Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [126]
The programmer looked up. “Third Wednesday of the month.”
“So?”
“OOPS meets on the third Wednesday.”
“Oh.” The Object Oriented Programmer Support association, or OOPS, was an association of programmers in the Seattle area. It was started by Microsoft some years earlier, and was partly social and partly trade talk.
Sanders said, “You know anything about what the Diagnostics team found?”
“Sorry.” The programmer shook his head. “I just came in.”
Sanders went back to the Diagnostics room. He flicked on the lights and gently removed the white cloth that covered the drives. He saw that only three of the CD-ROM drives had been opened, their innards exposed to powerful magnifying glasses and electronic probes on the tables. The remaining seven drives were stacked to one side, still in plastic.
He looked up at the blackboards. One had a series of equations and hastily scribbled data points. The other had a flowchart list that read:
Contr. Incompat.
VLSI?
pwr?
Optic Dysfunct-? voltage reg?/arm?/servo?
Laser R/O (a,b,c)
Σ Mechanical √ √
Gremlins
It didn’t mean much to Sanders. He turned his attention back to the tables, and peered at the test equipment. It looked fairly standard, except that there were a series of large-bore needles lying on the table, and several white circular wafers encased in plastic that looked like camera filters. There were also Polaroid pictures of the drives in various stages of disassembly; the team had documented their work. Three of the Polaroids were placed in a neat row, as if they might be significant, but Sanders couldn’t see why. They just showed chips on a green circuit board.
He looked at the drives themselves, being careful not to disturb anything. Then he turned to the stack of drives that were still wrapped in plastic. But looking closely, he noticed fine, needle-point punctures in the plastic covering four of the drives.
Nearby was a medical syringe and an open notebook. The notebook showed a column of figures:
PPU
7
II (repeat II)
5
2
And at the bottom someone had scrawled, “Fucking Obvious!” But it wasn’t obvious to Sanders. He decided that he’d better call Don Cherry later tonight, to have him explain it. In the meantime, he took one of the extra drives from the stack to use in the presentation the following morning.
He left the Diagnostics room carrying all his presentation materials, the easel boards flapping against his legs. He headed downstairs to the ground floor conference room, which had an AV closet where speakers stored visual material before a presentation. He could lock his material away there.
In the lobby, he passed the receptionist’s desk, now manned by a black security guard, who watched a baseball game and nodded to Sanders. Sanders went back toward the rear of the floor, moving quietly on the plush carpeting. The hallway was dark, but the lights were on in the conference room; he could see them shining from around the corner.
As he came closer, he heard Meredith Johnson say, “And then what?” And a man’s voice answered something indistinct.
Sanders paused.
He stood in the dark corridor and listened. From where he stood, he could see nothing of the room.
There was a moment of silence, and then Johnson said, “Okay, so will Mark talk about design?”
The man said, “Yes, he’ll cover that.”
“Okay,” Johnson said. “Then what about the . . .”
Sanders couldn’t hear the rest. He crept forward, moving silently on the carpet, and cautiously peered around the corner. He still could not see into the conference room itself, but there was a large chrome sculpture in the hallway outside the room, a sort of propeller shape, and in the reflection of its polished surface he saw Meredith moving in the room. The man with her was Blackburn.
Johnson said, “So what if Sanders doesn’t bring it up?”
“He will,” Blackburn said.
“You’re sure he doesn’t—that the—” Again, the rest was lost.
“No, he—no idea.”
Sanders held his breath. Meredith was pacing, her image in the reflection, twisting and distorted. “So when he does—I will say that this