“Why? I’ll tell you why! You were too fucking slow, that’s why!” Lemon pounds his desk hard. “Let me try to explain the Air Force to you again, McPherson. They like results! They don’t have the patience of a hummingbird, and when they ask for something they want it now! If they don’t get it they go somewhere else. So you didn’t produce as fast as they wanted! It’s been four months, for Christ’s sake! Four months! And so now the RFP for the Stormbee contract is coming out this Friday in Commercial Business Daily, and after that we’re just one of any number of bidders. If the Pentagon had already gotten our proposal and accepted it this couldn’t have happened, but as it is now, we’re fucked! We’re back to square one!”

Lemon has worked himself into a therapeutic frenzy with this outburst, and he can see McPherson is infuriated too, the man’s lips are going to fuse if he doesn’t watch out. If he were a normal kind of guy they’d shout it out, get it all off their chests and be able to go out afterward and drink it off and plan some strategy, the hard words forgotten as things spoken in the heat of anger. But McPherson? No, no, he just holds it all in with an almost frightening compression, till it metamorphoses into a hate for Lemon that Lemon can see just as sure as he can see the man’s face. And it makes Lemon mad. He hates that closemouthed supercilious style, it angers him personally and it loses them business. Disgusted, he waves the man away. He can’t stand to look at him. “Get out of here, McPherson. Get out of my sight.”

“I take it we’ll be making a bid?”

“Yes! For Christ’s sake, do you think I’m going to let all that work go to waste? You get this thing whipped into proper proposal shape and do it fast. Was the test at White Sands successful?”

“Yes.”

“Good! You get this proposal into the selection board first. With the head start we’ve had we should be able to make the strongest bid by a good margin.”

“Yeah.”

“You bet, yeah. I’ll tell you this, McPherson—your ass is on the line, this time. After all the stunts you’ve pulled—you’d better win this one. You’d better.”