Tool of the Trade

A  tool  of  the  trade,  you  could  say.  Not  a  craftsman's  tool,
admittedly. Not something you could  use  for the painstaking creation
of works of art, nor even an  object for qualifications; no one gets a
BA in using a stapler.

I suppose you could say that whenever I staple together the programmes
for the exploration journeys, I  am  taking  part in these ventures to
the "other place", as they so innocuously  call it, as if it were some
Shakespeare's theatre. But in fact I never leave my desk, and the work
of the Secretary to the Director of the Programme of Extra-dimensional
Research goes on, staple after staple after staple. Or it did.

Now they don't use paper.  They  finally  realised  that the 100 or so
people who've been on these  trips  to  the  other place couldn't take
their instructions with them.  Apparently,  the  machine they use just
doesn't like paper (not  that  a  mere  secretary  would know anything
about  that,  of  course).  What  comes   out  the  other  end  should
theoretically come out as so  much  printed  confetti. The reason that
they took so long to  find  this  out  is  that  none of the first ten
exploratory teams came back. Not a soul.  Although it scared me just a
little, I also felt a  twinge  of  satisfaction.  I thought I had done
what I set out to  do  when  I  joined  the  Programme as secretary to
Richard Dobkins PhD. But  they  continued  sending  them through - and
abandoned paper.

On the other side the  search  for  God continued, with proof positive
(or negative for the  accursed  atheists)  of  His existence being the
objective. But when  they  stopped  using  paper,  my  power  over the
failure of the project was ended. I  had to do  something; the staples
that wrecked the machine  were  no  longer  needed,  and very soon the
researchers would start coming back.

                                * * *

And as I walk calmly away  from  the  bloodied body of Richard Dobkins
PhD, I can see in the mirror  before  me the reflected glint of just a
few, and then many more of the  staples, embedded in his pale academic
flesh. A tool of the trade, you could say.