Prof

In the pub, Jerry-O had his boys around him. Roger would have to sit opposite him at the table, something he had been wanted to avoid. The best way to get on Jerry-O’s good side, he had heard, was to get on his left side. He had come too far to quit now, though. Nothing was going to stop him from getting in.

He sat down at the small table in front of the group of burly men and tried to copy Jerry-O’s slump and scowl. He had done this on every visit, and hoped it was about to pay off.

“So, Roger-me-boy, ‘ave you thought it through then?” said Jerry-O, his large, cheeky face as blank as Minitrue, the grey building that Roger saw occasionally on errands for his mother. Jerry-O was talking about the conditions of membership with the profs. Part of Roger’s income would become Jerry-O’s. He made it sound as if the choice were Roger’s, but everyone had to say yes before he would even say maybe.

“Yeh, Jerry-O, that’d be. . . “ Roger stopped himself from getting too excited and, trying to act disinterested, kicked around the sawdust on the floor with his boots. “I mean, I reckon I could do with a good spot, if you’d let me in. What do you say?”

Jerry-O leaned back and guffawed. Roger mirrored his movements. The boss had laughed. That was a good sign.

Just then, a cheer came from outside the pub as a parade of people marched by carrying banners and flags. It was an appreciation parade for Big Brother. According to the papers, the boot quota, or something like that, had been exceeded and there had been demonstrations all morning long. Roger thought it queer that he didn’t recognize any of the people in the parades. Oceania seemed to always be having parades of strangers.

“Well, Roger-me-boy,” said Jerry-O after several minutes of silence. “I ‘ave to admit. You been comin ‘ere quite reg’lar askin’ me to let ya join and I got to say I ain’t seen a prof before who so much reminded me of my young days. You’re only twenny, you got a lot to learn about the business, and you ain’t too bright, but you got spunk, you ‘ave!”

A smile spread over Jerry-O’s face and Roger smiled along with him. This was turning out better than he’d had expected. Not only was he being let in, it was with compliments. Like Jerry-O, Roger didn’t use systems to predict winning lottery numbers, he relied on intuition. His gut-feelings had won his clients the three-spot prize twice already.

“Get my boy an ‘alf-liter, Sam!” said Jerry-O and all the men laughed. At 20, Roger was younger than all of them, and by asking for a half-liter Jerry-O had put him in his place. Only a man would get a full liter at his table. Roger felt a blush coming on and breathed deep to clear it, calling timidly after Sam, who had gone to the bar.

“Make that two ‘alf-liters.”

The group howled again. He drank until sundown.

Roger was having dream of the test. He was sitting in a large chair, surrounded by glaring lights. He squinted, like when he first walked out of the house on summer mornings. The table was immense, and there were papers on it, with little shapes and drawings on some, words on others.

A man kept asking him questions about the shapes and drawings and even though Roger knew the answers to a lot of them, he felt that for some reason this man didn’t want to know the answers. It may have been the expression on the man’s face, which made him look bored, as though he didn’t expect that Roger knew very much at all. So Roger kept saying “I don’t know,” and “yes” when he should have said “no,” and “no” when he knew the answer was “yes,” and looking confused, because he was. But he was more afraid than confused, all the while thinking of knives for some reason and how sharp they were, even though he couldn’t see any knives. He shivered in the cold drafts that blew through the gray, shadowed room.

He he was surprised when they told him he had done well on the test. He was of average intelligence, they said, so they were going to put him to work. Pop was pleased and scruffed Roger’s hair and said he’d be a machine grinder, just like his old man.

Then Roger was standing at the grinder, sparks flying, metal burning, trying to hold the hot metal to the flying stone wheel. His clothes caught fire and he fell down on the ground, rolling, screaming.

“Just like your old man!” roared the people around him. “Just like your old man!”

The dream flame was still burning on his skin when he woke. He shook off the thickness of sleep, scratched his flea bites and his burn scars, and rolled out of his straw cot.

In the kitchen, Roger’s mother had just finished making breakfast.

“Mornin’, Mum, how’s the leg?” Roger said.

“Fine, Roj,” said his mother. “Don’t forget that flour on ya way by the store, now, lad. It’s the monthly ration and I won’t be out to get it. All right?”

“I gotcha, Mum. I’ll pick it up comin’ home.”

“Like ‘ell you will, lad! ‘At’s a month’s ration. It’ll be gone by noon!”

Roger stirred his gruel. If the profs saw him lugging a sack of flour to work, they’d never stop joking. It had been hard enough proving he deserved to be chief since Jerry-O had disappeared last year.

“Mum…,” Roger hesitated and decided not to argue about it. “Right-O Mum. Will do.”

As Roger stepped onto the cracked pavement again, he wished for a moment that the profs would just accept him for what he had become. The cold air leaked into his canvas overcoat. It wasn’t his fault that he had won more times than all of them put together, which meant, according to Jerry-O’s rules, that he had to be the new chief. It was performance that decided it. It wasn’t his fault that he was making enough money from sales of winning numbers to equal a grinder’s salary. Roger had won his customers small prizes in every one of the last twenty drawings, an unprecedented lucky streak. If the upper-ups ever found out the winning numbers had come from one man, it wouldn’t be long before Roger disappeared, too. Fortunately, they didn’t pay much attention to that because most of the profs weren’t any better at predicting the lottery than anyone else. They just knew how to get paid for their predictions.

An old woman was practically dragging her load of stained white linen through the street with a half-naked child in tow. The child was whining and scratching his behind.

