John Wick has never read anything, he doesn't know history, and he has no sense of world politics. Except for the fact that he's a gifted computer programmer, he's a zero. But four years ago, he came up with an important numerical algorithm that put him on the map. It's strange that something can just appear in a person's mind, and then ... nothing. It got him on the computer science faculty at Stanford. Four years, however, is an eternity at Stanford. He hasn't produced anything of significance since. I am one of his PhD students, and I think he's on the way out. I need a lifeboat.
As we return from a consulting job at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space in Sunnyvale, California, he begins talking about simulating satellite constellations. He steadies the steering wheel with his leg and waves his arms around while delivering a staccato, rapid-fire monologue. Then he grabs a large coffee from the cup holder. I can see the coffee slosh over the side of the chipped styrofoam cup, and splatter onto his crotch. He starts convulsing electrically in his seat, arching his back. The car swerves across an entire lane of traffic. "Goddamnfuckingshit!" he screams. He grits his teeth and clutches the steering wheel until his knuckles turn white. Then he continues. "Getting government money is easy. They don't have people like us at these defence contractors. They need real experts." He fumbles with the cup holder, then lights a cigarette. "At Stanford we are truly on the foreskin of technology," he says, looking over at me and grinning from ear to ear.
When we get back to the campus, I watch him walk slowly down the hall to his sunlit, wood-panelled office on the second floor of Margaret Jacks Hall. I walk up the carpeted staircase to the fourth floor, where I share a common area with four other grad students. The room has an open ceiling with wooden beams suspending fluorescent-light assemblies. Cheesy, maroon-carpeted cube dividers cut up the territory. Power and Ethernet cables have been strewn all over the floor and over the walls of the cubes. Broken workstations sit on the floor. People are writing text and coding virtually any time of the day or night. I never have the place to myself, and I rarely talk to anyone. There isn't time. You constantly have to remind yourself that you're at the top of the pyramid. Lots of people would like to be here - and you are.
I'm not sure what Wick does in his office every day and many nights. His door is always closed. He's supposed to be writing journal articles, but he has produced very few. He drinks 12 to 15 cups of coffee a day and hardly ever sleeps. He seems to have an insatiable lust for sensory experiences. I've heard that he just tried sky diving, and he's a veteran deep-sea scuba diver. He speeds around the campus on a greasy Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.
About a year ago, Wick's wife divorced him because he was spending almost every waking hour at Stanford University . He was pulling at least one all-nighter a week. Now he has to pay alimony and child support. He lives in a cheap stucco apartment in San Mateo, California. Once he told me that his wife was a liability to his career because she didn't understand his ambition.
I don't know how much longer my wife can hold out. She's tired of being poor. I keep telling her that a PhD from Stanford University is a very hot ticket. Stanford graduates go on to some of the most prestigious corporate positions in the world. But that's not really my motivation. I'm not the corporate type. Jobs in industry seem so trivial, the people so mediocre. Once you've tasted the cutting edge of research, there's no going back. You do everything you can to stay in the saddle.
I never studied very hard when I went to the University of California at Riverside, and I got an A in nearly every course I took. Now I have to bust my ass. There are people here who are so smart they seem like they're from another planet. Your mind races to keep up with the massive stream of information, and if you're not right there with them, they just walk away. It can be very demoralizing - but it's exciting as hell.
The satellite constellation simulator for Lockheed Martin will require some industrial-strength number crunching. I'll have to write a huge load of C++ code. Wick always trivializes the difficulty of everything, except the projects he's working on. He thinks I should be able to knock it out in about a week. I drape a large black beach towel over my workstation monitor, and then over my head, so that I have a dark shroud. Then I can write code and debug for hours in my own little world. I have to create a certain mood before I can be creative. I can feel it when the optimal brain state kicks in. But when I'm in the zone, I can really crank.
Peter Jakab is the chair of the Department of Computer Science. He sits in his office hour after hour with the door open. Sometimes he seems to be meditating. He is generally regarded as a genius, even by Stanford standards. As I am leaving the building at 9 p.m., I walk down the faculty corridor and pass his office. "Hello professor," I say, as I glance inside his door.
Jakab comes from a wealthy family in Budapest, and requires a certain formality. He wears expensively tailored suits and walks with regal posture. I am 40 feet down the hall when I hear him call me back. "Mr. Hargreaves. Could I talk to you for a minute?" he asks. His accent is very unusual. He went to boarding schools in England, then later to MIT.
