1. Timeline
IT WAS FARTHER ACROSS AFRICA FROM TANGIER TO Nairobi than it was across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to London—3,600 miles, an eight-hour flight. Ross spent the time at the computer console, working out what she called “hyperspace probability lines.”
The screen showed a computer-generated map of Africa, with streaking multicolored lines across it. “These are all timelines,” Ross said. “We can weight them for duration and delay factors.” Beneath the screen was a total-elapsed-time clock, which kept shifting numbers.
“What’s that mean?” Elliot asked.
“The computer’s picking the fastest route. You see it’s just identified a timeline that will get us on-site in six days eighteen hours and fifty—one minutes. Now it’s trying to beat that time.”
Elliot had to smile. The idea of a computer predicting to the minute when they would reach their Congo location seemed ludicrous to him. But Ross was totally serious.
As they watched, the computer clock shifted to 5 days 22 hours 24 minutes.
“Better,” Ross said, nodding. “But still not very good.” She pressed another key and the lines shifted, stretching like rubber bands over the African continent. “This is the consortium route,” she said, “based on our assumptions about the expedition. They’re going in big—thirty or more people, a full-scale undertaking. And they don’t know the exact location of the city; at least, we don’t think they know. But they have a substantial start on us, at least twelve hours, since their aircraft is already forming up in Nairobi.”
The clock registered total elapsed time: 5 days 09 hours 19 minutes. Then she pressed a button marked DATE and it shifted to 06 21 790814. “According to this, the consortium will reach the Congo site a little after eight o’clock in the morning on June 21.”
The computer clicked quietly; the lines continued to stretch and pull, and the clock read a new date: 06 21 79 1224.
“Well,” she said, “that’s where we are now. Given maximum favorable movements for us and them, the consortium will beat us to the site by slightly more than four hours, five days from now.”
Munro walked past, eating a sandwich. “Better lock another path,” he said. “Or go radical.”
“I hesitate to go radical with the ape.”
Munro shrugged. “Have to do something, with a timeline like that.”
Elliot listened to them with a vague sense of unreality: they were discussing a difference of hours, five days in the future. “But surely,” Elliot said, “over the next few days, with all the arrangements at Nairobi, and then getting into the jungle—you can’t put too much faith in those figures.”
“This isn’t like the old days of African exploration,” Ross said, “where parties disappeared into the wilds for months. At most, the computer is off by minutes—say, roughly half an hour in the total five-day projection.” She shook her head. “No. We have a problem here, and we’ve got to do something about it. The stakes are too great.”
“You mean the diamonds.”
She nodded, and pointed to the bottom of the screen, where the words BLUE CONTRACT appeared. He asked her what the Blue Contract was.
“One hell of a lot of money,” Ross said. And she added, “I think.” For in truth she did not really know.
Each new contract at ERTS was given a code name. Only Travis and the computer knew the name of the company buying the contract; everyone else at ERTS, from computer programmers to field personnel, knew the projects only by their color-code names: Red Contract, Yellow Contract, White Contract. This was a business protection for the firms involved. But the ERTS mathematicians could not resist a lively guessing game about contract sources, which was the staple of daily conversation in the company canteen.
The Blue Contract had come to ERTS in December, 1978. It called for ERTS to locate a natural source of industrial-grade diamonds in a friendly or neutralist country. The diamonds were to be Type IIb, “nitrogen-poor” crystals. No dimensions were specified, so crystal size did not matter; nor were recoverable quantities specified: the contractor would take what he could get. And, most unusual, there was no UECL.
Nearly all contracts arrived with a unit extraction cost limit. It was not enough to find a mineral source; the minerals had to be extractable at a specified unit cost. This unit cost in turn reflected the richness of the ore body, its remoteness, the availability of local labor, political conditions, the possible need to build airfields, roads, hospitals, mines, or refineries.
For a contract to come in without a UECL meant only one thing: somebody wanted blue diamonds so badly he didn’t care what they cost.
Within forty-eight hours, the ERTS canteen had explained the Blue Contract. It turned out that Type JIb diamonds were blue from trace quantities of the element boron, which rendered them worthless as gemstones but altered their electronic properties, making them semiconductors with a resistively on the order of 100 ohms centimeters. They also had light-transmissive properties.
