Hot Shot (10 page)

She knew all that. She knew it without question. But still she couldn't make herself draw away.

He tilted his head, and his mouth settled on hers. His lips were moist and warm, alive with activity. He was so lusty, so young, his skin so fresh and rough. Her hand crept upward until she rested her open palm on his jacket. She felt starved for the touch and taste of him. Her fingers constricted, grasping at the leather, and her lips parted involuntarily.

Their tongues tangled—hers tentative at first, his quicksilver and full of magical promises. She forgot about good manners, about reserve and dignity. She even forgot about being afraid as youth churned in her veins—springtime green and callow. Her blood was young and abundantly fed. She felt its surge. She grew weak beneath the spurt of rich new hormones flowing through her veins. He opened her mouth farther, slipped his hands inside her coat, pushed them under her sweater to touch her skin. He made love to her with his tongue. She moaned and leaned toward him.

It was he who finally pulled away.

"Christ," he muttered.

Appalled, she pressed her wrist over her lips. She had lost control again—just like the first time she and Cal had made love. Just like that long-ago June day when she'd slipped through the safe iron gates of Falcon Hill to chase a bundle of balloons.

"Relax, Suzie." His voice was soothing as he observed her consternation. "Don't get so uptight about everything. Take it easy."

"I can't take it easy. I'm not like you." With shaking fingers she reached into her coat pocket for her car keys. "I can't do this anymore, Sam. I'll—I'll talk to my father and ask him to meet with you. I can't do anything more."

And then, because she was frightened and couldn't think clearly, she did something incredibly stupid. It was a reflex, the involuntary response of someone who has attended too many formal receptions. Before she turned to leave, she extended her hand to him.

He looked down at it and laughed. She started to snatch her hand back, but he caught it, lifted it to his mouth and bit down hard on the ends of her fingers.

She gave a small exclamation of pain.

He sucked where he had bitten, and then kissed the tips of her fingers. "You crack me up," he said huskily. "You really do."

She wanted to bolt, but before she could get away, he caught her arm in a firm grip. "Not yet, honey. I'm not letting you leave yet."

Holding her tightly, he steered her up the steps and into the breezeway that led to the building. "I really have to go," she protested.

"You don't have to do anything you don't want to. And right now, you want to stay with me."

He led her across the lobby to the auditorium doors. Without giving her time to recover, he pulled them open and thrust her into the very epicenter of nerddom—the Homebrew Computer Club.

Her thoughts still weren't coherent, and it took her a few moments to calm her breathing pattern enough so she could adjust to the activity taking place around her. She saw several hundred people gathered in clusters about the auditorium and vaguely noted that they were an odd mixture. As her head cleared, she saw that almost all of them were male

—most of them in their twenties, although some were obviously teenagers. A few wore the shirts and ties of respectable businessmen, but the majority were scruffy—many of them leftovers from the counterculture. She saw unshaven cheeks and long ponytails draping the backs of faded blue work shirts. Groups huddled around electronic equipment set up on card tables placed near the stage and across the back wall of the auditorium.

Directly in front of her, a pimply-faced boy who couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen was engaged in a hot argument with a group of men who were twice his age.

An obese character with polyester pants belted above his protruding stomach passed in front of her. "Who's got an oscilloscope?" he called out. "I need to borrow a 'scope for a couple of days."

"You can borrow mine if you've got a logic probe."

Electronic parts were being passed back and forth. Schematic drawings exchanged hands.

Sam gestured toward an unkempt-looking man with a sharp nose and tangled hair. "That's John Draper. He's Captain Crunch—probably the most famous phone phreak in the world."

"Phone phreak?"

"He discovered that the toy whistles packed in Captain Crunch cereal produced the same 2600 Hertz tone that the telephone company was using to move long distance calls over its lines. He dialed a number, blew the whistle into the mouthpiece, and the call went through free. Then he started mapping telephone access codes, bouncing from one trunk line to another—hitting communications satellites all over the world. He got a kick out of taking the longest possible route to call himself—sending the call through Tokyo, India, South Africa, about four or five other places—all to make a second phone ring on the table right next to him. With the time delay, he could actually talk to himself."