I stop in my tracks and walk back to his office. He raises his palm to the chair in front of his desk, beckoning me to sit down. He strokes his trim salt-and-pepper beard. "Do you think that the most profound creative leaps come from concerted discipline and careful incremental effort ... or do they come from wild, almost chaotic explorations that require a complete jump outside oneself?"
"I think it's usually a combination of both," I say.
He laughs. "That's a very diplomatic answer." He pauses for a long time. "Yesterday, I visited a very strange institution. I went to Los Angeles to consult at the Rand Corporation, and afterward, I stopped by a place in Culver City called The Museum of Jurassic Technology. One of my graduate students recommended it. He thought I would find it amusing. Instead, it gave me an odd feeling. I would even call it disturbing. It led me to question the kind of science we do here at Stanford. This museum presented information about natural history, displayed in a very formal setting, through beautifully constructed dark-wood-trimmed dio-ramas. A very high-quality look and feel, but the information was tainted by a certain schizophrenic patina." Dr. Jakab begins speaking very quickly while he looks into my eyes, "There was an exhibit relating to a bat called Deprong mori which echo-locates using ultraviolet and X-rays. The bat is capable of penetrating solid objects, which, of course, is pa tently absurd. But it was presented with no sense of irony, and with a great deal of pseudoscientific artifice. Another one of the displays used speakers to whisper barely audible conflicting messages in each of your ears as you viewed a dimly lit, reclining bone-white dummy draped in black velvet. Then there was a complicated story about a beautiful opera singer who inspired a neurophysiologist to invent a complex cognitive model of the experience of memory. His assertion was that memories are, in fact, artificial constructions, tainted by injections of imagination. Reality becomes suspect, because we can never be sure of the validity of our memories. There were numerous three-dimensional diagrams of cones intersecting planes with extensive technobabble descriptions designed to 'prove' these assertions."
Dr. Jakab pauses to take a long drink from a mug of hot tea. His hand trembles slightly as he sets the mug down on his desk. Then he continues while looking out the window. "It was all very disturbing to me, and I wasn't quite sure why. I became agitated and felt a bit like I was losing my mind." He looks back at me. "Then I realized that the place was a metaphor for all the institutionalized enclaves of esoteric information, like Stanford. Blind acceptance of the entire body of knowledge is a prerequisite. And the system seems to work extremely well, for now. But what if it's flawed in some very basic way, and at the end of this complex exercise, the string is pulled, and the knot just disappears? You may have gone down a very convoluted path in the rat maze that leads to a dead end. The knowledge that you are left with, in retrospect, could seem every bit as absurd as the information in that museum. Remember, it wasn't so long ago that we believed that Earth was the centre of the solar system."
He gets up and starts walking slowly back and forth across his office. "The museum called to mind the fact that new discoveries have always seemed absurd to the establishment. And that's exactly what we are here at Stanford - one of the ultimate scientific establishments. I wonder if the most monumental breakthroughs can really come from the establishment."
Then he sits back down in his chair and stares off into space. "Do you get transcendent work or merely pedantic, incremental work? We certainly do win Nobel Prizes here, but that might not even be the yardstick. Einstein never received a Nobel Prize for the special theory of relativity. It was considered too controversial. Instead they gave him the prize for the photoelectric effect, which was safer. He was a 26-year-old patent clerk when he wrote his original paper on the special theory of relativity. Those theories took decades to be accepted by the establishment. By the time he got to prestigious institutions like Cal Tech and Princeton, he had become...." Dr. Jakab pauses for a long time. His gaze is somewhere out beyond my left shoulder, and he's stroking his beard.
"He became isolated from the environments that had stimulated his creativity," I say.
"That's precisely it," he says, perking up and leaning forward on his elbows as he focuses on me. "He was no longer connected to the source. He was on the decline." Dr. Jakab pauses. "So what is the remedy for all of this?"
"If I find the answer, can I be your student?" I say impulsively.
"I didn't know that you were unhappy with Dr. Wick," he says. "Although I couldn't blame you. Why did you choose him in the first place?"
"He recruited me with promises that we would coauthor a breakthrough encoding algorithm. I think he was getting bogged down, and he felt that my theoretical math background would be helpful.
"He's totally mired in the details and is unable see the deep structure of problems. His famous algorithm is just one of those serendipitous things. Like a million monkeys typing infinite sequences. If they type long enough, they will produce the complete works of Knuth." At this, Dr. Jakab begins to laugh loudly, and I laugh with him. Then he looks at his watch and becomes very serious. He says he must go home because his wife is expecting him.
