Chapter 7

Harold left work uncharacteristically early. He was truly excited at the prospect of a date with Emily. Smart, good looking, friendly, probably even free of viral illness. Too good to really be true. He had failed before and knew how to fail in so many ways. He crossed the Bay Bridge in rush hour traffic and then turned north on the Bay Shore. Exiting in north Berkeley he progressed up Marin Avenue. His old Sixty Nine station wagon loved these hills. This was a road. Built straight up the Berkeley hills. It rises 1000 vertical feet in about a mile. It was originally built for cable cars. Now it just has locals who don't mind the ski jump-like nature of the road. Harold bumped through each intersection dragging his tailpipe every time. He pulled onto Grizzly Peak Road and then turned into the park. Emily lived just over the crest of the Berkeley Hills just where the fog gets really thick. He pulled into her driveway around six thirty.

He climbed out of the old car. It is rare that a person can have a vehicle for so long and still bonk his head but Harold was that sort of man. He dressed for failure in every way. Gray and blue silk linen blend coat picked out by his last girl friend over ten years before. Tan cotton pants just baggy enough to hold everything he owned in his pockets, and Nike running shoes. They were new and he knew they topped the ensemble.

Emily's house was spectacular. It was one of those houses that was built on stilts. Every time there was an earth tremor you got to test the genius of the contractor: The kind of contractor that seems to change his name, address, and company every few years just on principle. Harold rang the door bell and almost instantly the door opened to reveal Emily. Harold never quite got over his fascination for truly beautiful women. When he hit twelve suddenly a whole new outlook on life had developed. An outlook driven by his favorite of all steroids, testosterone. In early life it had been a primitive force that guided his every move. The sole encompassing goal of his every thought, except those that guided his autonomic functions of course, had been carnal lust. By the time he was twenty two or three he had gotten this aspect of his life to occupy only 80% of his conscious mind. By the age of thirty after four years of college, four years of medical school, four years of graduate school, and five years of residency, these thoughts almost never came up. Of course, now at this age, women were haunted by these thoughts, but it served them right, he thought. It was too late. I was ready and they laughed at me. Now I laugh at them. But tonight it was different. This lady stirred his loins. And she stirred them with a big spoon. After a bit of small talk they got into his awesome boat of an automobile and were off to George's.

"Harold, I haven't seen George and you in a long time. What have you been up to?" Emily was great at small talk.

"Well, after I finished training, I set up a lab at UCSF. We are working on neurochemistry." Harold was driving down the Fish Ranch Road to the Caldecott tunnel. "I do half clinical and half research work." The fog was really thick and Harold was driving by watching only the line.

"What are you working on now?" Emily was going to get what she wanted out of Harold.

"Well, it's a study of the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of several drugs in humans. We were developing an aerosol muscle relaxant as a defensive weapon but that has been dropped." Harold was trying to keep on the road but could only see the line. Every once in a while large branches of eucalyptus would hit the windows as he missed a curve.

"What was the muscle relaxant for?" Just then a large branch whacked the side of the car and Emily jumped.

"It was a great idea. We put 500 mg of succinyl choline in an aerosol canister with a DMSO cartridge. The defender simply sprays the attacker in the face and twenty to thirty seconds later the attacker is awake but unable to move. Paralyzed, the attacker falls to the ground. Each canister came with a set of plastic handcuffs. The succinyl choline only lasted five to ten minutes but plenty long enough to handcuff the assailant." Harold was completely oblivious to the branches, any danger on this mountain road, or even the beauty of this woman. He was wrapped up in the description of his device.

"So what happened?" Emily was trying to concentrate on the story but kept looking out the window at the gray abyss punctuated by slapping trees. Her hands gripped the door handles with fear.

"Well, one of our test subjects was robbed in San Francisco. She whipped out her sux spray, as we liked to call it, and sprayed the guy right in the face. He took one gasp of it and his last words were, "Lady, you be crazy." He turned to run with her purse and fell flat on his face. Our test subject hog tied the guy and then supported his airway until the cops took him away." Harold was really getting into this story.

"Sounds great." Emily looked at him as if he were rabid.

