The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

  This delicate operation is comparable to a brain scan. Short of melting the wax out of it, there is no way to open up the computer sandwich, just as there is no simple way to lift off the top of the skull. All one can do is search for electronic discontinuities. Spikes appearing in an otherwise regular wave that indicate a loose connection or a burnt-out chip. The examination of a computer from the outside, pin by pin, is tedious work. It also calls for the hands of a surgeon, because a slip of the electronic probe can itself accidentally blow out a component.

  In the small hours of the morning Doyne discovers a discontinuity in one of the lines. He resolders the pin and then all hell breaks loose. Where formerly there had been a clean wave on the scope, there now flashes across its screen a crosscurrent of peaks and troughs. Doyne reburns the solder joint and pokes his needles from one part of the sandwich to another. Finding nothing but a roaring sea of noise, he phones Mark in California, describes the problem, and tells him to call back when he’s thought about it. Throughout the night, with Mark simulating the problem back in Santa Cruz, the two of them speculate about “the fifty-six-ohm resistor being open circuited, the on-line going high, or noise getting kicked into the amplifier,” until Doyne is finally forced to admit, “There’s chaos everywhere.”

  He hangs up the phone and turns to me. “This is the Polish fix. I’m talking to the only person who knows how to get this computer running, and he’s five hundred miles away.” The first shift is already on the highways heading for work when Doyne places a final call to California. “I give up,” he tells Mark. “I want you to wax the second set of computers and get them out here as fast as possible with Letty and Rob. If we’re going to work, we need some tools.”

  Doyne and I leave the shop at dawn. After a cold night in the desert, with temperatures down in the thirties, the mountains are covered with wispy clouds that won’t burn off until afternoon. By then the temperature will have crept up into the sixties, and the wind will have risen to blow the dust off the bare lots between the casinos and condominiums. The weather is all we have to think about as we wait for a take-out order of computer sandwiches to reach us from five hundred miles across the desert.

  Cooling my heels waiting for the second team to arrive from California, I tour downtown casinos, eyeball the wheels, map layouts, and return to the motel to find Doyne where I left him, sitting at the kitchen table poking an ohmmeter into a computer sandwich. I walk out again for an afternoon promenade on the Strip. Perpendicular to the high-rise signs on Las Vegas Boulevard South branch smaller arteries of plastic that run to gravel out in the desert, where the sun is setting neon red behind the Spring Range. The mountains on the horizon offer a lunar calm, but down in the conduits of Las Vegas the air is charged with megawatts. While tubes of light flash around me in the shape of boomerangs, star bursts, and intertidal organisms, sunset on the Strip is one throbbing light show superimposed on top of another.

  As mercenary as it may be, Las Vegas is also a mystery, or at least a set of paradoxes. Casino gambling was once the sport of kings and aristocrats, and the genius of Las Vegas lies in having elevated everyone to the peerage. Caesars Palace is open to the public, and anyone can be sheik for a day at the Sahara. But leisure here is a mirage, a calculated feat of social engineering. The casinos offer perfectly controlled environments that pretend to be free and at risk, but actually everything in them, from gambling to sex, is geared into a machine for maximizing profit.

  Absent of commodities in the traditional sense—things like pork bellies and wing nuts—Las Vegas itself has become a commodity. To do so, the city had to transform itself into a fetish and phantasm of pleasure. Among fetishes in the modern world, Las Vegas is one of the most potent. Who, when polled, fails to associate it with pleasure in excess? Las Vegas is a dreamscape, a simulacrum not to be missed by philosophers interested in studying the paradox of false pleasure. This city of signs and symbols—this green world of semiotics—teems with what might be called the “fun cue.” This is the sign that denotes the idea of fun, and it appears in the form of towel boys standing solicitously at the door of the steam room, or as hostesses with their bottoms pulled tight into leotards. The linguistic correlate for the fun cue—the word most often employed to denote the idea of fun—is free, as in free drinks, free breakfast, free champagne, free hamburgers, free tourist gambling packages. When you know what to look for, the fun cue can be seen everywhere in Las Vegas: in bars decorated with palm trees, in motel lobbies with birds in rattan cages, or in the welcoming ease with which croupiers bend forward to convert your money into chips.

