A Ruling Passion

by Judith Michael

  She looked at him to see if he were making fun of her, but his eyes and his smile were warm. "Thank you," she said huskily; her throat was dry with fear.

  Nick brought Chad from his room upstairs and held him against his chest, while his other arm held Sybille. They watched the end of the local news and the commercials at the half hour. And then, in bold jagged letters, "The Hot Seat" splashed across the screen. Sybille's body clenched into a tense knot.

  On the screen, two men and a woman sat in brown leather armchairs at a round table, notepads and pencils before them. In a red leather chair sat a balding young man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a somber tie that clutched a high, starched collar. A circle of white light pinpointed the red leather chair.

  "The hot seat," murmured Nick.

  Sybille smiled.

  "The Hot Seat," said a deep voice as the camera moved in to the group at the table, then panned slowly around it, pausing at each of the three interrogators and the young man in the red leather chair. "The toughest place in San Jose. Where there's no hiding. No room for pretense. No escape." The camera pulled back, showing the whole group. "The Hot Seat. A discussion among equals where the truth will be found, because our questioners ask all the questions you, our audience, would ask if you were in their seats. No holds barred."

  The announcer introduced the interrogators and the man in the hot seat. "Wilfred Broome, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. We'll begin our discussion with Morton Case."

  Case was short and round, with cheerful eyes and rosy cheeks. His voice was like syrup. "Mr. Broome, thirteen years ago you led several demonstrations at the University of California in Berkeley. Today you come down hard on demonstrators—"

  "That was a long time ago." Broome's smile did not reach his eyes. "It has nothing to do with this election."

  "Or with you?" asked the other man at the table.

  "Nothing to do with me today/" Broome said, his smile becoming complicitous, man to man. "We all had our salad days; you know how it is. I went through mine—wild oats, and all that—but it didn't last; I came to my senses when I realized"—his shoulders went back, his chin came up, and his words rolled out—"I could not risk destroying the fabric of our society, the very beliefs and ethics and morals I revered and vowed to cherish and protect—"

  "The kind of morals that led you to be sued for child support by a woman whose baby you fathered?"

  The woman who had dropped the question into the middle of Broome's sentence looked at him with raised eyebrows.

  "What the—" Broome's eyes darted to the camera, then away. The muscles of his face were drawn. "You can't bring up—" He ran a hand over his cheeks and tightened his lips to a thin line. "That was a long time ago. The past. Nothing to do with me."

  "But you were the father," one of them said.

  "I was a kid—!" exclaimed Broome.

  "You were thirty-one." Suddenly the pace quickened. "Eight years ago-"

  "You were running a business—"

  "And giving speeches on American morality—"

  "Mothers shouldn't work, you said, to protect the family—"

  "Ban abortions, you said, to protect the family—"

  "While you were getting an elementary-school teacher from Santa Cruz pregnant."

  "I never—hey, what is this, I didn't—"

  "You aren't paying child support today?"

  "Yes! No! I'm helping a young woman who was in trouble!" Silence fell over the table. The three interrogators let the silence stretch out. Broome stretched his lips. "This is ridiculous. I won't sit here and let you dredge up the past—"

  Case pointed over Broome's shoulder. "The door is behind you, Mr. Broome. You don't have to talk about anything. You don't have to be in the Hot Seat. We'd regret your departure, and our viewers would, too, but we don't try to keep embarrassed guests against their will."

  Nick leaned forward as if pulled toward the screen. He didn't like Broome, he hated everything he stood for, but there were accepted ways to question candidates and this was not one of them. He felt Broome's helpless fury so keenly it was as if he too were squirming in that bright light.

  "Isn't it incredible?'''' Sybille asked. "It works; it really works. Oh, Nick, isn't it wonderful?"

  He looked at her. Her face was as bright as as child's, her eyes shining, her moist lips parted. She was breathing rapidly, as if she were at the height of sexual pleasure. He drew back and stood up. Chad hung over his arm, wide-eyed, turning his head to watch the television screen.

