Will Martin moved toward his office door, but the urge to stop and turn back was irresistible. Once more he stood quietly, memorizing the details of the peaceful vista outside his window.
The conference could wait a few seconds more.
The new teleconferencing suite had been complete for less than a month. The entire setup — from the long, rectangular mahogany table to the wallpaper and state-of-the-art video equipment — had been leased to Uniwave by a company called Simulight, a rapidly growing corporation that was wowing Wall Street and changing the idea of teleconferencing from a novelty to a necessity. The suite had cost Uniwave practically nothing, and Martin was proud of that deal. Since he had dearly wanted the technology, and Simulight had dearly wanted their business, it had been a win-win situation.
Martin walked into the room wearing his trademark air of seriousness and nodded to the six senior executives who would be sitting with him on the Raleigh-Durham side of the table. The room itself was twenty-five feet long by what appeared to be sixteen feet, but in fact the real width was only eight feet since the room was divided in half lengthwise by a solid panel of high-definition liquid crystal glass. The team in Anchorage appeared in living color, sitting on the other side of their half of the table in the composite room, which was adorned with matching paintings, wallpaper, and even matching coffee cups and pitchers. He had entertained the idea of trying to buy Simulight, but his board had vetoed the idea, which was a shame, he thought. The new technology would eventually make billions by setting the worldwide standards for teleconferencing, but his board was too panicked about whether Uniwave itself could survive.
“We all here?” the chairman asked the assemblage on both sides of the screen, surveying the nodding heads and noting the fear in the eyes of those in Anchorage. It would be a challenge getting the truth out of the Alaskan group, he thought. They were well aware their jobs were on the line.
Maybe, he thought, I should have entered the room a little more pleasantly.
Martin cleared his throat and the conversations ceased.
“Okay, team. We’re in deep excrement here and up against the deadline. What happened last night, why did it happen, and how are we going to fix it and retest it in the next forty-eight hours? I also need to hear any lingering concerns anyone might have over the system’s safety before we give it to the Air Force and ask for our check.” All but two of the Anchorage contingent appeared ready to bolt from the room in fear. Tone it down, he warned himself, as he pointed to the senior project manager in Anchorage.
“Joe? Why don’t you give me the basics.”
Joe Davis scooted his chair forward and narrated the sequence of events over the Gulf of Alaska the night before, describing Dr. Ben Cole’s ultimate solution, which had been to simply turn off the main computer.
“So, Ben’s computer was the culprit?” Martin asked. “Not the software?”
“We think so. We’re running all kinds of diagnostics. Have been all night. Our best guess right now is a hardware fault of some sort.”
Martin could see the look of alarm on Ben Cole’s face. He turned to him. “Ben? You look upset.”
“Well…”
“You agree with Joe’s assessment?”
Ben shot Joe Davis a worried look before answering. “Ah… turning the computer off did unlatch the relays, Mr. Martin, so, technically…”
“Your on-board computer was sending signals to lock the aircraft in its control, right?”
Ben nodded without enthusiasm.
“But,” Martin continued, “why was it diving you to fifty feet and then skimming the water?”
“We don’t know,” Ben answered cautiously.
“Well, hardware or software? Or both?”
There was a flurry of activity to one side of the suite in Anchorage and a woman entered with a note for Joe Davis, withdrawing quickly. Martin saw a broad smile spread over Davis’s face as he shared the note with the others and gestured for the chairman’s attention.
“I think we’ve got it!” Davis said, looking at Ben. “Our guys just found a bad circuit board in Ben’s computer aboard the Gulfstream, and it’s the board that governs pitch and altitude as well as the latching relays for the flight controls.”
Martin smiled and exhaled as he flashed a thumbs-up gesture. “Great!”
But Ben Cole was not smiling, and the chairman noticed.
“Ben? You look unconvinced.”
“Well…”
“Spit it out.”
Ben pursed his lips and smiled as he shook his head. “I hate to be the skunk at the party, and, of course, I haven’t seen what they found, but I really think we need to finish looking through the program to make sure there’s nothing else going on.”
“Ben,” Joe Davis began, reaching a hand toward his sleeve, but Ben Cole’s eyes were locked on Will Martin’s across the transparent divide of the screen.
“Leave him be, Joe,” Martin ordered quietly. “Everyone gets their say here. Go ahead, Ben.”
“Well, first, we shouldn’t try to fly the acceptance test tonight, just in case I’m right. If we blow this one, as I understand it, we blow the on-time acceptance.”
Will Martin was nodding slowly as he watched the young engineer and made quiet note of the perspiration glistening on his forehead.
“Okay,” Ben continued. “This has nothing to do with the fact that we almost died in that Gulfstream last night. I just want to make sure we get this right, and the logic here — that it would be just a circuit board and not involve the software — really scares me. And after all, we’ve been moving awfully fast.”
“So you think it could be software. Isn’t the software your responsibility as lead engineer, Ben?” the chairman asked. His words and tone were gentle, but the implication was devastating. Here was the chief software engineer for the project giving his boss a “no confidence” rating on two years of his own work, and in the eleventh hour.
“Yes, Mr. Chairman,” Ben managed, “but what happened last night was too precise — the fifty-foot altitude, I mean — to be explained by a fried circuit board, in my opinion.”
“Is that a guess, Ben, or do you have some hard evidence?”
“It’s all guesswork, Mr. Martin, until we find a faulty line of code… but it’s good guesswork. Bad circuits don’t stop a jet at precisely fifty feet. At least, I don’t think they would. Look, I’m sorry—”
“You made reference a second ago… what’d you say? That we’ve been moving too fast? What do you mean by that, Ben?”
The fact that Joe Davis was looking at Ben Cole with a frozen expression had not escaped Will Martin’s attention.
“What I mean, or meant, sir, is that we’ve been under tremendous pressure on this project, and while I know everyone’s done their best to get it right the first time, the truth is, this is a very complex software program with millions of lines of code, and I’m worried that we haven’t fully tested it yet. At least, not enough to deploy.”
“Okay, thanks for the caution,” Martin began, nodding dismissively at Ben Cole as he straightened his back and surveyed all of them in turn around the table. “Here’s the deal, folks. By the contract, we have until Saturday night to hand this system over to General MacAdams and proclaim it ready, or two very undesirable things are going to happen: One, we don’t get paid the little green government check for one hundred ninety-three million dollars this company has to have by Wednesday to avoid default and stay afloat, as well as pay your paychecks. Two, we go into contract penalty clause territory for late delivery and start losing two hundred fifty thousand dollars per day, which is a million seven hundred fifty thousand a week. We can’t afford either occurrence. We’ve lost two other contracts this year, as you know, our bond ratings are in the toilet, we’ve used up all but a pittance of our credit lines, and we’re down to the crunch. So, if we’re not sure we can be safe, we don’t fly. But if there’s any way we can patch the situation together sufficiently so we can be safe and still dazzle MacAdams and get this damn Boomerang Box system accepted, I say we find a way to do it. Now. Tonight. We need creative thinking, but with lightning speed. Understood?”