The Gold Coast

  Tashi stares at Jim as if he has just proposed eating shit. “No way! Come on, let’s follow the exit stream down toward Dragon Lake. There’s bound to be a good campsite before that, and if not it’s a fine lake.”

  Wearily Jim humps his pack and follows Tashi down the crease in the rib that holds the lake in, where water gurgles over flat yellow granite and carves a ravine in the slope falling off into a big basin.

  They hike until sunset. The sky is still light, but the ground and the air around them are dim and shadowed. Alpine flowers gleam hallucinogenically from the black moss on the stream’s flat banks. Gnarled junipers contort out of cracks in the rock. Each bend in the little stream reveals a miniature work of landscaping that makes Jim shake his head: above the velvet blue sky, below the dark rock world, with the stream a sky-colored band of lightness cutting through it. He’s tired, footsore, he stumbles from time to time; but Tash is walking slowly, and it seems a shame to stop and end this endless display of mountain grandeur.

  Finally Tash finds a flat sandy dip in a granite bench beside the stream, and he declares it camp. They drop their packs.

  Four or five junipers.

  To the west they can see a long way;

  A fin of granite, poking up out of shadows.

  “Fin Dome,” Tashi says.

  To the east the great crest of the ridge they crossed is glowing,

  Vibrant apricot in the late sunset light.

  Each rock picked out, illuminated.

  Each moment, long and quiet.

  The stream’s small voice talks on and on.

  Light blue water in the massy shadows.

  Two tiny figures, walking aimlessly:

  “Whoah. Whoah. Whoah.”

  Slowly the light leaks out of the air.

  And you have always lived here.

  “How about dinner?” says Tashi. And he sits by his pack.

  “Sure. Are we going to build a fire? There’s dead wood under these junipers.”

  “Let’s just use the stove. There really isn’t enough wood in the Sierras to justify making fires, at least at this altitude.”

  They cook Japanese noodles over a small gas stove. Somehow Jim manages to knock the pot over when cooking his, and when he grabs the pot to save his noodles from spilling, he burns the palm and fingers of his left hand. “Ah!” Sucks on them. “Oh well.”

  Tashi has brought a tent along, but it’s such a fine night they decide to forgo it, and they lay their sleeping bags on groundpads spread in the sandy patches. They get in the bags and—ah!—lie down.

  The moon, hidden by the ridge to the east, still lights the wild array of peaks surrounding them, providing a monochrome sense of distance, and an infinity of shadows. The stream is noisy. Stars are dumped all across the sky; Jim has never seen so many, didn’t know so many existed. They outnumber the satellites and mirrors by a good deal.

  Soon Tashi is asleep, breathing peacefully.

  But Jim can’t sleep.

  He abandons the attempt, sits up with his bag pulled around his shoulders, and … watches. For a moment his past life, his life below, occurs to him; but his mind shies away from it. Up here his mind refuses to enter the mad realm of OC. He can’t think of it.

  Rocks. The dark masses of the junipers, black needles spiking against the stars. Moonlight on steep serrated slopes, revealing their shapes. Ah, Jim—Jim doesn’t know what to think. His body is aching, stinging, and throbbing in a dozen places. All that seems part of mountains, one component of the scene. His senses hum, he’s almost dizzy with the attempt to really take it in all at once: the music of falling water and wind in pine needles, the vast and amazingly complex vision of the stippled white granite in the foreground, the moonlit peaks at every distance.… He doesn’t know what to think. There’s no way he can take it all in, he only shivers at the attempt. There’s too much.

  But he has all night; he can watch, and listen, and watch some more.… He realizes with a flush in his nerve endings, with a strange, physical rapture, that this will be the longest night of his life. Each moment, long and quiet, spent discovering a world he never knew existed—a home. He had thought it a lost dream; but this is California too, just as real as the rock underneath his sore butt. He raps the granite with scraped knuckles. Soon the moon will rise over the range.