  "Where are you going?" Sybille cried. "You haven't seen all of it!"

  "Ifs just more of the same, isn't it?" He lifted Chad to his shoulder, "Twisting the knife. They aren't interested in ideas or information; all they're interested in is making him squirm. I don't find that amusing. I don't think many people will."

  "You're wrong," she said. "Everybody loves to watch people squirm. How many people really want ideas and information? They'd rather see someone slip on a banana peel or get whacked in the rear with a paddle or be made a fool of. What do you think 'Candid Camera' was about? Someone once told me nobody cares about news; they want human interest. Well, this is the best kind of human interest. The kind that makes viewers feel superior to the fool on the screen."

  She watched Morton Case ask three rapid-fire questions in a row. 'When we were showing the pilot to Wooster Insurance, trying to sell them on sponsoring it, the president of the company said I'd have been in the first row of the Colosseum, watching the Christians being thrown to the lions."

  Nick felt his heart contract. "Did you take that as a compliment?"

  She met his eyes. "He meant it as one. He told me he likes tough people. He bought this show because he knew I'd dehver."

  "Meaning you wouldn't get soft."

  "Exactly. That's what you meant, wasn't it, when you told me you loved my determination?"

  "Not quite." Chad began chewing on his knuckle, and with relief Nick said, "I'm going to get this young man some food."

  "What did you mean when you said that?"

  "I meant I loved it that you refiised to be defeated, that you weren't afraid to try again, that you always picked yourself up from a setback and kept going. That has nothing to do with getting ahead by appealing to the side of people that likes to watch Christians thrown to the lions. I didn't know that was a side of you, either." He turned to go, then paused. "I should congratulate you. It's not easy to get a new program on the air. You've done wonders in a very short time. I hope you're pleased."

  "Of course," Sybille said automatically. She felt cold. Her delight in her program was oozing away beneath Nick's hard voice, and she hated him for it. She looked at him as he stood in the doorway, holding his son as naturally as he held a pencil at his desk. He was good at whatever he did, she thought, everything came easily to him, and it rankled her especially with Chad. Nick hadn't ever been a father, he didn't even have younger brothers or sisters, but he'd helped with

  Chad's delivery as calmly as if he'd been trained for it, and, from the first time he held that tiny form in the hospital, he had handled him and cared for him with a casual authority Sybille couldn't hope to compete with, and a pleasure she couldn't understand.

  Chad knew that his father was more comfortable with him than his mother was, and he was mean about it, Sybille thought. Seven months old and he had a mean streak, squirming and kicking and crying when she held him and then grinning and making odd singing noises as soon as he was in Nick's arms. It was as if they'd fallen in love with each other, those two, and she was the outsider.

  "Of course I'm pleased," she said. "I'm going to make people notice me. That's what this is all about." She turned her back on both of them and stared at the screen. "I'm sorry you won't watch it with me. You said you would. And we don't do so many things together these days."

  "Whatever we do," Nick said as he left, "it won't be watching that show."

  The warm spring day that Nick and Ted moved Omega Computing Ser
vices from the family room to the garage was a red-letter day. At the time, they joked about it—"Doesn't look like progress to me," Nick said, "banished to the garage"—but in fact it was a leap forward that would take them, in less than five years' time, to triumphs and fortunes greater than any they had ever dreamed of.

  They were at the beginning of a revolution. Only a few people, in the early 1970s, glimpsed the ftiture that would be transformed by computers; Nick was one of them. He knew, when they changed the name of their company to Omega Computer, that they had nothing but room to grow.

  Computers themselves had been around since the 1940s, but they were primitive things: big and slow, used mostly by universities for mathematical calculations, and by big corporations to handle large amounts of data. But by 1974, the year Nick and Sybille moved to San Jose, the first successftil microprocessor had appeared: an integrated circuit etched on a tiny chip of silicon. The chip, barely a quarter of an inch square, did the same work that until then had taken five thousand separate transistors. And that chip would transform not only the computer industry, but a piece of California: the stretch of land from San Francisco south to Monterey, already dubbed Silicon Valley.