  Stiff from having crossed the desert at night in a car with no heat, Letty and Rob arrive early the next morning. Letty carries two computer sandwiches into the apartment. “The B team to the rescue,” she says with a smile.

  Rumpled but hearty, Rob follows with a portable oscilloscope and toolbox. He greets Doyne with a bear hug. “Where’s the action?” he asks. “I’m looking forward to some wild and crazy times.” Then he announces in a deadpan voice, “The new computers test out perfectly. We checked them thoroughly for five minutes before getting in the car.”

  “It took Mark a few extra hours to wax the components,” Letty reports. “Every time you called him on the phone, he’d take them out of the oven for fear of overcooking them. Then there was a big scare when he thought he’d assembled the sandwich upside down. It turned out that he hadn’t. But the paranoia was thick while he checked it out.”

  “It’s great to see you guys,” Doyne says. “Why don’t you get some sleep, and then later tonight we can play roulette.”

  But instead of going to sleep, Rob heads for the kitchen table. “What seems to be the problem here?” he asks, sitting down in front of our two dysfunctional computers. “I understand your sandwiches are suffering from spurious noise. Is that right? We don’t usually make house calls. But you told us the situation was desperate.”

  He snaps the cover off the oscilloscope and holds the needles in his large hands. As he probes the computers, patch cords dangle from his mouth. He mumbles to Doyne about discontinuities in the address line. “It’s hard to understand how this could happen, unless your PIA has burned out.” He plugs in the solder gun and waits for it to heat up. Doyne sits next to him, studying wiring diagrams. “Run it by me again,” Rob says. “What’s supposed to happen in the power-up, power-down sequence?”

  By the end of the day, sandwiches and boats cover the table like war casualties lined up for triage. Doyne scrutinizes pin-out maps describing where in the microcrystalline wax the unseen chips are buried. The oscilloscope burns green in front of him with glitches. Smoke hangs in the air, along with the bitter smell of solder.

  Doyne and Rob run range tests and probes. They cut lines and retune components. They tweak and solder, and entire days go by in which the boredom is punctuated only by false alerts in which everyone scrambles to tie on magic shoes, only to find these sessions time and again aborted by attacks of spurious noise. Solenoids pop off. Computers motor around their programs at random, get lost, and burn up batteries. The machines tink and buzz with increasing weakness in their vital signs. Most depressing of all is the news that the new computers are no better off than the old ones. As if having contracted a contagious disease, they too are now afflicted with spuriosity. Theories and rumors multiply as fast as glitches on the scope. Has a bad boat burned out all the computers? Was there a flaw in the design, like something wrong with the on-off line? Or is the environment in Las Vegas itself just too hostile?

  “Maybe we were overly strict about the design requirements,” says Doyne, who is slowly resigning himself to becoming philosophic. “It might be asking too much to put a computer in a shoe. There are so many different things in there that can screw each other up. Let’s face it, building a computer to walk on is a difficult problem to solve.”

  Viewing the current dilemma as a temporary setback, he speculates on what the Project might do next. “By thinking about it,
we should be able to get rid of whatever it is that’s making the system flaky. I see exactly what the next generation of equipment would look like if we worked backwards and de-evolutionized the design. I’d take the computer out of the shoe and strap it onto my leg, along with a little garter belt for holding the solenoids. I’d put the battery pack on the other side of the computer, or down in the solenoid garter belt. Then I’d fill up a shoe with a hefty antenna and toe switch. There’s no reason not to keep the mode transmitter just like it is in the other shoe. We haven’t had any problems with that. Unlike the old days, when we had cables strung from our toes to our armpits, the new system would have a single power harness running from the shoe to thigh level. Building a new computer isn’t that big a deal. All I imagine doing is spreading the system up the leg.”

  “God,” Letty exclaims, “it sounds like the Project is starting up all over again. Is this the first step down the old road?”

  “You’re right,” Doyne admits. “It may be a waste of time thinking about the next generation of roulette computers. For all I know, the Project is dead.”

