“Did you hear about Johnson at Loral?” asks Art. “He’s in charge of the fourth-tier ICBM program, shooting down leakers. So, one day he gets a directive from SDC, and it says, Please assume that you will have to deal with twenty percent more than the total amount estimated to be launched in a full-scale attack!” They all laugh. “He almost has a heart attack, this is a couple of orders of magnitude more incoming than he thought the system was going to have to deal with, and all his software is shit out of luck. The whole system is overwhelmed. So he calls the Pentagon just before his ticker says good-bye, and finds out that whoever wrote ‘twenty percent more than’ should have written ‘twenty percent of. “…”

“He’s still got trouble,” Dan says when they stop laughing. “They can’t even knock down one incoming with more than fifty percent reliability, so they’re going to have to at least double the number of smart rocks, and the Pentagon is already threatening to dump him.” This reminds Dan of his own troubles, and with a grim smile he downs the rest of his margarita.

Art and Jerry, aware of their boss’s moods, sense this change of humor. And this is supposed to be a conference between the two managers. So they chat for a while longer, and finish their drinks, and then they’re up and off. Dan and Dennis are left there to talk things over.

“So,” Dan says, smiling the same unhumorous smile. “Lemon has stuck you into the Ball Lightning program, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“Worse luck for you.” Dan signals to a passing waitress for another pitcher. “He’s running scared, I’ll tell you that. Hereford is calling from New York and putting the pressure on, and right now he’s feeling it but good, because we are stuck.” He shakes his head miserably. “Stuck.”

“Tell me about it.”

Dan gets out a pen, draws a circle on the yellow paper tablecloth. “The real problem,” he complains, “is that the first tier has been given an impossible job. Strategic Defense Command has said that seventy percent of all Soviet ICBMs sent up in a full attack are to be destroyed in the boost phase. We won a development contract using that figure as the baseline goal. But it can’t be done.”

“You think not?” McPherson suspects that Dan may just be making excuses for his program’s problems. He sips his drink. “Why?”