Disclosure

FROM: DC/M

ARTHUR KAHN

TWINKLE/KUALA LUMPUR/MALAYSIA

TO: DC/S

TOM SANDERS

SEATTLE (AT HOME)

TOM:

CONSIDERING THE MERGER, I THOUGHT YOU SHOULD GET THIS AT HOME AND NOT THE OFFICE:

TWINKLE PRODUCTION LINES RUNNING AT 29% CAPACITY DESPITE ALL EFFORTS TO INCREASE. SPOT CHECKS ON DRIVES SHOW AVG SEEK TIMES IN 120-140 MILLISECOND RANGE WITH NO CLEAR INDICATION WHY WE ARE NOT STABLE AT SPECS. ALSO, WE STILL HAVE POWER FLICKER IN SCREENS WHICH APPEARS TO COME FROM HINGE DESIGN DESPITE IMPLEMENTATION OF DC/S FIX LAST WEEK. I DON'T THINK IT'S SOLVED YET.

HOW'S THE MERGER COMING? ARE WE GOING TO BE RICH AND FAMOUS?

CONGRATULATIONS IN ADVANCE ON YOUR PROMOTION.

ARTHUR

Tom Sanders never intended to be late for work on Monday, Juneis.At 7:30 in the morning, he stepped into the shower at his home on Bainbridge Island. He knew he had to shave, dress, and leave the house in ten minutes if he was to make the 7:50 ferry and arrive at work by 8:30, in time to go over the remaining points with Stephanie Kaplan before they went into the meeting with the lawyers from Conley-White. He already had a full day at work, and the fax he had just received from Malaysia made it worse.

Sanders was a division manager at Digital Communications Technology in Seattle. Events at work had been hectic for a week, because DigiCom was being acquired by Conley-White, a publishing conglomerate in New York. The merger would allow Conley to acquire technology important to publishing in the next century.

But this latest news from Malaysia was not good, and Arthur had been right to send it to him at home. He was going to have a problem explaining it to the Conley-White people because they just didn't

"Tom? Where are you? Tom?"

His wife, Susan, was calling from the bedroom. He ducked his head out of the spray.

"I'm in the shower!"

She said something in reply, but he didn't hear it. He stepped out, reaching for a towel. "What?"

"I said, Can you feed the kids?"

His wife was an attorney who worked four days a week at a downtown firm. She took Mondays off, to spend more time with the kids, but she was not good at managing the routine at home. As a result, there was often a crisis on Monday mornings.

"Tom? Can you feed them for me?"

"I can't, Sue," he called to her. The clock on the sink said 7:34. "I'm already late." He ran water in the basin to shave, and lathered his face. He was a handsome man, with the easy manner of an athlete. He touched the dark bruise on his side from the company touch football game on Saturday. Mark Lewyn had taken him down; Lewyn was fast but clumsy. And Sanders was getting too old for touch football. He was still in good shape still within five pounds of his varsity weight-but as he ran his hand through his wet hair, he saw streaks of gray. It was time to admit his age, he thought, and switch to tennis.

Susan came into the morn, still in her bathrobe. His wife always looked beautiful in the morning, right out of bed. She had the kind of fresh beauty that required no makeup. "Are you sure you can't feed them?" she said. "Oh, nice bruise. Very butch." She kissed him lightly, and pushed a fresh mug of coffee onto the counter for him. "I've got to get Matthew to the pediatrician by eight-fifteen, and neither one of them has eaten a thing, and I'm not dressed. Can't you please feed them? Pretty please?" Teasing, she ruffled his hair, and her bathrobe fell open. She left it open and smiled. "I'll owe you one…"

"Sue, I can't." He kissed her forehead distractedly. "I've got a meeting, I can't be late."

She sighed. "Oh, all right." Pouting, she left.

Sanders began shaving.

A moment later he heard his wife say, "Okay, kids, let's go! Eliza, put your shoes on." This was followed by whining from Eliza, who was four, and didn't like to wear shoes. Sanders had almost finished shaving when he heard, "Eliza, you put on those shoes and take your brother downstairs right now!" Eliza's reply was indistinct, and then Susan said, "Eliza Ann, I'm talking to you!" Then Susan began slamming drawers in the hall linen closet. Both kids started to cry.

Eliza, who was upset by any display of tension, came into the bathroom, her face scrunched up, tears in her eyes. "Daddy…," she sobbed. He put his hand down to hug her, still shaving with his other hand.

"She's old enough to help out," Susan called, from the hallway.

"Mommy," she wailed, clutching Sanders's leg.

"Eliza, will you cut it out."

At this, Eliza cried more loudly. Susan stamped her foot in the hallway. Sanders hated to see his daughter cry. "Okay, Sue, I'll feed them." He turned off the water in the sink and scooped up his daughter. "Come on, Lize,'' he said, wiping away her tears. "Let's get you some breakfast."

He went out into the hallway. Susan looked relieved. "I just need ten minutes, that's all," she said. "Consuela is late again. I don't know what's the matter with her."

Sanders didn't answer her. His son, Matt, who was nine months old, sat in the middle of the hallway banging his rattle and crying. Sanders scooped him up in his other arm.

"Come on, kids," he said. "Let's go eat."

When he picked up Matt, his towel slipped off, and he clutched at it. Eliza giggled. "I see your penis, Dad." She swung her foot, kicking it.

"We don't kick Daddy there," Sanders said. Awkwardly, he wrapped the towel around himself again, and headed downstairs.

Susan called after him: "Don't forget Matt needs vitamins in his cereal. One dropperful. And don't give him any more of the rice cereal, he spits it out. He likes wheat now." She went into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

His daughter looked at him with serious eyes. "Is this going to be one of those days, Daddy?"

"Yeah, it looks like it." He walked down the stairs, thinking he would miss the ferry and that he would be late for the first meeting of the day. Not very late, just a few minutes, but it meant he wouldn't be able to go over things with Stephanie before they started, but perhaps he could call her from the ferry, and then

"Do I have a penis, Dad?"

"No, Lize."

"Why, Dad?"

"That's just the way it is, honey."

"Boys have penises, and girls have vaginas," she said solemnly.

"That's right."

"Why, Dad?"

"Because." He dropped his daughter on a chair at the kitchen table, dragged the high chair from the corner, and placed Matt in it. "What do you want for breakfast, Lize? Rice Krispies or Chex?"

"Chex."

Matt began to bang on his high chair with his spoon. Sanders got the Chex and a bowl out of the cupboard, then the box of wheat cereal and a smaller bowl for Matt. Eliza watched him as he opened the refrigerator to get the milk.

"Dad?"

"What."

"I want Mommy to be happy."

"Me too, honey."

He mixed the wheat cereal for Matt, and put it in front of his son. Then he set Eliza's bowl on the table, poured in the Chex, glanced at her. "Enough?"

"Yes."

He poured the milk for her.

"No, Dada"his daughter howled, bursting into tears. "I wanted to pour the milk!"

"Sorry, Lize-"

"Take it out-take the milk out-" She was shrieking, completely hysterical.

"I'm sorry, Lize, but this is-"

"I wanted to pour the milk."She slid off her seat to the ground, where she lay kicking her heels on the floor. "Take it out, take the milk out!"

His daughter did this kind of thing several times a day. It was, he was assured, just a phase. Parents were advised to treat it with firmness.

"I'm sorry," Sanders said. "You'll just have to eat it, Lize." He sat down at the table beside Matt to feed him. Matt stuck his hand in his cereal and smeared it across his eyes. He, too, began to cry.

Sanders got a dish towel to wipe Matt's face. He noticed that the kitchen clock now said five to eight. He thought that he'd better call the office, to warn them he would be late. But he'd have to quiet Eliza first: she was still on the floor, kicking and screaming about the milk. "All right, Eliza, take it easy. Take it easy." He got a fresh bowl, poured more cereal, and gave her the carton of milk to pour herself. "Here."

She crossed her arms and pouted. "I don't want it."

"Eliza, you pour that milkthis minute."

His daughter scrambled up to her chair. "Okay, Dad."

Sanders sat down, wiped Matt's face, and began to feed his son. The boy immediately stopped crying, and swallowed the cereal in big gulps. The poor kid was hungry. Eliza stood on her chair, lifted the milk carton, and splashed it all over the table. "Uh-oh."

"Never mind." With one hand, he wiped the table with the dish towel, while with the other he continued to feed Matt.

Eliza pulled the cereal box right up to her bowl, stared fixedly at the picture of Goofy on the back, and began to eat. Alongside her, Matt ate steadily. For a moment, it was calm in the kitchen.

Sanders glanced over his shoulder: almost eight o'clock. He should call the office.

Susan came in, wearing jeans and a beige sweater. Her face was relaxed. "I'm sorry I lost it," she said. "Thanks for taking over." She kissed him on the cheek.

"Are you happy, Mom?" Eliza said.

"Yes, sweetie." Susan smiled at her daughter, and turned back to Tom. "I'll take over now. You don't want to be late. Isn't today the big day? When they announce your promotion?"

"I hope so."

"Call me as soon as you hear."

"I will." Sanders got up, cinched the towel around his waist, and headed upstairs to get dressed. There was always traffic in town before the 8:20 ferry. He would have to hurry to make it.

He parked in his spot behind Ricky's Shell station, and strode quickly down the covered walkway to the ferry. He stepped aboard moments before they pulled up the ramp. Feeling the throb of the engines beneath his feet, he went through the doors onto the main deck.

"Hey, Tom."

He looked over his shoulder. Dave Benedict was coming up behind him. Benedict was a lawyer with a firm that handled a lot of high-tech companies. "Missed the seven-fifty, too, huh?" Benedict said.

"Yeah. Crazy morning."

"Tell me. I wanted to be in the office an hour ago. But now that school's out, Jenny doesn't know what to do with the kids until camp starts."

"Uh-huh."

"Madness at my house," Benedict said, shaking his head.

There was a pause. Sanders sensed that he and Benedict had had a similar morning. But the two men did not discuss it further. Sanders often wondered why it was that women discussed the most intimate details of their marriages with their friends, while men maintained a discreet silence with one another.

"Anyway," Benedict said. "How's Susan?"

"She's fine. She's great."

Benedict grinned. "So why are you limping?"

"Company touch football game on Saturday. Got a little out of hand."

"That's what you get for playing with children," Benedict said. DigiCom was famous for its young employees.

"Hey," Sanders said. "I scored."

"Is that right?"

"Damn right. Winning touchdown. Crossed the end zone in glory. And then I got creamed."

At the main-deck cafeteria, they stood in line for coffee. "Actually, I would've thought you'd be in bright and early today," Benedict said. "Isn't this the big day at DigiCom?"

Sanders got his coffee, and stirred in sweetener. "How's that?"

"Isn't the merger being announced today?"

"What merger?" Sanders said blandly. The merger was secret; only a handful of DigiCom executives knew anything about it. He gave Benedict a blank stare.

"Come on," Benedict said. "I heard it was pretty much wrapped up. And that Bob Garvin was announcing the restructuring today, including a bunch of new promotions." Benedict sipped his coffee. "Garvin is stepping down, isn't he?"

Sanders shrugged. "We'll see." Of course Benedict was imposing on him, but Susan did a lot of work with attorneys in Benedict's firm; Sanders couldn't afford to be rude. It was one of the new complexities of business relations at a time when everybody had a working spouse.

The two men went out on the deck and stood by the port rail, watching the houses of Bainbridge Island slip away. Sanders nodded toward the house on Wing Point, which for years had been Warren Magnuson's summer house when he was senator.

"I hear it just sold again," Sanders said.

"Oh yes? Who bought it?"

"Some California asshole."

Bainbridge slid to the stern. They looked out at the gray water of the Sound. The coffee steamed in the morning sunlight. "So," Benedict said. "You think maybe Garvin won't step down?"

"Nobody knows," Sanders said. "Bob built the company from nothing, fifteen years ago. When he started, he was selling knockoff modems from Korea. Back when nobody knew what a modem was. Now the company's got three buildings downtown, and big facilities in California, Texas, Ireland, and Malaysia. He builds fax modems the size of a dime, he markets fax and e-mail software, he's gone into CD-ROMs, and he's developed proprietary algorithms that should make him a leading provider in education markets for the next century. Bob's come a long way from some guy hustling three hundred baud modems. I don't know if he can give it up."

"Don't the terms of the merger require it?"

Sanders smiled. "If you know about a merger, Dave, you should tell me," he said. "Because I haven't heard anything." The truth was that Sanders didn't really know the terms of the impending merger. His work involved the development of CD-ROMs and electronic databases. Although these were areas vital to the future of the company-they were the main reason Conley-White was acquiring DigiComthey were essentially technical areas. And Sanders was essentially a technical manager. He was not informed about decisions at the highest levels.

For Sanders, there was some irony in this. In earlier years, when he was based in California, he had been closely involved in management decisions. But since coming to Seattle eight years ago, he had been more removed from the centers of power.

Benedict sipped his coffee. "Well, I hear Bob's definitely stepping down, and he's going to promote a woman as chairman."

Sanders said, "Who told you that?"

"He's already got a woman as CFO, doesn't he?"

"Yes, sure. For a long time, now." Stephanie Kaplan was DigiCom's chief financial officer. But it seemed unlikely she would ever run the company. Silent and intense, Kaplan was competent, but disliked by many in the company. Garvin wasn't especially fond of her.

"Well," Benedict said, "the rumor I've heard is he's going to name a woman to take over within five years."

"Does the rumor mention a name?"

Benedict shook his head. "I thought you'd know. I mean, it's your company.

On the deck in the sunshine, he took out his cellular phone and called in. His assistant, Cindy Wolfe, answered. "Mr. Sanders's office."

"Hi. It's me."

"Hi, Tom. You on the ferry?"

"Yes. I'll be in a little before nine."

"Okay, I'll tell them." She paused, and he had the sense that she was choosing her words carefully. "It's pretty busy this morning. Mr. Garvin was just here, looking for you."

Sanders frowned. "Looking for me?"

"Yes." Another pause. "Uh, he seemed kind of surprised that you weren't in."

"Did he say what he wanted?"

"No, but he's going into a lot of offices on the floor, one after another, talking to people. Something's up, Tom."

"What?"

"Nobody's telling me anything," she said.

"What about Stephanie?"

"Stephanie called, and I told her you weren't in yet."

"Anything else?"

"Arthur Kahn called from KI. to ask if you got his fax."

"I did. I'll call him. Anything else?"

"No, that's about it, Tom."

"Thanks, Cindy." He pushed theENDbutton to terminate the call. Standing beside him, Benedict pointed to Sanders's phone. "Those things are amazing. They just get smaller and smaller, don't they? You guys make that one?"

Sanders nodded. "I'd be lost without it. Especially these days. Who can remember all the numbers? This is more than a telephone: it's my telephone book. See, look." He began to demonstrate the features for Benedict. "It's got a memory for two hundred numbers. You store them by the first three letters of the name."Sanders punched in K-A-H to bring up the international number for Arthur Kahn in Malaysia. He pushed SEND, and heard a long string of electronic beeps. With the country code and area code, it was thirteen beeps.

`Jesus," Benedict said. "Where are you calling, Mars?"

`Just about. Malaysia. We've got a factory there."

DigiCom's Malaysia operation was only a year old, and it was manufacturing the company's new CD-ROM players-units rather like an audio CD player, but intended for computers. It was widely agreed in the business that all information was soon going to be digital, and much of it was going to be stored on these compact disks. Computer programs, databases, even books and magazineseverything was going to be on disk.

The reason it hadn't already happened was that CD-ROMs were notoriously slow. Users were obliged to wait in front of blank screens while the drives whirred and clicked-and computer users didn't like waiting. In an industry where speeds reliably doubled every eighteen months, CD-ROMs had improved much less in the last five years. DigiCom's SpeedStar technology addressed that problem, with a new generation of drives code-named Twinkle (for "Twinkle, twinkle, little SpeedStar"). Twinkle drives were twice as fast as any in the world. Twinkle was packaged as a small, stand-alone multimedia player with its own screen. You could carry it in your hand, and use it on a bus or a train. It was going to be revolutionary. But now the Malaysia plant was having trouble manufacturing the new fast drives.

Benedict sipped his coffee. "Is it true you're the only division manager who isn't an engineer?"

Sanders smiled. "That's right. I'm originally from marketing."

"Isn't that pretty unusual?" Benedict said.

"Not really. In marketing, we used to spend a lot of time figuring out what the features of the new products were, and most of us couldn't talk to the engineers. I could. I don't know why. I don't have a technical background, but I could talk to the guys. I knew just enough so they couldn't bullshit me. So pretty soon, I was the one who talked to the engineers. Then eight years ago, Garvin asked me if I'd run a division for him. And here I am."

The call rang through. Sanders glanced at his watch. It was almost midnight in Kuala Lumpur. He hoped Arthur Kahn would still be awake. A moment later there was a click, and a groggy voice said, "Uh. Hello."

"Arthur, it's Tom."

Arthur Kahn gave a gravelly cough. "Oh, Tom. Good." Another cough. "You got my fax?"

"Yes, I got it."

"Then you know. I don't understand what's going on," Kahn said. "And I spent all day on the line. I had to, with Jafar gone."

Mohammed Jafar was the line foreman of the Malaysia plant, a very capable young man. "Jafar is gone? Why?"

There was a crackle of static. "He was cursed."

"I didn't get that."

"Jafar was cursed by his cousin, so he left."

"What?"

"Yeah, if you can believe that. He says his cousin's sister in Johore hired a sorcerer to cast a spell on him, and he ran off to the Orang Ash witch doctors for a counter-spell. The aborigines run a hospital at Kuala Tingit, in the jungle about three hours outside of KL. It's very famous. A lot of politicians go out there when they get sick. Jafar went out there for a cure."

"How long will that take?"

"Beats me. The other workers tell me it'll probably be a week."

"And what's wrong with the line, Arthur?"

"I don't know," Kahn said. "I'm not sure anything's wrong with the line. But the units coming off are very slow. When we pull units for IP checks, we consistently get seek times above the hundred-millisecond specs. We don't know why they're slow, and we don't know why there's a variation. But the engineers here are guessing that there's a compatibility problem with the controller chip that positions the split optics, and the CD-driver software."

You think the controller chips are bad?" The controller chips were made in Singapore and trucked across the border to the factory in Malaysia.

"Don't know. Either they're bad, or there's a bug in the driver code."

"What about the screen flicker?"

Kahn coughed. "I think it's a design problem, Tom. We just can't build it. The hinge connectors that carry current to the screen are mounted inside the plastic housing. They're supposed to maintain electrical contact no matter how you move the screen. But the current cuts in and out. You move the hinge, and the screen flashes on and off."

Sanders frowned as he listened. "This is a pretty standard design, Arthur. Every damn laptop in the world has the same hinge design. It's been that way for the last ten years."

"I know it," Kahn said. "But ours isn't working. It's making me crazy.

"You better send me some units."

"I already have, DHL. You'll get them late today, tomorrow at the latest."

"Okay," Sanders said. He paused. "What's your best guess, Arthur?"

"About the run? Well, at the moment we can't make our production quotas, and we're turning out a product thirty to fifty percent slower than specs. Not good news. This isn't a hot CD player, Tom. It's only incrementally better than what Toshiba and Sony already have on the market. They're making theirs a lot cheaper. So we have major problems."

"We talking a week, a month, what?"

"A month, if it's not a redesign. If it's a redesign, say four months. If it's a chip, it could be a year."

Sanders sighed. "Great."

"That's the situation. It isn't working, and we don't know why."

