The Gold Coast

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  For the sake of the reporters and cameras, they first have to endure a glowing description of the Stormbee system and its tremendous importance for American security. Also its great size and monetary worth, of course. Tension among the competitors present reduces them all to a state of sullen, tight attentiveness. Nearly seventy minds are thinking, Get to it, you bastard, get to it. But it’s part of the ritual, one of the reminders of who is boss in this game.…

  For a moment McPherson is distracted by these thoughts, and then he hears: “We’re pleased to announce that the contract for the Stormbee system has been awarded to Parnell Aviation Incorporated. Their winning bid totaled six hundred ninety-nine million dollars. Details of the decision process are available in the document that will now be distributed.”

  McPherson’s stomach has closed down to a singularity. Lemon is red-faced with anger, and something in his expression ignites fury in McPherson more than the announcement itself did. He snatches one of the booklets being passed around, reads the basic information page feverishly. When he finishes he is so surprised that he stops and goes back to read it more slowly, blinking in disbelief.

  Apparently they’re using a YAG laser system, in a two-pod configuration. And $669 million! It’s impossible! It’s instantly clear that Parnell has made a lower bid than they can possibly stick to. And the Air Force has let the fraud pass. Has, in fact, colluded in it. The room is filling with incredulous or angry voices, enough to overwhelm the happy chatter of the Parnell team, as more and more people get the gist of the booklet. Reporters are scurrying around, surrounding the Parnell group, faces bright under the video lights—disembodied pink faces, smiles, eyes—

  Something snaps in McPherson. He stands, speech spills out of him. “By God, they’ve rigged it! We’ve got the best proposal in there, and they’ve given it to one that’s an obvious lie!”

  Lemon and the rest of the Laguna Hills folks are staring at him in amazement. They’ve never in their lives heard such an outburst from Dennis McPherson, and they’re really taken aback. Art Wong’s mouth hangs open.

  Donald Hereford, silver-haired and calm, just looks at McPherson impassively. “You think their bid is unrealistically low?”

  “It’s impossibly low! I can’t imagine the MPC evaluations letting this crap pass! And the proposal itself—look how they’ve ignored the specs in the RFP—two pods, YAG laser, eleven point eight KVA, why the planes won’t have the power to run these rigs!” Heart racing, face flushed hot, McPherson slams the booklet down on the back of a chair. “We’ve been screwed!”

  Hereford nods once, no expression on his face at all. “You’re certain our proposal is superior to this?”

  “Yes,” McPherson grates out. “We had a better proposal.”

  Hereford’s mouth tightens. After a moment he says, “If we let them do it this time, they’ll feel free to do it again. The whole bid process will unhinge.”

  He looks at Lemon. “We’ll file a protest.”

  The possibility hadn’t even occurred to McPherson. His eyes fix on Hereford. A protest!…

  Lemon starts to say something: “But—”

  Hereford cuts him off with a hand motion, a quick chop. Perhaps he’s angry too? Impossible to tell. “Contact our law firm here in Washington, and start giving them all the particulars. We need to hurry. If there are irregularities in their compliance with the RFP, then we may be able to get a court injunction to halt the award immediately.”

  Court injunction.

  McPherson’s stomach begins to return to him, a little at a time. They have recourse to some legal action, apparently. It’s a new area for him, he doesn’t know much about it.

  Lemon is swallowing, nodding. “Okay. We’ll do it.” He looks confused.

  McPherson forces down a few deep breaths, thinking court injunction, court injunction. Meanwhile, across the room, the Parnell people are still in paroxysms of joy, the dishonest bastards. They know better than anyone else that they can’t possibly build the Stormbee system for only $699 million. It’s just a ploy to get the bid; later they can get into the matter of some unfortunate “cost overruns.” It can only be a deliberate plan on their part, a deliberate lie. That’s the competition, the people he has to put his own work up against: cheaters and liars. With the Air Force going along with them all the way, completely a part of it, of the cheating and lying. In control of it, in fact. Feeling physically ill, McPherson sits down heavily and stares through the booklet, seeing nothing at all.

