Hot Shot (9 page)

Something to stick on top of a desk and hack around on. In the next couple of years, we're going to turn those big fat cat computers into dinosaurs."

There was something so charismatic about the fire in his eyes, the energy charging through his body, that for a few moments she actually found herself caught up. "How does it work?"

"I can't show you here. It has to be hooked up. You need a power supply. The memory has to be loaded in. You have to have a terminal—like a typewriter keyboard. A television for video display."

"In other words, this doesn't do anything."

"It's a computer, for chrissake!"

"But it can't do anything unless you attach all these other things to it?"

"That's right."

"I think you're wasting your time, Sam. My father won't be interested in something like this. I can't imagine anyone wanting to buy it."

"Everyone in the entire frigging world is going to want to buy it! Before too many years have passed, a home computer will be another everyday appliance—like a toaster or a stereo. Why can't you see that?"

His antagonism jarred her, but she forced her voice to remain smooth yet strong, just as it was when she needed to make a point at a hospital auxiliary meeting. "Maybe in the twenty-first century, but not in 1976. Who would actually buy something like this—a machine that doesn't do anything until you hook up a dozen other things to it?"

"For the next few years, mainly hobbyists and electronics junkies. But by the 1980s—"

"There can't be enough hobbyists to make something like this profitable." She forced herself to glance at her watch so he could see that she had more important things to do than sit here chatting about his quixotic vision of computer-filled households.

He shook his head and regarded her with thinly disguised hostility. "For someone who looks intelligent, you're really out of touch. Do you spend so much time planning dinner parties that you can't see what's happening all around you? This is California, for chrissake. You're living on top of Silicon Valley. The electronics capital of the world is right at your feet. There's a whole universe of people out there who've been waiting all their lives for something like this."

As Joel Faulconer's daughter, she had spent most of her life in a world where high technology was served right along with the soup course. She wasn't ignorant, and she didn't like his condescension. "I'm sorry, Sam," she said stiffly, "but all I see is a briefcase full of electronic parts that don't do anything. I'm certain you're wasting your time. My father won't agree to see you, and—even if he did—he would never be interested in anything this impractical."

"Talk to him for me, Suzie. Convince him to see me. I'll take care of the rest."

Her gaze took in the leather jacket, the length of his hair, the earring. "I'm sorry, but I can't do that."

His thin lips twisted and he looked past her toward the lagoon. It had begun to rain harder and the surface of the water was gray and rippled. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket, making the leather rustle. "Okay, then here's something you
can
do. Come to a meeting with me next week."

She was alarmed. Meeting him once was bad enough—twice would be unforgivable.

"That's impossible."

"You just think it's impossible. Loosen up a little. Take a risk for a change."

"You don't seem to understand. I'm engaged. It would be unseemly for me to meet you again."

"Unseemly?" His eyebrows shot up. "I'm not asking you to sleep with me. I just want you to meet some people I know. Do it, Suzie. Throw away your etiquette book for a change."

She tried not to let him see how badly he had shaken her. Gathering up her purse, she stood—straitlaced Susannah Faulconer wrapping propriety around her like a maiden aunt's crocheted shawl. She opened the catch on her purse and pulled her car keys from one of the neatly arranged compartments. "What kind of people do you want me to meet?" She asked the question coolly, as if a guest list were the only really important thing on her mind.

Sam Gamble smiled. "Hackers, honey. I want you to meet some hackers."

Chapter 5

They were the nerdiest of the nerds—bespectacled California boys of the sixties, who grew up in the suburbs of the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco.

In other parts of America, baseball and football reigned unchallenged, but in the Santa Clara Valley electronics permeated the air. The Valley harbored Stanford and Hewlett-Packard, Ames Research Laboratory and Fairchild Semiconductor. From the moment they woke up to the moment they fell asleep, the boys of the Valley breathed in the wonders of transistors and semiconductors.

