Coverly’s resolve to do something illustrious settled on a plan to diagnose the vocabulary of John Keats, a project that in turn depended upon a friend named Griza. Most of the employees lunched in the subterranean cafeteria but Coverly usually took the elevator up and ate a sandwich in the sunlight. This choice was odd enough to serve as the basis for a friendship. One of the technicians in the computer room also ate a sandwich in the sun, and this and the fact that they both came from Massachusetts made them fast friends. In the spring they threw a baseball; in the autumn they spiraled a football back and forth with a conspicuous sense of simpler things than the gantry line on the horizon. Griza was the son of a Polish immigrant but he had been raised in Lowell and his wife was the granddaughter of a Yankee farmer. He was one of the technicians who serviced the big computer and might have been recognized as one. There were no mandates for dress in the computation center and no established hierarchies but over the months the outlines of a society and a list of sumptuary laws had begun to emerge, expressing, it seemed, an inner love of caste. The physicists wore cashmere pullovers. The senior programmers wore tweeds and colored shirts. Coverly’s rank wore business suits and the technicians seemed to have settled on a uniform that included white shirts and dark ties. They were separated from the rest of the center by the privilege of manipulating the console and by the greater privilege of technical knowledge and limited responsibility. If a program failed repeatedly, they could be sure it was not their fault, and this gave them all the briskness and levity that you sometimes see in the deck hands on a ferry boat. Griza had never been to sea but he walked as if he walked on a moving deck and looked somehow as if he slept in a bunk, kept watches and did his own laundry. He was a slight man with less than a stomach—that whole area seemed limber and concave; he used a fixative on his hair and combed it in a careful cross-hatch at the nape of his neck, a style that had been popular with street boys ten years earlier. Thus he seemed to have one foot in the immediate past. Coverly expected him, sooner or later, to confess to some eccentric ambition. Was he building a raft in his cellar for a trip down the Mississippi? Was he perfecting a machine for compressing empty beer cans? A simplified contraceptive? A chemical solvent for autumn leaves? A project like this seemed necessary to settle the lines of his character, but Coverly was mistaken. Griza hoped to work at the site until the retirement age, when he planned to invest his savings in a parking lot in Florida or California.
From his position at the computer Griza seemed to know a great deal about the politics at the site. He did not seem to have the disposition of a gossip and yet Coverly came away from their lunch hours each day with a wealth of information. The receptionist at the security center was pregnant. Cameron, the director of the site, wouldn’t last six weeks. The top brass were bitterly divided in their opinions. They quarreled over whether or not coherent radio signals had been received from Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, they disputed the existence of other civilizations in the solar system, they challenged the intelligence of dolphins. Griza passed along his news indifferently but there was always plenty of it. Coverly cultivated Griza with the hope that Griza might help him. He wanted Griza to put the vocabulary of Keats through the computer. Griza seemed undecided but he did invite Coverly to come home with him for supper one night.
When they finished work they took a bus to the end of the line and began to walk. It was a part of the site that Coverly had never seen. “We’re in the emergency housing section,” Griza explained. It was a trailer camp although most of the trailers stood on cement block foundations. Some of them were massive and had two levels. There were street lights, gardens, picket fences and inevitably a pair of painted wagon wheels, a talisman of the rural and mythical past. Coverly wondered if they had come from the farm near the computation center. Griza stopped at the door of one of the more modest trailers, opened the door and let Coverly in.
