Authors: Michael Crichton
Sometimes e-mail was protected with a flag that prevented it from being deleted.
He typed: UNPROTECT MAIL.
THE MAIL IS UNPROTECTED.
He typed: DELETE MAIL.
SORRY, YOU CANNOT DELETE THIS MAIL.
What the hel is this? he thought. The system must be hanging up. Maybe it had been stymied by the Internet address. He decided to delete the message from the system at the control level. He typed: SYSTEM.
WHAT LEVEL?
He typed: SYSOP
SORRY, YOUR PRIVILEGES DO NOT INCLUDE SYSOP CONTROL.
“Christ,” he said. They'd gone in and taken away his privileges. He couldn't believe it.
He typed: SHOW PRIVILEGES.
SANDERS, THOMAS L.
PRIOR USER LEVEL: 5 (SYSOP)
USER LEVEL CHANGE: TUE JUNE 16 4:50 PM PST
CURRENT USER LEVEL: 0 (ENTRY)
NO FURTHER MODIFICATIONS
There it was: they had locked him out of the system. User level zero was the level that assistants in the company were given.
Sanders slumped back in the chair. He felt as if he had been fired. For the first time, he began to realize what this was going to be like.
Clearly, there was no time to waste. He opened his desk drawer, and saw at once that the pens and pencils were neatly arranged. Someone had already been there. He pul ed open the file drawer below. Only a half-dozen files were there; the others were al missing.
They had already gone through his desk.
Quickly, he got up and went out to the big filing cabinets behind Cindy's desk.
These cabinets were locked, but he knew Cindy kept the key in her desk. He found the key, and unlocked the current year's files.
The cabinet was empty. There were no files there at al . They had taken everything.
He opened the cabinet for the previous year: empty.
The year before: empty.
Al the others: empty.
Jesus, he thought. No wonder Cindy had been so cool. They must have had a gang of workmen up there with trol eys, cleaning everything out during the afternoon.
Sanders locked the cabinets again, replaced the key in Cindy's desk, and headed downstairs.
The press office was on the third floor. It was deserted now except for a single assistant, who was closing up. “Oh. Mr. Sanders. I was just getting ready to leave.”
“You don't have to stay. I just wanted to check some things. Where═ do you keep the back issues of ComLine?”
“They're al on that shelf over there.” She pointed to a row of stacked issues.
“Was there anything in particular?”
“No. You go ahead home.”
The assistant seemed reluctant, but she picked up her purse and headed out the door. Sanders went to the shelf. The issues were arranged in six-month stacks.
Just to be safe, he started ten stacks back-five years ago.
He began flipping through the pages, scanning the endless details of game scores and press releases on production figures. After a few minutes, he found it hard to pay attention. And of course he didn't know what he was looking for, although he assumed it was something about Meredith Johnson.
He went through two stacks before he found the first article.
NEW MARKETING ASSISTANT NAMED
Cupertino, May 10: DigiCom President Bob Garvin today announced the appointment of Meredith Johnson as Assistant Director of Marketing and
Promotion for Telecommunications. She wil report to Howard Gottfried in M and P. Ms. Johnson, 30, came to us from her position as Vice President for Marketing at Conrad Computer Systems of Sunnyvale. Before that, she was a senior administrative assistant at the Novel Network Division in Mountain View. Ms. Johnson, who has degrees from Vassar Col ege and Stanford Business School, was recently married to Gary Henley, a marketing executive at CoStar. Congratulations!
As a new arrival to DigiCom, Ms. Johnson . . .
He skipped the rest of the article; it was al PR fluff. The accompanying photo was standard B-school graduate: against a gray background with light coming from behind one shoulder, it showed a young woman with shoulderlength hair in a pageboy style, a direct businesslike stare just shy of harsh, and a firm mouth.
But she looked considerably younger than she did now.
Sanders continued to thumb through the issues. He glanced at his watch. It was almost seven, and he wanted to cal Bosak. He came to the end of the year, and the pages were nothing but Christmas stuff A picture of Garvin and his family (“Merry Christmas from the Boss! Ho Ho Ho!”) caught his attention because it showed Bob with his former wife, along with his three col ege-age kids, standing around a big tree.
Had Garvin been going out with Emily yet? Nobody ever knew. Garvin was cagey. You never knew what he was up to.