  It was there, in small towns and fields lush with vineyards and artichoke fields—soon to become industrial parks and cities blurring into each other along traffic-dogged highways—that growing numbers of

  young inventors plunged into the world of computers. In homes and offices, garages, basements and family rooms, they scribbled ideas, assembled circuits, and stared for hours at terminal screens; they sat in coffee shops late at night debating possibilities, drawing circuit diagrams and making programming notes on the backs of envelopes; they sat in silent rooms, thinking in new languages.

  What they wanted was clear to them: to solve any problem, cut through any conundrum, organize any chaos so swiftly and with such clarity that the messy world would seem neat.

  Most of them, in their casual, laid-back style, would have said it differendy: that they were turned on by computers and wanted to see what they could do; or they liked being part of revolutions; or they wanted a piece of the big money they were sure was there to be made; or they wanted to help humanity with new technology.

  Among them, Nick was an oddity. He was too normal to be accepted by the freaks whose whole world lay between a keyboard and its terminal; he was too ambitious to fit in with those who were in it only for one thing, whether it was fun, or excitement, or a sense of accomplishment, or for the good of humanity.

  Sybille didn't understand what he wanted, though he had tried to explain it to her. "I love the fun of it," he said. "It's a game: like kids writing letters to each other in secret codes, or solving puzzles they've made up."

  "It doesn't sound very grown-up," she said.

  He grinned at her. "It's not. We're all litde kids with a new toy and we keep making the new toy better."

  "You don't mean that."

  "Why not.> If work can be fim, why not?"

  "Because it's serious."

  'Work.>"

  "Everything. Work, getting what you want, handling people, being married... And you do work hard, I've watched you; you take off and play Ping-Pong, but the rest of the time you're not having fun; you're hard at work."

  "Games can take as much concentration as work; why not make it as much fun as we can?"

  "Because then you won't get anywhere."

  She couldn't risk lightheartedness, he thought, and a brief memory came to him of someone who could, even in making love. "I'm willing to give it a chance," he said. "And if I have a good time and still make myself the biggest in this business, would you be convinced?"

  She shrugged. "It wouldn't matter. I have to live my own way; I can't live yours."

  So they went separate ways, and Nick shared the hard work and the sense of play with Ted and others who became his friends in those first years of Omega Computing. But besides the fun, the excitement of discovery, the pleasures of work, it was ambition that drove him: the compulsion to do more, expand their company from the garage to its own building, make his reputation, make his fortune, start a second company, start a third... there was no end to what he expected of himself

  And he was getting there faster than most. Already he and Ted were known as the top consultants in the valley; they were the ones called in first, and called back when companies wanted to expand.

  Then, after only two years, everything changed. One day they were following current technology, showing others how to use it; the next they were making inventions of their own. They moved to the front of the crowd, and stayed there.

  They found only a handftil of others already there, among them two young men named Wozniak and Jobs, working in another garage in a city not far from San Jose. They started a company called Apple Computer. With Nick's Omega Computer, and a few others, they helped make the revolution that created the era of modern computers.

  It was when they began their own inventions that Nick and Ted moved from the family room to the garage. It all started with a new client: a chain of twenty-six high-priced women's-sportswear shops called Pari's of Pebble Beach, that stretched up and down the West Coast, from Carmel south to San Diego and north to Vancouver. Pari Shandar, forty-nine, shrewd, small, darkly exquisite, had built the chain by herself in the fifteen years since her husband left her for a younger woman. Energetic and curious. Pari welcomed each new idea that caught her attention. Two years earlier Nick had helped her set up a computer system for her accounts payable and receivable, her payroll, and the mailing list that was a key to her success, since it was a closely guarded list of wealthy women throughout the world, including her native India.