"Me too," I say.
He smiles approvingly. We walk out of the building together, and he gets into a Mercedes diesel sedan. I walk several blocks to the student parking lot to find my 1976 Screaming Eagle Pontiac Firebird. Soon, I'm racing through the quiet stately neighbourhoods on the east side of the campus. I get on Highway 101 and drive for a while blasting Pink Floyd. Then I light up a joint.
I push it hard through a semicircular offramp and into the neighbourhood where my wife and I rent a house on the edge of nearby East Palo Alto. I got used to neighbourhoods like this when I lived in downtown Riverside. My wife hates it, but it's cheap. There is graffiti every-where. Some of it is real art. Liquid silver spaceships flying through a universe of splattering colour. Everything glowing orange in the reflection of sodium-vapor bulbs. Our house is a dilapidated 1940s white wooden job with peeling paint and bars on the windows. My wife is sitting in the living room, listening to music and nursing the baby.
"I told Dr. Jakab today that I want to be his student," I say.
"That's nice," she says. She sounds irritated.
"What is it?"
"Won't changing professors mean you'll have to backtrack and lose some of the work you've already done?"
"Probably. But I'm not happy with Wick. He's not well respected, and that's very important to how valuable your PhD is. This isn't about getting through in record time, it's about quality."
"I want quality, too," she says. "I just worry that you may be deluding yourself. This will be your fourth faculty advisor. I'm wondering if there isn't some other problem. Why didn't you check out this Wick before you got involved with him?"
This comment produces immediate anger in me. I feel like turning over the table. "Look, you couldn't possibly understand the complexities of the politics involved. Reputations are like an onion skin. There are so many layers to uncover, it's all very subtle ... and I'm under tremendous pressure. What I don't need is you second guessing every move I make. If you think you can do it better, I'll stay home and take care of the kid, and you go out and make a name for yourself."
"I'm not saying that, I'm just trying to take an active role. You wouldn't like it if I was completely uninterested in your work, would you?"
"No," I say, distractedly. Our daughter is busy sucking ravenously on my wife's breast. Finally, I sit down on the sofa and my wife turns on the TV. We watch the news in silence. I am thinking about Peter Jakab, and how I can get into his domain. I have to find a way to really impress him.
I get up at five the next morning and head back to the campus. I walk past the faculty offices on my way up the stairs. Wick is walking down the hallway. He is wearing a thin white T-shirt, blue jeans, and ten-nis shoes. He is unshaven and his hair is disheveled - he looks like he's been on an all-night bender. There is a large mug of steaming coffee in his hand. "Have you been here all night?" I ask him.
"Damn straight," he says. "It's the only way to get anything done. Cut out all distractions."
"I guess," I say.
"Let me show you what I'm working on," he says, putting his arm behind my back and almost shoving me into his office. Then he closes the door. We sit and sift through about 50 sheets of canary-yellow paper that he has been scribbling on. He's also been writing code and running data. He has some test cases that show images before data compression and after. There is some distortion and aliasing error in his end product. The images look like they have television snow in them. I tell him that a Householder tridiagonalized eigen-vector algorithm might be the one to use, rather than the one he's using. He looks at me with a blank expression, and I realize that he's never heard of it. That's shocking, because it is widely used in numerical analysis. He works in a narrow vacuum, but he produces and produces. Scattershot. I take his notes and start to walk down the hall with them.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing with my notes?" he screams. He runs behind me and grabs my shoulder and spins me around. He's fat, but he's strong. His eyes are squinty and on fire. His breathing is shallow and erratic.
"I was going to copy them, so that I could look them over today at my leisure."
"At your leisure - that's the trouble with you. You do everything at your leisure. Why don't you do it now! Right here in my office! My notes don't ever leave my office. I'm tired of people stealing my ideas. Understood?"
"Understood," I say. I feel like the slightest provocation would result in a fistfight. I was a wrestler at UC Riverside, but I think he could probably take me. He's got the fire in his belly.
I go back in his office and continue to pore over his notes. He sits typing madly on his workstation with his back to me. I can hear him wheezing rhythmically. Then I synch in, and everything else disappears. I'm in the zone.
After about three hours, I come up with an alternative solution that I think will yield better results with less distortion. We plug the new method into his computer simulation and run data again. It produces significantly better images, and he seems very excited. He is smiling, but he paces like a tiger in a small cage. Finally he stops. "I guess you turned out to be good for something after all," he says, patting me on the back. His BO is overpowering. It smells like cat urine.
