Bruce Sterling - Distraction

“Forgive me for cold-calling you, ma’am, but I think Mr. Griego will want to talk to me. Would you please tell Ron that it’s Oscar Valparaiso, class of ’37, and that it’s an urgent federal matter?”

Griego was on the phone within five minutes. He and Oscar traded wary pleasantries.

“Went into the family car business after all, eh, Ron?”

“That’s why Dad sent me to Harvard,” Griego said. “What’s with this awful phone connection?”

“Encryption and rerouting. Sorry. Look, it’s about the Buna Na-tional Collaboratory.”

“I hear you’re shutting the place down,” Griego said cheerfully. “There’s a big workers’ strike going on there. Well, of course that’s a blow to our futuristic research effort, but I don’t want you to worry. We understand labor troubles, here in the auto business. If we can lobby Congress to let us keep this fiscal year’s R D deductions, we think we can survive the loss of our Buna lab.”

“Sorry, but it won’t be quite that easy, Ron.”

“But I’m making it easy for you,” Griego said, wounded. “Shut the place down, fire ’em all. Zero it out, lock the doors, it’s over, they’re history. What could be easier than that?”

“Oh, that’s easy enough for me — I meant to say that it wouldn’t be easy for you.”

“I might have known,” Griego groaned. “Why can’t it ever be easy with you, Valparaiso? What have you got against the rest of us? What is your problem?”

“Just fitting a few loose ends together. Believe me, Ron, I can sympathize. It must have been a nightmare for you — netwarring some krewe of lunatics who built a magic sugar battery.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Look, Ron, relax. Remember that time I hid those two hook-ers from the campus police? I never outed you on anything, and I’m not planning to out you now. Just level with me. That’s all that I ever ask. ”

There was a long uneasy silence. Then Griego burst out in a fury. “Don’t get all high-and-mighty with me, Mr. Third-in-His-Class. You think it’s easy running corporate R D? It was just fine, as long as the guy didn’t have anything. Jesus, nobody ever thought a goddamn sugar engine would work. The goddamn thing is a giant germ in a box! We build cars up here, we don’t build giant germs! Then they pull this crazy stunt and… well, it Just makes our life impossible! We’re a classic, metal-bending industry! We have in-terlocking directorates all throughout the structure, raw materials, fuel, spare parts, the dealerships… We can’t get into the face of our fuel suppliers, telling them that we’re replacing them with sugar water! We own our fuel suppliers! It’d be like sawing off our own foot!”

“I understand about interlocking directorates and mutual stock ownership, Ron. I was sitting right next to you in business school, remember? Cut to the chase — what about the battery?”

“Batteries have the highest profit margin of any automobile component. We were making money there. You can’t make real money anywhere else in our business. The Koreans are building auto bodies out of straw and paper! We can’t support an industry when cars are cheaper than grocery carts! What are we gonna tell our unions? This is a great American tradition at stake here! The car defines Amer-ica: the assembly line, suburbs, drive-ins, hot rods, teenage sex, every-thing that makes America great! We can’t turn ourselves inside out because some big-brained creep has built an engine out of bug guts! There wouldn’t be anything left of us! The guy is a menace to society! He had to be stopped.”

“Thank you for that, Ron. Now we’re getting somewhere. So tell me this — why didn’t you just pull his damn funding?”

“If only it were that simple! We’re required by federal fiat to invest in basic R D. It was part of our federal bailout deal. We’re supposed to have trade protection, and we’re supposed to catch our breath, and jump a generation ahead of our foreign competitors. But if we jump a generation ahead of the damn Koreans, our industry will vanish entirely. People will make cars the way they make pop-up toast. Proles will build cars out of bio-scrap, and compost them in the backyard. We’ll all be doomed.”

“So you’re telling me that you’ve achieved a tremendous scien-tific R D success, but as a collateral effect, it will eliminate your industry.”

“Yeah. That’s it. Exactly. And I’m sorry, but we just can’t face that. We have stockholders to worry about, we have a labor force. We don’t want to end up like the computer people did. Jesus, there’s no sense to that. It’s total madness, it’s demented. We’d be cutting our own throats.”

“Ron, take it easy, okay? I’m with you here, I’m following your argument. Thanks for leveling with me. I comprehend your situation now. It fits into the big picture.”

Oscar drew a breath. “You see, Ron, the true core issue here is the basic interplay of commerce and science. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this problem recently, and now I realize that the old-style big-science game is just no longer tenable. Only savages and Con-gressmen could believe that science is a natural friend of commerce. Science has never been the friend of commerce. The truth doesn’t have any friends. Sometimes the interests of science and commerce can coincide for a little while, but that’s not a marriage. It’s a danger-ous liaison. If you’re a working businessman, R D can turn on you with sudden, vicious speed.”

“You got that right,” Griego said fervently.

“Ron, it saddens me to see you jerked around in this way. If you don’t want to finance R D, that ought to be a decision properly left to the industry. You shouldn’t be compelled to take action by distant, uncaring federal bureaucrats who don’t understand the real dynamics of private enterprise. And most of all, you certainly shouldn’t have to waste your time, and mine, running sabotage mind games against a federal laboratory. That’s just a big, counterproductive distraction that puts you and me at unnecessary loggerheads. We’re serious players, Ron. People like us ought to be talking this over as mature individuals and arriving at a modus vivendi.”

Griego sighed into the phone. “Okay, Oscar. You can stop sweet-talking me now. What are you planning to do to me?”

“Well, I could out this whole ugly thing. Then we’d have inves-tigations, and Senate hearings, and possible indictments, and the whole tiresome, unfortunate business. But suppose that never happened. Suppose that I could personally guarantee you that this guy’s miracle battery drops right off the edge of the earth. And all that costs you is a mere fifty percent of your current R D invest-ment.”

“I’d say that’s much too good to be true.”

“No, Ron. It’s the new order, here at the Collaboratory. You just don’t need major scientific advances in the American car industry. You’ve already had more of that than you can stand. You guys are a national historic treasure, like a buffalo herd or Valley Forge. You need protection from the menace of basic research. Instead of paying federal scientists to march your industry right off the cliff, you should be paying scientists protection money not to research your business. That’ll ensure that your industry doesn’t go anywhere.”

“That sounds so beautiful,” Griego said wistfully. “Is it legal?”

“Why not? Your sabotage routine can’t be legal, but you’ve been getting away with that for years. My proposal is a major improvement on the status quo, because now we’re being honest about it. As a gesture of goodwill, I’ll not only overlook your sad little corporate espionage, I’ll cut your R D expenditure in half!”