Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 ï>¿So, drowning men (and woman) as we were, we grabbed at Simon's offer and
damn the implications  -" like the 10% of equity.  Maggie  -" who'd done
her time with the nuns and the confessional  -" even cheerfully referred to
Salvation, at one point, but Tim and I nonetheless did our best to
co-operate with the Man's plan, contact this bloody Ruth person, make
ourselves available for tarting up so that we could be sold to the
investment world.  It was not easy.  Turned out that the Lady Ruth may have
been the apple of her father's eye but she was just another boss to her
employees, none of whom seemed to grasp the Saving The Planet importance of
what we were trying to do.  Instead, we got a whole load of contradictory
demands as to what they might require from us  -" a 'visually effective
workplace' was the one that threw me  -" before they would contemplate even
pencilling in dates to do anything vaguely resembling work.  And, no, we
didn't get Simon involved, play the father card.  We were, I realise now,
amateurs  -" worse, we were trying to be fair ...  Eventually, of course,
we did get stuff together.  Actually, Tim sweet talked the University we'd
been using for our hydrodynamic testing into using their facilities for
promotional purposes, Mag pretty much redecorated the office/work space and
I even rewrote some of our simulation software so that it would  -" sorry,
but I really, really, did this  -" produce Hollywood style Big Numbers on
screen, complete with multi-coloured progress bars and all that shit.  And
eventually we had a video crew on site, another working simultaneously
"elsewhere".  I did eventually wonder aloud, one day, watching these guys
do their stuff, when or whether we'd ever get to meet the mysterious Ruth.
A passing clipboard carrier disabused me.  "On a job this size?  Nah ... 
no chance.  Anyway, guv, Queen Bee's away in Strasbourg  -" some big EU
gig...  " + ++ +++ ++++ +++++ ++++ +++ ++ + In fact we only met Ruth for
the first time when we finally saw the video  -" well, it was more a
multimedia thing, really, much background information buried in hyperlinks
and stuff  -" at a presentation they organised at our offices.  Simon
didn't grace us with his presence but, whatever we might have thought of
the idea, he did invite our existing investors.  So it was just as well
that the thing turned out to be good.  Very good, in fact.  I mean, from my
point of view there was hardly a lot of new information, so I had time to
be amused by the 'human interest' side of things being more or less
entirely taken up by lingering shots of Maggie  -" on a beach, by the
testing pool, etc etc  -" while Tim and I were restricted to distant shots
of us looking industrious, and in Tim's case working on a large and complex
CNC machine that I'd never seen before and which was thus presumably also
borrowed from the University.  No matter, I thought  -" male camera crew
but then probably also primarily male investors, so ...  Ruth herself was
charming but professional.  I didn't make anything of the fact that she
was, of course, the stunning  -" sorry.  'drop dead gorgeous'  -" woman I'd
seen Simon hugging on St Pancras station and had assumed to be his trophy
wife.  Rather, I told her that I thought she'd done a good job.  She looked
at me with total disdain, handed me a pile of obviously 'finished product'
DVDs.  "No chance of a final edit, or anything, then?", I said, slightly
nonplussed.  "At this price, no." Well, that was clear enough.  But she
went on.  "However, my father did say you'd be helpful, so I do need to
talk to your engineering bloke ..." + ++ +++ ++++ +++++ ++++ +++ ++ + And
with that, she was gone, leaving Maggie and me with our other guests  -"
our funders to date  -" all of whom were even more enthusiastic than ever
...  and, as ever, no more inclined to cough up the dosh.  Still, we kept
them entertained and happy for a while  -" or, at least, until Ruth's crew
began to pack away their gear ...  which included most of the seats they
were sitting on.  At which point they got the hint and left.  And I got a
bottle of champagne  -" well, Cava, we were on a budget  -" from our
minimal fridge and Mag went off to collect Tim, given that we reckoned it
was now safe to let him back into the office.  Except that, as M reported
back moments later, Tim was still  -" umm  -" locked in discussions with
Ruth.  Or, as Mag put it, positively drooling over the poor woman.  So we
had a glass each and talked, in a desultory fashion, about the day we'd
had, whether the New Product  -" the DVD  -" would actually help produce
the Real Product  -" the generator  -", whether the investors had been all
that impressed and, if so, by what, whether ...  we did all the usual
debrief stuff, basically.  I tried to read her emotions while we were
talking, get a sense of where she was at in all of this  -" whether she
minded her partner ...  well boyfriend, really ...  being so obviously
besmitten by the photogenic Ruth, came close, perhaps, to asking what on
earth she was doing with someone like Tim in the first place ...  But I
didn't.  We worked together well enough as we were, I thought  -" Tim and I
long standing collaborators if never really friends, Maggie and I sort of
nudging up to something like a friendship of our own, and M and T ... 
