Disclosure: A Novel (15 page)

"Where the hell were you?"Johnson said.

"I thought the meeting was for eight-thirty."

"I called your house last night, specifically because it was changed to eight. They're trying to catch a plane to Austin for the afternoon. So we moved everything up."

"I didn't get that message."

"I talked to your wife. Didn't she tell you?"

"I thought it was eight-thirty."

Johnson shook her head, as if dismissing the whole thing. "Anyway," she said, "in the eight o'clock session, I had to take another approach to Twinkle, and it's very important that we have some coordination in the light of-"

"Meredith?" Up at the front of the group, Garvin was looking back at her. "Meredith, John has a question for you."

"Be right there," she said. With a final angry frown at Sanders, she hurried up to the head of the group.

Back in the conference room, the mood was light. They were all still joking as they took their seats. Ed Nichols began the meeting by turning to Sanders. "Meredith's been bringing us up to date on the Twinkle drive. Now that you're here, we'd like your assessment as well."

I had to take another approach to Twinkle, Meredith had said. Sanders hesitated. "My assessment?"

"Yes," Nichols said. "You're in charge of Twinkle, aren't you?"

Sanders looked at the faces around the table, turned expectantly toward him. He glanced at Johnson, but she had opened her briefcase and was rummaging through her papers, taking out several bulging manila envelopes.

"Well," Sanders said. "We built several prototypes and tested them thoroughly. There's no doubt that the prototypes performed flawlessly. They're the best drives in the world."

"I understand that," Nichols said. "But now you are in production, isn't that right?"

"That's right."

"I think we're more interested in your assessment of the production."

Sanders hesitated. What had she told them? At the other end of the room, Meredith Johnson closed her briefcase, folded her hands under her chin, and stared steadily at him.

He could not read her expression.

What had she told them?

"Mr. Sanders?"

"Well," Sanders began, "we've been shaking out the lines, dealing with the problems as they arise. It's a pretty standard start-up experience for us. We're still in the early stages."

"I'm sorry," Nichols said. "I thought you've been in production for two months."

"Yes, that's true."

"Two months doesn't sound likèthe early stages' to me."

"Well-"

"Some of your product cycles are as short as nine months, isn't that right?"

"Nine to eighteen months, yes."

"Then after two months, you must be in full production. How do you assess that, as the principal person in charge?"

"Well, I'd say the problems are of the order of magnitude we generally experience at this point."

"I'm interested to hear that," Nichols said, "because earlier today, Meredith indicated to us that the problems were actually quite serious. She said you might even have to go back to the drawing board."

Shit.

How should he play it now? He'd already said that the problems were not so bad. He couldn't back down. Sanders took a breath and said, "I hope I haven't conveyed the wrong impression to Meredith. Because I have full confidence in our ability to manufacture the Twinkle drive."

"I'm sure you do," Nichols said. "But we're looking down the barrel at competition from Sony and Philips, and I'm not sure that a simple expression of your confidence is adequate. How many of the drives coming off the line meet specifications?"

"I don't have that information."

”Just approximately."

"I wouldn't want to say, without precise figures."

"Are precise figures available?"

"Yes. I just don't have them at hand."

Nichols frowned. His expression said: why don't you have them when you knew this is what the meeting was about?

Conley cleared his throat. "Meredith indicated that the line is running at twenty-nine percent capacity, and that only five percent of the drives meet specifications. Is that your understanding?"

"That's more or less how it has been. Yes."

There was a brief silence around the table. Abruptly, Nichols sat forward. "I'm afraid I need some help here," he said. "With figures like that, on what do you base your confidence in the Twinkle drive?"

"The reason is that we've seen all this before," Sanders replied. "We've seen production problems that look insurmountable but then get resolved quickly."

"I see. So you think your past experience will hold true here."

"Yes, I do."

Nichols sat back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked extremely dissatisfied.