  35

  Sandy Chapman is in the middle of an ordinary business day, snorting Polymorpheus and listening to The Underachievers with his friend and client John Sturmond, watching the hang-gliding championships at Victoria Falls on John’s wall video and talking about the commercial possibilities of a small-scale aural hallucinogen. Suddenly John’s ally Vikki Gale bursts in, all upset. “We’ve been ripped off!”

  Turns out that she and John fronted nearly a liter of the Buzz to a retailer of theirs named Adam, who has now disappeared from the face of OC. No chance of finding him, or collecting the bill, which means they are out some ten thousand dollars. Gone like a dollar bill dropped in the street, and with no lost and found. And no police to call. It’s gone. The price you pay for bad character judgment.

  Vikki is collapsed on the couch crying, John is up striding around, shouting, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! I knew I shouldn’t have trusted that guy!”

  Heavy gloom ensues. Sandy sighs, roots around in his Adidas bag and pulls out a large eyedropper of California Mello. “Here,” he says. “There’s only one solution to a situation like this, and that’s to get as stoned as you can.”

  So they start lidding. “Think of it as an event,” Sandy drones. “An experience. I mean, how often does it happen? It’s great, in a way. Teaches you some about the realms of experience and emotion.”

  “For sure,” Vikki says.

  “I’m with you there,” says John.

  “Besides, I fronted you, and okayed the front to this thief Adam, so I’ll halve the loss with you. We’ll just have to sell more and make it back.”

  “For sure.”

  “That’s really tubular of you, man. Absolutely untold.”

  They lid some Funny Bone. Now the whole thing strikes them funny, but they’re too mellow to laugh.

  “It’s a high-risk industry.” Giggles.

  “Investment portfolio just walked off on us.” Chuckles.

  “We’ve been completely fucked.”

  But beneath all that, under the attempt to take the bummer in style, Sandy is thinking furiously. He had expected to be paid several thousand by John and Vikki, which apparently they thought they were going to get from the absent Adam. So much for that.

  But he needs that several thousand to buy the supplies for the next shipment from Charles, who works C.O.D. only. Without the several thousand, he is into a serious cash-flow problem, especially given the giant bills from the medical center in Miami. He starts doing some serious accounting in his head, where all the books are anyway, at the same time holding down his part of the conversation with John and Vikki.

  Somewhere in that conversation John says something that Sandy finds particularly interesting, and after he’s done with his calculations—which remain disheartening—he tries to track back to it.

  “What did you say a second ago?”

  “Huh?” John says. “What?”

  “I say, say what? What did you say? Say it again?”

  “Oh man, you’re asking a lot! What were we talking about?”

  “Um, dangerous work, something about chancy occupations like ours, and you said something about aerospace plants?”

  “Oh yeah! That’s right. This guy I know, Larry, he’s working for a friend in San Diego who does industrial espionage. He slips into offices as a repairman or janitor and rips off paperwork and disks. Now that’s already chancy enough, but he tells me that it’s escalated into sabotage recently.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve rea
d about some of that I guess,” Sandy says. This is connecting up with something he heard … when was that? “Do you know the friend?”

  “Larry didn’t mention the name. But they’re hiring out to people that want the work done, apparently, and Larry is freaked. Even though the pay is good he’s not too comfortable with the way things are trending.”

  “He’s doing the actual sabotage himself?”

  “Some of it. And then he’s got people working for him too. Like your friend Bastanchury.”

  “Arthur’s one?”

