by Norman Oro
If Guy Pool were asked about the fund, he would’ve described it primarily as a way to continue doing what he enjoyed and secondly as a personal favor to his long-time friends to help them manage their wealth. As always, he sought to keep investments simple; and placed most of Jalama’s $15 million in stalwarts from prior funds such as Apple, Intel, Oracle and Sun. Though he personally still liked each of those businesses, he would’ve been quick to point out that those stocks weren’t chosen out of any sense of sentimentality. Rather, he chose them because they’d all turned out to be truly exceptional companies, leaders in their respective segments of the computer industry. And in Guy Pool’s estimation, they’d continue to be exceptional companies for at least another eight years, after which the fund would end.
As he began purchasing shares, it struck him just how charmed their little firm had been in its investments; and he wondered for a moment whether the same feeling hit his great-grandfather a century earlier. Like him, Guy Pool knew he was at the end of his career. It felt right. He was sixty-one years old. He’d be sixty-nine years old when the fund’s term ended in September 2000. The firm he’d founded had done good, financing leading edge companies that created countless new jobs in their local communities and spurring technological innovation that was now a cornerstone of the American economy. And he’d been a part of it all. Soon, it’d be time to pass the reins onto a new generation, most probably to Alberto Marshall. There was one final thing to do, though. With that in mind, he focused once again on the task at hand. He wanted to add at least one more company to the fund’s investments, ideally a true startup. However, it was very difficult figuring out which one. There were so many promising ideas to choose from.
Ultimately, Jalama’s largest early-stage investment was in a company called Yahoo. The founders had built a website that helped to bring the Internet to the masses. In addition to enabling people to search for online content, it also categorized it, so it could be accessed more intuitively. The younger Dr. Marshall had been using the Yahoo! website almost since it’d launched and argued very persuasively that it should be a portfolio company. However, even in those early days, Yahoo! was well regarded and had relatively easy access to venture financing. Its founders and management team had their pick of venture capital firms, and their compelling technology wouldn’t go under because the Jalama Fund wasn’t there to finance it. As a result, Guy Pool’s mind was at ease regarding the very real possibility that Pacific Capital wouldn’t be able to participate in funding the company. Somehow, though, they did make it into an early round, investing $1 million in November 1995.
Guy Pool didn’t know it, but his final fund had been launched near the cusp of one of the greatest periods of value creation ever. The resulting bull market in equities was nothing short of breathtaking. Once all of Jalama’s positions were closed in September of 2000, every dollar invested eight years earlier had made eighty-five dollars, translating into a 74% annual rate of return. It was a time of tremendous optimism regarding computer technology and the capital markets. Consequently, as September drew near, there were understandably calls to keep the fund’s positions open, to extend the term out another two years, to make an even greater return. It was tempting. Fortune had once again smiled down on Guy Pool and his friends just like it did over forty-two years earlier at the fund’s namesake in Santa Barbara County. However, just like on that cool July morning, he knew the time had simply arrived for them to paddle in.
Vela
Once Jalama ended, Pacific Capital’s management transition began in earnest with its newest partner, Alberto Marshall, taking over. Guy Pool continued to be involved temporarily as an advisor and was fairly active in raising money for the firm’s next fund; however, more than anything else, that was to transfer his immense Rolodex of contacts to the younger Dr. Marshall. Like his father, Alberto Marshall was a very quick study and before long, he was ably running the firm on his own. With his responsibilities at Pacific Capital handed off, Guy Pool spent the closing weeks of 2000 working with Piper Finesine at the Allen Foundation. He also surfed, of course, often paddling out with their son, Alberto, or “Bert” as he liked to be called. Bert had just gotten his driver’s license that year and Guy Pool had begun looking for a new car for him. However, he eventually found out that his son was fond of the family car, a blue and white 1969 F250 that Guy Pool had bought when he’d just returned to California. He loved that truck, took care of it and it ran as well as the day he’d bought it. So, that Christmas, he purchased a 2001 F150 for himself and passed his beloved F250 on to his son.
