It comes to him in a flash: he’s got no sense of humor at all!
Hmm. Is that right? Well, it certainly is true that he has about the same amount of wit as a refrigerator. His carbrain would be quicker with repartee, if it only had a speaker. Yes, it’s true. Jim has never really thought of it this way before, but many’s the time when he’s recalled a funny conversation, Abe and Sandy and Tash jamming on one comic riff or another, and a great line to throw into the hilarious sequence will come to him!—only a week or so too late. A bit slow in that department, you could say.
Of course his friends are perfectly aware of this; now Jim sees it clearly. They’ll get on a jag and everyone’ll be laughing hard and Sandy will get that gleam in his eye and demand swiftly of Jim, “What do you say about that, Jimbo?” and Jim will conquer his giggling and puff and wheeze and blow out all his mental circuits trying to think of just one of the kind of witticisms that are flying out of his friends as natural as thoughts, and finally he’ll say something like, “Well … yeah!” and his three friends will collapse, howling like banshees. Leaving Jim grinning foolishly, only dimly aware that in a gang of wits a dorker can be more valuable than another quick tongue.
What joy it would be to convulse the crowd with an ad-libbed one-liner, tossed into a long sequence of them! But it’s not something Jim, Mr. Slow, has ever managed. He’s just a convulsee, a one-man audience, the great laugher; when they get Jim going they can drive him right to the floor with laughing, he gasps and chuckles and screams and beats the floor, stomach muscles cramping, Sandy and Tash and Abe standing over him giggling, extemporizing one comic theme or another, Sandy saying “Should we kill him right now? Should we asphyxiate him right here on the spot?”
Sigh. It’s been a long night. Partying can be damned hard work. And rather disturbing as well.
Mr. Dull walks in the door of his little ap just before dawn. In the gray light it looks messy, stupid. Books in the city built tomorrow. Sigh. Go to sleep.
28
But he hasn’t been sleeping for long when he wakes to the sound of Virginia Novello coming in the door.
“What are you doing, still sleeping?”
“Yeah.” Didn’t she give her key to his place back to him last week? Throw it at him, in fact?
“Christ, this place is a mess. You are so lazy.” She sits on the bed hard, rolls him over.
“Hi,” he says fuzzily.
Kiss on the forehead. “Hello, lover.”
And suddenly he is in the world of sex. Virginia gets up, turns on his bedroom video, undresses, climbs into the rumpled bed with him. He watches the screens goggle-eyed.
“Want me to cook you some breakfast?” she says when they’re done.
“Sure.”
Jim rolls over and begins to wonder what Virginia is doing there. Officially they broke up their alliance at the famous softball game, but since then they have gotten together pretty frequently, for no real reason that Jim can see. Except for some easy sex, and perhaps a stimulating fight or two.… He gets up, feeling uneasy, and goes to the bathroom.
From the shower he can just hear her voice, raised to carry over the sound of the freeway. “You really should try to keep your kitchen cleaner. What a mess!” After a bit: “So where were you last night?”
“San Diego.”
“I know. But I don’t know why you didn’t ask me along.”
“Um,” Jim says, drying off. “Couldn’t find you at Sandy’s, you know—”
“Bullshit, I was there the whole time!” She appears in the bathroom doorway, potholder on one hand clenched like a boxing glove. Jim pulls up his shorts more quickly than usual.
“The truth is,” she says sadly, “you’d rather be away from me than with me.”
Sigh. “Come on, Virginia, don’t be ridiculous please? I just woke up.”
“Lazy bastard.”
Sigh. From endearment, to complaint, to recrimination: it’s a familiar pattern with Virginia. “Give me a break?”
“Why should I, after you skipped off my track last night?”
“I just went with the guys to another party. You and I didn’t have anything on last night.”
“Well whose fault was that?”
“Not mine.”
“Oh yeah? You wanted to go off with your friends that you’re so queer for. Sandy, Tashi, Abe, you’d rather do anything with them than something with me.”
“Ah come on.”