"Seems great, right? No need for recreational gun play. No need for a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The assailant gets arrested without being injured. The person being assailed defends herself without a problem. Seems perfect, right? Well, we got sued. The attacker sued us for using an unapproved medical device without FDA approval and won. The NRA paid all the bills. They don't like competition for firearms. They felt she should have blown the guy away."

"Lawyers are scum." Emily retorts.

"Scum, but smart scum. Do you know what the problem is when you see three lawyers buried up to their necks in sand?

"What?"

"Not enough sand." Harold enjoyed his own jokes more than the people listening to them. He slapped his leg and laughed out loud.

"So, Harold, what are you and George up to with this sulfur dioxide business? George is not exactly a whole earth environmentalist. He must have an angle." Emily really wanted the answer.

"It is quite simple. We want to clean up sulfur dioxide emissions using bacteria." Harold pulled onto the freeway and accelerated toward Black Hawk.

"I am still suspicious." Emily relaxed a bit now that the fog had cleared and she could see the road.

"What's to be suspicious of? You think every time George and I come up with an idea it either has an ulterior motive or is bad for the world. What about Searski? That was my idea and it wasn't so bad." Harold had always been proud of that concept. The fact that it made two billion dollars a year for someone else had been lost on him.

"You came up with Searski?" Emily had great disbelief.

"Absolutely. George and I were having dinner five years ago. We were shooting the breeze and I thought, what could we do to help Eastern Europe? It wasn't what could we do to help George and me it was what could we do to help Big Boris and his band of renown. We decided that if his people could buy whatever they wanted they would be happier and let the government alone for a while. We decided that what the commies needed was Sears. You know - where America shops. So the concept was simple. We go to Sears, not the store, the company, and we suggest that they set up outlets in Moscow, Kiev, etc. and then do mail order for the rest of the country. We print up the Sears Catalog in Russian, put Boris Yeltsin's picture on the front. And bammo-total commie happiness. Then you say, "How do George and Harold profit from this great idea?" We go to Boris and get him to allow us to take rubles out of the country. Doesn't hurt them at all. They can't be worth any less than pesos can they? Once they are exchangeable we buy oil, gold, furs, vodka, space launch rights, whatever in rubles and sell the commodity for dollars. We set up the ruble stock exchange and thereby let US companies sell them stuff."

"So why are we driving a beat up old wagon to someone else's house?" Emily cut right to the heart of the matter.

"Well, it was such a simple idea that the big people took over. They were going to name the Moscow stock exchange after George and me but even that fell through. Sears did do well, and they still send me catalogs."

"Harold, they sent everyone catalogs." Emily shook her head in disbelief.

"Not any more." Just then they pulled into a driveway in Black Hawk. George had sold his last house for four times what he had paid for it and bought this new one. Bigger, better, and able to appreciate faster. Harold always contended that if the price of the average house was greater than three times the average income, the average person couldn't buy a house, thereby lowering the price of houses. If average people couldn't buy the average house, then they couldn't be sold. Sounds like great logic, George would say, and then he would sell another house for three times what he paid for it and twenty times the average American's income. So much for economic theory.

This house was spectacular. It sat on a hill side with a view of the valley and the freeway. Most people who bought a million dollar house didn't want a view of the freeway but George was different. George liked progress. He liked the concept of a band of commerce stretching out across this great land bringing people to work and home again. A very expensive parking lot at rush hour and a raceway late at night. Besides freeways were an investment in the country: The road to economic development. The house had a pool in back with a patio, a hot tub, and a pool house. Caroline Stone opened the door as they drove in. The electronic sensors on the driveway had signaled a car's presence. She had simply turned to the monitor in the kitchen which had switched to the driveway camera and once she saw it was Harold and his tacky car she went to the front door to greet them. The neighbors had complained about his car before and so she always had him park in the garage.

