The Gold Coast

71

The next day, after a productive morning and a busy lunch conferring with Dan Houston, Dennis gets a call from Lemon’s secretary Ramona, instructing him to come up for a conference with the boss. McPherson needs to talk to him anyway, so he ignores his usual irritation at the peremptory summons and goes on up.

Lemon is standing in front of his window as usual, looking out at the sea. He seems on edge, ill at ease—at least to a certain minute extent. It’s hard to tell, but McPherson has had to become an expert in reading the tiny signals that mark his boss’s mercurial mood swings, and now, as he sits down on the hot seat and watches Lemon pacing, he senses something unusual, a tension beyond the usual manic energy.

At first he speaks only of the Ball Lightning program. He really grills McPherson about it, a cross-examination as intense as any Lemon has ever subjected him to, something reminiscent of an SSEB questioning back in Dayton. Lemon hasn’t discussed technical matters in such detail as this in years; he’s really done his homework.

But why? McPherson can’t figure it out.

“What it comes down to,” Lemon says heavily when he is done, “is that you’ve got a great idea for a phased array attack, which takes us far into the post–boost phase. But we can’t meet the specs that we supposedly proved we could meet, in the initial proposal that won us the program.”

“That’s right,” McPherson says. “It isn’t physically possible.”

“Not for you, you mean.”

McPherson shrugs. He’s so tired of Lemon he doesn’t even care about hiding it anymore. “Not for me, right. I can’t change the laws of physics. Maybe you can. But if you fake tests to try to bend the laws of physics, you always get caught at this point, don’t you.”

Lemon’s eyes are just barely narrowed, a dangerous sign. “You’re saying Houston faked the tests on the proposal?”

“We’ve just gone over all the data, right? We’ve known this ever since you put me on the program. What’s the point of all this? Someone either concocted a good-looking test, with real but irrelevant results—and if that’s faking the Air Force has been doing it for years—or else someone made a stupid mistake, and assumed the test proved the system would work in the real world, when it didn’t.”

Lemon nods slowly, as if satisfied with something. For a long time he stands staring out the window.

McPherson watches him; he’s lost the drift of the meeting, he still doesn’t know what Lemon wanted him here for. Confirmation that the Ball Lightning program is really and truly sunk? It isn’t, if you stretch the definition of the boost phase, give the defense more time; but Lemon doesn’t seem interested in that, he seems to think that the Air Force will reject the system if any spec is unfulfilled. And he may be right about that, but they have to try.

McPherson brings up the matter of Goldman’s phone call and the Stormbee appeal.

Lemon nods. “I got your memo yesterday.”

“We only need to give them an okay to initiate the appeal, and we’re in business. It looks really promising, from Goldman’s account.”

Lemon turns his head to look at him. Face blank. No expression at all. Sunlight makes his left eye look like crystal.

Slowly he shakes his head. “We’ve gotten other instructions from Hereford. No appeal.”

“What?”

“No appeal.”

Even through his shock, McPherson can see that Lemon is not rubbing this one in in his usual style, taunting McPherson with it. In fact, he looks uncomfortable, depressed. But all this is just his continuous Lemon-watch, going on automatically under the shock of the news.

McPherson stands. “Just what the hell is going on? We’ve worked on this for a year now, and put some twenty million dollars into it, and we’re right on the edge of winning the contract!”

Lemon puts a hand up. “I know,” he says wearily. “Sit down, Mac.”

When McPherson remains standing, Lemon sits himself, on the edge of his desk.

“It’s a victory we can’t afford to win.”

“What?”

“That’s Hereford’s decision. And I suppose he’s right, though I don’t like it. Do you know what a Pyrrhic victory is, Mac?”

“Yes.”

Lemon sighs heavily. “Sometimes it seems like all the victories are Pyrrhic, these days.”

He gathers himself, looks at McPherson sharply. “It’s like this. If we win this one—force the Air Force to take back their award, and win the contract ourselves—then we’ve got the Stormbee system, sure. But we’ve also embarrassed the Air Force in front of the whole industry, the whole country. And if we do that, then Stormbee is the last program we can ever expect to get from the Air Force again. Because they’ll remember. They’ll do their best to bankrupt us. Already they’ve got our balls in a vise with this Ball Lightning program going bad on us. That’s bad enough, but beyond that—no more black programs, no more superblack programs, no more early warnings on RFPs, no more awards in close bidding competitions, consistent screwings on the MPCs—my God, they can do it to us! It’s a buyer’s market! There’s only one buyer for space defense systems, and that’s the United States Air Force. They’ve got the power.”

Lemon’s face twists bitterly as he acknowledges this. “I hate it, but that’s the case. We’ve got to be agreeable, and stand up for our rights when we have to, but without really beating them, see. So Hereford is right, even though I hate to say it. We can’t afford to win this one. So we’re giving up. The law firm will be called off.”

McPherson can barely think. But he remembers something: “What about the investigation in Congress?”

“That’s their doing. We won’t cooperate any further. It’s belly-up time—bare the throat to the top dog, goddamn it.” Lemon gets up, goes to the window. “I’m sorry, Mac. Go home, why don’t you. Take the rest of the day off.”

McPherson finds he is already standing. When did that happen? He’s at the door when Lemon says, perhaps to himself, “That’s the way the system works.”

And then he’s out in the hall. In the elevator. In his mouth is a coppery taste, as if he had thrown up, though he feels no nausea. The body’s reaction to defeat is a bitterness at the back of the throat. The idea of being “bitter” is another concept taken directly from sensory experience. He knows he is bitter because his throat gags on a coppery taste roiling at the back of his mouth. He’s in his office. The whole operation, so neat, so efficient, so real looking, is all a sham, a fake. The work done in this office might as well be replaced by the scripts of a video screenplay; it would all come to the same in the end. Engineering, he thinks, isn’t real at all. Only the power struggles of certain people in Washington are real, and those battles are based on whims, personal ambitions, personal jealousies. And those battles make the rest of the world unreal. The walls around him might as well be cardboard (thwack! thwack!), the computers empty plastic shells—all parts of a video set, a backdrop to the great battles of the stars in the foreground. He’s an extra in those battles, his little scene has been filmed—then the script rewritten, the scene tossed out. His work, tossed out.

He goes home.