Tuesday it rained in the morning, hard sheets of drumming downpour that slashed across the windows of the ferry. Sanders stood in line to get his coffee, thinking about the day to come. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Dave Benedict coming toward him, and quickly turned away, but it was too late. Benedict waved, “Hey, guy.” Sanders didn’t want to talk about DigiCom this morning.
At the last moment, he was saved by a call: the phone in his pocket went off: He turned away to answer it.
“Fucking A, Tommy boy.” It was Eddie Larson in Austin.
“What is it, Eddie?”
“You know that bean counter Cupertino sent down? Well, get this: there’s eight of ’em here now. Independent accounting firm of Jenkins, McKay, out of Dallas. They’re going over all the books, like a swarm of roaches. And I mean everything: receivables, payables, A and L’s, year to date, everything. And now they’re going back through every year to ‘eighty-nine.”
“Yeah? Disrupting everything?”
“Better believe it. The gals don’t even have a place to sit down and answer the phone. Plus, everything from ‘ninety-one back is in storage, downtown. We’ve got it on fiche here, but they say they want original documents. They want the damned paper. And they get all squinty and paranoid when they order us around. Treating us like we’re thieves or something trying to pull a fast one. It’s insulting.”
“Well,” Sanders said, “hang in there. You’ve got to do what they ask.”
“The only thing that really bothers me,” Eddie said, “is they got another seven more coming in this afternoon. Because they’re also doing a complete inventory of the plant. Everything from the furniture in the offices to the air handlers and the heat stampers out on the line. We got a guy there now, making his way down the line, stopping at each work station. Says, `What’s this thing called? How do you spell it? Who makes it? What’s the model number? How old is it? Where’s the serial number?’ You ask me, we might as well shut the line down for the rest of the day.”
Sanders frowned. “They’re doing an inventory?”
“Well, that’s what they call it. But it’s beyond any damn inventory I ever heard of. These guys have worked over at Texas Instruments or someplace, and I’ll give ’em one thing: they know what they’re talking about. This morning, one of the Jenkins guys came up and asked me what kind of glass we got in the ceiling skylights. I said, `What kind of glass?’ I thought he was shitting me. He says, `Yeah, is it Corning two forty-seven, or two-forty-seven slash nine.’ Or some damned thing like that. They’re different kinds of UV glass, because UV can affect chips on the production line. I never even heard that UV can affect chips. `Oh yeah,’ this guy says. `Real problem if your ASDs get over two-twenty.’ That’s annual sunny days. Have you heard of that?”
Sanders wasn’t really listening. He was thinking about what it meant that somebody either Garvin, or the Conley-White people would ask for an inventory of the plant. Ordinarily, you called for an inventory only if you were planning to sell a facility. Then you had to do it, to figure your writedowns at the time of transfer of assets, and-
“Tom, you there?”
“I’m here.”
“So I say to this guy, I never heard that. About the UV and the chips. And we been putting chips in the phones for years, never any trouble. And then the guy says, `Oh, not for installing chips. UV affects it if you’re manufacturing chips.’ And I say, we don’t do that here. And he says, `I know.’ So, I’m wondering: what the hell does he care what kind of glass we have? Tommy boy? You with me? What’s the story?” Larson said. “We’re going to have fifteen guys crawling all over us by the end of the day. Now don’t tell me this is routine.”
“It doesn’t sound like it’s routine, no.”
“It sounds like they’re going to sell the plant to somebody who makes chips, is what it sounds like. And that ain’t us.”
“I agree. That’s what it sounds like.”
“Fucking A,” Eddie said. “I thought you told me this wasn’t going to happen. Tom: people here are getting upset. And I’m one of ’em.”
“I understand.”
“I mean, I got people asking me. They just bought a house, their wife’s pregnant, they got a baby coming, and they want to know. What do I tell ’em?”
“Eddie, I don’t have any information.”
`Jesus, Tom, you’re the division head.”
“I know. Let me check with Cork, see what the accountants did there. They were out there last week.”
“I already talked to Colin an hour ago. Operations sent two people out there. For one day. Very polite. Not like this at all.”
“No inventory?”
“No inventory.”
“Okay,” Sanders said. He sighed. “Let me get into it.”
“Tommy boy,” Eddie said. “I got to tell you right out. I’m concerned you don’t already know.”
“Me, too,” Sanders said. “Me, too.”
He hung up the phone. Sanders pushed K-A-P for Stephanie Kaplan. She would know what was going on in Austin, and he thought she would tell him. But her assistant said Kaplan was out of the office for the rest of the morning. He called Mary Anne, but she was gore, too. Then he dialed the Four Seasons Hotel, and asked for Max Dorfman. The operator said Mr. Dorfman’s lines were busy. He made a mental note to see Max later in the day. Because if Eddie was right, then Sanders was out of the loop. And that wasn’t good.
