First he kicked out all the outsiders, the NASA people and the rest, whom he regarded as not strictly necessary for the progress of the MEM. It took him a day just to do that, and he had a lot of opposition from the NASA bigwigs, of course, but he did it anyhow.

Still, it worried him a little that Art Cane’s backing in this was muted.

Then he spent a couple of days working through the two audit reports, and blue-penciling the politics and the waffle and the ill-informed and the downright goddamn stupid. And there was a hell of a lot of that.

The auditors, both internal and external, had gone for what he considered to be easy meat: schedule delays and paperwork snarl-ups and procedural problems. To Lee, schedules on paper were all very well — you had to produce them for senior management, and they were always the best guess you could make, and you had to keep a weather eye on them — but the fact was, half the time Columbia didn’t know what they were trying to build here, or what the latest batch of test results would throw at them, or what the latest flood of changes from the design teams at Marshall, Houston, and elsewhere would bring. In a program like the MEM you couldn’t expect actually to stick to a schedule. The delays certainly weren’t a question of his people’s competence, as far as Lee was concerned; they were more a measure of the inherent complexity of what they were trying to do.

Columbia was building a spacecraft, for God’s sake; and you only had to walk through the Clean Room, to see the four beautiful test articles emerging, to understand that basically, at the heart of all the paper storms, JK Lee was succeeding.

He tried to distill the reports down to what he considered to be the elements of common sense, of valid criticism, and then act on them. For instance the auditors had found poor demarcation of work areas, and sloppy handling of materials, and so forth. Well, he wasn’t going to argue about that kind of thing. Lee fired off memos, and called in people to chew ass, and demanded some fixing.

After a few days of this he went to see Art Cane, and he was able to throw the two fat audit reports across the desk at Art. Every paragraph of each report had been blue-penciled by Lee, either as completed, with a fat tick, or as irrelevant bullshit, in which case he’d just scribbled it out.

Cane leafed through the stuff, looking a little dubious; but he accepted what Lee had given him, and told him to write up his responses to the reports formally.