Understanding suddenly dawned on Jon as he finished his meal. Lettie liked Harry because he didn’t see her as a sexual object. His newfound understanding quickly turned into resentment. Did she really put him in the same box as Harry? Did she have no idea of how attractive he found her?
As they got up from the table and carried their trays toward the conveyor, Lettie asked him a question. “Are you stopping off at Miller’s tonight?”
“I think I probably will. It is Friday, you know.”
Lettie smiled at him. “Maybe I’ll see you down there.”
They placed their lunch trays on the conveyor and went their separate ways.
It wasn’t until nearly two o’clock that Jon was finally able to settle down and concentrate. It felt good to put all the work drama aside, at least for a short while. Before he even realized it, it was nearly five-thirty and time to wrap it up for the week.
Once again, he waited a long time for Lettie to arrive at Miller’s. It was nearly six-thirty when she finally showed up, and Jon’s heart went out to her as he saw her walking toward the table. She seemed so unlike her usual self. There was definitely a cloud over her head. Normally she was such a vibrant person, but today she seemed depressed. There was a faraway look in her eyes. Jon was surprised when she ordered a margarita. He had never seen her drink anything stronger than Chardonnay.
“Here’s to better times,” said Jon, and the two of them clicked their glasses together.
Things developed much as they had the last time they met at Miller’s. They talked quietly for half an hour, touching on the issues critical to Lettie. Then they both seemed to settle in and grow more comfortable with each other. Throwing caution to the wind, Jon told her what had happened earlier in the day in his meeting with George Ludwig and John Balis and his reason for not bringing it up at lunch. He was greatly relieved when she seemed to take it all in stride.
Without even really discussing it, they had dinner together again. As they waited for their food to arrive, Jon saw a new side of Lettie. Perhaps it was the margarita, but it was as if everything that had troubled them had fallen away. They were like two old friends having a good time together.
The upbeat mood collapsed when Harry’s name came up.
“I’m worried sick about him,” Lettie said. “Something has changed about him but I can’t pin down what it is.”
Jon took a deep breath. He had finally decided he would level with Lettie about Harry’s trip to Tartan’s Crag, how Harry had fallen and injured his head, lying unconscious on the ground for three days straight.
As he told the story, Lettie grew visibly distressed and wrenched her napkin apart. “Why didn’t you get him to a doctor?”
“I tried,” said Jon. “Honest to God, I tried. You know how stubborn Harry can be.”
“Don’t I!” Lettie exclaimed. “He is the most stubborn, single-minded person I have ever known in my life!”
“I won’t argue there.”
Lettie grew quiet. “You know, I don’t think it’s a head injury. It’s something else. He’s changed fundamentally, somehow, almost as if he’s more like Harry Sale than he used to be, if you know what I mean. For example, Harry’s pulled all-nighters before and I’ve seen him afterward. He’s been a wreck! But this time he worked four days and nights without so much as a break. It just doesn’t fit with what used to be true about him. He’s a guy who needs his sleep. It’s almost as if he’s suddenly turbo-charged or something. I don’t know what to make of him anymore. I swear to God, he isn’t the same guy.”
A tender look came over her face and she put her hand on Jon’s knee. “You know I’m very fond of him, don’t you?” she asked, her voice a near whisper.
Jon nodded.
“I sometimes wish I wasn’t,” she said. “He can be so exasperating. Sometimes I’m in the room with him and it’s like I’m invisible. He can be so thoughtful and nice one moment and then the next he’s off in space somewhere. There’s something about me that makes him very uneasy.” Lettie hesitated a moment before plunging on. “Has he ever said anything to you about me?”
Jon considered her question and felt a flash of resentment for being put on the spot. “No. I can honestly say he’s never so much as mentioned your name.” Jon knew immediately he had made a mistake. This is not what she had been hoping to hear. He spoke again, trying to mitigate his words. “I’m sure he thinks highly of you. I can assure you, he thinks you’re a very attractive woman.”
