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was hoping,
hoping
you would say something to Trick about that because I knew Bishop wasn’t –”
    Gerald shifted abruptly. He hated to do it, but he had to pull on Sandy’s reins a bit. “I think we should probably leave comments about Bishop out of this.”
    Sandy looked horrified. “Of course!” she said. “No, no, that’s not what I – this isn’t about him. At all. It was just, I was so glad when you stopped Trick and made him go back to that slide because he’s –”
    “Trick too,” said Gerald, leaning forward. “I think, Sandy, if you have an idea, that’s what we should be discussing.”
    She was already nodding. “Right,” she said, “you’re right. I’m sorry.” As she looked down at her pad her head vibrated slightly. The small features of her face seemed to cinch. She was, in a moment like this, everything Gerald wanted in a subordinate – someone who cared about her job and wanted to do it well, someone whose aspirations were balanced by propriety,someone who attended to his signals, respected his position, followed his lead. Unfettered ambition was always bad news, in Gerald’s view; it was a wild, bucking thing that could do as much harm as good, and witnessing it made him queasy. But ambition with restraint, that could take a company places. It wasn’t a matter of control; he didn’t want her to think like him, he wanted her to think
with
him.
    “You think there’s a way to improve our market share?” he said. “Let’s hear it.”
    Sandy took a deep breath, took one last look at her pad, then fixed her eyes on Gerald’s. “We aren’t crazy enough.”
    Gerald started nodding, as if this were a reasonable idea.
    “Do you think we’re crazy enough?”
    Gerald stopped nodding. He made a hand gesture to indicate that Sandy should keep going, and quickly get to the part that would make sense.
    “We don’t take any chances, Gerald. We don’t take risks! I was looking back through the files in Trick’s office the other night. We haven’t launched a new product – I mean something really exciting – in like, four years.”
    Gerald glanced down at the spec binders. It was an involuntary motion. “What about Teflon-coated screens?” He shifted in his seat. He wanted to reach for the spec binders, for the comfort they promised, but that was just an urge, and he could handle it. “Just around when I moved into this office we were launching Teflon screens for easier cleaning.”
    “Right,” said Sandy. “Well, that’s what I’m saying. That was four years ago, and there’s been nothing since.” Her thin, creaseless lips turned up into a thin, creaseless smile. “And it’snot like Teflon screens went huge or anything. I mean, who cleans their window screens?”
    To Gerald, the dearth of new product initiatives after the failure of the Teflon screens had always seemed a tidy cause-and-effect package that required no explanation or apology. “So I take it,” he said, “you’ve got some new craziness in mind?”
    “I do.” Sandy smiled, almost seductively. It was a look, Gerald calculated, of ravishing confidence, fed by aspirations powerful enough to cause her, an assistant sales and marketing director ten months out of university, to stay late one night, or perhaps many nights, in order to examine old files in her boss’s office. “I think it could change everything.”
    Gerald was just about to pick up a spec binder, was actually touching the plastic-cool spine of one of them with an index finger, when his office door opened and Bishop appeared in the doorway. The older man had his hands sunk into his trouser pockets. He looked rather dolefully over at Gerald and Sandy sitting at the small table in the algae-dyed light of the tinted window, then sighed and seemed about to turn away.
    “Bishop?” called Gerald. “Did you need something?”
    His boss stood there for another moment and drew a flattening hand down the length of his blue and silver tie. He