“All right, Art,” McPherson says wearily. “Thanks for telling me.”
Poor Dan.
That night at the dinner table Dennis watches Lucy bustle around the kitchen telling him about the day’s events at the church, which as usual he is tuning out entirely; and he thinks about Dan. McPherson has spent much of his life—too much of it—at work. On the weekends, in the evenings … But he can see, just by looking at her, that it has never even occurred to Lucy to leave him because of that, no matter how sick of it she may have gotten. It just isn’t something she would do. He can rely on that, whether he deserves it or not. As she passes his chair he reaches out impulsively and gives her a rough hug. Surprised, she laughs. Who knows what this Dennis McPherson will do next, eh? No one. Not even him. He gives her a wry grin, shakes his head at her inquiries, eats his dinner.
And at work he tries to treat Dan with a little more sympathy, tries to lay the eye on him a little less often. Still, one day he can hardly contain himself. Dan is moaning again about the impossibility of their task, and says in a low voice, as if he has a good but slightly dangerous idea, “You know, Dennis, the system makes a perfectly fine weapon for fixed ground targets like missile silos. We’ve worked up its power so much for the rapidly moving targets that stationary ones wouldn’t stand a chance. Missile silos hit before they launch, you know.”
“Not our job, Dan.” Strategy.…
“Or even cities. You know, just the threat of a firestorm retaliation for any attack—who could ignore that?”
“That’s just MAD all over again, Dan,” McPherson snaps. He tries to control himself. “It wasn’t what they bought this system for, so really, it’s irrelevant. We just have to try to track and hold the boosters long enough to cook them, that’s all there is to it. We’ve done everything possible to the power plant—let’s work on tracking and on phased-array to increase the brightness of the beam, and just admit to the Air Force that the kill process will take longer than expected. Call it a boost phase/post–boost phase defense.”
Dan shrugs. “Okay. But the truth is that every defense system we’ve got works even better at suppressing defenses. Or at offense.”
“Just don’t think about that,” McPherson says. “Strategy isn’t our area.”
And they get back to it. Software design, a swamp with no bottom or border. With the deadline closing in on them.
Dennis is in Laguna when he gets the next call from Louis Goldman. “The GAO report is out.”
“And?” Heartbeat accelerating at an accelerating rate, not good for him.…
“Well, it concludes that there were irregularities, and recommends the contract be bid on again.”
“Great!”
“Well, true. But it’s not really as gung-ho as I expected, frankly. The word is that the Air Force really put the arm on the GAO in the last couple of weeks, and they managed to flatten the tone of the report considerably.”
“Now how the hell can they do that?” McPherson demands. “I mean, what sort of power could the Air Force have over the GAO? Isn’t GAO part of Congress? They can’t possibly threaten them, can they?”
“Well, it’s not a matter of threatening physical violence, of course. But you know, these people have got to work with each other in case after case. So if the Air Force cares enough, they can say, Listen, you lay off us on this or we’ll never cooperate with you again—we’ll make sure any dealings you have with us are pure torture for you, and you won’t be able to fully function in this realm anymore. So, the folks at GAO have to look beyond this particular case, and they’re realists, they say, this one is top priority for them, but not for us. And so the report gets laundered a little. No lies, just deemphasizing.”
McPherson doesn’t know what to say to this. Disgust makes him too bitter to think.
“But listen,” Goldman goes on, “it isn’t as bad as I’m making it sound. In the main the GAO stuck to their guns, and after all they did recommend a new bidding process. Now we’ll just have to wait and see what Judge Tobiason decides in the case.”
“When will that take place?”
“Looks like about three weeks, judging by his published schedule.”
“I’ll come out for it.”
“Good, I’ll see you then.”
Thus McPherson is in a foul mood, apprehensive and angry and hopeful all at once, when Dan Houston comes by at the end of the day and asks him to come along to El Torito for some drinks.
“Not tonight, Dan.”
But Dan is insistent. “I’ve really got to talk to you, Mac.”
