Ocean Black

CHAPTER TWO

Rae Thomas called it “Hoboville,” for the transient nature of the employees as well as for the junkyard accumulation of furnishings, but Brande kind of liked the homey and relaxed decor of the Marine Visions headquarters on the second floor of the warehouse off Dickens.

Except for the prerequisite spaces for restrooms, storage, and a kitchenette, the entire floor was open, providing an expansive feeling, Brande thought. Thomas objected to the furnishings, but she couldn’t fault the cost. The desks, file cabinets, and chairs were mostly Navy surplus. The computer terminals were generally purchased from the newspaper want ads and refurbished and upgraded by Dokey and Otsuka. Their cables dangled from the false ceiling, and above the ceiling was a snake’s nest of gray and color-coded cabling that would defy the logic of most mortals. Fortunately, MVU had a plethora of electrical engineers and computer-literates who found the maze intriguing.

Brande admitted to himself though not to anyone else that the color schemes prevalent in the office might be a trifle jangled. The metal pieces were black, gray, or beige, depending on what was on sale at the time. The woods and fabrics ranged from walnut to oak and yellow or blue to orange and red. Then again, he reminded himself, it wasn’t a perfect world. One didn’t order the angel fish to stand in that corner of the ocean, and the silver grunnion to move over there.

Thomas, whose father was a retired admiral, also thought the desks and cabinets should be lined up in neat rows, ship shape. She didn’t care for the seemingly random placements three desks angled together here, five circled there. The blueprints and schematics taped to the walls and to the windows bothered her. Brande was all for ship shape aboard a ship, but in his office, in the workroom on the first floor, or in the dockside building on the Commercial Basin a half block away, he was more interested in creative output. The people who formed the various project teams kept shifting with the projects, or worked on multiple tasks, and he didn’t care if they moved their desks to the roof.

The disciplinary specialties oceanography, biology, computer science, civil and structural engineering, environmental engineering, robotics, and propulsion interacted with each other by shouts across the room, by telephone calls from one desk to another, and by computer conversations.

Downstairs, the same kind of controlled confusion existed. The birth of a new concept resulted in the components of one project being shunted to one side while the new idea was formed into brass, stainless steel, reinforced carbon, fiberglass, or fiber optics.

It was all very reassuring to Brande. It meant that creation was taking place.

He was never bothered by the fluorescent light that buzzed nor the ceiling mounted air conditioner that shivvered loudly from time to time.

To the northeast, San Diego International Airport was busy, a file of United, Continental, and Quantas passenger liners taking to the skies. From where he sat, Brande could view the U.S. Naval Air Station on North Island, relatively quiet this evening.

Where he sat was in Larry Embry’s high backed, blue Naugahyde chair, with his feet up on one of the pulled out drawers of Embry’s scarred gray metal desk. He would have used the Formica walnut desktop for his feet, but it was piled high with geographical reports, charts, maps, paper cups, and the remnants of two large pepperoni, black olive, green pepper, and onion pizzas.

In the far corner, in a quiet buzz of their own, Okey Dokey and Ingrid Roskens were ideating submarine entrance and exit hatches for the physically challenged.

Across from him, sitting cross-legged in the middle of Mayberry’s green blotter with a huge slice of pizza in one hand and a can of Coke in the other was Kim Otsuka. In the chair at her own desk, to his left, was Rae Thomas.

“I think,” Otsuka said, “that Dane ought to endorse the check, then give it to the American Cancer Society or to one of the AIDS projects.”

“That would be called theft. Or fraud, or something,” Thomas said.

“That’s justice,” Otsuka countered.

Neither of the women liked Paul Deride much better than Brande did.

Thomas waved the check in the air. “It’s a cashier’s check.”

“Hell,” Brande said. “Let’s cash it then. We could maybe pay off a couple notes, and there’s this forty foot ketch I saw over at the marina….”

“Dane,” Thomas said.

“My grandma Bridgette used that very same tone with me all too often.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that she probably had a right to use it,” Thomas said.