Caroline Stone was a beautiful woman: 32 years old with a shapely figure, auburn hair, and exceptionally intelligent. The only thing she had ever done that people questioned was marrying George. George was so-so. Well, after George bought his second home, and started his third company, and bought his fourth Mercedes, her friends gave up. Caroline had done well. She ran the second Stone company, an information service out of their home. She had written a program that was able to learn. A simple concept, an exceptionally difficult thing to do. The program was able to read text, analyze it, summarize it, and answer questions. Once the original software algorithm was written she purchased an unlimited access to the AP news wire, New York Stock Exchange, an Encyclopedia Britannica, Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, the PDR, and Lexis and let it go wild. It was an artificial intelligence robot that scanned the net and provided not just information, something much more valuable - interpretation of that information. She set the machine up in the garage but had to build a second story on the latest garage to hold the hard disks. People could connect by modem or internet to consult Bery, the program. At a dollar an hour for every person in the World with a question, she was doing well. Bery stood for Bery Entilligent computeR sYstem. Caroline could spell. She just liked the name and George wasn't ready for offspring.

Her friends would come over and tell her about the cute thing so and so had done. Usually something like blurting out some unintelligible gibberish between diaper changes. She would think peacefully of her offspring running 24 hours a day at a jillion MIPS, generating gigabucks and realize that she would never have to change a diaper filled with silicon goo.

"Welcome. Long time no see. Emily you look like you've done well. Harold, thanks for putting your car out of sight. The neighbors continue to complain. George is out back getting the barbecue going. I don't know what possesses that man. He can barely control the microwave and he thinks he's Davy Crockett when it comes to barbecue."

Harold moseyed out to the backyard while Emily and Caroline talked. "Can I offer you a drink?" Caroline was the perfect hostess.

"Sure, how about a mineral water. How are things?" Emily thought she might get the information from Caroline but doubted it.

"Fine. You're at Berkeley now, aren't you? What are you doing?"

"I'm in biochemistry. I was working on a gene that controls cell surface markers but your husband and Harold have started a new project." Emily would see what Caroline knew.

"Those two never give up. Every week a new project. 99% of them die by the wayside. 1% make it big. You know Harold gave me the germinal idea for the information system. He didn't know how to solve the problem but he came up with the concept. It sounded easy when he suggested it. If I had known then what I know now, I never would have tried. My naiveté allowed me to get sucked in and by the time I figured out how impossible the task was, it worked and we were on the way." Caroline liked Harold despite himself.

"What do you know about this present scheme? The sulfur dioxide project." Emily was not so subtle in her questions.

"Almost nothing. George has been calling lots of people and is going to Houston next week to see a guy at NASA but I am not sure of the details." Just then George and Harold walked in carrying a platter.

"Dinner is served" intoned George. He placed the platter on a table in the patio. Caroline brought out a pitcher of ice tea. They all sat down. There was sea food pasta salad, a fruit salad, and barbecued chicken. The chicken looked as if it had been incinerated but it tasted fine. George brought out a carafe of his latest wine, a project Harold and he started several years before. George and Harold went to Napa, bought the grapes, crushed them in the yard, then put them into oak casks two years before. George liked a very oaky wine with fully body and that light vanilla orange taste. Caroline always wondered how a man with such intelligence could drink home made sludge when even Gallo made a better wine. Everyone was polite and tried it. After the second glass it tasted great. After ten minutes in the hot tub it didn't matter where it had been fermented.

Harold and Emily thanked the Stones and climbed into the old station wagon. Emily seemed more comfortable in the seat next to Harold and he didn't seem to mind. The evening's conversation, wine, and the warmth of the hot tub had smoothed the edges. He was a little calmer, a little more at ease. As they drove back toward the hills of Berkeley a warm glow followed them. Emily gently nestled into Harold's shoulder with her hand on his thigh. By the time they reached the Berkeley Hills they just walked into her house.

"Harold, I know this seems a tad bit indiscreet, but the New Viral Era mandates it. Do you have, or have you ever had anything that I don't want to get?" Emily was nervous about asking but felt better raising the topic.

"Never had, hope to never have." Harold quickly started to beam as he realized the implication of the question. "Besides." He tapped his coat pocket. "Once a boy scout, always a boy scout."

Emily hugged him and they walked hand in hand to her bedroom.

Chapter 8

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