Mr Schueler, managing director by night of Plastiform Plastics Inc., which operated without cease twenty-four hours a day, considered himself a happy man, in so far as he understood the term. He would sit in his neat glass-fronted office, elevated above and looking down almost omnipotently upon what he quietly called `his little people', and he would think with a carefully abstracted glee of how well things were, on the whole. He would think of profit margins and of take-over bids and of sensible numbers like soldiers, battling for his cause. He would check the larger cheques and sign for new signs and balance his books so frequently that even he, with his precise scientific mind, could observe that they were in a perpetual state of equilibrium. This was how he liked his world. This was the way his world, on the whole, was.

It was midnight and punctually he turned over the calendar on his wall and read with optimism, 1 January, 2070. He marked the passing of the last decade simply by contemplating the profits the new one held for the growing company. Once there had been `parties' at a time like this, he recalled with a shiver from his youth, dozens of people crammed into stifling proximity, ethanol-based drinks, an awful song... But that

And he considered again that he must indeed be what they call a happy man.

His happiness - well, he decided, contentment was probably a more accurate word for it - was occasionally intruded upon, however. Very rarely was the source of the intrusion himself. Oh, of course there would be the odd flicker of something, well, unbusinesslike from time to time - like that fancy a moment ago that he was omnipotent - but in general such anomalies were kept carefully in check and he could trust himself almost completely, as you would a clock that loses only an unimportant few seconds a year. No, it was not he who spoiled the happy success the company enjoyed, its continual striving for greater profit and larger monopolies; no, not he, but an even less probable cause. It was the little people.

Oh, it baffled him. And that was odd, because nothing else in the world could have been said to completely baffle him. Baffle: a silly word, he mused, used by silly people when they could not grasp a thing. Other concepts or facts or opportunities might elude the admirable Mr Schueler, but never baffle him! Being baffled, in fact, was so new and so unexpected to him at the age of fifty-seven years, three months, eight days, that he wondered whether - well, whether maybe it weren't the first clawing hand of senility settling on his mind, this bafflement. For the numbers, surely, could not be to blame.

He had an equation, you see, Mr Schueler, and it worked out perfectly how much work a factory of x workers working y hours could be expected to do. It all had to do with work, you see. He had an equation so long and complex, with so many chattering brackets opening and closing along its length that it made the eyes water, with so many numbers and variables and cleverly interwoven sub-equations that it might have driven a less Schueler-like man than Schueler mad. But to him the equation made perfect sense, and it took into account every single factor - `Every single one!' he would say to his management staff, beating out each word with his pen on the desk, eyes bright with the closest thing he had to passion. Yes, the equation compensated for everything, he was sure - a slight draught that would mean a loss of heat and so a loss of energy and so a loss of work, the necessity of toilet breaks (strictly rationed). Every contingency, every possibility and probability and one-in-a-million shot was foreseen - for example, a neat pair of brackets enclosed a calculation of the likelihood of an extra-terrestrial object falling from the sky and hitting a spot where a worker or machine were standing and its effect on productivity... It all made perfect sense, he had declaimed grandly on completing the equation - his opus, his work of twenty years, covering reams upon reams of paper - and now he was, to use the vernacular (which Mr Schueler never did), being forced to eat his own words.

The trouble lay with the rather insignificant last twenty-six operations he'd been forced to add to account for that which baffled him. Not knowing what the source of the bafflement was, naturally he could not explain the last part of the equation to anyone, because he knew only through experimentation that it had to be there to make the result tally with reality; he knew not why it had to be there, and this among all the things under the sun - a sun which he would gladly have purchased and locked deep in a bank vault if he could profit from it - he did not understand.

It was most baffling.