Someone then found a brief article in Electronic News for November 17, 1978: “McPhee Doping Dropped.” It explained that the Waltham, Massachusetts, firm of Silec, Inc., had abandoned the experimental McPhee technique to dope diamonds artificially with a monolayer boron coating. The McPhee process had been abandoned as too expensive and too unreliable to produce “desirable semi conducting properties.” The article concluded that “other firms have underestimated problems in boron monolayer doping; Morikawa (Tokyo) abandoned the Nagaura process in September of this year.” Working backward, the ERTS canteen fitted additional pieces of the puzzle into place.
Back in 1971, Intec, the Santa Clara microelectronics firm, had first predicted that diamond semiconductors would be important to a future generation of “super conducting” computers in the 1980s.
The first generation of electronic computers, ENIAC and UNIVAC, built in the wartime secrecy of the 1940s, employed vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes had an average life span of twenty hours, but with thousands of glowing hot tubes in a single machine, some computers shut down every seven to twelve minutes. Vacuum-tube technology imposed a limit on the size and power of planned second-generation computers.
But the second generation never used vacuum tubes. In 1947, the invention of the transistor—a thumbnail-sized sandwich of solid material which performed all the functions of a vacuum tube—ushered in an era of “solid state” electronic devices which drew little power, generated little heat, and were smaller and more reliable than the tubes they replaced. Silicon technology provided the basis for three generations of increasingly compact, reliable, and cheap computers over the next twenty years.
But by the 1970s, computer designers began to confront the inherent limitations of silicon technology. Although circuits had been shrunk to microscopic dimensions, computation speed was still dependent on circuit length. To miniaturize circuits still more, where distances were already on the order of millionths of an inch, brought back an old problem: heat. Smaller circuits would literally melt from the heat produced. What was needed was some method to eliminate heat and reduce resistance at the same time.
It had been known since the 1950s that many metals when cooled to extremely low temperatures became “superconducting,” permitting the unimpeded flow of electrons through them. In 1977, IBM announced it was designing an ultra-high-speed computer the size of a grapefruit, chilled with liquid nitrogen. The superconducting computer required a radically new technology, and a new range of low temperature construction materials.
Doped diamonds would be used extensively throughout.
Several days later, the ERTS canteen came up with an alternative explanation. According to the new theory, the 1970s had been a decade of unprecedented growth in computers. Although the first computer manufacturers in the 1940s had predicted that four computers would do the computing work of the entire world for the foreseeable future, experts anticipated that by 1990 there would actually be one billion computers—most of them linked by communications networks to other computers. Such networks didn’t exist, and might even be theoretically impossible. (A 1975 study by the Hanover Institute concluded there was insufficient metal in the earth’s crust to construct the necessary computer transmission lines.)
According to Harvey Rumbaugh, the 1980s would be characterized by a critical shortage of computer data transmission systems: “Just as the fossil fuel shortage took the industrialized world by surprise in the 1970s, so will the data transmission shortage take the world by surprise in the next ten years. People were denied movement in the 1970s; but they will be denied information in the 1980s, and it remains to be seen which shortage will prove more frustrating.”
Laser light represented the only hope for handling these massive data requirements, since laser channels carried twenty thousand times the information of an ordinary metal coaxial trunk line. Laser transmission demanded whole new technologies—including thin-spun fiber optics, and doped semiconducting diamonds, which Rumbaugh predicted would be “more valuable than oil” in the coming years.
Even further, Rumbaugh anticipated that within ten years electricity itself would become obsolete. Future computers would utilize only light circuits, and interface with light transmission data systems. The reason was speed. “Light,” Rumbaugh said, “moves at the speed of light. Electricity doesn’t. We are living in the final years of microelectronic technology.”
Certainly microelectronics did not look like a moribund technology. In 1979, microelectronics was a major industry throughout the industrialized world, accounting for eighty billion dollars annually in the United States alone; six of the top twenty corporations in the Fortune 500 were deeply involved in microelectronics. These companies had a history of extraordinary competition and advance, over a period of less than thirty years.