  Dispassionately Sandy considers it. Up until this point he hadn’t placed the earlier conversation he remembers having on this topic, but now with the mention of Arthur the party on Torrey Pines Cliffs comes back to him, the opium conference with Bob Tompkins. What was it Bob had been saying? Whew. There is this problem with drug taking at Sandy’s level: functioning in the present is possible, just barely, with the most intense concentration; but the past … the past tends to disappear. A lot of tracks branch back up into the hippocampus there, and he doesn’t seem to have much of a program for navigating them.

  Well, he couldn’t give a word-for-word transcript, but finally he does recall the gist of it. Something about Raymond taking revenge against the military, which is a funny idea on the face of it, although it’s developing disturbing aspects. Instinctively he is curious. He wants to know what is going on. Partly this is because it is going on in his territory, the black economy of OC, and it’s important for him to know as much as he can about the territory. Then partly it’s because he has the feeling that the whole affair might have something to do with his friends, through Arthur. Jim hangs out with Arthur a lot these days, and probably he doesn’t know what Arthur’s gotten himself into.…

  For the moment, however, he’s distracted by the memory of Raymond and Bob Tompkins. That was the night that Bob’s friend Manfred made the proposal concerning the aphrodisiac coming in from Hawaii, that’s right. A little smuggling for twenty thousand and a lot of aphrodisiac, which no doubt there would be a good demand for. Of course it goes against Sandy’s usual operating principle, but in a situation like this one … necessity makes its own principles. Now when was that conference? Just a week or so ago, wasn’t it? So there might still be time.…

  Vikki starts crying again. She was the one who first met this disappearing Adam, and introduced him to John and Sandy, and so she feels responsible. “Let’s lid some more,” John suggests morosely.

  Without a word, Sandy shifts back into support mode, pulls another eyedropper from his bag. Impassively he watches his friends blink Mello into their tears. We use drugs as a weapon, he thinks suddenly; a weapon to kill pain, to kill boredom. The thought shocks him a little, and he forgets it.

  After cheering them up again he makes his way out. He types in the program for his next appointment, and sits in the driver’s seat watching the cars tracking around him. Ten thousand dollars. John and Vikki won’t be able to repay him for months and months, if ever, so essentially the loss is entirely his. Ach. Thieves, frauds, con men, do they ever think how their victims feel? He redoes the accounting, confirms the results; he is in a bad cash crunch.

  Bleakly he picks up the car’s phone, calls Bob Tompkins. “Bob? Sandy here … I’m calling about your friend Manfred…”

  So he agrees to do it. Bob says he has a few days before the transfer is to take place. The boat is all ready, in a slip in Newport harbor. Fine.

  Once or twice during the next couple days Sandy remembers to ask casually about the industrial sabotage thing. It turns out that there are a whole lot of rumors about sabotage attacks on defense contractors—that they’re being made by members of the black economy’s extended family. But the rumors tend to contradict each other. No one but John Sturmond has heard Arthur’s name connected with it. Eveline Evans believes that the security chief at Parnell is behind it all, and that it’s all a manifestation of an intercorporations war. But Eveline is a big fan of intercorporate espionage videos, so Sandy is suspicious. This is a problem; filtering through rumors to real information is not an easy task. But Sandy keeps at it, when he remembers.

  One night around 2:00 A.M. he’s talking with Oscar Baldarramma, a friend and a big distributor of the lab equipment and tissue cultures Sandy needs for his work. They’re out on Sandy’s balcony, near the end of the nightly party. And Oscar says, “I hear that Aerojet is going to get hit tonight by those saboteurs.”

  “Is that right? How do you know?”

  “Ah, Raymond himself was up here last night, and he let it slip.”

  “Not very good security.”

  “No, but Raymond likes to show off.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Bob says. Is that all Raymond’s doing this stuff for, though?”

  “’Course not. He’s doing it for money, just like he does everything. There’s lots of people happy to pay to see some of these companies suffer a setback or two.”

  “Yeah.” And Sandy is thinking of Arthur, who left the party a couple hours before, after turning down an eyedropper of the Buzz, which surprised Sandy. And, for that matter, what happened to Jim?

