He had made her feel foolish, so she was deliberately unkind. It wasn't like her, but then, neither was slipping away from home to meet a street-smart biker. She gestured dismissively toward the unimpressive batch of electronic parts that obviously meant so much to him. "I can't imagine anybody wanting to buy something like this."

"You're kidding, aren't you?"

"I never kid."

She saw his impatience and once again found herself staring at him, almost mesmerized as she watched him try unsuccessfully to contain his emotions. Unlike her, he didn't seem to conceal anything. What would it feel like to be so free?

"You don't get it, do you?" he said.

"Get what?"

"Think about it, Suzie. Most of the computers in this country are million-dollar machines locked up in concrete rooms where only guys in three-piece suits can get to them-guys with ID cards and plastic badges with photos on them. Companies like FBT and IBM make these computers for big business, for government, for universities, for the military. They're made by fat cats to serve fat cats. Computers are knowledge, Suzie. They're power. And right now the government and big business have all that power locked up for themselves."

She tilted her head toward the collection of electronic circuits. "This is going to change that?"

"Not right away. But eventually, yes, especially with a company like FBT marketing it. The board needs expanding. Everything has to be self-contained. We need a terminal, a video monitor. It needs more memory. But Yank is coming up with new hacks all the time. The guy's a genius."

"You don't seem to have much respect for FBT. Why are you offering them your design?"

"I don't have enough money to manufacture it myself. Yank and I could make a few of these and sell them to our friends, but that's not good enough. Don't you see? A giant like FBT can make it happen. With FBT behind Yank's design, the world will have a computer that's small enough and-even more important-one that's cheap enough so that people can buy it for their homes. A person's computer. A home computer. Something to stick on top of a desk and hack around on. In the next couple of years, we're going to turn those big fat cat computers into dinosaurs."

There was something so charismatic about the fire in his eyes, the energy charging through his body, that for a few moments she actually found herself caught up. "How does it work?"

"I can't show you here. It has to be hooked up. You need a power supply. The memory has to be loaded in. You have to have a terminal-like a typewriter keyboard. A television for video display."

"In other words, this doesn't do anything."

"It's a computer, for chrissake!"

"But it can't do anything unless you attach all these other things to it?"

"That's right."

"I think you're wasting your time, Sam. My father won't be interested in something like this. I can't imagine anyone wanting to buy it."

"Everyone in the entire frigging world is going to want to buy it! Before too many years have passed, a home computer will be another everyday appliance-like a toaster or a stereo. Why can't you see that?"

His antagonism jarred her, but she forced her voice to remain smooth yet strong, just as it was when she needed to make a point at a hospital auxiliary meeting. "Maybe in the twenty-first century, but not in 1976. Who would actually buy something like this-a machine that doesn't do anything until you hook up a dozen other things to it?"

"For the next few years, mainly hobbyists and electronics junkies. But by the 1980s-"

"There can't be enough hobbyists to make something like this profitable." She forced herself to glance at her watch so he could see that she had more important things to do than sit here chatting about his quixotic vision of computer-filled households.

He shook his head and regarded her with thinly disguised hostility. "For someone who looks intelligent, you're really out of touch. Do you spend so much time planning dinner parties that you can't see what's happening all around you? This is California, for chrissake. You're living on top of Silicon Valley. The electronics capital of the world is right at your feet. There's a whole universe of people out there who've been waiting all their lives for something like this."

As Joel Faulconer's daughter, she had spent most of her life in a world where high technology was served right along with the soup course. She wasn't ignorant, and she didn't like his condescension. "I'm sorry, Sam," she said stiffly, "but all I see is a briefcase full of electronic parts that don't do anything. I'm certain you're wasting your time. My father won't agree to see you, and-even if he did-he would never be interested in anything this impractical."

"Talk to him for me, Suzie. Convince him to see me. I'll take care of the rest."

Her gaze took in the leather jacket, the length of his hair, the earring. "I'm sorry, but I can't do that."

His thin lips twisted and he looked past her toward the lagoon. It had begun to rain harder and the surface of the water was gray and rippled. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket, making the leather rustle. "Okay, then here's something you can do. Come to a meeting with me next week."

