UNIVERSAL BOUGHT Random Planet.
Dennis Hogg called everyone and screamed in their ears.
“Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh!” he screamed. “I can’t believe it. They’re going to pay us to do that shit. Are you excited? I’m peeing my pants. Are you peeing? I am.”
SO THEY HAD A BUDGET now, and could have used a soundstage. But they decided to keep filming out in what Dennis called the quasi-real world.
“You had something done,” said Katie, taking her aside the first time they filmed on the Universal budget. “You had your hair straightened.”
They were setting up in a shopping mall.
“No,” said Memory. “Well, yeah.” She had. “And a face-lift.”
“No way! You look great.”
“Thanks.”
“You look almost like in some of the old pictures.”
Younger people talked about the sixties like they were Roman times.
“It was fourteen years ago,” she told Katie.
“Yeah,” said the girl, and you could tell she was thinking, Roman times.
THE NIGHT THE PILOT AIRED, Memory came home from the library and found the Devil cooking gumbo in the kitchen.
“You’re famous again!” he said, twirling a ladle, splattering sauce everywhere.
Memory shrugged and tried to play it off, but couldn’t. She was excited, and it showed.
He’d been cooking for hours. Everything went into the Devil’s gumbo. All over the counter and floor lay lobster shells and clamshells and oyster shells and signs that sausage had been ground fresh. A murder-scene spray of cocktail sauce coated the wallpaper.
He made her taste some. Like the best cooking, it was a thousand flavors, and it was one mighty flavor alone.
When she opened her eyes, he was holding a tiny green ear of corn over the kettle. It was somehow reflective … Hmm.
It was a marijuana bud so drenched in crystals it might have been a disco ball.
“Don’t you dare.”
The Devil dropped it in the gumbo.
And they watched the pilot together, giggling more and more, until they were laughing at the commercials, too. And when it was over—
He pounced like a tiger, flattening her against the wall, driving his jaws against her throat. Nightmare fingers gripped her legs. Clothes shredded like clouds in a hurricane.
She pulled his hair, forcing him closer. Their foreheads met. They glared at each other, point-blank, then thundered to the floor.
29.
Like Having a Psychic Heart
San Francisco, 1985
THEY CALLED HIM Big Zach.
The nine hundred people at Bullhorse Technologies dominated the home-computer market. Had practically invented the home-computer market.
Being called “Big Zach” was inevitable, especially now that Zachary had put on some weight. The effect was imposing.
A hush fell over the offices of Bullhorse Technologies when he came towering through, usually accompanied by engineers from senior staff. The hush lasted after he was out of sight, too.
That’s what happens when you change the world. People hush when you go by.
THE DEVIL FOLLOWED HIM to work three days in a row, and wandered around touching things and asking dumb questions until Zachary finally asked, “What do you want?”
The Devil loped over, spun around twice in an ergonomic swivel chair, and said, “Games.”
Zachary tapped his teeth with a pencil.
“We’ve got games.”
“They’re stupid.”
Zachary argued that games had come a long way. That they had started out with games like video tennis and video hockey, where you doinked around a little white square. There were better games, with spaceships and asteroids and racetracks—
“You have to go to an arcade to play them. What if you could play them at home?”
“On your computer?”
“Bingo! This market will eat you, Zach-O, if you don’t stay ahead of the curve.”
When had it quit being history and started being a market?
“Games.” Zachary tried the idea out on his tongue, before letting it play in his brain.
HE TRIED TO think about things that were fun. Things that would make a good game. He couldn’t think of any. So he drove to Golden Gate Park, where he sat watching the bay change colors.
It occurred to him that he was lonely.
Being unmarried, very busy, and a little shy about his extra weight, he sometimes passed a year between dates. Women, more and more, felt like a part of his life that was getting away from him. Still, he had always believed that he was destined to fall in love. Since he was a little kid, he’d had a premonition that he would meet a girl, the love of his life, and she would ask him if he rode horses.
He would stammer, and reply, “Sometimes. Not real well or anything,” and when he said that, she would realize who he was, because she’d had the dream, too, and they would rush into each other’s arms and be together.
It was like having a psychic heart whose prediction hadn’t come true yet.
He was a little old for this kind of fantasy, surely. He was a man of eminent practicality. Wasn’t he?
And instead of his heart starting to ache the way another man’s would, Zachary’s electrocuted brain kicked on.
Being lonely, said his brain, really meant that he wanted to be in love. Right?
Love, suggested his brain, was a game.
Zachary almost stopped breathing.
“That’s it!” he whispered to the park and the bay and the setting sun.
He got a speeding ticket on the way back to the lab, and when he got there he put all his single young nerds on a new project.
Two weeks later, City Park Pickup, complete with graphics that barely made it past the censors, generated white-hot sales in the first forty minutes of its release.
“You’ve got it!” cheered the Devil. “You’re like the pimp of technology. This is the kind of thing that will bring people to computers. Not just lots of people. I mean everybody, man. You hear me? This is what it’s all about.”