  36

  Hurrying to his night class Jim stops at Burger King for a quick hamburgerfriesandcoke. He picks up the little free paper, the Register, and scans it briefly. Among the personals and real estate ads that constitute the bulk of the paper is a small OC news section; the headline reads, AEROJET NORTH LATEST VICTIM OF SABOTAGE. Yes, that’s Jim and Arthur’s work again. Jim reads the details with interest, because just as at Northrop and Parnell, they never got to see the effects of their action. Appears the ballistic missile defense software program has taken a serious blow, according to the Aerojet PR people. Fantastic, Jim thinks. He throws the paper in the trash on the way out, feeling that he is becoming a part of history. He is now an actor on the stage of the world.

  Thus it’s difficult to concentrate on the grammatical problems of his little class. Tonight one of his students hands in a gem: “We can take it for granite that the red gorillas will destroy Western civilization if they can.” Jim shudders to think of the student’s conception of the wars in Indonesia and Burma: Marines being hunted down by giant crimson apes … And take it for granite! It’s perfect, really; the way the student has heard the phrase even makes sense, as metaphor. Solid as granite. Jim likes it. But it’s one more sign among many others that his students don’t read. Thus writing is completely foreign to them, a different language. And it’s impossible to teach a language in one short semester. They’ve all got an impossible task. Why even try?

  Class over, Jim collects the papers on the table. Turns off the room’s light, walks into the hall. The door to the room across from his is open, which is unusual. Inside it a black-haired woman is lecturing vigorously.

  Wild black frizzed-out mane, flying behind her.

  She’s big: tall, bulky, big-boned.

  Army fatigue pants, frumpy wool sweater rucked up over the arms.

  Boots.

  Working at an easel: ah. An artist. That explains it, right?

  Wrong. Brake light. A poem is a list of

  Things To Do.

  Jim moves to one side of the doorway, to try and see what’s on the easel. Black lines. She sketches with careless boldness, sometimes looking at the class while she does it. “Try that,” she commands. Try drawing while looking the other way?

  While they try she comes to the door. “You lost?”

  “No! No, I just finished teaching across the hall here.” Though, still, I may be lost.… “I was just watching.”

  “Come in if you’re going to watch.”

  Jim hesitates, but she’s back at the easel, and just to disappear seems impolite. So he slips in and sits at a desk by the door. Why not?

  The students are at tables, desks, easels, drawing away. The teacher’s sketch is a landscape, in an Oriental style: mountain peaks piled on each other, disappearing in cloudbanks and reappearing. At the bottom, tiny pine trees,
a stream, a teahouse, a group of fat monks laughing at a bird. It’s like the illustrations in one of his books on Zen. He’s given up on Zen as hopelessly apolitical, but still, the art has something.… The teacher looks at the clock, says, “We’re going overtime. Time to stop.” While the students pack up, she says, “You practice the strokes until you can do them without thinking, so that it’s your head painting. That takes a long time. And all that time you’ve got to practice seeing too. It’s a matter of vision as much as technique. Using the white spaces, for instance. Once you’ve learned washes, it’s entirely a matter of vision.” She walks among them. “We sleepwalk our way through most of this life, and it won’t do. It won’t do. You’ve got to throw your mind into your eyes and see. Always be watching.” She takes her paintbox to a sink in the corner, where some others are washing brushes. “When it becomes a habit you begin to see the world as a great sequence of paintings, and the technique you know will help get some of them onto a surface. Tonight when you walk out the door, remember what I’ve said, and wake up! Okay, see you Thursday.”

  The students leave, talking in small groups. Jim sits and watches her. She tosses her equipment into a large briefcase, almost a suitcase. Snaps it shut. “Well?” she says to Jim.

  “I’m learning how to see.”

  She wrinkles her nose. “Watch out you don’t break something.”

  Jim hesitates. “Want to get something at the Coffee Hut?”