The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

  On descending into the Shop the morning after my arrival in California, I find it packed with equipment and no fewer than five people seated at workbenches assembling microcomputers and building them into shoes. Norman, trying to ferret out a loose connection, manipulates the probes of an oscilloscope inside one of the radio receivers. Sine waves flash across the screen as he makes contact.

  Doyne wields a solder gun over a PC board onto which he is mounting a collection of RAMs and ROMs. Sitting in a cloud of resinous smoke, he squints down at the chips and their miniature pins. “These were working fine yesterday when I had them breadboarded,” he mutters, “but today they’re not showing any signs of life at all.”

  Letty stands against the wall under the buffalo head of Manifest Destiny. Holding a piece of sandpaper, she leans over the roulette wheel and listens to the thunk of the swollen rotor rubbing against the stator. On the opposite side of the room, Mark faces a power saw mounted into a wooden frame. “Hold your ears,” he yells. “This is going to hurt for a minute.” Wearing goggles, with his hair and beard full of fiber glass dust, he makes a ferocious racket trimming the edges of a PC board. Rob Lentz, newly installed in the fall of 1981 as a full-fledged Projector, sits in the middle of the room at a workbench covered by batteries, antenna wire, connectors, resistors, and plastic boxes shaped like the heel of a shoe.

  Wearing red bib overalls and no shirt over his large frame, Lentz is a blue-eyed southern Californian in strapping good health. He sports a mustache and medium-length brown hair parted in the middle and puffed around his ears. With strong arms and a layer of adipose evenly distributed over his body, he has the well-scrubbed look of a surfer newly beached.

  In spite of ten years’ difference in age, Lentz and Truitt were in the same class together at UC Santa Cruz. Doyne had been Lentz’s teaching assistant for a course in mathematical physics, and Rob Shaw had been his adviser for a senior honors thesis. When Mark went for his job interview at Watkins-Johnson, the classmate whom he met there was Rob Lentz. And when Mark walked out in disgust on learning that it was a military assignment, it was Lentz who had landed the job. Rob stayed at Watkins-Johnson for a year and a half, working his way up through the ranks to become project manager on a $21 million contract to Raytheon for Sparrow missile components. Then he walked out in disgust.

  “When I told them I was quitting, the big bosses took me to lunch and pleaded with me. ‘Rob, we don’t understand. This is our plum contract. Do you want more money? Do you want more people?’ They were falling over themselves to find out why I was leaving. I worked in the VCO division, which was the fastest-growing part of the company. VCO stands for voltage control oscillators. These are high-frequency, small-wavelength radar devices—the same sort of stuff we’re making down here for the Project—but at Watkins-Johnson everything was done half-assed. When they put me in charge of the missile program, it was already two years behind schedule. We were filling orders for military hardware, which meant we had to spend as much time trying to break the stuff as make it. This was your run-of-the-mill, medium-sized electronics company. But the place was a mess, and if that’s the way the electronics business works, then I don’t want to be part of it.

  “At my lunch with the bosses I told them straight out, ‘I don’t like working for the military. I don’t want to argue the morality of it. But I’ll let someone else do the dirty work. It’s leading straight to Armageddon.’ A lot of seemingly good physics ends up in the wrong hands; so I’m thinking of getting out of science and doing art. My brain has a right hemisphere that isn’t getting used enough.”

  Rob considered going to medical school or graduate school or on a cruise to Mexico. He tinkered with a couple of patent ideas and audited Rob Shaw’s lectures on chaos theory. One afternoon he was walking out of the physics building to catch some surf when he ran into Doyne in the corridor. They chatted for a few minutes and then Doyne said, “As long as you’re unemployed, I have a business proposition that might interest you.” They drove into town for an espresso at Caffè Domenica, and Doyne told Rob about the Project.

  “The story didn’t sound believable. So we walked across the river to the house. When I saw the Shop and the roulette wheel and the computers, I thought, ‘This is really neat. It’s the same stuff I’ve been doing at Watkins-Johnson, but it’s anti-nuke physics. It’s high tech for civilians.’ I was looking for something like this and it arrived at just the right moment—a chance to do rebel science.”

