After what she had seen, there wasn't a lot for her to think about. But she didn't want to appear too eager.
"What sort of longer-term prospects would we be talking about?" she asked.
Corrigan threw out a hand carelessly. "Unlimited. It could be the beginnings of a whole new research section dedicated to higher-level coupling. You could end up running it."
That seemed good enough. "Confirm the figures in writing," she said. "If there are no surprises . . . Well, yes. . . . I'll take it."
"Splendid." Corrigan looked at Shipley for an endorsement. "Come on, Eric. Congratulate the lady, at least."
"Pinder hasn't confirmed the appointment yet," Shipley reminded him.
"He's the VP of R and D," Corrigan explained to Evelyn. "He's away today. Don't worry about it. It's just a rubberstamping thing."
Shipley gave her a reassuring nod. "Joe's right. You're just the person we need. I don't think there'll be any problem."
Over the remainder of lunch they talked about lighter things, asking Evelyn about her other interests and swapping personal anecdotes. Then they took her to meet Peter Quell, Pinder's deputy. Apparently, Pinder was with a group visiting the Air Force Space Defense Command in California. Quell stood in for him by delivering some routine corporate messages about CLC being a caring company, and the career opportunities being unlimited for somebody who could fit in, after which they went to Shipley's office and spent a half hour clearing up miscellaneous questions that Evelyn raised. That concluded the business for the moment. While Shipley stayed behind to catch up on what was happening in the lab, Corrigan had a cab called to take Evelyn back to her hotel and walked her back to main reception in the Executive Building. While they were waiting, he talked her into having dinner together that night, before she caught her flight back to Boston the next morning.
Chapter Nine
Corrigan and Evelyn met for dinner in the downtown Vista Hotel, where she was staying. The interview had told him much about her. Now the informal setting gave her an opportunity to satisfy more of her curiosity about him.
"Oh, I'm from a place that I'd be surprised if you've heard of," he told her as they sat in the lounge over drinks, waiting for a table. "On the coast a few miles south of Dublin." He wrote the words "Dun Laoghaire" on a coaster and asked her how she'd pronounce it.
Evelyn shrugged. "Dun Layo-ghe-air?" she tried, sounding it out phonetically.
"It's Dun Leery." Corrigan grinned. "You can always win a dollar bet in a bar with that. The piers there are famous. They enclose what used to be the biggest artificial harbor in the world at one time."
"When was that?"
"Back in the eighteen hundreds. The granite was brought down on a cable railway from a quarry a little farther down the coast. It was driven by gravity. The weight of the loaded cars going down hauled the empties back up."
"Neat."
Corrigan sipped his gin and tonic and nodded. "Great engineers; those Victorians. They made things to last. Big brass knobs on everything not plastic ones that come off in your hand all the time."
"So how did you end up in computing and things like that?" Evelyn asked.
Corrigan pursed his lips and stroked the tip of his nose with a knuckle. "Well, now, I was more of a mathematician to begin with—you know, in college. Then I got this, kind of, scholarship thing . . ."
"Never mind the false modesty."
"Good. It doesn't come naturally to an Irishman anyway. I got to Trinity—that's one of the Dublin universities. That got me in touch with the computer scene, and I came over to the States to do postgraduate work on AI."
"They do a lot of that at MIT, up in Boston," Evelyn commented.
"I was there for a while—at the AI lab that Minsky and John McCarthy started. Plus, I did a sabbatical with Thinking Machines there, too. You know them?"
"TMC at Cambridge?" Evelyn nodded. "Sure."
"Then I was at Stanford for some time, and after that Carnegie Mellon, which brought me to Pittsburgh. That was up to a couple of years ago, and then I joined CLC."
Evelyn regarded him for a moment. "Okay, I know you must get asked this a hundred times a week, but when are we actually going to see it—the real thing? Does anyone know?"
