Jim says “Hey, with his arms out like that he looks just like the statue of Poseidon in the Athens museum, here wait a second.” He goes to the video console and starts typing at the computer, and suddenly the wave is replaced by the motionless image of a statue: tall darkened-bronze bearded man, arms up to throw a javelin, eyes empty holes in the metal. Tash looks up, takes the pose instantly, and it brings down the house. “He does look just like him!” everyone exclaims. Jim, laughing, says, “Even the eyes are the same!” Tash growls in mock anger, without breaking the pose.

Abe laughs loud enough to draw the attention of a couple of the Tustin Trollops. Mary and Inez come over and join him on the couch; they’re part of Abe’s little fan club, and their lithe bodies press against his warmly, their fingers tangle in his black curls. Ah, yes, the blisses of unallied freedom.…

He’s putting his arm around Inez when something—the give of soft flesh?—causes the image of the injured woman to strike him. Pulled from the wreck, bent, patched, braced, bloody—Fuck. Tension twists his stomach and he hugs Inez to him violently, clamping his eyes shut; his face contorts back to a mask of normality. “Where’s that eyedropper I had with me?”

Chapter 10

10

Dennis McPherson walks into his office one morning, just a mail visit before he runs over to White Sands, New Mexico, to oversee a test of the RPV system, now called Stormbee. He finds a note commanding him to go up and see Lemon.

His pulse goes up as the elevator rises. It’s only been a week since Lemon flared into one of his tantrums, pounding his desk and going scarlet in the face and shouting right at McPherson. “You’re too slow to do your job! You’re a goddamned nitpicking perfectionist, and I won’t abide it! I don’t allow dawdlers on my team! This is a war like any other! You seize the offensive when the chance comes, and go all the way with it! I want to see that proposal for Stormbee yesterday!” And so on. Lemon likes to burst all constraints occasionally, everyone working for him agrees about that. This doesn’t make McPherson like it any better. Lemon’s been out of engineering so long that little matters like weight or voltage or performance reliability don’t mean anything to him anymore. Those are things for others to worry about. For him it’s cost-effectiveness, schedules, the team’s momentum, its look. He’s the team’s fearless leader, the little führer of his little tin reich. If the project were perpetual motion he’d still be screaming about schedules, costs, PR …