Chapter 2

The offices of Skopos, Incorporated were on the fifth floor of the old Antler Building, along Second Avenue in downtown Rapier City. Roger Carmel parked his Ford stationwagon in the basement garage of the building across the street, and then walked down the street to the Antler Building, hurrying because he was late.

Not that he could really mind that he was late... the interlude of loving with his wife had made him feel better than he had in the last couple of weeks. No doubt about it: sex was the greatest tranquilizer in the world. He needed the eager arms and hot body of his lovely wife more than he could tell her; he needed her understanding and warmth and support, especially in these final few months before the coup was realized that was going to put Skopos on the tongue of every person in the country.

He was sorry that he wasn't able to be around her much these last weeks, but it couldn't be helped. A little effort now, a little sacrifice, and the whole Carmel family would be able to retire with ease, and he could start making up the lost time.

Roger frowned as he thought of his beautiful young wife, Lonnie, pouting. He was doing all of this for her, couldn't she understand it? She wasn't very understanding about what was necessary, always demanding more of his time and attention than he could afford to give, as if the future didn't matter. It was always now, now... but that was like a woman, he consoled himself.

The morning fog pulled up its skirts and dissolved among the tops of the buildings... The street was full of ten o'clock businessmen hurrying and stenographers dawdling and women shopping. Roger paused long enough to buy a package of cigarettes at the counter in his building, and then he went to the elevator. The elevator operator eyed him sullenly, then carefully avoided his return gaze.

Roger pictured himself as the Provider of the family. The stalwart guard between Us and Everybody Else. As he rode up the elevator, he almost felt as if he was going into battle for Lonnie and Jennifer, that his suit was of armor, his attache case a sword, and Skopos, Incorporated the arena. In a way, his vision wasn't too wrong, if a bit romantic. Lonnie didn't work, and Jennifer was too young -- it was up to him to be the link between the close-knit family unit and the cold, different, potentially brutal world beyond their doorstep. It was he who wore the two hats of Husband/Father and of Mr. Carmel. It was he who shouldered the responsibilities to see that both hats were worn skillfully.

Lonnie had but one role, that of mate and mother. Sometimes it's difficult for a person who's committed to only one position to see that another person who must straddle two or more positions is constantly having to compromise. Roger was being pulled by the requirements of his career just as hard as he was being called upon to be with Lonnie. She wanted him home all the time -- Skopos wanted him to be on the job all the time. The men he was going to meet this morning were going to pout in their own way just as forcefully as Lonnie had done, with the same cry: "Spend more time with me!"

"What?" The elevator operator turned to Roger, startled.

"Nothing," Roger said, a little shaken. He realized that he'd suddenly burst out loud with his thoughts, a sure sign that the pressures, were getting to him. Just a little more, though, he thought... hold on for a little more; you can do it, Rog. You have to do it...

Skopos's downtown offices were actually for their sales force, though all of the upper executives were there as well. It was handier and a better area to live around than where the plant was. Roger, as chief engineer and vice-president in charge of development, was in the unenviable position of being liaison between the plant in Kirsten, Nevada, and the main office. He had moved from Kirsten when his promotion to vice-president had happened; Rapier City was much nicer and more varied than the smaller Nevada town; and he'd figured it really didn't matter at which end of the business he lived. He had to be at the other end half of the time, and his family would still be five hundred miles away. Here, they had a nicer home, a better neighborhood, and more things to do. For him to have turned down the promotion or shirked the duties and stayed in Rapier City all the time would be tantamount to quitting. Roger felt it was the best compromise under the circumstances.

Especially now, especially when his invention was at the brink of success. He went into the reception room, nodded to the PBX operator, and walked briskly to his office. His secretary, Agnes Goodfall, was all but wringing her hands.

"You're late," she said timorously.

"I know. Everybody in the board room?"

"Yes, Mr. Carmel. Including Mr. Quarran. He said --"

"I'm sure he did, Agnes," Roger said, cutting off her whine. He took a few papers from his desk and added: "See you later."

The president and chairman of the board of Skopos was sitting at the head of the board room conference table, leaning back with a cigar in his mouth like some despot. Not so benevolent a despot though; Jerome Quarran was a ruthless shrewd manipulator who'd taken over Skopos when the electronics engineer who'd started the company five years ago went broke. A scientist does not a businessman make. Quarran looked up with his thick, heavy, watery eyes as Carmel entered and took his usual chair on the left band side. He didn't say anything, merely brushed an invisible cigar ash off his plaid vest with that quick flick of annoyance superiors sometimes use on underlings.

The scientist who'd begun the company was across from Carmel. Wilfred Krocklin was in his mid-fifties, but looked older and emaciated. Unlike the arrogant and fleshy-jowled face of Quarran, Krocklin was gaunt and lined with doubt, with large, ever-frightened eyes like those of a tarsier monkey. His suit jacket was unbuttoned, his collar turned up, his tie askew. His sparse white hair was uncombed where he'd run his fingers through it for one reason or another.

