"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 called The 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-ROM players 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."