Hot Shot

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  Her eyes swept over the case and then stopped as she found what she had been looking for-a brightly colored sticker mounted crookedly on the side of the metal housing. In hot pink letters it announced boss lady. One of her assistants had put the sticker on the machine as a joke. This was her missing computer.

  She called Yank from the telephone in the beauty salon. He was awake but vague. She repeated her instructions twice, hoping he would follow them. Then she sat down in the quiet garage along with the ghosts of her past and waited.

  He arrived more quickly than she had expected. Without asking any questions, he set four of the computers on the workbench, including Susannah's old machine, and turned them on. Two of the machines were completely dead, and their screens remained dark. Two of them, including her computer, responded normally.

  He tilted one of the nonfunctioning machines onto its side and unscrewed the case. "Somebody's been here first," he said. "The board is missing."

  Susannah peered inside and saw that the printed circuit board that held many of the computer's components had been removed.

  Yank moved the two machines that were still working over to the old burn-in box and left them running. Then he turned his attention to the computers on the floor. "Let's see what we've got here. One by one."

  By the time they were finished, they discovered six dead machines and seven that still worked. Two of the dead machines still contained their circuit boards. Yank removed them and began testing them.

  She pulled up one of the old metal stools and watched him, taking care not to disturb his concentration, even though she itched to question him. Eventually her back began to ache. Slipping off the stool, she went into the Pretty Please Salon, where she made a pot of coffee.

  She was walking back into the garage with two steaming mugs in her hand when a banging noise erupted from one of the working computers that had been plugged into the burn-in box. Startled, she moved closer, only to realize that the awful noise was coming from her old machine. It sounded as if the disk drive head was slamming back and forth. Coffee splashed over the side of the mug and spilled on the back of her hand as the noise grew worse. Instead of behaving like a sweetly engineered piece of high-tech equipment, her beautiful little Blaze was banging away like an old Model T.

  Abruptly, the machine grew quiet and the screen went dark. A tiny wisp of smoke curled from the case.

  "Interesting," Yank murmured, with typical understatement.

  "Interesting? My God, Yank, what happened?"

  "It died," he said.

  She wanted to scream at him to be more specific, but she knew it wouldn't do any good.

  He pulled her old machine from the burn-in box and carried it to the workbench. As he tilted it onto its side, he said, "Why don't you go on? This is going to take a while."

  She hesitated, then decided she would go crazy just standing around watching Yank and waiting for him to say something. When Yank knew what was wrong, he would tell her. Until then, not even the threat of torture could pull an opinion from him.

  She picked up her purse. "Work on this by yourself, Yank. When you find out what's happening, report to me directly. Don't talk to Sam. And don't talk to Mitch, either." She felt guilty for cutting Mitch out, but she wanted a little time to absorb the facts first before she told him what was happening.

  He studied her closely, but didn't comment.

  She had an appointment with her attorney that afternoon to discuss the divorce. Paige went with her, and afterward they did some shopping together. Although Susannah enjoyed her time with her sister, her mind was back in the Gamble garage trying to sift through what she had seen.

  Only one moment of tension marred their afternoon together. As they were driving back to the town house, Susannah, in an attempt to encourage her sister to look for organizations where she could be useful, mentioned some of the local charities SysVal had involved itself with over the past few years. Perhaps it was because she was so worried about what she had discovered in the garage that she didn't guard her tongue carefully enough.

  "I don't know whether or not you're aware of it, Paige, but ever since Father died, FBT has been doing a lousy job of getting money into the community. It's gotten even worse lately. Cal's great on high-profile grants-museums, symphonies-but he won't involve the company with drug programs, alcoholism, the homeless-anything that's down and dirty."

  Paige's expression grew distant. "I won't talk about anything that has to do with Cal. He's the one subject that's off limits between us. There aren't very many people on this planet I owe any loyalty to, but Cal stood by me when I didn't have anyone else, and he's one of them."

  Susannah didn't say anything more.

  When they got back to the town house, Susannah found a message from Yank asking her to come to the garage at seven that evening. Paige had already made plans for dinner with a friend. Susannah did some chores around the town house and then drove to Angela's.

  The lights were on in the garage when she got there. As she let herself in, she saw that Yank was still hunched over the workbench, his shirt pulled tight across his back. For a fraction of a moment the years flew away and she was a runaway bride again, watching a skinny egghead genius at work. But then Yank turned toward her and the illusion slipped away. The face of the man before her was strong and arresting, full of character and an almost unearthly sweetness. This man was self-confident in the deepest, most private way.

  "The others will be here soon," he said quietly.

  She stopped in her tracks. "Others?"

  "We're partners, Susannah. We have to solve this together."

  She experienced a disturbing combination of anger and guilt. "I gave you a direct order, and you chose to disregard it."

  "Yes."

  "I told you not to talk to anyone until you'd talked to me."

  "It was an improper order, Susannah. Mitch should be here soon. I didn't call Sam, however, until just a few minutes ago. It will take him a while to get here, so the three of us will have a little time to talk first."

  Headlights flashed through the side window as another car pulled in. Moments later Mitch stalked through the door. "What's this about?" he asked abruptly.