In 1958, a manufacturer could fit 10 electronic components onto a single silicon chip. By 1970, it was possible to fit 100 units onto a chip of the same size—a tenfold increase in slightly more than a decade.
But by 1972, it was possible to fit 1,000 units on a chip, and by 1974, 10,000 units. It was expected that by 1980, there would be one million units on a single chip the size of a thumbnail, but, using electronic photo projection, this goal was actually realized in 1978. By the spring of 1979, the new goal was ten million units—or, even better, one billion units— on a single silicon chip by 1980. But nobody expected to wait past June or July of 1979 for this development.
Such advances within an industry are unprecedented. Comparison to older manufacturing technologies makes this clear. Detroit was content to make trivial product design changes at three-year intervals, but the electronics industry routinely expected order of magnitude advances in the same time. (To keep pace, Detroit would have had to increase automobile gas mileage from 8 miles per gallon in 1970 to 80,000,000 miles per gallon in 1979. Instead, Detroit went from 8 to 16 miles per gallon during that time, further evidence of the coming demise of the automotive industry as the center of the American economy.)
In such a competitive market, everyone worried about foreign powers, particularly Japan, which since 1973 had maintained a Japanese Cultural Exchange in San Jose—which some considered a cover organization for well-financed industrial espionage.
The Blue Contract could only be understood in the light of an industry making major advances every few months. Travis had said that the Blue Contract was “the biggest thing we’ll see in the next ten years. Whoever finds those diamonds has a jump on the technology for at least five years. Five years. Do you know what that means?”
Ross knew what it meant. In an industry where competitive edges were measured in months, companies had made fortunes by beating competitors by a matter of weeks with some new techniques or device; Syntel in California had been the first to make a 256K memory chip while everyone else was still making 16K chips and dreaming of 64K chips. Syntel kept their advantage for only sixteen weeks, but realized a profit of more than a hundred and thirty million dollars.
“And we’re talking about five years,” Travis said. “That’s an advantage measured in billions of dollars, maybe tens of billions of dollars. If we can get to those diamonds.”
These were the reasons for the extraordinary pressure Ross felt as she continued to work with the computer. At the age of twenty-four, she was team leader in a high-technology race involving a half-dozen nations around the globe, all secretly pitting their business and industrial resources against one another.
The stakes made any conventional race seem ludicrous. Travis told her before she left, “Don’t be afraid when the pressure makes you crazy. You have billions of dollars riding on your shoulders. Just do the best you can.”
Doing the best she could, she managed to reduce the expedition timeline by another three hours and thirty-seven minutes—but they were still slightly behind the consortium projection. Not too far to make up the time, especially with Munro’s cold-blooded shortcuts, but nevertheless behind— which could mean total disaster in a winner-take-all race.
And then she received bad news.
The screen printed PIGGYBACK SLURP / ALL BETS OFF.
“Hell,” Ross said. She felt suddenly tired. Because if there really had been a piggyback slurp, their chances of winning the race were vanishing—before any of them had even set foot in the rain forests of central Africa.
2. Piggyback Slurp
TRAVIS FELT LIKE A FOOL.
He stared at the hard copy from Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
ERTS WHY ARE YOU SENDING US ALL THIS MUKENKO DATA WE DON’T REALLY CARE THANKS ANYWAY.
That had arrived an hour ago from GSFC/Maryland, but it was already too late by more than five hours.
“Damn!” Travis said, staring at the telex.
The first indication to Travis that anything was wrong was when the Japanese and Germans broke off negotiations with Munro in Tangier. One minute they had been willing to pay anything; the next minute they could hardly wait to leave. The break-off had come abruptly, discontinuously; it implied the sudden introduction of new data into the consortium computer files.
New data from where?
There could be only one explanation—and now it was confirmed in the GSFC telex from Greenbelt.
ERTS WHY ARE YOU SENDING ALL THIS MUKENKO DATA
There was a simple answer to that: ERTS wasn‘t sending any data. At least, not willingly. ERTS and GSFC had an arrangement to exchange data updates—Travis had made that deal in 1978 to obtain cheaper satellite imagery from orbiting Landsats. Satellite imagery was his company’s single greatest expense. In return for a look at derived ERTS data, GSFC agreed to supply satellite CCTs at 30 percent below gross rate.
