“No.”
“But you—aren’t you?”
“Ah.” Jim laughs again, uncomfortable. “Yeah, I guess so.” Of course he is! But if he says so, doesn’t it underline his lack of accomplishment, his lack of effort? It isn’t something that he likes to talk about.
She nods, watching the table again. “Everyone is, I think. If they can’t admit it, they’re scared somehow.”
A bit of mind-reading, there! And Jim hears himself say, “Yeah, it scares me, actually.”
“Sure. But you admitted it anyway, didn’t you.”
“I guess so.” Jim grins. “I’d like to see some of your work.”
“Sure. And maybe I can read some of yours.”
Stab of fear. “It’s terrible.”
She smiles at the table. “That’s what they all say. Uh-oh, look. They’re closing the place.”
“Of course, it’s eleven!” They laugh.
They gather their things and leave. As they walk under the light in the entryway Jim notices how wild looking she is. Hair unbrushed, sweater poorly knitted, she really is strange looking. Couldn’t be more out of fashion if she tried. Jim supposes that’s the point, but still…
“We should do this again,” he says. She’s looking off at the ground, maybe checking out the way ground bulbs underlight the shrubbery edging the quad. It is a weird effect. Ha—here’s Jim seeing things, all of a sudden.
“Sure,” she says indifferently. “Our classes end the same time.”
He walks her to her car. “Thursday, then?”
“Sure. Or whenever.”
“Okay. See you.” Jim gets in his car and drives off, thinking of things they have talked about. Is he really ambitious? And if so, for what? You want to make a difference, he thinks. You want to change America! In the writing, in the resistance work, in the teaching, in everything you do! To change America, whoah—you can’t get much more grandiose than that. Remarkable, then, how lazy he is, and what a huge gap there is between his desires and his achievements! Big sigh. But there, look at that string of headlights snaking along the shore of Rattlesnake Reservoir, reflected in the black water as a whole curved sequence of squiggly S-blurs…
It’s a question of vision.
37
Dennis McPherson is not surprised to find that Lemon is furious about all aspects of the Stormbee decision, including the protest. Since the protest was Hereford’s idea, stimulated by McPherson’s outburst and made before the whole traveling crew of the company, it makes Lemon look like he is not crucial to the policy-making process of LSR, and he can’t stand it. So with his most malicious smile he gives McPherson the job of representing LSR in the long and involved matter of the appeal. He guesses that McPherson will hate it, and he is right. Now McPherson has two main tasks: flying to Washington and talking to their law firm, appearing before committees and making depositions and the like; and helping Dan Houston, back in Laguna, with the disaster that Ball Lightning is about to become. Great. McPherson can feel his stomach shrinking, a little more every day.
So he’s off to Crystal City again. In for consultation with LSR’s law firm, Hunt Stanford and Goldman Incorporated. One of the most prosperous firms in the city, which is saying a lot.
It’s Goldman who has been put in charge of their case; Louis Goldman, who is fortyish, balding, handsome, and a very snappy dresser. McPherson, who for years has believed lawyers to be one of the principal groups of parasites in the country, along with advertisers and stockbrokers, was at first quite stiff with the East Coast smoothie. But it turns out that Goldman is a nice guy, very sharp, and someone who takes his job seriously, and McPherson has grown to respect and then like him. For a lawyer he isn’t bad.
Tonight they’re having dinner up in Crystal City’s finest restaurant, a rotating thing on the roof of the forty-story Hilton. Planes landing at National Airport cruise down the Potomac River basin, already below them: a strange sight.
McPherson asks about the appeal and Goldman makes a little flow chart on a napkin. “The whole history of the project prior to the Air Force’s RFP is out, of course,” he says. “No one wants these superblack programs acknowledged in public, and there’s nothing written down concerning it anyway, so for our purposes it’s irrelevant.”
McPherson nods. “I understand that. But the RFP as published matched the specs they gave us for the superblack program, so any deviation from that—”
“Sure. That could be grounds for a successful challenge. Let’s see if I’ve got the main points as you see them. Air Force asked you for a covert guidance system for a remotely piloted aircraft that could be dropped from low orbit, to underweather but without blind let-down, where it would be navigated at treetop level. Then it was to locate enemy military vehicles and lock on air-to-surface missiles it would be carrying.”
“That’s what they wanted.”
“And they wanted it in one pod, preferably, and it was to use less than eleven KVA.”
“Right. And yet they chose a system that uses two pods, and although Parnell claims they only need eleven point five KVA, they appear to be lying, according to our calculations of the needs of their system. The Air Force should have been able to see that too.”
Goldman jots down these points on a pad he’s put by his dessert plate. No napkin for this stuff. “And they’ve got a radar system, you say?”
“Right. See, the RFP repeats the original request that the system be covert, that it doesn’t give itself away by its outgoing signals. Parnell has ignored that feature of the RFP and put in a radar system. So they won’t be covert, but it does mean that they’ll be able to do a blind let-down. And now the Air Force is listing that capability as a plus for Parnell, even though it’s not asked for in the RFP.” McPherson shakes his head, disgusted.
“It’s a good point. And there are other discrepancies?”
“That’s the main one, but there’s others.” They go over them, and Goldman fills out his list. The Air Force has listed Parnell’s accelerated schedule as an advantage, then given them a contract with a relaxed schedule. And the Air Force’s most probable cost estimates of the LSR and Parnell proposals consistently upped LSR’s figures, while leaving Parnell’s alone, or even lowering them. Then the lower cost of the Parnell system, as determined by the Air Force, was listed as a plus for them.
“It’s pretty clear from all this that the Air Force wanted Parnell, no matter what the proposals were like,” Goldman remarks. “Do you have any idea why that might be?”
“None.” McPherson’s anger over the matter is getting its edge back. “None whatsoever.”
“Hmm.” Goldman taps his pen against a tooth. “I’ve got some of my moles looking into the matter, actually. Don’t tell anyone that. But if we can figure out their motive for doing this, and find any way of proving it, that would be a big help to the appeal.”
“I believe it.” They order brandies and sit back as the table is cleared. “So where do we go from here?” McPherson asks.
Back to the flow chart on the napkin. “Two approaches initially, see? First, we’ve petitioned the courts in the District to make an injunction halting the award of the contract until an investigation by the General Accounting Office is made. At the same time we’ve asked the GAO to make the investigation. Results so far have been fifty-fifty. The GAO has agreed to investigate, and that’s very good. They’re an arm of Congress, you know, and one of the most impartial bodies in Washington. One of the only real watchdogs left. They’ll go after it full force, and I think we can count on a good effort from them.”
Goldman swirls his brandy, takes a sip. “The other front has brought some bad news, I’m afraid. In the long run it could be pretty serious.”