Sigh. The man’s hurting, that’s clear. “All right. Just one pitcher, though.”
They track over and take their usual table, order the usual pitcher of margaritas, start drinking. Dan downs his first in two swallows, starts on a second. “This whole BM defense,” he complains. “We can barely make these systems work, and when we do they work just as well against defensive systems, so in essence they’re another offense. And meanwhile we aren’t even paying attention to cruise missiles or sub attack, so as for a real umbrella, well that isn’t even what we’re trying for!”
McPherson nods, depressed. He’s felt that way about strategic defense for years. In fact that was his big mistake, accidentally letting Lemon know how he felt. And his dislike for the concept springs from exactly the reasons Dan is speaking of; every aspect of it has spiraled off into absurdity. “You’d think the original system architects would have thought of these kinds of things,” he says.
Dan nods vehemently and puts down his margarita to point, spilling some ice over the salt on the rim. “That’s right! Those bastards…” He shakes his head, is already drunk enough to keep going: “They just saw their chance and took it. During their careers they could make it big designing these programs and selling them to the Air Force, making it all look easy! Because for them it meant bucks! It meant they had it made. And it’s only after it was put in space and began to come on line that the next generation of engineers had to make the system work. And that’s us! We’re the ones paying for their fat careers.”
“Well, whatever,” McPherson says, uncomfortable with Dan’s raw bitterness. There is a sort of team code in the defense industry, and really, you don’t say things like this. “We’re stuck with it, anyway, so we might as well make the best of it.”
Here he is, sounding like Lucy. And Dan, drunk and miserable, far past the code, will have none of it: “Make the best of it! How can we make the best of it? Even if we could get it to work, all the Soviets have to do is put a bucket of nails in orbit and wham, ten of our mirrors are gone. Talk about cost-effective at the margin! A ten-penny nail will take out a billion-dollar mirror! Ha! ha! So we defend those mirrors by claiming that we will start a nuclear war with anyone who attacks them, so it comes right back to MAD to defend the very system that was supposed to get us away from all that.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.” McPherson can feel the margaritas fuzzing his brain, and Dan has had about twice as many as he has. Dan’s getting sloppy drunk here, McPherson can see it. So he tries to prevent Dan from ordering another pitcher, but Dan shoves his hand away angrily and orders another anyway. Nothing McPherson can do about it. He feels depression growing in him, settling into a knot around the tequila in his stomach. This is a waste of his time. And Dan, well, Dan …
Dan mutters on while waiting for the next drink to arrive. “Soviets get their own BMD and we don’t like it, no no no, even though the whole strategy demands parity. All sorts of regional wars start so our hard guys can express their displeasure without setting off the big one. Boom, bam, hook to the jaw, jab in the eye, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists sets the war clock at one second to midnight—one second to midnight, man, set there for twenty years! And, and the Soviets’ beam systems could be trained on American cities, burn us to toast in five minutes, and we could do the same to them like I was saying today but we all ignore that, that’s not real no no no, we pretend they’re defensive systems onl
y and we work on knocking each other’s stuff down before the other side does, so we can MIRV each other right into the ground—”
“All right, all right,” McPherson says irritably. “It’s complicated, sure. No one ever said it wasn’t complicated.”
A tortilla chip snaps in Dan’s fingers. “I’m not saying it’s just complicated, Mac! I’m saying it’s crazy! And the people who designed this architecture, they knew it was crazy and they went ahead and did it anyway. They went along with it because it was good for them. The whole industry loved it because it was new business just when the nukes were topping out. And the physicists went along with it because it made them important again, like during the Manhattan Project. And the Air Force went along with it because it made them more important than ever. And the government went along with it because the economy was looking bad at the end of the century. Need a boost—military spending—it’s been the method of choice ever since World War Two got them out of the Great Depression. Hard times? Start a war! Or pump money into weapons whether there’s a war or not. It’s like we use weapons as a drug, snort some up and stimulate the old economy. Best upper known to man.”
