“That’s a great deal, Mr. Vladek. I’ll be waiting right here for your call.”
Harry sat down and drank the rest of his coffee. You had to be an expert in a lot of things to get along, he was thinking. What did he know about brain transplants? In one way, a lot. He knew that the surgery part was supposed to be straightforward, but the tissue rejection was the problem, but Dr. Nicholson thought he had that licked. He knew that every doctor he had talked to, and he had now talked to seven of them, had agreed that medically it was probably sound enough, and that every one of them had carefully clammed up when he got the conversation around to whether it was right. It was his decision, not theirs, they all said, sometimes just by their silence. But who was he to decide?
Margaret appeared in the doorway. “Harry. Let’s go upstairs and look at Tommy.”
He said harshly, “Is that supposed to make it easier for me to murder my son?”
She said, “We talked that out, Harry, and we agreed it isn’t murder. Whatever it is. I only think that Tommy ought to be with us when we decide, even if he doesn’t know what we’re deciding.”
The two of them stood next to the outsize crib that held their son, looking in the night light at the long fair lashes against the chubby cheeks and the pouted lips around the thumb. Reading. Model airplanes. Riding a bike. Against a quick sketch of a face and the occasional, cherished, tempestuous, bruising flurry of kisses.
Vladek stayed there the full half hour and then, as he had promised, went back to the kitchen, picked up the phone and began to dial.
The Engineer
When writers collaborate, it often happens that one of them takes off in a direction which the other fellow simply can’t or won’t follow. So sometimes quite long chunks of real, printable copy get thrown away, and tempers fray. This almost never happened when Cyril and I worked together. Our first drafts, of course, needed a lot of revision and polishing, and they got them, but structurally they almost always survived unchanged into print. But there was one exception. In Gladiator-at-Law we were intrigued with the idea of a “political engineer” (in the same sense that Eisenhower was a “political general”), but it went nowhere in the novel, and we took it out. A few months later it occurred to us that the scene we had cut was practically a short story in itself, so we put it through the typewriter again and it came out this way.
IT WAS VERY SIMPLE. Some combination of low temperature and high pressure had forced something from the seepage at the ocean bottom into combination with something in the water around them.
And the impregnable armor around Subatlantic Oil’s drilling chamber had discovered a weakness.
On the television screen it looked more serious than it was-so Muhlenhoff told himself, staring at it grimly. You get down more than a mile, and you’re bound to have little technical problems. That’s why deep-sea oil wells were still there.
Still, it did look kind of serious. The water driving in the pitted faults had the pressure of eighteen hundred meters behind it, and where it struck it did not splash-it battered and destroyed. As Muhlenhoff watched, a bulkhead collapsed in an explosion of spray; the remote camera caught a tiny driblet of the scattering brine, and the picture in the screen fluttered and shrank, and came back with a wavering sidewise pulse.
Muhlenhoff flicked off the screen and marched into the room where the Engineering Board was waiting in attitudes of flabby panic.
As he swept his hand through his snow-white crew cut and called the board to order, a dispatch was handed to him-a preliminary report from a quickly-dispatched company trouble-shooter team. He read it to the board, stone-faced.
A veteran heat-transfer man, the first to recover, growled:
“Some vibration thing-and seepage from the oil pool. Sloppy drilling!” He sneered. “Big deal! So a couple hundred meters of shaft have to be plugged and pumped. So six or eight compartments go pop. Since when did we start to believe the cack Research and Development hands out? Armor’s armor. Sure it pops -when something makes it pop. If Atlantic oil was easy to get at, it wouldn’t be here waiting for us now. Put a gang on the job. Find out what happened, make sure it doesn’t happen again. Big deal!”
Muhlenhoff smiled his attractive smile. “Breck,” he said, “thank God you’ve got guts. Perhaps we were in a bit of a panic. Gentlemen, I hope we’ll all take heart from Mr. Breck’s level-headed-what did you say, Breck?”
Breck didn’t look up. He was pawing through the dispatch Muhlenhoff had dropped to the table. “Nine-inch plate,” he read aloud, white-faced. “And time of installation, not quite seven weeks ago.
If this goes on in a straight line-“ he grabbed for a pocket slide-rule -“we have, uh-“ he swallowed-“less time than the probable error,” he finished.
“Breck!” Muhlenhoff yelled. “Where are you going?”
The veteran heat-transfer man said grimly as he sped through the door: “To find a submarine.”
The rest of the Engineering Board was suddenly pulling chairs toward the trouble-shooting team’s’dispatch. Muhlenhoff slammed a fist on the table.
“Stop it,” he said evenly. “The next man who leaves the meeting will have his contract canceled. Is that clear, gentlemen? Good. We will now proceed to get organized.”
He had them; they were listening. He said forcefully: “I want a task force consisting of a petrochemist, a vibrations man, a hydrostatics man and a structural engineer. Co-opt mathematicians and computermen as needed. I will have all machines capable of handling Fourier series and up cleared for your use. The work of the task force will be divided into two phases. For Phase One, members will keep their staffs as small as possible. The objective of Phase One is to find the cause of the leaks and predict whether similar leaks are likely elsewhere in the project. On receiving a first approximation from the force I will proceed to set up Phase Two, to deal with countermeasures.”
He paused. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we must not lose our nerves. We must not panic. Possibly the most serious technical crisis in Atlantic’s history lies before us. Your most important job is to maintain-at all times-a cheerful, courageous attitude. We cannot, repeat cannot, afford to have the sub-technical staff of the project panicked for lack of a good example from us.” He drilled each of them in turn with a long glare. “And,” he finished, “if I hear of anyone suddenly discovering emergency business ashore, the man who does it better get fitted for a sludgemonkey’s suit, because that’s what he’ll be tomorrow. Clear?”
Each of the executives assumed some version of a cheerful, courageous attitude. They looked ghastly, even to themselves.
Muhlenhoff stalked into his private office, the nerve-center of the whole bulkheaded works.
In Muhlenhoff's private office, you would never know you were 1,800 meters below the surface of the sea. It looked like any oilman’s brass-hat office anywhere, complete to the beautiful blonde outside the door (but white-faced and trembling), the potted palm (though the ends of its fronds vibrated gently), and the typical section chief bursting in in the typical flap. “Sir,” he whined, frenzied, “Section Six has pinholed! The corrosion-“
“Handle it!” barked Muhlenhoff, and slammed the door. Section Six be damned! What did it matter if a few of the old bulkheads pinholed and rilled? The central chambers were safe, until they could lick whatever it was that was corroding. The point was, you had to stay with it and get out the oil; because if you didn’t prove your lease, PetroMex would. Mexican oil wanted those reserves mighty badly.