At least, that was the way Payne was fond of idealizing things. The frontier of technical advancement was still far west of any moderating influence capable of imparting much semblance of law and order. He had started the company twelve years previously to develop miniature, silicon-based sensors and actuators that could be fabricated into the same chips as the electronics to provide integrated subsystems, which had rapidly found application in just about every likely area, from industrial control and space instrumentation to smart cars and talking appliances. A big field was the growing interest in small robots, and it was a natural step for the company eventually to start producing its own line. It had changed its name to Microbotics five years previously.
The corporation’s dazzling financial performance had been due to more than simply the excellence of its technical innovations and the free play of market forces as enshrined in the textbooks espousing the American system; if the truth were known, it was more a result of political concessions and other practices that the said system’s official financial regulators would not have approved of at all—not publicly, anyway. But that was his function, Payne told himself. Weren’t results the first thing that stockholders wanted from a CEO? He and what he graciously termed the “executive committee” took all the risks and were entitled to be compensated appropriately; the rest took their shares and didn’t even need to know the details. And those shares were far from table scraps. The way he saw it, they had a pretty good deal.
The billiard room, with its walnut paneling, leather upholstery, gun rack, trophy case, and mural sword display, was a celebration of wealth, success, and masculine opulence. It boasted a full-size, English twelve-foot table and commanded a view of the lake through French windows opening to a flagstone veranda with gray marble balustrade. The pillar supporting the overhead rack for glasses at one end of the bar, where Vogl, the house steward stood mixing drinks, was part of a totem pole from one of the Northwest tribes, dating back a couple of centuries. Payne would have had to look up the name to bring it to mind again. The designer commissioned to take care of the interior of the house had provided a book that contained their background and history.
The game was snooker—begun with fourteen red balls, six colors, and a white cue-ball. Sinking a red wins a point and allows a try at one of the colors, which score higher. Downed colors are brought up again and reused until all reds are eliminated. Play is then to dispatch the colors in turn, finishing with black, which is the highest scoring.
Norbert Dunne, Chief Financial Officer of Microbotics, stooped over the table to line up on a red. “From what I heard this morning, some people might be getting nervous already. It seems Geddes and West might be pulling out.” Dunne was a heavyset man with thinning hair going white, at present visibly feeling the heat, his tie hanging loose and vest unbuttoned. One of his most useful talents was an aptitude for turning publicly raised investors’ money, which was protected by law and required to be used only for properly authorized expenditures listed on the balance sheet, into short-term privately accessible venture capital, which wasn’t.
Victor Bazhin was an old friend of the committee’s, a partner in a New York trading bank that had provided a lot of Payne’s capital in the early days. He was lean, tanned, slightly built—in good shape for his sixty-odd years, dressed suavely but conservatively in a gray pinstripe, having come straight from a meeting with the directors that day. “Geddes and West might?” he repeated from the far side of the room. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Around,” Dunne said, playing his shot.
“That would put Neurodyne in real trouble,” Garsten said. He had driven across the bridge from the city to make up a foursome. “I’d guess that could hit them with another ten-point dive.”
“You get my point now about timing,” Payne said, addressing Dunne and Bazhin especially. The talk was about the DNC scare. Geddes & West was one of the large backers that had put funds into Neurodyne. If they pulled out it would send a message to the market that would start a stampede. For all its scientific trappings, imagery, and rhetoric, the stocks business was still largely computerized superstition.