  Rob signed up to work on the Project full time for no pay and nothing more certain by way of remuneration than a slice of Eudaemonic Pie. He had enough money for the moment. He could knock off in the afternoons and go surfing. All he cared about was putting his knowledge to use doing something other than building Sparrow missile components. His good-natured appearance down in the Shop came like a shot in the arm for the Project. Mission Control had unexpectedly sent up another good man to join the team already in orbit.

  A year and a half had passed since Doyne and Norman first imagined building a computer in a shoe. Once Mark had joined the Project, the three of them had worked steadily on the new device, which was now finally ready for installation. They had come up with a three-footed system in which the data taker wore a mode switch and low-frequency radio transmitter under the arch of his left foot. In his right shoe he wore a data switch, a microprocessor built into a computer sandwich, three solenoids, a collection of batteries, and a transmitter capable of beaming predictions to a bettor standing up to ten feet away. The bettor’s right shoe—the third foot in the system—contained a microprocessor computer sandwich, a radio receiver and antenna, a battery unit, and three solenoids designed to vibrate, like those of the data taker, under the arch and heel of the foot.

  To pack them into such limited space, the transmitters and other components had been built into special containers shaped like the soles and heels of shoes. Designed for slipping in and out of cavities cut into false-bottomed footwear, these modular units simplified the process of recharging batteries, troubleshooting the system, and otherwise adjusting the computers for a comfortable fit.

  On finishing his silicon sculptures, Mark looked at this new form of ambulatory art and declared, “The components, especially the computer itself, are so solid and so appropriate to their purpose that I find them aesthetically pleasing. They have integrity as objects. I look at them and say, ‘Is there any better way to do this?’ and I see there isn’t.”

  Once Mark had built a prototype version of the system—complete with mode switch, computer sandwich, and battery unit—all that remained was the topological chore of designing a shoe roomy enough to carry them. On returning from his trip to Bali, Doyne asked around town for a shoemaker who specialized in custom work. He found one down the coast in Rio Del Mar, and phoned for an appointment. The Project was a closely guarded secret, especially at this delicate stage of the operation. So Doyne carried to his meeting with the shoemaker not the computer components themselves, but blocks of wood cut to scale. He planned to say nothing about their use.

  On driving to Rio Del Mar, Doyne was surprised to meet a man in his early thirties—tall, tanned, and evidently as hip as many of the other young artisans in the Monterey Bay area. “I need a pair of false-bottomed shoes,” Doyne said. “Nothing illegal, you understand.”

  The man stepped to the front of the store, locked the door, and pulled down the blinds. He led Doyne into a back room and asked him what he had in mind. Doyne produced his blocks of wood and said, “I don’t want to go into the details, but I need to walk around with these fit into a pair of shoes. This big piece goes up front under the toes. This other piece rests behind it under the heel. If you can do that, then you should have no problem getting this smaller unit into the left shoe.”

  “First of all,” said the shoemaker, “I don’t care what line of work you’re in. Drugs, gems, it’s all the same to me. If I don’t ask any questions, you don’t give me any answers. That way you keep your busi
ness to yourself, and I keep my nose clean.

  “Take a look at this,” he said, pulling a pair of walking shoes off the shelf. “They look like your everyday strutters, don’t they? There’s nothing special to them, until you peel back the insole. That’s right,” he said, as Doyne looked inside. “There’s a lot of cargo room in there.

  “It requires some gluing and stitching, but a job like this is relatively straightforward. All you need to do is go out and buy the right kind of shoe—something I can take apart and put back together again without any sign of its being tampered with. You could order custom work and build a shoe from the ground up, but that’ll cost you. That’s why I recommend going with the ready-mades.”

  They shook hands on the deal and agreed to meet the following day in Santa Cruz. In exchange for a guided tour of the local shoe stores, the cobbler wanted Doyne to buy him lunch at Hilary’s, the most expensive restaurant in town. “I’m sure he had no idea what we were doing,” Doyne said. “He probably thought we were transporting drugs, because he told me once he wouldn’t mind receiving a little ‘present’ on our getting back from our trip.