As I wander down the hall, I check my watch and realize that I've been in Wick's office for five hours. I feel a little lightheaded as I walk up the stairs to the fourth floor. Inside my office, I sit with my officemates and eat a brown-bag lunch. Something is haunting me about the work Wick is doing. I have the intuitive feeling that the solution I came up with is not really optimal, and not all that elegant. I work the rest of the afternoon on the Lockheed-Martin project, and then go out in my Firebird to dinner.
There is a local Italian restaurant called Bonadio's that serves cheap, heavy, northern Italian food. The kind I like. It's located on a little finger of urban decay that has spilled across Highway 101 from East Palo Alto. On University Avenue, next to Won Choi's House of Wigs. I sit in the back and watch the headlights from the street creep along the wall through the slatted wooden blinds. It's dark inside, like my programming shroud. I like the over-stuffed red Naugahyde bar stools and booths. I sit in the back and drink a half carafe of full-bodied red table wine while I eat pappardelle with Italian sausage, plum tomatoes, and thick, butter-soaked garlic bread. When I get bored, I start Laplace transforming equations on my napkin, working on Wick's problem again. There is something out there that I can almost grab. I can feel it, but it keeps slipping through my fingers.
I spend the entire weekend on the fourth floor under the shroud, programming the satellite constellation simulator and thinking about Wick's compression problem. I only come home to sleep. On Monday morning at 7:30 a.m., I walk down the faculty hallway past Dr. Jakab's door. He is sitting in his chair staring up at the ceiling. I pass by and say hello. "Hello, Mr. Hargreaves," he says. His voice is friendly, but far away. "Did you hear about the big fires in the Los Altos hills over the weekend?"
"No, I was programming all weekend," I say.
"My house almost burned down. They came around and told us to evacuate. I sent my wife and children to her sister's house in Reno. But I stayed behind to water the roof. I was sitting in the backyard next to the koi pond waiting. It was dark, and the air was warm and dry and smelled intensely of wood ash. In spite of the fire, the air was very clear. You could see for miles. In the distance, there was a crest of scintillating orange fire that stretched in a wide jagged band across the top of the hillside. You could actually see it moving down from the ridge, consuming everything in its path. Occasionally a huge flare would leap up into the sky, like on the surface of the sun. The orange glow of the fire was reflected across the surface of the pond. I was mesmerized by it. I felt apprehensive - but at the core there was profound serenity." He pauses to drink some tea. "Have you ever seen a big fire like that?"
"No, thankfully I haven't," I say. I had never realized that Dr. Jakab could speak so poetically.
"It was quite spectacular...." He is stroking his beard rhythmically and staring out the window.
I want to talk technical with him, but he seems so distracted, and I am captivated by his mood. He is truly somewhere else. "Professor," I say, "I would like to run some ideas past you regarding compression and noise filtering."
Suddenly he snaps back from wherever he has been, and he's all business. He watches me carefully as I get out the notes I had made during the afternoon. I move around to his side of the desk, and show him some of my derivations. He springs into professional action, without speaking another word. He is energetically shuffling the papers back and forth, furiously jotting down page after page of his own notes. He does this for about 45 minutes with absolute concentration. Finally, he emerges from this state and begins to speak, slowly and carefully. "I have combined and simplified a number of your steps, and I have recommended that you substitute some new methodologies. I think if you do these things, you may actually have something very worthwhile on your hands. Possibly noteworthy." He smiles, and his left eye starts twitching. He looks extremely tired.
I thumb through the notes as he watches me. There is an elegance to his thought processes that can be seen in everything he does. Once you see it on paper, it seems obvious, but it is actually a great leap. He congeals and simplifies massive amounts of information with ease. He is on a higher tier than almost anyone I have met at Stanford. "I think this will be very useful," I say. "Extremely useful, actually."
"Another incremental triumph," he says. "I must go now. I have a committee meeting." He picks up his suit jacket, and wearily puts one arm in, and then the other. When he is almost out the door, he says, "I would like to have you as my student. We just need to figure out how to make it happen."
A surge of optimism comes over me when he says this. He is very hard to impress, and has only a small number of students. I feel pumped full of adrenaline. I go back to my cube and get under the programming shroud to experiment with the new technique. A breakthrough in this area could be immensely important to global data networking and interactive multimedia. It could make us all world famous. I type up a small abstract of the processes involved and e-mail it to Wick. I am cranked. I work until dinner time, then sit in the computer science lounge for 45 minutes eating a vending-machine ham-and-cheese sandwich and M&Ms. Newspapers are strewn everywhere. I pick one up from the floor and read while I drink a horrible, burnt cup of coffee from the big communal pot. Then I go back under the shroud.