Sanders said, "Who else have you told?"

"Nobody. This one's all vours, my friend."

"Thanks a lot."

Kahn coughed. "You going to bury this until after the merger, or what?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure I can."

"Well, I'll be quiet at this end. I can tell you that. Anybody asks me, I don't have a clue. Because I don't."

"Okay. Thanks, Arthur. I'll talk to you later."

Sanders hung up. Twinkle definitely presented a political problem for the impending merger with Conley-White. Sanders wasn't sure how to handle it. But he would have to deal with it soon enough; the ferry whistle blew, and up ahead, he saw the black pilings of Colman Dock and the skyscrapers of downtown Seattle.

DigiCom was located in three different buildings around historic Pioneer Square, in downtown Seattle. Pioneer Square was actually shaped like a triangle, and had at its center a small park, dominated by a wrought-iron pergola, with antique clocks mounted above. Around Pioneer Square were low-rise red-brick buildings built in the early years of the century, with sculpted facades and chiseled dates; these buildings now housed trendy architects, graphic design firms, and a cluster of hightech companies that included Aldus, Advance Holo- and DigiCom. Originally, DigiCom had occupied the Hazzard Building, on the south side of the square. As the company grew, it expanded into three floors of the adjacent Western Building, and later, to the Gorham Tower on James Street. But the executive offices were still on the top three floors of the Hazzard Building, overlooking the square. Sanders's office was on the fourth floor, though he expected later in the week to move up to the fifth.

He got to the fourth floor at nine in the morning, and immediately sensed that something was wrong. There was a buzz in the hallways, an electric tension in the air. Staff people clustered at the laser printers and whispered at the coffee machines; they turned away or stopped talking when he walked by.

He thought, Uh-oh.

But as a division head, he could hardly stop to ask an assistant what was happening. Sanders walked on, swearing under his breath, angry with himself that he had arrived late on this important day.

Through the glass walls of the fourth-floor conference room, he saw Mark Lewyn, the thirty-three-year-old head of Product Design, briefing some of the Conley-White people. It made a striking scene: Lewyn, young, handsome, and imperious, wearing black jeans and a black Armani T-shirt, pacing back and forth and talking animatedly to the blue-suited Conley-White staffers, who sat rigidly before the product mock-ups on the table, and took notes.

When Lewyn saw Sanders he waved, and came over to the door of the conference room and stuck his head out.

"Hey, guy," Lewyn said.

"Hi, Mark. Listen-"

"I have just one thing to say to you," Lewyn said, interrupting. "Fuck 'em. Fuck Garvin. Fuck Phil. Fuck the merger. Fuck 'em all. This reorg sucks. I'm with you on this one, guy."

"Listen, Mark, can you"

"I'm in the middle of something here." Lewyn jerked his head toward the Conley people in the room. "But I wanted you to know how I feel. It's not right, what they're doing. We'll talk later, okay? Chin up, guy," Lewyn said. "Keep your powder dry." And he went back into the conference room.

The Conley-White people were all staring at Sanders through the glass. He turned away and walked quickly toward his office, with a sense of deepening unease. Lewyn was notorious for his tendency to exaggerate, but even so, the -

It's not right, what they're doing.

There didn't seem to be much doubt what that meant. Sanders wasn't going to get a promotion. He broke into a light sweat and felt suddenly dizzy as he walked along the corridor. He leaned against the wall for a moment. He wiped his forehead with his hand and blinked his eyes rapidly. He took a deep breath and shook his head to clear it.

No promotion. Christ.He took another deep breath, and walked on.

Instead of the promotion he expected, there was apparently going to be some kind of reorganization. And apparently it was related to the merger.

The technical divisions had just gone through a major reorganization nine months earlier, which had revised all the lines of authority, upsetting the hell out of everybody in Seattle. Staff people didn't know who to requisition for laser-printer paper, or to degauss a monitor. There had been months of uproar; only in the last few weeks had the tech groups settled down into some semblance of good working routines. Now… to reorganize again? It didn't make any sense at all.

Yet it was last year's reorganization that placed Sanders in line to assume leadership of the tech divisions now. That reorganization had structured the Advanced Products Group into four subdivisions Product Design, Programming, Data Telecommunications, and Manufacturing-all under the direction of a division general manager, not yet appointed. In recent months, Tom Sanders had informally taken over as DGM, largely because as head of manufacturing, he was the person most concerned with coordinating the work of all the other divisions.

But now, with still another reorganization… who knew what might happen? Sanders might be broken back to simply managing DigiCom's production lines around the world. Or worse for weeks, there had been persistent rumors that company headquarters in Cupertino was going to take back all control of manufacturing from Seattle, turning it over to the individual product managers in California. Sanders hadn't paid any attention to those rumors, because they didn't make a lot of sense; the product managers had enough to do just pushing the products, without also worrying about their manufacture.

But now he was obliged to consider the possibility that the rumors were true. Because if they were true, Sanders might be facing more than a demotion. He might be out of a job.

Christ: out of a job?

He found himself thinking of some of the things Dave Benedict had said to him on the ferry earlier that morning. Benedict chased rumors, and he had seemed to know a lot. Maybe even more than he had been saying.

Is it true you're the only division manager who isn't an engineer?

And then, pointedly:

Isn't that pretty unusual?

Christ, he thought. He began to sweat again. He forced himself to take another deep breath. He reached the end of the fourth-floor corridor and came to his office, expecting to find Stephanie Kaplan, the CFO, waiting there for him. Kaplan could tell him what was going on. But his office was empty. He turned to his assistant, Cindy Wolfe, who was busy at the filing cabinets. "Where's Stephanie?"

"She's not coming."

"Why not?"

"They canceled your nine-thirty meeting because of all the personnel changes," Cindy said.

"What changes?" Sanders said. "What's going on?"

"There's been some kind of reorganization," Cindy said. She avoided meeting his eyes, and looked down at the call book on her desk. "They just scheduled a private lunch with all the division heads in the main conference room for twelve-thirty today, and Phil Blackburn is on his way down to talk to you. He should be here any minute. Let's see, what else? DHL is delivering drives from Kuala Lumpur this afternoon. Gary Bosak wants to meet with you at ten-thirty." She ran her finger down the call book. "Don Cherry called twice about the Corridor, and you just got a rush call from Eddie in Austin."

"Call him back." Eddie Larson was the production supervisor in the Austin plant, which made cellular telephones. Cindy placed the call; a moment later he heard the familiar voice with the Texas twang.

"Hey there, Tommy boy."

"Hi, Eddie. What's up?"

"Little problem on the line. You got a minute?"

"Yes, sure."

"Are congratulations on a new job in order?"

"I haven't heard anything yet," Sanders said.

"Uh-huh. But it's going to happen?"

"I haven't heard anything, Eddie."

"Is it true they're going to shut down the Austin plant?"

Sanders was so startled, he burst out laughing. "What?"

"Hey, that's what they're saying down here, Tommy boy. Conley-White is going to buy the company and then shut us down."

"Hell," Sanders said. "Nobody's buying anything, and nobody's selling anything, Eddie. The Austin line is an industry standard. And it's very profitable."

He paused. "You'd tell me if you knew, wouldn't you, Tommy boy?" "Yes, I would," Sanders said. "But it's just a rumor, Eddie. So forget it. Now, what's the line problem?"

"Diddly stuff. The women on the production line are demanding that we clean out the pinups in the men's locker room. They say it's offensive to them. You ask me, I think it's bull," Larson said. "Because women never go into the men's locker room."

"Then how do they know about the pinups?"

"The night cleanup crews have women on 'em. So now the women working the line want the pinups removed."

Sanders sighed. "We don't need any complaints about being unresponsive on sex issues. Get the pinups out."

"Even if the women have pinups intheirlocker room?"

"Just do it, Eddie."

"You ask me, it's caving in to a lot of feminist bullshit." There was a knock on the door. Sanders looked up and saw Phil Blackburn, the company lawyer, standing there. "Eddie, I have to go." "Okay," Eddie said, "but I'm telling you-" "Eddie, I'm sorry. I have to go. Call me if anything changes." Sanders hung up the phone, and Blackburn came into the room. Sanders's first impression was that the lawyer was smiling too broadly, behaving too cheerfully. It was a bad sign.

Philip Blackburn, the chief legal counsel for DigiCom, was a slender man of forty six wearing a dark green Hugo Boss suit. Like Sanders, Blackburn had been with DigiCom for over a decade, which meant that he was one of the "old guys," one of those who had "gotten in at the beginning." When Sanders first met him, Blackburn was a brash, bearded young civil rights lawyer from Berkeley. But Blackburn had long since abandoned protest for profits, which he pursued with singleminded intensity-while carefully emphasizing the new corporate issues of diversity and equal opportunity. Blackburn's embrace of the latest fashions in clothing and correctness made "PC Phil" a figure of fun in some quarters of the company. As one executive put it, "Phil's finger is chapped from wetting it and holding it to the wind." He was the first with Birkenstocks, thefirst with bell-bottoms, the first with sideburns off, and the first with diversity.

Many of the jokes focused on his mannerisms. Fussy, preoccupied with appearances, Blackburn was always running his hands over himself, touching his hair, his face, his suit, seeming to caress himself, to smooth out the wrinkles in his suit. This, combined with his unfortunate tendency to rub, touch, and pick his nose, was the source of much humor. But it was humor with an edge: Blackburn was mistrusted as a moralistic hatchet man.

Blackburn could be charismatic in his speeches, and in private could convey a convincing impression of intellectual honesty for short periods. But within the company he was seen for what he was: a gun for hire, a man with no convictions of his own, and hence the perfect person to be Garvin's executioner.

In earlier years, Sanders and Blackburn had been close friends; not only had they grown up with the company, but their lives were intertwined personally as well: when Blackburn went through his bitter divorce in 1982, he lived for a while in Sanders's bachelor apartment in

Sunnyvale. A few years later, Blackburn had been best man at Sanders's own wedding to a young Seattle attorney, Susan Handler.

But when Blackburn remarried in 1989, Sanders was not invited to the wedding, for by then, their relationship had become strained. Some in the company saw it as inevitable: Blackburn was a part of the inner power circle in Cupertino, to which Sanders, based in Seattle, no longer belonged. In addition, the two men had had sharp disputes about setting up the production lines in Ireland and Malaysia. Sanders felt that Blackburn ignored the inevitable realities of production in foreign countries.

Typical was Blackburn's demand that half the workers on the new line in Kuala Lumpur should be women, and that they should be intermingled with the men; the Malay managers wanted the women segregated, allowed to work only on certain parts of the line, away from the men. Phil strenuously objected. Sanders kept telling him, "It's a Muslim country, Phil."

"I don't give a damn," Phil said. "DigiCom stands for equality."

"Phil, it's their country. They're Muslim."

"So what? It's our factory."

Their disagreements went on and on. The Malaysian government didn't want local Chinese hired as supervisors, although they were the best-qualified; it was the policy of the Malaysian government to train Malays for supervisory jobs. Sanders disagreed with this blatantly discriminatory policy, because he wanted the best supervisors he could get for the plant. But Phil, an outspoken opponent of discrimination in America, immediately acquiesced to the Malay government's discriminatory policy, saying that DigiCom should embrace a true multicultural perspective. At the last minute, Sanders had had to fly to Kuala Lumpur and meet with the Sultans of Selangor and Pahang, to agree to their demands. Phil then announced that Sanders had "toadied up to the extremists."

It was just one of the many controversies that surrounded Sanders's handling of the new Malaysia factory.

Now, Sanders and Blackburn greeted each other with the wariness of former friends who had long since ceased to be anything but superficially cordial. Sanders shook Blackburn's hand as the company lawyer stepped into the office. "What's going on, Phil?"

"Big day," Blackburn said, slipping into the chair facing Sanders's desk. "Lot of surprises. I don't know what you've heard."

"I've heard Garvin has made a decision about the restructuring."

"Yes, he has. Several decisions."

There was a pause. Blackburn shifted in his chair and looked at his hands. "1 know that Bob wanted to fill you in himself about all this. He came by earlier this morning to talk to everyone in the division."

"I wasn't here."

"Uh-huh. We were all kind of surprised that you were late today."

Sanders let that pass without comment. He stared at Blackburn, waiting.

"Anyway, Tom," Blackburn said, "the bottom line is this. As part of the overall merger, Bob has decided to go outside the Advanced Products Group for leadership of the division."

So there it was. Finally, out in the open. Sanders took a deep breath, felt the bands of tightness in his chest. His whole body was tense. But he tried not to show it.

"I know this is something of a shock," Blackburn said.

"Well," Sanders shrugged. "I've heard rumors." Even as he spoke, his mind was racing ahead. It was clear now that there would not be a promotion, there would not be a raise, he would not have a new opportunity to

"Yes. Well," Blackburn said, clearing his throat. "Bob has decided that Meredith Johnson is going to head up the division."

Sanders frowned. "MeredithJohnson?"

"Right. She's in the Cupertino office. I think you know her."

"Yes, I do, but…" Sanders shook his head. It didn't make any sense. "Meredith's from sales. Her background is in sales."

"Originally, yes. But as you know, Meredith's been in Operations the last couple of years."

"Even so, Phil. The APG is a technical division."

"You're not technical. You've done just fine."

"But I've been involved in this for years, when I was in Marketing. Look, the APG is basically programming teams and hardware fabrication lines. How can she run it?"

"Bob doesn't expect her to run it directly. She'll oversee the APG division managers, who will report to her. Meredith's official title will be Vice President for Advanced Operations and Planning. Under the new structure, that will include the entire APG Division, the Marketing Division, and the TelCom Division."

`Jesus," Sanders said, sitting back in his chair. "That's pretty much everything."

Blackburn nodded slowly.

Sanders paused, thinking it over. "It sounds," he said finally, "like Meredith Johnson's going to be running this company."

"I wouldn't go that far," Blackburn said. "She won't have direct control over sales or finance or distribution in this new scheme. But I think there is no question Bob has placed her in direct line for succession, when he steps down as CEO sometime in the next two years." Blackburn shifted in his chair. "But that's the future. For the present-"

“Just a minute. She'll have four APG division managers reporting to her?" Sanders said.

“Yes.”

"And who are those managers going to be? Has that been decided?"

"Well." Phil coughed. He ran his hands over his chest, and plucked at the handkerchief in his breast pocket. "Of course, the actual decision to name the division managers will be Meredith's."

"Meaning I might not have a job."

"Oh hell, Tom," Blackburn said. "Nothing of the sort. Bob wants everyone in the divisions to stay. Including you. He'd hate very much to lose you."

"But it's Meredith Johnson's decision whether I keep my job."

"Technically," Blackburn said, spreading his hands, "it has to be. But I think it's pretty much pro forma."

Sanders did not see it that way at all. Garvin could easily have named all the division managers at the same time he named Meredith Johnson to run the APG. If Garvin decided to turn the company over to some woman from Sales, that was certainly his choice. But Garvin could still make sure he kept his division heads in place the heads who had served him and the company so well.

`Jesus," Sanders said. "I've been with this company twelve years."

"And I expect you will be with us many more," Blackburn said smoothly. "Look: it's in everybody's interest to keep the teams in place. Because as 1 said, she can't run them directly."

"Uh-huh."

Blackburn shot his cuffs and ran his hand through his hair. "Listen, Tom. I know you're disappointed that this appointment didn't come to you. But let's not make too much of Meredith appointing the division heads. Realistically speaking, she isn't going to make any changes. Your situation is secure." He paused. "You know the way Meredith is, Tom."

"I used to," Sanders said, nodding. "Hell, I lived with her for a while. But I haven't seen her in years."

Blackburn looked surprised. "You two haven't kept contact?"

"Not really, no. By the time Meredith joined the company, I was up here in Seattle, and she was based in Cupertino. I ran into her once, on a trip down there. Said hello. That's about it."

"Then you only know her from the old days," Blackburn said, as if it all suddenly made sense. "From six or seven years ago."

"It's longer than that," Sanders said. "I've been in Seattle eight years. So it must be…" Sanders thought back. "When I was going out with her, she worked for Novell in Mountain View. Selling Ethernet cards to small businesses for local area networks. When was that?" Although he remembered the relationship with Meredith Johnson vividly, Sanders was hazy about exactly when it had occurred. He tried to recall some memorable event-a birthday, a promotion, an apartment movethat would mark the date. Finally he remembered watching election returns with her on television: balloons rising up toward the ceiling, people cheering. She was drinking beer. That had been early in their relationship. "Jesus, Phil. It must be almost ten years ago."

"That long," Blackburn said.

When Sanders first met Meredith Johnson, she was one of the thousands of pretty saleswomen working in San Jose-young women in their twenties, not long out of college, who started out doing the product demos on the computer while a senior man stood beside her and did all the talking to the customer. Eventually, a lot of those women learned enough to do the selling themselves. At the time Sanders first knew Meredith, she had acquired enough jargon to rattle on about token rings and 1OBaseT hubs. She didn't really have any deep knowledge, but she didn't need to. She was good-looking, sexy, and smart, and she had a kind of uncanny selfpossession that carried her through awkward moments. Sanders had admired her, back in those days. But he never imagined that she had the ability to hold a major corporate position.

Blackburn shrugged. "A lot's happened in ten years, Tom," he said. "Meredith isn't just a sales exec. She went back to school, got an MBA. She worked at Symantec, then Conrad, and then she came to work with us. The last couple of years, she's been working very closely with Garvin. Sort of his protege. He's been pleased with her work on a number of assignments."

Sanders shook his head. "And now she's my boss…"

"Is that a problem for you?"

"No. It just seems funny. An old girlfriend as my boss."

"The worm turns," Blackburn said. He was smiling, but Sanders sensed he was watching him closely. "You seem a little uneasy about this, Tom."

"It takes some getting used to."

"Is there a problem? Reporting to a woman?"

"Not at all. I worked for Eileen when she was head of HRI, and we got along great. It's not that. It's just funny to think of Meredith Johnson as my boss."

"She's an impressive and accomplished manager," Phil said. He stood up, smoothed his tie. "I think when you've had an opportunity to become reacquainted, you'll be very impressed. Give her a chance, Tom."

"Of course," Sanders said.

"I'm sure everything will work out. And keep your eye on the future. After all, you should be rich in a year or so."

"Does that mean we're still spinning off the APG Division?"

"Oh yes. Absolutely."

It was a much-discussed part of the merger plan that after Conley-White bought DigiCom, it would spin off the Advanced Products Division and take it public, as a separate company. That would mean enormous profits for everyone in the division. Because everyone would have the chance to buy cheap options before the stock was publicly sold.

"We're working out the final details now," Blackburn said. "But I expect that division managers like yourself will start with twenty thousand shares vested, and an initial option of fifty thousand shares at twenty-five cents a share, with the right to purchase another fifty thousand shares each year for the next five years."

"And the spin-off will go forward, even with Meredith running the divisions?"

"Trust me. The spin-off will happen within eighteen months. It's a formal part of the merger plan."

"There's no chance that she may decide to change her mind?"

"None at all, Tom." Blackburn smiled. "I'll tell you a little secret. Originally, this spin-off was Meredith's idea."

Blackburn left Sanders's office and went down the hall to an empty office and called Garvin. He heard the familiar sharp bark: "Garvin here."

"I talked to Tom Sanders."

"And?"

"I'd say he took it well. He was disappointed, of course. I think he'd already heard a rumor. But he took it well."

Garvin said, "And the new stricture? How did he respond?"

"He's concerned," Blackburn said. "He expressed reservations."

"Why?"

