For the last several weeks McPherson has been whipping the informal Stormbee proposal into formal shape. Going from superblack to white. There are advantages to a white program that McPherson appreciates. Everything’s on the table, the specs are there in the RFP and can’t be changed by some clown in the Air Force who happens to come up with a new idea. And they’re forced by the intense competition to do a thorough job, including tests that are run until every part of the system has been proved to work, under all kinds of circumstances. And that’s good in the long run, as far as McPherson is concerned. He’s been out to White Sands seven times in the last month, working on further tests of the system, and in the tests they discovered, for instance, that if the target tanks were grouped in a mass the laser target designator tended to fix only on the tanks on the perimeter, leaving those in the middle alone. Some work by the programmers and the problem was solved, but if they hadn’t even known about it? Yes, this is the way McPherson likes to work. “Let’s get it right,” he tells his crew almost every day. In fact his programmers call him LGIR behind his back, pronounced “Elgir,” which has led certain music-minded programmers to speak of cello concertos, or to whistle “Pomp and Circumstance” to indicate the boss’s arrival on the scene.…

So, McPherson sits down at his desk and looks at the list of Things To Do that he left the night before. He adds several items that have occurred to him over the night, and on the drive in.

9:00 meet Don F. re Strmbee prop printing

see Lonnie on CO2 laser problems

work Strmb prop introduction

1:30 meeting software group re guidance

call Dahlvin on Strmb power

work Strmb prop

4:00 meet Dan Houston on Ball Lightning

He lifts the phone, punches the button for Don Freiburg. The day begins.

*   *   *

Becoming a white program means that the Stormbee proposal is now part of the mainstream of public military procurement in America. This is a vastly complicated process that contains hundreds of variables, and very few people, if any, understand all the facets of it. Certainly McPherson does not; he concentrates on the part of the process that is important to his work, just as everyone else does. Thus he is an expert in the Air Force’s aerospace technology procurement, and knows little or nothing about other areas. Just learning his own little area is difficult enough.