“Come on where? Admit it, you and those guys—”
“We’re friends, Virginia. Can you understand that? Friendship?”
“Friends. Your friends are all heroes to you.”
“Don’t be silly.” Actually that may be true, sure; Jim’s best friends are heroes to him, each in his different way. “Besides, what’s wrong with liking your friends?”
“It’s more than that with you, Jim, you’re weird about it. You idolize them and try to model your life on theirs, and you aren’t up to it. I mean none of you even have jobs.”
Jim has gotten used to Virginia’s logic, and now he just follows wherever it leads. “Abe has a job. We all have jobs.”
“Oh, grow up! Will you grow up? Ever?”
“I don’t know—”
“You don’t know!”
“I don’t know what you mean, I was going to say. Let me finish what I’m saying, all right?”
“Are you finished?”
“Yeah, I’m finished.”
Jim stalks past her to the kitchen, disgusted by the stupidity of their debate. Scrambled eggs have gone black in the pan. “Shit.”
“Now look what you made me do,” Virginia cries, rushing past him and putting the pan under the faucet.
“Me? Get serious!”
“I am serious, Jim McPherson. You don’t have a real job and you don’t have a real future. Your little jobs are just part-time excuses for work. You laze around all day writing stupid poems, while I work and make the money we use to go out, when you can be dragged away from your friends to go!”
Part of Jim is thinking, Fine, if that’s what you think then leave, quit bothering me. This alliance is over anyway! Another part is remembering the good times they’ve had, with their friends, out together, talking, in bed. And that part hurts.
Jim shakes his head. “Let me make some breakfast,” he says. Why does she even bother, he thinks, if she feels this way about him? Why did she come by? Why doesn’t she make it easy for him and leave for good? He doesn’t have the courage to tell her to leave him alone; she would crucify him with how cruel he was being to her. Besides, is he sure that’s what he wants? She’s smart, beautiful, rich—everything he desires in an ally, in theory. When she sloshes across the jacuzzi with everyone watching her, to sit on his lap with that perfect rounded bottom, he thinks that it’s worth all the fights, right? That’s right. Jim likes that. He wants that.
Ach. Just another tricky day with Virginia Novello. How long have they been doing this? One month, two? Three? And it’s been like this from the start. It’s gotten so he can cook and eat and carry on a fight and at the same time be considering what else he should read before tackling his next poem. Sure, why not? Everyone can run parallel programs these days.
But this time he really loses his temper. They aren’t allies anymore, they’re ex-allies, there’s no reason he has to stand for this kind of thing! He tells her that in a near shout and then storms out the front door.
Oops. He’s on his street; he’s just stormed out of his own ap. Bit of a mistake. He had thought, momentarily, that he was at Virginia’s. Now he’s in kind of an embarrassing position, isn’t he. What to do?
He drives around the block, returns, looks in his window surreptitiously. Yes, she’s gone. Whew. Got to remember where he is a little more securely.
Well, enough of that. The day can begin.
But when he sits down to write, a knot in his stomach forms that won’t go away: he keeps reimagining the argument in versions that leave Virginia repe
ntant, then naked in bed; or else crushed by his bitter dismissal, and gone for good. And yet those and all the other self-justifying scenarios leave him feeling as sick as the reality has. He doesn’t write a single word, all day; and everything he tries to read is dreadfully boring.
He turns on the video and replays the tape of this morning’s session in bed. Watches it morosely, getting aroused and disgusted in equal measure.
He’s twenty-seven years old. He hasn’t learned anything yet.
29
Stewart Lemon wakes early and pads out to his sunlit kitchen. His house is on Chillon Way in the Top of the World complex in Laguna Beach, and from the kitchen windows there’s a fine view out to sea. Lemon goes to the breadbox on top of the orange ceramic countertop, and judges that the sourdough bread there is stale enough to make good French toast. He puts a pan on the stove and whips up the egg and milk. A little more cinnamon than usual, today. Slice the bread, soak it, throw it in the pan. Sweet cinnamon smell as it sizzles away. Shafts of sunlight cutting in the windows, one of them lighting the Kandinsky in the hall. Lemon likes the Kandinsky better than their little Picasso, and has hung it where he can see it often. It soothes the spirit. A beautiful morning.