Though he enjoyed his newfound free time, it took Guy Pool a bit longer to adjust to retirement than he’d anticipated. Fundraising, reading business plans, attending board meetings, conducting due-diligence, drafting terms sheets; it had all become a part of him during his thirty-two years in venture capital. Nevertheless, he did eventually adjust without too much difficulty. With the field conditions almost met, he turned his attention to the increasingly viable task of getting US-395 started again.
Just a few days into 2001, he and Piper Finesine had breakfast with Dr. Gidsen and his wife while they were home in Palo Alto. It was a brisk winter morning just before the House of Representatives convened and a rare chance for all of them to get together since Dr. Gidsen was first elected several years earlier. His service in Washington was as intense as ever; nonetheless, even after eight years, he could honestly say that the work had never once been mundane.
On their walk back to the parking lot, while their wives were busy chatting with one another, Guy Pool asked him about US-395 and learned that there was no record left of the project that he could find. Even his attempts at tracing how Pueblo’s nuclear reactor was funded led to a dead-end. He’d discreetly tried to lay the groundwork for resuming development of Allen field technology; however, at least as far as the federal government was concerned, there apparently was nothing to resume. As they neared their cars, Guy Pool asked him a question that he’d been meaning to ask for almost three years: “Michael, has the first field condition been met?”
Dr. Gidsen gave it a few moments then answered, “Yes.”
A day didn’t pass in 2001 without Guy Pool thinking about US-395. It was a quandary. The Eisenhower administration did its job almost too well in stemming the abuse of Allen field technology. In the process, they’d apparently wiped it almost clean from existence. He spent the better part of spring looking up his old co-workers from the project and learned that all of them had already passed away. Professor Marshall, Congressman Gidsen and he were all that was left from Dr. Rys’s team.
Still, there was Pueblo. Since returning to California in 1968, he’d taken it upon himself to drive there at least once a year to walk around town and get a burger at Art’s Diner to remind himself that it was real. What they’d worked on was real. The town was real. The Maytag, unseen, silently generating the Allen field enveloping Dr. Rys and his son, was real. And their friends’ decades-long absence was real, as well.
In terms of courses of action, Guy Pool certainly had the material resources to make public what had happened with US-395, to force the government to revisit the project and consider building a second Maytag. However, that jeopardized reopening old wounds and bringing a slew of unwanted publicity. On top of that, making what happened public risked starting the sort of field generator arms race that so many had taken such great pains to prevent. If that were to happen, they’d be helpless to stop it. In the Internet they finally had the foundation for realizing the second field condition, but the monitoring system itself didn’t exist yet. Given that and Dr. Gidsen’s belief that the first condition was fulfilled, there seemed to really be only one course of action: Begin constructing the field detection system.
Guy Pool discussed it with Professor Marshall, who agreed with his assessment, but noted that his own Allen field research had progressed very slowly. His agreement with the government to never build a generator effectively precluded any empiri
cal work; and as a result, though he was expecting to become a professor emeritus soon, he estimated that even with the extra time he could devote to the project, he was at least seven years away from building something that could detect field activity. Fortunately, at least, a detector wouldn’t fall under the government ban on generator technology that he’d agreed to. They spoke with Representative Gidsen the following day regarding the issue; and together pledged to fund construction of a field monitoring system as soon as the technology was ready.