In the meantime, he could bring up the plant closing with Meredith at the conclusion of the morning meeting with Conley-White. That was the best he could do, for the moment. The prospect of talking to her made him uneasy. But he’d get through it somehow. He didn’t really have a choice.
When he got to the fourth-floor conference room, nobody was there. At the far end, a wall board showed a cutaway of the Twinkle drive and a schematic for the Malaysia assembly line. There were notes scribbled on some of the pads, open briefcases beside some of the chairs. The meeting was already under way. Sanders had a sense of panic. He started to sweat. At the far end of the room, an assistant came in, and began moving around the table, setting out glasses and water. “Where is everybody?” he asked. “Oh, they left about fifteen minutes ago,” she said. “Fifteen minutes ago? When did they start?” “The meeting started at eight.” “Eight?” Sanders said. “I thought it was supposed to be eight-thirty.” “No, the meeting started at eight.” Damn. “Where are they now?” “Meredith took everybody down to VIE, to demo the Corridor.”
Entering VIE, the first thing Sanders heard was laughter. When he walked into the equipment room, he saw that Don Cherry’s team had two of the Conley-White executives up on the system. John Conley, the young lawyer, and Jim Daly, the investment banker, were both wearing headsets while they walked on the rolling walker pads. The two men were grinning wildly. Everyone else in the room was laughing too, including the normally sour-faced CFO of Conley-White, Ed Nichols, who was standing beside a monitor which showed an image of the virtual corridor that the users were seeing. Nichols had red marks on his forehead from wearing the headset.
Nichols looked over as Sanders came up. “This is fantastic.”
Sanders said, “Yes, it’s pretty spectacular.”
“Simply fantastic. It’s going to wipe out all the criticism in New York, once they see this. We’ve been asking Don if he can run this on our own corporate database.”
“No problem,” Cherry said. `Just get us the programming hooks for your DB, and we’ll plug you right in. Take us about an hour.”
Nichols pointed to the headset. “And we can get one of these contraptions in New York?”
“Easy,” Cherry said. “We can ship it out later today. It’ll be there Thursday. I’ll send one of our people to set it up for you.”
“This is going to be a great selling point,” Nichols said. `Just great.” He took out his half-frame glasses. They were a complicated kind of glasses that folded up very small. Nichols unfolded them carefully and put them on his nose.
On the walker pad, John Conley was laughing. “Angel,” he said. “How do I open this drawer?” Then he cocked his head, listening.
“He’s talking to the help angel,” Cherry said. “He hears the angel through his earphones.”
“What’s the angel telling him?” Nichols said.
“That’s between him and his angel,” Cherry laughed.
On the walker pad, Conley nodded as he listened, then reached forward into the air with his hand. He closed his fingers, as if gripping something, and pulled back, pantomiming someone opening a file drawer.
On the monitor, Sanders saw a virtual file drawer slide out from the wall of the corridor. Inside the drawer he saw neatly arranged files.
“Wow,” Conley said. “This is amazing. Angel: can I see a file? . . . Oh. Okay.”
Conley reached out and touched one of the file labels with his fingertip. Immediately the file popped out of the drawer and opened up, apparently hanging in midair.
“We have to break the physical metaphor sometimes,” Cherry said. “Because users have only one hand. And you can’t open a regular file with one hand.”
Standing on the black walker pad, Conley moved his hand through the air in short arcs, mimicking someone turning pages with his hand. On the monitor, Sanders saw Conley was actually looking at a series of spreadsheets. “Hey,” Conley said, “you people ought to be more careful. I have all your financial records here.”
“Let me see that,” Daly said, turning around on the walker pad to look.
“You guys look all you want,” Cherry laughed. “Enjoy it while you can. In the final system, we’ll have safeguards built in to control access. But for now, we bypass the entire system. Do you notice that some of the numbers are red? That means they have more detail stored away. Touch one.”
Conley touched a red number. The number zoomed out, creating a new plane of information that hung in the air above the previous spreadsheet.
“Wow!”
“Kind of a hypertext thing,” Cherry said, with a shrug. “Sort of neat, if I say so myself.”
Conley and Daly were giggling, poking rapidly at numbers on the spreadsheet, zooming out dozens of detail sheets that now hung in the air all around them.
“Hey, how do you get rid of all this stuff?”
“Can you find the original spreadsheet?”
“It’s hidden behind all this other stuff”
“Bend over, and look. See if you can get it.”
Conley bent at the waist, and appeared to look under something. He reached out and pinched air. “I got it.”