  78

  Stewart Lemon is visited by Donald Hereford, out from New York early on the morning after Jim’s rampage. Hereford steps out of the helicopter that has brought him over from John Wayne, and walks out from under the spinning blades without even the suggestion of a stoop or a run. He looks over at the physical plant that he and Lemon inspected together not more than two weeks before.

  “What happened?” he says to Lemon.

  Lemon clears his throat. “An assault was made, I guess, but something went wrong with it. No one knows why. They got the sign at the entrance to the parking garage. And—and we caught a pair in a boat offshore, but they didn’t have anything on them, so…”

  Feeling silly, Lemon walks Hereford from the helipad around the physical plant to the car entrance to the complex. There six round metal poles stick out of two hardened puddles of blue plastic. They’re the signs that used to announce LAGUNA SPACE RESEARCH to the cars passing by. Ludicrous.

  Two FBI analysts are at work at the site, and they pause to speak briefly with Hereford and Lemon. “Appears it was a couple of the Mosquitoes that they’ve been using around here. Made by Harris, and carrying a load of Styx-ninety.”

  Hereford makes a tkh sound with tongue and roof of mouth, kneels to touch the deformed plastic. He leads Lemon away from the FBI agents, around the building and out in the open ground near the helipad.

  “So.” His mouth is a tight, grim line. “That’s that.”

  “Maybe they’ll try again?”

  Brusque shake of the head.

  Lemon feels his fear as a kind of tingling in his fingers.

  “Couldn’t we somehow … stimulate another attack?”

  Hereford stares. “Stimulate? Or simulate?” He laughs shortly. “No. The point is, we’ve been warned. So now it’s our responsibility to see it doesn’t happen again. If it does, it will look like we let it. So.”

  Lemon swallows. “So what happens now?”

  “It’s already happening. I’ve given instructions for the Ball Lightning program to be moved to our Florida plant and given to a new team. The Air Force is going to descend on us next month no matter what we do, but hopefully we can indicate to them that we have already acknowledged the problem in the production schedule and taken steps to rectify it.”

  Lemon hopes that his face doesn’t look as hot as it feels. “It’s not just a problem in the production schedule—”

  “I know that.”

  “The Air Force will know it too.”

  “I’m aware of that.” Hereford’s glance is very, very cold. “At this point I don’t have a whole lot of options left, do I? Your team has given me a program that could very easily do a Big Hacksaw on us. In fact I would bet now that that’s what will happen, no matter what I do. But I still have to take all the last twists I can. It’s possible that the ballistic missile defense problems that everyone else is having will camouflage us. You never know.”

  “So what do I do with my team here?” Lemon demands.

  “Fire them.” Calmly Hereford looks at him. “Lay off the production unit. Shift the best engineers somewhere else, if there’s room for them.”

  “And the executive team?”

  Hereford’s gaze never wavers. “Fire them. We’re clearing house, remember? We have to make sure the Air Force sees that we’re serious. Do the usual things, forced retirements, layoffs, whatever it takes. But do it.”

  “All right. All right.” Lemon thinks fast. “McPherson’s gone—he’s been in charge of the technical side of Ball Lightning for the last few months, and anyway, after the Stormbee fiasco our Andrews friends will be happy to see him go, no doubt. But Dan Houston, now
… Houston’s a useful fellow.…”

  In the face of Hereford’s baleful stare Lemon can’t continue. He begins to understand how Hereford got so high so fast. There’s a ruthlessness there that Lemon has never even come close to.…

  Finally Hereford says, “Houston too. All of them. And do it fast.”

  And then, as he turns to go back to the waiting helicopter: “You’re lucky you aren’t going with them.”

  79

  Early that afternoon Dennis McPherson finds out that he is forcibly retired. Dismissed. Fired. The news comes in a freshly printed and stiffly worded letter from Lemon. He’s given two months’ notice, of course, but given his accumulated vacation time and sick leave—and since there’s nothing left to work on, as someone else is overseeing the transfer of the Ball Lightning program to the Florida plant—which is a meaningless and in fact stupid maneuver, as far as McPherson can tell—well … Nothing to keep him here. Nothing at all.