He stared out the thick glass pane fronting his office at the little people: the workers on the factory floor, spaced out along conveyor belts as regularly as the machines were, seemingly working as ceaselessly and efficiently as their mechanical colleagues. But the problem lay with these very little people! Mr Schueler nearly thumped his desk - though it was not at all in his nature to be so demonstrative, to expend valuable energy needlessly - as he thought of the few little people, maybe just the one, through which profit and efficiency and reliability and predictability were pouring away, like water from an unknown hole in a pipe. He stared at the twenty-six glaring reminders of his inadequacy on the last page of his equation, which trembled in his hand, and felt as though a carpet had been whipped from under his feet, leaving him with a sore head and a bruised behind on the cold hard tiles beneath. Logic - pure logic, the exercise of reason, the boiling down of things until they could be seen as a matter only of figures - had never failed him before, but it failed him most distressingly now.

Perhaps only one of the little people was the cause of this gnawing dread, this sudden lack of faith in his precious figures. Just one... And if it were just one, then Bryant it was. The discrepancy with regards to productivity occurred quite frequently, and Mr Schueler had determined through careful scrutiny that Bryant was the only one of the workers present on every occasion when the discrepancy had occurred. `Simple elimination,' he would explain to us.

Schueler looked down at the seventeen-year-old boy now. The slovenly mass, he thought, the great unproductive... and yet he was working as tirelessly as the man at his side, as the rows upon rows of workers, clad as he in blue, who toiled beneath the high rafters of the place for their meagre share of the company's success. Oh, he works, Schueler found himself thinking, but he doesn't want to... And then he realised the flaw in that: that Bryant's opinion towards his work shouldn't matter if his output remained the same. And yet there was the discrepancy in the equation, and numbers didn't lie.

No, the mistake was never with the calculations, but always with the people - and this was why Mr Schueler had a great deal more time for calculations than people. And, as has already been stated, of all the people in the world he trusted himself the most, possibly because he was less a person than a clever adding machine himself. He was a neat man, a small man, an economical man - and above all, he told himself continually, a happy man - the binary opposite of Bryant down there. There the boy worked, face flushed red from the heat from the plastic moulding machines, big ungainly shoulders hunched behind his head like flags of dissent... Not happy, no, not content with his lot. Mr Schueler found himself striding out on to the gantry outside his office to better see his nemesis, the cause of this unaccustomed confusion within him. Nemesis! Mr Schueler shook his head incredulously. If the boy Bryant was that, he was a poor one.

Hoping to catch Bryant off-guard, to actually witness him committing the crime of not working, Mr Schueler made his way down the steep metal steps which led to the factory floor - a place he rarely visited, staying rather in the heady, air-conditioned world of his figures - and made a comprehensive tour of it. He examined the production line, the moulds, the presses, the row of computers against the wall and the suited employees who typed at them. He asked the odd question and was quite pleased with the terse, no-nonsense responses he got. Yet all the while his eyes were drawn to Bryant like two sharp little iron filings to a magnet. Bryant did not look at him, but then neither did any of the other workers: to look was to waste their precious energy, was the equivalent of dipping a hand into Mr Schueler's pocket and stealing his profits, and they knew such would not go unpunished.

But was that a look? Mr Schueler spun suddenly to look at Bryant, the way a person might feeling they are followed by the eyes in a painting - but of course the eyes had not moved; still they stared down at the yet vague plastic forms coming hot from the machine, the gloved hands that passed them on and on and on twenty-four hours a day, every day, and would for eternity. For though Bryant would weaken and die as any useful machine always does, he would have a child, and that child (unless it were exceptionally smart and studied and learned and rose at the expense of everything else in its life) would come under the Government's classification as `Worker', and he or she would continue in Bryant's stead. Yes, it was a beautiful racket Mr Schueler was involved in, bubbling on top of the unimportant lives and deaths of his little people, earning, growing, until one day... `Yes, but not a "racket",' Mr Schueler would interrupt us here; `it's called business.' And no doubt he would be certain that he was right, and so this proves that even Mr Schueler and his like cannot be right all the time. Racket it was, and Mr Schueler could not allow it to grind to a halt because of those anomalous twenty-six operations... that one boy...

