Breathing heavily, he surveys the room, then very carefully puts everything back in order. He’s still angry, but physically he feels less like he’s going to explode. His health really can’t take the pressures of this job, he thinks; it’s a race between ulcers and heart attack, and both contestants are picking up the pace as they near the finish line.… He swallows a Tagamet and a Minipress, hits the intercom button, says to Ramona in his calmest voice, “Is McPherson back from White Sands yet?”

“Let me check.…” Ramona knows perfectly well that this dead-calm voice means he is furious. All the better, he likes people to know when he’s mad. She gets back to him quickly: “Yes, he’s just in.”

“Get him up here now.”

Actually it takes more like fifteen minutes for McPherson to show up. He looks annoyed in his usual minimalist way, mouth drawn tight, eyes staring an accusation. He’s angry? Lemon stands up the moment he walks in, feels the pressure in him rising again.

Nearly shouting, he says, “I asked you to hurry on the Storm-bee program, didn’t I! And you gave me that what’s-the-big-hurry look, there’s no deadline, and now I’ll tell you what the big hurry was, goddamn it!”

McPherson flinches under this immediate onslaught, then clams up completely. No expression on his face at all. Lemon hates this robot response, and he sets about cracking it open: “They’ve made your superblack program white, do you understand? If we’d gotten the proposal to the Pentagon when I wanted to they wouldn’t have been able to do this, but you had to hold on to it! And now it’s a white program and the RFP is out there for everyone to go after!”

That got him all right. McPherson has visibly paled, his mouth is nothing but a tight white line across his face. “When did you hear?” he manages to say, jaw bunching and unbunching.

“Just now! I’m not as slow as you are, I just got the call from New York. From Hereford himself.”

“But—” The man is really in shock, or else he wouldn’t deign to ask Lemon questions like this: “What happened? Why?”