Still, Stewart Lemon is not at peace. Things are not going well at LSR these days, and Donald Hereford, the company’s president and an ever-growing power at Argo/Blessman, is really putting the heat on. Ball Lightning is in trouble and about to go into a showdown with Boeing, one of the giants. That’s enough cause for worry right there, but in addition to that Hereford is demanding a yearly growth rate of several percent, and the only chance that that will happen this year lies with the Stormbee proposal, another project in trouble. If both of these were to go down, LSR would not only not show any growth, it would without a doubt be a loss for Argo/Blessman for the year. And probably longer. And Hereford, and the people above him, aren’t the kind that will stand for that very long. They might sell LSR, they might send in a new team to take it over and turn it around; either way, Lemon would be in big trouble. A whole career … and at a time when it seems everyone else in the defense industry is prospering! It’s maddening.
And worrying, to the point that Lemon barely tastes his French toast. He leaves the dishes for Elsa—give her at least that to do—goes in and dresses. “I’m off,” he says brusquely to the sleeping form, still in her bed. Elsa just mutters something from a dream, rolls over. She hasn’t spoken to him for … Lemon’s mouth tightens. He leaves the house and tries to forget about it.
Into the Mercedes. A Vivaldi oboe concerto for the ride along the coast to work. In his mind are mixed images of Elsa in bed, the Ball Lightning proposal, Hereford watching him over the video from his desk in the World Trade Center. Dan Houston’s hangdog look, the Ball Lightning figures. Ach—the pressures on the executives are always the most extreme; but it’s what he’s trained for, what he’s always wanted.…
First meeting of the day is with Dennis McPherson, to go over the numbers for the Stormbee proposal. The proposals are due in just over a week, and McPherson is still dawdling; it’s time to get serious. Time to decide the amount for the bid, the money total, the number of dollars. This is probably the crux of the whole process, the moment when they will either win or lose.
“All right, Mac,” Lemon begins impatiently. Might as well settle immediately into their usual dialectic, Lemon sarcastic and oppressive, McPherson stiff and steaming. “I’ve looked over the numbers you’ve sent up, and my judgment is that the final total is considerably too high. The Air Force just doesn’t want to pay this much for unmanned systems, they still have a strong prejudice against planes without pilots and they’re only going for this stuff because the technology makes it inevitable. But we’ve got to play to that, or we’re going to be left out.”
McPherson shrugs. “We’ve kept everything down as much as we could.”
Lemon stares at him. “All right. Pull your chair over to the desk here, and let’s go into it line by line.”
Micromanagement. Lemon grits his teeth.
McPherson’s people have got all the figures printed out in a sheaf of graph-filled sheets. First comes the full-scale engineering development costs. Prime mission equipment, $189 million. Training, less than a million, as always. Flight test support equipment, $10 million. System test and evaluation, $25 million. System project management, $63 million. Data, $18 million. Total, $305 million.
Lemon presses McPherson on the prime mission equipment figures, running through the subtotals and pointing items out. “Why should it take that much? I’ve done a rough estimate using prices of the components we’re buying from other companies, and it shouldn’t be more than one thirty.”
McPherson points to the breakdown sheet, which has all the components priced exactly. “The CO-two laser is being modified to match the specs in the RFP. We can’t buy that off the shelf. Then the pods have to be assembled, which is accounted for in this category. The robotics for that are going to be expensive.”
“I know, I know. But do we have to use Zenith chips, for example? Texas Instruments are a quarter the cost, and there’s nine million right there.”
“We need Zenith chips because there’s a complete reliance on them for the whole system to work. As a criticality they get top priority.”
Lemon shakes his head. Texas Instruments chips are just as good, in his estimation, but there’s no denying the industry thinks otherwise. “Let’s go on and come back to this.”
