1992-09-21 Stop-Work

My work, my breakthrough, was buried alive.

[Nè mai a un Principe mancheranno cagioni legittime di colorare l’inosservanza.] A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise. — Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Once the proposal activity wound down, I was returned to my original division. Back in the main building of the old aircraft plant, I could detect changes in the air. I am not speaking metaphorically; the air smelled different. The usual mix of Los Angeles smog, ozone, scorched metal, solvent volatiles, and microwaved lunches was thinner and less sharp. It was also markedly quieter, a fact that became more obvious as I approached my old corner of the warren of cubicles.

My desk was bare, and my chair was upended on my desk. My phone was missing. The reference binders and the all-important Personnel Manual were missing. The file cabinet itself was missing; only the desk and chair remained of the furniture that had been there since my first day. I was confused.

I looked around my group's space and found similarly deserted desks. My manager's office door was propped open, revealing that his office was also cleared out. What was going on?

I tracked down George in the next aisle. He was shuffling and sorting papers into several piles on his desk, but most of them seemed to be going into a waste bin. At least he still had a phone and a computer.

George seemed startled to see me, then recovered quickly. "Robin! Hello! How did you like Seal Beach?"

We chatted a bit about the proposal project, which we had won but which had not yet been cancelled. I was probably coming across as an enthusiastic puppy again. It would have been reasonable, given the circumstances. Little did I know.

After the social niceties, George said, "Got something here for you." He pulled a few clipped-together documents out of his desk drawer and handed them to me. It was my transfer papers, the yellow third copies from the typed triplicate. Somewhere a file held the white top sheet, and another contained the pink second copy. The least legible yellow third copy always went to the person who had to be able to read and act on it, and it was rare that it was entirely legible. Apparently, I was still in the main building, but my new reporting location was in a cubicle bay I did not recognize.

Naturally I asked, "What's going on?"

"NASP got defunded a little while ago, with a hard shutdown and a stop-work order." George looked grim.

"Sorry, but I have no idea what that means. I get the defunded part, but the rest?"

George nodded. "It doesn't happen often. What it means is the customer won't pay for any more work, so the company has to make sure no one can claim any more billable hours. All the work products get locked up, and the workspaces shut down, no ifs, ands, or buts. You saw the other cubicles."

"What about the rest of the team?"

George looked even grimmer, something I would not have thought possible. "Once the order came down, everyone had to find another billing number. Until then, we're all sucking down overhead. If you're on overhead, you're just killing time until Accounting lays you off. Bill transferred to another division in the Midwest, and he's already gone. The union shop crew have scattered to the four winds, most to different plants nearby. I'm still trying to find another job here and not having much luck. I talked to Ed in the TIC about writing a CV. Never had to do that before."

George had been hired in the any-warm-body Apollo buildup. Pushing sixty, and he was having to write his first CV, hoping to find a job outside the company he had worked for his entire adult life.

None of this seemed right to me. "Everything got locked up? I can't even look at my own files?"

George shook his head. "All gone. Stored by the customer somewhere offsite. Good luck even finding out where, your clearance probably isn't high enough. Maybe try again in fifty years when it gets declassified."

My work, my breakthrough, was buried alive. No one would ever know. No one would ever use it. And I was forbidden, by security classification, federal statute, non-disclosure agreement, and employment contract, from putting to use the knowledge in my head. I was stunned.

I hope that I made my apologies. I still feel badly for George. He was in a much worse position than I. I had a viable career ahead of me, with the flexibility of taking any of a number of engineering jobs. I had valid diplomas from excellent schools. He had decades of experience and not a scrap of professional certification. I hope he made out OK.

I found my way to the cubicle coordinates printed on my yellow flimsy. The senior administrative assistant there said, "Hi, I'm Helen. You can use that desk over there. You have a meeting in twenty minutes. Here's the location slip," and turned back to her work.

I sat and thought for the next ten minutes, then went to what would become a seemingly endless series of such meetings. Welcome to the Lunar/Mars Initiative.

LMI was, in hindsight, probably the best thing for me at the time. I had had a series of shocks and could easily have fallen into depression or developed a bad attitude about work. Instead, I was thrown in among people who were doing things I had dreamed about since childhood. These were rocket scientists, working on the big architecture and the little details necessary to get back to the Moon and on to Mars, not someday but in the immediate future. I thought at first it was all paper-pushing and studies, but quickly learned differently.

One of the people I met was Evan, a former nuc, an engineer who had served aboard Navy nuclear submarines. He was an interesting character. The hearsay is that all nucs are a little odd. Among the rocket scientists of LMI, Evan did not stick out that much. It was an odd bunch, any way you measured it.