"He doesn't feel she has the technical expertise to run the division." Garvin snorted, "Technical expertise? That's the last goddamn thing I care about. Technical expertise is not an issue here."

"Of course not. But I think there was some uneasiness on the personal level. You know, they once had a relationship."

"Yes," Garvin said. "I know that. Have they talked?"

"He says, not for several years."

"Bad blood?"

"There didn't seem to be."

"Then what's he concerned about?"

"I think he's just getting used to the idea."

"He'll come around."

"I think so."

"Tell me if you hear otherwise," Garvin said, and hung up.

Alone in the office, Blackburn frowned. The conversation with Sanders left him vaguely uneasy. It had seemed to go well enough, and yet… Sanders, he felt sure, was not going to take this reorganization lying down. Sanders was popular in the Seattle division, and he could easily cause trouble. Sanders was too independent, he was not a team player, and the company needed team players now. The more Blackburn thought about it, the more certain he was that Sanders was going to be a problem.

Tom Sanders sat at his desk, staring forward, lost in thought. He was trying to put together his memory of a pretty young saleswoman in Silicon Valley with this new image of a corporate officer running company divisions, executing the complex groundwork required to take a division public. But his thoughts kept being interrupted by, random images from the past: Meredith smiling, wearing one of his shirts, naked beneath it. An opened suitcase on the bed. White stockings and white garter belt.Abowl of popcorn on the blue couch in the living room. The television with the sound turned off.

And for some reason, the image of a dower, a purple iris, in stained glass. It was one of those hackneyed Northern California hippie images. Sanders knew where it came from: it was on the glass of the front door to the apartment where he had lived, back in Sunnyvale. Back in the days when he had known Meredith. He wasn't sure why he should keep thinking of it now, and he-

"Tom?"

He glanced up. Cindy was standing in the doorway, looking concerned.

"Tom, do you want coffee?"

"No, thanks."

"Don Cherry called again while you were with Phil. He wants you to come and look at the Corridor."

"They having problems?"

"I don't know. He sounded excited. You want to call him back?"

"Not right now. I'll go down and see him in a minute."

She lingered at the door. "You want a bagel? Have you had breakfast?"

"I'm fine."

"Sure?"

"I'm fine, Cindy. Really."

She went away. He turned to look at his monitor, and saw that the icon for his e-mail was blinking. But he was thinking again about Meredith Johnson.

Sanders had more or less lived with her for about six months. It had been quite an intense relationship for a while. And yet, although he kept having isolated, vivid images, he realized that in general his memories from that time were surprisingly vague. Had he really lived with Meredith for six months? When exactly had they first met, and when had they broken up? Sanders was surprised at how difficult it was for him to fix the chronology in his mind. Hoping for clarity, he considered other aspects of his life: what had been his position at DigiCom in those days? Was he still working in Marketing, or had he already moved to the technical divisions? He wasn't sure, now. He would have to look it up in the files.

He thought about Blackburn. Blackburn had left his wife and moved in with Sanders around the time Sanders was involved with Meredith. Or was it afterward, when things had gone bad? Maybe Phil had moved into his apartment around the time he was breaking up with Meredith. Sanders wasn't sure. As he considered it, he realized he wasn't sure about anything from that time. These events had all happened a decade ago, in another city, at another period in his life, and his memories were in disarray. Again, he was surprised at how confused he was.

He pushed the intercom. "Cindy? I've got a question for you."

"Sure, Tom."

"This is the third week of June. What were you doing the third week of June, ten years ago?"

She didn't even hesitate. "That's easy: graduating from college."

Of course that would be true. "Okay," he said. "Then how about June, nine years ago."

"Nine years ago?" Her voice sounded suddenly cautious, less certain. "Gee… Let's see, June… Nine years ago?… June… Uh… I think I was with my boyfriend in Europe."

"Not your present boyfriend?"

"No… This guy was a real jerk."

Sanders said, "How long did that last?"

"We were there for a month."

"I mean the relationship."

“With him? Oh, let's see, we broke up… oh, it must have been… uh, December… I think it was December, or maybe January, after the holidays… Why?"

“Just trying to figure something out," Sanders said. Already he was relieved to hear the uncertain tone of her voice, as she tried to piece together the past. "By the way, how far back do we have office records? Correspondence, and call books?"

"I'd have to check. I know I have about three years."

"And what about earlier?"

"Earlier? How much earlier?"

"Ten years ago," he said.

"Gee, that'd be when you were in Cupertino. Do they have that stuff in storage down there? Did they put it on fiche, or was it just thrown out?"

"I don't know."

"You want me to check?"

"Not now," he said, and clicked off: He didn't want her making any inquiries in Cupertino now. Not right now.

Sanders rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. His thoughts drifting back over time. Again, he saw the stained-glass flower. It was oversize, bright, banal. Sanders had always been embarrassed by the banality of it. In those days, he had lived in one of the apartment complexes on Merano Drive. Twenty units clustered around a chilly little swimming pool. Everybody in the building worked for a high-tech company. Nobody ever went in the pool. And Sanders wasn't around much. Those were the days when he flew with Garvin to Korea twice a month. The days when they all flew coach. They couldn't even afford business class.

And he remembered how he would come home, exhausted from the long flight, and the first thing he would see when he got to his apartment was that damned stainedglass flower on the door.

And Meredith, in those days, was partial to white stockings, a white garter belt, little white flowers on the snaps with

"Tom?" He looked up. Cindy was at the doorway. She said, "If you want to see Don Cherry, you'd better go now because you have a ten-thirty with Gary Bosak."

He felt as if she was treating him like an invalid. "Cindy, I'm fine."

"I know. Just a reminder."

"Okay, I'll go now."

As he hurried down the stairs to the third floor, he felt relieved atthe distraction. Cindy was right to get him out of the office. And he was curious to see what Cherry's team had done with the Corridor.

The Corridor was what everyone at DigiCom called VIE: the Virtual Information Environment. VIE was the companion piece to Twinkle, the second major element in the emerging future of digital information as envisioned by DigiCom. In the future, information was going to be stored on disks, or made available in large databases that users would dial into over telephone lines. At the moment, users saw information displayed on flat screenseither televisions or computer screens. That had been the traditional way of handling information for the last thirty years. But soon, there would be new ways to present information. The most radical, and the most exciting, was virtual environments. Users wore special glasses to see computer-generated, threedimensional environments which allowed them to feel as though they were literally moving through another world. Dozens of high-tech companies were racing to develop virtual environments. It was exciting, but very difficult, technology. At DigiCom, VIE was one of Garvin's pet projects; he had thrown a lot of money at it; he had had Don Cherry's programmers working on it around the clock for two years.

And so far, it had been nothing but trouble.

The sign on the door said "VIE" and underneath, "When Reality Is Not Enough." Sanders inserted his card in the slot, and the door clicked open. He passed through an anteroom, hearing a halfdozen voices shouting from the main equipment room beyond. Even in the anteroom, he noticed a distinctly nauseating odor in the air.

Entering the main room, he came upon a scene of utter chaos. The windows were thrown wide; there was the astringent smell of cleaning fluid. Most of the programmers were on the floor, working with disassembled equipment. The VIE units lay scattered in pieces, amid a tangle of multicolored cables. Even the black circular walker pads had been taken apart, the rubber bearings being cleaned one by one. Still more wires descended from the ceiling to the laser scanners which were broken open, their circuit boards exposed. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. And in the center of the room, looking like a teenage Buddha in an electric blue T-shirt that said "Reality Sucks," was Don Cherry, the head of Programming. Cherry was twenty-two years old, widely acknowledged to be indispensable, and famous for his impertinence.

When he saw Sanders he shouted: "Out! Out! Damned management! Out!"

"Why?" Sanders said. "I thought you wanted to see me."

"Too late! You had your chance!" Cherry said. "Now it's over!"

For a moment, Sanders thought Cherry was referring to the promotion he hadn't gotten. But Cherry was the most apolitical of the DigiCom division heads, and he was grinning cheerfully as he walked toward Sanders, stepping over his prostrate programmers. "Sorry, Tom. You're too late. We're fine-tuning now."

"Fine-tuning? It looks like ground zero here. And what's that terrible smell?"

"I know." Cherry threw up his hands. "I ask the boys to wash every day, but what can I say. They're programmers. No better than dogs."

"Cindy said you called me several times."

"I did," Cherry said. "We had the Corridor up and running, and I wanted you to see it. But maybe it's just as well you didn't."

Sanders looked at the complex equipment scattered all around him. "You had it up?"

"That was then. This is now. Now, we're fine-tuning." Cherry nodded to the programmers on the floor, working on the walker pads. "We finally got the bug out of the main loop, last night at midnight. The refresh rate doubled. The system really rips now. So we have to adjust the walkers and the servos to update responsiveness. It's amechanicalproblem," he said disdainfully. "But we'll take care of it anyway."

The programmers were always annoyed when they had to deal with mechanical problems. Living almost entirely in an abstract world of computer code, they felt that physical machinery was beneath them.

Sanders said, "What is the problem, exactly?"

"Well, look," Cherry said. "Here's our latest implementation. The user wears this headset," he said, pointing to what looked like thick silver sunglasses. "And he gets on the walker pad, here."

The walker pad was one of Cherry's innovations. The size of a small round trampoline, its surface was composed of tightly packed rubber balls. It functioned like a multidirectional treadmill; walking on the balls, users could move in any direction. "Once he's on the walker," Cherry said, "the user dials into a database. Then the computer, over there-" Cherry pointed to a stack of boxes in the corner, "takes the information coming from the database and constructs a virtual environment which is projected inside the headset. When the user walks on the pad, the projection changes, so you feel like you're walking down a corridor lined with drawers of data on all sides. The user can stop anywhere, open any file drawer with his hand, and thumb through data. Completely realistic simulation."

"How many users?"

"At the moment, the system can handle five at one time."

"And the Corridor looks like what?" Sanders said. "Wire-frame?" In the earlier versions, the Corridor was outlined in skeletal black-and-white outlines. Fewer lines made it faster for the computer to draw.

"Wire-frame?" Cherry sniffed. "Please. We dumped that two weeks ago. Now we are talking 3-D surfaces fully modeled in z4-bit color, with anti-alias texture maps. We're rendering true curved surfaces-no polygons. Looks completely real."

"And what're the laser scanners for? I thought you did position by infrared." The headsets had infrared sensors mounted above them, so that the system could detect where the user was looking and adjust the projected image inside the headset to match the direction of looking.

"We still do," Cherry said. "The scanners are for body representation.

"Body representation?"

"Yeah. Now, if you're walking down the Corridor with somebody else, you can turn and look at them and you'll see them. Because the scanners are capturing a three-dimensional texture map in real time: they read body and expression, and draw the virtual face of the virtual person standing beside you in the virtual room. You can't see the person's eyes, of course, because they're hidden by the headset they're wearing. But the system generates a face from the stored texture map. Pretty slick, huh?"

"You mean you can see other users?"

"That's right. See their faces, see their expressions. And that's not all. If other users in the system aren't wearing a headset, you can still see them, too. The program identifies other users, pulls their photo out of the personnel file, and pastes it onto a virtual body image. A little kludgey, but not bad." Cherry waved his hand in the air. "And that's not all. We've also built in virtual help."

"Virtual help?"

"Sure, users always need online help. So we've made an angel to help you. Floats alongside you, answers your questions." Cherry was grinning. "We thought of making it a blue fairy, but we didn't want to offend anybody."

Sanders stared thoughtfully at the room. Cherry was telling him about his successes. But something else was happening here: it was impossible to miss the tension, the frantic energy of the people as they worked.

"Hey, Don," one of the programmers shouted. "What's the Z-count supposed to be?"

"Over five," Cherry said.

"I got it to four-three."

"Four-three sucks. Get it above five, or you're fired." He turned to Sanders. "You've got to encourage the troops."

Sanders looked at Cherry. "All right," he said finally. "Now what's the real problem?"

Cherry shrugged. "Nothing. I told you: fine-tuning."

"Don."

Cherry sighed. "Well, when we jumped the refresh rate, we trashed the builder module. You see, the room is being built in real time by the box. With a faster refresh off the sensors, we have to build objects much faster. Otherwise the room seems to lag behind you. You feel like you're drunk. You move your head, and the room swooshes behind you, catching up."

"And?"

"And, it makes the users throw up."

Sanders sighed. "Great."

"We had to take the walker pads apart because Teddy barfed all over everything."

"Great, Don."

"What's the matter? It's no big deal. It cleans up." Ile shook his head. "Although I do wish Teddy hadn't eaten huevos rancheros for breakfast. That was unfortunate. Little bits of tortilla everywhere in the bearings."

"You know we have a demo tomorrow for the C-W people."

"No problem. We'll be ready."

"Don, I can't have their top executives throwing up."

"Trust me," Cherry said. "We'll be ready. They're going to love it. Whatever problems this company has, the Corridor is not one of them."

"That's a promise?"

"That," Cherry said, "is a guarantee."

Sanders was back in his office by ten-twenty, and was seated at his desk when Gary Bosak came in. Bosak was a tall man in his twenties, wearing jeans, running shoes, and a Terminator T-shirt. He carried a large fold-over leather briefcase, the kind that trial attorneys used.

"You look pale," Bosak said. "But everybody in the building is pale today. It's tense as hell around here, you know that?"

"I've noticed."

"Yeah, I bet. Okay to start?"

"Sure."

"Cindy? Mr. Sanders is going to be unavailable for a few minutes."

Bosak closed the office door and locked it. Whistling cheerfully, he unplugged Sanders's desk phone, and the phone beside the couch in the corner. From there, he went to the window and closed the blinds. There was a small television in the corner; he turned it on. He snapped the latches on his briefcase, took out a small plastic box, and flipped the switch on the side. The box began to blink, and emitted a low white noise hiss. Bosak set it in the middle of Sanders's desk. Bosak never gave information until the white noise scrambler was in place, since most of what he had to say implied illegal behavior.

"I have good news for you," Bosak said. "Your boy is clean." He pulled out a manila file, opened it up, and started handing over pages. "Peter John Nealy, twenty three, DigiCom employee for sixteen months. Now working as a programmer in APG. Okay, here we go. His high school and college transcripts… Employment file from Data General, his last employer. All in order. Now, the recent stuff… Credit rating from TRW… Phone bills from his apartment… Phone bills for his cellular line… Bank statement… Savings account… Last two1040s… Twelve months of credit card charges, VISA and Master… Travel records… E-mail messages inside the company, and off the Internet… Parking tickets… And this is the clincher… Ramada Inn in Sunnyvale, last three visits, his phone charges there, the numbers he called… Last three car rentals with mileage… Rental car cellular phone, the numbers called… That's everything."

"And?"

"I ran down the numbers he called. here's the breakdown. A lot of calls to Seattle Silicon, but Nealy's seeing a girl there. She's a secretary, works in sales, no conflict. He also calls his brother, a programmer at Boeing, does parallel processing stuff for wing design, no conflict. His other calls are to suppliers and code vendors, and they're all appropriate. No calls after hours. No calls to pay phones. No overseas calls. No suspicious pattern in the calls. No unexplained bank transfers, no sudden new purchases. No reason to think he's looking for a move. I'd say he's not talking to anybody you care about."

"Good," Sanders said. He glanced down at the sheets of paper, and paused. "Gary… Some of this stuff is from our company. Some of these reports."

"Yeah. So?"

"How'd you get them?"

Bosak grinned. "Hey. You don't ask and I don't tell you."

"How'd you get the Data General file?"

Bosak shook his head. "Isn't this why you pay me?"

"Yes it is, but-"

"Hey. You wanted a check on an employee, you got it. Your kid's clean. He's working only for you. Anything else you want to know about him?"

"No." Sanders shook his head.

"Great. I got to get some sleep." Bosak collected all the files and placed them back in his folder. "By the way, you're going to get a call from my parole officer."

"Uh-huh."

"Can I count on you?"

"Sure, Gary."

"I told him I was doing consulting for you. On telecommunications security."

"And so you are."

Bosak switched off the blinking box, put it in his briefcase, and reconnected the telephones. "Always a pleasure. Do I leave the bill with you, or Cindy?"

"I'll take it. See you, Gary."

"Hey. Anytime. You need more, you know where I am."

Sanders glanced at the bill, from NE Professional Services, Inc., of Bellevue, Washington. The name was Bosak's private joke: the letters NE stood for "Necessary Evil." Ordinarily, high-tech companies employed retired police officers and private investigators to do background checks, but occasionally they used hackers like Gary Bosak, who could gain access to electronic data banks, to get information on suspect employees. The advantage of using; Bosak was that he could work quickly, often making a report in a matter of hours, or overnight. Bosak's methods were of course illegal; simply by hiring him, Sanders himself had broken a half-dozen laws. But background checks on employees were accepted as standard practice in high-tech firms, where a single document or product development plan might be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to competitors.

And in the case of Pete Nealy, a check was particularly crucial. Nealy was developing hot new compression algorithms to pack and unpack video images ontoCD-ROM laser disks. His work was vital to the new Twinkle technology. High-speed digital images coming off the disk were going to transform a sluggish technology and produce a revolution in education. But if Twinkle's algorithms became available to a competitor, then DigiCom's advantage would be greatly reduced, and that meant

The intercom buzzed. "Tom," Cindy said. "It's eleven o'clock. Time for the APG meeting. You want the agenda on your way down?"

"Not today," he said. "I think I know what we'll be talking about."

In the third-floor conference room, the Advanced Products Group was already meeting. This was a weekly meeting in which the division heads discussed problems and brought everyone up to date. It was a meeting that Sanders ordinarily led. Around the table were Don Cherry, the chief of Programming; Mark Lewyn, the temperamental head of Product Design, all in black Armani; and Mary Anne Hunter, the head of Data Telecommunications. Petite and intense, Hunter was dressed in a sweatshirt, shorts, and Nike running tights; she never ate lunch, but ordinarily went on a five-mile run after each meeting.

Lewyn was in the middle of one of his storming rages: "It's insulting to everybody in the division. I have no idea why she got this position. I don't know what her qualifications could be for a job like this, and-"

Lewyn broke off as Sanders came into the room. There was an awkward moment. Everyone was silent, glancing at him, then looking away.

"I had a feeling," Sanders said, smiling, "you'd be talking about this."

The room remained silent. "Come on," he said, as he slipped into a chair. "It's not a funeral."

Mark Lewyn cleared his throat. "I'm sorry, Tom. I think it's an outrage."

Mary Anne Hunter said, "Everybody knows it should have been you."

Lewyn said, "It's a shock to all of us, Tom."

"Yeah," Cherry said, grinning. "We've been trying like hell to get you sacked, but we never really thought it would work."

"I appreciate all this," Sanders said, "but it's Garvin's company, and he can do what he wants with it. He's been right more often than not. And I'm a big boy. Nobody ever promised me anything."

Lewyn said, "You're really okay with this?"

"Believe me. I'm fine."

"You talked with Garvin?"

"I talked with Phil."

Lewyn shook his head. "That sanctimonious asshole."

"Listen," Cherry said, "did Phil say anything about the spin-off?"

"Yes," Sanders said. "The spin-off is still happening. Eighteen months after the merger, they'll structure the IPO, and take the division public."

There were little shrugs around the table. Sanders could see they were relieved. Going public meant a lot of money to all the people sitting in the room.

"And what did Phil say about Ms. Johnson?"

"Not much. Just that she's Garvin's choice to head up the technical side."

