“Well?” Erica gestured, showing her impatience.
The man on her left raised an eyebrow. “Good example?” he pointed a thumb toward Erica as he asked the man on the far right.
“Perfect. Happens just like that.” He slipped his wrench into a pocket on his right jumpsuit leg.
“Think I should tell her?”
“Why not? What have we got to lose?”
The one on the left turned toward Erica and drew a deep breath. “I suppose you sent Heckmann off so you can directly ask us some questions?”
“Yeah,” Erica replied, cautiously. “So…”
“Which means you can’t trust him to tell you how buggered up things really are,” the man on the right volunteered.
“Well, that’s what I’m here to see.” Erica hooked her right arm onto a conduit.
“So yuh start right in by tryin’ to intimidate us,” said the one in the middle. “Yuh know, Press usta be kinda a reg’lar guy, ’fore yuh turned him inta a brown-nosed lyin’ paranoid.”
Before Erica could respond, the man on the left chimed in, his previously barely noticeable Russian accent suddenly thicker. “In old country, is famous story of State Tractor Factory. Is so fouled up, cannot even put one nut and bolt together. At each level on way to Politburo, reports of progress get a little better. By time Brezhnev hears, is making a hundred thousand tractors a month.”
“Yeah, I heard that one,” Erica admitted, looking dejected. “Am I really that intimidating?”
The men looked at each other, then back to Erica, and nodded.
Erica grimaced contritely. “Sorry. If I promise to try to stop, will you promise to give me the straight story?”
“Sure,” the Russian replied, back to his previous trace of an accent. “When this thing is finished, and we take out and crank engines up to about three-quarters thrust, the whole ass-end is going to come apart like a pair of cheap size six jeans on a size fourteen rump.”
“Nah,” said the man on the right. “Never happen. They’ll never get the engines to run that well.”
Erica glanced at the one in the middle, prompting him to add his two bits.
He shrugged. “Don’t know what these yay-hoos’r moanin’ ’bout.” He gestured toward Heckmann, darting back from his cubicle with a computer in his right hand. “Everybody knows milestones is more important than a ship that actually works.”
Erica climbed back down through the spoke airlock and looked around. She spotted Kara in a corner, one arm down inside of a large machine tool. Erica bounded over behind her. The tool was humming angrily, but didn’t seem to be operating.
“Got a minute?”
“Jee-zus H. Christ! What now?” Kara dropped whatever she had been working on. It clattered down into the case, and she kicked the base of the machine. “Who the fuh—” She looked around and saw Erica. “Oh, sorry, Dr. Thompson.”
Kara pulled her arm from the machine. Erica noticed it was striped with grease, scratched, and bleeding slightly. She gestured toward the machine. “What’s the problem?”
Kara glared at the machine like she wanted to grind it up for scrap right on the spot. “Damned clutch again.” She switched it off and the humming stopped. “Been acting up for a couple of years, and getting steadily worse.”
Erica peered down into the works. “Is it safe to reach down in there with the power on?”
Kara shrugged. “It’s either ten minutes doing that, or spend six hours tearing it down. Better than having the techs beat each other’s brains out over lack of access.”
Erica studied the gears, which matched the stripes of grease down Kara’s arm. If the machine had suddenly started, Kara would have drawn back a nub. “Why not just fix it? For good, I mean.”
Kara looked Erica straight in the eyes with the same tired look the first technologist of the day had given her. “That would be nice. But while we’re dreaming, why not just finish building the upset forge and thread rolling machines we were supposed to build in the first place?”
Erica gestured toward the cutting heads. “Everybody told me this tool was perfect for making fasteners.”
Kara reached over to the chuck and shook it. It rattled. “It was. Plus a lot of other things. In small quantities. But it is a toolmaker’s machine, not a mass production unit. We were supposed to use it and others like it to build bigger machines, then to make small quantities of speciality stuff. Instead, we’ve pushed it into production service, and run it at speeds and feeds it was never intended for. Poor thing done been rode hard and put away wet. Same as the rest of the equipment we brought up.”
Erica glanced at Kara’s cubicle. “Can we go someplace more private? I need some honest answers.”
Kara nodded, then pulled the key from the machine’s power switch and put it in her pocket. On the way to the cubicle, she grabbed a shop rag and started smearing the blood and grease from her arm.
Erica closed the door. “Kara, you’ve been working for me for what, twelve years now?”
Kara looked up for a second. “Let’s see, I started working for you at the Supercollider in… yeah about twelve.”
“Have I always been an intolerable bitch, or is this a recent phenomenon?”
Kara hesitated, her eyes darting about as she considered the answer. “You’ve only been an intolerable bitch for about two years. You started becoming a bitch about a year after we got up here. At the Supercollider, you were the best boss I’d ever had. When you won the Nobel prize, I was so proud to be working for you I could barely stand it.”
“I had good help,” Erica injected.
Kara shook her head. “Machinists are a dime a dozen. Technicians, maybe a quarter. Grad students, hell, they give them away in cereal boxes. People capable of figuring out, from scratch, the physics behind Higgs fields, how to create and manipulate them, and how to employ them to make controlled fusion simple… there is only one.”
Erica smiled, and shook her head. “I have stood on the shoulders of people who stood on the shoulders of giants, then stolen their lines. It bugs me that nobody seems to give Higgs any credit. And besides, the Higgs field work is just a spin-off of another crack pot theory I’ve been cooking up. Anyway, I’m coming to the very painful conclusion that a pretty medallion does not necessarily make a very good program manager. With your help, maybe I can change that. Any ideas on where I went wrong?”
Kara sighed. “At the Supercollider, you were always on our side. If management made stupid demands, you always stood up for us. If we needed something, you fought to get it. I would have followed you to the ends of…” Kara broke into a giggle that brought tears to her eyes.
“You followed me a lot further than that,” Erica said, suppressing a snicker. She stopped suddenly. “Now I’m management, and I’m making stupid demands, and telling you to do without.”
Kara stopped giggling, and wiped her eyes with the greasy rag, adding more streaks to those already on her face. “You’re stuck in the middle. We know that. That’s why we’ve been putting up with it for so long. That, and because we believe in the same things you do. This project ought to work. It would work if we could just take the time to do it right. But the way things are going right now… hell, we might be lucky to make it home alive. We need the old Erica Thompson fighting for us.”