Chapter Nine
Corrigan and Evelyn met for dinner in the downtown Vista Hotel, where she was staying. The interview had told him much about her. Now the informal setting gave her an opportunity to satisfy more of her curiosity about him.
“Oh, I’m from a place that I’d be surprised if you’ve heard of,” he told her as they sat in the lounge over drinks, waiting for a table. “On the coast a few miles south of Dublin.” He wrote the words “Dun Laoghaire” on a coaster and asked her how she’d pronounce it.
Evelyn shrugged. “Dun Layo-ghe-air?” she tried, sounding it out phonetically.
“It’s Dun Leery.” Corrigan grinned. “You can always win a dollar bet in a bar with that. The piers there are famous. They enclose what used to be the biggest artificial harbor in the world at one time.”
“When was that?”
“Back in the eighteen hundreds. The granite was brought down on a cable railway from a quarry a little farther down the coast. It was driven by gravity. The weight of the loaded cars going down hauled the empties back up.”
“Neat.”
Corrigan sipped his gin and tonic and nodded. “Great engineers; those Victorians. They made things to last. Big brass knobs on everything not plastic ones that come off in your hand all the time.”
“So how did you end up in computing and things like that?” Evelyn asked.
Corrigan pursed his lips and stroked the tip of his nose with a knuckle. “Well, now, I was more of a mathematician to begin with—you know, in college. Then I got this, kind of, scholarship thing . . .”
“Never mind the false modesty.”
“Good. It doesn’t come naturally to an Irishman anyway. I got to Trinity—that’s one of the Dublin universities. That got me in touch with the computer scene, and I came over to the States to do postgraduate work on AI.”
“They do a lot of that at MIT, up in Boston,” Evelyn commented.
“I was there for a while—at the AI lab that Minsky and John McCarthy started. Plus, I did a sabbatical with Thinking Machines there, too. You know them?”
“TMC at Cambridge?” Evelyn nodded. “Sure.”
“Then I was at Stanford for some time, and after that Carnegie Mellon, which brought me to Pittsburgh. That was up to a couple of years ago, and then I joined CLC.”
Evelyn regarded him for a moment. “Okay, I know you must get asked this a hundred times a week, but when are we actually going to see it—the real thing? Does anyone know?”
Corrigan snorted and made a face. “Ah, they’ve all got themselves bogged down on semantic issues, if you want my opinion—spending more time arguing over what intelligence is instead of actively doing anything to pursue it. We use the word to mean two different things: the `survival’ kind of intelligence that makes us different from animals, and the `intellectual’ kind that makes some people different from others—or think they are, anyway. The problem is that nobody can make their minds up which one they’re talking about.”
“Which kind do you mean?” Evelyn asked.
“Oh, I got out of the whole thing and left them to it.”
“So is that why you’re into virtual sensory worlds now, instead?”
“Exactly.” Corrigan showed his hands in a gesture of candor. “I’m in a hurry. I plan on going places in this world. There isn’t the time to wait for the likes of them to die off or get their act together.” It was a calculated brashness, playing off the light in Evelyn’s eye.
“Something tells me you’ll get there, too,” she said. “Is this the male competitive urge that I sense surfacing now?”
Corrigan smiled and shrugged in a way that said she could take it any way she liked. “Ah, well, now . . . Let’s just say that Eric can run the caution-and-conservatism department.”
“Eric Shipley, you mean? I thought he was a nice guy.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. He’s a great guy to work with. Good scientist, knows his stuff. . . .” Corrigan sighed and showed a palm briefly. “But he has his own style, and it’s got him where he is.”