At that moment Stephanie Kaplan, DigiCom's Chief Financial Officer, came into the room. A tall woman with prematurely gray hair and a notably silent manner, she was known as Stephanie Stealth, or the Stealth Bomberthe latter a reference to her habit of quietly killing projects she did not consider profitable enough. Kaplan was based in Cupertino, but she generally sat in once a month on the Seattle division meetings. Lately, she had been up more often.

Lewyn said, "`M'e're trying to cheer up Tom, Stephanie."

Kaplan took a seat, and gave Sanders a sympathetic smile. She didn't speak.

Lewyn said, "Did you know this Meredith Johnson appointment was coming?"

"No," Kaplan said. "It was a surprise to everybody. And not everybody's happy about it." Then, as if she had said too much, she opened her briefcase, and busied herself with her notes. As usual, she slid into the background; the others quickly ignored her.

"Well," Cherry said, "I hear Garvin's got a real thing for her. Johnson's only been with the company four years, and she hasn't been especially outstanding. But Garvin took her under his wing. Two years ago, he began moving her up, fast. For some reason, he just thinks Meredith Johnson is great.''

Lewyn said, "Is Garvin fucking her?"

"No, he just likes her."

"She must be fucking somebody."

"Wait a minute," Mary Anne Hunter said, sitting up. "What's this? If Garvin brought in some guy from Microsoft to run this division, nobody'd say he must be fucking somebody."

Cherry laughed. "It'd depend on who he was."

"I'm serious. Why is it when a woman gets a promotion, she must be fucking somebody?"

Lewyn said, "Look: if they brought in Ellen Howard from Microsoft, we wouldn't be having this conversation because we all know Ellen's very competent. We wouldn't like it, but we'd accept it. But nobody evenknows Meredith Johnson. I mean, does anybody here know her?"

"Actually," Sanders said, "I know her."

There was silence.

"I used to go out with her."

Cherry laughed. "So you're the one she's fucking."

Sanders shook his head. "It was years ago."

Hunter said, "What's she like?"

"Yeah," Cherry said, grinning lasciviously. "What's she like?"

"Shut up, Don."

"Lighten up, Mary Anne."

"She worked for Novell when I knew her," Sanders said. "She was about twentyfive. Smart and ambitious."

"Smart and ambitious," Lewyn said. "That's fine. The world's full of smart and ambitious. The question is, can she run a technical division? Or have we got another Screamer Freeling on our hands?"

Two years earlier, Garvin had put a sales manager named Howard Freeling in charge of the division. The idea was to bring product development in contact with customers at an earlier point, to develop new products more in line with the emerging market. Freeling instituted focus groups, and they all spent a lot of time watching potential customers play with new products behind one-way glass.

But Freeling was completely unfamiliar with technical issues. So when confronted with a problem, he screamed. He was like a tourist in a foreign country who didn't speak the language and thought he could make the locals understand by shouting at them. Freeling's tenure at APG was a disaster. The programmers loathed him; the designers rebelled at his idea for neon-colored product boxes; the manufacturing glitches at factories in Ireland and Texas didn't get solved. Finally, when the production line in Cork went down for eleven days, Freeling flew over and screamed. The Irish managers all quit, and Garvin fired him.

"So: is that what we have? Another Screamer?"

Stephanie Kaplan cleared her throat. "I think Garvin learned his lesson. Ile wouldn't make the same mistake twice."

"So you think Meredith Johnson is up to the job?"

"I couldn't say," Kaplan replied, speaking very deliberately.

"Not much of an endorsement," Lewyn said.

"But I think she'll be better than Freeling," Kaplan said.

Lewyn snorted. "This is the Taller Than Mickey Rooney Award. N ou can still be very short and win."

"No," Kaplan said, "I think she'll be better."

Cherry said, "Better-looking, at least, from what I hear."

"Sexist," Mary Anne Hunter said.

"What: I can't say she's good-looking?"

"We're talking about her competence, not her appearance."

"Wait a minute," Cherry said. "Coming over here to this meeting, I pass the women at the espresso bar, and what are they talking about? Whether Richard Gere has better buns than Mel Gibson. They're talking about the crack in the ass, lift and separate, all that stuff. I don't see why they can talk about-"

"We're drifting afield," Sanders said.

"It doesn't matter what you guys say," Hunter said, "the fact is, this company is dominated by males; there are almost no women except Stephanie in high executive positions. I think it's great that Bob has appointed a woman to run this division, and I for one think we should support her." She looked at Sanders. "We all love you, Tom, but you know what I mean."

"Yeah, we all love you," Cherry said. "At least, we did until we got our cute new boss."

Lewyn said, "I'll support Johnsonif she's any good."

"No you won't," Hunter said. "You'll sabotage her. You'll find a reason to get rid of her."

"Wait a minute"

"No. What is this conversation really about? It's about the fact that you're all pissed off because now you have to report to a woman."

"Mary Anne…"

"I mean it."

Lewyn said, "I think Tom's pissed off because he didn't get the job." "I'm not pissed off," Sanders said.

"Well, I'm pissed off," Cherry said, "because Meredith used to be Tom's girlfriend, so now he has a special in with the new boss."

"Maybe." Sanders frowned.

Lewyn said, "On the other hand, maybe she hates you. All my old girlfriends hate me."

"With good reason, I hear," Cherry said, laughing.

Sanders said, "Let's get back to the agenda, shall we?"

"What agenda?"

"Twinkle."

There were groans around the table. "Not again."

"Goddamn Twinkle."

"How bad is it?" Cherry said.

"They still can't get the seek times down, and they can't solve the hinge problems. The line's running at twenty-nine percent."

Lewyn said, "They better send us some units."

"We should have them today."

"Okay. Table it till then?"

"It's okay with me." Sanders looked around the table. "Anybody else have a problem? Mary Anne?"

"No, we're fine. We still expect prototype card-phones off our test line within two months."

The new generation of cellular telephones were not much larger than a credit card. They folded open for use. "How's the weight?"

"The weight's now four ounces, which is not great, but okay. The problem is power. The batteries only run 180 minutes in talk mode. And the keypad sticks when you dial. But that's Mark's headache. We're on schedule with the line."

"Good." He turned to Don Cherry. "And how's the Corridor?"

Cherry sat back in his chair, beaming. He crossed his hands over his belly. "I am pleased to report," he said, "that as of half an hour ago, the Corridor is fan-fuckingtastic."

"Really?"

"That's great news."

"Nobody's throwing up?"

"Please. Ancient history."

Mark Lewyn said, "Wait a minute. Somebody threw up?"

"A vile rumor. That was then. This is now. We got the last delay bug out half an hour ago, and all functions are now fully implemented. We can take any database and convert it into a 3-D z4-bit color environment that you can navigate in real time. You can walk through any database in the world." "And it's stable?" "It's a rock." "You've tried it with naive users?" "Bulletproof." "So you're ready to demo for Conley?" "We'll blow 'em away," Cherry said. "They won't fucking believe their eyes."

Coming out of the conference room, Sanders ran into a group of Conley-White executives being taken on a tour by Bob Garvin.

Robert T. Garvin looked the way every CEO wanted to look in the pages ofFortunemagazine. He was fifty-nine years old and handsome, with a craggy face and salt-and-pepper hair that always looked windblown, as if he'd just come in from a fly-fishing trip in Montana, or a weekend sailing in the San Juans. In the old days, like everyone else, he had worn jeans and denim work shirts in the office. But in recent years, he favored dark blue Caracem suits. It was one of the many changes that people in the company had noticed since the death of his daughter, three years before.

Brusque and profane in private, Garvin was all charm in public. Leading the Conley-White executives, he said, "Here on the third floor, you have our tech divisions and advanced product laboratories. Oh, Tom. Good." He threw his arm around Sanders. "Meet Tom Sanders, our division manager for advanced products. One of the brilliant young men who's made our company what it is. Tom, say hello to Ed Nichols, the CFO for Conley-White…"

A thin, hawk-faced man in his late fifties, Nichols carried his head tilted back, so that he seemed to be pulling away from everything, as if there were a bad smell. He looked down his nose through half-frame glasses at Sanders, regarding him with a vaguely disapproving air, and shook hands formally.

"Mr. Sanders. How do you do."

"Mr. Nichols."

"… and John Conley, nephew of the founder, and vice president of the firm…"

Sanders turned to a stocky, athletic man in his late twenties. Wireframe spectacles. Armani suit. Firm handshake. Serious expression. Sanders had the impression of a wealthy and very determined man.

"Hi there, Tom."

"Hi, John."

"… and Jim Daly, from Goldman, Sachs…"

A balding, thin, storklike man in a pinstripe suit. Daly seemed distracted, befuddled, and shook hands with a brief nod.

``… and of course, Meredith Johnson, from Cupertino."

She was more beautiful than he had remembered. And different in some subtle way. Older, of course, crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes, and faint creases in her forehead. But she stood straighter now, and she had a vibrancy, a confidence, that he associated with power. Dark blue suit, blond hair, large eyes. Those incredibly long eyelashes. He had forgotten.

"Hello, Tom, nice to see you again." A warm smile. Her perfume.

"Meredith, nice to see you."

She released his hand, and the group swept on, as Garvin led them down the hall. "Now, just ahead is the VIE Unit. You'll be seeing that work tomorrow."

Mark Lewyn came out of the conference room and said, "You met the rogues' gallery?"

"I guess so."

Lewyn watched them go. "Hard to believe those guys are going to be running this company," he said. "I did a briefing this morning, and let me tell you, they don't knowanything.It's scary."

As the group reached the end of the hallway, Meredith Johnson looked back over her shoulder at Sanders. She mouthed, "I'll call you." And she smiled radiantly. Then she was gone.

Lewyn sighed. "I'd say," he said, "that you have an in with top management there, Tom."

"Maybe so."

"I just wish I knew why Garvin thinks she's so great."

Sanders said, "Well, she certainly looks great."

Lewyn turned away. "We'll see," he said. "We'll see."

A twenty past twelve, Sanders left his office on the fourth floor and headed toward the stairs to go down to the main conference room for lunch. He passed a nurse in a starched white uniform. She was looking in one office after another. "Where is he? He was just here a minute ago." She shook her head.

"Who?" Sanders said.

"The professor," she replied, blowing a strand of hair out of her eyes. "I can't leave him alone for a minute."

"What professor?" Sanders said. But by then he heard the female giggles coming from a room farther down the hall, and he already knew the answer. "Professor Dorfman?"

"Yes. Professor Dorfman," the nurse said, nodding grimly, and she headed toward the source of the giggles.

Sanders trailed after her. Max Dorfman was a German management consultant, now very elderly. At one time or another, he had been a visiting professor at every major business school in America, and he had gained a particular reputation as a guru to high-tech companies. During most of the 1980s, he had served on the board of directors of DigiCom, lending prestige to Garvin's upstart company. And during that time, he had been a mentor to Sanders. In fact, it was Dorfman who had convinced Sanders to leave Cupertino eight years earlier and take the job in Seattle.

Sanders said, "I didn't know he was still alive."

"Very much so," the nurse said.

"He must be ninety."

"Well, he doesn't act a day over eighty-five."

As they approached the room, he saw Mary Anne Hunter coming out. She had changed into a skirt and blouse, and she was smiling broadly, as if she had just left her lover. "Tom, you'll never guess who's here."

"Max," he said.

"That's right. Oh, Tom, you should see him: he's exactly the same." "I'll bet he is," Sanders said. Even from outside the room, he could smell the cigarette smoke.

The nurse said, "Now, Professor," in a severe tone, and strode into the room. Sanders looked in; it was one of the employee lounges. Max Dorfman's wheelchair was pulled up to the table in the center of the room. He was surrounded by pretty assistants. The women were making a fuss over him, and in their midst Dorfman, with his shock of white hair, was grinning happily, smoking a cigarette in a long holder.

"What's he doing here?" Sanders said.

"Garvin brought him in, to consult on the merger. Aren't you going to say hello?" Hunter said.

"Oh, Christ," Sanders said. "You know Max. He can drive you crazy." Dorfman liked to challenge conventional wisdom, but his method was indirect. He had an ironic way of speaking that was provocative and mocking at the same moment. He was fond of contradictions, and he did not hesitate to lie. If you caught him in a lie, he would immediately say, "Yes, that's true. I don't know what I was thinking of," and then resume talking in the same maddening, elliptical way. He never really said what he meant; he left it for you to put it together. His rambling sessions left executives confused and exhausted.

"But you were such friends," Hunter said, looking at him. "I'm sure he'd like you to say hello."

"He's busy now. Maybe later." Sanders looked at his watch. "Anyway, we're going to be late for lunch."

He started back down the hallway. Hunter fell into step with him, frowning. "He always got under your skin, didn't he?"

"He got under everybody's skin. It was what he did best."

She looked at him in a puzzled way, and seemed about to say more, then shrugged. "It's okay with me."

"I'm just not in the mood for one of those conversations," Sanders said. "Maybe later. But not right now." They headed down the stairs to the ground floor.

In keeping with the stripped-down functionality of modern high-tech firms, DigiCom maintained no corporate dining room. Instead, lunches and dinners were held at local restaurants, most often at the nearby 11 Terrazzo. But the need for secrecy about the merger obliged DigiCom to cater a lunch in the large, wood-paneled conference room on the ground floor. At twelve-thirty, with the principal managers of the DigiCom technical divisions, the Conley-White executives, and the Goldman, Sachs bankers all present, the room was crowded. The egalitarian ethos of the company meant that there was no assigned seating, but the principal C-W executives ended up at one side of the table near the front of the room, clustered around Garvin. The power end of the table.

Sanders took a seat farther down on the opposite side, and was surprised when Stephanie Kaplan slid into the chair to his right. Kaplan usually sat much closer to Garvin; Sanders was distinctly further down the pecking order. To Sanders's left was Bill Everts, the head of Human Resourcesa nice, slightly dull guy. As white-coated waiters served the meal, Sanders talked about fishing on Orcas Island, which was Everts's passion. As usual, Kaplan was quiet during most of the lunch, seeming to withdraw into herself.

Sanders began to feel he was neglecting her. Toward the end of the meal, he turned to her and said, "I notice you've been up here in Seattle more often the last few months, Stephanie. Is that because of the merger?"

"No." She smiled. "My son's a freshman at the university, so I like to come up because I get to see him."

"What's he studying?"

"Chemistry. He wants to go into materials chemistry. Apparently it's going to be a big field."

"I've heard that."

"Half the time I don't know what he's talking about. It's funny, when your child knows more than you do."

He nodded, trying to think of something else to ask her. It wasn't easy: although he had sat in meetings with Kaplan for years, he knew little about her personally. She was married to a professor at San Jose State, a jovial chubby man with a mustache, who taught economics. When they were together, he did all the talking while Stephanie stood silently by. She was a tall, bony, awkward woman who seemed resigned to her lack of social graces. She was said to be a very good golfer-at least, good enough that Garvin wouldn't play her anymore. No one who knew her was surprised that she had made the error of beating Garvin too often; wags said that she wasn't enough of a loser to be promoted.

Garvin didn't really like her, but he would never think of letting her go. Colorless, humorless, and tireless, her dedication to the company was legendary; she worked late every night and came in most weekends. When she had had a bout of cancer a few years back, she refused to take even a single day off. Apparently she was cured of the cancer; at least, Sanders hadn't heard anything more about it. But the episode seemed to have increased Kaplan's relentless focus on her impersonal domain, figures and spreadsheets, and heightened her natural inclination to work behind the scenes. More than one manager had come to work in the morning, only to find a pet project killed by the Stealth Bomber, with no lingering trace of how or why it had happened. Thus her tendency to remain aloof in social situations was more than a reflection of her own discomfort; it was also a reminder of the power she wielded within the company, and how she wielded it. In her own way, she was mysterious-and potentially dangerous.

While he was trying to think of something to say, Kaplan leaned toward him confidentially and lowered her voice, "In the meeting this morning, Tom, I didn't really feel I could say anything. But I hope you're okay. About this new reorganization."

Sanders concealed his surprise. In twelve years, Kaplan had never said anything so directly personal to him. He wondered why she would do so now. He was instantly wary, unsure of how to respond.

“Well, it was a shock," he said.

She looked at him with a steady gaze. "It was a shock to many of us,"she said quietly. "There was an uproar in Cupertino.A lot of people questioned Garvin's judgment."

Sanders frowned. Kaplan never said anything even obliquely critical of Garvin. Never. But now this. Was she testing him? He said nothing, and poked at his food.

"I can imagine you're uneasy about the new appointment."

"Only because it was so unexpected. It seemed to come out of the blue."

Kaplan looked at him oddly for a moment, as if he had disappointed her. Then she nodded. "It's always that way with mergers," she said. Her tone was more open, less confidential. "I was at CompuSoft when it merged with Symantec, and it was exactly the same: last-minute announcements, switches in the organization charts. Jobs promised, jobs lost. Everybody up in the air for weeks. It's not easy to bring two organizations together-especially these two. There are big differences in corporate cultures. Garvin has to make them comfortable." She gestured toward the end of the table where Garvin was sitting. `Just look at them," she said. "All the Conley people are wearing suits. Nobody in our company wears suits, except lawyers."

"They're East Coast," Sanders said.

"But it goes deeper than that. Conley-White likes to present itself as a diversified communications company, but it's really not so grand. Its primary business is textbooks. That's a lucrative business, but you're selling to school boards in Texas and Ohio and Tennessee. Many of them are deeply conservative. So Conley's conservative, by instinct and experience. They want this merger because they need to acquire a high-tech capacity going into the next century. But they can't get used to the idea of a very young company, where the employees work in T-shirts and jeans, and everybody goes by first names. They're in shock. Besides," Kaplan added, lowering her voice again, "there are internal divisions within Conley-White. Garvin has to deal with that, too."

"What internal divisions?"

She nodded toward the head of the table. "You may have noticed that their CEO isn't here. The big man hasn't honored us with his presence. He won't show up until the end of the week. For now, he's only sent his minions. Their highest-ranking officer is Ed Nichols, the CFO."

Sanders glanced over at the suspicious, sharp-faced man he had met earlier. Kaplan said, "Nichols doesn't want to buy this company. He thinks we're overpriced and underpowered. Last year, he tried to form a strategic alliance with Microsoft, but Gates blew him off. Then Nichols tried to buy InterDisk, but that fell through: too many problems, and InterDisk had that bad publicity about the fired employee. So they ended up with us. But Ed isn't happy about where he landed."

"He certainly doesn't look happy," Sanders said.

"The main reason is he hates the Conley kid."

Seated beside Nichols was John Conley, the bespectacled young lawyer in his twenties. Distinctly younger than anyone around him, Conley was speaking energetically, jabbing his fork in the air as he made a point to Nichols.

"Ed Nichols thinks Conley's an asshole."

"But Conley's only a vice president," Sanders said. "He can't have that much power."

Kaplan shook her head. "He's the heir, remember?"

"So? What does that mean? His grandfather's picture is on some boardroom wall?"

"Conley owns four percent of C-W stock, and controls another twenty-six percent still held by the family or vested in trusts controlled by the family. John Conley has the largest voting block of Conley-White stock."

"And John Conley wants the deal?"

"Yes." Kaplan nodded. "Conley handpicked our company to acquire. And he's going forward fast, with the help of his friends like Jim Daly at Goldman, Sachs. Daly's very smart, but investment bankers always have big fees riding on a merger. They'll do their due diligence, I'm not saying they won't. But it'd take a lot to get them to back out of the deal now."

"Uh-huh."

"So Nichols feels he's lost control of the acquisition, and he's being rushed into a deal that's a lot richer than it should be. Nichols doesn't see why C-W should make us all wealthy. He'd pull out of this deal if he could-if only to screw Conley."