It seemed like a good deal at the time, and the coded locks were specified in the agreement.
But now the potential drawbacks loomed large before Travis; his worst fears were confirmed. Once you put a line over two thousand miles from Houston to Greenbelt, you begged for a piggyback data slurp. Somewhere between Texas and Maryland someone had inserted a terminal linkup—probably in the carrier telephone lines—and had begun to slurp out data on a piggyback terminal. This was the form of industrial espionage they most feared.
A piggyback-slurp terminal tapped in between two legitimate terminals, monitoring the back and forth transmissions. After a time, the piggyback operator knew enough to begin making transmissions on line, slurping out data from both ends, pretending to be GSFC to Houston, and Houston to GSFC. The piggyback terminal could continue to function until one or both legitimate terminals realized that they were being slurped.
Now the question was: how much data had been slurped out in the last seventy-two hours?
He had called for twenty-four-hour scanner checks, and the readings were disheartening. It looked as though the ERTS computer had yielded up not only original database elements, but also data-transformation histories—the sequence of operations performed on the data by ERTS over the last four weeks.
If that was true, it meant that the Euro-Japanese consortium piggyback knew what transformations ERTS had carried out on the Mukenko data—and therefore they knew where the lost city was located, with pinpoint accuracy. They now knew the location of the city as precisely as Ross did.
Timelines had to be adjusted, unfavorably to the ERTS team. And the updated computer projections were unequivocal—Ross or no Ross, the likelihood of the ERTS team reaching the site ahead of the Japanese and Germans was flow almost nil.
From Travis’s viewpoint, the entire ERTS expedition was mow a futile exercise, and a waste of time. There was no hope of success. The only unfactorable element was the gorilla Amy, and Travis’s instincts told him that a gorilla named Amy would not prove decisive in the discovery of mineral deposits in the northeastern Congo.
It was hopeless.
Should he recall the ERTS team? He stared at the console by his desk. “Call cost-time,” he said.
The computer blinked COST—TIME AVAILABLE.
“Congo Field Survey,” he said.
The screen printed out numbers for the Congo Field Survey: expenditures by the hour, accumulated costs, committed future costs, cutoff points, future branch-point deletions. . . . The project was now just outside Nairobi, and was running at an accumulated cost of slightly over
$189,000.
Cancellation would cost $227,455.
“Factor BF,” he said.
The screen changed. B F. He now saw a series of probabilities. “Factor BF” was bona fortuna, good luck—the imponderable in all expeditions, especially remote, dangerous expeditions.
THINKING A MOMENT, the computer flashed.
Travis waited. He knew that the computer would require several seconds to perform the computations to assign weights to random factors that might influence the expedition, still five or more days from the target site.
His beeper buzzed. Rogers, the tap dancer, said, “We’ve traced the piggyback slurp. It’s in Norman, Oklahoma, nominally at the North Central Insurance Corporation of America. NCIC is fifty-one percent owned by a Hawaiian holding company, Halekuli, Inc., which is in turn owned by mainland Japanese interests. What do you want?”
“I want a very bad fire,” Travis said.
“Got you,” Rogers said. He hung up the phone.
The screen flashed ASSESSED FACTOR B F and a probability: .449. He was surprised: that figure meant that ERTS had an almost even chance of attaining the target site befure the consortium. Travis didn’t question the mathematics; .449 was good enough.
The ERTS expedition would continue to the Congo, at least for the time being. And in the meantime he would do whatever he could to slow down the consortium. Off the top of his head, Travis could think of one or two ideas to accomplish that.
3. Additional Data
THE JET WAS MOVING SOUTH OVER LAKE RUDOLPH in northern Kenya when Tom Seamans called Elliot.
Seamails had finished his computer analysis to discriminate gorillas from other apes, principally chimpanzees. He had then obtained from Houston a videotape of three seconds of a garbled video transmission which seemed to show a gorilla smashing a dish antenna and staring into a camera.
