Distraction - Bruce Sterling [102]
She gazed at her laptop. “It just gets worse and worse. You want me to cut our budget and get people fired.”
“The budget has to be cut. Cut drastically. People have to be fired. Fired by the truckload. The lab’s sixteen years old, it’s full of bureaucratic deadwood. Get the dead-wood out of here. Fire the Spinoffs department, they’re all Dougal’s cronies and they’re all on the take. Fire the lab procurement drones and put the budgets back into the hands of researchers. And, especially, fire the police.”
“I can’t possibly fire the police. That’s crazy.”
“The police have to go as soon as possible. Hire your own police. If you don’t control your own police, you live on sufferance. The police are the core of any society, and if you don’t have them on your side, you can’t hold power. Huey knows that. That’s why Huey owns the cops in here. They may be feds officially, but they’re all in his pockets.”
The car jostled with a thump and a creak. Oscar yelped. A shapeless black beast was bumping and clawing at the hood.
“It’s a lemur,” Greta said. “They’re nocturnal.”
The lemur stared through the windshield with yellow eyes the size and shape of golf balls. Pressed flat against the glass, its eldritch protohuman mitts gave him a serious turn. “I’ve had it with these animals!” Oscar shouted. “They’re like Banquo’s ghost, they never let us alone! Whose bright idea was this anyway? Wild animals loose in a science lab? It doesn’t make any sense!”
“They are ghosts,” Greta said. “We raised them from the dead. It’s something we learned how to do here.” She opened her door and stepped half out, waving one arm. “Go on. Shoo.”
The lemur sidled off reluctantly.
Oscar had broken into a cold sweat. His hair was standing on end and his hands were shaking. He could actually smell his own fear: a sharp pheromonal reek. He crossed his arms and shivered violently. His reaction was all out of whack, but he couldn’t help it: he was very inspired tonight. “Give me a minute.… Sorry.… Where were we?”
“I can’t stand up in public and start screaming for people to be fired.”
“Don’t prejudge the evidence. Try it out first. Just suggest that a few of these creeps should be fired, and see what the public response is.” He drew a breath. “Remember the climax—you do have a final ace to play.”
“Where I say that I refuse my own salary.”
“Yeah, I thought voluntarily cutting it in half might be good—I’d like to see the Collaboratory’s budget cut about in half—but it’s a better and stronger gesture if you just refuse your pay altogether. You refuse to take government pay until the lab is put back in order. That’s a great conclusion, it shows you’re really serious and it gets you out with a punch, and a nice hot sound bite. Then you sit back and watch the fireworks.”
“I sit back, and the Director fires me on the spot.”
“No, he won’t. He won’t dare. He’s never been his own man, and he’s just not bright enough to react that quickly. He’ll stall for time, and he’s all out of time. Getting the Director out of office is not a problem. The next big step is getting you in as Director. And the real challenge will be keeping you in office—long enough for you to push some real reforms through.”
She sighed. “And then, finally, when that’s all over, do I get to go back and do my labwork?”
“Probably.” He paused. “No, sure, of course. If that’s what you really want.”
“How am I supposed to eat with no salary?”
“You’ve got your Nobel Prize money, Greta. You’ve got big piles of Swedish kronor that you’ve never even touched.”
She frowned. “I kept thinking I would buy new equipment with it, but the lab procurement people wouldn’t let me do all the paperwork.”
“Okay, that’s your problem in a nutshell. Fire all those sorry bastards first thing.”
She shut her laptop. “This is serious. When I do this, it will make a terrible stink. Something will happen.”
“We want things to happen. That’s why we’re doing all this.”
She turned in her seat, anxiously poking him with a kneecap. “I just want to be truthful. Not political. Truthful.”
“This is an