"But Conley's driving this deal."

"Yes. And Conley's abrasive. Ile likes to make little speeches about youth versus age, the coming digital era, a young vision for the future. It enrages Nichols. Ed Nichols feels he's doubled the net worth of the company in a decade, and now this little twerp is giving him lectures."

"And how does Meredith fit in?"

Kaplan hesitated. "Meredith is suitable."

"Meaning what?"

"She's Eastern. She grew up in Connecticut and went to Vassar. The Conley people like that. They're comfortable with that."

"That's all? She has the right accent?"

"You didn't hear it from me," Kaplan said. "But I think they also see her as weak. They think they can control her once the merger is completed."

"And Garvin's going along with that?"

Kaplan shrugged. "Bob's a realist," she said. "He needs capitalization. He's built his company skillfully, but we're going to require massive infusions of cash for the next phase, when we go head-to-head with Sony and Philips in product development. Conley-White's textbook operation is a cash cow. Bob looks at them and sees green-and he's inclined to do what they want, to get their money."

"And of course, Bob likes Meredith."

"Yes. That's true. Bob likes her."

Sanders waited while she poked at her food for a while. "And you, Stephanie? What do you think?"

Kaplan shrugged. "She's able."

"Able but weak?"

"No." Kaplan shook her head. "Meredith has ability. That's not in question. But I'm concerned about her experience. She's not as seasoned as she might be. She's being put in charge of four major technical units that are expected to grow rapidly. I just hope she's up to it."

There was the clink of a spoon on a glass, and Garvin stepped to the front of the room. "Even though you're still eating dessert, let's get started, so we can finish by two o'clock," he said. "Let me remind you of the new timetable. Assuming everything continues as planned, we expect to make the formal announcement of the acquisition at a press conference here on Friday noon. And now, let me introduce our new associates from Conley-White…"

As Garvin named the C-W people, and they stood up around the table, Kaplan leaned over and whispered to Tom, "This is all fluffand feathers. The real reason for this lunch is you-know-who."

"… and finally," Garvin said, "let me introduce someone that many of you know, but some of you do not, the new Vice President for Advanced Operations and Planning, Meredith Johnson."

There was scattered, brief applause as Johnson got up from her seat and walked to a podium at the front of the room. In her dark blue suit, she looked the model of corporate correctness, but she was strikingly beautiful. At the podium, she put on horn-rimmed glasses and lowered the conference room lights.

"Bob has asked me to review the way the new structure will work," she said, "and to say something about what we see happening in the coming months." She bent over the podium, where a computer was set up for presentations. "Now, if I can just work this thing… let me see…"

In the darkened room, Don Cherry caught Sanders's eye and shook his head slowly.

"Ali, okay, here we are," Johnson said, at the podium. The screen behind her came to life. Animated images generated by the computer were projected onto the screen. The first image showed a red heart, which broke into four pieces. "The heart of DigiCom has always been its Advanced Products Group, which consists of four separate divisions as you see here. But as all information throughout the world becomes digital, these divisions will inevitably merge." On the screen, the pieces of the heart slid back together, and the heart transformed itself into a spinning globe. It began to throw off products. "For the customer in the near future, armed with cellular phone, built-in fax modem, and handheld computer or PDA, it will be increasingly irrelevant where in the world he or she is and where the information is coming from. We are talking about the true globalization of information, and this implies an array of new products for our major markets in business and education." The globe expanded and dissolved, became classrooms on all continents, students at desks. "In particular, education will be a growing focus of this company as technology moves from print to digital displays to virtual environments. Now, let's review exactly what this means, and where I see it taking us."

And she proceeded to do it all-hypermedia, embedded video, authoring systems, work-group structures, academic sourcing, customer acceptance. She moved on to the cost structures-projected research outlays and revenues, five-year goals, offshore variables. Then to major product challenges-quality control, user feedback, shorter development cycles.

Meredith Johnson's presentation was flawless, the images blending and flowing across the screen, her voice confident, no hesitation, no pauses. As she continued, the room became quiet, the atmosphere distinctly respectful.

"Although this is not the time to go into technical matters," she said, "I want to mention that new CD-drive seek times under a hundred milliseconds, combined with new compression algorithms, should shift the industry standard for CD to fullres digitized video at sixty fields per second. And we are talking about platformindependent RISC processors supported by 3z-bit color active-matrix displays and portable hard copy at12ooDPI and wireless networking in both LAN and WAN configurations. Combine that with an autonomously generated virtual database especially when ROM-based software agents for object definition and classification are in place and I think we can agree we are looking at prospects for a very exciting future."

Sanders saw that Don Cherry's mouth was hanging open. Sanders leaned over to Kaplan. "Sounds like she knows her stuff."

"Yes," Kaplan said, nodding. "The demo queen. She started out doing demos. Appearance has always been her strongest point." Sanders glanced at Kaplan; she looked away.

But then the speech ended. There was applause as the lights came up, and Johnson went back to her seat. The room broke up, people heading back to work. Johnson left Garvin, and went directly to Don Cherry, said a few words to him. Cherry smiled: the charmed geek. Then Meredith went across the room to Mary Anne, spoke briefly to her, and then to Mark Lewyn.

"She's smart," Kaplan said, watching her, "touching base with all the division heads especially since she didn't name them in her speech."

Sanders frowned. "You think that's significant?"

"Only if she's planning to make changes."

"Phil said she wasn't going to."

"But you never know, do you?" Kaplan said, standing up, dropping her napkin on the table. "I've got to go-and it looks like you're next on her list."

Kaplan moved discreetly away as Meredith came up to Sanders. She was smiling. "I wanted to apologize, Tom," Meredith said, "for not mentioning your name and the names of the other division heads in my presentation. I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea. It's just that Bob asked me to keep it short."

"Well," Sanders said, "it looks like you won everybody over. The reaction was very favorable."

"I hope so. Listen," she said, putting her hand on his arm, "we've got a slew of due diligence sessions tomorrow. I've been asking all the heads to meet with me today,if they can. I wonderif you're free to come to my office at the endof the day for a drink. We can go over things, and maybe catch up on old times, too."

"Sure," he said. He felt the warmthof her hand on his arm. She didn't take it away.

"They've given me an office on the fifth floor, and with any luck there should be furniture in by later today. Six o'clock work for you?"

"Fine," he said.

She smiled. "You still partial to dry chardonnay?"

Despite himself, he was flattered that she remembered. He smiled, "Yes, I still am."

"I'll seeif I can get one. And we'll go over someof the immediate problems, like that hundred-millisecond drive."

"Okay, fine. About that drive-"

"I know," she said, her voice lower. "We'll deal with it." Behind her, the Conley-White executives were coming up. "Let's talk tonight."

"Good."

"See you then, Tom."

"See you then."

A the meeting broke up, Mark Lewyn drifted over to him. "So, let's hear it: what'd she say to you?"

"Meredith?"

"No, the Stealthy One. Kaplan was bending your ear all during lunch. What's up?"

Sanders shrugged. "Oh, you know. Just small talk."

"Come on. Stephanie doesn't do small talk. She doesn't know how. And Stephanie talked more to you than I've seen her talk in years."

Sanders was surprised to see how anxious Lewyn was. "Actually," he said, "we talked mostly about her son. He's a freshman at the university."

But Lewyn wasn't buying it. He frowned and said, "She's up to something, isn't she. She never talks without a reason. Is it about me? I know she's critical of the design team. She thinks we're wasteful. I've told her many times that it's not true-"

"Mark," Sanders said. "Your name didn't even come up. Honest."

To change the subject, Sanders asked, "What'd you think of Johnson? Pretty strong presentation, I thought."

"Yes. She's impressive. There was only one thing that bothered me," Lewyn said. He was still frowning, still uneasy. "Isn't she supposed to be a late-breaking curve, forced on us by management at Conley?"

"That's what I heard. Why?"

"Her presentation. To put together a graphic presentation like that takes two weeks, at a minimum," Lewyn said. "In my design group, I get the designers on it a month in advance, then we run it through for timing, then say a week for revisions and re-do's, then another week while they transfer to a drive. And that's my own in-house group, working fast. For an executive, it'd take longer. They pawn it off on some assistant, who tries to make it for them. Then the executive looks at it, wants it all done over again. And it takes more time. So if this washer presentation, I'd say she's known about her new job for a while. Months."

Sanders frowned.

"As usual," Lewyn said, "the poor bastards in the trenches are the last to know. I just wonder what else we don't know."

Sanders was back at his office by 2:15. He called his wife to tell her he would be home late, that he had a meeting at six.

"What's happening over there?" Susan said. "I got a call from Adele Lewyn. She says Garvin's screwing everybody, and they're changing the organization around."

"I don't know yet," he said cautiously. Cindy had just walked in the room.

"Are you still getting a promotion?"

"Basically," he said, "the answer is no."

"I can't believe it," Susan said. "Tom, I'm sorry. Are you okay? Are you upset?"

"I would say so, yes."

"Can't talk?"

"That's right."

"Okay. I'll leave soup on. I'll see you when you get here."

Cindy placed a stack of files on his desk. When Sanders hung up, she said, "She already knew?"

"She suspected."

Cindy nodded. "She called at lunchtime," she said. "I had the sense. The spouses are talking, I imagine."

"I'm sure everybody's talking."

Cindy went to the door, then paused. Cautiously, she said, "And how was the lunch meeting?"

"Meredith was introduced as the new head of all the tech divisions. She gave a presentation. She says she's going to keep all the division heads in place, all reporting to her."

"Then there's no change for us? Just another layer on top?"

"So far. That's what they're telling me. Why? What do you hear?"

"I hear the same."

He smiled. "Then it must be true."

"Should I go ahead and buy the condo?" She had been planning this for some time, a condo in Queen Anne's Hill for herself and her young daughter.

Sanders said, "When do you have to decide?"

"I have another fifteen days. End of the month."

"Then wait. You know, just to be safe."

She nodded, and went out. A moment later, she came back. "I almost forgot. Mark Lewyn's office just called. The Twinkle drives have arrived from KL. His designers are looking at them now. Do you want to see them?"

"I'm on my way."

The Design Group occupied the entire second floor of the Western Building. As always, the atmosphere there was chaotic; all the phones were ringing, but there was no receptionist in the little waiting area by the elevators, which was decorated with faded, taped-up posters for a 1929 Bauhaus Exhibition in Berlin and an old science-fiction movie calledThe Forbin Project. Two Japanese visitors sat at a corner table, speaking rapidly, beside the battered Coke machine and the junk food dispenser. Sanders nodded to them, used his card to open the locked door, and went inside.

The floor was a large open space, partitioned at unexpected angles by slanted walls painted to look like pastel-veined stone. Uncomfortable-looking wire chairs and tables were scattered in odd places. Rockand-roll music blared. Everybody was casually dressed; most of the designers wore shorts and T-shirts. It was clearly A Creative Area.

Sanders went through to Foamland, the little display of the latest product designs the group had made. There were models of tiny CDROM drives and miniature cellular phones. Lewyn's teams were charged with creating product designs for the future, and many of these seemed absurdly small: a cellular phone no larger than a pencil, and another that looked like a postmodern version of Dick Tracy's wrist radio, in pale green and gray; a pager the size of a cigarette lighter; and a micro-CD player with a flip-up screen that could fit easily in the palm of the hand.

Although these devices looked outrageously tiny, Sanders had long since become accustomed to the idea that the designs were at most two years in the future. The hardware was shrinking fast; it was difficult for Sanders to remember that when he began working at DigiCom, a "portable" computer was a thirty-pound box the size of a carry-on suitcase and cellular telephones didn't exist at all. The first cellular phones that DigiCom manufactured were fifteen-pound wonders that you lugged around on a shoulder strap. At the time, people thought they were a miracle. Now, customers complained if their phones weighed more than a few ounces.

Sanders walked past the big foam-cutting machine, all twisted tubes and knives behind Plexiglas shields, and found Mark Lewyn and his team bent over three dark blue CD-ROMplayers from Malaysia. One of the players already lay in pieces on the table; under bright halogen lights, the team was poking at its innards with tiny screwdrivers, glancing up from time to time to the scope screens.

"What've you found?" Sanders said.

"Ah, hell," Lewyn said, throwing up his hands in artistic exasperation. "Not good, Tom. Not good."

"Talk to me."

Lewyn pointed to the table. "There's a metal rod inside the hinge. These clips maintain contact with the rod as the case is opened; that's how you maintain power to the screen."

"Yes…"

"But power is intermittent. It looks like the rods are too small. They're supposed to be fifty-four millimeters. These seem to be fiftytwo, fifty-three millimeters."

Lewyn was grim, his entire manner suggesting unspeakable consequences. The bars were a millimeter off, and the world was coming to an end. Sanders understood that he would have to calm Lewyn down. He'd done it many times before.

He said, "We can fix that, Mark. It'll mean opening all the cases and replacing the bars, but we can do that."

"Oh sure," Lewyn said. "But that still leaves the clips. Our specs call for 16/10 stainless, which has requisite tension to keep the clips springy and maintain contact with the bar. These clips seem to be something else, maybe 16/4. They're too stiff: So when you open the cases the clips bend, but they don't spring back."

"So we have to replace the clips, too. We can do that when we switch the bars."

"Unfortunately, it's not that easy. The clips are heat-pressed into the cases."

"Ah, hell."

"Right. They are integral to the case unit."

"You're telling me we have to build new housings just because we have bad clips?"

"Exactly."

Sanders shook his head. "We've run off thousands so far. Something like four thousand."

"Well, we've got to do 'em again."

"And what about the drive itself?"

"It's slow," Lewyn said. "No doubt about it. But I'm not sure why. It might be power problems. Or it might be the controller chip."

"If it's the controller chip…"

"We're in deep shit. If it's a primary design problem, we have to go back to the drawing board. If it's only a fabrication problem, we have to change the production lines, maybe remake the stencils. But it's months, either way."

"When will we know?"

"I've sent a drive and power supply to the Diagnostics guys," Lewyn said. "They should have a report by five. I'll get it to you. Does Meredith know about this yet?"

"I'm briefing her at six."

"Okay. Call me after you talk to her?"

"Sure."

"In a way, this is good," Lewyn said.

"How do you mean?"

"We're throwing her a big problem right away," Lewyn said. "We'll see how she handles it."

Sanders turned to go. Lewyn followed him out. "By the way," Lewyn said. "Are you pissed off that you didn't get the job?"

"Disappointed," Sanders said. "Not pissed. There's no point being pissed."

"Because if you ask me, Garvin screwed you. You put in the time, you've demonstrated you can run the division, and he put in someone else instead."

Sanders shrugged. "It's his company."

Lewyn threw his arm over Sanders's shoulder, and gave him a rough hug. "You know, Tom, sometimes you're too reasonable for your own good."

"I didn't know being reasonable was a defect," Sanders said.

"Being too reasonable is a defect," Lewyn said. "You end up getting pushed around."

"I'm just trying to get along," Sanders said. "I want to be here when the division goes public."

"Yeah, true. You got to stay." They came to the elevator. Lewyn said, "You think she got it because she's a woman?"

Sanders shook his head. "Who knows."

"Pale males eat it again. I tell you. Sometimes I get so sick of the constant pressure to appoint women," Lewyn said. "I mean, look at this design group. We've got forty percent women here, better than any other division, but they always say, why don't you have more. More women, more-"

"Mark," he said, interrupting. "It's a different world now."

"And not a better one," Lewyn said. "It's hurting everybody. Look: when I started in DigiCom, there was only one question. Are you good? If you were good, you got hired. If you could cut it, you stayed. No more. Now, ability is only one of the priorities. There's also the question of whether you're the right sex and skin color to fill out the company's HR profiles. And if you turn out to be incompetent, we can't fire you. Pretty soon, we start to get junk like this Twinkle drive. Because no one's accountable anymore. No one is responsible. You can't build products on atheory.Because the product you're making is real. And if it stinks, it stinks. And no one will buy it."

Coming back to his office, Sanders used his electronic passcard to open the door to the fourth floor. Then he slipped the card in his trouser pocket, and headed down the hallway. He was moving quickly, thinking about the meeting with Lewyn. He was especially bothered by one thing that Lewyn had said: that he was allowing himself to be pushed around by Garvin-that he was being too passive, too understanding.

But Sanders didn't see it that way. When Sanders had said it was Garvin's company, he meant it. Bob was the boss, and Bob could do what he wanted. Sanders was disappointed not to get the job, but no one had promised it to him. Ever. He and others in the Seattle divisions had come, over a period of weeks, to assume that Sanders would get the job. But Garvin had never mentioned it. Nor had Phil Blackburn.

As a result, Sanders felt he had no reason to gripe. If he was disappointed, it was only because he had done it to himself. It was classic: counting your chickens before they hatched.

And as for being too passive what did Lewyn expect him to do? Make a fuss? Yell and scream? That wouldn't do any good. Because clearly Meredith Johnson had this job, whether Sanders liked it or not. Resign? That really wouldn't do any good. Because if he quit, he would lose the profits pending when the company went public. That would be a real disaster.

So on reflection, all he could do was accept Meredith Johnson in the new job, and get on with it. And he suspected that if the situation were reversed, Lewyn, for all his bluster, would do exactly the same thing: grin and bear it.

But the bigger problem, as he thought it over, was the Twinkle drive. Lewyn's team had torn up three drives that afternoon, and they still didn't have any idea why they were malfunctioning. They had found some non-spec components in the hinge, which Sanders could track down. He'd find out soon enough why they were getting non-specmaterials. But the real problemthe slowness of the drives-remained a mystery to which they had no clue, and that meant that he was going to

"Tom? You dropped your card."

"What?" He looked up absently. An area assistant was frowning, pointing back down the hall.

"You dropped your card."

"Oh." He saw the passcard lying there, white against the gray carpet. "Thanks."

He went back to retrieve it. Obviously, he must be more upset than he realized. You couldn't get anywhere in the DigiCom buildings without a passcard. Sanders bent over, picked it up, and slipped it in his pocket.

Then he felt the second card, already there. Frowning, he took both cards out and looked at them.

The card on the floor wasn't his card, it was someone else's. He paused for a moment, trying to decide which was his. By design, the passcards were featureless: just the blue DigiCom logo, a stamped serial number, and a magstripe on the back.

He ought to be able to remember his card number, but he couldn't. He hurried back to his office, to look it up on his computer. He glanced at his watch. It was four o'clock, two hours before his meeting with Meredith Johnson. He still had a lot to do to prepare for that meeting. He frowned as he walked along, staring at the carpet. He would have to get the production reports, and perhaps also the design detail specs. He wasn't sure she would understand them, but he should be prepared with them, anyway. And what else? He did not want to go into this first meeting having forgotten something.

Once again, his thoughts were disrupted by images from his past. An opened suitcase. The bowl of popcorn. The stained-glass window.

"So?" said a familiar voice. "You don't say hello to your old friends anymore?"

Sanders looked up. He was outside the glass-walled conference room. Inside the room, he saw a solitary figure hunched over in a wheelchair, staring at the Seattle skyline, his back to Sanders.

"Hello, Max," Sanders said.

Max Dorfman continued to stare out the window. "Hello, Thomas."

"How did you know it was me?"

Dorfman snorted. "It must be magic. What do you think? Magic?" His voice was sarcastic. "Thomas: I can see you."

"How? You have eyes in the back of your head?"

"No, Thomas. I have a reflection infront of my head. I see you in the glass, of course. Walking with your head down, like a defeated putz." Dorfman snorted again, and then wheeled his chair around. His eyes were bright, intense, mocking. "You were such a promising man. And now you are hanging your head?"

