'Georgi-i-i,' Griffith said, shaking his head to chastise Filatov for the vile aspersion.
'What threshold did it establish for a match?' Gray asked sitting unperturbed through the shocking display of disunity.
'I don't know,' Margaret replied.
'Check it,' Gray ordered curtly. 'I want you to set it very low. I'd rather chase a few wild geese than miss the chance for an early detection.' He looked now at Filatov — his head of operations. 'What about you, Georgi?' Gray asked in a buoyant tone, pressing the corners of his lips flat to deny a smile. An attentive Hoblenz leaned forward, grinning ear to ear in anticipation.
'Before I report,' Filatov began in a deliberate and overly loud voice, 'I think maybe we should all give Margaret a round of applause for the fine work she's been doing to resolve our present difficulties.'
Filatov clapped his hands slowly several times — no one else joining in.
Still, Gray said nothing.
When Filatov was through, he sighed deeply then resumed as if nothing had happened. 'We're running at about ninety-six percent system capacity. That net, of course, of the phase one antiviral program. I've been discussing with Dorothy the… the possibility of clearing up enough resources for phase two.'
Laura still marveled at the unchallenged rudeness of the man and missed at first the fact that all eyes had gravitated toward Gray.
She had no idea what the significance of Filatov's comment was, but a tension had filled the room on his use of the words 'phase two.'
The proposal, whatever it was, seemed momentous.
Gray made a slow sweep of the faces ending with Dorothy. The girl was doodling on her palmtop absentmindedly and didn't bother to look up before speaking. 'We'd need to free up a total of about' — she cringed, bunching her shoulders as if to ward off impending doom—'six percent?' She winced.
There was instant commotion from around the table, everyone voicing their outrage at Dorothy's suggestion.
'One conversation at a time!' Gray said sternly, and the room fell quiet again. He turned back to Dorothy.
The girl went on, her body having sunk further into the chair and her voice to barely a whisper. 'Georgi said figure at least one, preferably two percent…'
'Speak up!' Hoblenz interrupted — speaking in a stentorian tone as if to set an example.
Dorothy sat bolt upright. 'Yes, sir!' she replied assertively but in her childlike voice. She sarcastically saluted Hoblenz in an inexpert manner. 'We need two-o-o percent more,' she said loudly, lowering her soprano's voice in imitation of Hoblenz's bass and staring at him through two fingers wiggling in air.
'Without headroom for spikes,' Filatov jumped in, 'we'd run dangerously close to a hundred percent of capacity. If we had a surge of throughput…' He faltered and fell silent. Everyone there knew what results would ensue if Filatov's fears materialized. Everyone but Laura. 'That means we'd need a total of eight percent free,' Filatov continued sheepishly. 'Right now, I can find four with a little juggling of the night's runs.' His eyes panned the table, his hands spreading wide in a gesture of apology or of supplication. 'We'd have to come up with another four percent from somewhere.'
A pathetic attempt at a whistle came from Philip Griffith, Gray's director of robotics.
'How much do we gain if we drop overnight error checking on interbank transfers?' Gray asked. Several people's heads shot up.
'I'll indemnify the banks for any discrepancies,' he said, allaying a concern Laura could only guess at from context. She felt like a spectator at a game whose rules she hadn't learned. Her appreciation of what transpired hinged upon reading the reactions of the others.
Filatov rocked back in his chair and cupped his hands behind his head. His eyes drifted up toward the ceiling. There were rings of sweat on his shirt beneath his arms. 'That would give us four percent or so, I suppose. But if you figure ten P.M. on the West Coast is about seven A.M. on the Continent, that only gives us a couple of hours before the banks open in Europe and we start wire-clearing operations.'
'What about trying to load phase two a little earlier in the evening?' Gray asked.
'You can check with programming,' Filatov said, 'but tonight's that big pay-per-view heavyweight championship fight in Las Vegas. Last I heard, the marketing people were expecting close to fifty million orders.'
'And that's an eight-channel broadcast,' Hoblenz spoke up unexpectedly. 'One channel in each fighter's corner, one with and one without announcers, plus the helmet-cams and I don't know what else. And all that with full VR simulcast for the beta testers.'
'Is two hours enough to finish a phase-two sweep of the system?' Gray asked Dorothy.
She shrugged, then began to waggle her head from side to side in motions that slowly became a rhythmic nodding in time with music only Dorothy could hear. 'O-o-o-h,' she said, and then sighed. 'We haven't run a phase- two scan since last year. And we've doubled system size since then. That run time was seventy-four minutes.'
Gray frowned. 'Let's start off-loading, then. I want everybody to give me proposals for ten percent reductions in their department's budgeted usage.' There were groans from all sides, and Hoblenz cleared his throat and sat forward. 'Everybody but security,' Gray amended, and Hoblenz nodded. 'We'll meet again in four hours.'
Laura looked at her watch.
'Meanwhile, Dr. Aldridge,' Gray said, jarring Laura from her cocoon of anonymity, 'I'll let you get familiarized a bit before you settle in and get started. Dr. Griffith, why don't you give Dr. Aldridge a tour of the facilities?' Gray said to his head of robotics.
The man looked astonished. He stared back at Gray, his red lips parted at the intersection of his enormous sideburns. His eyes — magnified behind Coke-bottle lenses — appeared ready to pop out of his head. 'But, Mr. Gray, I've scheduled a… a systems check for tonight on the auxiliary belts, and a quality control review in the…'
'Get someone to cover for you,' Gray replied, cutting him short and rising to leave. 'I'll see you all in four hours. Meeting adjourned.'
11
'I'm sorry if I'm keeping you from your job,' Laura said as the elevator continued its high-speed descent. 'I mean, you sound pretty busy. I don't know why Mr. Gray would pick you to show me around.'
Griffith shrugged. 'Mr. Gray is a way strange dude.' After smiling her way, Griffith raised his upper lip to expose his teeth in what looked like a snarl. He grimaced a total of three times — wrinkling his face and squinting with each exaggerated expression before finally relenting and using his fingers to press his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose.
Laura turned away and maintained a neutral expression. She'd seen Griffith's type many times before, especially in academia. Oddballs.
Clueless loners. The kind of people who populated the lines at the department of motor vehicles and loved to talk about government conspiracies. The only difference between that sort and academics like Griffith was their IQ scores.
Griffith snorted loudly and made a grunting sound as he cleared his throat. When Laura's ears popped for the third time, she asked, 'How far down are we going?'
'The main pool is about three hundred meters below sea level,' he replied. 'We found at that depth the lava stone absorbs most of the subatomic junk flying around through space and reduces our error rate substantially. It also, of course, eliminates electromagnetic interference and more mundane problems like vibrations and dust.' The elevator began to slow. 'Then, of course, there's the physical security.' Griffith opened a box set into the wall of the elevator and handed Laura a pair of dark sunglasses.
