Ray Majors

Laura_s Training Camp

Chapter 1

Laura's mouth flew open when she realized she was looking at a sketch of a penis. Her lips felt numb, and low in her stomach she felt a sensation that was somewhere between nausea and the feeling one gets on the first big dip of a roller coaster. She held up the paper on which it had been drawn and looked through it to confirm the obscenity-and it was there, even though it had been erased: A hard penis, fitted with testicles and wings, leaped across the circular chart, as if to attack her thumb.

How disgusting! People who doodled at all were idlers, and the people who doodled such obscenities as this were little better than animals. Perry Coleman should be locked in a cage for doing that, or better yet, he should never have been released from the cage that had once held him. The winged penis proved he was a sex pervert as well as a convicted criminal, and hopefully it would be enough to get him fired. The brazen insult had been done on company paper and on company time, and it should certainly be enough for Coleman's dismissal. Mr. Markham would probally keep him on, though. At times Mr. Markham was entirely too lenient, especially when it came to Perry Coleman, and he'd undoubtedly be just as lenient with other of the ex-convicts at Consolidated Chemicals who might go to work in Plant Engineering as laboratory technicians. Laura didn't believe In hiring supposedly rehabilitated criminals to begin with; and once they were hired, she certainly didn't believe in coddling them.

The eighteen-year-old secretary took off her glasses to look at the horrid vulgarity more closely, seeing it still more clearly without the spectacles she'd bought to give herself a more mature appearance. Defaced and erased though it was, she was still certain the drawing represented a penis. But Mr. Markham would dismiss it as something else, and Chuck would just laugh it off. She set her full lips grimly and took her eraser in hand to complete the job. She filed away the chart on which it had been drawn and forced the matter out of her mind.

It was Wednesday, the fat part of the week, and Laura Dandridge was having another in a long string of good days at work. With few exceptions, each of her two hundred twenty days spent working at Consolidated Chemicals had been good ones, and this one had been going particularly well until she'd been exposed to that dirty scrawl on the chart. She was all by herself in the office, handling the phone calls, typing the memos, bringing the data books up to date, and doing it all very well. She was confident that not many girls her age could be trusted with all the responsibilities she so capably handled, and also more modestly aware that this was largely because she'd been in training for her job ever since she could remember. Consolidated was her life, and she loved it. She had a long way to go before she would realize her ultimate ambition there, but she'd come a long way a1ready.

She had a desk of her own with a nameplate on it, the nicest boss in the whole big organization, the respect of her fellow employees, and from her window a grand view of the big, complex plant that turned out so many chemicals essential for industry. She had other fringe benefits even more rewarding, as well as the few irritants that went along, with any good thing. Well, there was only one real irritant, and it went by the name of Perry Coleman, and the less she thought about having to face him at the end of the day, the better that day would be.

Laura's training for her job had begun at the knees of her parents, both former employees of Consolidated, and both sadly gone and badly missed now. Her parents had had a company romance. Twenty years before, her mother, had been a librarian at the Sulfur City plant, and her father a young, ambitious mechanical engineer transferred in from the main plant in Michigan. His transfer had been a part of his training program. He was to spend a year at each of various key plants of Consolidated and in ten years or less, move into the upper echelons of Engineering Management. But love had blossomed there in the industrial environment, and before two months of his first year in training had passed, he was married to her mother. This was strictly against company policy at the time, and of course Consolidated had found out about it. Her father had been dropped from the engineering training program, but the benevolent company had bent the rules and allowed both her mother and her father to stay on at the Sulfur City plant.

Her mother bad worked her way up to the position of Chief Librarian, and her father had contented himself with reaching the top in plant engineering there, though that was a far cry from the goals he'd set for himself as an ambitious young college graduate. Through the years, work had been the favorite topic of discussion around the house, and even as a schoolgirl, Laura had known the various departments and problems at the Sulfur City plant. With this background, she'd had plans to work for a year or two at Consolidated, saving her money, and then attend a good engineering school with the help of the company's Educational Assistance program. The sweetest of her fringe benefits had come along then to try to alter those plans, and his name was Chuck Davids.

Working in the same engineering training program as her father, the young chemical engineer had been transferred in to the very office in which Laura worked, and they'd fallen in love. Now he was after her to quit her job and marry him, to share in his career as he moved from plant to plant, up the corporate ladder. His offer was tempting. She loved him and she wanted to share in his life, his ambitions, perhaps even at the expense of her own ambitions. He wanted her answer, and she'd promised it at the end of another ten days-days in which the two young people would largely be apart, first with Chuck at an engineering convention with their boss, Mr. Markham, then with Laura on her week's vacation, thinking things out. On that Wednesday, Laura was not certain what her decision would be. There'd be time to think of it during the next week, and now was the time for work, for she had a lot to do before she could properly leave the Plant Engineering office unattended.

She worked steadily. The only one who came into the office that day was Stanley Phipps, the mail boy, and he came in several times. Both Chuck and Mr. Markham took great joy in making her blush by saying that young Stanley was in love with her. She secretly admitted to herself that the diminutive, bashful boy did have a crush on her. At nineteen, he was a year older than Laura, but be looked ten years younger. He was perpetually grinning and stammering and trying to talk to her about the inane things that interested him, but at least he didn't try to ogle her like some of the men in the plant did-like Perry Coleman, for instance.