And worrying, to the point that Lemon barely tastes his French toast. He leaves the dishes for Elsa—give her at least that to do—goes in and dresses. “I’m off,” he says brusquely to the sleeping form, still in her bed. Elsa just mutters something from a dream, rolls over. She hasn’t spoken to him for … Lemon’s mouth tightens. He leaves the house and tries to forget about it.

Into the Mercedes. A Vivaldi oboe concerto for the ride along the coast to work. In his mind are mixed images of Elsa in bed, the Ball Lightning proposal, Hereford watching him over the video from his desk in the World Trade Center. Dan Houston’s hangdog look, the Ball Lightning figures. Ach—the pressures on the executives are always the most extreme; but it’s what he’s trained for, what he’s always wanted.…

First meeting of the day is with Dennis McPherson, to go over the numbers for the Stormbee proposal. The proposals are due in just over a week, and McPherson is still dawdling; it’s time to get serious. Time to decide the amount for the bid, the money total, the number of dollars. This is probably the crux of the whole process, the moment when they will either win or lose.

“All right, Mac,” Lemon begins impatiently. Might as well settle immediately into their usual dialectic, Lemon sarcastic and oppressive, McPherson stiff and steaming. “I’ve looked over the numbers you’ve sent up, and my judgment is that the final total is considerably too high. The Air Force just doesn’t want to pay this much for unmanned systems, they still have a strong prejudice against planes without pilots and they’re only going for this stuff because the technology makes it inevitable. But we’ve got to play to that, or we’re going to be left out.”

McPherson shrugs. “We’ve kept everything down as much as we could.”

Lemon stares at him. “All right. Pull your chair over to the desk here, and let’s go into it line by line.”

Micromanagement. Lemon grits his teeth.

McPherson’s people have got all the figures printed out in a sheaf of graph-filled sheets. First comes the full-scale engineering development costs. Prime mission equipment, $189 million. Training, less than a million, as always. Flight test support equipment, $10 million. System test and evaluation, $25 million. System project management, $63 million. Data, $18 million. Total, $305 million.

Lemon presses McPherson on the prime mission equipment figures, running through the subtotals and pointing items out. “Why should it take that much? I’ve done a rough estimate using prices of the components we’re buying from other companies, and it shouldn’t be more than one thirty.”