Kim Robinson: The Gold Coast

“ Ah, hahaha. No party tonight, boys.”

“That’s what you think.”

The next morning Dennis McPherson, Jim’s father, takes United’s commuter flight from LAX to National Airport in Washington, D.C. He wakes as the Boeing 7X7 drops back into the atmosphere, shuffles the papers on his lap back into his briefcase. They haven’t helped him. Of course he’s napped for most of the short flight, but even if he had been reading them they wouldn’t have helped. He’s here, first, to meet with Air Force Colonel T. D. Eaton, to confer on the progress of the Ball Lightning program, one of the big contracts currently in development at McPherson’s company, Laguna Space Research. It’s not McPherson’s program, however, and he doesn’t know how to explain the delays that have plagued it. His old friend Dan Houston should be fielding this one, but Houston is down at White Sands, trying to get a successful trial out of Ball Lightning’s acquisition/pointing/tracking satellite. And McPherson has other errands to run in Washington, so he’s been stuck with this one too. Great.

The other purpose for this visit is a conference with Major Tom Feldkirk, from the Air Force’s Electronic Systems Division. Feldkirk requested the conference without giving a reason for it, which is worrying. LSR has several contracts with the Electronic Systems Division, and the problem to be discussed could be in one of a number of areas.

Because the truth of the matter is, LSR is struggling these days. Too many proposals have been lost, and too many of the contracts won have gone into delays and overruns. The Air Force is coming down on such problems harder than ever, and whatever Feldkirk wants to discuss, it isn’t likely to be good.

The plane floats down the Potomac River basin and lands. Time to get to his hotel.

He goes onto automatic pilot. So many repetitions.… He’s become chief errand boy at LSR for this kind of thing, sent to Washington about twenty times a year to put out one fire after another. (Off the plane, into the terminal. He’s refined his luggage to a single flight bag, and goes straight out to the taxi line.) From all these more-or-less diplomatic assignments you might guess he was a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy, someone who could pal around with the flyboys and drink away their objections. Not so: Dennis McPherson is a reserved man, with a contained manner that can make people nervous. (Into a taxi, off to the Crystal City Hyatt Regency. Traffic bumpertobumper on George Washington Parkway lower level.) He can handle his end of dinner talk as well as the next man; he just isn’t into a bonhomie that in this context has to be transparent and false always, and therefore offputting. This is big business, after all, the biggest business: defense. Why even pretend that your favorite buddy is some Air Force jock you have to deal with?

Into the Crystal City Hyatt Regency, a big irregular space filled with mirrors, escalators, cascading fountains of water and light, walls of glossy greenery, hanging elevators, overhanging balconies. He threads the maze without a thought and checks in, goes up to his room. Into the chrome-and-white-tile bathroom, to stare into the darkened mirror, perhaps clean up a bit before the day’s work.

Pink freckled skin. He needs a shave. Strawberry-blond hair, as Lucy always calls it, receding from a round Irish forehead. Cold blue eyes and deep vertical creases between his eyebrows; he’s a stocky stubborn figure, one of those smoldering Irish who don’t say much, and now he looks harried, tired, annoyed. It’s going to be a tough day.

Strange how it’s come to this. McPherson began as an engineer—damn it, he is an engineer. He has a degree in aerospace engineering from Cal Tech, and even though he’s hopelessly off the edge these days, he can still follow it when his design people describe things. And McPherson can see the larger patterns, where engineering touches both invention and administration. But management itself?… Other program managers got there on leadership, they know how to coax or bully extra results out of their teams. McPherson’s boss Stewart Lemon is a perfect example of this type, the Dynamic Leader of the business schools. McPherson leaves that kind of Napoleonic style to others, and in fact he despises it in Lemon. For his part, he just figures out what has to be done, and lays it out. Low-keyed approach. (Shower, shave.) No, it’s not leadership that got him out of engineering and into administration.

How did it happen, then? He’s never been too sure. (Into the day’s clothes: colorless conservative dress, appropriate for Pentagon dealings.) He can explain technical matters to people who don’t know enough to fully understand them. Administrators in LSR’s parent company, Pentagon people, congressional aides… people who need to have a clear idea of technical problems before they can make their own decisions. McPherson can do that. He’s not sure why, but it happens. He tries to explain, and they usually get it. Strange. His wife Lucy would laugh, perhaps angrily; she considers him awful at “communicating.” But that’s what’s gotten him where he is, and really it’s not funny; it means that he has somehow strayed out of the line of work where he might have enjoyed himself, been comfortable.

Half an hour to kill. He turns on the video wall’s news program. The war in Arabia is heating up; Bahrain is embroiled now, with U.S. Marines fighting the insurgents, which shows it’s serious. They’re finding the Hewlett-Packard IRHUD helmets are giving them a big advantage in night fighting, but the insurgents have some old Norwegian Kongsberg Vaapenfabrikk Penguin missiles that are wreaking havoc on the U.S. fleet offshore, all the aluminum in those old destroyers melting like plastic. And some Hughes Mavericks left over from the war in Thailand, still doing yeoman service in the desert hills… seems like most of the forty odd wars currently being fought are employing obsolete equipment, and the results, for democratic forces, are a real mess.

McPherson wanders past the bold rainbow of the immense bedspread to the window of his room. There before him stands the Hughes Tower, a hotel/restaurant/office complex, one of Crystal City’s newest. Crystal City is getting bigger every year, the defense industry towers looking like an architectural rendering of their business, steel and glass ICBMs densepacked and pointed at the sky. All the money that leaves the Pentagon is funneled through these towers, through the crystal city of weapons procurement.

It’s time to get over to the Pentagon. McPherson feels himself coming out of automatic pilot. Tuesday morning, Crystal City, USA: time to go offtrack, onto manual, into action.

Short taxi ride to the Pentagon. Into the security complex, out with his lapel badge. A lieutenant picks him up and they drive down the endless giant white corridors in a cart, dodging all the motor and foot traffic. They might as well be on a street. McPherson always gets a kick out of this blatant attempt to impress people. And it works, too, sure. The Pentagon may be old, but it’s still immense. Seems to him that the latest reorganization has taken notice of current fashion; service and division markers are painted in bright spectrum-bend colors that pulsate under the xenon bulbs, against all the white walls.

He meets Colonel Eaton at the Air Force’s SD Battle Management Division office, and Eaton takes him into one of the center courtyard commissaries. They talk over a lunch of croissants and salad. McPherson outlines some of the problems that Houston’s team is having with the boost-phase interceptor.

Ball Lightning: the job is to detect and track as many as ten thousand Soviet ICBMs, launched simultaneously; then aim ground-based free-electron laser beams, bounce them off mirrors in space, and destroy the ICBMs while they’re still in boost phase. It’s a tough job, and McPherson is glad it isn’t exactly his. But now he has to take Colonel Eaton’s grilling about it, which is informed and relentless. The test results in your proposal, Eaton says, indicated that you could solve the problems you’re telling me about. That’s why you have the contract. Get it together, and soon. Or it’s a Big Hacksaw for you.