Interface (6 page)

"That's a depressing image."

"It's a depressing country. It's not like that in other countries
where people save more money. But it's like that here, now,
because we don't have values that encourage savings."

"Okay."

"Consequently you are starved for capital."

"Right!"

"You had to get capital from venture capitalists - or vulture
capitalists, as we call them - who are like the vultures that feed on
the jackals when they become too starved and weak to defend
themselves."

"Well, I don't think my investor would agree."

"They probably would," Ogle said, "they just wouldn't do so in
your presence."

"Okay."

"Venture capitalism is risky and so the vulture capitalists hedge
their bets by pooling funds and investing in a number of start-ups at once - backing several horses, as it were."

"Of course."

"But what they don't tell you is that at a certain point a couple
of years into its life cycle, the start-up suddenly needs to double or triple its capitalization in order to survive. To get over those cash
flow problems that occur when orders suddenly go from zero to
more than zero. And when that happens, the vulture capitalists look
at all of their little companies and they cull out the weakest two-thirds and let them starve. The rest, they provide with the capital
they need in order to continue."

Aaron said nothing. Suddenly he was feeling tired and depressed.

"That's what's happening to your company right now," Ogle
said. "You're, what, three years old?"

"How'd you know that!?" Aaron said, twisting around in his
seat, glaring at Ogle, who remained quiescent in his big fat chair.
He was almost expecting to see a crew from
Candid Camera
filming
him from the galley.

"Just a lucky guess. Your logo," Ogle said, "you designed your
logo yourself."

Again Aaron's face reddened. He had, in fact, designed it himself.
But he thought it was fairly professional, a lot more so than the typical home-brewed logo. "Yeah, so what?" he said. "It works.
And it was free."

"Okay, this is ridiculous," Aaron said. "How did you know
that?"

"If you were old enough to have made the cut - if you had
passed through the capitalization barrier - you would have
immediately gone out and hired professional designers to spiff up
your corporate image. The vultures would have insisted on it."

"Yeah, that was going to be our next step," Aaron said.

"That's okay. That speaks well of you, as a scientist, if not as a
businessman," Ogle said. "A lot of people start with image and then
try to develop substance. But you are a techie and you hate all that
superficial crap. You refuse to compromise."

"Well, thank you for that vote of confidence," Aaron said, not
entirely sarcastically.

The flight attendant came through. They each ordered another
drink.

"You seem to have this all figured out," Aaron said.

"Oh, no, not at all."

"I don't mean that to sound resentful," Aaron said. "I was just
wondering-"

"Yes?" Ogle said, raising his eyebrows very high and looking at
Aaron over his glasses, which he had slid down his nose.

"What do you think? You think I have a chance?"

"In L.A.?"

"Yeah."

"With the big media moguls?"

"Yeah."

"No. You don't have a chance."

Aaron heaved a big sigh, closed his eyes, took a gulp of his drink.
He had just met Ogle but he instinctively knew that everything that
Ogle had said, all night long, was absolutely true.

"Which doesn't mean that your company doesn't have a
chance."

"It doesn't?"

"Course not. You got a good product there. It's just that you
don't know how to market it."

"You think I should have gone out and gotten a flashy logo."

"Oh, no, I'm not saying that at all. I think your logo's fine. It's just that you have a misconception in your marketing strategy."

"How so?"

"You're aiming at the wrong people," Ogle said, very simply
and plainly, as if he were getting annoyed at Aaron for not figuring
this all out on his own.

"Who else can I aim at with a product of this type?"

Ogle squeezed his armrest again, leaned forward, allowed his seat
to come upright. He put his drink on his tray table and sat up
straight, as if getting down to work. "You're right in thinking that
the media need to do people-metering kinds of stuff," he said.
"The problem is that the kinds of people who run media companies
are not going to buy your product."

"Why not? It's the best thing like it. It's years ahead."

Ogle cut him off with a dismissive wave of the hand. "Doesn't
matter," he said flatly, and shook his head. "Doesn't matter."

"It doesn't matter how good my product is?"

"Not at all. Not with those people. Because you are selling to
media people. And media people are either thugs, morons, or
weasels. You haven't dealt very much with media people, have
you?"

"Very little."

"I can tell. Because you don't have that kind of annoying,
superficial quality that people get when they deal for a living with
thugs, morons, and weasels. You are very earnest and sincere and
committed to certain principles, as a scientist, and thugs and
morons and weasels do not understand that. And when you give
them an explanation of how brilliant your machine is, you'll just be
putting them off."

"I have spent a hell of a lot of time finding ways to explain this
device in terms that almost anyone can understand," Aaron said.

"Doesn't mater. Won't help. Because in the end, no matter how
you explain it, it comes down to fine, subtle technicalities. Media
people don't like that. They like the big, fabulous concept." Ogle
pronounced "fabulous" with a mock-Hollywood gush.

