Dennis McPherson is not surprised to find that Lemon is furious about all aspects of the Stormbee decision, including the protest. Since the protest was Hereford’s idea, stimulated by McPherson’s outburst and made before the whole traveling crew of the company, it makes Lemon look like he is not crucial to the policy-making process of LSR, and he can’t stand it. So with his most malicious smile he gives McPherson the job of representing LSR in the long and involved matter of the appeal. He guesses that McPherson will hate it, and he is right. Now McPherson has two main tasks: flying to Washington and talking to their law firm, appearing before committees and making depositions and the like; and helping Dan Houston, back in Laguna, with the disaster that Ball Lightning is about to become. Great. McPherson can feel his stomach shrinking, a little more every day.

So he’s off to Crystal City again. In for consultation with LSR’s law firm, Hunt Stanford and Goldman Incorporated. One of the most prosperous firms in the city, which is saying a lot.

It’s Goldman who has been put in charge of their case; Louis Goldman, who is fortyish, balding, handsome, and a very snappy dresser. McPherson, who for years has believed lawyers to be one of the principal groups of parasites in the country, along with advertisers and stockbrokers, was at first quite stiff with the East Coast smoothie. But it turns out that Goldman is a nice guy, very sharp, and someone who takes his job seriously, and McPherson has grown to respect and then like him. For a lawyer he isn’t bad.

Tonight they’re having dinner up in Crystal City’s finest restaurant, a rotating thing on the roof of the forty-story Hilton. Planes landing at National Airport cruise down the Potomac River basin, already below them: a strange sight.

McPherson asks about the appeal and Goldman makes a little flow chart on a napkin. “The whole history of the project prior to the Air Force’s RFP is out, of course,” he says. “No one wants these superblack programs acknowledged in public, and there’s nothing written down concerning it anyway, so for our purposes it’s irrelevant.”

McPherson nods. “I understand that. But the RFP as published matched the specs they gave us for the superblack program, so any deviation from that—”

“Sure. That could be grounds for a successful challenge. Let’s see if I’ve got the main points as you see them. Air Force asked you for a covert guidance system for a remotely piloted aircraft that could be dropped from low orbit, to underweather but without blind let-down, where it would be navigated at treetop level. Then it was to locate enemy military vehicles and lock on air-to-surface missiles it would be carrying.”

“That’s what they wanted.”

“And they wanted it in one pod, preferably, and it was to use less than eleven KVA.”