Corrigan snorted and made a face. "Ah, they've all got themselves bogged down on semantic issues, if you want my opinion—spending more time arguing over what intelligence is instead of actively doing anything to pursue it. We use the word to mean two different things: the `survival' kind of intelligence that makes us different from animals, and the `intellectual' kind that makes some people different from others—or think they are, anyway. The problem is that nobody can make their minds up which one they're talking about."
"Which kind do you mean?" Evelyn asked.
"Oh, I got out of the whole thing and left them to it."
"So is that why you're into virtual sensory worlds now, instead?"
"Exactly." Corrigan showed his hands in a gesture of candor. "I'm in a hurry. I plan on going places in this world. There isn't the time to wait for the likes of them to die off or get their act together." It was a calculated brashness, playing off the light in Evelyn's eye.
"Something tells me you'll get there, too," she said. "Is this the male competitive urge that I sense surfacing now?"
Corrigan smiled and shrugged in a way that said she could take it any way she liked. "Ah, well, now . . . Let's just say that Eric can run the caution-and-conservatism department."
"Eric Shipley, you mean? I thought he was a nice guy."
"Oh, don't get me wrong. He's a great guy to work with. Good scientist, knows his stuff. . . ." Corrigan sighed and showed a palm briefly. "But he has his own style, and it's got him where he is."
"He seemed content enough to me," Evelyn said, letting it sound as an objection. She still liked the thought of working with Shipley. Sharing a dig at his expense—even so slight a one as this—didn't feel comfortable.
"He is," Corrigan replied.
The hostess came over to tell them that their table was ready, and they went through into the restaurant. Corrigan had already ordered while they were in the lounge, and they began their soup course straight away. When the waiter had left, Evelyn returned to the subject of Shipley.
"Why did it bother him that Jason Pinder wasn't here himself today?" she asked.
Corrigan shrugged unconcernedly. "That's the way Eric is. He seems to think that if Pinder attached as much importance to this job as Eric thinks he should . . ."
"Which job? You mean my job?"
"Yes: the one we're talking about . . . then he would have made sure that the interview was fixed for a day when he was here, instead of leaving it to Quell."
All of a sudden Evelyn felt uneasy. "What do you think?" she asked.
Corrigan waved a hand unconcernedly. "Ah, Eric worries too much about underhanded corporate politics—especially where influences are involved that he believes science could do without, such as SDC or anything else connected with the military. He should have lived in the nineteenth century and been one of those gifted, all-around amateurs that you read about."
"It doesn't bother you?" Evelyn said.
"The thought of getting mixed up with the Space Defense people?" Corrigan shook his head. "Not really. Why should it? That's where the money is. It might add some excitement to life. It's like everything else: you deal with the complications as they come."
He grinned. She smiled back. It was what she wanted to hear, and she thought no more about it. Over dinner, Corrigan brought up the possibility of his coming up to Boston to visit her. It was about time he looked up some of his friends there, he said. At the same time, he could show Evelyn some of his old haunts. Evelyn thought it would be a great idea.
* * *
At the Space Defense Command's Simulator Center at Inglewood, California, the time was three hours earlier. Jason Pinder and a party of technical and management executives that included the CLC president, Ken Endelmyer, w
ere finishing the VIP tour. They had seen the motion platforms mounting cockpit mockups that even experienced Air Force space pilots reported as being "better than the real thing"; they had played with the telemanipulator helmets and arm-gloves used to remote-direct spaceborne repair and construction robots from ground and orbital stations thousands of miles away. Now they were in a section of the Visual Environments labs for a demonstration of a device that had been undergoing development and improvement for some time: the Vision & Voice head assembly, known as "VIV." They had heard the presentations, watched the videos, and handled the equipment. Now it was time to lighten things up a little and conclude with some fun.
