Stiffly the man nods, stomps out. Goddamned robot. Lemon can’t believe he’s got such a tight-ass robot working for him still. It just isn’t his style, he can’t work with a man like that. Well—this is McPherson’s last chance, he has tinkered around in perfectionist dilettante style one time too many. Vengefully Lemon hits the intercom and tells Ramona to send a memo: “To Dennis McPherson. Tell him that along with program management for the Stormbee proposal, I want him co-directing the Ball Lightning program with Dan Houston. Tell him Houston remains head, but he is to render all assistance asked of him.”

That’ll give the bastard something to think about.

Chapter 15

15

So Jim tracks up to his parents’ home that evening, to join them for dinner. Up the knob of Red Hill, the first rise off the big flat plain of the OC basin, a sort of lookout point sticking out from the hills behind it. Jim’s books say there was a mine there in the 1920s, the Red Hill mercury mine, with tailings that could be found decades later. And the soil of the hill had a reddish cast, because of the high amount of cinnabar in it.

Home is the same. Dennis is back from work, out in the garage working on his car’s motor, which is already in perfect factory condition. He doesn’t reply to Jim’s hello, and Jim goes on into their section of the house. Lucy is making dinner; happily she greets him, and he sits down comfortably at the kitchen table. Quickly enough he’s up on the latest developments at the little church: the minister still has some problem related to the death of his wife, the new vicar continues to vex the veteran membership, Lillian Keilbacher has started work as Lucy’s assistant in the minister’s office.

Then he hears about Lucy’s friends, and then Dennis’s work. This is the only way that Jim ever hears about his father’s work, perhaps because Dennis assumes, correctly, that Jim is a pacifist bleeding-heart pseudoradical who wouldn’t approve of any of it. So Dennis never speaks of it to Jim. Apparently he’s almost as bad with Lucy; her account is fragmented and incomplete, consisting mostly of her own judgments and opinions, generated by the minute bits of evidence Dennis mutters when he arrives home, disgruntled and closemouthed. “He hates this Lemon he’s working for,” Lucy opines, shaking her head in disapproval. It’s not Christian, it’s not good for his health, it’s not good for his career. “He should try to like him more. It’s not as if the man is the devil or something like that. He probably has troubles of his own.”

“I don’t know,” Jim says. “Some people can be pretty awful to work for.”