Michael Crichton - Rising Sun

by Rising Sun [lit]

  "So much for a free press."

  "Hey," Ken said. "This is not the time for sophomore bullshit. You know how it works. The American press reports the prevailing opinion. The prevailing opinion is the opinion of the group in power. The Japanese are now in power. The press reports the prevailing opinion as usual. No surprises. Just take care."

  "I will."

  "And don't hesitate to call, if you decide you want to arrange mail service."

  * * *

  I wanted to talk to Connor. I was beginning to understand why Connor had been worried, and why he had wanted to conclude the investigation quickly. Because a well-mounted campaign of innuendo is a fearsome thing. A skillful practitioner — and the Weasel was skillful — would arrange it so that a new story came out, day after day, even when nothing happened. You got headlines like GRAND JURY UNDECIDED ON POLICEMAN'S GUILT when in fact the grand jury hadn't met yet. But people saw the headlines, day after day, and drew their own conclusions.

  The truth was, there was always a way to spin it. At the end of the innuendo campaign, if your subject was found blameless, you could still mount a headline like GRAND JURY FAILS TO FIND POLICEMAN GUILTY or DISTRICT ATTORNEY UNWILLING TO PROSECUTE ACCUSED COP. Headlines like that were as bad as a conviction.

  And there was no way to bounce back from weeks of negative press. Everybody remembered the accusation. Nobody remembered the exoneration. That was human nature. Once you were accused, it was tough to get back to normal.

  It was getting creepy, and I had a lot of bad feelings. I was a little preoccupied, pulling into the parking lot next to the physics department at U.S.C., when the phone rang again. It was assistant chief Olson.

  "Peter."

  "Yes, sir."

  "It's almost ten o'clock. I thought you'd be down here putting the tapes on my desk. You promised them to me."

  "I've been having trouble getting the tapes copied."

  "Is that what you've been doing?"

  "Sure. Why?"

  "Because from the calls I get, it sounds like you aren't dropping this investigation," Jim Olson said. "In the last hour, you've been out asking questions at a Japanese research institute. Then you've interrogated a scientist who works for a Japanese research institute. You're hanging around some Japanese seminar. Let's get it straight, Peter. Is the investigation over, or not?"

  "It's over," I said. "I'm just trying to get the tapes copied."

  "Make sure that's all it is," he said.

  "Right, Jim."

  "For the good of the whole department — and the individuals in it — I want this thing behind us."

  "Right, Jim."

  "I don't want to lose control of this situation."

  "I understand."

  "I hope you do," he said. "Get the copies made, and get your ass down here." And he hung up.

  I parked the car, and went into the physics building.

  ☼

  I waited at the top of the lecture hall while Phillip Sanders finished his lecture. He stood in front of a blackboard covered with complex formulas. There were about thirty students in the room, most of them seated down near the front. I could see the backs of their heads.

  Dr. Sanders was about forty years old, one of those energetic types, in constant motion, pacing back and forth, tapping the equations on the blackboard in short emphatic jabs with his chalk as he pointed to the "signal covariant ratio determination" and the "factorial delta bandwidth noise." I couldn't even guess what subject he was teaching. Finally I concluded it must be electrical engineering.

  When the bell rang on the hour, the class stood and packed up their bags. I was startled: nearly everyone in the class was Asian, both men and women. Those that weren't Oriental were Indian or Pakistani. Out of thirty students only three were white.

  "That's right," Sanders said to me later, as we walked down the hallway toward his laboratory. "A class like Physics 101 doesn't attract Americans. It's been that way for years. Industry can't find them, either. We would be up shit creek if we didn't have the Orientals and Indians who come here to get doctorates in math and engineering, and then work for American companies."

  We continued down some stairs, and turned left. We were in a basement passageway. Sanders walked quickly.

  "But the trouble is, it's changing," he continued. "My Asian students are starting to go home. Koreans are going back to Korea. Taiwanese the same. Even Indians are returning home. The standard of living is going up in their countries, and there's more opportunity back home now. Some of these foreign countries have large numbers of well-trained people." He led me briskly down a flight of stairs. "Do you know what city has the highest number of Ph.D.'s per capita in the world?"

  "Boston?"

  "Seoul, Korea. Think about that as we rocket into the twenty-first century."

  Now we were going down another corridor. Then briefly outside, into sunlight, down a covered walkway, and back into another building. Sanders kept glancing back over his shoulder, as if he was afraid of losing me. But he never stopped talking.

  "And with foreign students going home, we don't have enough engineers to do American research. To create new American technology. It's a simple balance sheet. Not enough trained people. Even big companies like IBM are starting to have trouble. Trained people simply don't exist. Watch the door."

  The door swung back toward me. I went through. I said, "But if there are all these high-tech job opportunities, won't they begin to attract students?"

  "Not like investment banking. Or law." Sanders laughed. "America may lack engineers and scientists, but we lead the world in the production of lawyers. America has half the lawyers in the entire world. Think of that." He shook his head.