After their discussion, Professor Marshall re-doubled his efforts to design a prototype detector; however, the lack of empirical data continued to be a hindrance. By September 2003, he’d made some headway, but not enough to change his estimated completion date for the device. It was then when a very large white cardboard box arrived at his doorstep. The label had him as the recipient; however, the return address had a name he didn’t recognize, Dr. Abigail Svoboda. In it he found a handwritten letter along with dozens of notebooks. The letter wished him well and asked him to take care of her husband’s personal journals. It went on to say that after over forty-three years, she’d decided to move on and felt that her husband would’ve wanted Dr. Marshall to have them. Halfway through the letter, he finally realized that Dr. Abigail Svoboda was Dr. Abigail Rys. He recalled Dr. Rys mentioning once that his wife’s family had roots in Central and Eastern Europe. There was a telephone number at the bottom of the letter, which Dr. Marshall called immediately to thank her. He also told her that the journals were her husband’s and belonged to her. She then explained that, based on her conversations with Dr. Rys, it felt right that Professor Marshall have them instead. There was no doubt in her mind it was what her husband would’ve wanted and so there was no doubt it was what she wanted, as well. At that, he thanked her again and their conversation ended.
Frankly, Dr. Marshall didn’t know what to do. Reading someone else’s journals, especially someone whom he believed was still alive, felt awkward to put it mildly. As someone who valued his own privacy intensely, he left the box of notebooks untouched in his study for almost two months before finally leafing through one of them. It was an effort, but quickly glancing through its pages, he saw that they were personal journals only in the sense that Dr. Rys had handwritten them himself. Outside of that, they were actually more like exceedingly detailed lab notes, much like the official journals each of the US-395 scientists and engineers kept then submitted to Dr. Gidsen back when they were working in the auditorium. The journals chronicled Dr. Rys’s thinking regarding the Allen field from his very first experiments in the Caltech synchrotron lab in 1951 until the day before he was sent through the field eight years later. They included pages of detailed commentary, charts, diagrams, experimental data, hypotheses and mathematical models. The timing couldn’t have been better. With the journals as a guide, he estimated that instead of a half-decade, the first field detector could be ready in a little over two years.
Though recognized in the group as being a very quick study who’d finished both his bachelor’s and PhD in physics in six years, it took even Professor Marshall over a year just to read through and grasp Dr. Rys’s journals. What he read confirmed his initial sense that the notebooks would shave around three years off making a field detector. As the time to build a prototype approached, Professor Marshall, Guy Pool and Dr. Gidsen established a company called Field Technologies with Dr. Marshall as its sole employee. To house it, they purchased an office in a nondescript plaza in Carpinteria and turned it into a state-of-the-art research & development facility. By late November 2004, everything was ready and Professor Marshall quietly set to work creating the device.
With a prototype in development, Guy Pool and Piper Finesine began designing the network that would eventually link the detectors together. Dr. Finesine’s knack for mathematics helped the process along immensely. Although it’d been about twenty years since she’d done her “math thing” as she sometimes liked to refer to it, she was still brilliant. By early November 2005, she’d drafted the specifications for an Internet-enabled network designed to detect “certain energetic events”, which was all Guy Pool could tell her about what it would target. A lot would depend, of course, on Professor Marshall’s detectors. Parameters like the range they covered and their power consumption would impact the network’s final configuration. Fortunately, they didn’t have to wait very long for those numbers. A month after completing their first draft of the specifications, Dr. Marshall’s prototype was ready.
After arranging to see a demonstration of the device in the Field Technologies lab, Guy Pool drove to Santa Barbara with Piper Finesine the next day. Checking into a bed and breakfast, Dr. Finesine stayed to review the detector network’s design while Guy Pool left for Carpinteria. Although it furthered research indirectly related to US-395 and was ironically just a few doors down from the Carpinteria Post Office, the Field Technologies lab bore little resemblance to its cavernous predecessor. Because there was no pathogen risk to speak of and due to technological advances since their days in Pueblo, the lab packed the auditorium’s research & development capabilities into a space about a tenth of the size. Guy Pool’s knock on the door was quickly greeted by Professor Marshall who told him that he was just in time for the trial run.
