Harried assistant manager Lloyd Murphy is asked by his boss to take his weekend early, so he can get needed rest. He ends up transformed, "perhaps a demigod in the making," as he describes his new nature.
Lloyd Murphy is an assistant manager in a manufacturing firm, and he is a man in the wrong world.Everybody makes demands on him, and what they demand is never anything he’d like.That’s how it always has been with him, ever since his childhood.He hates this, but he feels helpless to do anything about it.Then, late one Friday, his boss calls Murphy into his office to tell him something important. Little does Murphy know that his world is about to change, opening a whole different world to him, a fantasy about to come true.
It begins as he spends a weekend alone in his rented flat.The following Monday, he doesn’t return to his job.Just what has he become, and why is he willing to lose his humanity?
Excerpt
Evans looked pointedly at him. “Lloyd, I know better; it’s all over your face. It’s close to the end of the day, and it’s Friday, so you don’t have to worry about your people, and we need this talk. You’ve never been an enthusiastic worker, but you’ve always had a real talent for handling people, so you quickly got promoted to Assistant Manager. My Assistant Manager. I just want you to know that I appreciate what you do for me, and, besides that, I like you.
“The problem is, you’ve been looking haggard lately. Are you having problems at home?”
“I live alone. You know that.”
“Money problems?”
“No.”
“Family problems?”
“Nothing that’s new. What are you getting at?”
“Lloyd, I’m worried about you. You’re not even thirty, and you look like fifty. I don’t want you to have some sort of breakdown.”
Murphy didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. Evans waited awhile, then said, “I want you to leave work early today, like in five minutes. Take the weekend easy, and just try to do nothing. Make it a sort of mini-vacation.
"I don’t want you to take home a single scrap of work. And don’t work on anything you didn’t take home, either. Just take it easy and loaf. If your family pesters you, pull your phone’s plug or have an answering machine say you’re out of town. Whatever it takes. That’s an order. When you come in on Monday, I don’t want you to be looking like you’ve been on a chain gang.”
The second book of the trilogy, The Chronicles of Henry Roach-Dairier, this volume will be enjoyed by astute 10 or 11 year olds as well as adults. A reader does not have to read To Build a Tunnel First to understand this volume.
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