The hurt in Lettie’s eyes remained, but she turned the conversation in another direction. “Do you think he’s going to get fired?”
“One thing for sure,” said Jon, “George Ludwig is doing his damned best to make that happen.”
“You make it sound pretty bad.”
“It could be worse. It all depends on Harry’s new Operating System. If it works, Harry’s in-like-Flynn; if it doesn’t, then Harry will probably be out on his ear.”
Jon was one hundred percent right in his assessment.
Chapter Nine
Jon’s weekend dragged on, impossibly slow. The only thing that seemed to help him was a long walk in the woods on Sunday. Hiking on the rough paths took him away from his current concerns. But even on the walk, thoughts of Lettie kept intruding. He recalled her face as she sat across the table from him at Miller’s. Close enough to touch, which almost made it worse because that was exactly what he couldn’t do.
Jon turned down an old logging trail and walked deeper into the woods. For some reason he started thinking about Sarah, the girl he had dated his senior year at Dartmouth. Maybe she wasn’t quite as dynamic or as beautiful as Lettie, but she had been close. He had been sure she was the woman he wanted to marry. During winter break she had asked him to come home with her to Connecticut and meet her parents, but Jon had backed away, frightened by all the implications. So he hadn’t gone and Sarah had reconnected with an old boyfriend in Connecticut and that had been that.
Jon picked up a dead branch from a tree and began to tap it against a crumbling stone wall that ran down to one side of the logging trail. As the brittle branch clicked against the stones, its odd rhythm was almost hypnotic. For a moment it seemed that he had stepped outside of himself and was viewing his own life from another angle altogether. He was ashamed by what he saw, all the caution and hesitation—backing away from important decisions. He had made a career out of playing it safe. He had spent so much time looking to the right and to the left that he had missed what was right in front of him.
The logging trail and the wall suddenly ended, replaced by scrub trees and heavy brush. Jon dropped the dead branch he had been clutching so tightly, turned about, and began the long walk home.
When he returned to the office on Monday morning, he was on pins and needles waiting to hear what had happened over the weekend with the installation. He gave a quick call to Harry’s office but there was no answer. That did not bode well.
Halfway through the morning, he received news from Lettie. Too busy to call, she had fired off a terse email: “Installation failed. Harry suspended. Please call me at home this evening.”
Knowing just a little was worse than knowing nothing at all. It took all his discipline to turn his attention back to his job and get something done. At the end of the day he did not even bother to go home. He drove directly to Harry’s place. He rang the bell but there was no answer, so he immediately began to pound on the door. His fist was going numb when the door finally swung open.
“Hey,” said Harry with a wide grin. He looked calm and refreshed, almost like he had been on vacation. “Just the person I was hoping to see! Come on in.”
“What the hell is going on?” Jon said when he saw the incredible mess of parts and circuit boards strewn across Harry’s living room. At least a dozen PCs in various states of disassembly were lying willy-nilly about the room. It was an electronic chop shop, with chips, circuit boards, and various PC elements everywhere. Only someone like Harry would be able to navigate through such a
mess.
“What in hell’s name are you doing?”
“I’m building my own supercomputer. Come on over. I need your help with a tough nut.”
Harry had Jon tilt a tower-style PC at an odd angle and hold it steady while he worked a Phillips head screwdriver.
“What happened at the installation?” Jon asked, unable to restrain his curiosity.
“You filthy little bugger,” Harry muttered under his breath to the computer. Harry reached inside the casing, pressed his thumb against the slipping nut, and tried again. This time the screw turned loose.
“The installation, Harry. What happened, for God’s sake?”
“Oh, that,” said Harry in a faraway voice, his attention on the screw. It was almost as though for him it was something that had happened in the distant past and was no longer of any importance.
