The transformation was revolutionary in its speed and scope. The bill sponsored by the president's ink wasn't even dry before the initial organizational gathering of the newly created Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, convened in a grand Washington D.C. board room. The agency was the brainchild of Ezra, thought up during a contentious game of politics with a captive Nazi baron, but it had developed a life of its own. It was a new species within the world of Washington, a behemoth of unprecedented authority and literally unlimited funding.
Ezra sat around the long conference table, not as member but in his standard role as the sole "civilian consultant" of the agency. The title was a courtesy fiction. Every individual in the room—the veteran Air Force and Army generals, the serious-looking admirals, the laboratory directors—knew who wielded the true authority. He brought them together. The money they came to disburse, a congressional appropriation unprecedented in peacetime, was the result of the political capital his work created.
First on the agenda was the awarding of the first big research and development contracts. This was a foregone conclusion. The plans developed by Prentice Applied Science and its numerous subsidiary firms were so far ahead of anyone else who might possibly compete, so well reflecting the mission statement of the agency, that there was little competition.
General Groves, who was now the member most directly engaged with the newcomer organization, read from the roster in his usual gruff tones. "A fifty million dollar contract is being let to the Seversky Aeronautics Division to design a 'Project Neptune' heavy-lift launch vehicle. A thirty million dollar contract is being let to the Van Norman Computer Division to develop a 'Strategic Defense Calculator.' A twenty-five million dollar contract is being let to the Prentice Materials Division for the investigation of silicon refinement and the manufacture of heat-resistant alloys."
A river of public revenue, the unlimited support of the United States Treasury, began pouring into Ezra's own kingdom. His cash crisis, the financial strangulation that nearly throttled him, was over. His giant plans weren't just saved; they were accelerated and injected with the muscle and the size that even he hadn't dared to conceive. He had learned to harness the leviathan.
But shortly after that, he discovered that catching a leviathan and keeping it alive were two very different things. Government dollars came with government oversight, a creeping bureaucracy that began to surround his slim, secretive operations.
His mornings, once dedicated to long-range planning and scientific advising, were now devoted to another kind of conflict. He worked with military liaison officers, colonels and commanders who manned his projects and who demanded reports and rationales ad infinitum. His weeks were spent commuting to Washington every Tuesday and Thursday to testify before congressional committee hearings and to justify his project schedule to senators who knew more about pork-barrel politics than about solid-state physics.
His once absolute authority was now open to questioning, to checking, to the grinding machinery of the state. General Groves, who used to be his anxious co-operator, was his most frequent and ubiquitous minder. The General, who was a serious man about his military protocol and his clear chains of command, also resented Ezra's loose, irresponsible authority. He insisted on weekly reports of progress, on the picayune detail of cost claimed, on security studies that could betray Ezra's highly compartmentalized secrets.
"Prentice, I want a full reckoning on the cost overruns on the test of the Neptune engine!" Groves would growl over the phone. "The Senate Armed Services Committee is on my ass!"
Ezra was frustrated. The agency was his sword and his shield when he started the agency but the agency was proving to be his cage.
His most recent and sensational collaboration with the administration also yielded a brand-new and highly publicized kind of enemy. An influential isolationist senator from Ohio, a politician whose home state had lost a highly profitable contract to build a brand-new materials research facility that instead was awarded Ezra's New Jersey plant, launched an unprecedented broadside on the Senate floor.
"A brand-new and dangerous species of cronyism is being born," the senator fumed, his speech being reprinted in papers from sea to shining sea. "Unprecedented, sweetheart deals are being given to a handful of favored corporations, and they all belong to the Rockefeller interests, and they all fall under the impenetrable control of a single individual: Ezra Prentice. Do we need to take seriously the possibility that the defense of the nation is being farmed out to a shadow government?"
It was a nuisance, but a dangerous one. Ezra was forced to cash his chips with Truman, throwing his hard-won political capital on mundane political damage control, on issuing news denials and sowing positive stories among his well-informed news buddies. He was being wrested out of the darkness into the raw, gritty spotlight of public politics.
He also caught himself raging in his session with Baron von Hauser. He walked the floor of the locked unit, a tiger in his own cage.
"I've created a monster," growled Ezra, running his hands through his hair. "A leviathan of committees and subcommittees and red tape. I spend more time fending off politicians than fending off my own researchers. I've cured my financial affliction only to develop an even more recalcitrant political one."
The Baron sat in his armchair and observed the frustration on Ezra's face with a smile of detachment. He waited until Ezra finished and then offered a thin, knowing smile.
"What did you expect then, Mr. Prentice?" he added in detached calm. "You wanted the state treasury. Did you seriously not expect that the state would go with it? This is the perennial trade of the businessman who wades out into the political waters. You traded the lack of things for the lack of liberty. Fair trade."
He paused to allow his words to impact. "Your new task is not an invention. It is an infiltration. You've sought to control the bureaucracy from the outside. That is a foolish mission. The leviathan cannot be controlled; only directed. You must master the art of controlling it from the inside."
The Baron's eyes twinkled with the pleasure of the master teaching the apprentice. "You need to have people of yours in the right places on the subcommittees. You need to be able to employ the state's own Byzantine rules and regulations against the state itself, to tie the state's opponents up in knots while cutting the red tape on the proposals of yours. You need to be a master of the art of the budget rider and the classified appendix. You've been a superb general. Now, be a politician. A bureaucrat. A prophet of the sacred paperwork."
Ezra stopped pacing. He looked at the Baron, the man who'd managed the industrial machine of a tyrannical state and knew its twists and turns from memory. He realized, with a stunning, disorienting definitiveness, that the Baron was right. The nature of his struggle once again took a transformation. His principal battlefield wasn't the lab or the board room. It was the limitless, gloomy anonymous corridors of Washington D.C. He'd accepted the leviathan in order to save his empire, and now to keep it, he'd need to find a way to be its heart.