There was nervous laughter around the table. Reemer Bolt smiled, too, showing he could take a joke. Reemer knew how to take a joke at his expense very well. You smiled along with the others and then a week later, a month later, maybe even a year later, you did something to get the joker fired. The problem with the beautiful Dr. O'Donnell was that she would always be ready for that. She knew him too well.
"All right," said Bolt. "Are you saying we should ditch two-point-five million dollars in development costs because we're afraid of causing a worldwide suntan?"
"Not at all," said Dr. O'Donnell. "What I am saying is this: that before we punch this hole in the ozone layer, we make sure it's only a hole. I am talking about the safe use of the sun. Priority one. Let's not turn the world into a rock."
The debate raged in Conference Room A for four more hours, but it was a foregone conclusion. Kathleen O'Donnell of Research and Development had won. The main priority of the Fluorocarbon Stream Generator project would be the survival of life on earth. It won heavily, five to two. Reemer had only Accounting on his side at the end.
And Kathleen O'Donnell had an increased research budget of seven million dollars. It always paid to do the right thing.
Six months and seventeen million dollars later, Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell stood looking at a pile of transistors, computer components, pressurized tanks, and a black box three times the size of a man and as unwieldy as an entire operating room. Priority One had still not been met. No one could predict how big a hole would be opened in the vital ozone shield around the earth. And it was on her research budget. She had gone to Bolt's office. She went with her best little-girl-coy look and her womanly perfume. She announced that she had come to discuss the project, and she wanted to do it in Bolt's office-alone.
"We can punch the hole, and I think it would be just a hole. The probability is that it would be a hole. But, Reemer, we can't be sure," she said.
This time her argument had force. She said it in the proper way, on Bolt's lap, playing with the buttons of his shirt. She said it smilingly, moving her hands lower down his shirt. She whispered in his ear, creating tingling warm sensations.
"Do you think I am going to jeopardize my position at Chemical Concepts for a tawdry roll in the hay, Kathy?" asked Bolt. He noticed that the lights were dim in his office. It was very late. There was no one else in the flat single-story concept center that was like so many of the sandstone buildings dotting Route 128. Cars made a blurred procession of lights through the window as they sped by in the rain-slick night. He thought he recognized her perfume. Which of his wives had worn that? Somehow it smelled so much better on Dr. O'Donnell.
"Uh-huh," answered Kathy O'Donnell.
"Not tawdry," said Bolt.
"Very tawdry," whispered Kathy.
And thus on the floor of Marketing Reemer Bolt found himself the sole authorizer of seventeen million dollars in development funds.
But on this day, the very intelligent Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell misjudged the mettle, of Reemer Bolt, marketing genius of the high-tech industry, for the first time.
He had the bulky instrument loaded on a flatbed truck and carted to a field just across the state border in Salem, New Hampshire. He pointed it at the sky, saying:
"If I don't make it in this world, nobody will make it." Dr. O'Donnell heard about the experiment one hour after Bolt and her scientific staff had left for Salem. She flew to her car, careened out of the parking lot at seventy miles an hour, and then picked up speed. She was doing 165 along Route 93 North. In a Porsche 92RS, no state trooper was going to catch her. And if one did, no speeding ticket would matter. There wouldn't be anyone to sit on a judge's bench. There might not even be any bench.
She knew where in Salem Bolt had gone. The corporation had a field up there for softball games, picnics, and land investment. When she tore onto the field, tires gouging the soft earth, Bolt was staring disconsolately at his feet with the blank eyes of a man who knew it was all over. His normally immaculate pin-striped jacket lay on the ground. He had been scuffing it with his shoes.
All he said when he saw Kathy stumble out of her Porsche was:
"I'm sorry, Kath. I really am. I didn't mean for this to happen. I had no other choice. You stuck me with a seventeen-million-dollar failure. I had to go for it."
"You idiot! We're all done for now."
"Not you, so much. I was the one who did it."
"Reemer, you have some logic glitches in your mentality mode, but downright stupidity is not one of them. If all life goes down the drain, what difference does it make whether it was you or I who pulled the plug?"
"Seventeen million down the drain," said Bolt, pointing to the blackened metallic structure in the middle of the field. "Nothing works on it. Look."
He showed Kathy the remote console her staff had devised. It had to be remote, because the fluorocarbon generator was so cumbersome that it could only be aimed in one direction: straight up. And that meant the sun's unfiltered rays would return in only one direction: straight down. If everything worked as theorized, the fluorocarbon beam would open a window that allowed raw solar radiation to bathe the earth's surface in a circle thirty meters wide. If it worked. Perfectly.
But now Bolt was punching buttons on a dead board. Not even the on light glowed. The fluorocarbon generator stood silently a hundred yards away. Bolt pounded the console. He hated it because it didn't work. Seventeen million dollars and it didn't work. He hit the console again. He would have killed it if it weren't already dead.
Kathy O'Donnell said nothing. Something was happening in the sky. Set against the clouds was an exquisite ring of blue haze, as though the clouds themselves wore a glowing round blue sapphire. She watched the circle. One of her staff members had a pair of binoculars and she ripped them from his neck. Desperately, she tried to focus on the clouds, on the light blue hazy ring.
"Has it been growing larger or smaller? " she demanded. "It think it's smaller," said a staffer, one of about twenty people in white smocks or shirtsleeves. They were all looking at her and Bolt with bewildered expressions.
"Smaller," said Kathy O'Donnell. She was speaking as much to herself as anyone else. "Smaller."
"Yes," said a technician. "I think you're right." Kathy looked at the ground. The grass around the fluorocarbon generator had turned a lighter shade of green. At a distance of about thirty meters, the blades were dark green. Then, as though someone had sprayed a lightening agent, they grew paler, even now becoming a dry whiteness. It was as though someone had drawn the circle of pale grass around the device with a compass. Thirty magnificent, glorious, miraculous feet around the device. It had worked. Perfectly.
"We did it," said Kathy.
"What? The thing doesn't work," said Bolt.
"Not now," replied Dr. Kathy O'Donnell. "But it did work. And it seems our first clear solar window to the sun has given us some interesting side effects."
For the unfiltered solar rays had not only scorched the earth, they had rendered electronic circuits inoperable. The fluorocarbon generator itself was proof. It had been struck and killed by the unfiltered rays.
The eager scientists discovered other side effects. The rays parched plant life, raised the temperature slightly, and burned the skin of living matter in a horrible and unforeseen way. Skin bubbled and blackened, then separated and peeled away. They noticed this when they saw the little furry legs of a chipmunk trying to run out of what was left of its skin.