“That son-of-a-bitch George Ludwig fucked it up beyond all reckoning. Here I went a hundred light years out of my way to ensure a constant level of memory access efficiency and the son-of-a-bitch changes the number of independent memory banks without even adjusting the clock speeds in the memory active cycle.”
“So what happened?”
“It went kablooey! That’s what happened. And there I was, left to explain things to that old fart Benton Reeves, an airhead who doesn’t even know the difference between a bit and a byte!”
“Didn’t anyone stand up for you?”
“Not a one. George Ludwig was on me like stink on shit and the next thing I knew two security guards were escorting me out the door. I think Ludwig planned for this from the beginning. It was a setup, pure and simple.”
“Did they fire you?” Jon asked.
“Not officially. ‘Suspended without pay’—it amounts to the same thing. It just buys them some more time to line my head up nicely on the chopping block.”
“What are you going to do if they fire you?”
Harry looked Jon square in the eye. “I could give a good goddamn about HTPS Industries!”
“But seriously, Harry. Regardless of them, what are you going to do?”
Harry smiled mischievously. “Why, I’m going to build my own supercomputer. Could you hand me that flat-head screwdriver?”
A thousand and one questions rushed through Jon’s mind but he pushed them all aside. He knew how Harry was. When Harry was working like this, everything else in the world disappeared for him. He was single-minded to a fault and there was absolutely no use in trying to divert him from the task on which he was focused.
By the time they finally took a break, some order had been restored to the sundry PC parts, but there were still loose circuits boards tipped up against the wall and memory chips scattered across the oversized coffee table.
Jon sank back on the sofa, for the first time realizing how tired he was. He had just put in a ten-hour day at HTPS and then had worked with Harry for over three hours.
But there wasn’t even a crimp in Harry’s energy level. He paced back and forth on the living room floor and made odd gestures with his hands, as though he were counting something on his fingers.
“Say, Harry,” Jon said in a loud voice, trying to break through the impenetrable wall of thought that had consumed his friend. “Can we talk about something for two minutes?”
Harry smiled. “Well, maybe for two minutes,” he said as he seated himself on the opposite end of the sofa from Jon.
“What the hell is going on, Harry?”
“Why, we’re building a super computer.”
“That’s not what I mean, Harry. What are you building it for, that’s what I want to know.”
“I was afraid you were going to ask me that.”
“Well, I just did, in case you hadn’t noticed!”
“Okay, buddy. If anyone deserves a straight answer, it’s you.” Harry’s eyebrows knit together as if he was thinking of a way to frame a careful answer. “This is a tough one,” he began. “I want you to know what’s going on but at the same time I’m almost afraid that if I tell you, you’ll think I’m some kind of a nut case.” Harry paused and looked directly into Jon’s eyes. “First you’ll have to promise me that what I tell you is strictly between the two of us.”
Jon nodded his consent and Harry proceeded cautiously.
“This past week I was so caught up in my new Operating System that I completely lost my normal detachment. You know how I usually am, Jon—detached, rational, always looking for the most logical path. But last week I was possessed. I didn’t realize this until I woke up late Friday afternoon. After I had a hot shower and some coffee, I just sat down and thought about things. I realized that my new operating system wasn’t mine. It was completely foreign to me.”
“But isn’t that what a lot of creative people say?” Jon said. “You hear it all the time from mathematicians, musicians, scientists. They describe themselves as channels. The ideas come from someplace else.”
“That’s not what I mean at all, goddamn it!” Harry said and then slapped his hands together so violently that Jon almost jumped back a step. “What I’m saying is that the most basic elements of this new operating system are totally, completely foreign to me—they’re not mine! I could never have had an inkling of them on my own. The details of the syntax—sure, it’s Harry Sale code. It has my stamp on it. But the underlying structure, the basic logic and flow of it, is totally uncharacteristic of me.”
Harry paused again and Jon leaned forward in his seat, waiting for his friend to continue.
