The Fool's Run

point. He could say to the plane, ‘Take it. Run it to x number of gees, and it’s okay if I go out for a while, because you can handle it.’ And the plane would stay short of lethal maneuvers.
    “You see the advantage that gave us? No matter how fast their Hellwolf turned, we could turn inside it in critical situations. We could run with it, climb with it, and outwait it on target. We could do maneuvers Hellwolf couldn’t even consider. Maneuvers never seen before. We could attack and keep attacking when the pilots themselves were completely out of it.”
    “What happened?”
    Anshiser had become more and more animated as he recited the qualities of the Sunfire, but suddenly he was still, almost frozen. The hush lasted for five heartbeats before he moved again, to lean forward on his desk.
    “Those sonsofbitches at Whitemark stole String from us.” He slammed a big fist on the desk, his face tense and pale. “Stole it. Paid some sonofabitch to copy plans and carry them out of our corporate headquarters. They built their own String. The specs for their early system designs even had our mistakes, because they didn’t know enough to identify them.”
    “You didn’t have any legal protection?”
    “It’s not the sort of thing you get a patent on,” Anshiser snorted. “If we went to court, we might prove something fifty years from now. But after they figured out the system, they started altering it. Every time they found an alternate way to do something, they took it. If you went out right now and looked at the plans for our system, and their system, you’d probably feel the resemblance. But you’d have a hard time proving that their system is a copy.”
    He suddenly switched direction.
    “How old do you think I am?”
    I figured seventy or seventy-five, but gave him five years out of courtesy. “I don’t know. Sixtyfive? Seventy?”
    “Thank you.” He grinned. “I’m eighty-three. I don’t have much time left. I’ve been feeling . . . hollow. I can’t explain it, but it’s worse than being sick. Not that I’ve been sick that much. The doctors say it’s stress, and Dillon and Maggie say it’s this Sunfire thing.
    “My wife is gone, my kids are okay but nothing special. They’ll each inherit a couple of million or so when I die, and turn into the fossilized dipshits you see standing around country clubs. I can see it in my grandchildren. They’re okay— most of them—but I’m not very interested in them.
    “So I’m eighty-three, and the company is all I’m leaving behind. Now I might not leave that. In this business, development costs are so high that if you don’t win the contract, if you don’t get to build the plane, the whole company can go down.
    “Right now, we employ thirteen thousand workers in our aviation division. If Sunfire wins the competition, we’ll hire ten thousand more. If we lose, and all we have left is the corporate jet division, we’ll be down to five thousand by the end of the decade. The corporate jet field is saturated, competition is getting worse, and we have nowhere else to go. There are eight thousand people, more or less, who could lose their jobs because of a rotten little thief. I’m not going to stand for it. Not if I can do anything about it.”
    “Do you know who the thief is?”
    He glanced at Dillon. Dillon stared back impassively, and when Anshiser turned to me again, I got the feeling he was about to tell a lie. “No. We have some ideas. But right now, we don’t know.”
    “Okay. So where do I come in? What do you want me to do?”
    “A couple of things. Everything we do, from design to production to cost estimating, we do on computers. It’s all so complicated, there is no other way. If somebody smart got into our computer system, I don’t know how, but did it, he could hurt us. Badly.”
    “And you think it’s the same with Whitemark.”
    “I know it is. There simply isn’t any other way to do the work. Whitemark has about three months to integrate the String system with their Hellwolf avionics. Then they have to demonstrate to the Navy and Air Force that it will work. As it is, they might not make the deadline. They’ve got a crash program going, but they started late. I want you to slow them down. I want you to get into their computer system and screw it up. Be subtle, be obvious, I don’t care. But I want you to push them to the wall—I want you to jam them up so they can’t move. If they can’t demonstrate their