Lester was having difficulty settling down at home that evening. They'd had a late dinner, and the TV programs were all part-finished, so Annette loaded an audio cassette and settled down to read. She was working through a pile of papers.
"Haven't you got some commitments at the V4.Conference this week?" she asked, putting the bunch of papers aside for a moment.
"What conference is that?"
You do need a holiday," she marveled. "This week - all this week - we people here in Melbourne are hosting the Australian Computer Conference. Remember?"
He nodded. "Oh, yes. I booked in for two or three of the work sessions. Forget when they are."
"Well, there's only two days left, you know. Where have you been the last couple of weeks, the moon? You might have blown your attendance: can't understand how you could overlook something like that. Anyway, today was my day, and the sessions on Fourth Generation Languages were worth the money. You can have a look at the notes, if you like."
Whatever could have possessed him! With a start, he realised he hadn't opened his mail for the last week. Taking the pile of mail from the kitchen shelf, he flipped through, looking for the Computer Society Receipt. It was there along with the bills, junk mail and a few others he'd have to open to identify. No dates, though. Annette had a timetable however, and he sat back to sort out what he'd missed.
He really had missed one, but he wasn't too disappointed. The session on Database design had promised to be pretty heavy theory. He thought it might be challenging to look in on the way that science was developing: a chance missed.
There were another two sessions tomorrow, on EDP Project Management, that he'd booked for. This would all wash out very nicely, this sudden need to attend a conference for the whole day tomorrow. It was turning out to be quite a strain keeping his mouth shut at work, so he'd just start the holidays a couple of days early to include the conference sessions. He shouldn't have to use holiday time for professional development, but he and some pimply Personnel Clerk could argue that later.
That woman was buried again in her conference papers: it was going to be damned difficult to keep his mouth shut at home, too. He needed this break away, otherwise he'd let something slip, and get himself locked up.
* * * *
The sessions at Melbourne's Exhibition were deep, solid learning experiences. Lester put in the heaviest day of concentrated absorption that he could remember in quite a while, and came away drained. The notes would be a big help; the speakers had covered new, provocative issues. The material would take a while, and several reviews, he knew, to make his own. Never mind, he had the next week to do that.
The evening turned into one of those occasions when he would have preferred to be alone. A brief discussion on the Conference material, agreement that the Equipment exhibitions were definitely sub-standard this last year or so, and then he wanted to be alone to think.
Annette was definitely, most assuredly, nice to have around most times. Then there were the times when he just wanted to be alone. There were the periods when the social graces were a real pain in the butt, a nuisance, a positive barrier to some quiet, private, analytical thought. Like now, for instance. He voted for a TV program, any program that would contract them both into their private little spectator's cocoons, and set about savoring the impact of yesterday's achievement.
He'd done it! He'd proven he could pick up a cheque for a million dollars. The amazing thing was how easy it had been.
It seemed logical to wonder what an opportunist would do next. He'd obviously have an alternative identity all ready to slip into. He'd have to be an insider, to manage that kind of a job, and then the safest place to be was very, very elsewhere, far away. He'd have to take the money, and "lose" it through some process. There'd be some untraceable way of depositing, or investing it so that when it was withdrawn you had "clean" money. The white collar crims had means like that on tap; it was probably as much an established industry as fencing stolen goods, if you knew where to go.
Yes, the opportunist would only stay around long enough to clear away most of the traces, and then he'd disappear.
Lester wasn't the disappearing type, though. He was in trouble for not taking his annual leave for a couple of years! He dreaded to think what an emotional wrench it would be to clear out of that Computer Centre, just disappear, and start up doing something else, being someone else, somewhere else.
And what about Annette? She seemed a rather unlikely gangster's moll - she had her own career, and she was just as thoroughly chained as he was to her own small Box Hill work environment.
No, it just wasn't Lester. He'd never been to "crim" school, and imagined he'd fail miserably at it.
Next day, he dropped in at the office mid-morning. No, he wasn't staying, he told Fred Hart. He wanted to clean out some temporary monitors he'd left in the System, and then he was going home.
Programs A to C were gone already. The "vacuum cleaner", Program D, had worked perfectly, so he removed all trace of that, too. Then he found his way back into those print-file journals, and edited Marland's various names back the way they ought to be. The printed documents had gone out in the mail, so that meant there was no record of his achievements on site.
Well, almost no record.
