He sighed, turned to the other screen that they were using, and called down a simulation routine to test the patch.
Eric Heber’s office was on the top floor of the building, oriented to frame Mount Rainier’s snowy, thirty-mile-distant peak in the window to one side of the desk. According to Ohira, he had moved here out of Seattle when he set up his own company three years previously.
Michelle could see the attraction of being located a half mile off the Interstate, here at the south end of Tacoma: a guaranteed stress-reliever after the urban congestion, easy to get to from any direction, and handy for Seatac International Airport. Also, it was less than half an hour by car from Heber’s home, which Ohira said was somewhere just west of Olympia, the state capital. It seemed an ideal situation—close to town and his work, yet in easy reach of the Olympic Peninsula with its mountains and forest, and the Pacific Coast beyond; and the big city was always there in the other direction when he needed it. Michelle guessed him as somebody who knew himself and lived for his own values without too much concern for others’ expectations.
His office seemed to corroborate the image. It looked more the office of someone at heart the maverick scientist that Ohira had described, than the successful company president that Heber had ostensibly become. The modular walnut desk and credenza, glass-fronted bookcase, and coffee-style conference table, along with the tubular chairs and other accessories were all appropriately matched and imposing—but that was just background scenery that his secretary or a hired designer could have taken care of. The testimonials to the daily routine enacted center stage spoke differently: Files, papers, microelectronics parts, and gadgetry littered the desk; the rolled-gold twin pen set and digital clock-calendar had been moved to the top of the file cabinet to make room for a high-power magnifier; and charts tabling the physical and chemical properties of materials, an industry guide to chip manufacturers, and a whiteboard filled with scrawled math expressions, phone numbers, and reminders had found places between the marquetry designs and chrome-framed art prints adorning the walls.
Eric Heber himself was around forty, wiry, with crinkly yellow hair, fair skin, a thin nose, and gray eyes that peered keenly behind gold-rimmed spectacles. Ohira had mentioned that he was German born. He had taken off the lab coat that his two visitors had found him in, and sat looking relaxed and casual in a sky-blue shirt and tan slacks as he regarded them over his desk. Ohira sat with his hands planted on his knees, his rugged Oriental face expressionless. Michelle’s law firm had represented his family’s various business interests for six years. He still put her in mind of a godfather—or whatever the equivalent was—of the Japanese yakuza.
She leaned forward in her chair, using tweezers to hold a device no larger than a match head in the light from the desk lamp, and examined it through a magnifying glass in her other hand. It was vaguely humanoid in form, silver and black, with two legs and a pair of jointed arms—though there were additional attachments and interchangeable auxiliary parts on the outside. Its head, she observed, was more of a dome than head-shaped.
“That’s a general-purpose tool-operator that goes back about half a year,” Heber said, watching her. “We’ve come down a bit further in size with some experimental models since then. The idea was to implement full tooling and fabrication capabilities on a series of intermediate levels down to true nanotech. It’s like the fleas with the littler fleas. Once you’re equipped at a certain scale, you can use that to construct a next-smaller scale, and so on.” Although a soft accent was discernible, his English was flawless. Michelle guessed that he had migrated at a fairly early age. “In the early days, people thought it would be possible to do everything using the etching techniques developed in the chip industry. That worked well enough for making simple rotors and other things with only a few moving parts. But as things became more complicated we found that you have to have precision manipulation. God might be able to put things together with pure willpower, but we humans need a little help.”