But the vow was easier made than kept. With only a week left until her wedding, Susannah lay in the darkness and watched the illuminated numbers on her digital clock flip to 2:18. She couldn't eat, she couldn't sleep, Her chest felt heavy, as if a great weight were pressing down on her.

Without warning, the phone on her bedside table jangled. She snatched it up and held it to her chest for a moment. Then she cradled it to her ear. "Hi," she whispered, grateful to have a partner in insomnia. "You couldn't sleep either?"

But it wasn't Cal. It was Conti Dove-Conti, Paige's lover, calling to tell Susannah that Paige had been arrested several hours before at an all-night grocery store and he didn't have enough money to bail her out of jail. Susannah pressed her eyes shut for a moment, trying to imagine what else could go wrong. Then, being careful not to wake her father, she threw on the first clothes she could grab and left the house.

Paige was being held at a downtown police station on the fringes of San Francisco's crime-infested Western Addition. Conti was waiting by the front door. Susannah had only met him once before, but she had no trouble recognizing him. Low-slung chinos, sleepy bedroom eyes with lids at half mast, wiry dark hair. He didn't look like a candidate for Mensa, but he was definitely sexy in an earthy sort of way.

He slipped his hands from the pockets of a red Forty-Niners' windbreaker and walked toward her. "Uh, yeah-listen, I'm sorry I had to bother you. Paige'll probably kill me when she finds out, but I couldn't leave her in jail."

"Of course you couldn't." Shouldering her purse, Susannah followed him into the station, where she posted Paige's bond, handling everything as efficiently as if she did this kind of thing all the time. She was courteous to the police officers and did what she could to keep the arrest from ending up in the newspapers. She made polite conversation with Conti, but all the time she wanted to cry from a combination of exhaustion and rage. Her sister had been arrested for shoplifting. Her beautiful sister, child of one of the wealthiest men in California, had been caught slipping two cans of cat food into her purse.

"Why, Conti?" she asked, as they took their seats on a scratched wooden bench that lined one wall of a claustrophobically narrow hallway. "Why would Paige do something like this?"

"I dunno."

Normally, Susannah would have let it go at that, but something had happened to her in these past two months that had made her impatient with polite social evasions, so she pressed him. "If she needed money, I would have given it to her."

He looked embarrassed. "She doesn't like to take money from you." Shifting his weight on the bench, he crossed his ankle over his knee and then uncrossed it. "I dunno. We thought we was going to get this contract with Azday Records. Paige was all excited. And then a couple of weeks ago, this guy, this Mo Geller, backed out. He heard another group play and he said they had a better sound. Paige took it pretty hard."

Susannah asked several more questions, but Conti was uncommunicative. Finally, they lapsed into silence. Fifteen minutes passed. Conti got up and wandered over to a water cooler. Half an hour went by. Susannah had to go to the bathroom, but she was afraid to leave the hallway. Conti bummed a cigarette from an empty-faced teenager.

"I'm not supposed to smoke, you know," he finally said. "My voice."

"Yes. I understand."

"They got her in this holding cell."

"I know."

"You don't think there would be, like, guys or anything in there with her? Givin' her trouble."

"I don't think so. I'm sure they separate men and women." Why was she so sure? She had never been in a police station.

"She stole cat food," he said suddenly. "She's in jail because she stole two cans of cat food."

"Yes. That's what they said."

He dropped his cigarette and ground it into the linoleum with the toe of a leather sneaker. When he lifted his head, he looked as baffled and unhappy as a child. "See, the thing of it is-we don't have a cat."

At that moment, Paige came through the door. Her jeans were ripped at the knee. Her pretty blond hair hung in tangles around her face. She looked tired, young, and scared. Conti rushed toward her, but before he got there she spotted Susannah. Paige's shoulders stiffened. She lifted her head defiantly. "What's she doing here?"

"I'm sorry, hon," Conti said. "I-I couldn't pay the bond."

"You shouldn't have called her. I told you never to call her."

As Susannah stood, she found herself remembering the chocolate-covered cherries she had tried to smuggle to Paige when she got in trouble as a child.

"I don't need you here," Paige said belligerently. "Go back where you came from."

The hostility in her sister's face made Susannah feel ill.