The Computer Security system would probably have logged, and date-time stamped, his entries to every one of those files. That wouldn't hurt, though. He'd been legitimately doing an investigation job on those printers. Nothing wrong there, nothing abnormal, everything as one would expect.
He told Fred to regard his holiday as having started yesterday, to add two days on - for which Fred was grateful - and he was off the site within half an hour of arriving.
Late tomorrow morning he was booked to start the long five hour flight to Cairns for a week of sunshine. The choice hadn't taken very long at all. Cairns was well enough North to be thoroughly tropical in September, still within the "civilized" belt where you could stay at a top-quality hotel, but far enough towards the edge of that tourist strip of Queensland to be able to avoid the hordes of visiting Americans, Japanese and undisciplined children. It was surprisingly inexpensive at this time of year. He'd have done even better on prices if there'd been more time to book well ahead, but that wasn't possible this time around for Lester.
He had the rest of the day free at home then, he speculated as he made a sandwich and settled down with the morning paper. They rarely got past page three over breakfast, and he barely remembered what they put beyond the middle of newspapers these days.
An hour later, he went hunting for their list of weekend odd jobs. Might as well get those out of the way, or most of them would still be waiting for him a week later.
The laundry tap needed a washer, and he had a close look at some of their other taps while he had the tools out. A lounge chair wanted gluing; it needed rebuilding, he thought ruefully, but that was beyond his cabinet-making skills. Anyway, the landlord wouldn't thank him, much less pay, for his efforts. He jammed plenty of glue into the sloppy dowel joints, and called it finished. The doors were getting tight in a couple of frames, too. Funny they should do that at the end of winter. The house was surely a bit old to be settling. Not his problem. He pared the shiny spots off the two doors, went around their closed outlines with an old piece of carbon paper, and took a bit more off here and there for good measure.
Everything was in order, he felt, as he turned his attention to dinner. Tonight he'd make a pudding for dessert (they'd need some more cream), and perhaps Annie would be a little mollified by that parting gesture.
A week away wasn't anything to get upset about. It seemed so silly, because she'd so firmly turned down the offer to come with him, but now that he had it all set up she was quite obviously peeved at being left behind. Jealously, he supposed; and they’d really got used to each other these last couple of years.
The week away would do him good, though, for several reasons. He did need a break; his towering recreation leave credits proved that. Into the bargain, there were some disturbing implications in the events of the last couple of weeks. They'd crept up on him a couple of times the previous day or so and he'd pushed them aside.
He needed time to think... about the rest of his work life.
* * * *
Slowly step by step, between the trips, tours and souvenir shopping forays, mostly on the beach in the hot northern sun, he got it all together.
The whole thing had been so easy! There was almost no risk, and in the end there wasn't any trace. He'd set out to find a way to jolt the organisation, and he was far from finished absorbing the jolt himself.
He was a walking computer fraud; he'd achieved everything but the proceeds of the job, and he could pull it off any time he liked. The only thing that stopped him was his inertia, the discomfort involved in clearing out of Melbourne and starting afresh somewhere.
There was a moral question, of course. He was on the verge of robbery on the grand scale - well, simulated - , and that was wrong. He had a Church upbringing, way back.
The trouble was, the honest people got used, thoroughly, and repeatedly. Fred didn't care about Lester's career, the need for variety and all that. Neither did Fred's boss, and anyway the bird in Personnel didn't know where to start. Lester was too valuable where he was to shift anywhere else. They'd issue him a salary cheque, routinely, each fortnight until he retired. No, he reasoned, it wouldn't go on that long. Eventually, in five, ten years or so, the complexities of the computer industry would be too much for his mind to handle. He'd get slowed down by the load he carried of past methods, old software packages, outdated operating systems. He'd find himself gently shunted aside from the mainstream, and he'd start the long downhill slide to oblivion.
There was nothing you could do, nothing anyone could do. It was part of growing old on the bottom layer of a big, bureaucratic organization that demanded, and needed, innovation. They just had to make a path for the young, energetic comers who would make the running tomorrow.
After the talk with Fred Hart, Lester realised he had stumbled on the real truth. They couldn't help him. Now he was just understanding what that meant.
It was all very simple, really.
His preference was to do something else. The company's was to keep him where he was, to use him, regardless of his preferences, for just as long as he was useful.
Now he had the means to go his own way. Morality didn't come into it. He'd asked nicely, and look where that had got him.. It probably triggered that shiny-bottomed wart in Personnel to get tough over his leave record. He, Lester Bayliss, was the aggrieved party.
