And waited. And waited.
The meeting droned on and on around her, the chairman asking for information that he could have had on his screen in an instant, but getting it from each of the presidents who in turn demanded it from each of their vice presidents. Every now and then, the chairman would state an idea and ask the presidents what they thought of it. As one, they turned to their vice presidents and asked for information, then reported it back to the chairman, who nodded wisely and stated that he was glad to see his opinion supported.
Finally, Alice began to grow impatient. She realized that the chairman was setting not only the tone of the meeting, but also the opinions that were going to come out of it. There was no real opportunity to say “no” or to disagree in the slightest way. She finally began to realize that she was embedded in a ritual, in which the only purpose was to make sure everybody else in the company was doing what the chairman wanted, in the way he wanted it done. It was disguised as discussion, but it was as much an issuing of decrees as any emperor or dictator had ever exercised.
Then, suddenly, it all became ominous.
It started easily enough, with the chairman, Mr. Lamprey, turning to the president of sales and asking, “How’s the competition, doing, Mr. Dunbright?”
“Sales down five percent for Amalgamated, sir, and . . . Mr. Wron, what was the figure for Interstellar?”
“Four percent, sir.”
“Yes, four percent.” Dunbright turned back to the Chairman. “Down nine percent total, sir. That boosts our share of the market to just a little over a third.”
“Not good, but better than last quarter.” Lamprey frowned. “How are their prices?”
“That’s the good part,” Dunbright said, with a gloating smile. “They’ve had to boost prices an average of eight percent.”
“So.” Lamprey nodded, with the ghost of a smile. “We can boost ours five, then.” He turned to the president of production. “You disagree, Mr. Kriegspiel?”
“Oh, not really, sir,” Kriegspiel said quickly. “But wasn’t our market gain due to our underselling the competition?”
“Of course—and we’ll still undersell them. While we’re on the subject, any idea why they had to boost prices?”
“Yes, sir. Cost increase, of course.” Kriegspiel turned to his vice president for cost control. “What did you say was the prime factor in that increase, Immer?”
“Quality control, sir,” Immer answered. “They had to add on personnel, and recycle much more than we did.”
Alice stiffened.
“Nice to know we’re ahead.” But Lamprey frowned.
“How were we able to spend less on quality?”
“We already had the systems in place, sir,” Kriegspiel said proudly, “and at a fraction of the personnel.” He turned to Immer. “What’s our total number in quality control?”
“We don’t have a separate department, sir,” Immer explained. “It’s part of procurement.”
“Procurement?” The chairman frowned. “How did that happen?” He didn’t sound happy about it.
Immer turned an expressionless face to Alice. “Ms. Biedermann, you’re the under-manager for that department. How did quality control come under procurement?”
“Our people caught the discrepancies between weight ordered and weight received, sir,” Alice managed. “We investigated and found that the shortage was due to defects in the materials we were receiving.” She didn’t mention that she was the one who had found out. “And since we were investigating, production routed quality control to us, to do our testing.”
“And you hired more people.” Suddenly, she had the chairman’s full attention—and felt as though she were a butterfly pinned to a board. But she spoke up bravely.
“Yes, sir—we added four checkers. Then, when raw materials improved, we put two of them onto output quality control.”
“I should have thought you would have let those two go.” The chairman’s gaze was a needle through her.
And, meeting his gaze, she suddenly knew that this man didn’t want high quality control, didn’t want to produce sound weapons for soldiers, didn’t want anything that would reduce his profits or slacken the flow of money into his coffers.
She stammered out a reply as best as she was able, and that awful gaze swung off her and back to Irnmer, who assured President Kriegspiel that they’d rectify the situation, and the president assured the chairman that, really, there was no cause to expend monies needlessly—and, finally, the long meeting dragged to a close. Alice pushed herself out of her chair and managed to find her way out into the corridor, numb with the certainty that the chairman, and therefore all the presidents, and the vicepresidents, and the managers, and the under-managers, and almost all of the workers wanted as many defective weapons as possible going into the hands of Aristan soldiers.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she told Papa that night. “I still can’t. There he was, the chairman of Industrial Munitions, making it very clear to everybody in that room that his company should deliberately produce as many duds as he can get away with!”
Papa scowled. “That makes a lot of sense, Alice. Too much sense.”
Alice hugged herself and shivered. “I could stand it when I thought it was just an accident, Pepe—just a side-effect of their wanting to cut costs and not caring about whether or not the weapons were any good. But to do it deliberately!”
“Of course, he couldn’t come right out and say it,” Pepe mused.
“Of course not! But everybody in that room knew it, oh yes! And knew that their careers depended on doing what he said, too!”
“Sure. The only real purpose of a meeting like that is to make sure everybody knows what he wants, Alice—to make sure they all think the same way.”
“But what about ethics!” she cried.
“Ethics are whatever the chairman says they are.”
Something nudged Alice from inside her head. She looked up, frowning. “You know, this could all just be the way I saw it. I couldn’t prove a word of it. It could all be in me—I could be imagining things.”
“You could,” Pepe said, without emotion.
“I notice you aren’t exactly straining to prove I’m wrong.”
“Not a bit.” Papa agreed. “Mostly because I don’t doubt you for a second. It makes an awful lot of sense, Alice. Too much.”
“Too much?” She peered up at him. “Why ‘too much?’”
“Because Amalgamated and Interstellar are running the same way. Their track records could be copies of Industrial’s. They even cleaned up their quality control almost as soon as Industrial did—and let it go just as quickly, too. When you think of it as their producing as many duds as possible, until I made it clear they couldn’t get away with it, it makes sense. I put the heat on them, and they cleaned up—until I quit snarling so much. Then their dud rate went up again.”
But she caught the hint of something else in his tone. “What else, Peppy? Tell me what else!”
He sighed. “No fooling you, is there?”
“Not a bit.” She swung around in front, blocking him. “What else is there?”
Pepe sighed and said, “There’ve been a couple of tries . . .”
“Not at killing you!”
“Only a couple, I said.” He held up a palm. “I hated to believe that they’d try to assassinate me just to save money on quality control—but if they’re really on the Hothri’s side, it’s easier to believe.”
“On the Hothri’s side!”
“Why else would they want to produce duds? Once the system’s there, they wouldn’t lose money by keeping quality up.”