By the time I come out it is 1:30 a.m. It's too late to call my wife - she is probably asleep. I get on Highway 101 and open it up. Traffic is sparse. I don't smoke a joint or listen to music because I'm still thinking about the algorithm. I'm really excited. If this works out, I might be able to get on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon or MIT.
The house is completely still when I get home. I crawl into bed with my wife and try to spoon her. She angrily elbows me in the stomach and says nothing. I can feel the tension in her body. Then the baby starts crying and she gets up and goes into the other bedroom. The next day, I am only in my cubicle for a few minutes before Wick appears.
"Come and look!" He seems very excited. We go downstairs to his office where he has constructed a number of test cases. The compression is very clean with virtually no noise or distortion. "Your theoretical background has paid off. The suggestions you mailed me were fantastic. This may be the breakthrough I've been waiting for. We'll publish a paper together. It will be great. Life is good again. I think I'm gonna have an orgasm," he says with a maniacal grin.
"There is one thing," I say. "We have to include Peter Jakab in our credits, because I consulted with him at great length last night. He really came up with some of the crucial elements."
"Peter Jakab! Why in the fuck would you do that?" he screams.
"Because I thought he might have the best insight into the problem ... and he did," I say.
Then he whispers with a monster grimace, "He gave me a barely passing review. He's responsible for practically destroying my career here. And you try to bring him into our work. You are even stupider than I thought!" He is leaning over his desk now, his face very close to mine. "If you ever speak to Peter Jakab again, you will no longer be a student at Stanford. Do you understand?" he screams like a Marine drill instructor.
I feel like punching him. A fast shot to the jaw when he least expects it would finish him off. I am quivering with anger. Just as I am considering this, he rushes out of the office. He walks down the hall to Jakab's office, goes in and slams the door behind him. I can hear him talking through the walls. Only Wick's voice can be heard. Finally I hear him scream, "If you interfere with my student again, I'll burn your fucking house down!" He walks out of Jakab's office, and slams the door behind him. Then he walks out of the building. All the secretaries have heard him make this threat. They are standing in the hallway with their mouths agape. Dr. Jakab walks out of his office. His face looks tight, but otherwise he seems completely composed. I leave the building and walk aimlessly around the campus. The sun is scattering in hazy shafts through the big trees. Students are walking from class to class, passing silently through the sculpted sandstone archways of the quad. It looks ver y peaceful.
I stay on the fourth floor for three days refining the compression algorithm, and working on a paper to submit to the journals. I sleep on my desk and live on micro-wave burritos and coffee. My wife is very hostile on the phone, and tells me that I'm pushing her to the limit. I bring a sleeping bag into the office. At the end of the third day, I emerge at 5 p.m. and walk down the faculty office corridor. One of the secretaries tells me that Jakab and Wick have been battling all week. She says that an administrative assistant reported the threat, which resulted in Wick being summoned to the provost's office. He thought Dr. Jakab had turned him in, and that meant all-out war. Wick cooked up a hack to flood Jakab's e-mail server with profane messages, and he broke into Jakab's workstation and put up a huge gif of a woman performing fellatio. It could be seen clearly on the monitor by anyone walking past his office. I had also heard that there was something wrong with Dr. Jakab's home voicemail service. I don't know how Wick accomplished that, but he's an ingenious coder, and he has powerful accounts on numerous industry systems.
I get a microwave tamale and a Coke, and go back up to the fourth floor. After a few hours I decide to take a break. While I'm strolling the halls, I walk past Dr. Jakab's office. He's sitting inside. "Good evening professor," I say, as I pass.
"Mr. Hargreaves. Please come back and see me," he says. I turn and walk back, then sit down in the chair in front of his desk. "I still want you as my student. We can't let someone like Wick push us around, can we?" he asks. He looks very drawn, and has incredibly dark circles under his eyes.
"No, we can't," I say.
"Good. Then let's forge ahead. I'll submit formal paperwork to have you transferred over as my student." He tries to smile, but his face twitches.
"I'm excited," I say, standing up to shake his hand. "I'm really looking forward to working with you." Without saying anything else, he gets up, and puts on his suit jacket. He nods to me as he walks out the door. He seems deep in thought.
