"He didn't say any such thing," Perry said. Suzanne was aware that her ears had grown points. Perry gave Lester an affectionate slug in the shoulder. "Lester's only kidding. What we need is a couple of dogsbodies and some bigger printers and we'll be able to turn out more modest devices by the hundred or possibly the thousand. We can tweak the designs really easily because nothing is coming off a mold, so there's no setup charge, so we can do limited runs of a hundred, redesign, do another hundred. We can make 'em to order. " "And we need an MBA," Lester said. "Kodacell's sending us a business manager to help us turn junk into pesos." "Yeah," Perry said, with a worried flick of his eyes. "Yeah, a business manager." "So, I've known some business geeks who aren't total assholes," Lester said. "Who care about what they're doing and the people they're doing it with. Respectful and mindful. It's like lawyers -- they're not all scumbags. Some of them are totally awesome and save your ass." Suzanne took all this in, jotting notes on an old-fashioned spiral-bound shirt-pocket notebook. "When's he arriving?" "Next week," Lester said. "We've cleared him a space to work and everything. He's someone that Kettlewell's people recruited up in Ithaca and he's going to move here to work with us, sight unseen. Crazy, huh?" "Crazy," Suzanne agreed. "Right," Perry said. "That's next week, and this aft we've got some work to do, but now I'm ready for lunch. You guys ready for lunch?" Something about food and really fat guys, it seemed like an awkward question to Suzanne, like asking someone who'd been horribly disfigured by burns if he wanted to toast a marshmallow. But Lester didn't react to the question -- of course not, he had to eat, everyone had to eat. "Yeah, let's do the IHOP." Lester trundled back to his half of the workspace, then came back with a cane in one hand. "There's like three places to eat within walking distance of here if you don't count the mobile Mexican burrito wagon, which I don't, since it's a rolling advertisement for dysentery. The IHOP is the least objectionable of those." "We could drive somewhere," Suzanne said. It was coming up on noon and the heat once they got outside into the mall's ruins was like the steam off a dishwasher. She plucked at her blouse a couple of times. "It's the only chance to exercise we get," Perry said. "It's pretty much impossible to live or work within walking distance of anything down here. You end up living in your car." And so they hiked along the side of the road. The sidewalk was a curious mix of old and new, the concrete unworn but still overgrown by tall sawgrass thriving in the Florida heat. It brushed up against her ankles, hard and sharp, unlike the grass back home.