Schueler stood agape and dutifully checked. And Bryant was right. `So simple,' he murmured. `It was staring me in the face all along. I just didn't see it. But how? How am I gaining profits because of you?'

`Well,' he looked down, a little abashed. Oh, what does it matter, he thought, if I'm going to be fired anyway? `Sir, I did more overtime than was strictly allowed. I couldn't stand being at home, thinking of her here - and I thought that if I were here, I might see her. You must understand. It's awful to go back to my flat when she's here. I feel as if I'm split in two. I'm sitting and eating or lying in bed or whatever, but most of me is still here, and the rest of me wants to be. And every moment of my life screams at me to go, to see her, to be with her...'

`I see,' said Mr Schueler, troubled more and more deeply with each word, wanting only now to draw the conversation to a close. Still, he had to check that no profits had been lost because of this incomprehensible feeling of Bryant's. `You weren't,' he asked suddenly, `wasting time at work talking to her?'

`Hardly any, sir.' Bryant breathed in deeply and sadly. `About a few minutes in total.'

`I see.' Mr Schueler looked at his watch. `Well, you've wasted that talking to me. You might as well just get back to work.'

Bryant blinked. `You mean I can keep my job? Even with taking too much overtime...'

`True, it isn't healthy to work so many hours. You've been told enough how much it affects productivity, so I warn you not to repeat the offence.' Mr Schueler was not an unkind man. He hadn't the capacity to be, perhaps.

`Yes, sir.' Bryant couldn't believe it. He had been lucky, that was all - but he had almost been sacked. He had almost been banished, given no excuse to pass within inches of her every day, to catch sight of her face, to make embarrassed, stilted conversation he hated and loved. Yes, he had been lucky this time, but what if tomorrow the sack came, and he was cut off from her - before any real link had even formed to be broken? That would be agony, and he resolved instantly to do the impossible... to walk up to her and...

`Go on, then. I have work to do,' said Mr Schueler, at last erasing the final twenty-six operations on the page with not a little relief. But he felt no better for having done so, because the cause of them remained in his mind like some wasting disease.

`Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,' said Bryant, walking out the door with eyes shining brighter than ever and a definite mission behind them.

And with that he left his boss - left him as baffled as ever.

It was six in the morning, and Mr Schueler had to admit that something was niggling on his mind. He had wasted, he approximated, ten minutes or so in total over the last five and a half hours in pauses between pieces of paperwork - pauses in which he thought unproductively of something he never could understand, even in his youth when it had been relatively commonplace. `Love' - that had been the word the young, confused Bryant had used, hadn't it? Love...? he thought. It was like pressing a mental button, expecting a response, but getting nothing. Like seeing a sudden gap where you expected... something.

Mr Mueller, Mr Schueler's co-manager, stepped briskly into the office to take on the day shift

`Anything to report?' he asked in his official tone, the only one he possessed.

`Not much. But I believe I've found the problem with my equation.'

Mr Mueller smiled without feeling. `Good for you.'

But is it? wondered Mr Schueler, as he stepped out into the corridor. He made his slow way down it, but stopped suddenly halfway and turned to look out the window.

It was a cold winter's morning, and fog came up from the mouths of the crowd of workers who had just punched out, rising like smoke from chimney-stacks. Mr Schueler thought fleetingly of wasted heat energy as he observed his little people. They rubbed their hands and stamped their feet and buttoned up coats as they began to go their separate ways, mist obscuring the ground about them. Yet on the icy surface outside the factory, Mr Schueler thought he could see two stationary figures amid the departing rabble - they were far away, but he was sure he could distinguish two forms, male and female, at the corner of the building - and they hung together, seemingly not ready to leave. Instead they stood, one looking down and the other looking a little away, but their bodies quite close in the morning chill. Mr Schueler was reminded of a video he had watched decades before, at school, in science class, on animal mating habits, as he saw their faces turning - first one, then the other - to snatch a look of the other's, but never both faces turning at the same time.

Frost lay hard on the ground and by now the area outside the factory was empty but for the two, but still they did not seem to want to go. Mr Schueler did not think of the minutes of potential sleep they were wasting, though, as he believed (not thinking of his company, for once, but of his neglected self) that he might learn something of the inscrutable love from the meeting of this pair. He was quite sure it must be Bryant and the girl. Occasionally one of them would walk away a little, make an unwilling step into the empty morning, but then would return to the other as though tied by some very simple, intangible bond. Mr Schueler had an uncharacteristic fantasy that there were enormous amounts at stake for both of them in this... which was, of course, silly: both their annual wages could be taken from Mr Schueler's petty cash, so what deals could they conduct that could possibly interest him? And yet he watched rapt, as though some monumental exchange were unfolding before him.