  "Now I think you can help me again," she said to Nick as they sat in her fringed silk and velvet parlor. She lived alone in a stone casde perched above the Pacific on Seventeen Mile Drive in Pebble Beach. A high stone wall protected her from the tourists who drove along the looping road to see the ocean and the cypresses, the famous golf courses and the huge homes. The crash of the surf could be heard

  through her open windows, and die cries of gulls soaring against a silver-blue sky. Otherwise it was very quiet and secluded, the rooms filled with Indian and American art, the atmosphere warm, a little heavy, like an embrace.

  Pari poured tea into translucent porcelain cups and moved a plate of small cakes closer to Nick. "This is what I want: to know what is the inventory in my shops every day. Now, we count sweaters, skirts, jackets and so on by hand three times a year—and we must close the shops early to do this. It would be so much better to know every day what items have sold so we can adjust our main inventory list. Is this clear?"

  Nick nodded. "You want reports at the end of each workday on what was sold that day in each of your twenty-six stores, and you want it done automatically. You probably want it removed automatically from your inventory list at the same time."

  She looked starded. "Is that possible? Is any of it possible? When I told this idea to someone, he said it could not be done."

  "It can be done, but it has problems. This is what we can do right now." Leaning forward, he sketched on a pad of paper, turning it so Pari could read it with him. He drew swiftly, surely, but part of his mind was distracted, aware of her perftime, the rustle of the silk dress she wore, the gleam of her ebony hair, fastened in a neat bun at her neck. The prim hairstyle belied the seductive perfume and that soft whisper of silk that made a man think of bare limbs and soft skin, the curves and taut muscles of an embrace—

  "But what are these arrows?" Pari asked. Her eyes were on his drawing, but there was a small smile on her lips, and Nick knew that somehow she had known what he was thinking.

  "How the system could work for you." He kept his voice level. 'Your clerk rings up a sale—a cashmere sweater, say, at a hundred dollars—"

  "Try two or three hundred," said Pari with a gentle laugh.

  His eyebrows rose. He had never bought Sybille a cashmere sweater. Lately he hadn't bou
ght Sybille anything at all. "All right. The clerk enters the code for that sweater in the cash register, and when it's entered it's automatically recorded, with the sweater size, style and price, and anything else you want, on a magnetic tape recorder—"

  "One in each store?"

  "Yes." He met her eyes. She was watching him more than she was watching his pencil. There was a tiny mole below her left eye: a dark

  fleck that made her skin seem even smoother. He had never noticed it before. He knew if he moved slighdy, his arm would brush hers.

  He wrenched his eyes down, to his diagram. "After the shops close, the tape recorders play back the information through the telephone system to your main computer in Monterey. The cashmere sweater— and all the other items sold in the shop—is deleted from the inventory stored in the main computer; it's also printed in a list of items sold that day in each of your shops. So you have a fresh inventory, updated from the day before, and a list of sales in twenty-six stores."

  Now she too was looking at the diagram, nodding her head. "Perfect. Perfect. When can I have it? What will it cost? Ah, but it will save me so much, I can afford to spend... well, we will see how much I can afford to spend." She put her hand on his arm. "Nicholas, I need to know what it will cost and how soon you can have it in my shops. That is, if you give me a price I can manage."

  Her hand burned on his arm, each of her fingers like a small flame curled around his sleeve. But he smiled at her sudden wariness about money. "I can't promise anything yet; I want to work on how we'd put it together. There are problems in connecting the magnetic recorders with the telephone system. No one's come up with a good way to get all that information stored and transmitted. You don't want us to install another minicomputer to do it; it's too expensive, it takes up too much room, and it doesn't have the speed we want. What we need is something small and fast, uncomplicated, low-cost, very reliable..."

  "Like a team of workers in Bombay," said Pari with a laugh. "Perhaps that is what I really need: my family could send me a team and I would give each of them a pen and a telephone. Unless you have something that will do the work of a dozen people, maybe even a hundred."