Sanders went to the next stack, for the fol owing year. January sales predictions.
(“Let's get out and make it happen!”) Opening of the Austin plant to manufacture cel ular phones; a photo of Garvin in harsh sunlight, cutting the ribbon. A profile of Mary Anne Hunter that began, “Spunky, athletic Mary Anne Hunter knows what she wants out of life . . .” They had cal ed her “Spunky” for weeks afterward, until she begged them to give it up.
Sanders flipped pages. Contract with the Irish government to break ground in Cork. Second-quarter sales figures. Basketbal team scores against Aldus. Then a black box:
JENNIFER GARVIN
Jennifer Garvin, a third-year student at Boalt Hal School of Law in Berkeley, died on March 5 in an automobile accident in San Francisco. She was twenty-four years old. Jennifer had been accepted to the firm of Harley, Wayne and Myers fol owing her graduation. A memorial service was held at the Presbyterian Church of Palo Alto for friends of the family and her many classmates. Those wishing to make memorial donations should send contributions to Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. Al of us at Digital Communications extend our deepest sympathy to the Garvin family.
Sanders remembered that time as difficult for everyone. Garvin was snappish and withdrawn, drinking too much, and frequently absent from work. Not long afterward, his marital difficulties became public; within two years, he was divorced, and soon after that he married Emily Chen, a young executive in her twenties. But there were other changes, too. Everyone agreed: Garvin was no longer the same boss after the death of his daughter.
Garvin had always been a scrapper, but now he became protective, less ruthless. Some said that Garvin was stopping to smel the roses, but that wasn't it at al . He was newly aware of the arbitrariness of life, and it led him to control things, in a way that hadn't been true before. Garvin had always been Mr.
Evolution: put it on the shore and see if it eats or dies. It made him a heartless administrator but a remarkably fair boss. If you did a good job, you were recognized. If you couldn't cut it, you were gone. Everybody understood the rules. But after Jennifer died, al that changed. Now he had overt favorites among staff and programs, and he nurtured those favorites and neglected others, despite the evidence in front of his face. More and more, he made business decisions arbitrarily. Garvin wanted events to turn out the way he intended them to. It gave him a new kind of fervor, a new sense of what the company should be.
But it was also a more difficult place to work. A more political place.
It was a trend that Sanders had ignored. He continued to act as if he stil worked at the old DigiCom-the company where al that mattered were results. But clearly, that company was gone.
Sanders continued thumbing through the magazines. Articles about early negotiations for a plant in Malaysia. A photo of Phil Blackburn in Ireland, signing an agreement with the city of Cork. New production figures for the Austin plant.
Start of production of the A22 cel ular model. Births and deaths and promotions.
More DigiCom basebal scores.
JOHNSON TO TAKE OPERATIONS POST
Cupertino, October 20: Meredith Johnson has been named new Assistant Manager for Division Operations in Cupertino, replacing the very popular Harry Warner, who retired after fifteen years of service. The shift to Ops Manager takes Johnson out of marketing, where she has been very effective for the last year, since joining the company. In her new position, she wil work closely with Bob Garvin on international operations for DigiCom.
But it was the accompanying picture that caught Sanders's attention. Once again, it was a formal head shot, but Johnson now looked completely different. Her hair was light blond. Gone was the neat businessschool pageboy. She wore her hair short, in a curly, informal style. She was wearing much less makeup and smiling cheerful y. Overal , the effect was to make her appear much more youthful, open, innocent.
Sanders frowned. Quickly, he flipped back through the issues he had already looked at. Then he went back to the previous stack, with its year-end Christmas pictures: “Merry Christmas from the Boss! Ho Ho Ho!”
He looked at the family portrait. Garvin standing behind his three children, two sons and a daughter. That must be Jennifer. His wife, Harriet, stood to one side.
In the picture, Garvin was smiling, his hand resting lightly on his daughter's shoulder, and she was tal and athleticlooking, with short, light blond, curly hair.
“I'l be damned,” he said aloud.
He thumbed back quickly to the first article, to look at the original picture of Johnson. He compared it to the later one. There was no doubt about what she had done. He read the rest of the first article:
As a new arrival to DigiCom, Ms. Johnson brings her considerable business acumen, her sparkling humor, and her sizzling softbal pitch. She's a major addition to the DigiCom team! Welcome, Meredith!