Don Falker, chief engineer of CLC's Artificial Vision division, stood a short distance apart from the group. He was wearing a lightweight plastic helmet fitting close, like a skullcap, that supported a set of miniaturized vision goggles in front of his eyes and padded earphones. A microchip package in the crown communicated via an IR frequency link to nearby processing equipment. In his hand, he was holding an imitation Ping-Pong paddle made of aluminum, covered front, back, and around the edge in tiny reflecting surfaces. Similarly equipped, standing a few feet away and smiling a little self-consciously, was Therese Loel, head of CLC's Engineering Systems Group.
The man in charge of the proceedings was around forty, lean and tanned, with thinning hair, graying at the temples, and silver-rimmed spectacles. He had a presentation style that was smooth and polished, dynamic in content but coming relaxed and easy, developed over years of dealing with high-level individuals. His name was Frank Tyron, SDC's civilian project manager of the VIV program.
"Hold your other hand horizontal, as if you were about to serve a ball," Tyron called to Falker.
The stereo image being presented inside Falker's goggles showed a nonexistent, computer-generated Ping-Pong table, with Therese Loel transposed so as to be facing him from the far end of it. To everyone watching, Falker simply extended an empty hand palm-up and looked at it. A program analyzing the output from a pair of cameras mounted on the walls tracked the movement, and another program added a Ping-Pong ball to the image that he could see of his hand. Therese Loel saw it appear too, but the view in her goggles showed Falker at the far end of the table.
"Go ahead," Tyron invited, speaking into a mike.
The onlookers watched as Falker tossed the invisible ball up and hit at it with the metal paddle. Sensors around the room tracked the paddle's motion from laser reflections, and the ball in the optical representation followed the computed path.
"Hey!" Therese cried involuntarily, and jumped sideways to play a return stroke.
"I can hear it hitting the bats and the table," Falker said, playing a backhand. "The synchronization is perfect. This is good!" Therese returned, but the ball went high.
As state of the art, simulating a Ping-Pong game wasn't especially a revolutionary, or even a new, concept. What was different about this demonstration was the quality. There was nothing crude or cartoonlike about the images that the two players were seeing. The table in front of them and the room around it (actually a stored representation, encoded from videotape, of the games room in the OTSC Recreational Gym in another part of the establishment) were real. The figures at far ends were Therese Loel and Don Falker, superposed into the scene without the helmets—the missing facial details were added from TV images captured beforehand. Even with a fast forehand smash shot, the images of ball and paddle stayed clean and true: no flicker, no blurring. This hardware was fast.
The others couldn't keep from laughing at the two goggled figures lunging and swiping over a table that nobody else could see. Even Ken Endelmyer was smiling between two of his cohorts. What made the spectacle even stranger was that the two players were facing roughly the same way. The images that the computer was creating in the two sets of goggles were correct for the perspectives that each was perceiving.
"It's okay, Don," Tyron called as Falker turned automatically to retrieve the ball from the floor. "You don't have to chase after it. Just serve another."
"Oh, really? Okay." Falker faced the virtual table, raised his left hand again, and—to him—a ball appeared in it. "Say, I've got another one." He played it. "What happens to the first?"
"It evaporates."
Falker and Loel continued their game for a few minutes more, then stopped to allow a couple of the other visitors to try. While the helmets were being taken off and donned, Tyron took a spare unit from a rack by the wall. He turned to address himself particularly to Endelmyer and Pinder.
"We can give you Pinocchio with voice and vision now." He made a dismissive gesture, conveying that there really oughtn't to be anything to think about. "The way you're planning to go at present, it will take years at least. Even if you do shift the interface boundary from the medulla to the pons, you're still as far away as ever because visual data enters farther still above that." He patted the helmet resting in his hand and said again, "We can give you it now, using technology that already exists, right here. No banking on uncertain future developments. No speculating with unnecessary risks. It doesn't mean that you have to abandon your plans for extending to the pons. But going this way could relieve the time pressure for getting results."
Endelmyer looked inquiringly at Pinder. His expression said that it sounded good to him and he was looking for endorsement. Pinder obliged. "I think it would be worth looking into, Ken. It would give us a mainstream hybrid thrust toward full-sensory now: tactile from Pinocchio, visual and speech/auditory via the regular sensory apparatus, using VIV. The pons research gets relegated to lower-priority status as a secondary approach. It may produce results sooner or later. Either way, we can afford to wait."
