The Secret

by Harold Robbins

  Len? Well, he had known Texans at Amherst and Yale. They weren’t necessarily such bad fellows, he said. And what made Texans Texans wasn’t necessarily bad. Remember Lyndon Johnson.

  As for myself, I didn’t see how it could be much worse than California, so I went with an open mind.

  We flew down on the Lear jet. For people who had seen Hong Kong and lived there, Houston wasn’t much. On the other hand, there was nothing wrong with it. I suppose the people who lived there lived rather pleasantly.

  We had two suites on the same floor in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. There were other hotels in Houston, maybe more distinguished, but none were more comfortable and convenient, and the Regency suited us fine.

  We saw no cowboy hats. We saw no cowboy boots. A waitress in the bar explained, “Mistah Coopah … whut y’awl must understand ee-is, there are no Texans in Houston!”

  * * *

  Well … I don’t know how you define a Texan, but I guess Tom Malloy was one. He had no education, essentially. He had about as much as I had. In fact, I suspect Tom had experienced his own version of Uncle Harry. And he had taken the bull by the horns, I guessed, and wrestled it to the ground. He had been, among other things, a wildcatter—meaning an entrepreneur who had drilled for oil where oil was not supposed to be, and had found it.

  His wife was with him. She was the Texan of the pair.

  His most memorable characteristic was his obsessive intellectual curiosity. That was what had made him as a man. Instead of turning his energies to reassembling Jeeps—in effect, stealing them, as I had done—and then to selling fraud designer water, Tom Malloy had worried his way through the mathematics and other theories that were the foundation of computer science. I suppose the best thing about him was that he saw the potential in computers, as he had seen the potential in land that was supposed to have no oil under it, and from that had made opportunity.

  I remember the first one I ever saw. I thought it was wonderful, but I couldn’t think of a single useful thing it could do. Did I need a machine to—?

  Over dinner in the Regency that first night, sitting behind glass that afforded us a view of the lobby two or three floors below, I listened to Tom Malloy describe his commitment to a thing that, when he committed to it, was entirely new, with an uncertain future.

  “The thing about it that struck me from the start was that it was so beautiful, so elegant. The mathematics that made it work was elegant. That had been there all along, of course, but we had to wait until the ’seventies, then ’eighties, to have the technology. Look at it this way. No matter how skilled a carpenter you are, you can’t build a wooden television set. No matter what fine wood you can get, you can’t make a wooden picture tube.”

  “You have to have transistors,” said Len. “And resistors and capacitors and—”

  “Yes, and now chips that have all those components on chips the size of a postage stamp. They did build ’em with tubes, but those were in no way practical for most applications. Too big, too sensitive, too unreliable.… We had to have transistors. And circuit boards.”

  Malloy was in his forties. He was six-feet-five, I estimate, but even so was not the kind of man who would attract attention. His dark hair was cut short and was accented by the beginning of gray. He was handsome, with chiseled features. He read the menu with a pair of half-glasses which he returned to his pocket as soon as he was through reading.

  He was dressed more conservatively than either Len or I, in a charcoal-gray three-button suit with narrow lapels, a white shirt, and a regimental tie. When we had met him in the lobby he had been wearing an oilman’s champagne-colored Stetson, which was now in the checkroom. I guess we’d expected a beige suit with fancy stitching.

  He didn’t look like a techie whiz, either. I did detect a certain excess of enthusiasm when he talked about Sphere, the company and the computer.

  The wife was … Len put it that she could have been a cheerleader. I didn’t know from cheerleaders, but when the facts were disclosed, it turned out that she had been a cheerleader for the Houston Oilers. She was Tom’s second wife and was maybe fifteen years younger than he, and she was his trophy. Some guys bought Porsches and some Ferraris, some bought boats, and some leased Lear jets. Tom Malloy had married an Oilers cheerleader.

  Her hair had been stripped—not bleached, stripped. She did not have telltale dark eyebrows because she had almost no eyebrows at all. She did not wear a beehive—she was not that unstylish—but she had a lot of hair, artificially curled. She wore shiny pink lipstick. Her figure was perfect. You could guess that she worked out at a gym regularly. Her white minidress fit like it had been spray-painted on her.

  Her name was Becky.

  “Hong Kong!” she said. “Oh, I’d love to go there! I suppose a person ought to see it before it’s handed over to the Mainland Chinese. I have friends who despised Tokyo but loved Hong Kong. How very different is Cantonese from Mandarin?”

  Malloy wanted to talk about his computer.

  “It was the best, Cooper, I swear the Sphere was the best, for its time. We were, in fact, ahead of our time. We went to five-and-a-half-inch floppies when everybody else was still using those great big awkward ones. We began to offer a mouse when everybody else was still keyboarding everything.”

  “What went wrong?” Len asked bluntly.

  “Nothing went wrong. The Sphere is still the best—or could be, if we had the capital to add some refinements and market it.”

  “What kind of refinements?” I asked. I wanted him to open up on this subject because I planned to hire an expert to determine whether or not his ideas were still sound.