Without even thinking, Roger yelled “Steamer!” at the top of his lungs and people scrambled left and right, trying to escape the inevitable blast. He lay down on the pavement, hands on his head. It didn’t really matter where you went; it was chance that decided your fate.

Twenty seconds later a whump and an explosion came from three blocks away. A few screams followed. The enemy had taken a few more lives. Which enemy was it this time? Roger had forgotten. It changed so often.

Roger stood and brushed himself off. The woman continued, but looked back at him every few steps in suspicion. He had yelled his warning about the incoming bomb too early. It had been another of those irresistible gut feelings, knowing before he was supposed to know.

When he got near the pub, he saw the boys were standing in the street instead of going inside. Since he was leader now they were courteously waiting for him in the freezing wind, and probably resenting him all the more.

They were discussing systems, a subject Roger knew little about. The numbers and math were all too much for him to figure out. He suspected the others didn’t know much about it either. He didn’t claim to be smart, or even competent, he just knew what to do at the right time. Thinking with your gut, Jerry-O had called it. It seemed daft to pretend to be smart when the upper-ups would get you. But Roger hadn’t seen any profs taken away since Jerry-O. Maybe pretending just made you look stupider.

“’At’s what I was just now tellin’ ya, ya daft bloke! I’m telling ya, I got the system what’s won 5 times a year for the last seven years!” Yeats was red in the face, his white shock of hair waving around wildly. Burger was calm, but still meant to defend his own system. Roger wanted them both to shut up so they could all go into the pub. An idea had come to him lately and it was time to try it out.

“Ya bleedin’ liar!” said Burger, grimly calm. “You ain’t won twice in the last two years!”

Two others were arguing, too. They were tagalongs. They weren’t group members, but followed the profs in hopes of picking up clues on how to form their own systems. By the look in their eyes, they weren’t far from coming to blows.

“No, it ‘as not! Back ‘ome I got the whole lot of ’em over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes ’em down reg’lar as the clock. An’ I tell you, no number ending in seven — “

“Yes, a seven ‘as won! I could pretty near tell you the bleeding number. Four oh seven, it ended in. It were in February. Second week in February.”

Roger noticed a man in blue overalls, obviously one of the upper-ups, walk by, staring. It was strange to see any of the upper-ups in the streets, but they occasionally came around. Roger saw something in his eyes that he had never seen before. Fear mixed with defiance. He suddenly had one of the frightening twinges, like the ones that he got when he figured out a winning number and a window in his mind opened. That man knew something terrible. He turned and shuffled away, disappearing into a crowd. Roger decided he did not want to know the man’s story. His own was distressing enough.

“Oh, pack it in!” said Gregory, who had the best memory of all the profs. He had memorized all the winning lottery numbers since 1979. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very good at predicting new ones. “There ain’t been no number ending in 7 since ‘81.”

This quieted the tagalongs, who returned to listening to Burger and Keats. Roger continued to watch the man in blue cover-alls. The upper-up closed his eyes, opened them again, and pushed his hands down toward the ground, as if trying to convince himself of something. He looked around again and his gaze met Roger’s. For a moment, Roger felt a strange recognition, as if he had just seen someone he knew. Could this man have thoughts as strange as Roger’s? The man turned away and went into the pub. He hadn’t known those blokes did that sort of thing.

He turned back to the group. How could his men put such faith into a lottery whose main prize they had never won? He had long ago realized that it was fixed. It paid only the smallest of prizes. The trick was to guess only three of the six numbers. The demi-prize, it was called. But even the best of the profs went after the whole prize as if it were real. They’d never even met a man who’d won it.

He looked around and, seeing that there were no more men in blue overalls nearby, decided to join the conversation.

“What if the guv’ment ‘ad decided to stop the lott’ry?”

The men looked confused at first, but as understanding crept over their faces, they became outraged, not at Roger, as he was fearing they might, but at the government. At this, Roger became a bit more confident.

“Our jobs down the crapper?” he continued. “Would we really have to fight fer it, lads? To fight the traitor that done it?”

“Damn straight!” said Gregory, forgetting his resentment of Roger for a moment. “Nobody’s got the bloody right to do that! We’s got to make our livin’ too!”

“Yeah!” said Lester, one of the tagalongs that Roger always felt strangely wary of. “And it’s our only chance to get better’n what we got now! They wouldn’t dare to take it away!”

Over cries of “they’d better not” Roger threw in a few calming words.
 “S’alright, lads, I was just s’posin’. I’m with ya. Let’s ‘ope they don’t never do it!”

The profs filed into the pub, leaving behind the tagalongs, who knew better than to try following. Only profs were allowed into the back room.

“Boys, listen up,” Roger said when they all sat down at the table. It was dark in the room, the only light being what filtered in through the sheet covering the doorway. Roger tried hard to inject some authority into his voice.

“Billy ‘ere,” he continued, indicating the older man to his right. “’as been doing pretty well. I’s decided to move ‘im up to number five.”

“Roj!” sputtered Keats. “I’s number five!”

“You’s number six now,” said Roger. “And not jest that. Number one Burger here is gonna have his own set o’ profs from now on. We’s gonna get a bigger op’ration goin’ ‘round ‘ere. We’s gonna start addin’ in some more blokes to the bus’ness.”

There was a unison grunt of surprise and the profs began to whisper among themselves. Jerry-O would never have tried this. Roger wasn’t sure how all this was going to go over, but he was chief and, for some reason that he just couldn’t put his finger on, he was ready for a change….