  He makes sure with a quick calculation of his vacation days on the desk calculator. Nope. In fact they owe him a few days. But after twenty-seven years of work here, what does it matter?

  Numbly he orders up a box and packs his few personal possessions from the office into it. He gives the box to his secretary Karen to mail to him. She’s been crying. He smiles briefly at her, too distracted by his own thoughts to respond adequately. She tells him that Dan Houston has been dismissed too. “Ach,” he says. That on top of everything else; bad for Dan. “I think I’ll go home now,” he says to the office wall.

  The quick, shocked automatism of his actions gives him one moment of satisfaction; he’s on his way out when Lemon steps out of the elevator and says, “Dennis, let me talk to you,” with that automatic boss-assumption in his hoarse voice, the assumption that people will always do as he says. And without a glance back McPherson keeps on walking, out the door and down the stairs to the parking garage.

  Driving out he doesn’t even notice the melted company sign at the entrance.

  Automatic pilot home, as on so many other days of his life. It’s impossible to believe this is the last one. Traffic is a lot better this time of day. The only real clog is at the Laguna Freeway-Santa Ana Freeway interchange. On the way up Redhill the streets look empty and wrongly lit, like a bad movie set of the city. Same with Morningside, and his house.

  Lucy is out. At the church. Dennis sits down at the kitchen table. Funny how not once during the struggle for the Stormbee program did it occur to him that he was fighting for his job. He thought he was only fighting for the program.…

  He sits at the kitchen table and looks dully at the salt and pepper shakers. He’s numb; he even knows he’s numb. But that’s how he feels. Just go with your feelings, Lucy always says. Fine. Time to get behind some deep shock, here. Dive full into numbness.

  It was nice the way he was able to walk out on Lemon at last. Just like he always wanted to. What could they possibly have in mind moving the Ball Lightning program to Florida? It’ll just screw up the work they were doing on the phased array; and if they had gotten that working right—

  But no. He laughs shortly. A habit of mind. Working on the problems at home, in reveries around this table.

  What will he think about now?

  He solves the problem by not thinking anything.

  Lucy comes home. He tells her about it. She sits down abruptly.

  He glances up from the table, gives her a look: well? That’s that—nothing to be done. She reaches across the table and puts her hand on his. Amazing how extensive the private language of an old married couple can be.

  “You’ll get another job.”

  “Uhn.” That hadn’t occurred to him, but now he doubts it. It’s not a track record that is likely to impress the defense industry too much.

  Lucy hears the negative in his grunt and goes to the sink. Blows her nose. She’s upset.

  She comes back, says brightly, “We should go up to our land by Eureka. It would do you good to get away. And we haven’t seen that land since the year it burned. Maybe it’s time to build that cabin you talk about.”

  “The church?”

  “I can get Helena to fill in for me. It would be fun to have a vacation.” She is sincere about this; she loves to travel. “We might as well make what good we can out of the opportunity. Things will work out.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Meaning, don’t pester me about it right now.

  And so she doesn’t. She begins making dinner. Dennis watches her work. Things will work out. Well, he’s still got Lucy. That’s not going to change. Poor Dan Houston. She’s all sniffly. He almost grins; she hates the idea of that cabin on the coast of northern California, away from all her friends. It’s always been his idea. Build a cabin all by himself, do it right. There must be churches up there, she’d have new friends inside a week. And he—well, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have any friends down here, does he? None to speak of, anyway—a colleague or two, most of them long gone to different companies, out of his life. “I should call Dan Houston.” So it wouldn’t make any difference, being up near Eureka. He loved that tree-covered sweep of rocky coastline, its bare empty salt reaches.

  “We could visit, anyway,” he says. “It’s too late in the year to start building. But we could pick the site, and look around a bit.”

  “That’s right,” Lucy says, looking steadfastly into the refrigerator. “We could make a real vacation of it. Drive up the coast all the way.”

  “Stop at Carmel, first night.”

  “I like that place.”

  “I know.”