My wife and I spend the evening at home on the couch watching television. I can't stop thinking about Jakab and Wick. I hope that Jakab has enough power to keep Wick in check. I think he does. He has the entire force of the Stanford machine behind him.
The baby sleeps soundly through the whole evening. We drink some Chianti and smoke a joint together, and I begin to relax. She takes my hand and leads me into the bedroom. We don't talk about anything, we just make love. It's the best that it has been for a long time.
I am awakened from a dead sleep by a powerful jolt. I look around the room, and for a second everything looks unfamiliar - I feel like I have amnesia. Then I realize that an earthquake is beginning. My wife holds on to me as the air fills with thunderous sound. Usually earthquakes are over in a few seconds, but this one goes on and gathers momentum like a freight train. It is the strongest I have ever felt. My heart begins to race. I hear glasses and dishes pouring out of the cupboards and smashing onto the kitchen floor. My wife gets up and runs into the baby's room. I can hear the structure of the house ripping and tearing. As I walk toward the chest of drawers, it's like being on the deck of a pitching ship. I get out a flashlight, just as the shaking stops. The beam illuminates my wife as she rushes back into the bedroom with the baby in her arms. "I hate it here!" she explodes. "We have to get away from this place!" "We will. We will," I say. "As soon as I get my degree."
We all three get back into the bed and I turn off the flashlight. I tune through the FM dial on a battery-powered headset radio that I keep by the night stand. There are only a few stations on the air, and they're playing Muzak. No talking. There is nothing we can do but go back to bed and wait.
The computer science department is dead for the next few days. I spend part of the first day back replacing ceiling tiles that have fallen down all over the department, and doing software maintenance on the systems that come up disabled. For the most part the campus is in good shape, but only a few of the professors are back. Most are dealing with property damage and family problems. My wife is nearly psychotic as a result of the aftershocks, which roll through like clockwork, day and night. She wants out - with or without me. Some of the aftershocks would be considered major earthquakes, if not compared with the one that started it all.
The second day back, I get an e-mail from Peter Jakab.
From: pjakab@cs.stanford.edu
Subj: The Quake
To: jhargreaves@cs.stanford.eduMr. Hargreaves, The night of the quake, I slept fitfully. I was moving in and out of a phantasmagoric nightmare. A metallic dragon of immense proportions swept down from a mountaintop, roaring with a deep low-frequency rumble that shook the earth from the inside. It had gaping jaws the size of a skyscraper, and seemed poised to devour the world. Its dingy silver teeth were glinting in the moonlight. As I opened my eyes in a sweat, mirrors and paintings and crystal were crashing to the floor and shattering all around. My wife sat up next to me in bed, and my three children ran into the room crying. Then my wife screamed for them to get between the doorjambs.
I walked over to the sliding glass door that overlooks our backyard. The yard drops off the side of a canyon, and there is a panoramic view of city lights below. Waves of blue and green sparks fanned out across the grid of electric colors. Transformers arced and flared across the valley, then shorted out. In large blocks, pieces of the puzzle were removed. Giant patches flickered and then went dead, until there was total darkness below. I was hypnotized by the spectacle, unable to move. Then I realized that I had been cut. I had to have stitches in my head. For a few days, I will be working at home.
Hope you and your family are well. Peter Jakab
I send him a reply, telling him that we are fine, and that I have done software maintenance on the disabled computers. Then I continue to work on the compression algorithm for the next two days. I notice that Wick has not returned. One of the secretaries tells me that Wick has been calling Dr. Jakab at home and harassing him relentlessly. She says that Dr. Jakab seemed extremely tense when she talked to him on the phone. His voice cracked and wavered.
I work on refining the algorithm and building an extensive library of test cases to support the journal article. I decide to take the initiative to write the article that we will submit to the Association for Computing Machinery. I work into the early hours almost every day. At 3:07 a.m. a large aftershock rolls through. The building is shaking violently and the lights flicker on and off. A fluorescent tube falls from the assembly overhead and shatters next to my desk. The workstation screen goes blank, then starts into a reboot cycle. I clean up the big shards of broken glass and decide to head for home. The city looks like a ghost town. No one is driving anywhere. The area seems paralysed.
The house is quiet. I slip into bed, but I can tell that my wife is awake. I can feel her mind racing, but she says nothing. She will barely speak to me. She thinks that I should be at home every night to give her emotional support. She doesn't realize that this is a very rare window of opportunity. I have to run with it. This algorithm might be the one that could put me on the map. It might be my only chance.
