is an unhealthy, anti-social activity that endangers everyone in the workplace, so the No Smoking policy was not up for negotiation, but Roy could understand their point of view, and he was not without sympathy for it.
Roy was about to pull himself to his feet when he heard a funny kind of click. A panel had slid open in the wall beside him. Roy stared. In the hole revealed by the panel were the soles of two bare feet pointing downward. While he watched, some kind of mechanism must have been operating, because gradually the feet moved out into the room. Bare calves came into view. Bare thighs. Bare—Holy mackerel.
He was looking at the naked lower portion of a woman. The mechanism had stopped. He couldn’t see anything above the waist. As it was he could see plenty. And then some.
I don’t believe I’m seeing this, he thought.
This wasn’t some casual sexual liaison among the staff. Someone had had to build this contraption and put a hole in the wall. How many people were involved? What would the shareholders think? Was it even legal?
Nothing happened.
I gotta get outta here, thought Roy.
He stood up, did up his pants and buckled his belt. He flushed the toilet.
The naked rear end of the woman hadn’t moved.
Jesus, thought Roy.
Roy had never had a girlfriend, and though he had been on a couple of dates when he was younger and thinner he had always been shy. This kind of thing was way out of his league.
I’m getting too old for this job, he thought. Roy had had to deal with a couple of unsavory incidents in his time. But what the dickens was he supposed to do about this? Who would he even tell? What was he supposed to say? He tried to imagine telling someone, Steve Jackson for example, about the naked lower portion of a woman.
I just can’t do it, he thought. A man from the younger generation would probably have taken something like this in his stride. Roy just couldn’t deal with it. He couldn’t even think of words he could bring himself to speak in the presence of another person. But how could he just walk away from it? It would be irresponsible to bury his head in the sand and pretend it hadn’t happened. But what the hell was he supposed to do?
Besides, there was another problem. How was he going to get out of here? What if he opened the door and there was someone out there? What if somebody saw? They’d think he had been involved in this. If you’ve been in personnel long enough you know how stories get around. There was no way somebody was going to keep something like that to himself. The story would get around, and everyone in the building would think there was something in it.
Somehow he was going to have to persuade the woman to take herself off.
Was there some kind of speaker or something somewhere so he could tell her to go away?
Roy looked around the cubicle, but he couldn’t see anything. Unless maybe this thingamajig by the toilet roll was some kind of communication device? He jiggled at it. An unopened condom fell out onto the floor.
Roy picked up the condom and tried to squeeze it back up inside the thing it had fallen out of. Three more fell out on the floor.
He considered trying to shove the four condoms back in, but the way things were going he’d just end up with a whole stream of the darned things piling up on the floor. He stuffed them into the inside pocket of his jacket.
There seemed to be absolutely nothing in the cubicle that would allow above-the-waist communication.
Well, maybe if he just kind of pushed on her legs she would get the message?
But what if she got the wrong idea?
Roy hesitated. This could be really embarrassing.
He had thought that things couldn’t possibly get any worse. Suddenly he realized just how lucky he had been when all he had to worry about was how to get rid of the visitor.
The handle of the cubicle turned just a fraction.
Someone was trying to get in.
THE HUMAN STALLION
Sometimes life forces you to learn things about yourself that you would rather not know.
Ed had always known he had drive. He just didn’t realize how much drive. But after the facility had been in place a month many guys actually found they weren’t making that much use of it, whether because of being in a