He watched Bryant work for a while, frustrated, finding nothing amiss, then turned again and began to walk back to the steps and his office, ready to face the equation once more like a detective with no leads. But then he saw it. That was a look! He whirled again and this time found Bryant's eyes were not on his work, and neither did they meet his own. No, he saw, Bryant was looking at something else across the room with a kind of wide-eyed, bloodless-faced, childish wonderment. Mr Schueler quite correctly wasted no time by turning to see what it was which had attracted Bryant's eyes (that was unimportant, could have no relevance really); but still Bryant looked, still he looked, and Mr Schueler felt his profits being pushed away by the shining of the eyes and the beating of the heart and the strange gulp that shivered down the throat of Bryant. Now, he decided, was the time to neatly cross out those last twenty-six operations and balance his equation for once and for all.

`My office,' Mr Schueler almost snarled, red-faced, at the still stupid, detached face of Bryant, his eyes fixed over the managing director's shoulder. `Now!' Mr Schueler did not know how he had reached Bryant - he certainly did not remember walking towards him - and it seemed he had been carried to him by the sudden surge of anger he felt: anger hot with the crude love he felt for his equation, anger as unknown and inexplicable to Mr Schueler as bafflement, or as the thing in the shining eyes of Bryant.

`If there is a single loose bolt in a machine,' lectured Mr Schueler, pacing, which as a rule he never did, `a single melted diode, just one short circuit... Then, do you know what that machine is?'

Bryant simply stared across the desk, frightened visibly out of his mind. `No, sir.' His job was on the line here, and he knew it - and Mr Schueler knew it and also knew that Bryant knew, so he really had the upper hand. This is a situation that has occurred, let us say, more than once in the history of the world.

`Of course you don't know...' Mr Schueler turned from one of his promenades behind the desk and rested his hands gently on its polished surface. `It is useless, Mr Bryant, useless. And you are that part of the machine right now. Of course the part still works, might still work well, but that is not the point. It is unpredictable, unsound, and so it is useless to me, and therefore it is useless to the company, and it follows quite logically that it is useless to you.'

`Yes, sir.'

`"Yes, sir," you say, but I wonder, do you understand? Really? There are things bigger than yourself in this world' - he looked about himself at the great glass panels, the graphs on the wall, his monogram embroidered on the chair - `there is the company, Mr Bryant. The company.' He said it as Bryant imagined people used to say `God', back when that was permitted. `Yes, there is the company -' it was like a reminder of home in an empty place, a meaningless keepsake he had always on his person `- there is the company, and the company is us and we are it. Tiny, almost unimportant atoms of it, but we must contribute our best. Do you understand that?' he asked slowly, as though in pioneering communication with a genius chimp in a glass cage.

Bryant was left staring and all he could think to say, a comforting mantra, was, `Yes, sir.' While Schueler spoke, though, he found himself drifting far away and high above the concrete building and the cold glass panels and the conveyor belts below and the industrial chimneys above. High above... and yet here he was inside himself, as ever. Here he was in the grey weary body he inhabited, the dull grey world drifting before his inattentive grey eyes, but there was something new within him. Something golden and brilliant that shone inside him, a - he hesitated on the word `glow', for it reminded him of stupid greeting cards and their mindless messages, but that was what it was - and it was the difference between lifeless existence and life with a curious optimism, an excitement, a thrill beyond simple feeling that delved into his very being. Life was no more the dreary progress of days, the world sliding by like something blurred and unimportant on a sheet of card before him, his brain whirring on mechanically and this hollow inside of him; life was somehow more than the drudgery and the hours sucked away by work, the walk home, crawling into bed bone-weary, defeated again, as he was every other day. How had she done this to him? He couldn't begin to describe, so all he did was repeat, `Yes, sir'.

Mr Schueler brushed him aside as he would an aborted buyout or an uncooperative stock. He sighed deeply. `Are you listening to me at all?' he asked pointlessly, seeing Bryant was far away.