Aaron laughed rather hotly. He had seen enough media people
to know this was true.

"If you come to a media person and you want to do a miniseries
about the Civil War, or Shakespeare, or the life of J.S. Bach, they
will laugh in your face. Because nobody wants to watch that stuff.
You know, intelligent stuff. They want pro wrestling. Media
people who try to do Shakespeare get fired or go broke. The only
ones who survived long enough to talk to you are the ones who
backed pro wrestling. And when you come up to them talking
about the fine points of your brilliant technology, it makes them think of Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci, which they hate and
fear."

"So I'm dead."

"If you rely on selling to media people, you're dead."

"But who else needs a device like this one except for media
people?"

"Well," Ogle said softly, sounding almost surprised, as if he hadn't gotten around to considering this question. "Well, actually,
I could use it. Maybe."

"You said you were in media," Aaron said.

Ogle held one finger up. "Not exactly. I said I worked in the media industry. But I am not a media person, per se."

"What are you?"

"A scientist."

"And what is your field of study?"

"You, Aaron, are a biophysicist. You study the laws that
determine the functioning of the body. Well, I am a political biophysicist. I study the laws that govern the functioning of the body politic."

"Oh. Could you be a little more specific?"

"People call me a pollster," Ogle said. "Which is like calling you
a palm reader."

4

Eleanor Boxwood Richmond heard the State of the Union
address on the radio, but she didn't really listen to it. She was
driving a borrowed car down abandoned streets in Eldorado
Highlands, an aborted suburb ten miles north of Denver. She had
borrowed the car from Doreen, who lived in the trailer next to
hers, several miles to the east, in the town of Commerce City.

In case the police tried to phone with any news of her husband,
Eleanor had dropped her football phone out her kitchen window,
pulled it across the gap between her trailer and Doreen's, and fed it
through the window of Doreen's bedroom. Eleanor's husband, Harmon, for whom she was searching, had obtained the football
phone free of charge by subscribing to
Sports Illustrated
some years ago. Now the
Sports Illustrated
were still showing up on time, every
week, while Harmon himself, depressed by unemployment and bankruptcy, had become more and more erratic. Some things you could at least count on.

Eleanor felt foolish and humiliated every time she spoke on the
football phone. It did not make looking for a job in the banking
industry any easier. She would sit there in her trailer, which would
be baking hot or freezing cold according to the outside tem
perature. She kept the windows closed even in summer so that the
screaming of Doreen's kids, and the heavy metal from the trailer on
the other side, would not be audible to the person she was speaking
to. She would telephone people wearing dark suits in air-
conditioned buildings and she would hold the little plastic football
to the side of her head and try to sound like a banker. So far she had
not gotten any jobs.

Back in the old days, when the whole family had lived together,
happily, in their big house in this suburban development in
Eldorado Highlands, they had had a phone in every room. In
addition to the football phone they had had a sneaker phone; a
cheap little Radio Shack phone that would always go off the hook
unless you set it down firmly on a hard surface; and a couple of solid, traditional AT&T telephones. All of these phones had
disappeared during the second burglary of their trailer and so they
had been forced to get the football phone out of storage and use
that instead.

Eleanor Richmond had not seen her husband, Harmon, in two
days. For the first day, this had been more of a relief than anything else, because usually when she did see him, he was half-reclined on
their broken-backed sofa in front of the TV set, drinking. From
time to time he would go out and get a Mcjob, work at it for a few
days, quit or get fired, and then come back home. Harmon never
lasted very long at Mcjobs because he was an engineer, and flipping
burgers or jerking Slurpees grated on his nerves, just as talking on
the football phone grated on Eleanor's.

The neighborhood that Eleanor was driving through had been
built on a perfectly flat high plains ranch in the early eighties. All of
the houses were empty, and three-quarters of them always had
been; as you drove down the curvy streets, you could look across
yards that were reverting to short-grass prairie, in through the front
windows of the houses, all the way through their empty interiors,
out the back windows, across a couple of more yards, and through another similar house on another similar street.

Eleanor and Harmon Richmond had purchased their house
brand new, before the carpet was even installed. It was early in the
Reagan administration. Harmon worked for a medium-sized aerospace firm that sold avionics to the Defense Department.
Eleanor had just finished raising their two children to school age
and had reentered the workforce. She had started out as a teller for
a bank in Aurora and been promoted to customer service
representative in fairly short order. Soon she would be branch
manager. Eleanor's mother, a widow, had sold the ancestral town
house in Washington, D.C.,
 
and moved out to a fairly nice
retirement community a short distance away.

They were doing pretty well for themselves. So, when the
houses around them remained empty, for a month, then six
months, then a year, and the value of their house began to fall, they
didn't get too worried about it. Everyone makes a bum investment
now and then. They were well compensated, the mortgage pay
ments weren't that bad, and they could easily cover their expenses,
including the monthly payment to Mother's retirement
community.