  "We have four percent of the world population. We have eighteen percent of the world economy. But we have fifty percent of the lawyers. And thirty-five thousand more every year, pouring out of the schools. That's where our productivity's directed. That's where our national focus is. Half our TV shows are about lawyers. America has become Land of Lawyers. Everybody suing. Everybody disputing. Everybody in court. After all, three quarters of a million American lawyers have to do something. They have to make their three hundred thousand a year. Other countries think we're crazy."

  He unlocked a door. I saw a sign that said ADVANCED IMAGING LABORATORY in hand-painted lettering, and an arrow. Sanders led me down a long basement hallway.

  "Even our brightest kids are badly educated. The best American kids now rank twelfth in the world, after the industrialized countries of Asia and Europe. And that's our top students. At the bottom, it's worse. One-third of high school graduates can't read a bus schedule. They're illiterate."

  We came to the end of the hallway, and turned right. "And the kids I see are lazy. Nobody wants to work. I teach physics. It takes years to master. But all the kids want to dress like Charlie Sheen and make a million dollars before they're twenty-eight. The only way you can make that kind of money is in law, investment banking, Wall Street. Places where the game is paper profits, something for nothing. But that's what the kids want to do, these days."

  "Maybe at U.S.C."

  "Trust me. Everywhere. They all watch television."

  He swung another door open. Still another corridor. This one smelled moldy, damp.

  "I know, I know. I'm old-fashioned," Sanders said. "I still believe that every human being stands for something. You stand for something. I stand for something. Just being on this planet, wearing the clothes we wear, doing the work we do, we each stand for something. And in this little corner of the world," he said, "we stand for cutting the crap. We analyze network news and see where they have been fucking around with the tape. We analyze TV commercials and show where the tricks are— "

  Sanders suddenly stopped.

  "What's the matter?"

  "Wasn't there someone else?" he said. "Didn't you come here with someone else?"

  "No. Just me."

  "Oh, good." Sanders continued on at his same breakneck pace.
"I always worry about losing people down here. Ah, okay. Here we are. The lab. Good. This door is just where I left it."

  With a flourish, he threw the door open. I stared at the room, shocked.

  "I know it doesn't look like much," Sanders said. That, I thought, was a serious understatement.

  I was looking at a basement space with rusty pipes and fittings hanging down from the ceiling. The green linoleum on the floor curled up in several places to expose concrete beneath. Arranged around the room were battered wooden tables, each heaped with equipment, and drooping wires down the sides. At each table, a student sat facing monitors. In several places, water plinked into buckets on the floor. Sanders said, "The only space we could get was here in the basement, and we don't have the money to put in little amenities like a ceiling. Never mind, doesn't matter. Just watch your head."

  He moved forward into the room. I am about a hundred and eighty centimeters tall, not quite six feet, and I had to crouch to enter the room. From somewhere in the ceiling above, I heard a harsh rasping sizzle.

  "Skaters," Sanders explained.

  "Sorry?"

  "We're underneath the ice rink. You get used to it. Actually, it's not bad now. When they have hockey practice in the afternoon, then it's a bit noisy."

  We moved deeper into the room. I felt like I was in a submarine. I glanced at the students at their workstations. They were all intent on their work; nobody looked up as we passed. Sanders said, "What kind of tape do you want to duplicate?"

  "Eight-millimeter Japanese. Security tape. It might be difficult."

  "Difficult? I doubt that very much," Sanders said. "You know, back in my youth, I wrote most of the early video image-enhancement algorithms. You know, despeckling and inversion and edge tracing. That stuff. The Sanders algorithms were the ones everybody used. I was a graduate student at Cal Tech then. I worked at JPL in my spare time. No, no, we can do it."

  I handed him a tape. He looked at it. "Cute little bugger."

  I said, "What happened? To all your algorithms?"

  "There was no commercial use for them," he said. "Back in the eighties, American companies like RCA and GE got out of commercial electronics entirely. My image enhancement programs didn't have much use in America." He shrugged. "So I tried to sell them to Sony, in Japan."

  "And?"

  "The Japanese had already patented the products. In Japan."

  "You mean they already had the algorithms?"

  "No. They just had patents. In Japan, patenting is a form of war. The Japanese patent like crazy. And they have a strange system. It takes eight years to get a patent in Japan, but your application is made public after eighteen months, after which royalties are moot. And of course Japan doesn't have reciprocal licensing agreements with America. It's one of the ways they keep their edge.

  "Anyway, when I got to Japan I found Sony and Hitachi had some related patents and they had done what is called 'patent flooding.' Meaning they covered possible related uses. They didn't have the rights to use my algorithms — but I discovered I didn't have the rights, either. Because they had already patented the use of my invention." He shrugged. "It's complicated to explain. Anyway, that's ancient history. By now the Japanese have devised much more complicated video software, far surpassing anything we have. They're years ahead of us now. But we struggle along in this lab. Ah. Just the person we need. Dan. Are you busy?"

  A young woman looked up from the computer console. Large eyes, horn-rim glasses, dark hair. Her face was partially blocked by the ceiling pipes.

  "You're not Dan," Sanders said, sounding surprised. "Where's Dan, Theresa?"

