Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [5]
“You think the controller chips are bad?” The controller chips were made in Singapore and trucked across the border to the factory in Malaysia.
“Don’t know. Either they’re bad, or there’s a bug in the driver code.”
“What about the screen flicker?”
Kahn coughed. “I think it’s a design problem, Tom. We just can’t build it. The hinge connectors that carry current to the screen are mounted inside the plastic housing. They’re supposed to maintain electrical contact no matter how you move the screen. But the current cuts in and out. You move the hinge, and the screen flashes on and off.”
Sanders frowned as he listened. “This is a pretty standard design, Arthur. Every damn laptop in the world has the same hinge design. It’s been that way for the last ten years.”
“I know it,” Kahn said. “But ours isn’t working. It’s making me crazy.”
“You better send me some units.”
“I already have, DHL. You’ll get them late today, tomorrow at the latest.”
“Okay,” Sanders said. He paused. “What’s your best guess, Arthur?”
“About the run? Well, at the moment we can’t make our production quotas, and we’re turning out a product thirty to fifty percent slower than specs. Not good news. This isn’t a hot CD player, Tom. It’s only incrementally better than what Toshiba and Sony already have on the market. They’re making theirs a lot cheaper. So we have major problems.”
“We talking a week, a month, what?”
“A month, if it’s not a redesign. If it’s a redesign, say four months. If it’s a chip, it could be a year.”
Sanders sighed. “Great.”
“That’s the situation. It isn’t working, and we don’t know why.”
Sanders said, “Who else have you told?”
“Nobody. This one’s all yours, my friend.”
“Thanks a lot.”
Kahn coughed. “You going to bury this until after the merger, or what?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I can.”
“Well, I’ll be quiet at this end. I can tell you that. Anybody asks me, I don’t have a clue. Because I don’t.”
“Okay. Thanks, Arthur. I’ll talk to you later.”
Sanders hung up. Twinkle definitely presented a political problem for the impending merger with Conley-White. Sanders wasn’t sure how to handle it. But he would have to deal with it soon enough; the ferry whistle blew, and up ahead, he saw the black pilings of Colman Dock and the skyscrapers of downtown Seattle.
DigiCom was located in three different buildings around historic Pioneer Square, in downtown Seattle. Pioneer Square was actually shaped like a triangle, and had at its center a small park, dominated by a wrought-iron pergola, with antique clocks mounted above. Around Pioneer Square were low-rise red-brick buildings built in the early years of the century, with sculpted façades and chiseled dates; these buildings now housed trendy architects, graphic design firms, and a cluster of high-tech companies that included Aldus, Advance Holo-Graphics, and DigiCom. Originally, DigiCom had occupied the Hazzard Building, on the south side of the square. As the company grew, it expanded into three floors of the adjacent Western Building, and later, to the Gorham Tower on James Street. But the executive offices were still on the top three floors of the Hazzard Building, overlooking the square. Sanders’s office was on the fourth floor, though he expected later in the week to move up to the fifth.
He got to the fourth floor at nine in the morning, and immediately sensed that something was wrong. There was a buzz in the hallways, an electric tension in the air. Staff people clustered at the laser printers and whispered at the coffee machines; they turned away or stopped talking when he walked by.
He thought, Uh-oh.
But as a division head, he could hardly stop to ask an assistant what was happening. Sanders walked