Sanders wasn't in the mood. "Let's just say this hasn't been one of my better days, Max."

"And you want everybody to know about it? You want sympathy?"

"No, Max." He remembered how Dorfman had ridiculed the idea of sympathy. Dorfman used to say that an executive who wanted sympathy was not an executive. He was a sponge, soaking up something useless.

Sanders said, "No, Max. I was thinking."

"Ah.Thinking. Oh, I like thinking. Thinking is good. And what were you thinking about, Thomas: the stained glass in your apartment?"

Despite himself, Sanders was startled: "How did you know that?"

"Maybe it's magic," Dorfman said, with a rasping laugh. "Or perhaps I can read minds. You think I can read minds, Thomas? Are you stupid enough to believe that?"

"Max, I'm not in the mood."

"Oh well, then I must stop. If you're not in the mood, I must stop. We must at all costs preserve your mood." He slapped the arm of his wheelchair irritably."You told me, Thomas. That's how I knew what you were thinking."

"I told you? When?"

"Nine or ten years ago, it must have been."

"What did I tell you?"

"Oh, you don't remember? No wonder you have problems. Better stare at the floor some more. It may do you good. Yes. I think so. Keep staring at the floor, Thomas."

"Max, for Christ's sake."

Dorfman grinned at him. "Do I irritate you?"

"You always irritate me."

"Ali. Well. Then perhaps there is hope. Not for you, of course for me. I am old, Thomas. Hope has a different meaning, at my age. Youwouldn't understand. These days, I cannot even get around by myself. I must have someone push me. Preferably a pretty woman, but as a rule they do not like to do such things. So here I am, with no pretty woman to push me.Unlike you."

Sanders sighed. "Max, do you suppose we can just have an ordinary conversation?"

"What a good idea," Dorfman said. "I would like that very much. What is an ordinary conversation?"

"I mean, can we just talk like normal people?"

"If it will not bore you, Thomas, yes. But I am worried. You know how old people are worried about being boring."

"Max. What did you mean about the stained glass?"

He shrugged. "I meant Meredith, of course. What else?"

"What about Meredith?"

"How am I to know?" Dorfman said irritably. "All I know of this is what you told me. And all you told me is that you used to take trips, to Korea or Japan, and when you came back, Meredith would-"

"Tom, I'm sorry to interrupt," Cindy said, leaning in the door to the conference room.

"Oh, don't be sorry," Max said. "Who is this beautiful creature, Thomas?"

"I'm Cindy Wolfe, Professor Dorfman," she said. "I work for Tom."

"Oh, what a lucky man he is!"

Cindy turned to Sanders. "I'm really sorry, Tom, but one of the executives from Conley-White is in your office, and I thought you would want to"

"Yes, yes," Dorfman said immediately. "He must go. Conley-White, it soundsvery important."

"In a minute," Sanders said. He turned to Cindy. "Max and I were in the middle of something."

"No, no, Thomas," Dorfman said. "We were just talking about old times. You better go."

"Max-"

"You want to talk more, you think it's important, you come visit me. I am at the Four Seasons. You know that hotel. It has awonderful lobby, such high ceilings. Very grand, especially for an old man. So, you go right along, Thomas." His eyes narrowed. "And leave the beautiful Cindy with me."

Sanders hesitated. "Watch out for him," he said. "He's a dirty old man."

"As dirty as possible," Dorfman cackled.

Sanders headed down the hallway to his office. As he left, he heard Dorfman say, "Now beautiful Cindy, please take me to the lobby where I have a car waiting. And on the way, if you don't mind indulging an old man, I have a few little questions. So manyinterestingthings are happening in this company. And the secretaries always know everything, don't they?"

Mr. Sanders."Jim Daly stood quickly, as Sanders came into the room. "I'm glad they found you."

They shook hands. Sanders gestured for Daly to sit down, and slid behind his own desk. Sanders was not surprised; he had been expecting a visit from Daly or one of the other investment bankers for several days. Members of the Goldman, Sachs team had been speaking individually with people in various departments, going over aspects of the merger. Most of the time they wanted background information; although high technology was central to the acquisition, none of the bankers understood it very well. Sanders expected Daly to ask about progress on the Twinkle drive, and perhaps the Corridor.

"I appreciate your taking the time," Daly said, rubbing his bald head. He was a very tall, thin man, and he seemed even taller sitting down, all knees and elbows. "I wanted to ask you some things, ah, off the record."

"Sure," Sanders said.

"It's to do with Meredith Johnson," Daly said, in an apologetic voice. "If you, ah, don't mind, I'd prefer we just keep this conversation between us."

"All right," Sanders said.

"I understand that you have been closely involved with setting up the plants in Ireland and Malaysia. And that there has been a little controversy inside the company about how that was carried out."

"Well." Sanders shrugged. "Phil Blackburn and I haven't always seen eye to eye."

"Showing your good sense, in my view," Daly said dryly. "But I gather that in these disputes you represent technical expertise, and others in the company represent, ah, various other concerns. Would that be fair?"

"Yes, I'd say so." What was he getting at?

"Well, it's along those lines that I'd like to hear your thoughts. Bob

Garvin has just appointed Ms. Johnson to a position of considerable authority, a step which many in Conley-White applaud. And certainly it would be unfair to prejudge how she will carry out her new duties within the company. But by the same token, it would be derelict of me not to inquire about her past duties. Do you get my drift?"

"Not exactly," Sanders said.

"I'm wondering," Daly said, "what you feel about Ms. Johnson's past performance with regard to the technical operations of the company. Specifically, her involvement in the foreign operations of DigiCom."

Sanders frowned, thinking back. "I'm not aware that she's had much involvement," he said. "We had a labor dispute two years ago in Cork. She was part of the team that went over to negotiate a settlement. She lobbied in Washington about flatpanel display tariffs. And I know she headed the Ops Review Team in Cupertino, which approved the plans for the new plant at Kuala Lumpur."

"Yes, exactly."

"But I don't know that her involvement goes beyond that."

"Ali. Well. Perhaps I was given wrong information," Daly said, shifting in his chair.

"What did you hear?"

"Without going into specifics, let me say a question of judgment was raised."

"I see," Sanders said. Who would have said anything to Daly about Meredith? Certainly not Garvin or Blackburn. Kaplan? It was impossible to know for sure. But Daly would be talking only to highly placed officers.

"I was wondering," Daly said, "if you had any thoughts on her technical judgment. Speaking privately, of course."

At that moment, Sanders's computer screen beeped three times. A message flashed:

ONE MINUTE TO DIRECT VIDEO LINKUP: DC/M-DC/S

SEN: A. KAHN

REC: T. SANDERS

Daly said, "Is something wrong?"

"No," Sanders said. "It looks like I have a video feed coming in from Malaysia."

"Then I'll be brief and leave you to it," Daly said. "Let me put it to you directly. Within your division, is there any concern whether Meredith Johnson is qualified for this post?"

Sanders shrugged. "She's the new boss. You know how organizations are. There's always concern with a new boss."

"You're very diplomatic. I mean to say, is there concern about her expertise? She's relatively young, after all. Geographic move, uprooting. New faces, new staffing, new problems. And up here, she won't be so directly under Bob Garvin's, ah, wing."

"I don't know what to say," Sanders said. "We'll all have to wait and see."

"And I gather that there was trouble in the past when a nontechnical person headed the division… a man named, ah, Screamer Freeling?"

"Yes. He didn't work out."

"And there are similar concerns about Johnson?"

Sanders said, "I've heard them expressed."

"And her fiscal measures? These cost-containment plans of hers? That's the crux, isn't it?"

Sanders thought: what cost-containment plans?

The screen beeped again.

30 SECONDS TO DIRECT VIDEO LINKUP: DC/M-DC/S

"There goes your machine again," Daly said, unfolding himself from the chair. "I'll let you go. Thank you for your time, Mr. Sanders."

"Not at all."

They shook hands. Daly turned and walked out of the room. Sanders's computer beeped three times in rapid succession:

15 SECONDS TO DIRECT VIDEO LINKUP: DC/M-DC/S

He sat down in front of the monitor and twisted his desk lamp so that the light shone on his face. The numbers on the computer were counting backward. Sanders looked at his watch. It was five o'clock-eight o'clock in Malaysia. Arthur would probably be calling from the plant.

A small rectangle appeared in the center of the screen and grew outward in progressive jumps. He saw Arthur's face, and behind him,

the brightly lit assembly line. Brand-new, it was the epitome of modern manufacturing: clean and quiet, the workers in street clothes, arranged on both sides of the green conveyor belt. At each workstation there was a bank of fluorescent lights, which flared a little in the camera.

Kahn coughed and rubbed his chin. "Hello, Tom. How are you?" When he spoke, his image blurred slightly. And his voice was out of sync, since the bounce to the satellite caused a slight delay in the video, but the voice was transmitted immediately. This unsynchronized quality was very distracting for the first few seconds; it gave the linkup a dreamy quality. It was a little like talking to someone under water. Then you got used to it.

"I'm fine, Arthur," he said.

"Well, good. I'm sorry about the new organization. You know how I feel personally."

"Thank you, Arthur." He wondered vaguely how Kahn in Malaysia would have heard already. But in any company, gossip traveled fast.

"Yeah. Well. Anyway, Tom, I'm standing here on the floor," Kahn said, gesturing behind him. "And as you can see, we're still running very slow. And the spot checks are unimproved. What do the designers say? Have they gotten the units yet?"

"They came today. I don't have any news yet. They're still working on it."

"Uh-huh. Okay. And have the units gone to Diagnostics?" Kahn asked.

"I think so. Just went."

"Yeah. Okay. Because we got a request from Diagnostics for ten more drive units to be sent in heat-sealed plastic bags. And they specified that they wanted them sealed inside the factory. Right as they came off the line. You know anything about that?"

"No, this is the first I heard of it. Let me find out, and I'll get back to you."

"Okay, because I have to tell you, it seemed strange to me. I mean, ten units is a lot. Customs is going to query it if we send them all together. And I don't know what this sealing is about. We send them wrapped in plastic anyway. But not sealed. Why do they want them sealed, Tom?" Kahn sounded worried.

"I don't know," Sanders said. "I'll get into it. All I can think is that it's a full-court press around here. People really want to know why the hell those drives don't work."

"Hey, us too," Kahn said. "Believe me. It's making us crazy."

"When will you send the drives?"

"Well, I've got to get a heat-sealer first. I hope I can ship Wednesday, you can have them Thursday."

"Not good enough," Sanders said. "You should ship today, or tomorrow at the latest. You want me to run down a sealer for you? I can probably get one from Apple." Apple had a factory in Kuala Lumpur.

"No. That's a good idea. I'll call over there and see if Ron can loan me one.

"Fine. Now what about Jafar?"

"Hell of a thing," Kahn said. "I just talked to the hospital, and apparently he's got cramps and vomiting. Won't eat anything. The abo doctors say they can't figure out anything except, you know, a spell."

"They believe in spells?"

"Damn right," Kahn said. "They've got laws against sorcery here. You can take people to court."

"So you don't know when he'll be back?"

"Nobody's saying. Apparently he's really sick."

"Okay, Arthur. Anything else?"

"No. I'll get the sealer. And let me know what you find out."

"I will," Sanders said, and the transmission ended. Kahn gave a final wave, and the screen went blank.

SAVE THIS TRANSMISSION TO DISK OR DAT?

He clicked DAT, and it was saved to digital tape. He got up from the desk. Whatever all this was about, he'd better be informed before he had his meeting with Johnson at six. He went to the outer area, to Cindy's desk.

Cindy was turned away, laughing on the phone. She looked back and saw Sanders, and stopped laughing. "Listen, I got to go."

Sanders said, "Would you mind pulling the production reports on Twinkle for the last two months? Better yet, just pull everything since they opened the line."

"Sure."

"And call Don Cherry for me. I need to know what his Diagnostics group is doing with the drives."

He went back into his office. He noticed his e-mail cursor was blinking, and pushed the key to read them. While he waited, he looked at the three faxes on his desk. Two were from Ireland, routine weekly production reports. The third was a requisition for a roof repair at the Austin plant; it had been held up in Operations in Cupertino, and Eddie had forwarded it to Sanders to try and get action.

The screen blinked. He looked up at the first of his e-mail messages.

OUT OF NOWHERE WE GOT A BEAN COUNTER FROM OPERATIONS DOWN HERE IN AUSTIN. HE'S GOING OVER ALL THE BOOKS, DRIVING PEOPLE MAD. AND THE WORD IS WE GOT MORE COMING DOWN TOMORROW. WHAT GIVES? THE RUMORS ARE FLYING, AND SLOWING HELL OUT OF THE LINE. TELL ME WHAT TO SAY. IS THIS COMPANY FOR SALE OR NOT?

EDDIE

Sanders did not hesitate. He couldn't tell Eddie what was going on. Quickly, he typed his reply:

THE BEAN COUNTERS WERE IN IRELAND LAST WEEK, TOO.

GARVIN'S ORDERED A COMPANY-WIDE REVIEW, AND THEY'RE LOOKING AT EVERYTHING. TELL EVERYBODY DOWN THERE TO FORGET IT AND GO BACK TO WORK.

TOM

He pushed the SEND button. The message disappeared.

"You called?" Don Cherry walked into the room without knocking, and dropped into the chair. He put his hands behind his head. `Jesus, what a day. I've been putting out fires all afternoon."

"Tell me."

"I got some dweebs from Conley down there, asking my guys what the difference is between RAM and ROM. Like they have time for this. Pretty soon, one of the dweebs hears `flash memory' and he goes, `How often does it flash?' Like it was a flashlight or something. And my guys have to put up with this. I mean, this is high-priced talent. They shouldn't be doing remedial classes for lawyers. Can't you stop it?"

"Nobody can stop it," Sanders said.

"Maybe Meredith can stop it," Cherry said, grinning.

Sanders shrugged. "She's the boss."

"Yeah. Sowhat's on your mind?"

"Your Diagnostics group is working on the Twinkle drives."

"True. That is, we're working on the bits and pieces that're left after Lewyn's nimble-fingered artistes tore the hell out of them. Why did they go to design first? Never,ever,let a designer near an actual piece of electronic equipment, Tom. Designers should only be allowed to draw pictures on pieces of paper. And only give them one piece of paper at a time."

"What have you found?" Sanders said. "About the drives."

"Nothing yet," Cherry said. "But we got a few ideas we're kicking around."

"Is that why you asked Arthur Kahn to send you ten drives, heatsealed from the factory?"

"You bet your ass."

"Kahn was wondering about that."

"So?" Cherry said. "Let him wonder. It'll do him good. Keep him from playing with himself."

"I'd like to know, too."

"Well look," Cherry said. "Maybe our ideas won't amount to anything. At the moment, all we have is one suspicious chip. That's all Lewyn's clowns left us. It's not very much to go on."

"The chip is bad?"

"No, the chip is fine."

"What's suspicious about it?"

"Look," Cherry said. "We've got enough rumors flying around as it is. I can report that we're working on it, and we don't know yet. That's alt. We'll get the sealed drives tomorrow or Wednesday, and we should know within an hour. Okay?"

"You thinking big problem, or little problem? I've got to know," Sanders said. "It's going to come up in the meetings tomorrow."

"Well, at the moment, the answer is we don't know. It could be anything. We're working on it."

"Arthur thinks it might be serious."

"Arthur might be right. But we'll solve it. That's all I can tell you."

"Don…"

"I understand you want an answer," Cherry said. "Do you understand that I don't have one?"

Sanders stared at him. "You could have called. Why'd you come up in person?"

"Since you asked," Cherry said, "I've got a small problem. It's delicate. Sexual harassment thing."

"Anotherone? It seems like that's all we have around here."

"Us and everybody else," Cherry said. "I hear UniCom's got fourteen suits going right now. Digital Graphics has even more. And MicroSym, look out. They're all pigs over there, anyway. But I'd like your read on this."

Sanders sighed. "Okay."

"In one of my programming groups, the remote DB access group. The group's all pretty old: twenty-five to twenty-nine years old. The supervisor for the fax modem team, a woman, has been asking one of the guys out. She thinks he's cute. He keeps turning her down. Today she asks him again in the parking lot at lunch; he says no. She gets in her car, rams his car, drives off. Nobody hurt, and he doesn't want to make a complaint. But he's worried, thinks it's a little out of hand. Comes to me for advice. What should I do?"

Sanders frowned. "You think that's the whole story? She's just mad at him because he turned her down? Or did he do something to provoke this?"

"He says no. He's a pretty straight guy. A little geeky, not real sophisticated."

"And the woman?"

"She's got a temper, no question. She blows at the team sometimes. I've had to talk to her about that."

"What does she say about the incident in the parking lot?"

"Don't know. The guy's asked me not to talk to her. Says he's embarrassed and doesn't want to make it worse."

Sanders shrugged. "What can you do? People are upset but nobody will talk… I don't know, Don. If a woman rammed his car, I'd guess he must have done something. Chances are he slept with her once, and won't see her again, and now she's pissed. That's my guess."

"That would be my guess, too," Cherry said, "but of course, maybe not.

"Damage to the car?"

"Nothing serious. Broken taillight. He just doesn't want it to get any worse. So, do I drop it?"

"If he won't file charges, I'd drop it."

"Do I speak to her informally?"

"I wouldn't. You go accusing her of impropriety-even informally-and you're asking for trouble. Nobody's going to support you. Because the chances are, your guydiddo something to provoke her."

"Even though he says he didn't."

Sanders sighed. "Listen, Don, they always say they didn't. I never heard of one who said, `You know, I deserve this.' Never happens."

"So, drop it',"

"Put a note in the file that he told you the story, be sure you characterize the story as alleged, and forget it."

Cherry nodded, turned to leave. At the door, he stopped and looked back. "So tell me this. How come we're both so convinced this guy must have done something?"

`Just playing the odds," Sanders said. "Now fix that damned drive for me."

A six o'clock, he said good night to Cindy and took the Twinkle files up to Meredith's office on the fifth floor. The sun was still high in the sky, streaming through the windows. It seemed like late afternoon, not the end of the day.

Meredith had been given the big corner office, where Ron Goldman used to be. Meredith had a new assistant, too, a woman. Sanders guessed she had followed her boss up from Cupertino.

"I'm Tom Sanders," he said. "I have an appointment with Ms. Johnson."

"Betsy Ross, from Cupertino, Mr. Sanders," she said. She looked at him. "Don't say anything."

"Okay."

"Everybody says something. Something about the flag. I get really sick of it."

"Okay."

"My whole life."

"Okay. Fine."

"I'll tell Miss Johnson you're here."

Tom." Meredith Johnson waved from behind her desk, her other hand holding the phone. "Come in, sit down."

Her office had a view north toward downtown Seattle: the Space Needle, the Arly towers, the SODO building. The city looked glorious in the afternoon sun.

“I’ll just finish this up." She turned back to the phone. "Yes, Ed, I'm with Tom now, we'll go over all of that. Yes. He's brought the documentation with him."

Sanders held up the manila folder containing the drive data. She pointed to her briefcase, which was lying open on the corner of the desk, and gestured for him to put it inside.

She turned back to the phone. "Yes, Ed, I think the due diligence will go smoothly, and there certainly isn't any impulse to hold anything back… No, no… Well, we can do it first thing in the morning if you like."

Sanders put the folder in her briefcase.