Sitting at the end of the table was Martin Oliss, V-P for sales. He was sharply dressed in the latest style as usual, a natty robin's egg blue suit with a slight Edwardian cut to it, and his long, wavy blond hair was perfectly in place. He looked imperturbable and slightly amused, like a cat with canary feathers caught in its mouth. That was his way, constantly cool and a little condescending.

Roger was sometimes piqued by Oliss; that supercilious air rasped his nerves after a while, and the ever-present preening of the fashion-plate image made Roger wonder if Oliss wasn't a near egomaniac. If anything personified Martin Oliss in Roger's mind, it was the way the man was always smoothing his thin mustache as if it was a waxed objet d'art. It was to Roger little more than a milk stain on Oliss's upper lip, the blondness being hardly visible. Nevertheless, Oliss was invaluable, a long-term employee who grasped what Quarran wanted, and did it. He was to the others at Skopos the emitomy of dedication and hard work. So Carmel took what he considered Oliss's personality quirks in stride, saying nothing.

"Hello, Roger," Oliss said, fingering his mustache. "We were wondering if you'd missed the plane."

"No," Roger replied. "No, I took an earlier one." He smiled as if sharing a common complaint with the others. "Have to see my wife sometimes or risk a divorce, you know."

Oliss was bemused; he had one luscious babe for a wife, as Carmel knew. Lonnie had told him that Cylvia had the same problem as she had when Martin went out of town.

Quarran made a noise in his throat like coal rattling down a chute. He was married to a dreadnaught of a wife, and while Roger had no way of knowing, he suspected that Quarran stayed away from the home and hearth as much as possible. There were office rumors about a little sweetheart stashed in a high-rise apartment on the other side of town...

"How's the Min-miniskopos doing, R-roger?" Krocklin stuttered. He was referring to the invention which had made Carmel the vice-president. "W-we're most anxious about it-t."

Oliss came forward and put his hands on the chair beside his boss. "Yes, Roger. Is it about ready?"

Carmel opened his attache case and brought out a sheaf of papers. He spread them on the table. "I can announce that by this time next month, we'll have a working prototype."

"Excellent" Korcklin said, beaming.

"You said it would be done by now," Quarran grumbled. He chewed on his cigar and glared at Carmel. He was never pleased.

Carmel replied: "I also told you that with the aluminum companies on strike, I couldn't guarantee it. All we're waiting for is the extruded panels, which have to be made up special. If the president puts a Taft-Hartley injunction against the strikers and there's the 90-day cooling of period, we'll get the paneling and..." he paused to shrug slightly, "and then it's only a matter of putting one together. While I was down at Kirsten we tested one that was in sections, and it works fine, but you know how the government is -- they have to see shiny new boxes, not a mess of wires."

"Damnit," Quarran snorted, "we don't have the time! We have to have your miniskopos ready in time for the Fall Appropriations convention in Washington. You know that, Roger."

"That's --" Oliss consulted his mental calendar for a moment. "That's fifteen days from now."

"I don't know what you're going to have to do to get that blasted invention in presentable shape, Roger, but you're going to have to come up with something!" Quarran twisted into something of a smile, and looked levelly at Carmel over his glasses. "We can't afford to wait another year."

Carmel groaned and sat back in his chair. He was afraid of this. Skopos, Incorporated was in the video tape recording business, had been almost from the time of the market's inception. Krocklin had named the company after the old Greek word which eventually became the English word, scope; apt enough title, but Krocklin hadn't been able to meet the changing demands of the market as wisely.

When video tape first started, there were any number of companies, each with different systems. Unlike audio tape recorders or record players, there weren't any standard speeds or tape widths, and as a result, Ampex was out with an inch wide tape running at faster speeds than the Sony machines with quarter-inch tape. Panasonic and Concord came in with half-inch tapes at still another inches-per-second speed, and others loaded the market with their attempts. Nothing was interchangeable, and if a customer bought one brand, he sometimes found that six months later not even the same company was producing the same gear.

It was a guessing game as to who would come out on top, the developments in the industry outstripping any possibility for inter-company cooperation and standardization. Krocklin found that although his machines and cameras were of excellent quality, the average consumer was leery and often bought from the Big Boys out of fear of obsolescence -- and the still high cost of manufacture had effectively stopped mass home consumption which would make the whole venture profitable.

Quarran had come in and under his guidance, sales improved a hundred percent. Then its chief engineer came up with a revolutionary development. A year ago Roger Carmel had approached Quarran with nothing more than an idea down on paper. Out of the discussions and negotiations, Carmel became vice-president with a hefty increase in salary, plus a percentage of the profits. In return he gave Skopos exclusive marketing and production rights.

