ever made.
CWO4 Sandy Richter looked up. In the dry, cold desert air he could see
the strobe lights of the orbiting E-3A AW ACS. Not all that far away. Thirty
thousand feet or so, he estimated. Then he had an interesting thought. That
Navy guy looked smart enough, and maybe if he presented his idea in the
right way, he’d get a chance to try it out. . . .
“I’m getting tired of this,” President Durling was saying in his office, diag-
onally across the West Wing from Ryan’s. There had been a couple of good
years, but they’d come to a screeching halt in the past few months. “What
was it today?”
“Gas tanks,” Marty Caplan replied. “Deerfield Auto Parts up in Massa-
chusetts just came up with a way to fabricate them into nearly any shape and
capacity from standard steel sheets. It’s a robotic process, efficient as hell.
They refused to license it to the Japanese-”
“Al Trent’s district?” the President cut in.
“That’s right.”
‘ ‘Excuse me. Please go on.” Durling reached for some tea. He was having
trouble with afternoon coffee now. “Why won’t they license it?”
“It’s one of the companies that almost got destroyed by overseas compe-
tition. This one held on to the old management team. They smartened up,
hired a few bright young design engineers, and pulled their socks up.
They’ve come up with half a dozen important innovations. It just so happens
that this is the one that delivers the greatest cost-efficiency. They claim they
can make the tanks, box ’em, and ship them to Japan cheaper than the Japa-
nese can make them at home, and that the tanks are also stronger. But we
couldn’t even make the other side budge on using them in the plants they
have over here. It’s computer chips all over again,” Caplan concluded.
“How is it they can even ship the things over-”
“The ships, Mr. President.” It was Caplan’s turn to interrupt. “Their car
carriers come over here full and mainly return completely empty. Loading
the things on wouldn’t cost anything at all, and they end up getting delivered
right to the company docks. Deerfield even designed a load-unload system
that eliminates any possible time penalty.”
“Why didn’t you push on it?”
“I’m surprised he didn’t push,” Christopher Cook observed.
They were in an upscale private home just off Kalorama Road. An expen-
sive area of the District of Columbia, it housed quite a few members of the
diplomatic community, along with the rank-and-file members of the Wash-
community, lobbyists, lawyers, and all the rest who wanted to be
i’lose, but not too close, to where the action was, downtown.
“1C Deerfield would only license their patent.” Seiji sighed. “We offered
them a very fair price.”
“True,” Cook agreed, pouring himself another glass of white wine. He
could have said, But, Seiji, it’s their invention and they want to cash in on it,
hul he didn’t. “Why don’t your people-”
It was Seiji Nagumo’s turn to sigh. “Your people were clever. They hired
« particularly bright attorney in Japan and got their patent recognized in rec-
ord lime.” He might have added that it offended him that a citizen of his
country could be so mercenary, but that would have been unseemly under
the circumstances. “Well, perhaps they will come to see the light of rea-
MMl.”
” K could be a good point to concede, Seiji. At the very least, sweeten your
offer on the licensing agreement.”
“Why, Chris?”
“The President is interested in this one.” Cook paused, seeing that
Nugumo didn’t get it yet. He was still new at this. He knew the industrial
»ide, but not the politics yet. “Deerfield is in Al Trent’s congressional dis-
trict. Trent has a lot of clout on the Hill. He’s chairman of the Intelligence
Committee.”
“And?”
“And Trent is a good guy to keep happy.”
Nagumo considered that for a minute or so, sipping his wine and staring
out the window. Had he known that fact earlier in the day, he might have
nought permission to give in on the point, but he hadn’t and he didn’t. To
change now would be an admission of error, and Nagumo didn’t like to do
that any more than anyone else in the world. He decided that he’d suggest an
improved offer for licensing rights, instead-not knowing that by failing to
accept a personal loss of face, he’d bring closer something that he would
have tried anything to avoid.
5
Complexity Theory
Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skill-
ful manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which
they cannot predict. For Raizo Yamata the knowledge was usually a com-
fort. He usually knew what to do when the unexpected took place-but not
always.
“It has been a troublesome time, that is true, but not the worst we have
experienced,” one of his guests pronounced. “And we are having our way
again, are we not?”
“We’ve made them back off on computer chips,” another pointed out.
Heads nodded around the low table.
They just didn’t see, Yamata told himself. His country’s needs coincided
exactly with a new opportunity. There was a new world, and despite Amer-
ica’s repeated pronouncements of a new order for that new world, only dis-
order had replaced what had been three generations of-if not stability, then
at least predictability. The symmetry of East and West was now so far back
in the history of contemporary minds that it seemed like a distant and un-
pleasant dream. The Russians were still reeling from their misguided experi-
ment, and so were the Americans, though most of their pain was
self-inflicted and had come after the event, the fools. Instead of merely
maintaining their power, the Americans had cast it aside at the moment of its
ascendancy, as they had so often in their history, and in the dimming of two
formerly great powers lay the opportunity for a country that deserved to be
great.
“These are small things, my friends,” Yamata said, graciously leaning
across the table to refill cups. “Our national weakness is structural and has
not changed in real terms in our lifetime.”
“Please explain, Raizo-chan,” one of his friendlier peers suggested.
“So long as we lack direct access to resources, so long as we cannot con-
trol that access ourselves, so long as we exist as the shopkeeper of other
nations, we are vulnerable.”
“Ah!” Across the table a man waved a dismissive hand. “I disagree. We
are strong in the things that matter.”
“And what are those things?” Yamata inquired gently.
“First and most importantly, the diligence of our workers, the skill of our
designers …” The litany went on while Yamata and his other guests lis-
tened politely.
‘ ‘And how long will those things matter if we no longer have resources to
use, oil to burn?” one of Yamata’s allies inquired with a litany of his own.
“Nineteen forty-one all over again?”
“No, it will not be that way … exactly,” Yamata said, rejoining the con-
versation. “Then it was possible for them to cut off our oil because we
bought almost all of it from them. Today it is more subtle. Back then they
had to freeze our assets to prevent us from spending them elsewhere, yes?
Today they devalue the dollar relative to the yen, and our assets are trapped
there, are they not? Today they trick us into investing our money there, they
complain when we do, they cheat us at every turn, they keep what we give to
them for their property, and then they steal back what we’ve bought!”
This tack caused heads first to turn and then to nod. Every man in the
room had lived through that experience. That one, Yamata saw, had bought
Rockefeller Center in New York, had paid double what it was really worth,
even in that artificially inflated real-estate market, been tricked and cheated
by the American owners. Then the yen had risen relative to the dollar, which
meant that the dollar had lost value relative to the yen. If he tried to sell now,
everyone knew, it would be a disaster. First, the real-estate market in New
York City had dropped of its own accord; second, and as a result, the build-
ings were worth only half of the dollars that had already been paid; third, the
dollars were worth only half the value in yen that they had been in the begin-
ning. He’d be lucky to get back a quarter of what he’d put into the deal. In
fact, the rent he was earning barely paid the interest payments on the out-
standing debt.
That one there, Yamata thought, had bought a major motion-picture stu-
dio, and across the table a rival had done the same. It was all Raizo could do
not to laugh at the fools. What had each bought? That was simple. In each