Meredith was saying, "Right, Ed, right. Absolutely." She came toward Tom and sat with one hip on the edge of the desk, her navy blue skirt riding up her thigh. She wasn't wearing stockings. "Everybody agrees that this is important, Ed. Yes." She swung her foot, the high heel dangling from her toe. She smiled at Sanders. He felt uncomfortable, and moved back a little. "I promise you, Ed. Yes. Absolutely."

Meredith hung up the phone on the cradle behind her, leaning back across the desk, twisting her body, revealing her breasts beneath the silk blouse. "Well, that's done." She sat forward again, and sighed. "The Conley people heard there's trouble with Twinkle. That was Ed Nichols, flipping out. Actually, it's the third call I've had about Twinkle this afternoon. You'd think that was all there was to this company. How do you like the office?"

"Pretty good," he said. "Great view."

"Yes, the city's beautiful." She leaned on one arm and crossed her legs. She saw that he noticed, and said, "In the summer, I'd rather not wear stockings. I like the bare feeling. So much cooler on a hot day."

Sanders said, "From now to the end of summer, it will be pretty much this way."

"I have to tell you, I dread the weather," she said. "I mean, after California…" She uncrossed her legs again, and smiled. "But you like it here, don't you? You seem happy here."

"Yes." He shrugged. "You get used to rain." He pointed to her briefcase. "Do you want to go over the Twinkle stuff?"

"Absolutely," she said, sliding off the desk, coming close to him. She looked him directly in the eyes. "But I hope you don't mind if I impose on you first. Just a little?"

"Sure."

She stepped aside. "Pour the wine for us."

"Okay."

"See if it's chilled long enough." He went over to the bottle on the side table. "I remember you always liked it cold."

"That's true," he said, spinning the bottle in the ice. He didn't like it so cold anymore, but he did in those days.

"We had a lot of fun back then," she said.

"Yes," he said. "We did."

"1 swear," she said. "Sometimes I think that back when we were both young and trying to make it, I think that was the best it ever was."

He hesitated, not sure how to answer her, what tone to take. He poured the wine.

"Yes," she said. "We had a good time. I think about it often."

Sanders thought: I never do.

She said, "What about you, Tom? Do you think about it?"

"Of course." He crossed the room carrying the glasses of wine to her, gave her one, clinked them. "Sure I do. All us married guys think of the old days. You know I'm married now."

"Yes," she said, nodding. "Very married, I hear. With how many kids? Three?"

"No, just two." He smiled. "Sometimes it seems like three."

"And your wife is an attorney?"

"Yes." He felt safer now. The talk of his wife and children made him feel safer somehow.

"I don't know how somebody can be married," Meredith said. "I tried it." She held up her hand. "Four more alimony payments to the son of a bitch and I'm free."

"Who did you marry?"

"Some account executive at CoStar. He was cute. Amusing. But it turned out he was a typical gold digger. I've been paying him off for three years.And he was a lousy lay." She waved her hand, dismissing the subject. She looked at her watch. "Now come and sit down, and tell me how bad it is with the Twinkle drive."

"You want the file? I put it in your briefcase."

"No." She patted the couch beside her. "You just tell me yourself." He sat down beside her.

"You look good, Tom." She leaned back and kicked off her heels, wiggled her bare toes. "God, what a day."

"Lot of pressure?"

She sipped her wine and blew a strand of hair from her face. "A lot to keep track of. I'm glad we're working together, Tom. I feel as though you're the one friend I can count on in all this."

"Thanks. I'll try."

"So: how bad is it?"

"Well. It's hard to say."

"Just tell me."

He felt he had no choice but to lay it all out for her. "We've built very successful prototypes, but the drives coming off the line in KL are running nowhere near a hundred milliseconds."

Meredith sighed, and shook her head. "Do we know why?"

"Not yet. We're working on some ideas."

"That line's a start-up, isn't it?"

"Two months ago."

She shrugged. "Then we have problems on a new line. That's not so bad."

"But the thing is," he said, "Conley-White is buying this company for our technology, and especially for the CD-ROM drive. As of today, we may not be able to deliver as promised."

"You want to tell them that?"

"I'm concerned they'll pick it up in due diligence."

"Maybe, maybe not." She leaned back in the couch. "We have to remember what we're really looking at. Tom, we've all seen production problems loom large, only to vanish overnight. This may be one of those situations. We're shaking out the Twinkle line. We've identified some early problems. No big deal."

"Maybe. But we don't know that. In reality, there may be a problem with controller chips, which means changing our supplier in Singapore. Or there may be a more fundamental problem. A design problem, originating here."

"Perhaps," Meredith said, "but as you say, we don't know that. And I don't see any reason for us to speculate. At this critical time."

"But to be honest-"

"It's not a matter of honesty," she said. "It's a matter of the underlying reality. Let's go over it, point by point. We've told them we have a Twinkle drive."

"Yes."

"We've built a prototype and tested the hell out of it."

"Yes."

"And the prototype works like gangbusters. It's twice as fast as the most advanced drives coming out of Japan."

"Yes."

"We've told them we're in production on the drive."

"Yes."

"Well, then," Meredith said, "we've told them all that anybody knows for sure, at this point. I'd say we are acting in good faith."

"Well, maybe, but I don't know if we can-"

"Tom." Meredith placed her hand on his arm. "I always liked your directness. I want you to know how much I appreciate your expertise and your frank approach to problems. All the more reason why I'm sure the Twinkle drive will get ironed out. We know that fundamentally it's a good product that performs as we say it does. Personally, I have complete confidence in it, and in your ability to make it work as planned. And I have no problem saying that at the meeting tomorrow." She paused, and looked intently at him. "Do you?"

Her face was very close to him, her lips half-parted. "Do I what?"

"Have a problem saying that at the meeting?"

Her eyes were light blue, almost gray. He had forgotten that, as he had forgotten how long her lashes were. Her hair fell softly around her face. Her lips were full. She had a dreamy look in her eyes. "No," he said. "I don't have a problem."

"Good. Then at least that settled." She smiled and held out her glass. "Do the honors again?"

"Sure."

He got up from the couch and went over to the wine. She watched him.

"I'm glad you haven't let yourself go, Tom. You work out?"

"Twice a week. How about you?"

"You always had a nice rush. Nice hard rush."

He turned. "Meredith…"

She giggled. "I'm sorry. I can't help it. We're old friends." She looked concerned. "I didn't offend you, did I?"

No.

"I can't imagine you ever getting prudish, Tom."

"No, no."

"Not you." She laughed. "Remember the night we broke the bed?"

He poured the wine. "We didn't exactly break it."

"Sure we did. You had me bent over the bottom of the footboard and"

"I remember-"

"And first we broke the footboard, and then the bottom of the bed crashed downbut you didn't want to stop so we moved up and then when I was grabbing the headboard it all came

"I remember," he said, wanting to interrupt her, to stop this. "Those days were great. Listen, Meredith-"

"And then the woman from downstairs called up? Remember her? The old Lithuanian lady? She vanted to know if somebody had died or vhat?"

"Yeah. Listen. Going back to the drive…"

She took the wineglass. "I am making you uncomfortable. What did you think I was coming on to you?"

"No, no. Nothing like that."

"Good, because I really wasn't. I promise." She gave him an amused glance, then tilted her head back, exposing her long neck, and sipped the wine. "In fact, I-ah! Ah!" She winced suddenly.

"What is it?" he said, leaning forward, concerned.

"My neck, it goes into spasm, it's right there…" With her eyes still squeezed shut in pain, she pointed to her shoulder, near the neck.

"What should I-"

`Just rub it, squeeze-there-"

He put down his wineglass and rubbed her shoulder. "There?"

"Yes, ah, harder-squeeze -"

He felt the muscles of her shoulder relax, and she sighed. Meredith turned her head back and forth slowly, then opened her eyes. "Oh… Much better… Don't stop rubbing."

He continued rubbing.

"Oh, thanks. That feels good. I get this nerve thing. Pinched something, but when it hits, it's really…" She turned her head back and forth. Testing. "You did that very well. But you were always good with your hands, Tom."

He kept rubbing. He wanted to stop. He felt everything was wrong, that he was sitting too close, that he didn't want to be touching her. But it also felt good to touch her. He was curious about it.

"Good hands," she said. "God, when I was married, I thought about you all the time."

"You did?"

"Sure," she said. "I told you, he was terrible in bed. I hate a man who doesn't know what he's doing." She closed her eyes. "That was never your problem, was it."

She sighed, relaxing more, and then she seemed to lean into him, melting toward his body, toward his hands. It was an unmistakable sensation. Immediately, he gave her shoulder a final friendly squeeze, and took his hands away.

She opened her eyes. She smiled knowingly. "Listen," she said, "don't worry."

He turned and sipped his wine. "I'm not worried."

"I mean, about the drive. If it turns out we really have problems and need agreement from higher management, we'll get it. But let's not jump the gun now."

"Okay, fine. I think that makes sense." He felt secretly relieved to be talking once again about the drive. Back on safe ground. "Who would you take it to? Directly to Garvin?"

"I think so. I prefer to deal informally." She looked at him. "You've changed, haven't you."

"No… I'm still the same."

"I think you've changed." She smiled. "You never would have stopped rubbing me before."

"Meredith," he said, "it's different. You run the division now. I work for you."

"Oh, don't be silly."

"It's true."

"We're colleagues." She pouted. "Nobody around here really believes I'm superior to you. They just gave me the administrative work, that's all. We're colleagues, Tom. And I just want us to have an open, friendly relationship."

"So do I."

"Good. I'm glad we agree on that." Quickly, she leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips. "There. Was that so terrible?"

"lt wasn't terrible at all."

"Who knows? Maybe we'll have to go to Malaysia together, to check on the assembly lines. They have very nice beaches in Malaysia. You ever been to Kuantan?"

No.

"You'd love it."

"I'm sure."

"I'll show it to you. We could take an extra day or two. Stop over. Get some sun."

"Meredith-"

"Nobody needs to know, Tom."

"I'm married."

"You're also a man."

"What does that mean?"

"Oh Tom," she said, with mock severity, "don't ask me to believe you never have a little adventure on the side. Iknow you, remember?"

"You knew me a long time ago, Meredith."

"People don't change. Not that way."

"Well, I think they do."

"Oh, come on. We're going to be working together, we might as well enjoy ourselves."

He didn't like the way any of this was going. He felt pushed into an awkward position. He felt stuffy and puritanical when he said: "I'm married now."

"Oh, I don't care about your personal life," she said lightly. "I'm only responsible for your on-the-job performance. All work and no play, Tom. It can be bad for you. Got to stay playful." She leaned forward. "Come on. Just one little kiss…"

The intercom buzzed. "Meredith," the assistant's voice said.

She looked up in annoyance. "I told you, no calls."

"I'm sorry. It's Mr. Garvin, Meredith."

"All right." She got off the couch and walked across the room to her desk, saying loudly, "But after this, Betsy, no more calls."

"All right, Meredith. I wanted to ask you, is it okay if I leave in about ten minutes? I have to see the landlord about my new apartment."

"Yes. Did you get me that package?"

"I have it right here."

"Bring it in, and then you can leave."

"Thank you, Meredith. Mr. Garvin is on two."

Meredith picked up the phone and poured more wine. "Bob," she said. "Hi. What's up?" It was impossible to miss the easy familiarity in her voice.

She spoke to Garvin, her back turned to Sanders. He sat on the couch, feeling stranded, foolishly passive and idle. The assistant entered the room carrying a small package in a brown paper bag. She gave the package to Meredith.

"Of course, Bob," Meredith was saying. "I couldn't agree more. We'll certainly deal with that."

The assistant, waiting for Meredith to dismiss her, smiled at Sanders. He felt uncomfortable just sitting there on the couch, so he got up, walked to the window, pulled his cellular phone out of his pocket, and dialed Mark Lewyn's number. He had promised to call Lewyn anyway.

Meredith was saying, "That's a very good thought, Bob. I think we should act on it."

Sanders heard his call dial, and then an answering machine picked up. A male voice said, "Leave your message at the beep." Then an electronic tone.

"Mark," he said, "it's Tom Sanders. I've talked about Twinkle with Meredith. Her view is that we're in early production and we are shaking out the lines. She takes the position that we can't say for sure that there are any significant problems to be flagged, and that we should treat the situation as standard procedure for the bankers and C-W people tomorrow…"

The assistant walked out of the room, smiling at Sanders as she passed him.

"… and that if we have problems with the drive later on that we have to get management involved with, we'll face that later. I've given her your thoughts, and she's talking to Bob now, so presumably we'll go into the meeting tomorrow taking that position…"

The assistant came to the door to the office. She paused briefly to twist the lock in the doorknob, then left, closing the door behind her.

Sanders frowned.She had locked the door on her way out.It wasn't so much the fact that she had done it, but the fact that he seemed to be in the middle of an arrangement, a planned event in which everyone else understood what was going on and he did not.

“.. Well, anyway, Mark, if there is a significant change in all this, I'll contact you before the meeting tomorrow, and-"

"Forget that phone," Meredith said coming up suddenly, very close to him, pushing his hand down, and pressing her body against his. Her lips mashed against his mouth. He was vaguely aware of dropping the phone on the windowsill as they kissed and she twisted, turning away, and they tumbled over onto the couch.

"Meredith, wait-"

"Oh God, I've wanted you all day," she said intensely. She kissed him again, rolling on top of him, lifting one leg to hold him down. His position was awkward but he felt himself responding to her. His immediate thought was that someone might come in. He had a vision of himself, lying on his back on the couch with his boss half-straddling him in her businesslike navy suit, and he was anxious about what the person seeing them would think, and then he was truly responding.

She felt it too, and it aroused her more. She pulled back for a breath. "Oh God, you feel so good, I can't stand the bastard touching me. Those stupid glasses. Oh! I'm sohot, Ihaven't had a decent fuck-" and then she threw herself back on him, kissing him again, her mouth mashed on him. Her tongue was in his mouth and he thought,Jesus, she’s pushing it.He smelled her perfume, and it immediately brought back memories.

She shifted her body so she could reach down and touch him, and she moaned when she felt him through his trousers. She fumbled at the zipper. He had suddenly conflicting images, his desire for her, his wife and his kids, memories of the past, of being with her in the apartment in Sunnyvale, of breaking the bed. Images of his wife.

"Meredith"

"Oooh. Don't talk. No! No…" She was gasping in little breaths, her mouth puckering rhythmically like a goldfish. He remembered that she got that way. He had forgotten until now. He felt her hot panting breath on his face, saw her flushed cheeks. She got his trousers open. Her hot hand on him.

"Oh, Jesus," she said, squeezing him, and she slid down his body, running her hands over his shirt.

"Listen, Meredith."

`Just let me," she said hoarsely. `Just for a minute." And then her mouth was on him. She was always good at this. Images flooding back to him. The way she liked to do it in dangerous places. While he was driving on the freeway. In the men's room at a sales conference. On the beach at Napili at night. The secret impulsive nature, the secret heat. When he was first introduced to her, the exec at ConTech had said,She one of the great cocksuckers.

Feeling her mouth on him, feeling his back arch as the tension ran through his body, he had the uneasy sense of pleasure and danger at once. So much had happened during the day, so many changes, everything was so sudden. He felt dominated, controlled, and at risk. He had the feeling as he lay on his back that he was somehow agreeing to a situation that he did not understand fully, that was not fully recognized. There would be trouble later. He did not want to go to Malaysia with her. He did not want an affair with his boss. He did not even want a one-night stand. Because what always happened was that people found out, gossip at the water cooler, meaningful looks in the hallway. And sooner or later the spouses found out. It always happened. Slammed doors, divorce lawyers, child custody.

And he didn't want any of that. His life was arranged now, he had things in place. He had commitments. This woman from his past understood none of that. She was free. He was not. He shifted his body.

"Meredith-"

"God, you taste good."

"Meredith"

She reached up, and pressed her fingers over his lips. "Ssshhh. I know you like it."

"I do like it," he said, "but I-"

"Then let me."

As she sucked him, she was unbuttoning his shirt, pinching his nipples. He looked down and saw her straddling his legs, her head bent over him. Her blouse was open. Her breasts swung free. She reached up, took his hands, and pulled them down, placing them on her breasts.

She still had perfect breasts, the nipples hard under his touch. She moaned. Her body squirming as she straddled him. He felt her warmth. He began to hear a buzzing in his ears, a suffusing intoxicated flush in his face as sounds went dull, the room seemed distant, and there was nothing but this woman and her body and his desire for her.

In that moment he felt a burst of anger, a kind of male fury that he was pinned down, that she was dominating him, and he wanted to be in control, to take her. He sat up and grabbed her hair roughly, lifting her head and twisting his body. She looked in his eyes and saw instantly.

"Yes!" she said, and she moved sideways, so he could sit up beside her. He slipped his hand between her legs. He felt warmth, and lacy underpants. He tugged at them. She wriggled, helping him, and he slid them down to her knees; then she kicked them away. Her hands were caressing his hair, her lips at his ear. "Yes," she whispered fiercely. "Yes!"

Her blue skirt was bunched up around her waist. He kissed her hard, pulling her blouse wide, pressing her breasts to his bare chest. He felt her heat all along his body. He moved his fingers, probing between her lips. She gasped as they kissed, nodding her head yes. Then his fingers were in her.

For a moment he was startled: she was not very wet, and then he remembered that, too. The way she would start, her words and body immediately passionate, but this central part of her slower to respond, taking her eventual arousal from his. She was always turned on most by his desire for her, and always came after he did sometimes within a few seconds, but sometimes he struggled to stay hard while she rocked against him, pushing to her own completion, lost in her own private world while he was fading. He always felt alone, always felt as if she were using him. Those memories gave him pause, and she sensed his hesitation and grabbed him fiercely, fumbling at his belt, moaning, sticking her hot tongue in his ear.

But reluctance was seeping back into him now, his angry heat was fading, and unbidden the thought flashed through his mind:It's not worth it.

All his feelings shifted again, and now he had a familiar sensation. Going back to see an old lover, being attracted over dinner, then getting involved again, feeling desire and, suddenly, in the heat of the moment, in the press of flesh, being reminded of all the things that had been wrong with the relationship, feeling old conflicts and angers and irritations rise up again, and wishing that he had never started. Suddenly thinking of how to get out of it, how to stop what was started. But usually there was no way to get out of it.

Still his fingers were inside her, and she was moving her body against his hand, shifting to be sure he would touch the right place. She was wetter, her lips were swelling. She opened her legs wider for him. She was breathing very hard, stroking him with her fingers. "Oh God, I love the way you feel," she said.

Usually there was no way to get out ofit.

His body was tense and ready. Her hard nipples brushed against his chest. Her fingers caressed him. She licked the bottom of his earlobe with a quick dart of her tongue and instantly there was nothing but his desire, hot and angry, more intense for the fact that he didn't really want to be there, that he felt she had manipulated him to this place. Now he would fuck her. He wanted to fuck her. Hard.

She sensed his change and moaned, no longer kissing him, leaning back on the couch, waiting. She watched him through half-closed eyes, nodding her head. His fingers still touched her, rapidly, repeatedly, making her gasp, and he turned, pushed her down on her back on the couch. She hiked up her skirt and spread her legs for him. He crouched over her and she smiled at him, a knowing, victorious smile. It made him furious to see this sense that she had somehow won, this watchful detachment, and he wanted to catch her, to make her feel as out of control as he felt, to make her part of this, to wipe that smug detachment from her face. He spread her lips but did not enter her, he held back, his fingers moving, teasing her.

She arched her back, waiting for him. "No, no… please…"

Still he waited, looking at her. His anger was fading as quickly as it had come, his mind drifting away, the old reservations returning. In an instant of harsh clarity, he saw himself in the room, a panting middle aged, married man with his trousers down around his knees, bent over a woman on an office couch that was too small. What the hell was he doing?