Bryant saw her face in place of the fat corporate visage before him, saw her wonderful short black-brown hair instead of the creeping male pattern baldness, saw her sculpted nose and dark soft eyes dislodge the cruel questioning look of his boss, saw her petite frame and the dark suit she wore. He had dreamed so often of touching - not the marble white flesh, which he dared not soil with something as crude as his blistered hand, but just the soft fabric of the suit: a poor substitute for the velvet of her hair or the deep liquid of her eyes, but the texture of which was important above all else to him, like food or shelter or friendship. Only then did he see that Mr Schueler's suit was of the very same material, and it unnerved him suddenly to think that they were cut from the same cloth. But he felt a strange, unknown store of energy rise up inside him, and there was something glorious in his unlikely struggle... against all odds... love conquers... It seemed to him a very old and beautiful story to re-enact once more.

`You can't know,' he said suddenly, `sir, what it's like.'

`What what is like?' asked Schueler, surprised out of another tirade.

`Love.' He admitted it as you would an old secret, quieted afterwards by how different it looked in the light of today. It was a word that had been forgotten, almost, confined as it was to the entirely business-related ceremonies of marriage and death, and it sounded somewhat conceited to apply it to his poor self.

`I see,' said Mr Schueler, like a doctor noting down an unsavoury possibility. `And I suppose it was that girl down there - the short one, who works at terminal six - that you were... looking at like that, was it?'

The nod from Bryant was slow in coming because he was enraged for a moment that she should be described as just `the short one' - as though she were not more than that, were not... He had not the words. The wooden romances on TV, where the rich suited yuppie always got the girl in the end (assuming she was of his class), were passed off and generally accepted as love, but Bryant, when he thought of her, longed for more words like,`Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!' His grandfather had quoted that at him once, out of the blue, and it had buried itself in his brain, and when he had lain down to sleep that night, the words thundered and thundered endlessly in his soul, and the more he thought them the better they were. He didn't know whose words they were, assumed they were his grandfather's, but he did know that they described her perfectly. He needed more words like that. He wanted to speak and speak of her, to her, paint wonderful pictures of her in others' minds, and most of all let her know: This is what I see when I see you, this is what my head is filled with in your presence. But other words never formed and he was left looking dumbly at her always. He had just the image of her, the knowledge that she was perfect, the few commonplace words they had exchanged, like lines of dialogue in an endless, plotless soap. And so he had no way to express any of it at all to the contented man before him, who could never understand. He couldn't bring himself to repeat his grandfather's line, for it would be far more embarrassing to say than `love', so he settled for the lesser shame: `I love her.' It seemed horribly insufficient.

`She,' said Schueler, tapping a few keys on the computer before him and checking his memory against her personal profile on the screen, `is of Business-Beta class, and her parents have hopes that she will marry a Business-Alpha or even a Management-Delta class man. She works with an efficiency a whole point-six per cent higher than the mean average, and her future is a promising one. Do you honestly believe - I know you aren't the brightest specimen of your Working-Beta class, but still... - do you really hold any hope of signing a joint marriage account with her? I assume that's what you meant when you said you "loved" her. (What a curious, old-fashioned word to choose, by the way.) It would be sheer lunacy on her part to share her personal profits with you, outrageous fortune on yours if she did, and I have no doubt the Government would intervene. Moreover... Bryant, I say Bryant? Are you listening to me at all? I can see why you are where you are in the world...'

Bryant, meanwhile, was straining his head around Mr Schueler's desk at a painful angle, trying to look inconspicuous while sneaking a peek at the information on the computer screen.

`Whatever are you doing?' asked Schueler, turning the monitor away from Bryant's prying eyes. `That is confidential information.'

`Would you just tell me her last name? Please.'

`Whose?'

