Government Men Page 12

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  The tumbling Sandra episode motivated Bates to rearrange his office furniture the first thing Wednesday morning, hopefully for the final time. It simply wouldn't do for visitors to his high office to be randomly falling to the floor out of chairs that way, so he moved most of his furniture collection out and into a nearby vacated office, keeping only a few of the better chairs and other pieces. Thanks to the Mafia rumors, he concluded that his belongings would be safe regardless of where he put them.

  When he finished later that morning, the huge Head Office seemed almost bare. The desk, his best five chairs, his computer/VISICOM hutch, a couple of bookshelves, the mysterious safe of Twig's, the MX-84, and a few additional odds and ends occupied less than half of the big office.

  As Bates put finishing touches on his new office, Milo laid claim to an empty box next to the desk, to Bates' recliner whenever the dog got there first, or, just as often, to the top of the desk, which was the least drafty. This suited Milo, for whatever canine breeds were part of his lineage, they did not seem to include anyone with thick fur. Having Milo on his desk suited Bates just fine, as long as the dog stayed away from his computer/VISICOM controls, since Milo just didn't seem to have a knack for high-tech.

  The new emptiness of the office only served to emphasize the isolation that came with Bates' new status and location. Today he had hardly any visitors. His new office was too far removed from the offices of his friends Mel and Oscar. They came by once that morning to give Bates more Premium Fuel for the Nitro, but then they went right back to work on their projects. Bates knew that normally workers avoided the front office unless something went wrong and they wanted something, so he actually took the absence of visitors as a good sign. On the other hand, he was getting very bored.

  He was lonely too. Bates had originally brought Milo to work with him to keep the dog company, but now he was finding that he very much needed his furry friend to provide himself company. At the moment though, Milo wasn't a very entertaining companion, for the dog was currently in his normal state: doggie deep sleep. He was lying on an empty pizza box on Bates' desk with all four legs sticking straight up in the air, snoring loudly. With the exception of cats, dogs are about the sleepingest animals on Earth, Bates observed, a trait that he admired deeply.

  Around mid-morning, Bates suddenly remembered that Margaret was now his personal secretary. He tiptoed to the office door, opened it a crack, and peaked out to verify that this was not some crazy fantasy of his. Yes! There she was, sitting in the lobby at the end of the hallway outside his office, watching a morning soap-opera on her desk-top VISICOM. She was certainly a stunning improvement over Twig. Besides looking great she could probably even type using all of her fingers, and do other office sorts of things.

  He decided to find out. He called her into his office to take dictation. In the 21st century office place, this was an unusual request, but as he explained to Margaret, VISICOM auto-dictation didn't work for him very well because of voice peculiarities. What luck for him!

  Bates dictated several important sounding letters to fictitious people, including congress members. That probably impressed the heck out of Margaret, or at least that was the plan. Margaret certainly impressed Bates. She took the dictation wearing a micro-mini skirt, and the view of her legs was simply incredible.

  He remembered to give her the Fuming Right disk he had been given on Monday, and was rewarded by a big smile. Damn she was cute!

  By afternoon, Bates had used up most of his pseudo-plausible excuses to call her into his office, but he had already seen enough. Bolstered by his increasing confidence as boss of the Base, finally, after only thinking about it for at least three years, he asked her for a date. To his astonishment, she accepted! In fact, she didn't seem at all surprised that he had asked.

  In anticipation of the evening to come, the rest of the day went by without much conscious thought, with the exception of planning the date. What was he going to do with Margaret? Dinner? A movie? A shopping mall? The library? The zoo? Bowling? Most evenings Bates usually read a book or watched the VISICOM, he really didn't know what the hell to do that would interest another person, especially a woman person.

  That was one reason he hadn't suggested anything specific then he asked her for the date, the other being that it would have then been much too easy for her to turn it around with a response like: 'sorry, I just did that last night with my sister,' even if she didn't even have a sister. He'd seen that trick too many times before to be taken in by it, and he wanted to avoid the very possibility of it happening this time around, if at all possible.

  The logical thing to do, he knew, would be to discuss date options with her, but he felt that would mar his new image as a dynamic leader. He finally decided that dinner, a movie, and a nightclub would be about right. For his last two hours at work, he used the VISICOM to research places to go, and finally established an itinerary that wasn't too pricy but wasn't too blatantly cheap either.

  As Bates rushed home with Milo after work to prim for his date that evening with Margaret, the thought belatedly crossed his mind that for a boss to date his secretary was probably improper. However, he was able to logically refute that notion of impropriety with what he felt were several really good arguments, or at least arguments that were good enough for him.

  First, he had only been boss for less than three days. He could claim ignorance of the rules; that excuse had worked for him before. Second, he had been working up to this date for years, and it was his private business. He couldn't let a little last minute change in status at the workplace interfere in his personal life. Such rules were probably unconstitutional anyway, or should be. Third, his love life was in dire straits; non-existent, as a matter of fact. Nothing much had happened in nearly twenty years. It had been a pretty serious lull.

  His final argument was that the micro-mini-skirt provided him with such a good look at her legs that irresistible, primal forces of nature had been put into play. Biochemistry had taken over. No mere mortal man with functioning glands and proper gene sequences could have withstood those legs. Thus it followed logically that there was absolutely no way that this date could be avoided.

  Perhaps it all added up to destiny. He wondered if a perverted form of this same force of nature had brought together Barns and Twig. That fleeting thought was notable only because it was the first and last time that Bates thought of Barns that day.

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