At first we didn’t know what to make of it. I mean suddenly our work load was cut maybe by two-thirds. We started working eight-hour days. No more weekends. And we were actually filling out our schedule sheets honestly! It was amazing.
Oh, there was the usual quota of corporate BS to deal with. The company started a new quality drive. We got a couple of visits from inspection teams looking for safety violations. Our consultants pretended to be stuffed animals and we explained them as gifts for Sanchez’s nieces, but that was the closest we had to a problem.
So there we were, sailing along. The latest revision of TMFB was working fine, all our projects were on schedule for a change and most of them were under budget. Life was good.
I should have been scared to death.
I didn’t really begin to figure it out until Dark Gray Tuesday, the day before Black Wednesday, the Night Eagle’s scheduled rollout.
You know about the Night Eagle, the super-stealthy unmanned recon aircraft that was going to save the company from the merger mania that had hit the defense industry after the Cold War. It was hot. It was new, it was sexy, it was wicked looking and it was going to keep the company afloat into the next century. The Night Eagle program was probably the only thing corporate management took more seriously than CCTEE. Cost Containment Through Effective Engineering was a fad. This was business.
The big day was Wednesday and the company had pulled out all the stops. They were bringing in everything from a couple of tame Congressmen to the local junior college band. A couple of thousand employees, carefully picked for their appearance, diversity, and mindless enthusiasm, would fill the bleachers. There would be bigwigs from the Air Force, the major subcontractors, the local and trade press and, as we were constantly reminded, DynoDyne would be on display to the whole world.
Unfortunately the rollout was scheduled for hangar 17, not the production building. Apparently the production building was too messy and they wanted a nice, clean tarmac and hangar as a background for the picture. Never mind the place hadn’t been used by anyone but pigeons, bats, and the occasional owl since 1957.
So for the last month crews had been painting the exterior, polishing the glass, erecting bleachers, resurfacing the tarmac and generally complicating life for those of us who worked in Building 23 across the way. That included making us park in the main lot and hike nearly half a mile to our building.
Anyway, Tuesday morning as I was pulling into the main parking lot, it all came together.
Nearly literally. I had spotted a parking spot near the main entrance and was cutting the wheel to pull into it when a bicycle messenger with a basket full of interoffice mail came tearing around the corner and cut right in front of me. I hit my brakes as the kid missed my bumper by inches.
He made it, but he’d been so intent on cutting me off he hadn’t seen the guy in the pickup with an enormous cabover camper turning down the aisle. The messenger was still looking over his shoulder at me when he slammed head-on into the nearly stopped pickup and went down in a blizzard of memos.
The guy in the pickup camper jammed on his brakes so hard he stalled the pickup. Then he started yelling out the window at the messenger while cranking the truck. He was so involved in swearing at the messenger I guess he didn’t realize he still had the truck in reverse. Anyway, it lurched backwards and was still picking up speed when it rammed into the light pole behind him.
There was a tremendous crunch as the light pole went over, smashing in the hoods of five parked cars and bridging the space I had been trying to pull into. The guy in the camper jumped out and started screaming at the bicycle messenger, who was trying to pick up all the papers before the wind scattered them. Meanwhile the owner of one of the cars came running over and started yelling at them both.
I found a parking spot in the next row and by that time all of them were engaged in a three-way fistfight. Two security guards passed me at a puffing run as I went into the building. They were so intent on getting to the fight they didn’t realize the sprinklers were on and both of them ran right through the spray. As the door swung shut behind me I saw one of them slip on a wet patch of sidewalk and go down.
I started down the hall shaking my head. What a way to start the day. I mean, what was the probability…?
That’s when this cold little prickle crawled out from the waistband of my jockey shorts and scampered up my spine to muss the hair on the back of my neck. Probability. All of a sudden the word had an ugly ring to it.
That sensitized me. When I took my usual shortcut through one of the shops I noticed the big sign over the work floor that announced “At DynoDyne, Safety Is Job One! 1 Day Without A Serious Accident.” The numeral ‘1’ was a little dirty. As if it had been up there for a while.
That bothered me more.
As soon as I got to the shop, I pulled the chief wombat aside. “I need to know more about just what you’re doing.”
The wombat looked slightly annoyed, the way consultants do when you try to pry into their secrets. “Well mate, it’s a little complicated, y’see. Have you got any grounding in probability engineering?”
“Nope.”
The wombat looked satisfied and a little smug. “Ah then. That makes it a little hard, doesn’t it? But basically we’re maintaining a flow of positive probabilities suitable to the accomplishment of your mission by exchanging them by quantum probability tunneling.”
I understood about as much of that as the wombat intended me to—which is say almost none of it—but there was something in there that I was afraid I did understand.
“So you mean,” I said slowly, “that all the good luck we’re having here is being balanced by bad luck elsewhere?”
The wombat frowned. “That’s a crude, layman’s way of putting it, but I think you have the basic idea there.”
Suddenly a couple of hundred hairs on the back of my neck snapped to attention and my stomach took a down elevator. “Where,” I asked just a little too calmly, “are you dumping the bad luck?”
The wombat looked annoyed. “I told you, we’re not ‘dumping’ anything. We’re exchanging probabilities by quantum probability tunneling.”
“Where with?”
“Why the nearest source of positive probabilities, of course. Doesn’t do any good to transfer them any further than we have to, now does it? I mean, inefficient and all.”
“Of course,” I said weakly. “But, ah, what about the other places, the ones you’re getting the probability from?”
“Oh we don’t worry about those, mate,” the wombat said airily. “Not covered by the contract, you see, so they’re not our job, now are they?”
I gulped, nodded and went looking for Wilson.
I found him and Sanchez over at the other side of the shop, looking out across the tarmac at Hangar 17. The bleachers were up, the platforms for the television cameras were in place, and a crew of workmen with a couple of cherry pickers were trying to hang the DynoDyne Night Eagle banner over the hangar doors.
“Hey Jase,” Wilson chuckled. “Take a look at this. It’s better than a sitcom.”
“Yeah,” Sanchez said. “They’ve been trying to hang that banner for two hours now.”
The elevator took off with my stomach again. “Two hours?” I managed.
“Yeah. Every time they nearly get it up, the wind comes along or something and it comes down again.”