She was alarmed. Meeting him once was bad enough-twice would be unforgivable. "That's impossible."

"You just think it's impossible. Loosen up a little. Take a risk for a change."

"You don't seem to understand. I'm engaged. It would be unseemly for me to meet you again."

"Unseemly?" His eyebrows shot up. "I'm not asking you to sleep with me. I just want you to meet some people I know. Do it, Suzie. Throw away your etiquette book for a change."

She tried not to let him see how badly he had shaken her. Gathering up her purse, she stood-straitlaced Susannah Faulconer wrapping propriety around her like a maiden aunt's crocheted shawl. She opened the catch on her purse and pulled her car keys from one of the neatly arranged compartments. "What kind of people do you want me to meet?" She asked the question coolly, as if a guest list were the only really important thing on her mind.

Sam Gamble smiled. "Hackers, honey. I want you to meet some hackers."

Chapter 5

They were the nerdiest of the nerds-bespectacled California boys of the sixties, who grew up in the suburbs of the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco.

In other parts of America, baseball and football reigned unchallenged, but in the Santa Clara Valley electronics permeated the air. The Valley harbored Stanford and Hewlett-Packard, Ames Research Laboratory and Fairchild Semiconductor. From the moment they woke up to the moment they fell asleep, the boys of the Valley breathed in the wonders of transistors and semiconductors.

Instead of Wilt Chamberlain and Johnny Unitas, these boys of the sixties found their heroes in the electrical engineers who lived next door, the men who toiled in the laboratories at Lockhead and Sylvania. Electronics permeated the air of the Santa Clara Valley, and to the bespectacled boys of the suburbs, the engineers with their slide rules and plastic pocket protectors were modern-day Marco Polos, adventurers who had unlocked the exotic mysteries of electron flows and sine waves.

The boys grew adept at barter. They did odd jobs in exchange for the surplus parts the men culled from the storerooms of the companies for which they worked. The boys washed cars for boxes of capacitors, painted garages for circuit boards, and every spare penny they earned went into buying parts for the transistor circuits and ham radio receivers they were building in their bedrooms.

In actuality, there wasn't much else for these boys to do with their money. Most of them were still too young to drive, and the older ones had no need to save their money for dates because no self-respecting California schoolgirl would have been caught dead with any one of them. They were the nerdiest of the nerds. Some were so overweight that their stomachs bulged from beneath their belts, others so underweight their Adam's apples seemed larger than their necks. They were pimply, myopic, and stoop-shouldered.

As they grew older, they went to college. Despite their impressive IQ's, some of the most talented never graduated. They were too busy having fun hacking around in their university's computer lab to go to their thermodynamics class or study for an exam in quantum mechanics. They programmed the big mainframes to play games they invented-games with galaxies exploding in dazzling patterns of starbursts and jets streaking across screens spattered with constellations that actually moved. They could only get time on the machines at night, so they slept during the day and hacked until the graduate assistants kicked them out in the morning. They ate junk food to the point of malnutrition and lived their lives under the blue flicker of fluorescent lighting. Like vampires, their skin turned pasty and white.

They were always horny. When they weren't hunched over a terminal, they were dreaming of feelable, kissable, suckable breasts and sweet little miniskirted asses. But they lived at night, it was hard for them to meet women, and when they did, they ran into trouble. How could anyone talk to a person who didn't understand the joy of spending an evening with a DEC PDP-8 writing a subroutine to solve quadratic functions?

They were the nerdiest of the nerds, and their encounters with women frequently didn't go well.

Most of them were too caught up in the excitement of an interesting hack to think about the fact that they might hold the keys to a new society in their heads. Although they yearned for small, inexpensive machines they could use freely at any time of night or day instead of having to sneak into a computer lab at three in the morning, most of them didn't let their thoughts go much further than ephemeral daydreams. They were having too much fun writing elaborate sine-cosine routines that would make the games they had invented run better. They were hackers, not visionaries, and they didn't think too much about the future.