The Business by Iain Banks
Author:Iain Banks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780748109920
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2008-09-03T12:00:00+00:00
'I say, did you know that you can count up to over one thousand just using your fingers?'
'Really?'
'Yes. Can you guess how? I bet you can't.'
'You'd…use a different base, I suppose, not ten. Ah, of course; binary. Yes. It'd be…one thousand and twenty-four.'
'One thousand and twenty-three, actually. Zero to one thousand and twenty-three. Gosh, though, well done. That was very quick. I must have bored you with this before. Have I?'
'No, Mr Hazleton.'
'Then I'm impressed. And you know my name, and here I am and I've very rudely forgotten yours, though I'm sure we were introduced earlier. I do hope you'll forgive me.'
'Kathryn Telman, Mr Hazleton.'
'Kathryn, how do you do. I do believe I've heard of you.'
We shook hands. It was November 1989, in Berlin, the week the Wall came down. I'd squeezed myself into a Lufthansa flight from London (jump seat, snooty stewardesses) just that day, determined to be there for a bit of history that had seemed unthinkable just a few years earlier. A whole bunch of the more adventurous Business high-ups had had exactly the same idea — Tempelhof and Tegel must have been double-parked with executive jets for those few days — and as a result almost by default there was a sort of impromptu meeting of various Level Twos and Ones set up for that evening. I'd decided to try and gatecrash that as well, and succeeded.
We were sitting down to dinner in a private room in the Kempinski after a chaotic evening in a collection of limos and taxis, touring the various places where people were swarming over the Wall, attacking it, demolishing it, wheeling bits of it away and pocketing it. Everybody was a bit drunk, and, I suppose, infected with the heady, almost revolutionary — make that counter-revolutionary — atmosphere of that particular time and place.
I had indeed been introduced to Hazleton at the reception before dinner. He was a Level Two at the time, but marked out for still greater things. He'd looked me over in an automatic, unfocused way. I was twenty-nine, already a Four, thanks to my inspired guesses about computers and IT. I looked pretty good; better than I had at nineteen. Hazleton might have forgotten my name but he hadn't forgotten what I looked like. He'd made straight for the seat at my side. Well, fairly straight: he bumped a couple of gold-painted chairs on the way.
He'd just nodded at me as he'd sat down and then ignored me throughout the first course, as though he'd really chosen this seat at random or had taken it reluctantly, then suddenly he'd come up with this unlikely chat-up line about digital digits. I had become used to this sort of thing from upper-class Englishmen. At least he had used the second person, rather than 'one'.
'And if one used one's toes,' he said, 'one could go up to over a million.' (Oh, so we were using 'one', were we?)
'Impractical, though,' I said.
'Yes, you'd have to take your socks or stockings off.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
The Social Psychology of Inequality by Unknown(2313)
The Plant Paradox by Dr. Steven R. Gundry M.D(2047)
The Writing on the Wall by Anselm Jappe(1761)
Working for Yourself by J.D. (Nolo) Stephen Fishman(1480)
Every Landlord's Legal Guide by Janet Portman & Stewart Marcia & Ralph Warner(1329)
The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything ... Fast by Kaufman Josh(1309)
ADHD on Trial by Michael Gordon(1242)
Decisive by Chip Heath(1202)
Drafting Contracts: How and Why Lawyers Do What They Do, Second Edition by Stark Tina L(1175)
Working for Yourself by Stephen Fishman J.D. (Nolo)(1141)
The Economist Aug 8th 2015 by The Economist(1124)
Restitution by Restitution(1116)
The Economist Aug 29th 2015 by The Economist(1099)
A Practical Guide to International Arbitration in London by Hilary Heilbron(1085)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the Two Towers, the Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien(1084)
Intellectual Property Strategy by John Palfrey(1083)
Collusion by Luke Harding(1046)
Persuasion by Owner(1018)
Chapter 1 by Owner(952)