  “What do you want to do about it?”

  “We have three alternatives,” Doyne says. “We could build a new generation of equipment by plugging away at it in our spare time.”

  “That’s a bad idea.”

  “O.K. It’s a bad idea. There are two other things we could do. We could find investors and hire a professional technician out of the Silicon Valley. For twenty-five thousand dollars we could get it done right.”

  “That means more people expecting a bite out of the Eudaemonic Pie.”

  “The third thing we could do is quit. We already have our statistical victory. We’ve proved we can beat the casinos with a large advantage. So we forget about pushing the stakes and making a lot of money and all the rest of it. We just snap a few photographs and show them to our grandchildren.”

  We are sitting in front of the TV on a Saturday night eating “homemade” Betty Crocker date bars and watching Peter Ustinov narrate a PBS program called “Einstein’s Universe.”

  “Hey, Al,” Doyne calls to the image on the TV screen. “What would you do if you were us?”

  Rob wanders over to the kitchen table and takes a final poke at the computer. “My latest theory is that we have a problem with the RAM.”

  “That’s the only thing we haven’t slung any mud at yet,” Doyne says, “and we might as well.”

  “It’s not the CPU. It’s not the PIA. It’s not the EPROM.”

  “It’s not the CIA,” Letty quips. “It’s not the NRC.”

  “Maybe it’s the FBI,” Doyne says. Picking up Rob’s guitar, he strums a few chords and starts singing “Me and My Uncle” in his best New Mexico twang.

  “Hey, you guys,” Letty says. “It’s Saturday night. We’re supposed to be out on the town having fun.”

  “That’s right,” Rob agrees. “I’m too young to turn into a nerd.”

  “We know all the high spots, don’t we?” Doyne says, turning toward me. “What do you say we take everybody out and show ‘em a good time?”

  “Let’s get dressed up,” Letty proposes. “I want to do the whole thing right. Put on my shoes and load them with a computer and batteries. I don’t care if they’re not working. I want to experience walking around Las Vegas with a computer in my shoe. Just this once I want to head out the door and feel what it’s like to be powered up and ready to play.”

  “That’s what we should do tonight,” says Rob. “Put all the stuff in our shoes and go out on the town.”

  “We’ll pretend we’re big-time roulette players,” Letty says. “We can communicate with each other through meaningful glances.”

  The four of us get dressed in our gambling outfits, complete with computer sandwiches and battery boats. None of the equipment functions for more than the occasional random buzz. Letty wears dark pants, a blue Oxford cloth shirt, and sumba cloth vest from Bali. I sport the cravat and sports coat of a French restaurateur. Rob, in a Hawaiian shirt opened three buttons at the neck, looks like he just arrived on the last wave from Waikiki. Doyne emerges in white pants and a black shirt. “My mom bought this for me,” he says. “When she heard I was going to play roulette in Las Vegas, she wanted me to wear the right kind of clothes. It’s a disco suit, which is why it doesn’t have a jacket.”

  We eat a large Mexican dinner of enchiladas washed down with margaritas. We cruise up and down the Strip admiring the neon and then head for the parking lot at Caesars Palace.

  Letty turns to Rob. “Are you powered up?”

  “My toes are clicking away like crazy,” he tells her. “It’s the best-fitting pair of shoes I’ve had in a long time.”

  “Are you getting any signals?”

  “No. Not a thing.”

  “Good,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  Riding the elevated skyway into the casino, we roll past anatomically enhanced centurions and nymphs while listening to a taped message about “the glory that was Rome.” The conveyor belt dumps us into a hall filled with slot machines and change ladies, and we make our way from there down a corridor leading to the main gambling floor. On the way we pass various souvenir shops and discotheques, including Cleopatra’s Barge, which consists of a wooden structure that looks like a cross between a trireme and a helicopter pad floating in a pool of chlorinated water. Couples dressed in disco suits and party dresses walk up a gangplank to dance on the Barge, where the Bruce Westcott Band is playing a medley of soft core rock.

