The zenith angle (5 page)

“I know why you’re here, son,” the old man said, his pale eyes slitting under pouchy lids. “It’s about those Boeings. The ones that hit those skyscrapers.”

“That’s right,” Van admitted.

“So the CIA wants you back now, Robbie? I always said those spooks would have to come running back to you, didn’t I?”

“I’m not Robbie,” Van blurted. “Robbie’s my dad. It’s me, Van. I mean, it’s Derek.”

The old man’s face gaped. “Little Derek? Robbie’s little Derek? Derek the computer kid?”

“Yeah, Grandpa. The feds are all over me. They want me to take a job in Washington.”

Grandpa lifted a liver-spotted hand and smoothed the remains of his hair. “Well, you’d better come in here, then.”

Van shook the iron bars. They had been poorly installed, tucked into the stucco with cheap Phillips-head screws. Five minutes with a power tool would have them all down.

“Did you ring the doorbell?” the old man said patiently. “Mrs. Srinivasan should be making her congee now.”

Surprised, Van retreated. He brushed dew from the hems of his pants and rang the doorbell to Duplex B. It was answered by a stout older lady in a Hawaiian blouse, purple slacks, and rubber zoris.

“Oh,” Mrs. Srinivasan said, looking him up and down. “You must be Chuck’s boy. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“I’m his grandson.”

“You look just like him.”

“Could I talk to Dr. Vandeveer? It’s urgent.”

She opened the door politely. Van stepped inside. A glossy Hindu calendar with a technicolor goddess flapped gently on the wall. The place smelled of cone incense, Lipton tea, and tandoori.

“Sorry to be so, uh, soon,” Van said.

“He’s no trouble, darling,” Mrs. Srinivasan said cheerily, leading Van down a scruffy, beige-carpeted hall. “We keep him in my son’s old room. He wanders a little. He wanders a lot, don’t you know.”

“I heard about that.”

“Sometimes he is also very stubborn, your grandfather.”

Van nodded. “Yeah.”

“Please don’t let him smoke.” Mrs. Srinivasan pulled a house key from a chain in her hefty bodice. She unlocked the door.

His grandfather’s cell smelled like a plastics refinery. He’d been using hot glue on his airplane models, something pungent. Worse yet, he’d somehow managed to set fire to his mattress. The narrow wooden bed frame had a long scorched scar under the wrinkled sheets.

Van hugged his grandfather. The old man was stooped and bony, with the empty flabbiness of old age.

“Little Derek,” he said.

“I brought my son here, Grandpa Chuck. Your great-grandson, Ted. Ted’s out there in a truck.”

“Oh, wow.” The old man stared at him peaceably.

“Grandpa, I think I need your advice.”

“My advice, huh? Okey-doke!” The old man sat on his metal stool, and with a careful, visible effort, he crossed his legs. “Shoot!”

“So, did you see what just went down in New York? And the Pentagon?”

“I saw the President’s speech on the TV,” said the old man, growing livelier. “That kid is all right! He’s not like his dad. Old George Bush, he used to come out to Area 51 when we were launching Blackbirds. Back when George was Company. ‘Fifty thousand dollars an hour,’ George Bush would say. No vision thing! He was a bean-counter! Anywhere on earth, any Sunday, a Blackbird could bring back pictures!

High detail, too, shots the size of bedsheets!”

“Great.”

“We never lost a pilot.”

“Right.”

“First ten pilots inside the Blackbird, nine of them became Air Force generals!”

“Right, Grandpa.”

“Surveillance shots straight from Eastman Kodak, the size of dang tabletops! With a handful of planes. Every one of ’em handmade in Burbank!”

Van had no reply to offer. An ugly thrill of weariness shot through him. He sat on the old man’s reeking bed. It scrunched and shot a cloud of dust into a beam of morning sunlight.

“Made out of
titanium
!” The old man brandished his glue gun. It was big, hollow, and shiny, with fins like a Flash Gordon ray gun.

Van sat up. “Titanium, huh?”

Van’s grandfather quickly hid the titanium gun inside his desk. He forgot to unplug it, though, so the bright red cord simply trailed from the desk to the wall, an obvious trip hazard. “Robbie, if I say anything I’m not supposed to say, you just forget that. All right? You can just forget about all of it.” He waved a hand at the crumbling boxes on his walls. “Don’t look at all this.”

Van looked. “What?”