  "We have a problem, I'm afraid," Yank replied.

  Mitch's eyes roamed the garage, taking in the computers, the workbench, and coming to rest on her. She hoped he didn't guess that he was here at Yank's invitation, not her own.

  Yank cleared his throat and began to speak. "We produced thirteen test models of the Blaze HI because Sam wanted the computer in use for at least four months before it went on the market."

  She could almost see Mitch mentally counting the machines scattered around the garage. "I remember. They've performed like champions. A few of the employees had them. Some of our customers. A couple went to elementary schools."

  "Susannah had one in her office," Yank continued, "but it disappeared while she was in Greece. When she tried to find it, she discovered that hers wasn't the only one missing."

  "Why didn't you tell me about this?" Mitch asked.

  "In light of our other problems, I didn't think it was that important."

  "Our test models disappear, and you don't think it's important?"

  "It wasn't like that." She didn't like the way he was putting her on the defensive, so she recited the sequence of events coldly.

  After she told of her phone call from Angela, Yank took over and described what he had found. He mentioned the missing circuit boards on some of the machines and recounted the failure he and Susannah had witnessed in her computer. "It was an amazing piece of luck for me to actually be able to watch Susannah's machine fail. If that hadn't happened, it would have taken me much longer to understand the problem. All of the trouble has its source in one of the ROM chips."

  ROM-standing for "read only memory"-was a custom microchip containing instructions that allowed the computer to perform automatically a specific set of tasks. Susannah listened carefully as Yank detailed h
ow he had pinpointed the source of the trouble.

  While Mitch questioned him more closely, Susannah mentally reconstructed the process of making a ROM chip. First the SysVal engineers decided what specific jobs the chip was required to perform. Then they wrote a list of instructions for those tasks in machine language. When the instructions were complete, the listing was sent to a ROM chip manufacturing firm where the chip was produced. For years, SysVal had used an Oakland-based firm named Dayle-Wells. The firm was efficient, reliable, and stood by its work.

  "We've had chip failures before," Mitch said, when he was finally satisfied with Yank's explanation. "It's not something we take lightly, but it certainly doesn't justify all this secrecy."

  Susannah had been thinking the same thing. Each tiny Sen-Sen-sized microchip was housed in a rectangular casing about an inch long. The casing had always reminded her of a caterpillar because it had a series of pointed legs at the bottom that fit into minuscule slots on the computer board. It was a relatively simple matter to unplug a faulty chip and plug in a good one.

  Once again Mitch turned his attention to Susannah. "I assume Sam is behind this. Do you think this is related to his rush to sell the company?"

  "I can't imagine what the link is, but it's difficult for me to believe this is coincidental."

  Mitch gestured toward the computers. "But why all the subterfuge? Just because one batch of chips fails doesn't mean that they're all bad. It's a problem, but it's not unsolvable."

  "Remember that we're dealing with a ROM chip that contains software," Yank said, "and the possibility that I find alarming-"

  But whatever Yank was about to say was cut short as Sam slammed into the garage. He looked wild, like a man on the brink of losing control. "Is it coincidence that I'm the last person here, or did my invitation have a different time printed on it from everyone else's?"

  Mitch's features hardened. "You're lucky you got an invitation at all."

  Sam turned on Susannah. For a moment, she almost thought he would strike her. Mitch must have thought so, too, because he took a step forward.

  "This is your fault," Sam shouted. "You pick away and pick away without the slightest goddamn idea of what you're doing-always second-guessing me, thinking you know better."

  "That's enough," Mitch interrupted. "Why don't you just cut through all the crap and tell us what's going on here."

  Sam looked around at the empty cartons and the machines scattered everywhere. The tendons of his neck were stretched taut, his eyebrows drawn so close together they looked like a single line. "You should have done it my way. Ail of you should have trusted me. I was willing to take the responsibility. You should have let me do it. Why didn't you let me do it?"

  "Because it's not your company," Susannah retorted.

  His arm slashed the air. "It's not going to be yours, either, for very long because it's going up in smoke."

  "A chip failure is hardly the end of the world," she countered.

  "Oh, no? How many Blaze III's have we shipped since we introduced the machine?"

  "Nearly two hundred thousand. But just because we have a bad part in the test models doesn't mean the ROM chip in every HI we've manufactured is bad."

  "Wrong again," Sam sneered.

  "How can you know that?" she asked. "You can't possibly-"

  "They're all bad. Every III we've shipped is going to fail after one thousand hours of use. Statistically, that'll average out to about a year-less time under office use, more time under home use."

  "One year!" She caught her breath while Mitch swore softly. She wanted to reject Sam's conclusion, but she couldn't. He would never have predicted something this dire if he weren't absolutely certain.

  She tried to sort through the facts logically. They'd faced recalls before, but never one this massive. She began thinking aloud, hoping to reassure herself as she reassured them. "It'll be a huge headache, but we can deal with it. Dayle-Wells is a reliable firm. If they've made a bad chip, they'll take financial responsibility for it." In her mind, she was already envisioning the logistics of this kind of recall. Once the outer case was opened, the actual replacement of the ROM chip was a relatively minor procedure. The old one was simply unplugged from its slots and a new one inserted. But the sheer number of machines involved made the recall complex, and it had to be done before the faulty chip physically destroyed the computer by smashing the disk drive head.