  “Voice recognition,” he said. “There are recognition programs, but they are primitive. Imagine sitting down at your computer and talking to it. Imagine saying Tower on … boot … word processor,’ and it turns itself on, boots, and sets up the word processor. Imagine saying, ‘Letter format,’ and it sets up the word processor to take a letter. Then you dictate the letter, and your words appear on the screen as you talk. When you’re finished you might want to make a correction or two with the keyboard. Then you say, ‘Save letter in Acme file and print. Print envelope.’ It does it all. You might have to fold the letter and stuff it in the envelope, but the computer has printed the postage on the envelope, which is ready to go.”

  “How about a laptop?” Len asked.

  “We have one. But I think the big future is with the multifunction, easy-to-use desktop computer. Given a choice between a computer that can do all the things I just mentioned, plus hundreds of other jobs, with full automation, and one you can carry around in your briefcase, more users will want the functions.”

  “You’re going to run Windows?” Len asked.

  “I’m afraid we are.”

  I changed the subject. “Have you ever been in a Cheeks store, Mr. Malloy?”

  “You bet. When you fellows proposed to come to Houston and talk, I went to the Cheeks store in the Galleria and took a look. Bought Becky a nightie, too. Better than that, I asked my bank to give me a rundown on you. Hope you won’t think that’s pushy, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Not at all. You can bet we’ve done a study of you. And … let’s make it Jerry and Len, also Vicky and Therèse.”

  “Sure. Tom and Becky.”

  “The nightie is great,” said Becky. “I’m going over to the Galleria and look into that store for myself.”

  “I hope you won’t mind my asking this question so soon,” said Tom, “but why does a company in your line of business want to acquire a company in my line?”

  Len answered. “You just said yourself that one of your problems is marketing. We are a marketing company. Sure, we have great designs, but the secret of Gazelle, Incorporated is marketing.”

  I took it up. “One of your problems, Tom, is that people don’t know about Sphere. People who do, people who used to run Spheres, swear by you, but there aren’t enough of them.”

  My God, what was I saying? We had no intention
whatever of selling his Sphere computer. We were going to turn Sphere, Incorporated into an assembler of microprocessors, which would not be sold to the public but to a limited number of manufacturers who would incorporate them in their products.

  And what the hell was I thinking? I hardly knew what a microprocessor was.

  “I’ve told Tom,” said Becky, “that we ought to look at how Dell, for example, works. They send out beautiful catalogs. Tom has tended to believe that was beneath Sphere’s dignity.”

  “The key to almost every business is marketing,” Len said—surprising me; I had not supposed he had such insights.

  We had ordered oysters on the half shell to begin our dinner, and their delivery interrupted the talk. The table was silent for a moment as we took oysters and began to eat them.

  When talk resumed—

  “It would be a departure for you, though, wouldn’t it?” Tom asked. “I mean, the two lines of business don’t seem to match.”

  “They don’t have to match,” said Len. “Mead was a paper company. Paper! A smokestack industry if ever there was one. Then they went into the computer business and eventually sold off that business for one-point-five billion dollars, cash. The point is, we’ve got investment capital, and you need investment capital.”

  Tom frowned over an oyster. Someone said it was a brave man who first ate an oyster. Giselle had taught me how to eat them: with lemon juice and French bread with butter, and white wine. A sauce of ketchup and horseradish was an abomination, she had insisted. None of that was on the table.

  “You’ll want control,” said Tom.

  “Enough to guide the company into a new line of business,” Len said.

  “And what is that?”

  Len explained what Zhang Feng had in mind.

  “Assemble Chinese components onto circuit boards! Gentlemen, there is no way Sphere is going to do that.”

  “Sphere will run quality-control checks on the components,” Len said, “and assure itself the components are good. It’s a coming line of business.”

  “I’m inclined to say no to this,” said Tom.

  “You may not have the luxury,” I told him. “You’ve got a lot of debt out. If we buy up enough of that, we will take control of Sphere, Incorporated whether you like it or not.”

  I could have sworn I saw a glitter of triumph in Becky’s eyes.

  “And what happens to Sphere Four?” Tom asked dolefully.

  “We’ll look into it. Maybe—”

  Was I saying that maybe even Gazelle was going into the computer business?

  51

  LEN

  Zhang Feng had gotten us interested in a business about which my father knew nothing and I knew very little more. It would be essential for us to bring aboard a computer guru.

  But where to find one?

  Middleton put out inquiries. So did Scheck.

  Computer types did not flock to the offices of a company known for selling women’s underwear. How would that look on their precious résumés?

  Each one who came in was flawed. One was a drinker. One smoked—which is a no-no around computers, not to mention around our offices. References and letters of recommendation are useless. Who would give as a reference or solicit a letter from anyone except someone who was going to endorse the candidate in glowing terms?

  I interviewed one candidate who had never in his entire life associated with anyone or with any enterprise that was not identified with his religion. He had gone to religious schools and worked for religious institutions, was a member of religious organizations, was married in his faith, and was making certain that his children were being educated in that faith. I will not say what faith it was; that doesn’t make any difference. He was too parochial for Gazelle.

