Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [18]
Harvey beckoned to Mark. They walked across the studio lot toward Mercedes Row, where the executives parked. "Look," Harvey said, "your job title is Production Assistant. That theoretically makes you management. It has to be that way because of union rules."
"Yeah—" Mark said.
"But you aren't management. You're a gofer."
"I'm hip." Mark sounded hurt.
"Don't get upset and don't get huffy. Just understand. My crew has been with me a long time. They know the game. You don't."
"I know that, too."
"Fine. You can be a big help. Just remember, what we don't need is—"
"Is me telling everybody how to do their job." He flashed a big grin. "I like working for you. I won't blow it."
"Good." Harvey detected no signs of irony in Mark's voice It made him feel better. He had been worried about this interview—it had to be said, but that didn't make it easier. One of his associates had once remarked that Mark was like a jungle, all right but you had to chop him back every now and then or he'd grow all over you.
The TravelAll started instantly. It had been through a lot with Harvey Randall: from the Alaska pipeline to the lower tip of Baja, even into Central America. They were old friends, the TravelAll and Harvey: a big three-seat International Harvester four-wheel drive, truck motor, ugly as sin, and utterly reliable. He drove in silence to the Ventura Freeway and turned toward Pasadena. Traffic was light.
"You know," Harvey said, "we're always complaining how nothing works, but here we are going fifty miles for this interview, and we count on being there in less than an hour. When I was a kid a fifty-mile trip was something you packed lunches for and hoped you'd make it by dark."
"What'd you have, a horse?" Charlie asked.
"No, just L.A. without the freeways."
"Yuk."
They drove through Glendale and turned north on Linda Vista to go past the Rose Bowl. Charlie and Manuel talked about bets they'd lost a few weeks before.
"I thought Cal Tech owned JPL," Charlie said.
"They do," Mark told him.
"Sure put it way the hell far from Pasadena."
"Used to test jet engines there," Mark said. "JPL. Jet Propulsion Laboratories, right? Everybody thought they'd blow up, so they made Cal Tech put the labs out in the Arroyo." He waved to indicate the houses outside. "Then they built the most expensive suburb in this end of L.A. just around it."
The guard was expecting them. He waved them into a lot near one of the large buildings. JPL nestled into its arroyo and filled it with office buildings. A big central steel and glass tower looked strangely out of place among the older Air-Force standard "temporary" structures erected twenty years before.
There was a PR flack waiting for them. She led them through the routine: Sign in, wear badges. Inside, it looked like any other office building, but not quite: There were stacks of IBM cards in the corridors, and almost no one wore coats or ties. They passed a ten-foot color globe of Mars gathering dust in a corner. No one paid any attention to Harvey and his people; it wasn't unusual to see TV crews. JPL had built the Pioneer and Mariner space probes, had set Viking down on Mars.
"Here we are," the PR flack said.
The office looked good. Books on the wall. Incomprehensible equations on the blackboards. Books on every flat surface in view, IBM print-outs all over the expensive teak desk.
"Dr. Sharps, Harvey Randall," the flack said. She hovered near the door.
Charles Sharps wore glasses that curved around to cover his whole field of view; very modernistic, vaguely insectile against his long pale face. His hair was black and straight, worn short. His fingers played with a felt-tip pen, or fished into his pockets, always moving. He looked to be about thirty, but might have been older, and he wore a sport jacket and tie.
"Now let's get this straight,"