  "Little Miss Pollyanna," Sam scoffed. "Always looking for the bright side. Well, babe, this time there isn't one. Dayle-Wells isn't responsible for the bad chip. We are."

  Mitch's head shot up. Susannah felt as if a cold fist had clutched her spine.

  Sam began to pace. "The ROM listing Dayle-Wells received from us was buggy."

  Mitch spun around. "That's impossible. We have a dozen safeguards built in to keep that sort of thing from happening."

  "Weil, it happened this time. Five lines-just five lousy lines of bum code out of a hundred-but those five lines programmed a time bomb into the machines. Every Blaze III we've shipped will work for exactly one thousand hours, and then it will fail. The disk drive slams its head back and forth. It destroys itself and burns out the power supply. After that-nothing." His voice had a harsh, raspy edge. "One thousand hours from the date the computer is first turned on, every one of those III's is going down."

  Yank spoke thoughtfully. "The first of those failures will be showing up any day now, if they haven't already. Others are going to take years."

  Dates and numbers spun like a roulette wheel in Susannah's head. They had charts that were amazingly accurate at predicting computer-use time. At best, they had only a few months to prepare. Once again, she began to think aloud. "We can handle the recall. It'll be expensive-it'll definitely hurt-but it won't kill the company."

  "Susannah's right," Mitch said. "We can set up some sort of centralized system. Move a few hundred of our people into temporary service positions and send them out into the field. Thank God it's just one chip. We take out the old one, plug in the new one. We can do it."

  Sam hunched his shoulders and turned his back to them.

  Yank's voice was strained. "No. No, I'm afraid we can't. Come here and take a look."

  With a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, Susannah got up from the arm of the couch and walked to the workbench. Mitch fell into step beside her. Sam stayed where he was with his back turned away from them. Whatever Yank was about to show them, Sam had already seen.

  Susannah gazed down into the orderly, internal world of the Blaze III. Its microchips were laid out like rows of miniature houses on the neat little village streets of the green printed circuit board. With the tip of a pair of long-nosed pliers, Yank singled out one microchip. Susannah leaned forward to take a look.

  "This is the bad chip," Yank said. "Look. It's soldered. The chip is permanently soldered to the board." He paused a moment, giving his words time to sink in. "We can't do a simple little chip swap. This particular part was designed to be permanent. That means we have to replace the whole circuit board on every Blaze HI we've ever made."

  Susannah's bones seemed to have lost the ability to support her. She felt as if she had just been punched in the belly. They couldn't afford to replace the circuit board on every machine they had manufactured. The cost would be prohibitive.

  They didn't look at each other. Susannah stared down at the circuit board, Mitch at the litter of tools on the workbench. Silence ticked away like a doomsday clock. All of them knew that Yank had just pronounced their death sentence.

  Chapter 28

  The four of them sat silently around Angela's kitchen table. Mitch held his reading glasses between his fingers and folded one stem in and out. Sam rolled an empty can of Coke between his open palms. Susannah rubbed her right temple with the pad of her thumb. She had just done the unthinkable. She had made the phone call that shut down the Blaze HI assembly line.

  Yank stared off into space. He had taken himself to a place so far awa
y he might not have been with them at all.

  Mitch finally spoke. "I can't even conceive of how many hundreds of millions this is going to cost."

  No one said anything. Even a giant company like IBM or FBT would have difficulty recovering from this sort of financial catastrophe, and a young company like SysVal simply didn't stand a chance.

  Susannah's hand curled into a fist. If only some of the III's had been bad, they could have handled it, but the fact that the machines they had shipped last week, yesterday, the ones that had come off the line that very morning-the fact that all of them were bad-made the situation so hopeless her mind could barely absorb it.

  Yank slowly re-entered their world. "Who wrote the bad code?"

  The Coke can slapped between Sam's palms. "I don't know for sure. My guess is that it was one of the engineers who was working on the instructions for the chip. A guy named Ed Fiella. He only worked for us about six months, then he quit."

  "Did you try to find him?"

  "Yeah, but he disappeared, so I let it go. I couldn't ask too many questions or people would have been able to figure out that something was wrong."

  "No one else knows about this?" Mitch asked sharply.

  Sam shook his head. "Until today, I was the only one who had all the pieces."

  Susannah rubbed the pulse in her temple. "How could you keep something like this secret?"

  "I used a couple of independent engineers in Boston to run a few tests, some guys in Atlanta-people who weren't likely to bump into each other while they were out jogging. And I didn't let any of them know this involved anything more than a couple of prototypes."

  Yank looked searchingly at Sam. "You realize that these failures aren't accidental. Everything happens too specifically. The machine works for a thousand hours and then it stops. And when it fails, it does it spectacularly. All that noise-the disk drive banging. That's too bizarre to be accidental."

  "You're saying someone-this Fiella, probably-deliberately planted a bug in the ROM chip?" Susannah asked.