After the Safety Meeting, Eddie prepared another memorandum indicating
the acute need for a better training program and an increase in
maintenance personnel. Shortage of qualified technicians was chronic.

At four twenty-five, the night supervisor phoned in to say he was
having engine trouble with his new car and would be delayed until
about six o'clock. Eddie agreed to wait for him.

Eddie dialed home to let his wife, Lois, know he would be late again.
A modulated low-frequency note told him the home phone was out of
order.

Ray Morely, one of the night-shift engineers, came in with coffee.
"You still here, Eddie?"

"Yeah, until Wheeler makes it. His car's down."

"Market hit a new high."

"Yeah. I guess you heard about the meeting today?"

Ray sipped coffee. "Budget again? I missed the day crew. I got hung up
in traffic and was a little late."

"A pay cut goes with it, this time."

"You're kidding?"

"Been by your desk yet?"

"No."

"I'm not kidding. Ten per cent for those making above eight hundred."

"Nobody's going to put up with that," Ray said. "We're in an engineering
shortage. We've got ICBMs rusting in their silos all over the country
because we can't afford the engineering maintenance--that's how bad it is.
Everybody'll quit."

"I don't think they'll make it stick. Ramon Lopez, one of the truck
crew, was killed today hosing down a high-voltage pothead."

"No kidding?"

Eddie told him about the accident.

"That was a rough one to lose, wasn't it?"

The phone rang.

Ray said, "I'll get it."

He listened for a minute and hung up. "There's an outage in the Silver
Lake Area. The brakes on a bus failed and took out an overhead
section."

Eddie sat back. "No sense in you going. With work traffic on the
surface streets until the freeway gets fixed, they won't get the truck
there until 6:30 or so."

"Right." Ray drank coffee reflectively. "You going looking?"

"I'm an old-timer. I got a lot of seniority. How about you?"

"I got bills. It's going to cost me near a hundred a month--that's a
steep bite."

"I still think they'll back off."

"They'll have to," Ray said. "If not right now, when the pressure gets
on. You ask me, we've got them by the short hair." He settled into the
chair. "I see it as an organic phenomenon. When society gets as
complex as ours, it has to grow more and more engineers. But there's a
feedback circuit in effect. The more engineers we grow, the more
comple