  "Picking up a midterm," Theresa said. "I'm just helping run the real-time progressions. They're finishing now." I had the impression that she was older than the other students. It was hard to say why, exactly. It certainly wasn't her clothes: she wore a bright colored headband and a U2 T-shirt under a jeans jacket. But she had a calm quality that made her seem older.

  "Can you switch to something else?" Sanders said, walking around the table to look at the monitor. "Because we have a rush job here. We have to help out the police." I followed Sanders, ducking pipes.

  "Sure, I guess," the woman said. She started to shut down units on the desk. Her back was turned to me, and then finally I could see her. She was dark, exotic-looking, almost Eurasian. In fact she was beautiful, drop-dead beautiful. She looked like one of those high cheek-boned models in magazines. And for a moment I was confused, because this woman was too beautiful to be working in some basement electronics laboratory. It didn't make sense.

  "Say hello to Theresa Asakuma," he said. "The only Japanese graduate student working here."

  "Hi," I said. I blushed. I felt stupid. I felt that information was coming at me too fast. And all things considered, I would rather not have a Japanese handling these tapes. But her first name wasn't Japanese, and she didn't look Japanese, she looked Eurasian or perhaps part Japanese, so exotic, maybe she was even—

  "Good morning, Lieutenant," she said. She extended her left hand, the wrong hand, for me to shake. She held it out to me sideways, the way someone does when their right hand is injured.

  I shook hands with her. "Hello, Miss Asakuma."

  "Theresa."

  "Okay."

  "Isn't she beautiful?" Sanders said, acting as if he took credit for it. "Just beautiful."

  "Yes," I said. "Actually, I'm surprised you're not a model."

  There was an awkward moment. I couldn't tell why. She turned quickly away.

  "It never interested me," she said.

  And Sanders immediately jumped in and said, "Theresa, Lieutenant Smith needs us to copy some tapes. These tapes."

  Sanders held one out to her. She took it in her left hand and held it to the light. Her right hand remained bent at the elbow, pressed to her waist. Then I saw that her right arm was withered, ending in a fleshy stump protruding beyond the sleeve of her jeans jacket. It looked like the arm of a Thalidomide baby.

  "Quite interesting," she said, squinting at the tape. "Eight-millimeter high density. Maybe it's the proprietary digital format we've been hearing about. The one that includes real-time image enhancement."

  "I'm sorry, I don't know," I said. I was feeling foolish for having said anything about being a model. I dug into my box and brought out the playback machine.

  Theresa immediately took a screwdriver and removed the top. She bent over the innards. I saw a green circuit board, a black motor, and three small crystal cylinders. "Yes. It's the new setup. Very slick. Dr. Sanders, look: they're doing it with just three heads. The board must generate component RGB, because over here — you think this is compression circuitry?"

  "Probably digital to analog converter," Sanders said. "Very neat. So small." He turned to me, holding up the box. "You know how the Japanese can make things this way and we can't? They kaizen 'em. A process of deliberate, patient, continual refinements. Each year the products get a little better, a little smaller, a little cheaper. Americans don't think that way. Americans are always looking for the quantum leap, the big advance forward. Americans try to hit a home run — to knock it out of the park — and then sit back. The Japanese just hit singles all day long, and they never sit back. So with something like this, you're looking at an expression of philosophy as much as anything."

  He talked like this for a while, pivoting the cylinders, admiring it. Finally I said, "Can you copy the tapes?"

  "Sure," Theresa said. "From the converter, we can run a signal out of this machine and lay it down on whatever media you like. You want three-quarter? Optical master? VHS?"

  "VHS," I said.

  "That's easy," she said.

  "But will it be an accurate copy? The people at JPL said they couldn't guarantee the copy would be accurate."

  "Oh, hell, JPL," Sanders said. "They just talk like that because they work for the government. We get things done here. Right Theresa?"

  But Theresa wasn't listening. I watched her plugging cables
and wires, moving swiftly with her good hand, using her stump to stabilize and hold the box. Like many disabled people, her movements were so fluid it was hardly noticeable that her right hand was missing. Soon she had the small playback machine hooked to a second recorder, and several different monitors.

  "What're all these?"

  "To check the signal."

  "You mean for playback?"

  "No. The big monitor there will show the image. The others let me look at the signal characteristics, and the data map: how the image has been laid down on the tape."

  I said, "You need to do that?"

  "No. I just want to snoop. I'm curious about how they've set up this high-density format."

  Sanders said to me, "What is the actual source material?"

  "It's from an office security camera."

  "And this tape is original?"

  "I think so. Why?"

  "Well, if it's original material we want to be extra careful with it," Sanders said. He was talking to Theresa, instructing her. "We don't want to set up any feedback loops scrambling the media surface. Or signal leaks off the heads that will compromise the integrity of the data stream."

  "Don't worry," she said. "I got it handled." She pointed to her setup. "See that? It'll warn of an impedance shift. And I'm monitoring the central processor too."

  "Okay," Sanders said. He was beaming like a proud parent.

  "How long will this take?" I said.

  "Not long. We can lay down the signal at very high speed. The rate limit is a function of the playback device, and it seems to have a fast-forward scan. So, maybe two or three minutes per tape."