well, doing their stuff.  So I left well alone, as one does, eventually
took a couple of glasses down to Tim and Ruth  -" they were discussing
universal joints and servo motors as I got to the bottom of the stairs  -"
then retreated back to 'my' space ...  and Maggie.  Who was pulling on her
coat, as I got back, and clearly about to leave.  "Have a good evening",
she said, as she made for the door.  "And chuck a bucket of water over the
love birds, if you happen to leave before they do ..." + ++ +++ ++++ +++++
++++ +++ ++ + Next morning, Tim was in before either of us, working away at
some CAD drawings when I arrived.  A glance at the screen over his shoulder
revealed something that looked very like a hugely complicated boom  -"
presumably for use with a camera or microphone and rather obviously nothing
remotely to do with the turbine project.  Not that it mattered, I thought 
-" there wasn't much to be done on the engineering side for the moment  -"
and took myself up to the office.  Where I found, amongst other things, an
e-mail from Simon, simply telling me to phone him.  So I did.  "Told you
she was good, didn't I?", he said without preamble, then proceeded to give
me a list of the people he was going to distribute the disks to.  Which I
bridled at, a bit  -" I mean, it was our bloody company  -" but his logic
was simple enough.  None of these guys would have heard of us, they all got
a lot of approaches every day ...  and, by implication, they would have
heard of him.  Which seemed fair enough, especially when he proceeded to go
through the list and I realised that I'd never heard of any of them,
either. Only one name  -" or rather, address  -" did cause me a problem ...
some professor in California.  I mean, we still hadn't patented our stuff
in the States, this guy was a prof  -" what if he just nicked the entire
concept?  Simon laughed at the suggestion.  "What, Hal?  Hell, no  -" he's
an economist, for a start, not an engineer or anything, and, trust me, he 
-" and his wife  -" are seriously rich.  And they've been putting a lot of
money into energy generation and storage recently.  You do not want to
exclude him from the list." Which left me feeling that I'd just been pretty
firmly put in my place and also  -" as far as Simon was concerned  -" ended
the conversation.  I was still standing there with the phone in my hand  -"
wondering what I'd just agreed to  -" when Maggie came in.  So I told her
what had just happened, let her know that Tim was in  -" they usually
arrived together  -" and took some time to notice that she was most
definitively not her normal cheerful self.  In fact, she looked pretty
terminally hacked off about something.  And even I, I felt, could make a
reasonable guess as to what that might be.  + ++ +++ ++++ +++++ ++++ +++ ++
+ The morning passed.  We had a few things to deal with, none of them out
of the ordinary, just settling a few bills, chasing a few invoices of our
own, even answering one or two enquiries  -" sadly not from potential
financiers, just contacts from suppliers or sub contractors we'd dealt with
before, looking out for future work, or from others working in the same
sort of field, fishing for information.  Not that anyone was giving
anything away, of course, but it was nice to keep in the loop, especially
since none of us knew quite who's work  -" if anyone's  -" would finally
pay off and who would thus maybe be in the market for recruiting
experienced staff ...  or which of us would be ringing round looking for a
proper job when we finally realised that our particular effort was not
going to be the one to make the breakthrough.  So we kept relationships
friendly, as a rule, had been known to join some of the guys also working
on wave generators for the occasional drink when they were in town,
certainly didn't snarl at them when they phoned and generally take out our
inner conflicts on them.  Except that that's precisely what Mag did, about
half way through the morning  -" took a routine type call from a guy called
Steve we knew  -" he was working in a lab on the south coast, building very
big bendy balloons, routinely pooh poohed our more rigid approach, as he
put it, and had been known to share genuine information  -" given that,
balloon or steel mesh, all our designs had to work in a similar, hostile
environments and ...  And so I wasn't brilliantly happy to hear Maggie tell
him to go fuck himself, or words to that effect.  I mean, I knew the guy
routinely flirted with her, maybe to a degree a little beyond the
conventional limits, but she'd never shown signs of taking offence before.
Then again, I thought, wondering how I was supposed to react to such an
unexpected situation, she never normally slammed the phone down on people
and started to cry, either.  What I did was, immediately, absolutely
nothing.  Which is to say, I didn't make a big scene about events, didn't
rush round to offer her sympathy or a hug or whatever, I just stayed calm,
waited to see what would happen.  What I wanted to avoid was making a
crisis out of a drama, as they say  -" so, Mag was clearly pretty wound up
and I didn't for a moment think that anything Steve might have said was the
direct cause.  I also knew that it would be easy enough to sort any future
difficulties with him  -" he was a fairly easy going bloke, in my
experience  -" whilst getting myself into some sort of argument with
Maggie, volatile as she currently seemed to be  -" well, that could cause
long term problems.  So I did nothing  -" didn't ignore what I'd just seen
but I didn't overtly react to it either.  Thought I'd give Maggie the time
to get herself together, let her tell me about stuff  -" or not  -" in her
own time.  It was the right thing to do, I'm convinced.  And it very
probably would have worked.  Except that Tim chose that moment to stroll
into the office, fail totally to notice that his girlfriend was rather
visibly upset and stroll back out again, pausing only to inform me that he
was going to take some designs over to 'Ruth's place', that he might or
might not be back later in the day.  He'd hardly got out of the door before
Maggie started throwing things around the office.
   ### To be continued ...