Michael Crichton - Disclosure

"That's right."

"Okay. I'll leave soup on. I'll see you when you get here."

Cindy placed a stack of files on his desk. When Sanders hung up, she said, "She already knew?"

"She suspected."

Cindy nodded. "She called at lunchtime," she said. "I had the sense. The spouses are talking, I imagine."

"I'm sure everybody's talking."

Cindy went to the door, then paused. Cautiously, she said, "And how was the lunch meeting?"

"Meredith was introduced as the new head of all the tech divisions. She gave a presentation. She says she's going to keep all the division heads in place, all reporting to her."

"Then there's no change for us? Just another layer on top?"

"So far. That's what they're telling me. Why? What do you hear?"

"I hear the same."

He smiled. "Then it must be true."

"Should I go ahead and buy the condo?" She had been planning this for some time, a condo in Queen Anne's Hill for herself and her young daughter.

Sanders said, "When do you have to decide?"

"I have another fifteen days. End of the month."

"Then wait. You know, just to be safe."

She nodded, and went out. A moment later, she came back. "I almost forgot. Mark Lewyn's office just called. The Twinkle drives have arrived from KL. His designers are looking at them now. Do you want to see them?"

"I'm on my way."

The Design Group occupied the entire second floor of the Western Building. As always, the atmosphere there was chaotic; all the phones were ringing, but there was no receptionist in the little waiting area by the elevators, which was decorated with faded, taped-up posters for a 1929 Bauhaus Exhibition in Berlin and an old science-fiction movie called The Forbin Project. Two Japanese visitors sat at a corner table, speaking rapidly, beside the battered Coke machine and the junk food dispenser. Sanders nodded to them, used his card to open the locked door, and went inside.

The floor was a large open space, partitioned at unexpected angles by slanted walls painted to look like pastel-veined stone. Uncomfortable-looking wire chairs and tables were scattered in odd places. Rockand-roll music blared. Everybody was casually dressed; most of the designers wore shorts and T-shirts. It was clearly A Creative Area.

Sanders went through to Foamland, the little display of the latest product designs the group had made. There were models of tiny CDROM drives and miniature cellular phones. Lewyn's teams were charged with creating product designs for the future, and many of these seemed absurdly small: a cellular phone no larger than a pencil, and another that looked like a postmodern version of Dick Tracy's wrist radio, in pale green and gray; a pager the size of a cigarette lighter; and a micro-CD player with a flip-up screen that could fit easily in the palm of the hand.

Although these devices looked outrageously tiny, Sanders had long since become accustomed to the idea that the designs were at most two years in the future. The hardware was shrinking fast; it was difficult for Sanders to remember that when he began working at DigiCom, a "portable" computer was a thirty-pound box the size of a carry-on suitcase and cellular telephones didn't exist at all. The first cellular phones that DigiCom manufactured were fifteen-pound wonders that you lugged around on a shoulder strap. At the time, people thought they were a miracle. Now, customers complained if their phones weighed more than a few ounces.

Sanders walked past the big foam-cutting machine, all twisted tubes and knives behind Plexiglas shields, and found Mark Lewyn and his team bent over three dark blue CD-ROMplayers from Malaysia. One of the players already lay in pieces on the table; under bright halogen lights, the team was poking at its innards with tiny screwdrivers, glancing up from time to time to the scope screens.

"What've you found?" Sanders said.

"Ah, hell," Lewyn said, throwing up his hands in artistic exasperation. "Not good, Tom. Not good."

"Talk to me."

Lewyn pointed to the table. "There's a metal rod inside the hinge. These clips maintain contact with the rod as the case is opened; that's how you maintain power to the screen."

"Yes…"

"But power is intermittent. It looks like the rods are too small. They're supposed to be fifty-four millimeters. These seem to be fiftytwo, fifty-three millimeters."

Lewyn was grim, his entire manner suggesting unspeakable consequences. The bars were a millimeter off, and the world was coming to an end. Sanders understood that he would have to calm Lewyn down. He'd done it many times before.

He said, "We can fix that, Mark. It'll mean opening all the cases and replacing the bars, but we can do that."

"Oh sure," Lewyn said. "But that still leaves the clips. Our specs call for 16/10 stainless, which has requisite tension to keep the clips springy and maintain contact with the bar. These clips seem to be something else, maybe 16/4. They're too stiff: So when you open the cases the clips bend, but they don't spring back."

"So we have to replace the clips, too. We can do that when we switch the bars."

"Unfortunately, it's not that easy. The clips are heat-pressed into the cases."

"Ah, hell."

"Right. They are integral to the case unit."

"You're telling me we have to build new housings just because we have bad clips?"

"Exactly."

Sanders shook his head. "We've run off thousands so far. Something like four thousand."

"Well, we've got to do 'em again."

"And what about the drive itself?"

"It's slow," Lewyn said. "No doubt about it. But I'm not sure why. It might be power problems. Or it might be the controller chip."

"If it's the controller chip…"

"We're in deep shit. If it's a primary design problem, we have to go back to the drawing board. If it's only a fabrication problem, we have to change the production lines, maybe remake the stencils. But it's months, either way."

"When will we know?"

"I've sent a drive and power supply to the Diagnostics guys," Lewyn said. "They should have a report by five. I'll get it to you. Does Meredith know about this yet?"

"I'm briefing her at six."

"Okay. Call me after you talk to her?"

"Sure."

"In a way, this is good," Lewyn said.

"How do you mean?"

"We're throwing her a big problem right away," Lewyn said. "We'll see how she handles it."

Sanders turned to go. Lewyn followed him out. "By the way," Lewyn said. "Are you pissed off that you didn't get the job?"

"Disappointed," Sanders said. "Not pissed. There's no point being pissed."

"Because if you ask me, Garvin screwed you. You put in the time, you've demonstrated you can run the division, and he put in someone else instead."

Sanders shrugged. "It's his company."

Lewyn threw his arm over Sanders's shoulder, and gave him a rough hug. "You know, Tom, sometimes you're too reasonable for your own good."

"I didn't know being reasonable was a defect," Sanders said.

"Being too reasonable is a defect," Lewyn said. "You end up getting pushed around."

"I'm just trying to get along," Sanders said. "I want to be here when the division goes public."

"Yeah, true. You got to stay." They came to the elevator. Lewyn said, "You think she got it because she's a woman?"

Sanders shook his head. "Who knows."

"Pale males eat it again. I tell you. Sometimes I get so sick of the constant pressure to appoint women," Lewyn said. "I mean, look at this design group. We've got forty percent women here, better than any other division, but they always say, why don't you have more. More women, more-"

"Mark," he said, interrupting. "It's a different world now."

"And not a better one," Lewyn said. "It's hurting everybody. Look: when I started in DigiCom, there was only one question. Are you good? If you were good, you got hired. If you could cut it, you stayed. No more. Now, ability is only one of the priorities. There's also the question of whether you're the right sex and skin color to fill out the company's HR profiles. And if you turn out to be incompetent, we can't fire you. Pretty soon, we start to get junk like this Twinkle drive. Because no one's accountable anymore. No one is responsible. You can't build products on atheory.Because the product you're making is real. And if it stinks, it stinks. And no one will buy it."