“We could,” Otsuka mused, “actually sell him Gargantua. Or a copy of Gargantua.”

Brande went along with the musing for the moment. “What have we got invested in him?”

Thomas turned to her computer terminal and played with the keys. Since she had taken over the presidency, a number of things had become organized. Project costs, for example. In the past, if it wasn’t required by some federal or institutional grant, Brande had never worried unduly about the efforts and dollars put into a contract. Scientists were happy to boast about their accuracy in research and development, but many of them were slippery when it came to how much of the government’s, or their own, money they were pouring into some hole in the ocean. Rae Thomas preferred a more exact accounting than, “give or take a few hundred thousand.”

“Celebes,” she said, “has consumed two point two six million to date.”

“Nah,” Brande said.

“Yes.”

“Can’t be.”

“But it is.”

“How?” he asked.

“You never allocated the salary and fringe benefits costs of the people working the project.”

“I didn’t?”

“You didn’t.”

She was correct, of course. Brande hadn’t worried about such things as fringe benefits. His people got salaries and were happy with what they were doing. Sometimes, they got an insurance program thrown in, if they asked for it, but Brande wasn’t big on administration. Now, Thomas had standardized life, health, dental, and retirement programs in place. They cost money, and the cost was allocated to the various projects.

“So, a second Gargantua, with all the research and development costs taken care of, would cost us how much, Rae?”

She scrolled through her numbers, finding the materials section. “Nine hundred thousand, roughly, allowing for inflation, for the bits and pieces, and maybe another three hundred thousand in personnel costs.”

“That would give us a one point three mil profit,” he said, trying to be practical.

“Except that we want to recapture some of our R&D costs,” Thomas said. “Call it a half million profit. On a second copy of the robot.”

Brande looked at the check. “It’s damned tempting, isn’t it?”

“Look what happened the last time,” Otsuka said, “with Sneaky Pete.”

Sneaky Pete was a small tethered robot for use in exploration. Controlled from a submersible or from surface craft, Sneaky’s still cameras and video lens assisted deep sea searches. While beginning life with a more exotic name, the robot had become Sneaky Pete as a result of a graduate student intern’s use of the robot’s video system to survey naked female scuba divers.

The robot was in general and occasional production out of the workroom and, while not sold outright, had been leased to a number of research and salvage concerns.

Paul Deride’s AquaGeo Limited had leased four of them, and a couple years later, when Brande tried to get them back, he found that Deride’s super attorney, Anthony Camden, had written the lease agreement in such a way that MVU would never get the robots back, so long as the lease fees were paid. On top of which, MVU was required by law to maintain the robots. At controlled maintenance fee levels. The way he had been snookered still rankled.

Brande, accustomed to working with fairly reliable government offices and relatively standard forms, had learned a valuable lesson in legal maneuvering. He no longer relied on the clients’ legal firms.

“Tear it up,” Brande said.

“Mail it back,” Otsuka said. “Put it in a big box and send it third class, to the wrong address, so that it take a couple weeks.”

“We can use the money,” Thomas reminded them.

“From Deride?” Brande asked.

“I’ll mail it back.”

“God, I’m glad that settled,” Otsuka said. “I’m going home.”

She slid off the desk and started for the door. Seeing Dokey and Roskens still at work, she changed her mind and dodged around desks and filing cabinets to join them.

“Are you ready to go home?” he asked Thomas.

“I’m ready, but since we’re suddenly out a couple million, I’d better review Adrienne’s latest proposal.” Thomas tapped a thick sheaf of paper resting on the corner of her desk.

Adrienne Hampstead was a whiz at raising money. She tapped into the foundations, institutes, and institutions, scrounging research funds. She arranged dinners for Brande, so he could meet people and convince them that the future for minerals and food could be found beneath the sea. Since Avery Hampstead was her brother, all federal contracts through the Commerce Department were left to Brande, to avoid a conflict of interest.

“Do it tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll take you to dinner.”

“We just had dinner.”

“I’ll take you home then.”

“Let’s go.”

