She shook her head. “Nothing like that. Something small and informal.”
“Short and quick?”
“Just that. I want it just to be us. It doesn’t have anything to do with anybody else.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Corrigan said. “We can go straight on into Nevada and do it while we’re here. How’s that?”
Evelyn gaped at him. “While we’re here? You mean now?”
“Why not? If you’re going to live with Irish impulsiveness, you might as well get used to it. We could make Carson City or Reno tomorrow. A couple of days there. Then a flight to San Francisco or L.A., connecting to Dublin via London. You’re always saying how much you like to support wild life. Okay, then, how about Christmas and New Year’s in Ireland? Your life will never be the same again.”
She shook her head disbelievingly. “But . . . what about work? We’re expected back there. We can’t just . . .” She left it unfinished, not quite sure what she had been about to say.
Corrigan made a dismissive wave in the air. “Ah, to hell with the lot of them. They can manage on their own for a while, this once. We’ve both got enough leave due to us. We’ve been saying ever since we got on the plane: it’s about time we started living a little more for ourselves for a change. Well, I’m thinking, the time to begin that is right now.”
“But shouldn’t we at least call them and let them know what’s happening?” Evelyn asked.
“Oh, not at all. We’ll make it a surprise for them when we get back,” Corrigan said.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt so happy.”
They went back to the car. As they got in, Corrigan pressed the button to disable the phone from accepting incoming calls. “There,” he said. “Peace guaranteed. Come on and get in. I wouldn’t want you catching a cold. You’re mine now, exclusively, for the rest of this year. CLC can start taking its share again when we’re into the new one.”
* * *
Eric Shipley had a feeling that something unusual was in the air when Pinder appeared in the DINS laboratory, being genial and showing an uncharacteristic concern about how things in general were going. As a rule he spent most of his time holed up in the Executive Building with the others of the managerial elite who had transcended the mortal plane of solder guns, screwdrivers, and rolled-up shirtsleeves. Shipley believed that a chief’s place was where the troops were—in the trenches. When managers collected together in comfortable surroundings remote from where things were happening, it usually wasn’t long before they started inventing realities of their own that were far more virtual than anything going on in the labs.
“It’s come a long way since the days when it was you, some programmers, and a couple of techs,” Pinder said, casting his gaze around. He was referring to the group that had first experimented with adding DINS feedback to the MIMIC prototype that Carnegie Mellon and MIT had developed jointly—the combination that became Pinocchio.
“It’s going to go a lot farther, too, and get a lot bigger,” Shipley replied, sensing the way the conversation was headed. He might as well give Pinder his opening now, he decided, and find out what this was about.
Pinder obliged. “And the organization has to adapt to anticipate that. It was fine for handling things the way they used to be. But that has all changed. We see things going toward a more comprehensive organizational structure that will combine all the interactive environment work under one reporting function. Bring all the decision-making together, eliminate the duplications.”
By “we,” Shipley presumed he meant the Olympians across the parking lot. Pinder refocused away from the distance, where he stared when he was being evasive, and back on Shipley, which meant that he was getting to the point. “Don’t you think that the DINS group would function more smoothly all around as part of an integrated system like that?”
In other words, apart from possible semantic jugglings with job titles, Shipley couldn’t expect any promotional prospects. Pinder was sounding out his reactions to merging DINS under a larger structure that would be headed by someone else. “Integrated” was always the managerese code word for “more controllable.”