Why did Paige hate her so much? What did everyone want from her? She tried so hard to please them all, but whatever she did never seemed to be enough. She slipped her hand into the pocket of her trench coat and squeezed hard, digging the nails into her palm so she wouldn't lose control. "Paige, come home with me tonight," she said calmly. "Let me put you to bed. We can talk in the morning."

"I don't want to talk. I want to get laid. Come on, Conti. Let's get out of here."

"Sure, honey. Sure." He looped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her protectively to him. With her upper body turned into Conti's chest, she walked awkwardly.

Susannah stepped forward. She meant to tell Paige that they had to talk, that they couldn't just forget something like this had happened. She would be logical, reasonable, choose her words carefully. But the soft words that came from her mouth weren't the ones she had planned at all.

"Paige, I don't know if you remember, but I'm getting married on Saturday. It would mean a lot to me if you were there." At first Susannah didn't think Paige had heard. But then, just before Conti led her through the door, her sister gave a nearly imperceptible nod.

The electronics shop was located in Cupertino just off Stevens Creek Boulevard. Sam thought he knew every shop in the Valley, but Z.B. Electronics was new. As he pulled up outside, he spotted a group of three teenage boys approaching the shop. He immediately tagged them as "wireheads"-the name high school kids gave to the boys who spend all their time in the school electronics lab. When Sam was in high school, he had hung out with both the "wireheads" and "freaks," the kids who were caught up in the counterculture. The fact that he didn't stick to one group had confused everybody.

Acting on impulse, Sam got out of the car and opened the trunk of the Duster. He called out to the boys, "Hey, help me carry this stuff inside, will you?"

A pudgy, long-haired kid detached himself from the group and walked forward. "What do you have?"

"A microcomputer," Sam replied casually, as if every-body in the Valley drove around with a microcomputer in the trunk.

"No shit! Hey, guys, he's got a micro in his trunk." The kid turned to Sam and his face was alive with excitement. "Did you build it?"

Sam handed him one of the boxes of equipment and picked up the heavy television himself. Another boy slammed the trunk lid. "I helped a friend of mine design it. He's the best."

As they walked toward the shop, the boys began peppering him with questions.

"What kind of microprocessor did you use?"

"A7319 from Cortron."

"That's shit," one of them protested. "Why aren't you running it off an Intel 8008 like the Altair?"

"The 8008 is old news. The 7319 is more powerful."

"What do you think of the IMSAI 8080?" the pudgy kid asked, referring to a new microcomputer that was rapidly challenging the Altair's supremacy.

"IMSAI's nothing more than a rip-off of the Altair," Sam said derisively. "Same old stuff. Have you ever taken one apart? Total shit. A bucket of noise."

One of the boys rushed in front of Sam to open the door. "But if you're using another microprocessor, none of the Altair equipment will work with it."

"Who cares? We've done everything better."

As they walked inside Z.B. Electronics, an enormously obese man with yellow hair and pink watery eyes glanced up at them from behind the counter. Sam stopped in his tracks. As he looked past the man, his stomach did a flip-flop, and the television in his arms suddenly seemed as light as a box of microchips. No wonder the kids were attracted to this store. On two rows of shelving directly behind the man's head rested a dozen Altair microcomputers.

Sam Gamble had hit pay dirt.

"Chamber of Commerce weather," Joel kept saying the morning of the wedding. "It's Chamber of Commerce weather."

Susannah forced herself to take a bite of dry toast while she stared through the dining room window at the sun-spangled June day and watched the gardeners tying the last of the white ribbon festoons in the trees.

Her father glanced up from his newspaper, a man in complete command of his world. "Could I have more coffee, dear?"

As she refilled his cup, she felt tired and worn, like an old lady with all the drama of life behind her.

The woman who was coordinating the wedding arrived shortly before noon, and for the next few hours she and Susannah busied themselves double-checking arrangements that had already been triple-checked. She sat for the hairdresser who arrived at two, but the style he arranged was too fussy. After he left, she brushed it out and made a simple coil at the nape of her neck. At three o'clock she put on her antique lace dress and fastened a little Juliet cap to her head. While she secured the Bennett family choker around her neck, she watched through the window as the guests arrived. And then, when it was time, she went downstairs.