“Well?” Elliot said, looking at the computer screen. The data flashed up:
DISCRIMINANT FUNCTION GORILLA/CHIMP
FUN CT IONAL GROUPINGS DISTRIBUTED AS:
GORILLA: .9934
CHIMP: .1132
TEST VIDEOTAPE (HOUSTON): .3349
“Hell,” Elliot said. At those figures, the study was equivocal, useless.
“Sorry about that,” Seamans said over the phone. “But part of the trouble comes from the test material itself. We had to factor in the computer derivation of that image. The image has been cleaned up, and that means it’s been regularized; the critical stuff has been lost. I’d like to work with the original digitized matrix. Can you get me that?”
Karen Ross was nodding yes. “Sure,” Elliot said.
“I’ll go another round with it,” Seamans said. “But if you want my gut opinion, it is never going to turn out. The fact is that gorillas show a considerable individual variation in facial structure, just as people do. If we increase our sample base, we’re going to get more variation, and a larger population interval. I think you’re stuck. You can never prove it’s not a gorilla—but for my money, it’s not.”
“Meaning what?” Elliot asked.
“It’s something new,” Seamans said. “I’m telling you, if this was really a gorilla, it would have showed up .89 or .94, somewhere in there, on this function. But the image comes out at .39. That’s just not good enough. It’s not a gorilla, Peter.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s a transitional form. I ran a function to measure where the variation was. You know what was the major differential? Skin color. Even in black-and-white, it’s not dark enough to be a gorilla, Peter. This is a whole new animal, I promise you.”
Elliot looked at Ross. “What does this do to your timeline?”
“For the moment, nothing,” she said. “Other elements are more critical, and this is unfactorable.”
The pilot clicked on the intercom. “We are beginning our descent into Nairobi,” he said.
4. Nairobi
FIVE MILES OUTSIDE NAIROBI, ONE CAN FIND WILD game of the East African savannah. And within the memory of many Nairobi residents the game could be found closer still—gazelles, buffalo, and giraffe wandering around backyards, and the occasional leopard slipping into one’s bedroom. In those days, the city still retained the character of a wild colonial station; in its heyday, Nairobi was a fast-living place indeed: “Are you married or do you live in Kenya?” went the standard question. The men were hard-drinking and rough, the women beautiful and loose, and the pattern of life no more predictable than the fox hunts that ranged over the rugged countryside each weekend.
But modern Nairobi is almost’ unrecognizable from the time of those freewheeling colonial days. The few remaining Victorian buildings lie stranded in a modem city of half a million, with traffic jams, stoplights, skyscrapers, supermarkets, same-day dry cleaners, French restaurants, and air pollution.
The ERTS cargo plane landed at Nairobi International Airport at dawn on the morning of June 16, and Munro contacted porters and assistants for the expedition. They intended to leave Nairobi within two hours—until Travis called from Houston to inform them that Peterson, one of the geologists on the first Congo expedition, had somehow made it back to Nairobi.
Ross was excited by the news. “Where is he now?” she asked.
“At the morgue,” Travis said.
Elliot winced as he came close: the body on the stainless steel table was a blond man his own age. The man’s arms had been crushed; the skin was swollen, a ghastly purple color. He glanced at Ross. She seemed perfectly cool, not blinking or turning away. The pathologist stepped on a foot petal, activating a microphone overhead. “Would you state your name, please.”
“Karen Ellen Ross.”
“Your nationality and passport number?”
“American, F 1413649.”
“Can you identify the man before you, Miss Ross?”
“Yes,” she said. “He is James Robert Peterson.”
“What is your relation to the deceased James Robert Peterson?”
“I worked with him,” she said dully. She seemed to be examining a geological specimen, scrutinizing it unemotionally. Her face showed no reaction.
The pathologist faced the microphone. “Identity confirmed as James Robert Peterson, male Caucasian, twenty-nine years old, nationality American. “ He turned back to Ross. “When was the last time you saw Mr. Peterson?”
“In May of this year. He was leaving for the Congo.”
“You have not seen him in the last month?”
“No,” she said. “What happened?”