Instead of Wilt Chamberlain and Johnny Unitas, these boys of the sixties found their heroes in the electrical engineers who lived next door, the men who toiled in the laboratories at Lockhead and Sylvania. Electronics permeated the air of the Santa Clara Valley, and to the bespectacled boys of the suburbs, the engineers with their slide rules and plastic pocket protectors were modern-day Marco Polos, adventurers who had unlocked the exotic mysteries of electron flows and sine waves.

The boys grew adept at barter. They did odd jobs in exchange for the surplus parts the men culled from the storerooms of the companies for which they worked. The boys washed cars for boxes of capacitors, painted garages for circuit boards, and every spare penny they earned went into buying parts for the transistor circuits and ham radio receivers they were building in their bedrooms.

In actuality, there wasn't much else for these boys to do with their money. Most of them were still too young to drive, and the older ones had no need to save their money for dates because no self-respecting California schoolgirl would have been caught dead with any one of them. They were the nerdiest of the nerds. Some were so overweight that their stomachs bulged from beneath their belts, others so underweight their Adam's apples seemed larger than their necks. They were pimply, myopic, and stoop-shouldered.

As they grew older, they went to college. Despite their impressive IQ's, some of the most talented never graduated. They were too busy having fun hacking around in their university's computer lab to go to their thermodynamics class or study for an exam in quantum mechanics. They programmed the big mainframes to play games they invented

—games with galaxies exploding in dazzling patterns of starbursts and jets streaking across screens spattered with constellations that actually moved. They could only get time on the machines at night, so they slept during the day and hacked until the graduate assistants kicked them out in the morning. They ate junk food to the point of malnutrition and lived their lives under the blue flicker of fluorescent lighting. Like vampires, their skin turned pasty and white.

They were always horny. When they weren't hunched over a terminal, they were dreaming of feelable, kissable, suckable breasts and sweet little miniskirted asses. But they lived at night, it was hard for them to meet women, and when they did, they ran into trouble. How could anyone talk to a person who didn't understand the joy of spending an evening with a DEC PDP-8 writing a subroutine to solve quadratic functions?

They were the nerdiest of the nerds, and their encounters with women frequently didn't go well.

Most of them were too caught up in the excitement of an interesting hack to think about the fact that they might hold the keys to a new society in their heads. Although they yearned for small, inexpensive machines they could use freely at any time of night or day instead of having to sneak into a computer lab at three in the morning, most of them didn't let their thoughts go much further than ephemeral daydreams. They were having too much fun writing elaborate sine-cosine routines that would make the games they had invented run better. They were hackers, not visionaries, and they didn't think too much about the future.

But the visionaries were around. With rebellious young eyes uncorrupted by old knowledge, they saw what was happening at places where the nerds got together, places like the Homebrew Computer Club. The visionaries saw, and they understood.

Sam Gamble impatiently paced along the walkway leading to SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Susannah was late. Maybe she wouldn't come. He pushed his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and encountered his wallet. It was thicker than normal because he'd gotten paid that day. He'd bought two books—Clarke's
Profiles of the
Future
and Minsky's
The Society of Mind
—along with a new Eagles tape.

Sam hated his job. He worked as a technician at a small semiconductor company in Sunnyvale. He was competent at what he did, but since he didn't have a degree, it was basically dead-end work. Yank didn't have a degree either, but Yank was an electronics genius and he had a good job at Atari. A job that would probably end soon, Sam reminded himself. Yank tended to be chronically unemployed because he would get involved in some incredible hack and forget to go to work. Sam had come to the conclusion that the modern corporation—even one as freewheeling as Atari—wasn't designed for guys like Yank. In his opinion, time clocks were one of a million things wrong with the way businesses were run in this country.

After Sam had dropped out of college, he'd bummed around the country for a while on his bike. It was fun. He'd met a lot of people, slept with a lot of women, but he'd finally gotten tired of the aimlessness of it all. When he'd come home, he'd fallen in with Yank Yankowski, who'd just flunked out of Cal Tech. He and Yank had known each other since they were kids, but Yank was a year older and they'd run in different crowds. Sam had been a hell raiser, while Yank was almost invisible—this weird skinny kid who hid away in his family's garage and built strange gadgets.