He looked at her face, saw the way the makeup cracked at the corners of her eyes. Around her mouth.

She had her hands on his shoulders, tugging him toward her. "Oh please… No… No…" And then she turned her head aside and coughed.

Something snapped in him. He sat back coldly. "You're right." He got off the couch, and pulled up his trousers. "We shouldn't do this."

She sat up. "What are you doing?" She seemed puzzled. "You want this as much as I do. You know you do."

"No," he said. "We shouldn't do this, Meredith." He was buckling his belt. Stepping back.

She stared at him in dazed disbelief, like someone awakened from sleep. "You're not serious…"

"This isn't a good idea. I don't feel good about it."

And then her eyes were suddenly furious. "You fucking.son of a bitch.''

She got off the couch fast, rushing at him, hitting him hard with bunched fists. "You bastard! You prick! You fucking bastard!" He was trying to button his shirt, turning away from her blows. "You shit! You bastard!"

She moved around him as he turned away, grabbing his hands, tearing at his shirt to keep him from buttoning it.

"You can't! You can't do this to me!"

Buttons popped. She scratched him, long red welts running down his chest. He turned again, avoiding her, wanting only to get out of there. To get dressed and get out of there. She pounded his back.

"You fucker, you can't leave me like this!"

"Cut it out, Meredith," he said. "It's over."

"Fuckyou!" She grabbed a handful of his hair, pulling him down with surprising strength, and she bit his ear hard. He felt an intense shooting pain and he pushed her away roughly. She toppled backward, off balance, crashing against the glass coffee table, sprawling on the ground.

She sat there, panting. "You fucking son of a bitch."

"Meredith, just leave me alone." He was buttoning his shirt again. All he could think was:Get out of here. Get your stuff and get out of here.

He reached for his jacket, then saw his cellular phone on the windowsill. He moved around the couch and picked up the phone. The wineglass crashed against the window near his head. He looked over and saw her standing in the middle of the room, reaching for something else to throw.

"I'll kill you!" she said. "I'll fucking kill you."

"That's enough, Meredith," he said.

"The hell." She threw a small paper bag at him. It thunked against the glass and dropped to the floor. A box of condoms fell out.

"I'm going home." He moved toward the door.

"That's right," she said. "You go home to your wife and your little fucking family."

Alarms went off in his head. He hesitated for a moment.

"Oh yes," she said, seeing him pause. "I know all about you, you asshole. Your wife isn't fucking you, so you come in here and lead me on, you set me up and then you walk out on me, you hostile violent fucking asshole. You think you can treat women this way? You asshole."

He reached for the doorknob.

"You walk out on me, you're dead!"

He looked back and saw her leaning unsteadily on the desk, and he thought,She's drunk.

"Good night, Meredith," he said. He twisted the knob, then remembered that the door had been locked. He unlocked the door and walked out, without looking back.

In the outer room, a cleaning woman was emptying trash baskets from the assistants' desks.

"I'll fucking kill you for this!" Meredith called after him.

The cleaning woman heard it, and stared at Sanders. He looked away from her, and walked straight to the elevator. He pushed the button. A moment later, he decided to take the stairs.

Sanders stared at the setting sun from the deck of the ferry going back to Winslow. The evening was calm, with almost no breeze; the surface of the water was dark and still. He looked back at the lights of the city and tried to assess what had happened.

From the ferry, he could see the upper floors of the DigiCom buildings, rising behind the horizontal gray concrete of the viaduct that ran along the water's edge. He tried to pick out Meredith's office window, but he was already too far away.

Out here on the water, heading home to his family, slipping back into his familiar daily routine, the events of the previous hour had already begun to take on an unreal quality. He found it hard to believe that it had happened. He reviewed the events in his mind, trying to see just where he had gone wrong. He felt certain that it was all his fault, that he had misled Meredith in some important way. Otherwise, she would never have come on to him. The whole episode was an embarrassment for him, and probably for her, too. He felt guilty and miserable-and deeply uneasy about the future. What would happen now? What would she do?

He couldn't even guess. He realized then that he didn't really know her at all. They had once been lovers, but that was a long time ago. Now she was a new person, with new responsibilities. She was a stranger to him.

Although the evening was mild, he felt chilled. He went back inside the ferry. He sat in a booth and took out his phone to call Susan. He pushed the buttons, but the light didn't come on. The battery was dead. For a moment he was confused; the battery should last all day. But it was dead.

The perfect end to his day.

Feeling the throb of the ferry engines, he stood in thebathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. His hair was messed; there was a faint smear of lipstick on his lips, and another on his neck; two buttons of his shirt were missing, and his clothes were rumpled. He looked as if he had just gotten laid. He turned his head to see his ear. A tiny bruise marked where she had bitten him. He unbuttoned the shirt and looked at the deep red scratches running in parallel rows down his chest.

Christ.

How was he going to keep Susan from seeing this?

He dampened paper towels and scrubbed away the lipstick. He patted down his hair, and buttoned his sport coat, hiding most of his shirt. Then he went back outside, sat down at a booth by the window, and stared into space.

"Hey, Tom."

He looked up and saw John Perry, his neighbor on Bainbridge. Perry was a lawyer with Marlin, Howard, one of the oldest firms in Seattle. He was one of those irrepressibly enthusiastic people, and Sanders didn't much feel like talking to him. But Perry slipped into the seat opposite him.

"How's it going?" Perry asked cheerfully.

"Pretty good," Sanders said.

"I had agreat day."

"Glad to hear it."

`Justgreat," Perry said. "We tried a case, and I tell you, we kicked ass.

"Great," Sanders said. He stared fixedly out the window, hoping Perry would take the hint and go away.

Perry didn't. "Yeah, and it was a damned tough case, too. Uphill all the way for us," he said. "Title VII, Federal Court. Client's a woman who worked at MicroTech, claimed she wasn't promoted because she was a female. Not a very strong case, to tell the truth. Because she drank, and so on. There were problems. But we have a gal in our firm, Louise Fernandez, a Hispanic gal, and she is justlethal on these discrimination cases. Lethal. Got the jury to award our client nearly half a million. That Fernandez can work the case law like nothing you've ever seen. She's won fourteen of her last sixteen cases. She acts so sweet and demure, and inside, she's justice. I tell you, sometimes women scare the hell out of me."

Sanders said nothing.

He came home to a silent house, the kids already asleep. Susan always put the kids to bed early. He went upstairs. His wife was sitting up in bed, reading, with legal files and papers scattered across the bedcovers. When she saw him, she got out of bed and came over to hug him. Involuntarily, his body tensed.

"I'm really sorry, Tom," she said. "I'm sorry about this morning. And I'm sorry about what happened at work." She turned her face up and kissed him lightly on the lips. Awkwardly, he turned away. He was afraid she would smell Meredith's perfume, or

"You mad about this morning?" she asked.

"No," he said. "Really, I'm not. It was just a long day."

"Lot of meetings on the merger?"

"Yes," he said. "And more tomorrow. It's pretty crazy."

Susan nodded. "It must be. You just got a call from the office. From a Meredith Johnson."

He tried to keep his voice casual. "Oh yes?"

"Uh-huh. About ten minutes ago." She got back in bed. "Who is she, anyway?" Susan was always suspicious when women from the office called.

Sanders said, "She's the new veep. They just brought her up from Cupertino."

"I wondered… She acted like she knew me."

"I don't think you've ever met." He waited, hoping he wouldn't have to say more.

"Well," she said, "she sounded very friendly. She said to tell you everything is fine for the due diligence meeting tomorrow morning at eight-thirty, and she'll see you then."

"Okay. Fine."

He kicked off his shoes, and started to unbutton his shirt, then stopped. He bent over and picked his shoes up.

"How old is she?" Susan asked.

"Meredith? I don't know. Thirty-five, something like that. Why?"

"Just wondered." "I'm going to take a shower," he said.

"Okay." She picked up her legal briefs, and settled back in bed, adjusting the reading light.

He started to leave.

"Do you know her?" Susan asked.

"I've met her before. In Cupertino."

"What's she doing up here?"

"She's my new boss."

"She'sthe one."

"Yeah," he said. "She's the one."

"She's the woman that's close to Garvin?"

"Yeah. Who told you? Adele?" Adele Lewyn, Mark's wife, was one of Susan's best friends.

She nodded. "Mary Anne called, too. The phone never stopped ringing."

"I'll bet."

"So is Garvin fucking her or what?"

"Nobody knows," he said. "The general belief is that he's not."

"Why'd he bring her in, instead of giving the job to you?"

"I don't know, Sue."

"You didn't talk to Garvin?"

"He came around to see me in the morning, but I wasn't there."

She nodded. "You must be pissed. Or are you being your usual understanding self?"

"Well." He shrugged. "What can I do?"

"You can quit," she said.

"Not a chance."

"They passed over you. Don't youhave to quit?"

"This isn't the best economy to find another job. And I'm forty-one. I don't feel like starting over. Besides, Phil insists they're going to spin off the technical division and take it public in a year. Even if I'm not running it, I'd still be a principal in that new company."

"And did he have details?" He nodded. "They'll vest us each twenty thousand shares, and options for fifty thousand more. Then options for another fifty thousand shares each additional year."

“At?”

"Usually it's twenty-five cents a share."

"And the stock will be offered at what? Five dollars?"

"At least. The IPO market is getting stronger. Then, say it goes to ten. Maybe twenty, if we're hot."

There was a brief silence. He knew she was good with figures. "No," she said finally. "You can't possibly quit."

He had done the calculations many times. At a minimum, Sanders would realize enough on his stock options to pay off his mortgage in a single payment. But if the stock went through the roof, it could be truly fantastic-somewhere between five and fourteen million dollars. That was why going public was the dream of anyone who worked in a technical company.

He said, "As far as I'm concerned, they can bring in Godzilla to manage that division, and I'll still stay at least two more years."

"And is that what they've done? Brought in Goodwill?"

He shrugged. "I don't know."

"Do you get along with her?"

He hesitated. "I'm not sure. I'm going to take a shower."

"Okay," she said. He glanced back at her: she was reading her notes again.

After his shower, he plugged his phone into the charger unit onthe sink, and put on a T-shirt and boxer shorts. He looked at himself in the mirror; the shirt covered his scratches. But he was still worried about the smell of Meredith's perfume. He splashed after-shave on his cheeks.

Then he went into his son's room to check on him. Matthew was snoring loudly, his thumb in his mouth. He had kicked down the covers. Sanders pulled them back up gently and kissed his forehead.

Then he went into Eliza's room. At first he could not see her; his daughter had lately taken to burrowing under a barricade of covers and pillows when she slept. He tiptoed in, and saw a small hand reach up, and wave to him. He came forward.

"Why aren't you asleep, Laze?'' he whispered.

"I was having a dream," she said. But she didn't seem frightened.

He sat on the edge of the bed, and stroked her hair. "What kind of a dream?"

"About the beast."

"Uh-huh…"

"The beast was really a prince, but he was placed under a powerful spell by a 'chantress."

"That's right…" He stroked her hair.

"Who turned him into a hideous beast."

She was quoting the movie almost verbatim.

"That's right," he said.

"Why?"

"I don't know, Lize. That's the story."

"Because he didn't give her shelter from the bitter cold?" She was quoting again. "Why didn't he, Dad?"

"I don't know," he said.

"Because he had no love in his heart," she said.

"Live, it's time for sleep."

"Give me a dream first, Dad."

"Okay. There's a beautiful silver cloud hanging over your bed, and-"

"That dream's no good, Dad." She was frowning at him.

"Okay. What kind of dream do you want?"

"With Kermit."

"Okay. Kermit is sitting right here by your head, and he is going to watch over you all night."

"And you, too."

"Yes. And me, too." He kissed her forehead, and she rolled away to face the wall. As he left the room he could hear her sucking her thumb loudly.

He went back to the bedroom and pushed aside his wife's legal briefs to get into bed.

"Was she still awake?" Susan asked.

"I think she'll go to sleep. She wanted a dream. About Kermit."

His wife nodded. "Kermit is a very big deal now."

She didn't comment on his T-shirt. He slipped under the covers and felt suddenly exhausted. He lay back against the pillow and closed his eyes. He felt Susan picking up the briefs on the bed, and a moment later she turned off the light.

"Mum," she said. "You smell good."

She snuggled up against him, pressing her face against his neck, and threw her leg over his side. This was her invariable overture, and it always annoyed him. He felt pinned down by her heavy leg.

She stroked his cheek. "Is that after-shave for me?"

"Oh, Susan…" He sighed, exaggerating his fatigue.

"Because it works," she said, giggling. Beneath the covers, she put her hand on his chest. He felt it slide down, and slip under the T-shirt.

He had a burst of sudden anger. What was the matter with her? She never had any sense about these things. She was always coming on to him at inappropriate times and places. He reached down and grabbed her hand.

"Something wrong?"

"I'm really tired, Sue."

She stopped. "Bad day, huh?" she said sympathetically.

"Yeah. Pretty bad."

She got up on one elbow, and leaned over him. She stroked his lower lip with one finger. "You don't want me to cheer you up?"

"I really don't."

"Not even a little?"

He sighed again.

"You sure?" she asked, teasingly. "Really, really sure?" And then she started to slide beneath the covers.

He reached down and held her head with both hands. "Susan. Please. Come on."

She giggled. "It's only eight-thirty. You can't bethat tired."

"I am."

"I bet you're not."

"Susan, damn it. I'm not in the mood."

"Okay, okay." She pulled away from him. "But I don't know why you put on the after-shave, if you're not interested."

"For Christ's sake."

"We hardly ever have sex anymore, as it is."

"That's because you're always traveling." It just slipped out.

"I'm not `always traveling.' "

"You're gone a couple of nights a week."

"That's not `always traveling.' And besides, it's my job. I thought you were going to be more supportive of my job."

"I am supportive."

"Complaining is not supportive."

"Look, for Christ's sake," he said, "I come home early whenever you're out of town, I feed the kids, I take care of things so you don't have to worry-"

"Sometimes,"she said. "And sometimes you stay late at the office, and the kids are with Consuela until all hours"

"Well, I have a job, too-"

"So don't give me this `take care of things' crap," she said. "You're not home anywhere near as much as I am, I'm the one who has two jobs, and mostly you do exactly what you want, just like every other fucking man in the world."

"Susan…"

`Jesus, you come home early once in a while, and you act like a fucking martyr." She sat up, and turned on her bedside light. "Every woman I know works harder than any man."

"Susan, I don't want to fight."

"Sure, make itmy fault. I'm the one with the problem. Fuckingmen."

He was tired, but he felt suddenly energized by anger. He felt suddenly strong, and got out of bed and started pacing. "What does being a man have to do with it? Am I going to hear how oppressed you are again now?"

"Listen," she said, sitting straighter. "Women are oppressed. It's a fact."

"Is it? How are you oppressed? You never wash a load of clothes. You never cook a meal. You never sweep a floor. Somebody does all that for you. You have somebody to do everything for you. You have somebody to take the kids to school and somebody to pick them up. You're a partner in a law firm, for Christ's sake. You're about as oppressed as Leona Helmsley."

She was staring at him in astonishment. He knew why: Susan had made her oppression speech many times before, and he had never contradicted her. Over time, with repetition it had become an accepted idea in their marriage. Now he was disagreeing. He was changing the rules.

"I can't believe you. I thought you were different." She squinted at him, her judicious look. "This is because a woman got your job, isn't it."

"What're we going to now, the fragile male ego?"

"It's true, isn't it? You're threatened."

"No it's not. It's crap. Who's got the fragile ego around here? Your ego's so fucking fragile, you can't even take a rejection in bed without picking a fight."

That stopped her. He saw it instantly: she had no comeback. She sat there frowning at him, her face tight.

`Jesus," he said, and turned to leave the room.

"You picked this fight," she said.

He turned back. "I did not."

"Yes, you did. You were the one who started in with the traveling."

"No. You were complaining about no sex."

"I wascommenting."

"Christ. Never marry a lawyer."

"And your ego is fragile."

"Susan, you want to talk fragile? I mean, you're so fucking selfinvolved that you had a shitfit this morning because you wanted to look pretty for the pediatrician."

"Oh, there it is. Finally. You are still mad because I made you late. What is it? You think you didn't get the job because you were late?"

"No," he said, "I didn't-"

"You didn't get the job," she said, "because Garvin didn't give it to you. You didn't play the game well enough, and somebody else played it better. That's why. A woman played it better."

Furious, shaking, unable to speak, he turned on his heel and left the room.

"That's right, leave," she said. "Walk away. That's what you always do. Walk away. Don't stand up for yourself. You don't want to hear it, Tom. But it's the truth. If you didn't get the job, you have nobody to blame but yourself."

He slammed the door.

He sat in the kitchen in darkness. It was quiet all around him, except for the hum of the refrigerator. Through the kitchen window, he could see the moonlight on the bay, through the stand of fir trees.

He wondered if Susan would come down, but she didn't. He got up and walked around, pacing. After a while, it occurred to him that he hadn't eaten. He opened the refrigerator door, squinting in the light. It was stacked with baby food, juice containers, baby vitamins, bottles of formula. He poked among the stuff, looking for some cheese, or maybe a beer. He couldn't find anything except a can of Susan's Diet Coke.

Christ, he thought, not like the old days. When his refrigerator was full of frozen food and chips and salsa and lots of beer. His bachelor days.

He took out the Diet Coke. Now Eliza was starting to drink it, too. He'd told Susan a dozen times he didn't want the kids to get diet drinks. They ought to be getting healthy food. Real food. But Susan was busy, and Consuela indifferent. The kids ate all kinds of crap. It wasn't right. It wasn't the way he had been brought up.

Nothing to eat. Nothing in his own damned refrigerator. Hopeful, he lifted the lid of a Tupperware container and found a partially eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich, with Eliza's small toothmarks in one side. He picked the sandwich up and turned it over, wondering how old it was. He didn't see any mold.

What the hell, he thought, and he ate the rest of Eliza's sandwich, standing there in his T-shirt, in the light of the refrigerator door. He was startled by his own reflection in the glass of the oven. "Another privileged member of the patriarchy, lording it over the manor."

Christ, he thought, where did women come up with this crap?

He finished the sandwich and rubbed the crumbs off his hands. The wall clock said 9:15. Susan went to sleep early. Apparently she wasn't coming down to make up. She usually didn't. It was his job to make up.

He was the peacemaker. He opened a carton of milk and drank from it, then put it back on the wire shelf. He closed the door. Darkness again.

He walked over to the sink, washed his hands, and dried them on a dish towel. Having eaten a little, he wasn't so angry anymore. Fatigue crept over him. He looked out the window and through the trees and saw the lights of a ferry, heading west toward Bremerton. One of the things he liked about this house was that it was relatively isolated. It had some land around it. It was good for the kids. Kids should grow up with a place to run and play.

He yawned. She definitely wasn't coming down. It'd have to wait until morning. He knew how it would go: he'd get up first, fix her a cup of coffee, and take it to her in bed. Then he'd say he was sorry, and she would reply that she was sorry, too. They'd hug, and he would go get dressed for work. And that would be it.

He went back up the dark stairs to the second floor, and opened the door to the bedroom. He could hear the quiet rhythms of Susan's breathing.

He slipped into bed, and rolled over on his side. And then he went to sleep.

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'seightof '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 aninventory?"

"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. Inever evenheard 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'remanufacturingchips.' 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 isroutine."

"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 isfantastic."

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 agreatselling 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."