Susannah couldn't help but wonder what he had to say.

"Captain Crunch knows more about building illegal blue boxes to make free telephone calls than anybody here. Just mention his name and the phone company goes nuts."

"I can imagine."

"He's on probation now."

She smiled, although she shouldn't have, because she was on close terms with several members of the Bell System's Board of Directors.

"A lot of these guys really get off on exploring the telephone system."

"Because of its elegant design?" she inquired, feeling as if she was starting to catch on.

"The best. Fantastic."

"Your design's shit," an acne-scarred kid told a man in a wheelchair. "A bucket of noise."

"I worked on that design for six months," the other man protested.

"It's still a bucket of noise," the kid replied.

Sam steered her toward one of the card tables where a group of onlookers was gathered around an untidy-looking man in his early twenties with a beard and thick-lensed glasses.

He was peering intently at a moving pattern on a television screen. "That's Steve Wozniak. He's the only engineer I know who's as good as Yank. He works as a technician for Hewlett-Packard, and he and a buddy of his—a guy named Steve Jobs—are putting together a single-board computer, sort of like the one Yank and I have made. They've named theirs Apple. Pretty weird name, huh?"

Weird wasn't the word for it, she thought as she looked around at the strange assortment of people clamoring for information. Despite the fact that she didn't understand most of the technical references flying around her, she felt their excitement just as Sam had said she would.

"Everything is open here. Everybody shares whatever they know. It's part of the hacker heritage from the early 1960s—free exchange of information." He pointed toward the young kid arguing with three older men. "At Homebrew, people are judged by what they know, not how old they are or how much money they make. A lot different from big corporations like FBT, isn't it?"

A shadow passed across his face, and she knew that even while he urged her to set up an appointment with her father, he was regretting the necessity of dealing with FBT. His prejudice rankled.

"Let me introduce you to Yank."

As he led her toward the front of the auditorium, he called out greetings to various club members. Just like Steve Wozniak at the back of the room, Yank Yankowski was at the center of a group gazing down at a television set hooked up to a circuit board that looked like the one Sam had been carrying around in his case.

"It'll take me a few minutes to get his attention. Sometimes when he gets involved, he's

—" Sam broke off as he stepped in front of her and spotted the design flashing across the television screen. "Holy shit," he said, his voice full of wonder. "Yank's got color! He did it. He actually got color." He immediately forgot about her and pushed through the men clustered around the card table so he could make his way to Joseph "Yank" Yankowski.

Yank was one of the more noticeable figures in the room, Susannah decided. Probably four or five inches over six feet, he stood half a head taller than Sam. He wore thick-lensed glasses with black plastic frames and sported a short dark brown crew cut. Thin almost to the point of emaciation, he had a high sloping forehead, prominent cheekbones, and a long nose. His spare torso ended in a pair of pipe-stem legs. With twenty extra pounds of flesh, a decent haircut, contact lenses, and some clothes that didn't look as if they'd been slept in, he might have been moderately attractive. But as it was, he reminded her of someone Paige would have dismissed as a complete nerd.

Susannah watched as the demonstration continued. Sam had apparently forgotten she was there. He kept throwing questions at Yank and studying the machine on the card table.

She took one of the aisle seats and watched the way his hair curled up on the shoulders of his jacket. Her father wouldn't listen to a word Sam had to say once he caught sight of that hair, not to mention the Easter Island earring. Why had she promised Sam that she would try to set up an appointment?

She didn't want to think about her father, so she concentrated on the lively chaos in the auditorium. The confusion made her remember tours she had taken through the research and development labs at the Castle. Everything was always orderly in the FBT labs. Men with neat hair and necktie knots showing at the top of their white lab coats stood at well-defined work spaces. They spoke to each other respectfully. No one shouted. Certainly no one ever called a coworker's design "a monumental piece of shit."

