"We're really gonna get em this season. Last year we were too overconfident."

Greg Augustine, age 15

The annoying trickle of schedule slippages which had previously been suffered had, it must be reported, grown to avalanche proportions. This was exacerbated by the fact that the most experienced 40 percent of the engineers had been reassigned from the project to work on the audit team which had for several months been seeking to discover why the project was falling behind schedule. Although the supervisors were encouraging everyone to try faster, master schedules were being reissued on a weekly basis and updated hourly. Even the effort to find a more accurate method to estimate schedules was running late. It seemed that the 99-percent-complete point had been reached in no time at all, but the last 1 percent was taking forever. Friends at more experienced firms pointed out that one should always expect that this should be the case "that is," they said, "sort of the meaning of 99-percent complete." That these problems were taken seriously at Daedalus, however, was suggested by the fact that the members of the marketing department were now staying around until two...