“Okay, now you see a green arrow in the right corner. Touch it.”
Conley touched it. All the papers zoomed back into the original spreadsheet.
“Fabulous!”
“I want to do it,” Daly said.
“No, you can’t. I’m going to do it.”
“No, me!”
“Me”
.
They were laughing like delighted kids.
Blackburn came up. “I know this is enjoyable for everyone,” he said to Nichols, “but we’re falling behind our schedule and perhaps we ought to go back to the conference room.”
“All right,” Nichols said, with obvious reluctance. He turned to Cherry. “You sure you can get us one of these things?”
“Count on it,” Cherry said. “Count on it.”
Walking back to the conference room, the Conley-White executives were in a giddy mood; they talked rapidly, laughing about the experience. The DigiCom people walked quietly beside them, not wanting to disrupt the good mood. It was at that point that Mark Lewyn fell into step alongside Sanders and whispered, “Hey, why didn’t you call me last night?”
“I did,” Sanders said.
Lewyn shook his head. “There wasn’t any message when I got home,” he said.
“I talked to your answering machine, about six-fifteen.”
“I never got a message,” Lewyn said. “And then when I came in this morning, you weren’t here.” He lowered his voice. “Christ. What a mess. I had to go into the meeting on Twinkle with no idea what the approach was going to be.”
“I’m sorry,” Sanders said. “I don’t know what happened.”
“Fortunately, Meredith took over the discussion,” Lewyn said. “Otherwise I would have been in deepest shit. In fact, I-We’ll do this later,” he said, seeing Johnson drop back to talk to Sanders. Lewyn stepped away.
“Where the hell were you?”Johnson said.
“I thought the meeting was for eight-thirty.”
“I called your house last night, specifically because it was changed to eight. They’re trying to catch a plane to Austin for the afternoon. So we moved everything up.”
“I didn’t get that message.”
“I talked to your wife. Didn’t she tell you?”
“I thought it was eight-thirty.”
Johnson shook her head, as if dismissing the whole thing. “Anyway,” she said, “in the eight o’clock session, I had to take another approach to Twinkle, and it’s very important that we have some coordination in the light of-”
“Meredith?” Up at the front of the group, Garvin was looking back at her. “Meredith, John has a question for you.”
“Be right there,” she said. With a final angry frown at Sanders, she hurried up to the head of the group.
Back in the conference room, the mood was light. They were all still joking as they took their seats. Ed Nichols began the meeting by turning to Sanders. “Meredith’s been bringing us up to date on the Twinkle drive. Now that you’re here, we’d like your assessment as well.”
I had to take another approach to Twinkle, Meredith had said. Sanders hesitated. “My assessment?”
“Yes,” Nichols said. “You’re in charge of Twinkle, aren’t you?”
Sanders looked at the faces around the table, turned expectantly toward him. He glanced at Johnson, but she had opened her briefcase and was rummaging through her papers, taking out several bulging manila envelopes.
“Well,” Sanders said. “We built several prototypes and tested them thoroughly. There’s no doubt that the prototypes performed flawlessly. They’re the best drives in the world.”
“I understand that,” Nichols said. “But now you are in production, isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
“I think we’re more interested in your assessment of the production.”
Sanders hesitated. What had she told them? At the other end of the room, Meredith Johnson closed her briefcase, folded her hands under her chin, and stared steadily at him. He could not read her expression.
What had she told them?
“Mr. Sanders?”
“Well,” Sanders began, “we’ve been shaking out the lines, dealing with the problems as they arise. It’s a pretty standard start-up experience for us. We’re still in the early stages.”
“I’m sorry,” Nichols said. “I thought you’ve been in production for two months.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Two months doesn’t sound like `the early stages’ to me.”
“Well-”
“Some of your product cycles are as short as nine months, isn’t that right?”
“Nine to eighteen months, yes.”
“Then after two months, you must be in full production. How do you assess that, as the principal person in charge?”
“Well, I’d say the problems are of the order of magnitude we generally experience at this point.”
“I’m interested to hear that,” Nichols said, “because earlier today, Meredith indicated to us that the problems were actually quite serious. She said you might even have to go back to the drawing board.”
Shit.
How should he play it now? He’d already said that the problems were not so bad. He couldn’t back down. Sanders took a breath and said, “I hope I haven’t conveyed the wrong impression to Meredith. Because I have full confidence in our ability to manufacture the Twinkle drive.”
“I’m sure you do,” Nichols said. “But we’re looking down the barrel at competition from Sony and Philips, and I’m not sure that a simple expression of your confidence is adequate. How many of the drives coming off the line meet specifications?”
“I don’t have that information.”