“Can she really be that good-looking?” I asked. I had my doubts. Any number of times I had made a point of going to see the latest “knockout,” who turned out to be nothing much. This was one kind of rumor you could never trust.

“No lie,” he said. “Check her out yourself. If you don’t think she’s a beauty, go to Stage Six and get a new pair of eyes. Wish I didn’t have a wife. I’d get her. Or die tryin’.”

Lunch break was almost over, but as usual my section had almost no work left for the afternoon so I cooked up an excuse to go to Stage 8. To get there, you had to go through a long underground tunnel. There was a guard at the tunnel entrance, but he knew me from way back, so I had no trouble getting in.

The far end of the tunnel opened on a riverbank, and the Stage 8 building was a little ways downstream. Both the roof and the smokestack were pink. Stage 8 made elephant legs. Having worked there just four months earlier, I knew the layout well. The young guard at the entrance was a newcomer I had never seen before, though.

“What’s your business?” he demanded. In his crisp uniform, he looked like a typical new-broom type, determined to enforce the rules.

“We ran out of nerve cable,” I said, clearing my throat. “I’m here to borrow some.”

“That’s weird,” he said, glaring at my uniform. “You’re in the ear section. Cable from the ear and leg sections shouldn’t be interchangeable.”

“Well, let me try to make a long story short. I was originally planning to borrow cable from the trunk section, but they didn’t have any extra. And they were out of leg cable, so they said if I could get them a reel of that, they’d let me have a reel of the fine stuff. When I called here, they said they have extra leg cable, so that’s why I’m here.”

The guard flipped through the pages of his clipboard. “I haven’t heard anything about this,” he said. “These things are supposed to be arranged beforehand.”

“That’s strange. It has been. Somebody goofed. I’ll tell the guys inside to straighten it out.”

The guard just stood there whining. I warned him that he was slowing down production and that I would hold him responsible if somebody from upstairs got on my back. Finally, still grumbling, he let me in.