The Gold Coast

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 says 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?”

“Yes. But he’s a bit of a perfectionist, and in the art of presenting a proposal, balancing all the factors involved… well, he’s still an engineer at heart.”

Hereford nods briefly, his aquiline nose wrinkling. “I understand. In fact, I was wondering why you described him as good, when his previous two proposals lost.”

Yes, yes; Lemon is perfectly aware of Hereford’s powerfully retentive memory, thanks. He shrugs, scrambling mentally, says, “I meant from the engineering standpoint, of course.”

Hereford looks down at Manhattan. Finally he speaks. “Cut everything by five percent, and the management and data costs by ten. Any more than that and the MPCs are likely to be embarrassing. But that’ll bring it down into the range of the other bids, right?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Good. When’s the proposal due?”

“A week from today.”

“Talk to me then. I’ve got to go now.” And the video screen goes blank.