  “This guy turned out to be quite a figure in the community. He showed up for lunch wearing an ascot and sports coat. The waitress must have practiced for weeks to get her smile so perfect. A steady stream of people kept coming by the table to say, ‘Hi. How ya doing? I’d like to drop by the store tomorrow and show you a little something.’”

  After lunch, the shoemaker, Rob Lentz, and Doyne walked down the Pacific Garden Mall. They paused in front of a dozen window displays, while the cobbler offered a running commentary on the nature of footwear. “Penney’s specializes in ladies’ tasseled tennies and nursing whites. Gallenkamp’s, favored by the welfare set, offers your eight-ninety-eight all-plastic special. At Morris Abrams you can get your Padmores and Florsheim’s with real crepe soles and price tags over sixty dollars. These other stores go in for spaghetti-Western cowboy boots, high-heeled moccasins, desert kickers, Birkenstock sandals, and Gucci loafers. But you’ll also notice, if you look around, that a lot of people have said, ‘To hell with the whole thing.’ So they’re walking down the Mall barefoot.”

  Stopping at Herold’s shoe store, which had a window display of loan-officer six-eyelet brogans and Pat Boone loafers, they also saw some Dex and Drifter crepe-soled shoes with the flared toes made popular by the healthy-foot movement of the 1960s. Several jauntier models, influenced by Nike running shoes, looked like duck feet with racing stripes on them. On walking inside, the shoemaker picked a dozen shoes off the racks and sat surrounded by them in the middle of the store.

  “The first thing you need is depth in the sole. So you want to go with crepe or one of the better synthetics. Watch out for this kind of waffling,” he demonstrated to Doyne and Rob, as he flexed the bottom of a shoe with air holes layered into it. “The sole isn’t solid, and when you cut it, it just falls to pieces. You can buy a shoe with a heel or a straight wedge, but in either case you have to have a slipsole. That’s this thin layer inserted between the sole and the upper. Without it, there’s no way you can stitch the shoe back together again.

  “Most of the stuff in here is junk,” he said, peeling back the tongues of shoes and staring inside. “Instead of making shoes with slipsoles and stitching, they just fold the leather over and glue it down. The rest of the story you can pretty well figure out for yourselves,” he concluded, bending a shoe in half. “You want something flexible but solid, with plenty of toe room and no metal shank or other obstructions.”

  A saleslady hovering nearby alternately frowned and asked, “Can I help you?” She looked nervously at the three of them. Beside the shoemaker, dressed in his sports coat and ascot, Doyne was wearing a Balinese tie-dyed T-shirt, shorts, and a pair of down-at-the-heel jogging shoes. Rob, the third member of the party, sported buffalo-chip sandals and red bib overalls, which made him look like a farmboy hybridized out of corn pone and cannabis.

  “We’re in town making a movie,” Doyne told the woman. “And we have some scenes that require shoes with special effects.”

  They bought a pair of Bass walkers and another pair made by Clarks. Three days later the shoes reappeared at Riverside Street, apparently unaltered except for the substitution of wedge soles. The shoes from the outside looked meticulously normal. It was only on lifting up the insoles and peering inside that one discovered cavities large enough for a major drug run from Colombia—or the insertion of mode switches, battery boats, and computer sandwiches.

  The week before Halloween, the Project picked up speed. Letty quit her job and moved back to Santa Cruz. Doyne phoned his boss at Los Alamos and broke the news that he was going to be three months late for work. Rob Lentz gave up surfing in the afternoons. Mark Truitt spent sleepless nights fine-tuning the system. Norman shelved his dissertation and went back to ferreting bugs out of the radio receivers. Rob Shaw played background music on the piano. Grazia Peduzzi cooked pasta for everyone. Lorna paid the bills and tended the garden. Wendy Tanizaki worked three jobs at once so that Mark could stop worrying about money. Everyone started talking the language of computers. Conversations were brief, tactical. At Project meetings held around the dining room table, last-minute tasks were doled out three and four at a time: load chips onto PC boards, build battery boats, tune up receivers, oil the wheel, visit the shoemaker, shop for chips in the Valley, practice on the eye-toe coordination machine, design wardrobes for Las Vegas. Like a theater backstage before opening night, the air thickened with tension and nervous good humor.

