The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

There follows a long discussion on how many computers the first team should take to Las Vegas. Doyne wants two computers for a complete system, and another two computers for a back-up. Mark is in a hurry to send the team off with only one set. “I’m queasy about going to Nevada without a back-up system,” Doyne tells him. “Up on the bench the computer works fine. But when I start walking around on it, it tends to flake out. I get ghost signals and other garbage in the clicks.”

  “One also wonders,” Norman muses, “whether there is something about the electronic environment in Las Vegas that might make the computer unhappy. Where do you think the system is vulnerable?” he asks Mark.

  “We don’t have any software protection against noise,” he answers. “There could be a lot of garbage in the environment that confuses either the computer or the radio transmission.”

  “In the past we’ve always gotten squeezed in Las Vegas,” Doyne says. “Even when we went with two or three sets of equipment, we invariably got pared down to only one that worked. So people sat around getting antsy, and the shift rotation turned into a mess.”

  The question of how many computers to send with the first team remains open as Doyne turns to other items on the agenda. “Someone has to figure out how much money we should take for betting capital. We need a repair kit. We have to make costumes. And then there’s the question of transportation. Letty’s Fiat is a ringer, but finding a second car is a problem. What do you think about taking the Blue Bus?”

  “That’s a bad idea,” Rob answers. “With an orange sticker on the front saying, ‘Question Authority,’ the Bus doesn’t really project the kind of image we want to have when driving up to Caesars Palace.”

  It is past midnight when Doyne reaches the end of his list. “We need to call a dress rehearsal as soon as possible,” he concludes.

  “I’ll be the pit boss,” says Mark. Norman offers his services as croupier. Doyne volunteers as data taker. Rob says he’ll fill in as a cocktail waitress. “I’ll be the cashier,” says Letty. “And Thomas,” she adds, turning to me with a smile, “you get to be the roulette player stealing money out from under our noses.”

  I walk into the Shop early the next morning to find everyone already at work breadboarding computer sandwiches, assembling battery boats, and spinning the wheel. In a room no bigger than twenty feet by twelve, with walls either unfinished or covered merely by the silver lining of Johns Manville insulation, every available inch of concrete floor is taken up by the two posts needed for holding up the roof beams, three workbenches, a drill press, a grinder, and the roulette wheel jacked up on its table. New to the decor are a wet suit hanging in the rafters and a surfboard leaned against the wall under the glowering head of Manifest Destiny.

  “That’s for taking the system to Biarritz,” says Rob, pointing to the surfboard. “When we’re not playing roulette, we can catch a few waves.”

  I remark that the room looks neater than usual. The plastic ice cream containers lining the shelves have been newly labeled MSC CHIPS, LEDs, MSC RESISTORS, TRANSITORS, 110 V AC 60 Hz MALE AND FEMALE PLUGS, and so forth.

  “It’s Rob’s good influence,” Doyne says. “He even makes us put away our tools at the end of the day.”

  Doyne sits at a workbench covered by a Tektronix oscilloscope, a signal generator used for tuning components, and a power converter needed for transforming AC to DC and stepping it down to the meager 5 or 10 volts on which computers run. Lying in the middle of these tools is a breadboarded mode switch.

  “Yesterday it worked great,” he says, “but today I can’t get a clean signal out of it.” He probes among the components with needles wired to the oscilloscope. Instead of uniform waves rolling over the face of the scope, the lines are roughed into peaks and troughs. Hoping to straighten them out, Doyne spins a couple of dials under the screen, but this only skews the waves into gale-force chop.

  “Batten down the hatches,” Rob yells. Wearing green safety goggles, he leans over the drill press and drills three neat holes along the edge of a battery boat. Designed to fit into the heel of a shoe as the power supply and radio unit for a computer sandwich, each boat (so named because its rounded shape makes it look something like an inland scow) holds several kinds of batteries, an antenna, two solenoids, and a radio transmitter and receiver.

  “This is a little tricky,” Rob comments after drilling the holes. “There are a hundred and forty turns of antenna wire embedded in these things. One false move with the drill, and you end up tossing a week’s work in the garbage bin.”