It was what Endelmyer wanted to hear. From the things that had been said earlier in the day, it was also clear that Tyron was dangling the prospect of not only a working technology that would advance the project immediately, but of high-level political backing and generous additional funding too. It was also a good psychological ploy aimed at Endelmyer, who, Tyron knew—having done his homework as any good salesman would have—had hankerings for rubbing shoulders on the Washington circuit.
The meeting broke up on a promising note, with individuals from both sides gravitating into chatty groups. Endelmyer drew Pinder and Tyron to one side, along with a man called Harry Morgen, Tyron's right-hand man. "Personally I'm satisfied," he told them. "You've done an impressive job today, Mr. Tyron. Although I cannot give you a definite response today, you may take it that I will be reporting back to the CLC Board in an extremely positive light. Thank everyone who has been involved, from all of us, for their efforts."
Chapter Ten
Dun Laoghaire, the town that Corrigan was originally from, means, in Irish, "Laoghaire's Fort." It is generally assumed by historians that a fort once existed there, belonging to King Laoghaire of the fifth century, whose principal abode was at Tara, about thirty-five miles away. In more recent times it grew in less than a century from an insignificant fishing village to a major port and Victorian resort town. Its lifestyle in that era characterized the Dublin professional class: merchants, bankers, ex-army and -navy officers and others of the well-to-do, who flocked to live in its handsome terraces by the sea, yet within easy rail distance of the city.
The more scholarly of the town's progeny went, traditionally, into the arts, humanities, and literature. It was not noted for its contributions to the sciences or cutting-edge technologies, and this made it all the more remarkable to Joe Corrigan's relatives and friends when he walked away with every honor in mathematical computing at Trinity and took off across the Atlantic to do the rounds of the AI labs at MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and other unheard-of places.
He had taken to the U.S. scene as if it were his natural element. After a land less than half the size of Florida, the vastness of the country seemed to mirror the scale of everything he found around him. It wasn't just that the buildings were taller than the repatched and replastered Georgian fro
ntages of Merrion Square and Leeson Street, the avenues wider, the stores grander than Dunnes or Clery's, the cars longer, and the hamburgers huger. It had to do with ambition and opportunity, also. After the venerable but crowded surroundings that he was used to working in, the promise and lavishness of scale of American research was breathtaking. Imagination raced unchecked. Funding was unlimited. In two years he had become highly visible in the part of the academic computer world associated with intelligence modeling, and those who were supposed to know about such things listed his name among the front-runners that they expected to see heading the field in ten years' time. Corrigan, however, still intoxicated by the combination of early, practically effortless, success and his newfound continental-size lifestyle, succumbed easily when the talent scouts from CLC made approaches to recruit him.
That had been two years ago, when he was still only twenty-eight. Since then, his project management and personal technical contribution had put the development of Pinocchio a year ahead of its original schedule, further strengthening his reputation, and with the way ahead open for his rise into senior management, his self-confidence was at its peak.
This was the moment that Evelyn had chosen to appear, combining all the attributes of physical attractiveness, intelligence, professional presence, and social acceptability that would be required of the one accessory still missing from his life. Maybe it was an unconscious recognition of this that led him to react to her with a seriousness that had been singularly absent from the various female encounters that had dotted his career path until then. Perhaps it was an echo of some primeval male impulse to stake out his territory before potential rivals had a chance to appear. Possibly it was the part of his nature that scoffed at caution and enjoyed the mild impropriety of the situation. More likely, a combination of all three. But four days after Evelyn's interview, he found himself deplaning from a Delta Airlines evening flight at Boston's Logan Airport, and took a cab to the Hyatt Hotel, where he had made a reservation for the night, overlooking the bank of the Charles River.
Realtime Interrupt Page 8