They go on to production readiness. Here the figures are less firm, as it is a step beyond the FSED. Still, McPherson’s team has worked up the totals. Each category—the same group of them as for the FSED—has a few pages of explanations. Total, $154 million. They go over it line by line, Lemon objecting to equipment decisions, estimates of LSR’s labor costs, everything he can think of. McPherson stubbornly defends every single estimate, and Lemon gets irritated. The figures can’t possibly be that firm. McPherson just doesn’t think about money; it isn’t a factor for him.
An hour later they move on to the estimate sheet for production lot one, which would consist of eighty-eight units. Prime mission equipment, $251 million, system test and evaluation $2 million (it had better be working by then!), system project management, $30 million, data, $30 million. Total, $313 million. Lemon is fierce in his denunciation of the management and data costs. Here he knows more than McPherson, he’s got the authority to bend these figures down. McPherson shrugs.
So, the complete bid comes to $772 million dollars. “You’ve got to get that down!” Lemon orders. “I don’t have exact figures on the bids of McDonnell/Douglas or Parnell, but the feelers are out and it’s looking like the low seven hundreds will be common.”
McPherson just shakes his head. “We’ve cut it to the bone. You’ve just seen that.” He looks tired; it’s been a long onslaught. “If we try to slash numbers, the Air Force will just go over the proposal and bump them back up in their MPCs.” Members of the SSEB will do Most Probable Cost estimates on all the bids, and depending on whether they’re feeling friendly or not, the results can be devastating. “If they bump them up far enough we’ll look like monkeys.”
Lemon stands, irritated anew. “You don’t have to teach me my job, Mac.”
“I’m not.” He must be tired, to speak out like this! “You asked me how much the system will cost. I’ve told you. I’m not telling you how much our bid should be. That’s your decision. You can order us to make the system cheaper by downgrading the product, or you can keep the system the same and adjust the bid anyway. That’s your decision. But you can’t get me to tell you this system as designed will cost less than it does, because I won’t do it. My job is to tell you how much this system costs. I’ve done that. You can take it from there.”
So he has finally gotten McPherson to speak up! But it doesn’t make him any less angry, as he always imagined it would. In fact, he’s stung to the point that he forgets his persona. “Take that stuff and leave,” he sa
ys violently, and abruptly he goes to the window so that McPherson won’t see his face. Something—something in what McPherson has just said, perhaps—has given Lemon a fright, somehow, and it’s made him unaccountably furious. “Get out of here!”
McPherson leaves. Lemon heaves a sigh of relief, sits down and regains control of himself. That arrogant son of a bitch has put him on the spot again. The bid is too high, the system over-designed. But he can’t change that without endangering the bid from the technical point of view. You’ve got to balance quality and cost, but how to do that with a man like McPherson designing the thing? The man is crazy!
When he’s completely calm again he calls Hereford on the video link.
Hereford comes onscreen; he’s at his desk, before the window. Behind him is a fine view of New York harbor. They express pleasure at each other’s views, the usual opening between them.
Lemon hesitates, clears his throat nervously. He’s more than a little in awe of Donald Hereford, and he can’t help it. Lemon has driven himself all his life, and he’s risen at LSR very quickly indeed—about as fast as one can, he thinks. And yet Hereford is about his age, perhaps even a year or two younger, and there he is high in the complex power structure of Argo/Blessman, one of the biggest corporations in the world, sixtieth in the Fortune 500 the year before.… Lemon can’t really imagine how the man did it. Especially since he is by no means a monomaniac; on the contrary, he is very urbane, very cultured; he has Manhattan’s cultural world, perhaps the richest anywhere, at his fingertips, as he proves every time Lemon comes for a visit. Small galleries, the Met, theater on Broadway and off, the Philharmonic, dance … it’s admirable. In fact, Lemon finds it incredibly impressive.
So he gives the facts to Hereford in as casual and efficient a tone as he can muster. Hereford pulls at his lean jaw, scratches his silver hair, straightens a five-hundred-dollar tie. His face remains impassive. “This man McPherson is good, you say?”
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