Evan's area of research was how to process regolith, the lunar soil, into useful materials for building a Moonbase and outfitting a Mars expedition. He had come up with a complex system that used a succession of catalysts and other processes to take in almost anything and turn it into chemically pure compounds and elements that would be useful.

I remember saying to him, "That sounds like interesting theory."

He corrected me instantly with a huge smile and an upraised finger. "Not just theory. I have a working prototype. You should come see it sometime."

It was about the size of a semi-trailer, an amazingly intricate labyrinth of reactor tanks, pipes, condensers, and boilers. One dumped almost any material into the intake vat and, at the other end, gathered up a variety of liquids, suspensions, powders, and precipitates. It was the most mad science thing I had ever seen. It was brilliant.

I asked what the limitations were. "Can it reprocess anything?"

Evan's response was joyfully exuberant: "Almost anything!"

He expanded at length, gesturing widely and naming some of the most intractable or difficult materials to reprocess. "I want to park this at a Superfund site, like Love Canal, and just clean it all up. I think we could be strip-mining landfills in a few years, feeding all the mixed solid waste into my reprocessor to harvest new raw materials. The possibilities are endless!"

Evan was supremely confident. I could see the terrestrial applications and was in awe.

I never heard of Evan's system after I left the company. I have no idea what happened to it or to him. I do acknowledge that his invention inspired my own nanite recyclers, although I took a completely different approach.

Other Lunar/Mars people were of similar caliber. After I had been participating in LMI meetings for a few months, I was invited to a science fiction writers' salon in Altadena, hosted by one of my colleagues. This was a fascinating opportunity, intended to introduce space scientists and working engineers to writers who would pick their brains or run ideas by them. The cross-pollination was invigorating. I was able to meet authors whose work I had been reading for decades. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot, too.

It was around this time that the company CEO announced his ambition to stop bending metal at all, and to rely on licensing our intellectual property to maximize return on investment. The company's stock price went up.

The president of our division, an experienced aerospace engineer who had been promoted from the ranks, accepted a transfer to another division. His replacement was also an in-house promotion—from Accounting. The VP for Accounting was now the president of a world-class engineering organization, overseeing some of the brightest scientists and engineers ever assembled.

There was blood in the halls.

The major work in the division was, with few exceptions, tied to the Space Shuttle Orbiter program. The original Orbiter production program included a full set of spare parts, produced at the end of the run. When Challenger was lost, the spares program was turned into a complete new Orbiter, Endeavor, and another spares program was authorized. That final Shuttle had rolled out, and the spares program was running down.

As each line of spares was completed and delivered to the customer, that production crew was laid off. The plant went from eleven thousand people to less than three thousand in the space of six months.

Some of those laid off did not take it well. It became a commonplace to see a person being escorted to the gate, severance paperwork in hand. Some of them were ranting. Everyone else kept to the edges of the hallways and let the security guards handle it.

Not only the people were let go. The bean-counters were scrapping everything they could, as quickly as they could. I suspect the new leadership had a bonus incentive tied to the division's quarterly profit margin.

I recall the details of one case. We still had the water tank used for the Apollo capsule drop tests. It was the biggest tank in the industry, and every other company paid to use it when they needed to do a drop test. It was a regular moneymaker, in a small way. It was also a guarantee of regular government contracts. We could always bid what we liked on any drop test RFP, because we knew that any other company would have to pay our fee, plus their own overhead. It was a slam-dunk, if you will pardon the pun. We had an upcoming RFP that was going to be worth in excess of a hundred million dollars.

They cut up and sold the tank for scrap metal prices, to improve that quarter's bottom line. No more income from that, ever.

All this time I had been attending meetings, taking notes, drafting summaries, and passing them along to the admin assistant.

One day Helen told me, "You can stop giving me all these notes. I don't have time to type them up and file them, and no one is going to read them anyway."

I thought for a moment. "Should I stop going to the meetings?"

Helen didn't hesitate. "Nope. That's still your job. Keep up appearances."

Apparently, I had been attached to the VP for Engineering's personal staff and had been given busywork. The VP Engineering had heard of my work on the RFP and had plans for me on his personal staff in another company division. I had never been asked. It was assumed that I would accept the transfer to Wisconsin or Iowa or wherever.

I had had enough of being jerked around by factors and people beyond my control. I had been a dutiful worker, following orders and doing my best, and I was being shown about as much courtesy as a gerbil during a family vacation.

I guess the moral of the story was never to forget your Machiavelli. If you depend on crucial resources from some larger organization, they can always choose not to honor their agreement with you. This is just as true for corporations and charitable foundations as it is for nation-states.

For myself, at least my paychecks cleared. I was disappointed, but not damaged.

Discreetly, I consulted a headhunter, located another job in the area, and put in my two weeks' notice.