Hereford frowns. “Let me get back to you on that,” he says, and the screen goes blank.

Chapter 71

71

The next day, after a productive morning and a busy lunch conferring with Dan Houston, Dennis gets a call from Lemon’s secretary Ramona, instructing him to come up for a conference with the boss. McPherson needs to talk to him anyway, so he ignores his usual irritation at the peremptory summons and goes on up.

Lemon is standing in front of his window as usual, looking out at the sea. He seems on edge, ill at ease—at least to a certain minute extent. It’s hard to tell, but McPherson has had to become an expert in reading the tiny signals that mark his boss’s mercurial mood swings, and now, as he sits down on the hot seat and watches Lemon pacing, he senses something unusual, a tension beyond the usual manic energy.

At first he speaks only of the Ball Lightning program. He really grills McPherson about it, a cross-examination as intense as any Lemon has ever subjected him to, something reminiscent of an SSEB questioning back in Dayton. Lemon hasn’t discussed technical matters in such detail as this in years; he’s really done his homework.

But why? McPherson can’t figure it out.

“What it comes down to,” Lemon says heavily when he is done, “is that you’ve got a great idea for a phased array attack, which takes us far into the post–boost phase. But we can’t meet the specs that we supposedly proved we could meet, in the initial proposal that won us the program.”

“That’s right,” McPherson says. “It isn’t physically possible.”

“Not for you, you mean.”

McPherson shrugs. He’s so tired of Lemon he doesn’t even care about hiding it anymore. “Not for me, right. I can’t change the laws of physics. Maybe you can. But if you fake tests to try to bend the laws of physics, you always get caught at this point, don’t you.”

Lemon’s eyes are just barely narrowed, a dangerous sign. “You’re saying Houston faked the tests on the proposal?”

“We’ve just gone over all the data, right? We’ve known this ever since you put me on the program. What’s the point of all this? Someone either concocted a good-looking test, with real but irrelevant results—and if that’s faking the Air Force has been doing it for years—or else someone made a stupid mistake, and assumed the test proved the system would work in the real world, when it didn’t.”

Lemon nods slowly, as if satisfied with something. For a long time he stands staring out the window.