I let Grand do the talking, of course. And, equally of course, he made Driver think the SSZ was his idea instead of mine.
“A supersonic zeppelin?” Driver snapped, once Grand had outlined the idea to him. “Ridiculous!”
Unperturbed by our boss’s hostility toward new ideas, Grand said smoothly, “Don’t be too hasty to dismiss the concept. It may have considerable merit. At the very least, I believe we could talk NASA or the Transportation Department into giving us some money to study the concept.”
At the word money Driver’s frown eased a little. Driver was lean faced, with hard features and a gaze that he liked to think was piercing. He now subjected Grand to his most piercing stare.
“You have to spend money to make money in this business,” he said, in his best Forbes magazine acumen.
“I understand that,” Grand replied stiffly. “But we are quite willing to put some of our own time into this—until we can obtain government funding.”
“Your own time?” Driver queried.
We? I asked myself. And immediately answered myself, damned right. This is my idea, and I’m going to follow it to the top. Or bust.
“I really believe we may be onto something that can save this company,” Grand was purring.
Driver drummed his manicured fingers on his vast desk. “All right, if you feel so strongly about it. Do it on your own time and come back to me when you’ve got something worth showing. Don’t say a word to anyone else, understand? Just me.”
“Right, Chief.” I learned later that whenever Grand wanted to flatter Driver, he called him Chief.
“Our own time” was aerospace industry jargon for bootlegging hours from legitimate projects. Engineers have to charge every hour they work against an ongoing contract, or else their time is paid by the company’s overhead account. Anson’s management—and the accounting department—was very definitely against spending any money out of the company’s overhead account. So I became a master bootlegger, finding charge numbers for my APT engineers. They accepted my bootlegging without a word of thanks and complained when I couldn’t find a valid charge number and they actually had to work on their own time, after regular hours.
For the next six weeks Wisdom, Rohr, Kurtz, and even I worked every night on the supersonic zeppelin. The engineers were doing calculations and making simulator runs in their computers. I was drawing up a business plan, as close to a work of fiction as anything on the best sellers list. My social life went to zero, which was—I have to admit—not all that much of a drop. Except for Driver’s luscious executive assistant, Lisa, who worked some nights to help us. I wished I had the time to ask her to dinner.
Grand worked away every night too, on a glossy set of illustrations to use as a presentation.
We made our presentation to Driver. The guys’s calculations, my business plan, and Grand’s images. He didn’t seem impressed, and I left the meeting feeling pretty gunky. Over the six weeks, I’d come to like the idea of a supersonic zeppelin, an SSZ. I really believed it was my ticket to advancement. Besides, now I had no excuse to see Lisa, up in Driver’s office.
On the plus side, though, none of the APT team was laid off. We went through the motions of the Christmas office party with the rest of the undead. Talk about a survivor’s reality show!
I was moping in my cubicle the morning after Christmas when my phone beeped, and Driver’s face came up on my screen.
“Drop your socks and pack a bag. You’re going with me to Washington to sell the SSZ concept.”
“Yessir!” I said automatically. “Er . . . when?”
“Tomorrow, bright and early.”
I raced to Grand’s cubicle, but he already knew about it.
“So we’re both going,” I said, feeling pretty excited.
“No, only you and Driver,” he said.
“But why aren’t you—”
Grand gave me a knowing smile. “Driver wants all the credit for himself if the idea sells.”
That nettled me, but I knew better than to argue about it. Instead, I asked, “And if it doesn’t sell?”
“You get the blame for a stupid idea. You’re low enough on the totem pole to be offered up as a sacrificial victim.”
I nodded. I didn’t like it, but I had to admit it was a good lesson in management. I tucked it away in my mind for future reference.
I’d never been to Washington before. It was chilly, gray, and clammy; no comparison to sunny Phoenix. The traffic made me dizzy, but Driver thought it was pretty light. “Half the town’s on holiday vacations,” he told me as we rode a seedy, beat-up taxicab to the magnificent glass and stainless steel high-rise office building that housed the Transportation Department.
As we climbed out of the smelly taxi, I noticed the plaque on the wall by the revolving glass doors. It puzzled me.
“Transportation and Urban Renewal Department?” I asked. “Since when . . .”
“Last year’s reorganization,” Driver said, heading for the revolving door. “They put the two agencies together. Next year they’ll pull them apart, when they reinvent the government again.”
“Welcome to TURD headquarters,” said Tracy Keene, once we got inside the building’s lobby.
Keene was Anson Aerospace’s crackerjack Washington representative, a large, round man who conveyed the impression that he knew things no one else knew. Keene’s job was to find new customers for Anson from among the tangle of government agencies, placate old customers when Anson inevitably alienated them, and guide visitors from home base through the Washington maze. The job involved grotesque amounts of wining and dining. I had been told that Keene had once been as wiry and agile as a Venezuelan shortstop. Now he looked to me like he was on his way to becoming a Sumo wrestler. And what he was gaining in girth, he was losing in hair.
“Let’s go,” Keene said, gesturing toward the security checkpoint that blocked the lobby. “We don’t want to be late.”
Two hours