Jim Daly, the thin investment banker, sat forward and said, "Please don't misunderstand, Tom. We're not trying to put you on the spot," he said. "We have long ago identified several reasons for acquisition of this company, irrespective of any specific problem with Twinkle. So I don't think Twinkle is a critical issue today. We just want to know where we stand on it. And we'd like you to be as frank as possible."

"Well, there are problems," Sanders said. "We're in the midst of assessing them now. We have some ideas. But some of the problems may go back to design."

Daly said, "Give us worst case."

"Worst case? We pull the line, rework the housings and perhaps the controller chips, and then go back on."

"Causing a delay of?"

Nine to twelve months. "Up to six months," Sanders said.

`Jesus," somebody whispered.

Daly said, `Johnson suggested that the maximum delay would be six weeks."

"I hope that's right. But you asked for worst case."

"Do you really think it will take six months?"

"You asked for worst case. I think it's unlikely."

"But possible?"

"Yes, possible."

Nichols sat forward again and gave a big sigh. "Let me see if I understand this right. If there are design problems with the drive, they occurred under your stewardship, is that correct?"

"Yes, it is."

Nichols shook his head. "Well. Having gotten us into this mess, do you really think you're the person to clean it up?"

Sanders suppressed a surge of anger. "Yes I do," he said. "In fact, I think I'm the best possible person to do it. As I said, we've seen this kind of situation before. And we've handled it before. I'm close to all the people involved. And I am sure we can resolve it."

He wondered how he could explain to these people in suits the reality of how products were made. "When you're working the cycles," he said, "it's sometimes not so serious to go back to the boards. Nobody likes to do it, but it may have advantages. In the old days, we made a complete generation of new products every year or so. Now, more and more, we also make incremental changes within generations. If we have to redo the chips, we may be able to code in the video compression algorithms, which weren't available when we started. That will enhance the end-user perception of speed by more than the simple drive specs. We won't go back to build a hundred-millisecond drive. We'll go back to build an eighty-millisecond drive."

"But," Nichols said, "in the meantime, you won't have entered the market."

"No, that's true."

"You won't have established your brand name, or established market share for your product stream. You won't have your dealerships, or your OEMs, or your ad campaign, because you won't have a product line to support it. You may have a better drive, but it'll be an unknown drive. You'll be starting from scratch."

"All true. But the market responds fast."

"And so does the competition. Where will Sony be by the time you get to market? Will they be at eighty milliseconds, too?"

"I don't know," Sanders said.

Nichols sighed. "I wish I had more confidence about where we are on this thing. To say nothing of whether we're properly staffed to fix it."

Meredith spoke for the first time. "I may be a little bit at fault here," she said. "When you and I spoke about Twinkle, Tom, I understood you to say that the problems were quite serious."

"They are, yes."

"Well, I don't think we want to be covering anything up here."

He said quickly, "I'm not covering anything up." The words came out almost before he realized it. He heard his voice, high-pitched, tight.

"No, no," Meredith said soothingly. "I didn't mean to suggest you were. It's just that these technical issues are hard for some of us to grasp. We're looking for a translation into layman's terms of just where we are. If you can do that for us."

"I've been trying to do that," he said. He knew he sounded defensive. But he couldn't help it.

"Yes, Tom, I know you have," Meredith said, her voice still soothing. "But for example: if the laser read-write heads are cut of sync with the m-subset instructions off the controller chip, what is that going to mean for us, in terms of down time?"

She was just grandstanding, demonstrating her facility with techtalk, but her words threw him off balance anyway. Because the laser heads were read-only, not readwrite, and they had nothing to do with the m-subset off the controller chip. The position controls all came off the x-subset. And the x-subset was licensed code from Sony, part of the driver code that every company used in their CD drives.

To answer without embarrassing her, he had to move into fantasy, where nothing he could say was true. "Well," he said, "you raise a good point, Meredith. But I think the m-subset should be a relatively simple problem, assuming the laser heads are tracking to tolerance. Perhaps three or four days to fix."