  The battery boats not only resemble boats, they are also manufactured like them. The process begins with a plaster mold in which antenna wire, looped and tied together, is strung along the outer edge. After layers of spun-glass cloth have been laid over the wire to act as reinforcement, the mold is filled with liquid casting resin bought from a marine supply store. In half an hour the resin has hardened to the consistency of gelatin, and by the end of a day it can be walked on by an elephant, or at least a human.

  When broken out of their plaster molds, the units are ground, routed, polished, drilled, and loaded with components. The boats end up carrying a full cargo of resistors, capacitors, diodes, batteries, solenoids, antennas—in short, everything needed to power a computer, as well as to input, output, and transmit its signals. After being tested, the boats are fitted with a clear plastic lid, out of which stick two of the system’s three thumping solenoids. In order to register on a different part of the foot, the third thumper lies farther forward on the sandwich.

  “This isn’t your everyday plastic,” Rob explains, holding up one of the boat lids. “It’s polycarbonate, or Lexan. At nine dollars a square foot, it’s the same stuff they use to make jailhouse windows.”

  Complete with a ribbon cable trailing out its stern, a finished boat looks like a teaching aid in a high school biology class—maybe a sperm magnified a million times. The ribbon cable, which is designed to stretch along the arch of the shoe, connects the boat to its computer. Attached to the end of the cable is an eight-pronged socket with individual pins capable of delivering either 5 or 0 volts (required for running the microprocessor) or 20 volts (needed for radio transmission and solenoid buzzes).

  “These sockets are actually made for flying model airplanes,” Rob says. “They’re nifty little things. But getting the model airplane connectors soldered onto the cable has to be the biggest pain in boat building.”

  Holding a grease can and a collar of ball bearings lifted from the internal mechanism, Letty leans over the roulette wheel. “We were getting lousy predictions yesterday,” she says. “The rotor is swollen from having been rained on this winter. So I’m taking it apart to sand the rim and grease the bearings.”

  “It’s too humid for it in Santa Cruz,” Doyne remarks. “The wheel would be happier if we took it back to Las Vegas.”

  “After all the things that have been done to it,” says Rob, “I wonder if the wheel still likes us.”

  “It’s had a more exciting life than most wheels,” Letty says. “We liberated it from the casinos and brought it out here to do something much more interesting. I’m sure the wheel still likes us.”

  With the radio tuned to KFAT, Dolly Parton comes on the air singing the theme song from Nine to Five. Mark Truitt, his hair and beard tufted into clumps, strides into the Shop. “Waxed and ready to go,” he exclaims. “After a hike to the Mall and back, the sandwich still scopes out perfectly.”

  Mark holds in his hand a fiber glass rectangle tapered at one end. No larger and barely thicker than the sole of a size four shoe, the computer is opalescent gray and slightly transparent, so that on holding it up to the light one discerns inside the handful of smaller black rectangles that have been layered on top of each other in this electronic BLT constructed out of RAMs, ROMs, and a microprocessor.

  The problem with Mark’s metaphor, as just demonstrated, lies in the fact that this particular sandwich is sturdy enough to walk on. After inventing a novel design
for building computers with their chips inverted on top of each other, Mark has come up with another original idea for fixing these components in place by means of a process he describes as waxing the sandwich. Given the idea before he discovered the means to implement it, he had imagined that somewhere in the world there existed a substance, viscous when heated, hard when cooled, that could be poured into the middle of a computer sandwich. This miraculous material, after flowing around the microprocessor, would cool and set up like concrete with a time capsule buried in the middle of it. The only parts of the computer still exposed to the outside world would be a toe-operated microswitch, a solenoid, a battery plug, and the backsides of two PC boards, Acting as top and bottom to the sandwich, the boards would be covered with the solder points of an otherwise inscrutable circuit.