By the time I get back to Margaret Jacks Hall, it is nearly 11 a.m. There is a frantic mood in the halls. A camera crew with floodlights comes around the corner, and there is a TV newscaster talking into a microphone. Everything is buzzing, and everyone is eyeing one another. One of the secretaries is crying into a handkerchief. I walk past Wick's office. The door is open, and he is sitting there typing on his workstation. I rap on his door with my knuckles and walk in.
"What's going on around here?" I ask.
He swivels around in his chair so that he is facing me. Then he grabs a large cup of coffee and takes a drink.
"Last night, Peter Jakab died," he says, staring at me with absolutely no emotion on his face.
"What happened?" I ask. I can feel the blood rushing in my ears.
"His house burned down ... with him in it," he tells me. I can feel the hairs raise on the back of my neck. He is sitting there looking at me, and I can see that he is trying to keep from smiling. He must be insane. How does he think that he can get away with this?
"What happened to the rest of Jakab's family?" I ask.
"They were frightened by the earthquakes and had flown to New York to visit relatives. He was there alone, and somehow managed to burn himself up. It just goes to show how it can happen to anyone." He pauses again, staring at me. "If you'll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do. I need to get that paper out." He turns his chair back around and starts typing on his workstation.
My breathing is erratic, and I abruptly walk out of the room. My head is reeling. He said, "I need to get that paper out." Maybe he's planning to get rid of me, too. I go back upstairs and stare at my workstation. Everything seems ridiculous and depressing, and I think that it's strange that I spend almost every waking hour pecking on the keys of this machine. It's madness.
I leave the building and go out to my car. I put on a cassette of The Doors' first album and drive aimlessly around the neighbourhood, and then into East Palo Alto. As I pass a storefront called Pistol Pete's Guns 'n' Ammo, I pull the car over. It is a decrepit brick building with a large picture window covered with black iron bars. There is a cartoon painted on the window of Yosemite Sam with a big red beard and moustache. He's firing two monster handguns. Smoke and flames are shooting out of the barrels. Inside there are racks and racks of shotguns, handguns, hunting rifles, and semiautomatic assault rifles. I have never owned a gun. I've only shot one a couple of times. As I walk up to the counter, a middle-aged woman with a deeply lined face, dirty-blond hair, and dark, tinted glasses approaches. She takes a long drag from a cigarette, then puts it down in an ashtray.
"What can I do you for?" she says in a deep voice.
"I think I need a gun," I say.
"What kind of gun?"
"I don't know. Any kind of gun. A hand gun."
"There'll be a 15-day waiting period on that."
"I can't wait that long," I say. "Do you have any knives?"
"Do you have a situation?"
"Possibly."
She pushes a button on the counter, and a guy from the back walks out. He is about 6 foot 4 and 260 pounds of pure muscle. Built like a brick wall. He's wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket. Stubble on his face, and a buzz-cut flattop.
"This is Bob."
He reaches out to shake my hand.
"Hello Bob," I say.
He just nods. "Give him one of your business cards, Bob," says the woman.
I look at the card. It says NRA Regional Membership Manager.
"Bob was Gordon Liddy's bodyguard a few years back."
Bob nods again.
"Just let him know if you need anything. And yes, we do have some knives," she says, smiling. She shows me a large, serrated gun-metal knife that she claims is the same kind Navy Seals carry on com-bat missions. I decide against the knife, put Bob's business card in my pocket, and walk out.
I get on Highway 101 and punch it hard, with the stereo blasting. When I reach the Willow Street exit, I pull off and drive into our neighbourhood. My wife is sit-ting on the front porch in the sun with the baby in her arms. She smiles broadly when she sees me pull up in the driveway. She thinks that I have taken the day off. "Something has come up. I want you and the baby to go visit your mother for a few days," I say, as I walk quickly up to the porch.
"What in the hell are you talking about?" she says. She is very angry now.
"There is a big power struggle at Stanford. Peter Jakab is dead. I think John Wick may have killed him."
"You've got to be kidding! That's insane!" she says. "Why do we have to leave?"
"I don't know what Wick is capable of. He may have gone crazy. He's hanging onto his job by a thread, and he's paranoid. He thinks everyone is out to get him, steal his thunder, conspire against him, the whole thing. I just don't want to take any chances."
I pack my wife and the baby up in her beat-up Toyota Corolla and kiss her goodbye. "I still think this is crazy," she says. "You should come with us."
"No. I have to be here, to keep tabs on what's going on in the department," I tell her.