The pathologist touched the puffy purple injuries on his arms. His fingertips sank in, leaving indentations like teeth in the flesh. “Damned strange story,” the pathologist said.
The previous day, June 15, Peterson had been flown to Nairobi airport aboard a small charter cargo plane, in end-stage terminal shock. He died several hours later without regaining consciousness. “Extraordinary he made it at all. Apparently the aircraft made an unscheduled stop for a mechanical problem at Garona field, a dirt track in Zaire. And then this fellow comes stumbling out of the woods, collapsing at their feet.” The pathologist pointed out that the bones had been shattered in both arms. The injuries, he explained, were not new; they had occurred at least four days earlier, perhaps more. “He must have been in incredible pain.”
Elliot said, “What could cause that injury?”
The pathologist had never seen anything like it. “Superficially, it resembles mechanical trauma, a crush injury from an automobile or truck. We see a good deal of those here; but mechanical crush injuries are never bilateral, as they are in this case.”
“So it wasn’t a mechanical injury?” Karen Ross asked.
“Don’t know what it was. It’s unique in my experience,” the pathologist said briskly. “We also found traces of blood under his nails, and a few strands of gray hair. We’re running a test now.”
Across the room, another pathologist looked up from his microscope. “The hair is definitely not human. Cross section doesn’t match. Some kind of animal hair, close to human.”
“The cross section?” Ross said.
“Best index we have of hair origin,” the pathologist said. “For instance, human pubic hair is more elliptical in cross section than other body hair, or facial hair. It’s quite characteristic—admissible in court. But especially in this laboratory, we come across a great deal of animal hair, and we’re expert in that as well.”
A large stainless-steel analyzer began pinging. “Blood’s coming through,” the pathologist said.
On a video screen they saw twin patterns of pastel-colored streaks. “This is the electrophoresis pattern,” the pathologist explained. “To check serum proteins. That’s ordinary human blood on the left. On the right we have the blood sample from under the nails. You can see it’s definitely not human blood.”
“Not human blood?” Ross said, glancing at Elliot.
“It’s close to human blood,” the pathologist said, staring at the pattern. “But it’s not human. Could be a domestic or farm animal—a pig, perhaps. Or else a primate. Monkeys and apes are very close serologically to human beings. We’ll have a computer analysis in a minute.”
On the screen, the computer printed ALPHA AND BETA SERUM GLOBULINS MATCH: GORILLA BLOOD.
The pathologist said, “There’s your answer to what he had under his nails. Gorilla blood.”
5. Examination
“SHE WON’T HURT YOU,” ELLIOT TOLD THE frightened orderly. They were in the passenger compartment of the 747 cargo jet. “See, she’s smiling at you.”
Amy was indeed giving her most winning smile, being careful not to expose her teeth. But the orderly from the private clinic in Nairobi was not familiar with these fine points of gorilla etiquette. His hands shook as he held the syringe.
Nairobi was the last opportunity for Amy to receive a thorough checkup. Her large, powerful body belied a constitutional fragility, as her heavy-browed, glowering face belied a meek, rather tender nature. In San Francisco, the Project Amy staff subjected her to a thorough medical regimen— urine samples every other day, stool samples checked weekly for occult blood, complete blood studies monthly, and a trip to the dentist every three months for removal of the black tartar that accumulated from her vegetarian diet.
Amy took it all in stride, but the terrified orderly did not know that. He approached her holding the syringe in front of him like a weapon. “You sure he won’t bite?”
Amy, trying to be helpful, signed, Amy promise no bite. She was signing slowly, deliberately, as she always did when confronted by someone who did not know her language.
“She promises not to bite you,” Elliot said.
“So you say,” the orderly said. Elliot did not bother to explain that he hadn’t said it; she had.
After the blood samples were drawn, the orderly relaxed a little. Packing up, he said, “Certainly is an ugly brute.”
“You’ve hurt her feelings,” Elliot said.
And, indeed, Amy was signing vigorously, What ugly? “Nothing, Amy,” Elliot said. “He’s just never seen a gorilla before.”
The orderly said, “I beg your pardon?”
“You’ve hurt her feelings. You’d better apologize.”