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 complex society becomes. Each new one creates the need for two more. I get a sort of feeling of—I don't know—vitality, I guess, when I walk into, say, an automated factory. All that machinery and all that electronic gear is like a single cell in a living organism—an organism that's growing every day, multiplying like bacteria. And it's always sick, and we're the doctors. That's job security. We're riding the wave of the future. I don't think they'll make a salary cut stick."
"I hope you're right," Eddie said.
Eddie checked out at 7:15, when the night supervisor finally arrived. As he left the building, he noted that a burglar alarm down the street had gone off; probably because of a short circuit. The clanking set his nerves on edge. Apprehensively he felt a rising wind against his cheeks.