“They ordered us to
destroy all the documents.
They ordered us to
break all our tools.
” The pain was still fresh in the old man’s eyes. “That was the worst part, Robbie: when the politicians make you break your dang tools.” He looked at the slumping wall of boxes. “The D-21, that’s what this is. A cruise missile we built in 1963. Well, ol’ Kelly Johnson had all these boxes stored in his garage in Alameda. He was supposed to burn ’em all. Burn every blueprint! But in Alameda? There woulda been an
air quality
report
!” The old man chuckled wheezily. “Couldn’t break those federal rules and regulations now, could he? The EPA wouldn’t like the
smoke
! They’da sent ol’ Kelly straight to Leavenworth! Ha ha ha!”

“Why did they break your tools?” Van coaxed.

“So we couldn’t pull the D-21 back out of mothballs when the White House changed hands. Breaking the tools, son, that’s the only way to kill a secret federal program and keep it dead. We built ’em a cruise missile twenty-five years before its time. Fifty Lockheed engineers and about a hundred union guys in our machine shop. We made that bird with our own hands. We fired it over Red China four times. At Mach 3. The Chinese never knew a dang thing about that.”

“Did it work?”

“Radar signature the size of a Ping-Pong ball . . .” The old man lost interest suddenly. He groped at his bathrobe for a missing shirt pocket. Van recognized the gesture. He was missing his lighter, and his cigarettes. They’d made him stop smoking twenty years ago.

“They make you burn everything,” he groused, still patting at himself. “Then they give you a secret medal for doing that. What’s the name of that new cartoon? That comic strip? That good one. The one with all the engineers in it.”

Enlightenment dawned. “You mean ‘Dilbert’?”

“That’s right, that’s the one!” The old man rose and teetered to the tiny closet. He opened the warped veneer door with a squeak and picked at a loose heap of uniformly colored golf shirts. None of them had any cigarette pockets in them. “Good old Dilbert. Well, in the Skunk Works, nobody ever had to be the Dilbert. Because Kelly Johnson wouldn’t suffer a damn fool around for seven seconds. Whenever Kelly lowered the boom, the Air Force brass ran back to NORAD to cry in their three-percent beer.”

Grandpa Chuck chose a shirt and a loose, baggy pair of elastic sweatpants. Then he carefully sat on the narrow, stinking bed. He went through the extensive effort of pulling his baggy pants on, one leg at a time. His knees trembled pitifully. His back was very stiff. Van wanted to help his grandfather put his pants on, but there was something far too intimate about that.

“Grandpa, the feds want me for some kind of cyber Skunk Works. It’s really small. It’s secret. It’s elite.”

“Do they have a decent R&D budget?”

“Well, yeah, that’s what they tell me.”

“Take that job,” his grandfather said. He tugged the stretchy waistband up over his bony hips. “Son, you never know what you can accomplish until you’re in a Skunk Works. You pull that off right, and a Skunk Works makes big things happen. Big new things, son, genuine breakthroughs in engineering. Things competitors wouldn’t believe. Things the
Congress
wouldn’t believe.” The old man dropped his bathrobe and fingered his golf shirt, sitting there bare-chested. “The enemy believes it, though. The enemy, they pretty much always believe it. They even believed in Star Wars!”

Van had never directly worked for the federal government. Occasional consulting as a favor to Jeb and his friends, sure, but no official title, and certainly no money ever changing hands. To get himself full-time, paying federal work, there were legendary ethics hassles. And the feds didn’t pay well. If he went to work for Jeb, Dottie and he would lose a whole lot of money. “I’d have to leave my day job. Mondiale is a great company. They’re building the future.”

“Son, can you do this job your country is asking you to do?”

Van considered this. It surprised him that his grandfather would doubt his competence. He wasn’t cocksure about dealing with Washington insiders, but he knew for a fact that he had few rivals in his own line of work. “Yeah, I can do it. If anybody can.”

“Who’s your boss? Is he decent?”

“Well, it’s this new board for the, uh, National Security Council. There’s a bunch of NSC Advisers, and one other guy. That’s the guy who wants me on board.”

“You’re working
direct for the President
?”

“I guess so. Sort of.” Van blinked. “It’s software.”

The old man closed his dropped jaw. “You’ll grow into this, son! It’ll broaden you! You
need
some broadening. Computer people get way too specialized.” The old man laced his veiny hands in a big knuckly knot. “No man should ever get too specialized.” He took a breath, gazed at the wall with a fixed expression, and recited something.