  We push farther down the corridor until it opens onto the main gambling hall. The room is circular, and its domed ceiling twinkles with ersatz starlight. A crowd presses around the tables. Money in the form of silver dollars and chips tumbles over the baize. Hostesses wearing push-up bras, see-through togas, golden crowns, and hairpieces that tumble down their backs like horses’ tails circulate with cocktail glasses tinkling on silver trays. It’s the Roman Rapunzel look as concocted by Frederick’s of Hollywood. The men playing on the floor sport Gucci loafers, pinky rings, and pastel shirts unbuttoned to the navel. The women sashay in spike heels and strapless gowns with cutaway backs, or they wear harem pants tied at the ankle and slit to the thigh. Their hair is whipped into richly teased confections, ratted, frosted, tinted, streaked, and piled high on their heads or frizzed out into Barbra Streisand curls. Leaning back to laugh, the women show their necks to good effect. The men display approval by flashing their teeth and biting off the ends of cigars.

  The four of us walk across the floor to stand in the crowd around the roulette tables. Three Asian businessmen playing together in a consortium are winning big. Their hands shake as they linger what must be twenty thousand dollars in chips. Jotting down notes on the back of a postcard, they whisper among themselves. A security guard wheels over a rack of five-hundred-dollar chips, in case the businessmen decide to cash out. Other players buy into the game with large bills that the croupier, using his wooden trowel, stuffs through a slot in the cashbox. Still more players sit along the layout fumbling their chips, adding up the columns in their systems, and otherwise trying to hide the nakedness that comes on being cleaned out by the house.

  We watch the roulette wheels spin for an hour. The computers in our shoes are lifeless, but we automatically time the rotors and set parameters in our heads. These wheels are a perfect knockover—nicely tilted and shadowed, with steady rotors and fast balls up on the track. The croupiers couldn’t be more docile in offering them up to be beaten.

  “Let’s go,” Doyne says, pulling himself away from the tables. We walk back across the floor and down the corridor to Cleopatra’s Barge, where we climb the gangplank and dance to the soft-core sound of the Bruce Westcott Band. “You saw those wheels back there?” he tells us, with a look of disgust on his face. “We could have killed them”

  “You’re right,” we agree. “We could have killed them.”

  EPILOGUE

  The Intergalactic Infandibulum

  How
ever comical it may be that I should expect to get so much out of roulette, the routine opinion, accepted by everybody, that it is absurd and silly to expect anything at all from gambling seems to me even funnier.

  Feodor Dostoyevsky

  After a week of storms casting rain and snow over the desert, the sky breaks into patches of blue out of which shines a warm and buttery sun. The peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains sparkle with snow. Down in Santa Fe and nearby Jacona, where a handful of adobe houses straggle along the banks of the Pojoaque River, not far from where it joins the Rio Grande, the first day of spring has laid a carpet of lupine, poppy, mallow, and other desert ephemeral thick underfoot. The fruit and mulberry trees are in bloom. The Russian olives are leafing out along the stream beds. Farther south, toward the red mesa on top of which sits Los Alamos, the jumping cholla and prickly pear are budding alongside white thorn acacias and their sweet-smelling flowers.

  In the courtyard of an old adobe house surrounded by Chinese elms, fifty of us—gathered from off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, or down from the mountains stretched between Idaho and Silver City—stand in a semicircle around Doyne and Letty. Doyne wears a Mexican wedding shirt with a rosebud pinned to his collar. Letty is dressed in a white gown sashed at the waist, with satin panels and lace ties at the sleeves. Standing between them is Dave Miller, former Explorer Scout and New Mexico motocross champion. An engineer turned social worker, Miller presides over this gathering on the banks of the Pojoaque River in his capacity as card-carrying minister in the Universal Life Church. “I’m just here to sign the forms,” he says nervously. “This is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this.”

  Norman Packard and Letty’s sister, Margaretta, stand next to Doyne and Letty as best man and woman. A puckish smile on his face, Norman rifles through his pockets and pretends to have lost the ring box. Everyone laughs when it finally appears. The parents of the bride and groom give their blessing. Minister Miller pronounces the benediction, and then, as everyone presses close around them, he opens a small silver knife and hands it to Letty.