The Guide and the CEO by David M. Detweiler

Author:David M. Detweiler [M. David Detweiler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780811751278
Publisher: Stackpole Books
Published: 2013-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Ten

The trail wound through a double revetment, a hallway of stone narrow enough, as if opposing fortresses had been built in too close proximity, to obscure the mountaintops of the region—even much sky. It was hard to sense where you were. Stones and pebbles troubled their boots, the soil here a bleached tan, floury and sifty like moondust maybe. Maybe like moondust. Rick wondered. He had never been on the moon. As they came out of the corridor and crested the next rise, he noticed a log. It looked like a hippo—knot for eye, split for maw, riverhorse-fat . . . he didn’t mention it. He was the guide. He was not being paid to think unrelated thoughts.

The lonely little cloud was still there. What would make such an isolated one? Rogue thermal. Heat column rising passes the level where temperature-drop induces condensation: cloud. Of course! But why only one? And why stationary? Rick relished miniature puzzles. Hm. Now what in the wide nurturing world . . . ah. Nothing. Nothing would. Nothing in the natural world would. Only something man-made would. Smokestack. Bonfire sending up heat—man-made crystals swelling in pure white—waif cumulus. Of course!

To have solved it exhilarated Rick and he all of a sudden magnanimously cared about Boldt as if this were Eden and Boldt the world’s first child.

“How’s the legs?”

“Never better,” Boldt bragged.

His compact bursting back, with lightest cloud-chamber pointillism between the shirt blades, swung on ahead as they conversed, not needing to raise their voices in the airplane-less still.

“You’re in shape.”

“Damned straight.”

“You have to be,” it occurred to Rick.

“Damned straight I do. To be in all the conferences in all the hours I gotta be in ’em in. And on all the planes. In all the cars. On the phone, on the laptop, at the conference table.”

“I never thought of it.”

“Well you go right ahead and you think of it,” Boldt growled, “because it’s true. Business isn’t physical, it’s mental; but you still gotta be in prime condition. Least I do. Some guys don’t. Some guys I know are in no shape at all. They go on nervous energy or youth or something else that I don’t get. I couldn’t do it. Take Veroni. Take that ass Winston. Each of those guys has twice the bucks I do—they work ninety-hour weeks, and they stay sharp, I gotta admit, but neither of ’em could’ve made it past the second switchback.”

“Maybe if you were out of shape you’d be worth a billion.”

Boldt’s nearer eye end-over-ended a dagger at Rick. Boldt held the look, the disapproval. He wasn’t necessarily saying Rick wasn’t right, he was just saying did Rick really want to get into this?

“Okay,” Rick huffled and scraped, “yeah, so.”

Boldt turned back to the trail.

“Can’t use the head if the body’s not rested. Muscles okay. Lungs good. Fish smell, dirt in the cracks,” Boldt meditated mystically. “Casting arm tired.”

“Goodness.”

“No shit,” Boldt warned.

“To use my body in my guiding,” Rick concluded, “I gotta be in good physical shape. I always knew that.

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