“ ‘A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write a sonnet, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.’ ”

“Who said all that?” said Van, impressed.

“A great American writer. Robert A. Heinlein.” The old man looked watery-eyed at his glowing Macintosh. “Are there any Heinlein e-books these days? Something this machine can read out loud to me? I can’t handle that fine print anymore.”

“I’ll get some for you, Grandpa,” Van promised.

“I tried to make Kelly Johnson read himself some Heinlein, but Kelly never read a novel after those Tom Swift books of his.
Tom Swift and His Airplane.
” The old man snorted. “Kelly Johnson decided to build airplanes when he was twelve years old.”

Twelve years old, mused Van. For him, that meant 1981. He had been eleven when his father brought home the Commodore Vic-20. He’d been twelve when he rebuilt it.

“Son,” his grandfather rasped, “if you’ll be working for the feds, you do need some advice. Yes, you surely do. And I can tell you something real useful. That is, how to run a Skunk Works. Once you do that right, you can’t ever forget.” The old man was brightening. He looked many years younger now.

“The right way is one way that gets results. Are you listening to me, son?”

Van nodded soberly.

“These are simple things. They’re the principles. You gotta listen, that’s number one. It’s more important to listen to your own people than it is to tell ’em what to do. Decide, that’s number two. Make your management decisions whenever they’re needed. You can figure out later whether they were right or wrong. And believe. Don’t ever try to build a project that you can’t believe in. Because otherwise, when they cut your funding—and they will cut it—you won’t be able to tell ’em with a straight face why they should go straight to hell.”

Van felt grateful. “Oh, yeah. This is the right stuff.”

“Son, government programs are just like people. They get slow as they get older. They get very stuck in their ways. That just won’t do for a Skunk Works. You’ve got to be quick, you’ve got to be quiet, and you’ve got to be on time. You had your three principles, and those are your three rules.”

“Okay.”

“When I tell you ‘quick,’ that means small. Small teams, the best people, very restricted. Ten or twenty percent of the people that normal outfits would use. No long reports, ever. Never read a long report, and if a guy writes you one, fire him. No long meetings. You want to keep ’em all working close together, no distractions, focused on the project all the time. Everybody stays hands-on with the tools, everybody stays close to the aircraft. Stick with the machine, never back off. That’s how you get results quick.”

“Should I record all this?”

“Just
pay attention,
dang it! It took good men a lifetime to figure this stuff out!” The old man was breathing harder. “When I say ‘quiet,’ that means no talking. You don’t brag about what you’re doing. Ever. You just do it, and you never demand any credit. If nobody ever knows who you are, then nobody knows what you did. Except for the enemy, of course.” The old man cackled and coughed. “Every day, Russki spy-sats counted every car in our parking lots! Those spies in Moscow, they knew a lot more about my work than my own family ever did.”

There was a painful silence. This was by far the longest, frankest talk Van had ever had with his grandfather about work. Of course, he’d always known that his grandfather built jets, but a fine haze of Vandeveer family silence had always hung over the details.

Van examined the yellow wallpaper. It was cracking and peeling in spots.

“My second wife knew quite a lot about my work,” the old man said defensively. “Because Angela was my secretary. So was my third wife. Well, Doris was not a secretary exactly. Doris was a headhunter from Northrop.” The old man sighed. “I should never have jumped over to Northrop, but Ben Rich had the top job at the Skunk Works sewn up, and I just couldn’t stand to work on civilian subsonics.”

“Give me the ‘on time’ part,” Van prompted.

“That was it! Right! You got to be on time! You got to do it when there are stars in their eyes about it!

Before they get all bureaucratic, and start counting every nickel and dime! Timing is the hardest part, son: you gotta know when good enough will do. You gotta know when to quit.”

The old man tunneled his bony arms through his golf shirt. Static left the remnants of his hair like a windblown thistle. “Me, I got out. I got out at last. I should have got out earlier.”

“Why, Grandpa?”

“Because of the Grease Machine.” The old man made a bitter, money-pinching gesture. “The Grease Machine never needs maintenance, son. That Japanese Minister and his crooked payoffs . . . Lockheed was never the same. A Skunk Works is finished, once the Grease Machine takes over. Once the money beats the engineering, that’s the end of it, son. Once the money beats the engineering, it’s all just chrome and tail fins, after that.”