He glanced quickly at Cherry and Lewyn, the only people in the room who would know that Sanders had just spoken gibberish. Both men nodded sagely as they listened. Cherry even rubbed his chin.

Johnson said, "And do you anticipate a problem with the asynchronous tracking signals from the mother board?"

Again, she was mixing everything up. The tracking signals came from the power source, and were regulated by the controller chip. There wasn't a mother board in the drive units.

But by now he was in the swing. He answered quickly: "That's certainly a consideration, Meredith, and we should check it thoroughly. I expect we'll find that the asynchronous signals may be phase-shifted, but nothing more than that."

"A phase-shift is easy to repair?"

"Yes, I think so."

Nichols cleared his throat. "I feel this is an in-house technical issue," he said. "Perhaps we should move on to other matters. What's next on the agenda?"

Garvin said, "We've scheduled a demo of the video compression just down the hall."

"Fine. Let's do that."

Chairs scraped back. Everyone stood up, and they filed out of the room. Meredith was slower to close up her files. Sanders stayed behind for a moment, too.

When they were alone he said, "What the hell was all that about?"

"All what?"

"All that gobbledygook about controller chips and read heads. You don't know what you were talking about."

"Oh Yes I do," she said angrily. "I was fixing the mess that you made." She leaned over the table and glared at him. "Look, Tom. I decided to take your advice last night, and tell the truth about the drive. This morning I said there were severe problems with it, that you were very knowledgeable, and you would tell them what the problems were. I set it up, for you to say what you told me you wanted to say. But then you came in and announced there were no problems of significance."

"But I thought we agreed last night-"

"These men aren't fools, and we're not going to be able to fool them." She snapped her briefcase shut. "I reported in good faith what you told me. And then you said I didn't know what I was talking about."

He bit his lip, trying to control his anger.

"I don't know what you think is going on here," she said. "These men don't care about technical details. They wouldn't know a drive head from a dildo. They're just looking to see if anybody's in charge, if anybody has a handle on the problems. They want reassurance. And you didn't reassure them. So I had to jump in and fix it with a lot of techno-bullshit. I had to clean up after you. I did the best I could. But let's face it: you didn't inspire confidence today, Tom. Not at all."

"Goddamn it," he said. "You're just talking about appearances. Corporate appearances in a corporate meeting. But in the end somebody has to actually build the damn drive-"

"I'll say-"

"And I've been running this division for eight years, and running it damn well-"

"Meredith." Garvin stuck his head in the door. They both stopped talking.

"We're waiting, Meredith," he said. He turned and looked coldly at Sanders.

She picked up her briefcase and swept out of the room.

Sanders went immediately downstairs to Blackburn's office. "I need to see Phil."

Sandra, his assistant, sighed. "He's pretty busy today."

"I need to see him now."

"Let me check, Tom." She buzzed the inner office. "Phil? It's Tom Sanders." She listened a moment. "He says go right in."

Sanders went into Blackburn's office and closed the door. Blackburn stood up behind his desk and ran his hands down his chest. "Tom. I'm glad you came down."

They shook hands briefly. "It isn't working out with Meredith," Sanders said at once. He was still angry from his encounter with her.

"Yes, I know."

"I don't think I can work with her."

Blackburn nodded. "I know. She already told me."

"Oh? What'd she tell you?"

"She told me about the meeting last night, Tom."

Sanders frowned. He couldn't imagine that she had discussed that meeting. "Last night?"

"She told me that you sexually harassed her."

"I what."

"Now, Tom, don't get excited. Meredith's assured me she's not going to press charges. We can handle it quietly, in house. That will be best for everyone. In fact, I've just been going over the organization charts, and-"

"Wait a minute," Sanders said. "She's saying I harassed her?"

Blackburn stared at him. "Tom. We've been friends a long time. I can assure you, this doesn't have to be a problem. It doesn't have to get around the company. Your wife doesn't need to know. As I said, we can handle this quietly. To the satisfaction of everyone involved."