“Okay, Dan, okay. But calm down, will you? Calm down, calm down. There’s nothing we can do about that now.”
Dan stares out the window. The next pitcher arrives and he fills his new glass, spilling over the edge so all the big grains of salt run in yellow-white streams down onto the paper tablecloth. He drinks, elbows on the table, leaning forward. He stares down into the empty glass. “It’s a hell of a business.”
McPherson sighs heavily; he hates a maudlin drunk, and he’s about to physically stop Dan from refilling his glass yet again when Dan looks up at him; and those red-rimmed eyes, so full of pain, pierce McPherson and hold him in place.
“A hell of a business,” Dan repeats soddenly. “You spend your whole life working on proposals. Bids, for Christ’s sake. It isn’t even work that is ever going to see the light. The Pentagon just sets companies at each other’s throats. Group bids, one-on-one competitions, leader-follower bids. Kind of like cockfighting. I wonder if they bet on us.”
“Stimulates fast development,” McPherson says shortly. There’s no sense talking about this kind of thing.…
“Yeah, sure, but the waste! The waste, man, the waste. For each project five or six companies work up separate proposals. That’s six times as much work as they would need to do if they were all working together in coordination, like parts of a team. And it’s hard work, too! It eats people’s lives.”
Now Dan gets an expression on his face that McPherson can’t bear to watch; he’s thinking of his ally Dawn now, sure. McPherson looks around for the waitress, signals for their check.
“All their lives used up in meeting deadlines for these proposals. And for five out of every six of them it’s work wasted. Nothing gained out of that work, nothing made from it. Nothing made from it, Mac. Whole careers. Whole lives.”
“That’s the way it is,” McPherson says, signing the check.
Dan stares at him dully. “It’s the American way, eh Mac?”
“That’s right. The American way. Come on, Dan, let’s get you home.”
And then Dan slips in the attempt to stand, and knocks the pitcher off the table. McPherson has to hold him up by the arm, guide him between tables as he staggers. My God, a sloppy drunk; McPherson, red-faced with embarrassment, avoids the eyes of the other customers as they watch him help Dan out.
He gets Dan into his car, fastens his seat belt around him, reaches across his slumped body to punch the car’s program for home. “There you are, Dan,” he says, irritation and pity mixing about equally in him. “Get yourself home.”
“What home.”
43
… Under the Spanish and then the Mexicans, Orange County was a land of ranchos. To the north were Ranchos Los Coyotes, Los Alamitos, Los Bolsas, La Habra, Los Cerritos, Cañon de Santa Ana, and Santiago de Santa Ana. Midcounty were Ranchos Bolsa Chica, Trabuco, Cañada de Los Alisos, and San Joaquín. In the south were Ranchos Niguel, Misión Vieja, Boca de La Playa, and Lomas de Santiago.
To give an idea of their size: Rancho San Joaquín was made up of two parts; first Rancho Ciénega de las Ranas, “Swamp of the Frogs,” which extended from Newport Bay to Red Hill—second Rancho Bolsa de San Joaquín, which contained much of the land that later became the Irvine Ranch. Say 140,000 acres.
These huge land grants were surveyed on horseback, with lengths of rope about a hundred yards long. They used landmarks like patches of cactus, or the skull of a steer. More precise than that they didn’t need to be; the land remained open, and cattle roamed over it freely.
In the spring, after the calving, the roundups took place. Horsemen, reputed to be among the best who ever lived, and including among them a good number of the rapidly disappearing Indians, rounded up the cattle and led them to the branding stations, several for each rancho, as they were all so large. The stations became festival centers, with tables set out and decorated, and great feasts of meat, beans, tortillas, and spicy sauces spread out on them. After the new calves were branded, and strays sent back to their correct ranchos, the celebrating began. The most important events were the horse races; many took place over a nine-mile course.
Other games were more bloody: trying to grab the head from a rooster buried to the neck, while galloping by it at full speed, for instance. Or the various forms of bull-baiting.