  To get computers and players to Las Vegas as soon as possible, the Projectors considered a two-wave approach, with one team leaving for Las Vegas immediately and the second following when more equipment was finished. Doyne was the obvious choice to fill the data taker’s shoes and go off in the first wave. But I was surprised to find myself nominated and elected as the second member of the team, playing the role of high-stakes bettor.

  “We’ll dress you in a cowboy shirt and string tie,” Doyne said. “You’ll do great with a southern drawl. You look like there’s money in your family.”

  “But watch out at someplace like Caesars Palace,” Letty advised. “When they turn on the heat, it can get hot fast.” As soon as you start winning at roulette, a lot of attention comes your way. Pit bosses and floormen nudge in at your elbow. They go from solicitous to threatening as the temperature mounts. At this point in the scenario it becomes a bravado performance, a high-wire act over an abyss of potentially very bad news. But the skills required for playing roulette in Las Vegas with a computer on your foot—stamina, wit, duplicity, and the reflex of technique perfected to invisibility—aren’t these the same skills that a writer summons up on facing the blank page? This fond thought, as delusive as it may have been, reminded me that I needed to invent a story about myself, one that Las Vegas croupiers would be reading over my shoulder with great interest. For such a discriminating audience, I had to produce a narrative that flowed without a stutter from beginning to end.

  “O.K.,” I reply, addressing my fellow Eudaemons officially for the first time. “Give me a pair of magic shoes and I’ll play the role of high-stakes bettor. But we’ll have to rethink the part. I’ve never liked Texas string ties. How about substituting a gold chain and a pinky ring?”

  Before deciding definitively on the two-wave approach, we schedule another Project meeting for the following night. After dinner, Doyne, Letty, Norman, Rob Lentz, and I walk down the back stairs, across the garden, and through the high wooden gate at the far end of the yard. We come out by the barn belonging to the Riverside house, where a common driveway serves a collection of bungalows built under the levees along the San Lorenzo River. Down the driveway and around the corner we come to Mark and Wendy’s cottage.

  With hardwood floors and white walls, their two-room house is spare and ordered. The front room holds a dresser, a small table, a potted fern, a quilt-covered bed, and a Goines lithograph of “Pandora’s Box.” A
bookcase along the wall is filled with textbooks ranging from biology to optics, an Encyclopaedia Britannica, a collection of science fiction, an oil lamp, and a jar full of paint brushes. The six of us squeeze into the room by sitting on the bed and floor. Holding a clipboard of notes written on a yellow legal pad, Doyne takes up the agenda.

  “There’s a long list of things we have to do before we can get out of town. I think we should divide up the tasks and put our initials next to them. That way we’ll know who’s responsible for doing what.” Mark says he needs three days to finish the first two computer sandwiches. Rob reports thirty to forty hours’ work remaining on the battery boats. Letty claims she is making good progress on assembling the solenoids. Norman is optimistic about getting the radio receivers debugged momentarily. Doyne signs up for finishing the mode transmitter. I take responsibility for teaching myself the layout and betting patterns. At the end of the discussion, Doyne tallies up the list. “There are a lot of hours here,” he reports. “Probably on the order of five or six more days.”

  “Watch out for Murphy’s law,” Rob advises. “If anything can go wrong, it probably will.”

  “We have another forty or fifty hours of practicing left to do,” Doyne says. “I want to set up the eye-toe feedback device and gather histograms. I also want to figure out analytically what advantage the new computers have over roulette wheels that are going really fast, in case that’s what we run up against in Las Vegas.”

  “Why can’t you figure out our advantage from histograms gathered during the practice sessions?” Letty asks.

  “Because in physics, it’s best to come at questions like this from both directions. You want to figure out the answer empirically and theoretically.”