set out with glasses and napkins, laptops brought in and set down at the places where their owners would sit. But out in the sunshine, half a mile away, a man on a black bike was pedaling slowly down a nearby path, thinking hard.
His phone rang, its ringtone singing a music-box version of “Hail to the Chief.” Dev sighed, braked, and hopped off the bike, walking it off the path onto the grass under a nearby tree and then letting it lean against him while he fished the phone out of his pocket. From about fifty feet farther back along the path, Dev heard the sound of badly smothered laughter. He glanced that way and saw a couple of his employees, one male and one female, watching him as they approached. The lady was talking to someone on her own cell phone, while the guy was texting someone at high speed. The phone-talker grinned at him as they got closer; the texter looked up and smiled too.
Dev rolled his eyes at them and tried to scowl, but he wasn’t really in a scowling mood at the moment and besides, they knew the joke. As he flipped his phone open, Phone Girl and Text Guy passed by. Phone Girl waved, Text Guy saluted snappily. Dev nodded, waved back, turned away. “Hi, Dad . . .”
“Morning, Son,” said Joseph Logan’s gravelly voice. “What the devil’s that noise?”
“Noise?” Dev said. He stared around him, trying to see what his father was talking about.
“That screeching!”
“What screeching? I can’t—” Then, in the tree above him, he located it. “Oh. It’s one of those jaybirds,” Dev said, peering up into the branches but unable to see anything: the birds in question were famously shy. “The beige and gray guys that keep wrecking your feeder.”
“Nonsense. Thing sounds like one of those birds you always hear screaming in nature movies. You should get rid of them, they’re probably dangerous.”
“Those are red-tailed hawks, Dad,” Dev said. “The TV people use that sound effect for every bird except the Bluebird of Happiness. If there were hawks here, we couldn’t get rid of them, they’re protected. Anyway, these are jays, and I can’t do anything about them. It’s their nesting season, and they’re protected too. Was there a reason for this call besides you trying to save me from the local wildlife?”
“I was worried about you,” said Dev’s dad. “Your stock is down.”
Dev rolled his eyes. His father might actually be worried about him, but the reasons would be far more complex than anything merely related to the antics of the stock market. “Jim says we’ll be fine. We’re hoping to hit a thousand by rollout day.”
The two statements were independently true, but Dev was hoping his father would take them as interrelated—that might buy him a few moments’ peace. But this was a futile hope. “Not that I don’t like Jim,” Dev’s dad said, and Dev thought, Bzzt! Five points off for fibbing!—“but he’s still kind of wet behind the ears at the corporate finance game—” Bzzt! Wall Street Journal’s CFO of the Year! “—and I’m a little worried about your exposure when you have all these conglomerates sniffing around your coattails and acquiring your shares on the sly. If you—”
“Dad,” Dev said, “before you get started, I know exactly what you’re thinking about, and it’s well nigh impossible for CapCities to do anything on the sly. They have as much on their plates and as many people staring at them right now as I do. CapCities wants to buy Shanghai Welter but can’t do it because they don’t have enough liquidity because of the jump Shanghai took on the NASDAQ last month. So CapCities has been strutting around the markets acting big for the past couple of weeks while they liquidize some of their other assets to cover their shortfall—” Dev heard his dad drawing breath to interrupt him, but he forcibly overrode his own politeness reflex and kept right on going. “And since our rollout’s coming up and we’re big in the news right now, it serves their purpose to pick up a little of our stock and make some smaller companies think Wow, look at that, I bet they’re thinking about acquiring a controlling stake in Omnitopia! I bet they’ll want some smaller stuff, too, let’s divest ourselves all over them! And Cap’ll pick up some of those little guys like Andorra Electronics and Delta V Broadcasting to cover the divisions they’re going to divest, which they’ve