  I interviewed a young man who, in spite of his doctorate in mathematics from an American university, could not speak English. He had been passed through the public schools and made his way to his Ph.D. without being able to read or speak English.

  I interviewed candidates who came in with chips on their shoulders and literally defied me not to hire them. If they didn’t get the job, they would know what I was: sexist, racist, anti-this, or anti-that.

  Hiring is not an easy process, particularly when you want someone in whom you can place your confidence.

  Eventually she showed up: Elizabeth McAllister.

  Elizabeth was an unfortunate young woman in an important respect. It shouldn’t have made so damned much difference, but it did—Elizabeth was an unattractive girl. And she knew it. She was painfully aware of it.

  It would have been difficult to define what was wrong with her. Actually, nothing was. Her problem simply was that there was too much of her. She was not obese, but she was big, and she was gawky. Horsy is the word people used. A young man in the office told his wife, “You don’t have to worry about my sleeping with Liz. What you have to worry about is that she will step on my foot.”

  Her dishwater-blond hair was coarse and frizzy. Her features were regular but oversized. Her big face was round and flushed.

  She tried to compensate with effervescence. Liz was enthusiastic. When she heard something she agreed with, she bubbled over it. She actually broke into little dances in the office.

  She was intelligent. She was articulate. She had a doctorate in computer science from the University of Michigan. She should have easily found employment in a responsible position, but she hadn’t; she came to us from a decidedly minor position in a big company.

  “What do you think of Sphere computers?” I asked her during her interview.

  “They’re obsolete,” she said simply.

  “Why?”

  “Because they ran out of development money, I imagine. The company made a big mistake. They insisted their computer must run their own proprietary operating system, which meant it could not run any off-the-shelf software.”

  This was exactly what we had been told in Guangzhou and again in Hong Kong, by Zhang Feng.

  “Who wanted a system that could not run Visi-Calc or WordStar?” she asked. “Or wants one that can’t run Windows today? Or Word or WordPerfect or Quicken? A lot of people swore by Sphere. I played with one in the lab. It was a good machine. But it’s practically worthless today. Practically? It is worthless.”

  “What would it cost to upgrade it?” I asked.

  “A lot more than it would be worth,” she said. “There’s too much competition out there, already established with good names. Dell. Hewlett-Packard. Micron. Gateway. Not to mention IBM and Compaq.”

  “Well … just suppose.”

  “You couldn’t do it without Tom Malloy,” she said. “And I’m not sure you could do it with him. He could be a major impediment.”

  “Why?”

  “He might insist on keeping the major features of the old Sphere. You might have a difficult time weaning him off his original ideas.”

  “But you also say we couldn’t do it without him.”

  “Mr. Cooper, computer manufacturing today is mostly just a matter of buying components and assembling them. The components come from Intel, Texas Instruments, and so on.”

  “Are you saying we could assemble a computer and put the Sphere name on it?”

  Her chin rose. Her big blue eyes opened wider. “Is that what you’re thinking of doing?”

  “Well … something like that. Maybe. What is the Sphere name worth?”

  “It stands for innovation and quality,” she said without hesitation. “Tom Malloy would campaign against you fiercely if you tried to change that.”

  She had said pretty much what we had deduced. I had to believe she knew her business. I had Middleton and Scheck interview her. I called my father in Florida. I offered her a job.

  * * *

  I soon learned more about Liz. She was starved for affection. She wanted a man, sure, but she wanted respect from women; she wanted people to like her. She was often misunderstood. Too often men took her affability for an invitation.


  She called people “honey” and “darling.” From others it might have been taken in a different way, but from her it was just an element of her personality.

  I let her teach me about some computer programs, and she would stand behind me as I sat at the keyboard and say things like, “C’mon now, honey babe. You’ve done it before, remember? Like last time, sweet.” She would lean forward to point at something on the screen, and I would feel her big, soft breasts pressing against my neck and shoulder. I don’t know if she was unconscious of that or did it purposefully. Outwardly, she was happy, exuberant even. I would understand in time that she was starved for affection.

  Anyway, we made it plain to her what we intended to do with Sphere if we acquired it. She expressed enthusiasm for the idea.

  She went to Texas to have a look at Sphere and came back with a report.

  “All that’s keeping the Sphere company afloat right now is their laser printer.”

  “Their what?”

  “Laser printer. It prints your computer output: your text, your spreadsheets, your graphs, your pictures. The Sphere prints fast and with extremely good quality. What’s more, it’s in a reasonable price range for that kind of equipment. Malloy was smart enough to make his printer compatible with just about anything. It can print from any computer, even the Apple line. The hardware of it is mostly outside stuff, but the software that runs it is strictly Malloy and company.”

  “‘And company?’”

  “A few of their key people have remained loyal to Tom Malloy and are still there. There’s a rumor afloat that a New York company with more money than good sense is about to bail Sphere out and make it a comer again.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning us, of course!” She laughed. “The very rumor of us is what’s holding some of those people. They dream of returning to the glory days.”

  She gave us a written report, which Scheck and Middleton pronounced “competent” and “thorough.”

  One day I called her into my office.