The sound of a well-tuned German engine caught Sam's attention. He watched the silver Mercedes pull into the parking lot, and the efficient, no-nonsense design of the car gave him a visceral rush of pleasure. There wasn't any reason in the world Detroit couldn't build a car like that—no reason except greed and a lack of imagination.

As Susannah came up the walk, she looked like all the women in the world he'd ever wanted but had never been able to have. It wasn't either her money or her looks that primarily attracted him. He'd slept with rich women before, and he'd certainly slept with prettier ones. But Susannah was different. He took in the way she moved, that discreet mouth, the simple design of her belted cashmere coat. It was classic, just like the car she drove. Just like Susannah Faulconer.

Susannah walked toward him, her spine as straight as the yardstick her grandmother had strapped to her back when she was a child. All day she had been telling herself she wouldn't come here tonight, but then she had been on the phone with Madge Clemens, discussing a luncheon program for the wives of the FBT regional presidents. Madge was debating whether Susannah should invite someone to do the women's colors, which was the very latest thing, or whether they should have a guest speaker. Madge had been going on about how nice it would be to have a personalized packet of fabric swatches when she'd suddenly changed her mind and told Susannah that they simply had to invite this wonderful doctor her sister had heard speak.

"He's marvelous, Susannah," Madge had said. "I know everyone will get a lot out of his presentation. He brings slides and everything. And all of us are interested in menopause."

Susannah hadn't said a word. For a moment she had sat without moving, and then she found herself slowly lowering the receiver to the cradle and hanging up right in the middle of Madge's sentence. It was unforgivably rude, but her arm had seemed to move of its own volition. Ten minutes later she was on her way to Palo Alto.

"I—I'm sorry I'm late," she said to Sam. "There was a lot of traffic and I—"

"You lost your guts?" He ambled toward her, his walk slightly bow-legged, as if he were still riding his Harley.

"Of course not," she replied stiffly. "I just didn't leave myself enough time."

"Sure." He stopped in front of her and his gaze was openly admiring as it traveled over her coat, although what he found so fascinating about her old cashmere wraparound, she couldn't imagine. "How old are you?" he asked.

Fifty years old. Fifty-five. Ready for menopause; ripe for estrogen supplements. "I was just twenty-five last month," she replied.

He smiled. "That's great. I'm twenty-four. I knew if you were too much older than me, you'd have all kinds of hang-ups about the two of us. You look closer to thirty." He took her arm and began drawing her toward the building, apparently unaware of how rude his comment was. He must have felt her resistance because he stopped. At first he looked puzzled, and then he scowled.

"You're not used to people who say what they're thinking, are you, Suzie? Well, I don't go for any dishonest bullshit. I'm real. That's one thing you have to learn about me."

"I'm real, too," she countered, which was a perfectly ridiculous thing to say. She unsettled herself even further by adding, "Nobody seems to understand that." She was appalled.

Why did she keep making these personal revelations to a man she barely knew?

He studied her with his intense dark eyes. "You're something, do you know that? Classic, elegant, efficient—like a great piece of design."

She took a shaky breath, forcing herself to speak lightly so she had time to pull back into her shell. "I don't know if I like the idea of being compared to a piece of design."

"I appreciate quality. I may not have any money, but I've always appreciated the best."

And then, unexpectedly, he slipped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her body close to his. The contact dazed her. He stared down into her face, his eyes touching her forehead, her nose, her mouth.

"Please," she whispered. "I don't think—"

"Don't think," he said, leaning forward to nuzzle her neck with his lips. "Just feel."

He was a seducer, a tempter, a peddler of patent medicines hawking his wares from the back of a Harley-Davidson, a tent-show evangelist delivering the promise of eternal life, a salesman in a sharkskin suit selling shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. He was a
hustler
.