  Working in favor of Mark’s idea for waxing the sandwich was its simplicity. It made for a one-piece, ready-to-wear computer. Should it ever fall into the wrong hands in Las Vegas, the device would likely remain an unidentified object that not even a specialist could reverse engineer. But the fact of its impregnability also argued against Mark’s idea to wax the computer. Once sealed, troubleshooting the system and replacing burnt-out components would prove difficult, if not impossible.

  The question was argued back and forth at several Project meetings. Doyne favored leaving the sandwich open and building a metal box around it, while Mark wanted to seal the computer in perpetuity with a filling of epoxy resin. They compromised on a third solution. After fitting a polycarbonate spacer between the upper and lower PC boards, the sandwich would be filled with microcrystalline wax. This was the magic substance Mark had been looking for. A petroleum product related to plastic, microcrystalline wax is hard, strong, and brittle—except at 300° Fahrenheit, when it takes on the consistency of molasses.

  “It’s a daring thing to do,” Mark says, handing me the newly waxed computer. “You take a microprocessor that works, and in an hour you make it very hard to fix if you’ve messed it up.”

  Explaining the waxing process, Mark describes how he stayed awake most of the night trying to calibrate his gas oven to exactly 300°. “That’s the maximum rated storage temperature for our chips. So I didn’t want to take any chances. I had a thermometer inside the oven, but it was tricky keeping the door wedged open to read it. When I had shut all the air currents out of the kitchen and finally got the temperature just right, I popped the computer into the oven for an hour. I wanted to warm it up before pouring in the wax, which I was melting on the stove in a double boiler with a candy thermometer. When the wax was highly viscous, I dripped it into the sandwich through a funnel and let everything bake in the oven for a few more minutes. Then I took out the computer and laid it on a cooling rack. As soon as I could, I put the scope to it and prayed everything was still intact. If there had been any problems, I theoretically could have thrown the computer back in the oven and melted the wax out of it. The process is supposed to be reversible, but we haven’t had a chance to test it yet.”

  Holding the sandwich in my hand, the only parts of the computer still clearly visible are the copper tracings etched on the inside of its PC boards and the nodules of solder that dot the backsides of these boards. The solder points indicate where under the fiber glass lie the golden pins that lead to buried boxes of silicon, boxes now frozen possibly forever into a translucent sea of microcrystalline wax.

  Mark points to the curving lines inside the sandwich. “This is unusual architecture for the circuit of a computer. You’ll notice that none of the lines is straight.”

  “Why is that?” I ask.

  “Because I drew them without a ruler.”

  15

  “Dear Eudaemons”

  The zodiac may be regarded as an immense roulette wheel on which the Creator has thrown a very great number of small balls.

  Henri Poincaré

  That night—actually, in the small hours of the following morning—I find Doyne and Norman standing at the kitchen table eating gingersnaps. Scattered in front of them are pages of graph paper covered with hundreds of data points.

  “I’m nervous about these,” Doyne says, pointing to the graphs. “Letty worked all day collecting data. But it seems more random than usual. I think I’ll pull out the old histograms and see how they compare. I also want to run the KIM in place of the shoes. By using the computer to simulate our toe clicks, we should be able to find out whether the statistical fluctuations are due to human error. But what makes me suspicious is the fact that Joe Random—some space case from down on the Mall—should be able to click better than this.”

  Norman chews a gingersnap and strokes his beard. “Has anyone tampered with the program?” he asks.

  “Mark made some changes so that now we clock the rotor past the reference point at every other revolution. It’s more accurate that way. And he’s done some housekeeping at one or two other addresses.”

  “Does Mark have any theories about what’s going on? Is he thinking about the problem?”

  “Yes, he’s thinking about it. But at this point, I’d rather not have any theories. We should run more tests and put the program on the KIM.”

  “At least you have some help in the software wars. You used to be all alone out there.”

  “I wish I still were,” Doyne says. “There’s no documentation for any of the recent changes in the program, which means there are stretches of it that no one knows anything about.”

  Later that morning, after breakfast, Doyne clears the dining room table and turns to me. “We’re picking up your shoes from the cobbler this afternoon. You’ll have to use your fingers until then, but I think it’s time you got started on betting practice.”