And Zachary agreed with him for a while, until the day he fell in love for real.
THE BULLHORSE TECHIES built something called a “game system.”
It was a bunch of hardware you could use to play different kinds of games, including competitors’ games. It was a masterstroke of market domination. Zachary threw a Fourth of July costume party to celebrate, and met his wife right smack in the middle of it.
She worked for him, as a chemical engineer in hardware, designing the parts of computers where something made of plastic had to fit something made of rubber, or where rubber had to be attached to metal. She had a master’s from Caltech, her name was Clara, and she came to the party as Abigail Adams.
Zachary was Benjamin Franklin. He stuck himself with the task of roasting the pig, which meant he couldn’t wander around much. Clara brought him a beer, asked how the pig was coming along, and three hours later they were still talking (Clara did not experience the Hush in his presence).
She was single. She had always been single. She had no children. She had a dog named Jake who would rip your balls off.
“If what?” asked Zachary.
“If he feels like it. Is it true you used to freeze people? You know, like—”
“I know what you mean. Yes, it’s true.”
“Did you ever think it would really work?”
“Yes,” he answered. “It tore me up when they started failing.”
She looked at him long and hard. Then she said, “I was going to get another drink. Come with me?”
“Of course,” he said, and pointed a ladies-first finger at the shipping dock, temporarily serving as a bar.
“Not here,” she said. “I was going somewhere else.”
Oh.
“I can’t really leave …”
“You’re the boss.”
He was the boss.
He left.
They went to his house and played City Park Pickup on his game system, and when their characters kissed on-screen, Zachary leaned over and kissed Clara for real.
In his bedroom, they both undressed completely, and folded their clothes before facing each other, before coming together.
AFTER, HE SAID, “Ask me if I ride horses.”
“Do you?”
“No, I mean, I want you to say—”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
And it didn’t.
PILLOW TALK seemed to be where their best selves came out, even if they were just being silly, their postorgasmic brains floating in oxytocin.
“Knock-knock.” Zachary’s brain, for some reason, gravitated to jokes.
“Who’s there?”
“Interrupting cow.”
“Interrup—”
“MOO!”
Even after Zachary noticed that telling knock-knock jokes in bed seemed to make continued lovemaking statistically unlikely, he still did it. He couldn’t help it.
SOMETIMES THEIR PILLOW talk was more personal.
“How come you waited,” Clara asked, half straddling him, her cheek pressed against his sternum, “until I was, you know, almost forty before you showed up in my life?”
“It’s like our hearts waited until we were old enough and wise enough for each other. They waited until practice was over.”
The personal pillow talk was usually pretty cheesy, but it was great, too.
“I wouldn’t have been ready for you when I was younger,” he added.
“I would’ve liked to have gone to Woodstock with you,” she whispered.
“I would’ve liked to have gone to Caltech with you. Besides, I got electrocuted at Woodstock. I drooled a lot, after that.”
Clara considered.
“Maybe it is best that we came along later. You know, for each other.”
Then she licked his chest.
Zachary noticed that the personal kind of pillow talk was statistically much more likely to lead to further lovemaking.
ONE NIGHT, the pillow talk started before the lovemaking was over.
It was Zachary’s fault. It took them both by surprise.
Clara was on top, slowly grinding in circles with her hips. This always drove him crazy, so when he suddenly bellowed, “Holy God!” she didn’t think anything of it, at first.
But then his big hands tightened around her buttocks and he said, “What if you could get a computer file on one system to talk directly to a file on another system?”
Clara stopped grinding.
Work thoughts sometimes popped into Clara’s head, too, when they were making love. She’d just always felt it wise to keep them to herself. So even though she was a little miffed, she understood.
“Go on,” she said.
“There are internets all over the place, right?” he said. “The military has them. Different companies have them, and colleges and so on. But they all run on different languages and protocols, so we can’t get one internet to talk to another internet. Right?”
“Duh.”
“What if I had suddenly figured out a way to design a digital ‘package’ that would travel between systems and … ignore … the system boundaries and go straight from one file to another? If the package could establish a link between the documents, it could build a web between systems, and systems could talk to each other even if they were programmed with different languages. We could build an internet that could be used by regular people, all over the world.”
“You make it sound easy,” said Clara.
Zachary moved his hips a little. He was still hard.
“Not easy,” he said. “But possible. I’m sure it’s possible. I’m going to put the whole lab on it tomorrow.”
“Good. Are you finished?”
Zachary nodded. He moved his hips again, and the grinding picked up where it left off. Work thoughts jumped like popcorn in both of their heads, but they kept quiet about it.
THAT NIGHT BORE two earthshaking fruits.
One was the World Wide Web, which would take five years to build and propagate, and would land Zachary’s face on the cover of Time, over the words “Connecting the World.”
The other was a child. A boy, Seth, who came along within months.
Zachary, gloved and gowned, pretended to help with the delivery, the way they let men do.
They let him hold the baby for a couple of minutes. Those two minutes became the center of his life.