Where current models were weighing sixty to eighty pounds, his miniskopos weighed less than twenty -- -and it was a tenth of the size as well. Instead of bulky and expensive reels of tape, it used cartridges, 8-track music cartridges like the automobile stereo players. A person would slip in a cartridge, costing less than five dollars per hour of recording time, and depending on whether the unit was plugged into a camera or a television set, it would record or play. It could do both at once, if a person wanted to monitor what was being recorded. The whole unit was eight inches high, a foot wide, and a little over fifteen inches deep. It could fit on top of a television set. Or so it would, when the aluminum casing arrived.

And if that wasn't enough, it could also be used for color as well as black-and-white.

That was a year ago. Since then, the concept had been transformed into test units. There were bugs, of course; tape had to be specially made and the cartridge feeder mechanism designed from scratch. The components weren't available, and companies building field-effects and integrated circuits had to be talked with and their samples tested. It had been one long headache and fight -- and the man who ran the whole she-bang was Carmel, for he alone understood what it was all about.

Oliss, a born huckster, skillfully let the news of the pending miniskopos "leak" out. It had set the industry on its ear; everybody was talking about it, everybody wanted to buy it. The home entertainment market would have at last a dirt-cheap way of showing video tape, of transcribing favorite television shows, of making "home movies." The schools and the government would have the perfect teaching aid, which could be bought en masse without wrecking budgets.

The Cannel miniskopos was worth a fortune.

But the time hadn't arrived when Carmel could rest on his laurels. That final effort to get them over the top and the units into the hands of buyers had to be made. Quarran was right; the miniskopos had to be ready to be shown to the government in two weeks, for with contracts in hand, the high cost of production and tooling could be weathered. Later would come the home markets, which were never over-night, but took advertising, negotiations, and the slow grinding of public acceptance. Later it would be Martin Oliss's turn to work his tail off from the marketing end.

"I hate doing it," Carmel said after listening to Quarran reiterate the obvious. "I hate doing it, but I suppose we could fashion one out of sheet metal. It won't look as well as the stamped paneling, and probably won't work as well, either. It sure as hell won't be as light."

"I can talk around that. Once those bureaucrats get their mitts onto a working prototype, they'll be too blinded to nit-pick." Quarran tapped his cigar ash into the large ceramic bowl beside him. "They'll specify aluminum and weight requirements, and by that time we'll be able to supply them."

"Y-yes, that s-sounds alright to me," Krocklin agreed.

Carmel sighed. "Then sheet metal it is. I'll call the plant and --"

"You go to the plant," Quarran said forcefully.

"But I just got backs!"

"It can't be helped. There's not enough time to make more than one, and that one has got to be right. I don't want you to merely hope that the men down there will know what the devil you want; I don't want you to assume they can read your plans -- I want you to be sure that every detail is perfect."

Carmel looked at Quarran witheringly. "I suppose you want me to leave today?"

"I'm sorry."

Under the circumstances Carmel realized that he would have to go. Not that he couldn't argue with Quarran, or even flatly refuse; it was the inherent realization that he was needed in Kirsten to supervise the fabrication. He glumly considered the inevitable scene with Lonnie. There were times when he wished he was still a bachelor.

Martin Oliss had other thoughts on his mind. Just as gloomy, perhaps, because he didn't know what he was going to do, but a great deal more dark, because of their subject. In less than two weeks he'd be handed the job of selling the finished product -- not that it needed any selling. He'd just take orders, the way the miniscope was exciting the public. In less than two weeks, any chance that he had to steal the miniscope for his own use would be gone. In less than two weeks...

Oliss fingered his mustache, sighing inwardly. What had ever gotten him into this two-faced industrial spying anyway? Greed, pure and simple. The greed for other women, enhanced by his own wife's insatiable lust for strange cock, had introduced him to the swinging element in Rapier City. He had been a devout member of the wife-swapping club for some time; it was their use of Club Royale and its private shows and still more private "rooms" for viewing and fucking which had allowed him to become acquainted with Sam Zeigler, Club Royale's owner and operator.

That goddamned gangster Zeigler. Oliss conjured up a swear word for the cynical member of the state crime syndicate Mafia connected, though not controlled -- who catered to the greedy vices of otherwise respectable members of the community. Greed, always greed. Greed had gotten Cylvia Oliss into the dog show there, a more than willing participant on the round stage when the Club had rented the whole second floor for one mass orgy last Spring.

Greed had made Martin Oliss go after and lay Zeigler's ex-chorus girl playmate; the only one who had balls enough to try, Zeigler had said afterwards.

And greed had made Oliss an enthusiastic partner when Zeigler had outlined his plan to take the secret of the miniscope and let one of the syndicate fronts -- the outwardly legitimate Vantage Electronics Corporation -- have it. The promise of a cut which would put Oliss on easy street overnight had put dollar signs in his eyes, and his wife had thought the scheme perfect.

The trouble had been that the miniscope was in Kirsten, and Oliss was stuck in Rapier City. He'd approached Carmel with under-played, implied suggestions that there were greater riches to be made if Carmel "sold out" on the sly, but it had failed dismally.

"I bet you've been approached secretly by other companies, eh, Roger?" had been met with open, naive shock. Carmel couldn't believe that the competition could stoop so low.