Then in the evenings there were dances, using forms invented at San Juan Capistrano, which throughout this period remained the biggest settlement in the area.
Houses were one story, adobe, with simple furnishings made in the area. Clothing fashions were those of Europe some fifty to eighty years before, transformed by local manufacture and custom. There was no glass. They were rich only in cattle, and in open land.
It was a life lived so far away from the rest of the world that it might as well have been alone on the planet: backed by empty mountains and desert, facing an empty sea.
When Jedediah Smith traveled overland from Missouri in 1826, the Mexican governor of California tried to kick him out of the state. But ten years later, when other Americans arrived to trade, they were welcomed. They brought with them various goods of modern Europe, and took away tallow and hides.
Some of the Americans who came to trade liked the look of the land, and stayed. They were welcomed in this as well. Learn Spanish, become a Catholic, marry a local girl, buy some land: more than one American and Englishman did just that, and became respected members of the community. Don Abel Stearns and Don John Forster (known better as “San Juan Capistrano” for his obsession with the old mission, which he bought after its secularization) did even better than that, and became rich.
All the Americans who came in contact with the Californians, even the most anti-Papist among them, came away impressed by their honesty, dignity, generosity, hospitality. When Edward Vischer visited Don Tomás Yorba, head of the most distinguished family in the area, he complimented Don Tomás on a horse that the don rode while seeing Vischer off his rancho; and as Vischer boarded his ship in San Diego the horse was ridden up to the dock and given to him, along with a message from Don Tomás asking him “to accept his beautiful bay as a present and a remembrance of California.”
Cut off from the world, existing in the slow rhythms of cattle raising, the ranchos of Orange County gave their people a slow, pastoral, feudal life, dreamlike in its disconnection from Europe, from history, from time. For four generations the cycle of ranch existence made its simple round, from branding to branding. Little changed, and the dominant realities were the adobe homes, the hot sun in the clear blue sky, the beautiful horses, the cattle out on the open hillsides, on the great broad coastal plain. The few foreigners who arrived to stay were welcomed, taken in; the traders brought glass. They didn’t make any difference to the Californians.
But then the United States declared war on Mexico, and conquered California along with t
he rest of the great Southwest. And then gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada, and Americans flocked to San Francisco, crazed by a gold rush that has never stopped. History returned.
The cattle of the south were driven north to feed these people, and Los Angeles grew on the business. As Americans poured into southern California, the immensity of the Spanish and Mexican land grants gained immediate attention; they were rich prizes to be captured. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, guaranteed the property rights of Mexican citizens in California; but that was just a treaty. Like the treaties the United States made with the Indian tribes, it didn’t mean a thing. Two years later Congress passed a law that forced the rancheros to prove their titles, and the hunt was on.
The old rancheros were asked to provide documentation that there had never been any need for, in earlier times, and court cases concerning the ownership of the land took up to twenty years to settle. The rancheros’ only assets were their land and their cattle, and most of the cattle died in the great drought of 1863–64. To pay their lawyers and their debts, in the fight for their land, the rancheros had to sell parcels of it off. And so win or lose the court fights, they lost the land.
By the 1870s all the land was owned by Americans, and was being rapidly subdivided to sell to the waves of new settlers.
And so all that—the cattle roaming the open land, the horsemen rounding them up, the adobe homes, the huge ranchos, and the archaic, provincial dignity of the lives of the people on them—
all that went away.
44
They land in Stockholm after a two-hour flight over the North Pole—just enough time to catch the in-flight movie Star Virgin. Once in the city they quickly decide that the Great Stagemaster in the Sky has shifted San Diego east and north to give them a surprise. Everyone speaks English, even. They eat at a McDonald’s to confirm the impression and hold a conference in Sandy and Angela’s hotel room to decide what to do next. Jim is for going north to the Arctic Circle and above, but no one else has much enthusiasm for the idea. “You can get reindeer steaks at Trader Joe’s,” Sandy tells him, “and snow on Mount Baldy. Midnight sun in the tanning parlor. No, I want to see someplace different.”