Part 17 (1/2)

Never socializing with the jocks, pot-heads, or any other group, Peter Jones was considered an oddball student. He had been an orphan most of his life, living in a Los Gatos home governed by an elderly couple. He was used to spending time alone, reading or going for walks in the nearby woods, imagining he was Henry David Th.o.r.eau, observing nature, lost in his own thoughts. Whenever he was forced to spend a few trial days with potential foster parents, he affected a sullen and despondent mood, saving a tantrum or explosive outburst for the last day of the test period. He had gotten by just fine on his own, and he didn't need anyone, or anything, except maybe his science fiction novels.

Clayton and Clara Dodson, the owners of the orphanage, had had their hands full with Peter. Eventually they stopped sending him off to potential homes. The youngster pretty much took care of himself and was always willing to help out around the orphanage.

One day the Dodsons's acceptance of Peter went from resigned to delighted when he burst into the house and told them he had invented the world's first truly portable computer. Peter had recently begun to hang around with the ”gear heads,” students who were involved in clubs fostering fans of rockets, automobile engines, and electronics. At the club meetings he met several kids like himself - bright, introverted; some of them would eventually become his first employees at Wallaby, right out of high school. During his senior year, while checking out some of the other student projects an hour before the science fair, Peter met two gawky fellows who had built a device they called the All-In-One Computer. The invention was primitive at best, but all the right parts were there: keyboard, screen, disk drive.

Captivated, and without a project of his own, Peter persuaded the boys to include him in their project which, five minutes before the show began, he renamed the Portable Personal Computer.

The project won first prize, and after the show an older gentleman named Mr. Towers introduced himself. He told the boys that they were on to something and that they should give him a call sometime if they advanced the design of the box. Peter shoved the man's business card in his pocket.

Peter became more and more intrigued with the concept of a computer you could take with you wherever you went. Theirs came close, but it required a wall socket to power it so the only place you could really take it was from room to room. During the summer after his high school graduation he reread all of his science fiction books featuring robots and computers as their main characters. In his mind's eye he fas.h.i.+oned a small computer that could be his friend, like the ones in the books. He imagined taking his computer with him for walks in the woods, telling the computer about the things he saw, and what he thought. His computer would keep these things in its memory, and the more it learned about him and the world, the more loyal and dependable a friend it would become. He would make a lot of them, inexpensively, so that everyone could afford one and use it for whatever they wanted. He envisioned the computer and how it would work, how people would approach it and work with it. When he felt he had realized the computer as clearly as if he already owned one, he sat down to start designing. But when he picked up his pen, he could do little more than sketch crude boxes with screens and keyboards. He realized that he didn't know how to design the circuits and parts necessary to actually fabricate the machine.

He called the two boys from the science fair, Paul Trueblood and Rick Boardman, and invited them over to the orphanage one afternoon. When he described his idea, the boys grew excited.

Pus.h.i.+ng his eyegla.s.ses up on his nose, Paul began rambling about how he could do the hardware part, maybe even squeeze in a modem for calling up other computers, and Rick described how he could write a integrated program for the computer so that it could do real work for people, like keep track of important names and addresses, right out of the box.

Three months later the three boys stood in front of their first prototype, the Mate, and ran their first program, an all-in-one organizer and word processor and communications program that they dubbed Easy Does It.

When the Mates development was well underway, Peter contacted Mr.

Towers, the man he had met a few months before at the science fair. Towers invited him to his nearby office. Two hours later, Towers had become the primary investor in the Mate's development, and overseer of the startup of a new company.

Within a year the boys were building as many computers as they could in Peter's garage. Towers remained in the background, working deals with parts suppliers through his electronic instrument company to provide the boys with what they needed for production. Eventually they had so many orders that they had to relocate to real offices in nearby Sunnyvale. Peter moved out of the orphanage and created a minimal living s.p.a.ce for himself in one of the building's corner offices. Together, Hank Towers and Peter, then twenty-two, founded their new company, which Peter named Wallaby, which everyone knew was an animal that had a pocket in which it carried its joey...the little friend that Peter had always dreamed of having, and knew someday he would create.

He snapped awake to a high-pitched warble. The telephone.

Reaching for it, he knocked over the bottle of Scotch, spilling its contents onto the hardwood floor.

”h.e.l.lo?” The voice on the other end was anxious.

”Yeah,” Peter said, pressing his fingers to his eyelids.

”Peter? Are you all right? Petey?”

”Kate.” This came out as a moan.

She spoke very fast. ”What's happened? I caught the tail end of something about Wallaby on the CNN, something about a reorganization, and called your office, Peter, and they said they had not seen you. Peggy put me on hold and called the boardroom and they told her you had bolted and that something happened but she wouldn't tell me what. What the h.e.l.l is going on?”

”It's over,” he slurred.

”What's over?”

”Me. Wallaby. Everything.”

”Petey, talk to me. Are you there? Petey?”

”I've been fired. From my own company.”

”I can hardly hear you. I don't understand. What do you mean fired?”

”Fired,” he shouted, and immediately regretted it. The sting in his head and heart diverged, spread. As if on cue, the secret thing in his heart a.s.serted itself again. With its arrival, an abstraction formed in his drunken mind. He thought of the word ”mate.” It represented the start of his life. Because of the Mate, he had met Kate. She was his soul mate, and with her he had experienced his coming of age. And wasn't she, in some ways, the inspiration behind the Joey? Wasn't their nomadic relations.h.i.+p what had inspired him to design a computer you could take with you when you went away? Now it had been taken from him. How long, he wondered, before Kate was gone too? The more aware he was of this feeling, of losing the things close to his heart, the more aware he became of his newest mate, the disagreeable feeling that had burrowed inside him. At this moment it was troubled, like a tiny caged creature suffering from hunger spasms, nourishment lying within its line of sight, in its owner's hand, beyond its reach, so close, yet so far away.

Kate shouted his name into the phone, breaking him out of his stupor. ”Tell me what happened.”