As she drives away hesitantly, she is shaking her head. Then she rolls down the window and yells, "You bastard!"
I walk inside and look around the house. I'm almost never here during the day. It looks incredibly depressing. I don't know how she can stand it. There are some letters for me on the table. I grab them and walk out.
I'm extremely wired. I get back on the freeway heading towards the campus. I don't even know why, or what I'm going to do when I get there. When I reach the edge of campus on University Avenue, I make an erratic left turn. I can't go back there. It is 1:30 p.m., and I drive east through the perfectly manicured residential neighbourhoods. Then I get back on University and pull into the little finger of East Palo Alto on the Stanford side of the freeway. I pass the liquor market, pawn shop, Won Choi's House of Wigs, and Bonadio's Italian. I park the car in a diagonal spot in front of the restaurant and grab my mail from the passenger seat.
It is very dark inside, even during the day. The traffic rumbling by reflects stroboscopic flashes of sunlight into the interior. I get my table in back, and order pappardelle, garlic bread, and a half carafe of wine. As I sort through my mail, I quickly thumb through the proceedings of the ACM. I begin to think again about the algorithm and the journal article. I am wondering what will happen to the work when I notice a handwritten letter in the stack of mail. It is a business-sized envelope with no return address. I slit it open, and move the candle closer so that I can read the script. My eyes begin to dart across the pages, and my heart starts racing. It is a letter from Peter Jakab.
Dear Mr. Hargreaves, I have been thinking very carefully about my life. My angels have left. I can feel it in the core of my existence. All my life I have been looking for a great mystery to decipher. I felt that if I could just achieve one major triumph of insight, that it would be profoundly satisfying. Something of truly lasting significance. But I have failed to do that. If it was going to happen, it would have happened by now. I'm already too old to make that transcendental leap. The window of opportunity has closed. I do hope, however, that my work will be a foundation for others.
Tonight I will ingest a bottle of Dilaudid that I have been stockpiling from my sleeping prescription. I have rigged up a timed device to set the house on fire. I mu st tell you that the natural disasters we have been experiencing have been very unsettling to me. I have never been very religious, but these events seem to have a life of their own. The aftershocks are unbearable. I am on edge every second of the day. I am sick and depressed.
I must also warn you that Dr. Wick is clinically insane. The constant stream of vituperation and invective that pours forth from him cannot be the product of a "normal" mind. He has been wearing me down. He has threatened to kill me a number of times. If he is indicted for my murder, you may use your own best judgment.
You remember The Museum of Jurassic Technology that I told you about. As you leave, there is an exhibit detailing the pathogenic effect of the inhalation of a spore by a large West African ant. While foraging on the jungle floor, by chance the ant inhales a microscopic spore, which lodges in its brain and begins to replicate throughout its body and nervous system. For the first time in its life, the ant is driven to leave the floor of the jungle. It climbs high into the branches of lush green foliage, travelling to places it never would have gone under normal circumstances. Finally, as the spores begin to consume the ant's entire body and nervous system, the ant clamps its mandibles to a leaf. In the last stage, a large, fire-orange tusk, heavily laden with spores, grows from the head, then finally ruptures, raining the spores down all over the floor of the jungle. I am that ant.
And I have planted a spore. I have introduced a virus into all the computer systems on our network. It is very subtle, virtually undetectable, and will produce minuscule cyclic errors in floating-point calculations on all of the workstations. These errors are not random. They follow a distribution that I derived, designed to slightly perturb the results of all the work being done on campus. The virus will inject a chaos factor into the research of the entire institution. I am convinced that in tracking down these errors, the faculty and students will be shaken out of their routines, which I'm hoping will have a positive effect. Each one will be forced to look at his or her data from a slightly new perspective. Forced to stop and ruminate. These are the spores that I have shed.
Goodbye, Peter Jakab
I take a big drink of red wine, and watch the candle dance on the dark wood table. The waitress brings my pappardelle with Italian sausage. I feel slightly nauseated. It would be too much to ask that Wick be convicted for murder. And if he does go down, would I really be able to sit back and not say anything? But without Jakab, I have no ally against him. I'm back in the belly of the beast. Glass and chrome flash from the traffic out on University Avenue. I shuffle the pages of Peter's letter in my hands. Life on the cutting edge is dangerous. You can bleed.
Michael Meloan (mdmeloan@aol.com) has published fiction in Buzz Magazine, L.A. Weekly, Chic and Caffeine, and written for National Public Radio.