Her admiring friends are never surprised to learn that Meredith was once a finalist in the Miss Teen Connecticut contest. In her student days at Vassar, Meredith was a valued member of both the tennis team and the debating society.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she took her major in psychology, with a minor in abnormal psych. Hope you ═won't be needing that around here, Meredith! At Stanford, she obtained her MBA with honors, graduating near the top of her class.
Meredith told us, “I am delighted to join DigiCom and I look forward to an exciting career with this forward-looking company.” We couldn't have said it better, Ms.
Johnson!
“No shit,” Sanders said. He had known almost none of this. From the start, Meredith had been based in Cupertino; Sanders never saw her. The one time he had run into her was soon after her arrival, before she changed her hair. Her hair and what else?
He looked careful y at the two pictures. Something else was subtly different. Had she had plastic surgery? It was impossible to know. But her appearance was definitely changed between the two portraits.
He moved through the remaining issues of the magazine quickly now, convinced that he had learned what there was to know. Now he skimmed only the headlines:
GARVIN SENDS JOHNSON TO TEXAS
FOR AUSTIN PLANT OVERSIGHT
JOHNSON WILL HEAD NEW
OPERATIONS REVIEW UNIT
JOHNSON NAMED OPERATIONS VEEP
TO WORK DIRECTLY UNDER GARVIN
JOHNSON: TRIUMPH IN MALAYSIA
LABOR CONFLICT NOW RESOLVED
MEREDITH JOHNSON OUR RISING STAR
A SUPERB MANAGER; HER SKILL IN
TECHNICAL AREAS VERY STRONG
This final headline ran above a lengthy profile of Johnson, wel placed on the second page of the magazine. It had appeared in ComLine only two issues ago.
Seeing it now, Sanders realized that the article was intended for internal consumption-softening up the beachhead before the June landing. This article was a trial bal oon that Cupertino had floated, to see if Meredith would be acceptable to run the technical divisions in Seattle. The only trouble was, Sanders never saw it. And nobody had ever mentioned it to him.
The article stressed the technical savvy that Johnson had acquired during her years with the company. She was quoted as saying, “I began my career working in technical areas, back with Novel . The technical fields have always been my first love; I'd love to go back to it. After al , strong technical innovation lies at the heart of a forward-looking company like DigiCom. Any good manager here must be able to run the technical divisions.”
There it was.
He looked at the date: May 2. Published six weeks ago. Which meant that the article had been written at least two weeks before that.
As Mark Lewyn had suspected, Meredith Johnson knew she was going to be the head of the Advanced Products Division at least two months ago. Which meant, in turn, that Sanders had never been under consideration to become division head. He had never had a chance.
It was a done deal.
Months ago.
Sanders swore, took the articles over to the xerox machine and copied them, then put the stacks back on the shelf, and left the press office.
He got on the elevator. Mark Lewyn was there. Sanders said, “Hi, Mark.” Lewyn didn't answer. Sanders pushed the button for the ground floor.
The doors closed.
“I just hope you know what the fuck you're doing,” Lewyn said angrily.
“I think I do.”
“Because you could fuck this thing up for everybody. You know that?”
“Fuck what up?”
“Just because you got your ass in the sling, it's not our problem.”
“Nobody said it was.”
“I don't know what's the matter with you,” Lewyn said. “You're late for work, you don't cal me when you say you wil ... What is it, trouble at home? More shit with Susan?”
“This has nothing to do with Susan.”
“Yeah? I think it does. You've been late two days running and even when you're here, you walk around like you're dreaming. You're in fucking dreamland, Tom. I mean, what the hel were you doing, going to Meredith's office at night, anyway?”
“She asked me to come to her office. She's the boss. You're saying I shouldn't have gone?”
Lewyn shook his head in disgust. “This innocent act is a lot of crap. Don't you take any responsibility for anything?”
“What-”
“Look, Tom, everybody in the company knows that Meredith is a shark. Meredith Manmuncher, they cal her. The Great White. Everybody knows she's protected by Garvin, that she can do what she wants. And what she wants is to play grabass with cute guys who show up in her office at the end of the day. She has a couple of glasses of wine, she gets a little flushed, and she wants service. A delivery boy, a trainee, a young account guy. Whatever. And nobody can say a word because Garvin thinks she walks on water. So, how come everybody else in the company knows it but you?”