  He spreads in front of me the Eudaemonic layout. Out of an old cigar box he pulls a handful of plastic casino chips and scatters them across the baize. “It may not be the real thing,” he says, “but you get the idea.”

  Next he places on the table a computer sandwich and battery boat. The two units, nestled one behind the other, look like the sole and heel of a shoe designed for a clubfooted toddler. Walking on them will take some getting used to. Doyne stretches the ribbon cable from the boat to the computer. “As soon as you plug in the sandwich, you’re powered up. The batteries should last several hours. But be sure to unplug the computer when you’re not playing.”

  Beside the cigar box full of roulette chips Doyne places a second, larger container made out of green plastic. “This is the betting practice box,” he says, propping open the lid. “Inside you have an LED display, some batteries, and a few chips wired into an electronic circuit.”

  I peer inside the box. “That’s Harry in there,” Doyne announces, referring to the old roulette computer. “I was sorry to see this happen, but Mark thought we should cannibalize it.”

  Doyne explains to me how the box works. “When you flick this toggle switch, Harry starts transmitting signals strong enough to buzz your solenoids from fifteen feet away. I designed a special random number program for the circuit, so there’s no pattern to the buzzes.”

  A tinking noise comes from the computer and battery boat in front of me. One of their three solenoids begins to pop up and down. Doyne places his hand over the buzzes and dampens the sound against his palm. With one solenoid sticking up from the sandwich and two from the boat, the buzzers are lined up within a few centimeters of each other. I hear another tink, tink, tink come from under his hand.

  “That’s a one,” he says. “A low-frequency buzz on the front solenoid.” I look at the LED display inside the betting practice box to see a red number “1” light up in computer script. A second, more insistent bzzzz comes from under Doyne’s palm. “High frequency, front solenoid,” he says. The diodes inside the box light up with the number “3.” Another bzzzz comes from down near Doyne’s metacarpals. “High frequency, middle solenoid.” A red number “6” glows on the display.

  “It’s like a computerized flash card,” he explains. “I designed the box for t
raining bettors while driving to Las Vegas. The speed is variable. By toggling this switch, you can make the buzzes come at you as fast as you want. After you’ve learned the signals and picked up speed, then you can start to work on your betting patterns.

  “You have to memorize the numbers in each octant on the wheel, as well as one or two numbers to either side. This allows you to vary your betting patterns and confuse anyone trying to figure out your system. You want to cover only three or four numbers at a time, depending on your bank-to-bet ratio, but you need a range of choices. If the table is crowded and you’re stuck at one end of the layout, you might have trouble reaching all the numbers. If you can’t get to 30, for example, you can substitute 11, which is next to it on the wheel, but farther up the layout. You have to work out various strategies like that for getting your bets placed as fast as possible. Your moves should be automatic. The computer gives you a moderate buzz on the middle solenoid. Octant five. Numbers 12, 8, 19, 31, and 18. Wham. You cover 8 and 12, because they’re next to each other on the layout, and then you hit 18 and 19. But you might want to forget 31, because it’s way down at the far end of the table.”

  Doyne leaves me in the dining room standing over a tablecloth painted with red and black numbers. I place my palm over the computer and battery boat. The front solenoid tickles my life line as it pops up and down. Tink, tink, tink. A low-frequency buzz. Octant number one. I look into the betting practice box and wait for the diode display to light up with a squared-off computer digit. I smile to myself on seeing the electronic flash card give me a red thumbs up.

  I lock into playing roulette and barely notice throughout the day as one storm after another rolls in off the Pacific. Late in the afternoon, I walk into the garden to find strong winds and thunder-heads building up into another storm. Entering the Shop, I discover Letty, Rob, and Doyne huddled around the roulette wheel. This mystic icon has every inch of its varnished frame covered with wires and scientific instruments, including a handful of optrons pointing down onto the ball. These are infrared, photosensitive transistors—neat little gadgets that record the position and velocity of a moving object by means of infrared radiation. I watch Letty clicking microswitches and then turn to look at the red numbers glowing on the face of the KIM.