly. They were keeping their affair a secret.

But the group manager read Brew's book, and said to him, one day, in the employee lounge, "So you write books on company time, do you?"

This is okay for Bernard Kerik. It is not okay for Art Brew.

That group manager was Don Parsons. He'd had a hard-on for Brew ever since.

In fact, once, after IMI laid Brew off, he thought that A/C/T was going to hire him back, and that Parsons had blackballed the appointment.

He couldn't prove it. He just suspected it.

Traci didn't seem to hold anything against him, though.

Once accused of it, what could you say?

I lied to them, but I'm telling you the truth?

Better to sneak. To go, or stay, underground.

Except for Don Parsons, Brew had a good reputation in the contractor community.

There's always somebody who doesn't like you.

Rhino liked Brew.

Brew thought.

Traci liked him.

He thought.

All he had to do was hold the writing down and do a good job on what he was being paid to do.