He laughs. “Good for you.” He lids a drip, laughs again. “Shit, what are you doing here? Last I saw you you were about thirteen, weren’t you?”
“Probably. But, you know, it doesn’t last.”
He cracks up. “No, I guess not.”
“I probably know more than you think I do.”
Utterly transparent come-on in her eyes as she sidles up to him, so girlish that he wonders if it’s actually a sophisticated come-on in clever disguise. He laughs and sees she’s hurt, instant contraction back into herself as when you touch a sea anemone, ah, clearly she knows just as little as he suspected she did, maybe less. A girl, really. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says.
“Don’t you worry about me.” She sniffs disdainfully. “We’re leaving soon to go to my friend Marsha’s to spend the night anyway.”
Jesus. “Good, good. How are your folks?”
“Fine, really.”
“Say hello to them for me.” Lillian agrees and with a last winsome over-the-shoulder smile she’s off with her buddies. Abe remembers the girlish come-on and cracks up. Maybe she had in mind a first kiss from this handsome dashing old acquaintance, an older man no lie. A nice kid, truly; Sandy’s seems definitely the wrong place for her, and he’s glad to see her and her young friends giggling together out the door, the brave exploration into the den of sin completed.
He’s even gladder half an hour later when Tash is pulled dripping from the Jacuzzi, naked and totally lidded. Giggling young women, friends of Angela’s that Sandy calls the Tustin Trollops, maneuver Tashi onto the surfboard surrogate and urge him to ride some video waves for them, which he does with a perfect stoned grace, unaware of anything but the video wave, a Pipeline beauty twenty feet tall and stretching off into eternity. “Whoah,” says Tash from deep in his own tube. Erica, Tash’s ally, watches him with a look of sharp disapproval; Abe laughs at her.
Jim says “Hey, with his arms out like that he looks just like the statue of Poseidon in the Athens museum, here wait a second.” He goes to the video console and starts typing at the computer, and suddenly the wave is replaced by the motionless image of a statue: tall darkened-bronze bearded man, arms up to throw a javelin, eyes empty holes in the metal. Tash looks up, takes the pose instantly, and it brings down the house. “He does look just like him!” everyone exclaims. Jim, laughing, says, “Even the eyes are the same!” Tash growls in mock anger, without breaking the pose.
Abe laughs loud enough to draw the attention of a couple of the Tustin Trollops. Mary and Inez come over and join him on the couch; they’re part of Abe’s little fan club, and their lithe bodies press against his warmly, their fingers tangle in his black curls. Ah, yes, the blisses of unallied freedom.…
He’s putting his arm around Inez when something—the give of soft flesh?—causes the image of the injured woman to strike him. Pulled from the wreck, bent, patched, braced, bloody—Fuck. Tension twists his stomach and he hugs Inez to him violently, clamping his eyes shut; his face contorts back to a mask of normality. “Where’s that eyedropper I had with me?”
10
Dennis McPherson walks into his office one morning, just a mail visit before he runs over to White Sands, New Mexico, to oversee a test of the RPV system, now called Stormbee. He finds a note commanding him to go up and see Lemon.
His pulse goes up as the elevator rises. It’s only been a week since Lemon flared into one of his tantrums, pounding his desk and going scarlet in the face and shouting right at McPherson. “You’re too slow to do your job! You’re a goddamned nitpicking perfectionist, and I won’t abide it! I don’t allow dawdlers on my team! This is a war like any other! You seize the offensive when the chance comes, and go all the way with it! I want to see that proposal for Stormbee yesterday!” And so on. Lemon likes to burst all constraints occasionally, everyone working for him agrees about that. This doesn’t make McPherson like it any better. Lemon’s been out of engineering so long that little matters like weight or voltage or performance reliability don’t mean anything to him anymore. Those are things for others to worry about. For him it’s cost-effectiveness, schedules, the team’s momentum, its look. He’s the team’s fearless leader, the little führer of his little tin reich. If the project were perpetual motion he’d still be screaming about schedules, costs, PR…
This morning he’s Mr. Charm again, ushering McPherson in, calling him “Mac,” sitting casually on the edge of his desk. Doesn’t he realize that the charmer routine means nothing when combined with the tantrums? Worse than that—the two-facedness turns him into a slimy hypocrite, a manic-depressive, an actor. It would be easier to take if he just did the screaming tyrant thing all the time, really it would.
“So, how’s Stormbee coming along, Mac?”
“We’ve manufactured a prototype pod that is within the specs set by Feldkirk. The lab tests went okay and we’re scheduled to test it on one of Northrop’s RPVs out at White Sands this afternoon. If those go well we can either run it through some envelope testing or give to the Air Force and let them go at it.”
“We’ll give it to the Air Force. The sooner the better.” Of course. “They’ll be testing it anyway.”
That’s true, but it would be a lot safer for LSR if they found out about any performance problems before they let the Air Force see it. McPherson doesn’t say this, although he should. This abrogation of his responsibility to the program irritates him, but he’s sick of the tantrums.
Lemon is going on as if the matter is settled. That’s the trouble with superblack programs; the contractor tends to do less testing than any competition for a white program could possibly get away with. And yet there’s no good reason for it; they don’t have a deadline. Feldkirk just said they should get back to him as soon as they could. So the haste is just Lemon’s obsession; he’s weakening the strength of their proposal by a completely irrational sense that they have to hurry.…
“We’re going as fast as we can,” McPherson allows himself to say. It’s risking another outburst, but to hell with it.
“Oh I know you are, I know.” A dangerous gleam appears in Lemon’s eye, he’s about to press home the point of how he knows—because he’s the boss here, he’s in charge, he knows all. But McPherson deadpans his way through the moment, passes through unscathed. Lemon trots out some more of his führer encouragements, then says, “Okay, get yourself out to White Sands,” with a very good imitation of a smile. McPherson doesn’t attempt to reciprocate.
He tracks to San Clemente and takes the superconductor to El Paso. Fired like a bullet in an electromagnetic gun.
It’s been a tough couple of months, getting this test prepared. Every weekday he’s gone into the office at six A.M., made a list of the day’s activities that is sometimes forty items long, and gone at it until early evening, or even later than that. At first he had to deal with all of the tasks concerned with designing the Stormbee system: talking with the engineers and programmers, making suggestions, giving commands, coordinating their efforts, making decisions… It’s good work at that point, responding to the technical challenge and dealing with the problems presented by them. And his design crew is a good group, resourceful, hardworking, quirky; he has to ride herd on the efforts of this disparate bunch, and it’s interesting.