Walking through the office hallway and into the lab, he found what appeared to be a snow-globe sitting on Dr. Marshall’s lab bench. It was a transparent sphere around six inches in diameter and sat on a squat metallic pedestal about three inches high. Upon closer inspection, however, it didn’t have a plastic figurine of an amusement park, a tourist attraction or a snowman in it. It seemed to be filled with water and contained tiny metal filings, but otherwise it was empty. Noticing his reaction, Dr. Marshall told him what he was looking at. To Guy Pool’s surprise, the snow-globe was actually the world’s first Allen field detector.
It was silly, but Guy Pool was expecting something more substantial. He wasn’t expecting an underground, nuclear-powered, water-cooled block of metal the size of a baseball field; nevertheless, he didn’t expect it to be a snow-globe either. Professor Marshall went on to explain that the prototype was in fact filled with a water-based solution. Within that solution were particulates he’d engineered to be extremely sensitive to the unique particle emissions that characterized the Allen field. Theoretically, the range of the detector was infinite. The characteristics of Allen field particles made it fairly straightforward to calculate the location of any given particle’s generator. As a practical matter, however, those particles lost energy as they interacted with matter and energy in the real world. Things like mountain ranges and city buildings could keep Allen particles that would otherwise reach the device from doing so. Consequently, he estimated that the prototype could detect activity within a radius of a little over a mile.
As for the trial run, Dr. Marshall personally felt there was only one sure way to test it and that was to bring it to Pueblo to calibrate it with the field that the Maytag was generating. Although a positive test result was ideal, a negative test result would also be useful to at least verify that the prototype worked. A couple of wires ran out from the detector into a USB port in Dr. Marshall’s laptop. He had a Web browser open and onscreen was an aerial photo from Mapquest of the office complex that housed Field Technologies. Professor Marshall had paid some computer science graduate students at UCSB to build an online interface to display telemetry from the detector in real-time on a map. Even though Guy Pool had seen and been a part of the advances in computer services and technology, what was now possible still amazed him. Looking at the screen, as expected, the aerial view of the office complex showed no activity. Then Dr. Marshall reached over and activated the prototype.
As expected, there continued to be nothing. Not surprisingly, Professor Marshall had again pulled through. Guy Pool was just about to congratulate his friend when all of a sudden, there was something. Lots of somethings. All over the aerial view of the office complex, little white blobs began bli
nking on to and off the screen. And looking at the detector, Guy Pool noticed with some amazement that it too had been roused. Inside the globe he saw the tiny metallic particles begin to glow and whirl to life, forming a shimmering dust storm. Based on the detector’s readings, there appeared to be Allen fields all around Carpinteria.
Glancing at Dr. Marshall, Guy Pool saw his annoyance, though he tried to hide it. Professor Marshall then turned off the detector, calmly explaining that sometimes his enthusiasm got the better of him and that he needed to check the device. He asked whether they could reschedule the demonstration to the following day. Guy Pool agreed then let himself out, leaving Dr. Marshall to his work.
When he came back to the office the next day, he found the front door unlocked. He also noticed with a bit of concern that the lab equipment and components lining the hallway seemed to have been more haphazardly scattered than he remembered, as though there’d been a struggle. An urge flashed through his mind, unheeded, to pick up something heavy. Even after over four decades, memories of that day in Pueblo when he was introduced with a jolt to real-world espionage were still all too fresh. Fortunately, his concern turned out to be unfounded. Rather than a cadre of spies, Guy Pool was relieved to instead find Dr. Marshall contentedly seated at his lab bench waiting for him. Apparently the only struggle had been with the telemetry they’d observed the day before. They greeted one another then walked back to the prototype still connected to his laptop. The nearly innumerable specks flickering all over the aerial map on the laptop’s screen were still there, and the detector still shimmered with the same furious whirl of activity as the day before. At this, Professor Marshall told him that after consulting Dr. Rys’s journals, examining the detector, testing it and reviewing its settings, he couldn’t find anything wrong. The detector worked fine. Having evaluated a list of hypotheses, he believed he had a reasonable explanation for the telemetry: Allen fields were naturally occurring phenomena.