In the headquarters of Marine Visions Unlimited, one section of fluorescent lights burned in one corner of the office. There was only one office. Except for partitioned-off restrooms, a kitchenette, and a couple of storage areas, the open space was a jumble of surplus navy gray steel desks, black, gray and beige filing cabinets, and desk, straight, and easy chairs in a rainbow of woods, fabrics, and Naugahyde. There did not seem to be any logic involved in the placement of work areas. Charts, diagrams and schematics were pinned to the walls in every place possible. For lack of wall space, one blueprint was taped to a window. There were plenty of windows in the perimeter walls, probably all destined for blueprint draperies.
If a new person came on board, a desk and chair were located in some thrift shop and inserted somewhere on the floor. At last count, there were twenty-seven desks scattered around. They butted up to each other head-on, at right angles, and at oblique angles. From the suspended ceiling, cables drooped to computer terminals and telephones.
Nor was there a functional division within the office. Oceanographers, biologists, computer specialists, civil and structural engineers, environmental engineers, robotics experts and propulsion designers were scattered like birdshot. During daylight hours, when the place was thriving, people called across the room, telephoned each other, kept three and four different technical conversations going. In comparison, Babel was a city where everyone spoke the same language.
The whole place was symbolic of MVU’s organization.
Kaylene Thomas thought that it was very antinaval. She was accustomed to neatness. Everything in its place. A tool for every job readily to hand. It drove her batty.
MVU’s office was on the second floor of an ancient, red brick warehouse off Dickens Street in the Roseville area. The streets were all named, in alphabetical order, for writers and poets — Addison, Byron, Carleton, Dickens, Emerson, working up to Zola, then starting over with Alcott.
The street names offered the only order Thomas could see in the immediate vicinity.
The ground floor of the warehouse was not much better. It was the manufacturing facility for MVU robotic creations, and it was a jungle of machine and hand tools, computers and exotic machines for casting and forming custom-designed parts in stainless steel, bronze, arcane alloys and carbon-embedded plastics. If someone got a hot idea, the various parts of one project were shoved aside, and the hot idea evolved into another mess of copper, brass, fiberglass, and fiber-optic components spread over workbenches, the tops of lockers, and the concrete floor.
From her desk jammed against an outside wall, under a window that needed washing, Thomas could view the Commercial Basin below and to the north. There was not much activity tonight. MVU’s dockside building, a half block away, was dark. Lights on a dock across the basin illuminated a dozen men operating forklifts and cranes, loading a small freighter. Farther to the northeast, a steady stream of airliners launched themselves from San Diego International Airport, climbing westward toward the prevailing winds.
There was no wind tonight. One of the ceiling-mounted air conditioners chattered irregularly, but it always did.
If she leaned back and looked to her right, a window in the end wall gave her a view across the bay of the U.S. Naval Air Station on North Island, also launching a few aircraft, though they were probably more lethal than a Boeing 767. Throughout the bay, she could see the lights of freighters, pleasure craft, and several navy warships that were underway.
The night lights of the city all but washed out the stars in a clear sky.
Thomas’s computer terminal, on the left of her desk, was alive with numbers, and she was getting tired of them. They were all pessimistic numbers.
Kaylene Rae Thomas had a master’s degree in geology and had devoted her doctoral program to oceanography, halfway expected from the daughter of a U.S. Navy admiral, now retired. She had spent two years at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography before being lured away by Dane Brande.
The bait had been his reputation for creativity and her directorship of Harbor One, a seabed laboratory that was only a seedling idea at the time. Five years later, as she neared her thirty-fourth birthday, Harbor One had been operational for two years and had spawned subcolonies. Experiments in resource mining, in food production, and in fish breeding were being conducted in their own self-contained modules located on the ocean floor within a mile of Harbor One. Nearing completion were three connected and oversized domes that would compete with Sea World, Universal Studios, and Knott’s Berry Farm for tourist dollars. She called it Disneyland West.
Brande called it revenue.
At her desk in Hoboville — another of her coined titles — with depressing numbers covering her computer screen, Thomas was busy doubting her future. She was afraid that the time was fast approaching when she should make a change.
She was still young enough, and had built enough of an academic reputation, to find a position with a decent university. Her looks were holding, though she expected to begin finding gray among the platinum blond daily. She kept her hair short, just below the level of her earlobes, for the sake of easy maintenance. Her eyes were those of her father, a pale, iridescent blue, and she suspected that tomorrow or the next day, if she kept reading numbers on computer screens, she would be wearing the admiral’s bifocals. At five-ten, she was tall, and her mostly active work kept her fit, perhaps a bit too lean. Colleagues kept telling her she needed to eat more. Her skin was pale as a result of so much time spent below the surface of the Pacific, and her complexion was not yet ravaged by weather or sun.
Brande never noticed. When she joined Marine Visions, she had halfway expected to find her attraction to its president reciprocal, but Dane kept his personal and professional lives separated. If he had a personal life. He seemed always to be at work on one project or another, and though she had never met a girlfriend, there were rumors of many.
Irrespective of the professional and nonsocial relationship between them, Dane Brande’s form of leadership was one of her problems. Everybody in MVU had a title, but no one apparently reported to anyone else. There was no hierarchy, no organizational structure. Brande was the chief, and that was it. People working on one project shifted to others without an explained reason. Graduate students from various universities were taken on for short stints to gain credit and experience. People were hired on the spur of the moment for specific projects, then were retained after the project was completed. Job descriptions changed daily.
Thomas was hired as Director of Harbor One. That was still her title, and she was still more or less in charge of the sealab, but over time, she had somehow assumed the responsibilities of chief fiscal officer. It was as if the administrative side of the company existed in a vacuum, and it had sucked her in. In a real company, she would be CFO or executive vice president or something. Any time someone wanted to know how much money they had, or when the federal research funds were due to expire, they asked her.
And, damn it, she always had the information handy. She was too organized for her own good.
She looked again at the computer screen. It displayed a summary of current fund balances, expected expenditures, and anticipated revenues for each of the dozen projects now in an active status.
She shuddered, picked up the phone, and dialed 6 to get into the satellite communications channel that MVU leased at exorbitant monthly rates. That was a luxury that would have to go.
When she got the secondary dial tone, she dialed the number of the Gemini.
A gruff voice answered, “Gemini, Mason.”