What she saw in front of her now verged on anarchy. Vehement arguments were still breaking out. People were climbing up on chair arms and calling out the name of a piece of equipment they wanted to borrow. She remembered the plastic ID badges she had seen on those white FBT lab coats, the special pass even her father had to display. She remembered the locked doors, the uniformed security guards, and she thought about what Sam had said concerning the hacker heritage. Here in the environment of the Homebrew Computer Club, no one seemed to have any secrets. Everywhere she looked, she saw a free exchange of information. Apparently, none of them thought about holding back what they knew for personal profit.

Sam appeared in the aisle at her side. "Susannah, come on over and meet Yank. That crazy son of a bitch got color without adding any more chips. At the last meeting, he and Wozniak talked about running it off the CPU, but nobody really believed either one of them could do it."

"Incredible," she said, although she had only the vaguest idea what Sam was talking about.

"It might take me a minute to get his attention." Sam led her forward. "Yank, this is Susannah. The one I was talking about."

Yank didn't look up from his screen.

"Yank?"

"The son of a gun still won't synch up." Yank's eyes remained glued to what he was doing.

Sam looked over at her and shrugged. "He gets pretty involved when he's working."

"I can see that."

Sam tried again. "Yank?"

"Why the heck won't it synch up?"

"Maybe we should save introductions for another time," Susannah suggested.

"Yeah, I guess so."

As they began walking toward the back of the auditorium, she wished she hadn't spoken as if they had a future. There wouldn't be another time. After what had happened between them outside, she couldn't possibly see him again.

"So what do you think?" he asked.

"It's definitely an interesting group."

"It's not the only one, either. There are others all around the country—hundreds of hardware hackers getting together to build small computers." He studied her face for a moment. "Can't you see what's happening here? This is the vanguard of the future. That's why it's so important for me to talk to your father. Did you mean it when you said you'd set up that appointment?"

"I'll try," she said reluctantly, "but he may not agree."

"I'll give you my phone number. Call me when you arrange it."

"
If
I arrange it." She hesitated, knowing he would probably laugh at her, but also knowing her father too well. "There's one thing more…"

"What's that?"

"If I can make the appointment, you'll—you'll be careful how you dress, won't you?"

"Afraid I'll show up like this?"

She hastily denied the truth. "Oh, no. Of course not."

"Well, you're right. I will."

Her forehead creased with alarm. "Oh, no. I'm afraid that would be a terrible mistake. My father's from another generation. He doesn't understand people who don't wear a business suit. Or men who wear earrings. And you'll need to get your hair cut." Even as she spoke the words, she felt a stab of regret. She loved his hair. It seemed a part of him—free and wild.

"I told you, Suzie. I don't go in for any bullshit. This is who I am."

"If you want to do business with my father, you'll have to learn to compromise."

"No!" He spoke the word so loudly that even in the chaos of the Homebrew Computer Club, people turned to look. "No. I don't make compromises."

"Please, not so loud."

He grabbed her arm, his fingers digging through her sleeve. "No compromises. Don't you see, Suzie? That's why people fail. It's why this country is so fucked up—why businesses are so fucked up. That's what I love about computers. They're as close as we can get to a perfect world. There aren't any compromises with computers. Something is either black or white. Octal code is absolute order. Three bits of ones or zeros. Either a bit
is
or it
isn't
."

"Life's not like that," she replied softly, thinking of all the compromises she had to make.

"That's because you won't let it be. You're a chickenshit, Suzie, you know that? You're afraid to get passionate about anything."

"That's not true."

"You pull this class A con job trying to keep anybody from seeing how scared you really are. Well, it's a waste of time when you're with me, so don't bother."

He glared at her for a moment, and then his expression softened. "Look, stop worrying about business suits and haircuts. Just get your old man to talk to me. He was a pioneer in the fifties when he whipped up those early computer patents. I know I can make him understand. I'll make him see the magic. Damn, I'll make him understand if it's the last thing I do!"