The Director of Computer Systems for Marine Visions Unlimited braked her Oldsmobile Festiva in front of the main entrance of the Sea View Tower.

The Chief Structural Engineer pushed open the passenger door. “Thanks for the ride, Kim.”

“You know, Ingrid, I was thinking,” Otsuka said.

Roskens brought her legs back inside the car. “That’s a problem with most of the people I work with. What are you thinking?”

In her mid forties, Roskens was the only member of the MVU team who did not know how to swim, and she had no intention of doing so. Her auburn hair was peppered with gray, and she had large green eyes, the kind that saw beyond lines and shadows into the underlying foundations. She was responsible for the basic design of the structures for Harbor One, the mining and agricultural complexes, and Ocean Deep. Her husband, Jake, ran a student counseling center at San Diego State University.

“I was thinking about the visually impaired. The museum at Ocean Deep could be adapted for the sense of touch.”

“You could do that landside, Kim.”

“Ah, but you could not capture the feeling of depth, the smell of salt water, the sense of detachment from the dry land.”

“The clamminess, you mean?”

Otsuka laughed. “All right, the clamminess.”

“But you’re right, Kim. We’ll have to convince the museum subcontractor to deal with it. He might just go along, if Dane gives him an incentive in his lease.”

“We will need to adapt the submersible and perhaps the domes. Braille signs will be necessary, for one thing.”

“Okey and I will put it in our proposal. Dane and Kaylene will buy it, and Adrienne can find the bucks somewhere.”

“We ought to hire a consultant who is blind.”

“Dane loves adding people to the roster,” Roskens laughed as she slipped out of the car and hurried up to her building entrance.

Otsuka slipped the shift lever into Drive and pulled away from the curb.

There were currently eighty seven people working for MVU, in one capacity or another, at one site or another. There might even be more; Otsuka found it difficult to keep up with all of the new operations Brande founded. Graduate students from Georgetown University, San Diego State, Rice, Miami, Washington, and other institutions spent a semester’s internship with MVU, swelling the employment rolls, then ebbing. People appeared, shifted to new endeavors, or disappeared.

Otsuka was part of the cadre of the company, as were the boat crews and most of the fabrication personnel. Others came and went in proportion to the contracts they were working on, but she was permanent, and she was grateful for it. She was a Japanese national, having been raised and schooled in Tokyo. Stanford University had admitted her to its doctoral program, and after she obtained the degree, she had assumed she would work as one of the computer science cogs in a giant conglomerate, a Sony, or an IBM. Indeed, that had been her goal until Dane Brande showed up at her apartment in Palo Alto the day after she graduated. Now, she had over nine years with the company, conducted largely in jeans and swim suits, as often below the surface as above it. The business suits of an IBM had never materialized for her, and she did not miss them at all.

The atmosphere of MVU was so casual and so bereft of infighting and job competitiveness that she had learned to laugh. Humor in her family had been in short supply as she and her siblings devoted their teenage years to study, to achieving coveted positions in school.

With short blue black hair that was frequently damp and crusted with salt, Otsuka was tiny at five two. She was agile and peppy, and she could take thirty hour stretches of work without blinking her brown eyes.

It frequently happened that way. A project on deadline, or just one of intense interest, might demand days long effort. No one complained about it, and no one punched a clock, and no one drew overtime pay.

Which was another reason she was happy; she liked her colleagues.

When she arrived at her home in Bay Park, she left the Oldsmobile in the carport and unlocked the side door into the house. It was a small house, but it was hers, a possession she had never dreamed of owning.

She dropped her purse on the counter in the kitchen and went through the house turning on lights. From her living room windows, she could see the lights of the developments around Mission Bay. In the front bedroom, which she used as her home office, she also had a view of the bay. She also had three computer systems, one of them dedicated solely to the design of computer systems. In her backyard, a satellite dish gave her instantaneous access through communications satellites to some of the world’s finest supercomputers. She had hard disk drives and tape drives stacked against the back wall, and they contained encyclopedias of information, ranging from atlases to oceanographic maps to arcane electronics reference works.