“But that was just an inkling. On Saturday, during the installation of my OS on Big Moe, something happened before the clock speeds brought everything crashing down. I connected with something, Jon. Something absolutely unbelievable.”
Jon waited impatiently for his friend to continue.
“I can only describe it as an intelligence; an intelligence as far beyond mine as mine is beyond a sparrow’s. It only lasted for about forty seconds but those forty seconds were the peak experience of my life.”
Jon was puzzled. It was the last thing he was expecting from Harry. He had always thought of Harry as a nuts-and-bolts type to a fault, completely unconcerned with the metaphysical or mystical.
“I don’t understand. You say an ‘intelligence.’ What kind of intelligence?”
Harry groaned and threw his hands up in the air.
“I can’t explain it. I’m not a word person. I’m not some silver-tongued devil who can explain away everything. Words are just too slippery and there are too goddamned many of them. They don’t map.”
Harry lapsed into silence and Jon watched as he slipped back into his earlier state of defense. There was no point in trying to prod Harry further about whatever it was he had experienced.
“What’s the point of all this,” Jon said, indicating the PCs in various states of assembly, which were strewn over the floor in front of them.
Harry smiled, a chink in his otherwise guarded demeanor. “We’re building a Beowulf cluster. Sixteen Pentium PCs networked together. I’m adapting my new OS to a Linux environment—if I can get the Beowulf cluster up to a couple of mega-flops, I can get it to run. Then all I’ll have to do is write a new messaging interface and I’m all set—minus George Ludwig’s fucking clock problems.”
Jon scratched his head. “Excuse me for being so dense, but what do you mean ‘all set’? All set for what?”
Harry smiled again. “All set to test my new OS and see if I make that connection again.”
Harry got up from the sofa and walked to a large Dell Server in the middle of the room. “This will be Node One. The messaging interface will be loaded on it and all the other PCs will be linked on Ethernet. Of course, I’ll have to make some adjustments for the different processing speeds to balance the workload. Could you hand me that 256K of memory from the coffee table?”
Jon reached for the chip and then stood up from the sofa. As he handed the chip to Harry, he realized he had a decision to make. The decision was made in an instant and once aga
in he pitched in to help his friend.
After about an hour, Harry was still going strong, but Jon’s eyes were starting to get blurry. He was just too tired to continue.
“Harry?” he said, but Harry didn’t answer, so intent was he on the innards of one of the slave-nodes.
“Harry, I’ve got to call it a night,” he said in a loud voice.
Harry looked up from his work. “Did you say something?”
“I’ve got to leave, Harry. I’ve got to call it a night.”
Jon started to walk toward the door, but stopped suddenly when a wild thought occurred to him. It went against his cautious nature and was completely out of character, but he felt compelled.
“You need help tomorrow?” he asked Harry
“What about HTPS?” Harry replied.
“I’m going to blow it off—I haven’t had a single sick day in the past six months so I’m going to call in sick.”
“Well, I sure could use the help. You’re the best, Jon. I really mean that.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” said Jon as he let himself out the front door.
When he arrived home, Jon was exhausted, but he still remembered to call Lettie. She had almost no information other than what she had given him in the morning. Jon filled her in on the Beowulf cluster that Harry was building but that was a mistake; it only led to questions that he could have answered but didn’t, because of his promise. And Lettie was sharp enough to know he was holding back. When he told her that he was calling in sick the next day so that he could help Harry, Jon was surprised by the vehemence of her reaction.
“Are you just plain crazy?” she said. “The powers-that-be have you in their crosshairs. You could go down along with Harry. Is it worth your career, Jon?”
Jon was too tired to care, or even respond properly to her words. “I’m sorry, Lettie. It’s just something I have to do. I’ll see you at work on Wednesday.”
He heard Lettie draw in a sharp breath. Then the receiver went dead. Lettie had hung up on him. He dropped the phone back in the cradle and sighed.
“What the hell have I gotten myself into?” he said aloud to the empty room.
The Infinity Program Page 7