If they spoke, Mr Schueler couldn't read their lips at this distance and through the mist - never could read lips very well, anyway - couldn't convince himself really that he needed to decipher the words passing out there. The words didn't seem that important, anyway: simply being together was unmistakably their biggest concern. Mr Schueler recalled seeing two foxes lying down together for warmth against a cold day like this one, forty years ago on the TV screen in science class. He had been sickened then, disgusted, had wondered how man had grown from that kind of familial primitiveness... But now he felt - on some level of highly abstract speculation, he told himself - he felt, or thought, or thought he felt, that maybe there was some wisdom in what Bryant had said, or maybe -

But what had Bryant said?

Mr Schueler felt distant from the scene before him, a watcher, a member of the audience who longed for the actor's sense of accomplishment - exultation - when the play was done, but couldn't drive himself on to a stage. He felt, an unexpected breath of humanity wafting across his mind, as though he were a shade, a disembodied spirit drifting on the edge of life, unsubstantial, making no contact. He peered, leaning forward, to see the scene better - and realised abruptly that his face was already pressed up against the glass of the window. Through the still mist of the morning he thought he glimpsed love, but he couldn't see its shape, wasn't even sure if it was Bryant and Penelope he saw. (Penelope Brown - `Brown', that was the surname Bryant had needed so desperately to know. Would that make Bryant happy, that name, or would it be as unsuitable for his mysterious purposes as `Penelope'? Mr Schueler couldn't even begin to wonder.) And if it weren't them, if it were an entirely different couple, surely that was even more terrifying. Perhaps, he thought, swallowing painfully for no reason he could place, this mysterious article called love was within them all - all the little people - and grew within them and between them, with a kind of beautiful charm that even the most adroit calculation could never have...

Mr Schueler blinked hard. Another anomaly, that was all this was. A momentary intrusion... But when he saw the two step into the beams of the young sun peering over the roof of the factory, when he saw that it was indeed Bryant and... and Miss Brown, then he realised that this was no simple aberration, but collapse. The clockwork machine that was Mr Schueler had not merely faltered this time, but was at last clicking and whirring and breaking down. He thought of one of those failed perpetual motion contraptions, which cannot really continue perpetually as they have no fuel, nothing but their own slowing momentum... And then he thought with a sudden deep self-pity that shocked him of his own wife, lying in a hospital bed in a different land. She had become `disenchanted', she had informed him, long-distance, from her luxurious ward in California. The expensive doctors there had no real cure for her, though they had lots of names for her condition, and they dulled the unwanted feelings by tranquillising her soul with drugs, in much the same way as you would anaesthetise an area of the body prior to amputation. And so she lay now all day in the hospital and ate and drank and absorbed TV shows: the bane of his bank account. The marriage was simply one of the few mistaken business deals into which Mr Schueler had entered in the course of his life; nothing more, nothing less. He'd been very professional about it all. As unemotional as he had been on his wedding day, signing the joint account and giving his fingerprints, never thinking to feel inside the show of feeling. Instead he smiled emptily for the camera. Superficially pleased; nothing more, nothing less.

But now he thought for the first time that maybe marriage - `love', rather, for what was marriage but a signature on a chequebook? - maybe love was after all meant to be an affair of Mores and Lesses, not this staid official propriety, this doing of deals and settling of accounts, this professionalism, this life like a graph with no troughs but no spikes either. Clearly, to Bryant, being with Pen-... being with Miss Brown was a definite More, and being without her, it seemed, was a terrible Less - a Less so terrible Bryant would choose to work more overtime than was permitted in a job he loathed just to be near her. (For who could like that job, really, even if they were of Working-Beta class?) Being so mathematical, Mr Schueler told himself that Bryant's equality of Mores and Lesses was just the same as his own continual null of feeling; and yet he envied Bryant his Mores, and maybe he envied him his Lesses too. Yes, thought Mr Schueler, feeling an odd tightness just above his voice box - yes, Bryant had one thing that he himself had somehow failed to acquire in a life devoted to accumulation... But as to what that thing was, it was a problem Mr Schueler had yet to solve.

As he watched Bryant and Miss Brown disappear at last into the lightening gloom, their hands now touching hesitantly for some unguessable reason, Mr Schueler began to scribble numbers absent-mindedly in the dust on the window-sill: slowly at first, but then faster and faster the numbers came. It was, after all, a problem, he reasoned desperately - this `love' - and every problem has a solution. It must have. Break it down, that was the key, make it a matter of probabilities... He scribbled more and more, more and more quickly, less and less legibly in the dust. People passed him by, walking down the corridor, and greeted him, but met with only the bald red back of his head, stooped over the window-sill and the impossible new equation forming there. Hours later, these same passers-by would be treated to the once-in-a-lifetime sight of their boss, still in the corridor, face pressed again against the glass of the window - crying bitterly, his tears pattering on to the dust of the sill, obliterating it all. And it would seem strange to them, because he had always been such a happy man.

But Mr Schueler, for once in his life, did not hold out any hope of finding the solution he sought.

The End

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