Are there alternatives, though?
I don't have enough capital to start up on my own, but I damn' soon could. It would never be any better for me in somebody else's organization because their priorities would always prevail over mine in the end.
Luxuriating in the gentle tropical breezes across the hotel's pool garden that fourth evening, he started exploring what he had to do.
First, there was a new identity. He needed a driver's license, couldn't recall that ever being inadequate as an identity document, but offhand he couldn't think of a safe way to get one. Perhaps he'd need a Birth Certificate as the first step. They'd tightened up on the issue of Birth Certificates: too many irregularities had been turning up in the system for issuing passports, he had read in newspapers over the last few years.
Then there was the question of a new job. He knew he'd need some activity to keep his sanity and self-respect. The question of what kind of work was a tough one, though. He knew, too, where his skills where. He was a real demon when it came to understanding the immense, raw detail of the operating systems used on IBM's computer mainframes..
There were several sub-questions there:
What exactly did he plan to do next?
How did his new personage create a reputation?
He didn't have any ready answers, yet, but he convinced himself that didn't really matter. If he collected a decent total, he would easily hire good people, and getting the work in would then depend on their reputations, not his. Once they had that in hand, he could get involved when, where and for as long as he pleased. After all, it was his company!
The third point was a company structure. He needed a new company, one that he owned. In theory he could set that up at any time, but there was one important practical risk. However well the financing operation worked, it did seem logical that setting it up before the operation would attract less attention than after. It mightn't matter; but it just might too. He would have to explore the process of setting up a company. It might be easier to buy somebody else's than for this new identity to come under early scrutiny in the setup operation.
Last in the early planning was the question of how far he had to run with the proceeds. In the relatively tiny world of mainframe systems programming experts, he'd quickly be found in Melbourne. He'd be walking down the street, browsing in a record shop, perhaps just waiting for a street light somewhere, and someone he knew would spot him. The safest thing to do would be to emigrate somewhere, but there'd doubtless be tax clearances, passport and visa questions- a mountain of paperwork with dozens of pitfalls for someone with no past. So he'd think for the moment about relocating to another Australian city. Intuitively, he felt confident that money could fix the rest of the problems.
Briefly, he noted another two questions as major research projects for when he returned to work. He didn't have the remotest idea how to handle a cheque for a million dollars or more. There weren't any "Dorothy Dix" advisers that he knew of would help, and he certainly wouldn't want to get mixed up with criminals in the process of finding out. Perhaps, if he were circumspect enough, he could talk to his bank manager about an expected bequest.
Then, lastly, there was the all-important matter of getting hold of the money. The chances of getting enough out of the Payables run were a bit risky. Just suppose, that month, they made a last -minute change to the supplier he selected? He might finish up taking all those risks for a lousy ten or twenty thousand dollars, not enough to take him out of reach.
No, it had to be something more reliable. He certainly had lots of possibilities, once he got into the right frame of mind. At first sight, he could do a lot of creative things to outgoing cheque payments - he'd proved that - but there must be other ways as well, and there must be more "reliable" payees. What about the Tax Department, for instance: how and when did we pay them?
What about redirecting some of the Company's short-term investments; could he get at those control mechanisms?
Was it possible to set up a cost centre that nobody kept a close eye on, and pass his own bills through it?
What other "bones" had he thrown Annette that night about possible ways to pull it off?
Lester just hadn't thought about it seriously before, and he'd have to now. He would just have to develop an interest in the pertinent details.
"There isn't anything wrong, is there, Sir," the desk clerk queried politely as he booked out Thursday.
"No, not at all, why should there be?"
"You've cut your holiday short. We'd surely like to know if there's anything else you'd like."
"Quite the contrary," Lester assured the youngster with the furrowed brow. "I've had a very good rest - haven't enjoyed myself so much in years. Now I'm keen to get back to home and friends."
The clerk was relieved. Off-season, every guest was important and he took his job very seriously. It was the way to get on. Mr. Bayliss hadn't even got a decent tan yet, but he did seem relaxed, and he had promised to come back if ever he stayed in Cairns again.
It was the truth, too. He felt thoroughly refreshed; but there were a lot of loose ends, and he strongly attracted to the idea of getting to work on them. He'd be able to make a good start back home in Melbourne tomorrow, several days before anybody was expecting him back.
Hope Annette doesn't decide to phone Cairns!