He had to admit the baby was hardly a movie star. Like most babies, he had a frightening, undercooked look about him. Most of him was wrapped up and hidden in a blue cocoon anyhow, but all it took was the soft scrap of weight against Zachary’s forearm, the tiny roundness of the head in his palm, and Zachary was lost.
Seth didn’t cry. He never would, much. He lay there with his two moon-pool eyes unblinking, and it seemed to Zachary that his whole life and his whole world vanished into those eyes and was multiplied, as if he had magically become ten times the Zachary he’d ever been before. He understood why Clifton Michael had been so desperate, and seemed so small compared to his daughter. He understood why people with families had an easier time dying than people without. He understood why almost everything that ever happened to him, no matter how wonderful it was, felt secretly hollow compared to this.
This was how you changed the world.
He understood this without thinking it, without thinking anything at all, really, because his nerves chose that moment to have one of their electronic hiccups, and the nurses took the baby away before his father could drool on him.
STILL GLOVED AND GOWNED, honorably bloody, Zachary was walking in a daze down a long, bright, hospital-smelling corridor when he found the Devil crouched on the floor with his arm halfway up inside a snack machine.
“Hey,” said Zachary.
“Congratulations,” grunted the Devil.
“What’s up?”
“Goddamn bag of pretzels didn’t drop. A dollar for a bag of pretzels with maybe nine pretzels in it.”
“Move your arm. Get your arm out of there.”
The Devil extricated himself and hopped to his feet. He watched expectantly as Zachary’s giant hand gripped the top corner of the machine, wobbled it once, and let go.
The pretzels fell. The Devil retrieved them.
“I mean,” said Zachary, “what are you doing here?”
“Looking out for things.”
Zachary didn’t know what that answer meant, and he didn’t like having the Devil in the same building as his son. Things were different now.
“What are the chances,” he asked, “of getting my soul back?”
The Devil had eaten all nine pretzels already, and was cleaning up the loose salt with a long, thrashing tongue.
“None,” he replied, licking his lips.
Zachary pursed his lips. Struggled not to say anything more. Now wasn’t the time. He felt dirty. Now that his son was here, now that Clara was here, he wanted a new past to go with his new future. Knowing that wasn’t possible, he resolved that the new future would at least be complete, and be clean.
The Devil walked away.
Zachary let him go.
The Devil might be the Devil, but he was Big Zach, the man who was going to connect everybody in the world.
He tore off his scrubs as if changing into Superman.
30.
Fish in Prison
Tall Timbers Minimum Security Correctional Facility for Men, 1987
FOUR YEARS DRAGGED OUT in court. Four years of sleepless nights and throwing up and almost shooting himself, all for nothing. He was convicted and packed off to the kind of prison they pack naughty businessmen off to.
It wasn’t so bad.
“It’s not so bad,” Fish whispered in the night to his cellmate, Charles, on the lower bunk, a former vice-president of the Coca-Cola Corporation.
“That’s because it’s not real p
rison,” said Charles.
Charles was a Harvard man. This seemed to be a prison for Harvard men. Yale guys went someplace else. If you were a self-made man like Fish, and had not completed college, you rubbed shoulders with the Ivy League felons, but they didn’t have to talk to you or pretend you had the right to be there among them.
“If it’s not a real prison,” said Fish, “then walk out and go home after roll call tomorrow. I dare you.”
Silence.
You can’t dare a Harvard man unless you’re a Harvard man yourself.
YOU COULD WORK, if you wanted to, at Tall Timbers. Most inmates wanted to. It passed the time and earned them money.
Fish lucked into a job in the prison library. The library was a nice assignment, because you had a lot of outside contact. Interlibrary loans, requests for articles, ordering new material, dealing with new technology.
For a week, Fish shelved books, and pushed a magazine cart around the various cells and dayrooms. The jobs no one else wanted to do. The other library clerks were mostly guys in their fifties. They winked at him and made “new guy” jokes.’
His second week, though, he decided enough was enough. Time for these old sacks to learn some respect. He might be a new guy, but he was still Mark Fish, goddammit. He had taken insurance to a whole new level! He was friends with the Devil!
So on Monday morning, he sat himself down at the front desk, and started stamping returned books.
Fish was on his tenth book when someone gave him a poke from behind and said, “My spot there, son.”
Fish cast an irritated eye over his shoulder.
“Huh?”
There stood Harry Truman, or someone who looked a lot like him, in a prison jumpsuit accented with a massive gold Rolex.
“You’re in my spot,” said Truman.
Fish told Harry to blow it out his ass, and went back to stamping.
The day came and went. Nothing more was said.
Fish thought, Somebody must have told him who I am.
THE PEOPLE WHO CAME and got him in the middle of the night did not wake him up. They just yanked his mattress off the top bunk, spilling him against the wall.
He struggled to his knees, but was kicked down by flying wingtip shoes, and held motionless by invisible fat hands, some with gold rings.
Up Jumps the Devil Page 24