McPherson doesn’t know what to say to this. Disgust makes him too bitter to think.
“But listen,” Goldman goes on, “it isn’t as bad as I’m making it sound. In the main the GAO stuck to their guns, and after all they did recommend a new bidding process. Now we’ll just have to wait and see what Judge Tobiason decides in the case.”
“When will that take place?”
“Looks like about three weeks, judging by his published schedule.”
“I’ll come out for it.”
“Good, I’ll see you then.”
Thus McPherson is in a foul mood, apprehensive and angry and hopeful all at once, when Dan Houston comes by at the end of the day and asks him to come along to El Torito for some drinks.
“Not tonight, Dan.”
But Dan is insistent. “I’ve really got to talk to you, Mac.”
Sigh. The man’s hurting, that’s clear. “All right. Just one pitcher, though.”
They track over and take their usual table, order the usual pitcher of margaritas, start drinking. Dan downs his first in two swallows, starts on a second. “This whole BM defense,” he complains. “We can barely make these systems work, and when we do they work just as well against defensive systems, so in essence they’re another offense. And meanwhile we aren’t even paying attention to cruise missiles or sub attack, so as for a real umbrella, well that isn’t even what we’re trying for!”
McPherson nods, depressed. He’s felt that way about strategic defense for years. In fact that was his big mistake, accidentally letting Lemon know how he felt. And his dislike for the concept springs from exactly the reasons Dan is speaking of; every aspect of it has spiraled off into absurdity. “You’d think the original system architects would have thought of these kinds of things,” he says.
Dan nods vehemently and puts down his margarita to point, spilling some ice over the salt on the rim. “That’s right! Those bastards…” He shakes his head, is already drunk enough to keep going: “They just saw their chance and took it. During their careers they could make it big designing these programs and selling them to the Air Force, making it all look easy! Because for them it meant bucks! It meant they had it made. And it’s only after it was put in space and began to come on line that the next generation of engineers had to make the system work. And that’s us! We’re the ones paying for their fat careers.”
“Well, whatever,” McPherson says, uncomfortable with Dan’s raw bitterness. There is a sort of team code in the defense industry, and really, you don’t say things like this. “We’re stuck with it, anyway, so we might as well make the best of it.”
Here he is, sounding like Lucy. And Dan, drunk and miserable, far past the code, will have none of it: “Make the best of it! How can we make the best of it? Even if we could get it to work, all the Soviets have to do is put a bucket of nails in orbit and wham, ten of our mirrors are gone. Talk about cost-effective at the margin! A ten-penny nail will take out a billion-dollar mirror! Ha! ha! So we defend those mirrors by claiming that we will start a nuclear war with anyone who attacks them, so it comes right back to MAD to defend the very system that was supposed to get us away from all that.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.” McPherson can feel the margaritas fuzzing his brain, and Dan has had about twice as many as he has. Dan’s getting sloppy drunk here, McPherson can see it. So he tries to prevent Dan from ordering another pitcher, but Dan shoves his hand away angrily and orders another anyway. Nothing McPherson can do about it. He feels depression growing in him, settling into a knot around the tequila in his stomach. This is a waste of his time. And Dan, well, Dan…
Dan mutters on while waiting for the next drink to arrive. “Soviets get their own BMD and we don’t like it, no no no, even though the whole strategy demands parity. All sorts of regional wars start so our hard guys can express their displeasure without setting off the big one. Boom, bam, hook to the jaw, jab in the eye, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists sets the war clock at one second to midnight—one second to midnight, man, set there for twenty years! And, and the Soviets’ beam systems could be trained on American cities, burn us to toast in five minutes, and we could do the same to them like I was saying today but we all ignore that, that’s not real no no no, we pretend they’re defensive systems only and we work on knocking each other’s stuff down before the other side does, so we can MIRV each other right into the ground—”
“All right, all right,” McPherson says irritably. “It’s complicated, sure. No one ever said it wasn’t complicated.”
A tortilla chip snaps in Dan’s fingers. “I’m not saying it’s just complicated, Mac! I’m saying it’s crazy! And the people who designed this architecture, they knew it was crazy and they went ahead and did it anyway. They went along with it because it was good for them. The whole industry loved it because it was new business just when the nukes were topping out. And the physicists went along with it because it made them important again, like during the Manhattan Project. And the Air Force went along with it because it made them more important than ever. And the government went along with it because the economy was looking bad at the end of the century. Need a boost—military spending—it’s been the method of choice ever since World War Two got them out of the Great Depression. Hard times? Start a war! Or pump money into weapons whether there’s a war or not. It’s like we use weapons as a drug, snort some up and stimulate the old economy. Best upper known to man.”
“Okay, Dan, okay. But calm down, will you? Calm down, calm down. There’s nothing we can do about that now.”
Dan stares out the window. The next pitcher arrives and he fills his new glass, spilling over the edge so all the big grains of salt run in yellow-white streams down onto the paper tablecloth. He drinks, elbows on the table, leaning forward. He stares down into the empty glass. “It’s a hell of a business.”
McPherson sighs heavily; he hates a maudlin drunk, and he’s about to physically stop Dan from refilling his glass yet again when Dan looks up at him; and those red-rimmed eyes, so full of pain, pierce McPherson and hold him in place.
“A hell of a business,” Dan repeats soddenly. “You spend your whole life working on proposals. Bids, for Christ’s sake. It isn’t even work that is ever going to see the light. The Pentagon just sets companies at each other’s throats. Group bids, one-on-one competitions, leader-follower bids. Kind of like cockfighting. I wonder if they bet on us.”
“Stimulates fast development,” McPherson says shortly. There’s no sense talking about this kind of thing.…
“Yeah, sure, but the waste! The waste, man, the waste. For each project five or six companies work up separate proposals. That’s six times as much work as they would need to do if they were all working together in coordination, like parts of a team. And it’s hard work, too! It eats people’s lives.”
Now Dan gets an expression on his face that McPherson can’t bear to watch; he’s thinking of his ally Dawn now, sure. McPherson looks around for the waitress, signals for their check.
“All their lives used up in meeting deadlines for these proposals. And for five out of every six of them it’s work wasted. Nothing gained out of that work, nothing made from it. Nothing made from it, Mac. Whole careers. Whole lives.”
“That’s the way it is,” McPherson says, signing the check.
Dan stares at him dully. “It’s the American way, eh Mac?”