He shuddered at having to say her name. It was an awful name - the kind of name a higher Business class family would choose to make their daughter appear as though she belonged to the Management class - but that was hardly her fault. She was, he felt with utter surety, faultless. Well, apart from the name. Which wasn't her fault. `Penelope's,' he said, daring Mr Schueler to laugh.

Mr Schueler, as was his custom, saw no humour in it. `Certainly not. And as you couldn't possibly have any transactions to conduct with her - at least, not if she has an iota of sense - there really is no point in your knowing it.'

`I know, but still, if you'd just...'

`Why do you want to know her name, Bryant?'

He cringed. `Well, I just... I just wanted to know.'

`That is no answer.'

`Fine,' said Bryant, lowering his voice and not meeting Mr Schueler's eyes. `Fine. It's because Penelope's such a terrible name - I can never use it to her face, or even think of her at the same time as I think of it - and I was hoping her other name might be better, might be as beautiful as she... That is, not that anything could be as beautiful as she is, but I thought, maybe, well...' It was painful to unravel his thoughts of her here in front of this man he hated and who was about to sack him, to see how disorganised the coil of them really was, and how feeble and hopeless it all seemed.

`I am afraid I do not understand you. I cannot help you at all, I am afraid,' said Mr Schueler, speaking like a recorded message. It wasn't that he disliked Bryant all that much - Schueler was as incapable of dislike as he was of liking - it was just that they seemed to be operating on entirely different wavelengths. Talking to Bryant reminded him of a company tour of Belgium he'd been on once, when he'd forgotten his phrase book. (He felt as though he were asking that waiter for a strawberry church all over again.) Perhaps, thought Schueler, it has to do with the class difference... Yes, he became quite certain that it must be that, and the inkling of a new equation began in his mind to work it all out.

`But can't you just tell me...?' Bryant interrupted his thoughts.

`It is not my place to tell. Ask her yourself. It is confidential information.'

`But I can't. I - I don't know where to start. I never know how to start talking to her.'

`Well, if you had a reason, maybe then...' Mr Schueler was really stretching himself here, and was really trying to understand his employee's predicament; for, after all, a happy worker is a productive one. But for the second time recently he felt himself truly in uncharted waters.

`I mean, I've talked to her a little, but not much... and I've never actually -'

`Look, if you're thinking of marriage - despite all the obstacles - then I have to say you're too young. What are you, seventeen? And she the same! Not financially sound.' He was surer of himself now. `It's mad to think of signing a financial contract...'

`I'm not thinking of marriage, nor of a joint bank account. I just... I can't describe it. I just like being around her, you know?' But Mr Schueler didn't know, and never would. In vain Bryant went on: `I feel as if I could talk and talk and talk to her - although I usually only manage a few sentences and then I escape, run away, but I don't know why - and she just makes me feel, well, sort of whole, if you see what I mean. It's as if she's the only real person in the world. You know how you pass by some people every day, talk to them even, but even then they're as lifeless as a name in an address book or a character on TV - well, with her it's different. It's as though we've felt all the same things, and I know exactly what -'

`Look,' said Mr Schueler, in a voice of surrender. He had been growing more and more agitated as Bryant spoke. `Look,' he said, as he would try to reach a settlement if a group of terrorists were to climb suddenly through the window into his office. `Somehow we've got off track.' He rummaged distractedly through an orderly pile of papers on his desk. `I called you here because I am losing profits - it's all here, in black and white, in this equation - and I fear you are the cause.' He held out the sheet of paper with his equation on it. `The trouble's with the last twenty-six operations. I've underlined them. Those twenty-six operations, Mr Bryant, represent your negative effect on the company. And if the best excuse for that effect you can come up with is... is "love", I will be very disappointed.'

Bryant, as it happens, had an untapped talent for mathematics his position didn't allow him to exploit, and after half a minute of looking at the equation - which Mr Schueler was sure he wouldn't understand - he spoke. `You're not losing profits, sir. You're gaining them. The result of these twenty-six operations is positive, always positive. If you'll just check your figures.'

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