  Fondness wells up in him like some sort of … like a spasm of grief. As he comes out of the numbness his feelings are jumbled. He doesn’t know exactly what he feels. But there is this woman here, his wife, whom he can count on to always, always, always put the best face on things. No matter the effort it costs her. Always. He doesn’t deserve her, he thinks. But there she is. He almost laughs.

  She glances at him cautiously, smiles briefly. Maybe she can sense what he’s feeling. She goes to work at the counter by the stove. A sort of artificial industriousness there, it reminds him of LSR. Ach, forget it. Forget it. Twenty-seven years.

  As Lucy is serving the hot casserole, the phone rings.

  She answers it, says hesitantly, “Yes, he’s here.”

  She gives the phone to Dennis with a frightened look.

  “Hello?”

  “Dennis, this is Ernie Klusinski.” One of Dennis’s long-lost colleague friends, now working for Aerojet in La Habra.

  “Oh hi, Ernie. How are you?” Unnatural heartiness to his voice, he can tell.

  “Fine. Listen, Dennis, we’ve heard over here about what happened at LSR today, and I was wondering if you wanted to come up and have lunch with me and my boss Sonja Adding, to sort of talk things over. Look into possibilities, you know, and see if you’re at all interested in what we’re doing here.” Pause. “If you’re interested, of course.”

  “Oh I’m interested,” Dennis says, thinking fast. “Yeah, that’s real nice of you, Ernie, I appreciate it. Uh, one thing though”—he pauses, decides—“Lucy and I were thinking of taking a vacation up the coast. Given the opportunity, you know.” Ernie laughs at this feeble jest. “So maybe we can do it when I get back?”

  “Oh sure, sure! No problem with that. Just give me a ring when you get back, and we’ll set it up. I’ve told Sonja about you, and she wants to meet you.”

  “Yeah. That’d be nice. Thanks, Ernie.”

  They hang up.

  Still thinking hard, Dennis returns to the table. Stares at his plate, the casserole steaming gently.

  “That was Ernie Klusinski?”

  “Yeah, it was.” It’s been a strange day.

  “And what did he want?”

  Dennis gives her a lopsided grin. “He was head-hunting. Word has gotten around I was let go, and Ernie’s boss is interested in talking to me. Maybe hiring me.”

  “But that’s wonderful!”
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  “Maybe. Aerojet has got those ground-based lasers, phase six of the BMD—I’d hate to get mixed up in that again.”

  “Me too.”

  “It’s a goddamned waste of time!” He shakes his head, returns to the topic at hand. “But they’re big, they have a lot of things going. If I could get into the right department…”

  “You can find that out when you talk to them.”

  “Yeah. But…” How to say it? He doesn’t understand it himself. “I don’t know … I don’t know if I want to get back into it! It’ll just be more of the same. More of the same.”

  He doesn’t know what he feels. It’s nice to be wanted, real nice. But at the same time he feels a kind of despair, he feels trapped—this is his life, his work, he’ll never escape it. It’ll never end.

  “You can figure that out after you talk to them.”

  “Yeah. Oh. I told him we’d be off on vacation for a while.”

  “I heard that.” Lucy smiles.

  Dennis shrugs. “It would be good to see our property.” He eats for a while, stops. Taps his fork on the table. “It’s been a strange day.”

  That night they pack their suitcases and prepare the house, in a pre-trip ritual thirty years old. Dennis’s thoughts are scattered and confused, his feelings slide about from disbelief to hurt to fury to numbness to bitter humor to a kind of breathless anticipation, a feeling of freedom. He doesn’t have to take the job at Aerojet, if it comes to that. On the other hand he can. Nothing’s certain anymore. Anything can happen. And he’ll never have to deal with Ball Lightning again; he never has to listen to Stewart Lemon boss him around, ever again. Hard to believe.

  “Well, I should call Dan Houston.”

  Reluctantly he does it, and is more relieved than anything else to get an answering machine. He leaves a short message suggesting that they get together when he returns, and hangs up thoughtfully. Poor Dan, where is he tonight?

  Lucy calls up Jim. No answer. And his answering machine isn’t turned on. “I’m worried about him,” she says, nervously packing a suitcase.