Free The Glass Factory by Kenneth Wishnia Page A

it?”
    “Sure.”
    “Give mommy a turn, Antonia.” I look in. What I see is a subtle explosion of color, nongeometric, just a jumble of shapes, but the blending of colors is a slight foretaste of heaven. “Wow. What is it?”
    “It’s a kaleidoscope. Only instead of mirrors and colored plastic I cut up paper-thin diffraction gratings and translucent polarized plastic and float them in a semiviscous polymer—it’s the polarized light that does it. The pattern never repeats. Kind of like genetics,” she says, patting Antonia’s head. “Completely nonoscillatory and aperiodic.”
    “You lost me there,” I confess.
    “Oh, just designer talk.”
    “Is that what you do?”
    “What I do is make all the flack these guys produce look good. And wouldn’t you know—”
    She must have the feel of this office down to an instinct, because at that precise instant Frank Schmidt pokes his head in the door and asks to see the page proofs for the new brochure that has to go to press by 3:00 P.M. Katherina angles the twenty-four-inch color monitor on her Unisystems 2000 towards him and gives him a whirlwind walking tour of the graphic layout she has created for whatever drivel they have churned out in the next office. All I can say is it looks beautiful, and this woman’s talents are wasted in this place. Schmidt looks satisfied, but gives me the eye long enough for the fluorescent light to start playing tricks with me—his shirt is just so white, his skin, the walls behind him so white—that I just lose all sense of depth perception trying to focus on him.
    “I’ve got to get back to work,” says Katherina. That gets rid of Schmidt. Her volume drops a bit: “Now what are you looking for?”
    “I’d like to see some information about what Morse Techtonics is doing with the incubator space.”
    “I don’t see a problem with that. Why?”
    I’ve got three stories prepared, but somehow I don’t feel like lying to this woman.
    “Private reasons.”
    She eyes me.
    “I’m not after his secret formula for Coca-Cola.”
    Just then the shape of Phil Gates blocks the doorway and he says, “I don’t see how it can be helping you get your work done when somebody’s in here with you.”
    “I was just admiring the new logo. That’s just what this university needs,” I say. “We’ll be going now.”
    Gates glares at me, then walks away, satisfied.
    I turn back to Katherina, lower my voice even further: “It could be a good way to get back at your boss.”
    “And why would I want to do that?”
    Because he’s an asshole, that’s why. But I say, “He doesn’t want to give me any information about Morse’s private use of the incubator site. Why not?”
    Silence.
    I continue: “Because I might find out something that’ll screw him up a little.”
    She leans back in her chair. Takes me in. “Meet me in the print shop.”
    “I’d walk through fire for it.”

    Fire would be an improvement. Some sadistic lunatic decided to put the print shop in the windowless basement of the Administration Building. There’s a half dozen thinners, cleaners and maybe two dozen inks fouling the air, and no ventilation. But the place is crowded and noisy as only a print shop can be, so we can talk. Katherina has reduced a poster-sized flow chart to a single 8½ x 11” sheet, so it’s almost unreadable, but it’s enough to give me a glimpse of Morse’s leveraged empire. There are three tiers of overlapping company names with enough branch connections to wire a mainframe computer.
    “Can I keep this?”
    “Sure, just don’t tell anyone where you got it from.”
    “Can we meet later and talk? The chemicals are really getting to me.”
    “Sure.” We arrange to meet after work. I got less than a ten-minute dose of chemical fumes, but it’s enough to start me coughing up blood, and my lungs burn for the next two and a half hours.

    For lunch we go to Jim Stella’s office. The whole gamut of emotions washed across his face: