The zenith angle by Bruce Sterling Read Free Book Online

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,