Otsuka loved her work, and her work was also her hobby.

She crossed the room to the wide conference table she used as a desk and flicked the switch to turn on the monitor. She did not have to initiate the computers since they operated twenty four hours a day.

Using the keyboard, which she could switch between the three computers, she first called up her stock portfolio and updated it with the stock quotes that had been collected at the closing bell in New York. Otsuka was trying to learn the stock business. In six months, she was twenty four dollars down on an investment of two hundred dollars.

She was not trying to learn the business of investment the hard way.

Then she checked her incoming messages and found one from Dokey:

Otsuka keyed in the automatic dialer, selected the number for Dokey’s home computer, and typed in the response:

She felt like Molly, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, starting with “yes,” and ending with “yes,” but avoiding the forty five substantial pages in between.

But then, she had a new hobby in Maynard Dokey, and she would learn the new pages, one by one.

Thomas and Brande stopped for a drink at a neighborhood bar they had come to like. She had wine, and he had a Black Label with a whisper of water.

She didn’t want to rush him, but she was eager to get him home.

“Is something bothering you, Rae?”

“Bothering me? No. Why?”

“You seem fidgety.”

“I’m always fidgety,” she said.

He shook his head, like he always did when she mystified him. His eyes were dark, drawing her in. His smile was a minor lift of one corner of his mouth. She could imagine him at ten years of age, smiling that way for Bridgette, probably after he had broken a prize vase.

He finally finished his drink, left some bills on the table, and they slid out of the booth. Outside, the air was balmy, and they walked down the quiet street to her Grand Am. He opened the door for her, and then took the driver’s side.

Brande was a bit on the old fashioned side, she thought. Bridgette had taught him to open doors for women, and he never failed to do so. Whenever he was in a car, he wanted to drive. She had to force herself to picture him driving a race car, as he used to do in road rallies, because on the streets of the city, he was a cautious driver.

Brande’s condo was in Crown Point, on Mission Bay. He had offered to flip a coin when they decided they might as well share their quarters, but she had readily given up her apartment. His place was spacious, even if a bit sparse on decoration. What there was too masculine, anyway, but she was working on it. His condo also boasted a two car garage, and the rental car he had leased for the last four months was sitting in one of the stalls because they had driven her car to work together that morning.

He left the Ingraham Street causeway crossing the bay, passed La Cima Drive, and turned into the driveway.

Thomas pushed the button on the remote control.

The garage door came up and the light went on.

Revealing his rental Mercury.

And a 1957 Thunderbird roadster in bright red for which she had paid $27,000.

He was rolling up the drive at a fair clip, and the tires chirped on the concrete when he slammed the brakes on.

“What the hell?”

“What do you think?” she asked.

Brande slapped the shift lever into Park and got out. She followed him into the garage as he made a complete circuit of the Thunderbird. His fingers trailed over the smooth finish, and in the dim light of the door opener light, his eyes sparkled. Thomas thought that, if she ever had a child, this would be what Christmas was like.

He bent and peered in through the driver’s side window, then stood up and looked across the top at her.

“Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know. Okey helped me pick it out. It’s supposed to be a first class restoration.”

“When did you decide to collect cars?”

“Me? Oh, it’s not mine, Dane.”

“What?”

“It’s yours.”

“Rae, this is crazy.”

“I broke your Bonneville.”

“Not your fault. And I’m fixing it.”

“You’ve found what? Two fenders and a hood? What about the windshield frame?”

“That’s a little tough,” he admitted, moving around to the front of the T Bird. “But I’ll find it.”

She moved up to meet him at the front fender. “In the meantime, you need something to drive.”

Brande slipped his arms around her waist. “It’s lovely, Rae, though not as lovely as you.”

She kissed him. There was still some salt tang of the sea on his lips.

His hands moved up her back, caressing.

“Got something in mind, sailor?” she asked.

“I can get the top off, and we can go for a ride.”

“Let’s.”

Then she realized that he meant the car.