“He diabetic?”
“No.”
“Raynaud’s?”
“No.”
Nieto went over to the bedside, looked at the fingers. “Only the tips are involved. All the damage is distal.”
“Right,” she said. “If he wasn’t found in the desert, I’d call that frostbite.”
“You check him for heavy metals, Bev? Because this could be toxic exposure to heavy metals. Cadmium, or arsenic. That would explain the fingers, and also his dementia.”
“I drew the samples. But heavy metals go to UNH in Albuquerque. I won’t have the report back for seventy-two hours.”
“You have any ID, medical history, anything?”
“Nothing. We put a missing persons out on him, and we transmitted his fingerprints to Washington for a database check, but that could take a week.”
Nieto nodded. “And when he was agitated, babbling? What’d he say?”
“It was all rhymes, the same things over. Something about Gordon and Stanley. And then he would say, ‘Quondam phone makes me roam.’”
“Quondam? Isn’t that Latin?”
She shrugged. “It’s a long time since I was in church.”
“I think quondam is a word in Latin,” Nieto said.
And then they heard a voice say, “Excuse me?” It was the bespectacled kid in the bed across the hall, sitting with his mother.
“We’re still waiting for the surgeon to come in, Kevin,” Beverly said to him. “Then we can set your arm.”
“He wasn’t saying ‘quondam phone,’” the kid said. “He was saying ‘quantum foam.’”
“What?”
“Quantum foam. He was saying ‘quantum foam.’”
They went over to him. Nieto seemed amused. “And what, exactly, is quantum foam?”
The kid looked at them earnestly, blinking behind his glasses. “At very small, subatomic dimensions, the structure of space-time is irregular. It’s not smooth, it’s sort of bubbly and foamy. And because it’s way down at the quantum level, it’s called quantum foam.”
“How old are you?” Nieto said.
“Eleven.”
His mother said, “He reads a lot. His father’s at Los Alamos.”
Nieto nodded. “And what’s the point of this quantum foam, Kevin?”
“There isn’t any point,” the kid said. “It’s just how the universe is, at the subatomic level.”
“Why would this old guy be talking about it?”
“Because he’s a well-known physicist,” Wauneka said, coming toward them. He glanced at a sheet of paper in his hand. “It just came in on the M.P.D. Joseph A. Traub, seventy-one years old, materials physicist. Specialist in superconducting metals. Reported missing by his employer, ITC Research in Black Rock, around noon today.”
“Black Rock? That’s way over near Sandia.” It was several hours away, in central New Mexico. “How the hell did this guy get to Corazón Canyon in Arizona?”
“I don’t know,” Beverly said. “But he’s—”
The alarms began to sound.
:
It happened with a swiftness that stunned Jimmy Wauneka. The old man raised his head from the bed, stared at them, eyes wild, and then he vomited blood. His oxygen mask turned bright red; blood spurted past the mask, running in streaks across his cheeks and chin, spattering the pillow, the wall. He made a gurgling sound: he was drowning in his own blood.
Beverly was already running across the room. Wauneka ran after her. “Turn the head!” Nieto was saying, coming up to the bed. “Turn it!” Beverly had pulled off the oxygen mask and was trying to turn the old man’s head, but he struggled, fighting her, still gurgling, eyes wide with panic. Wauneka pushed past her, grabbed the old man’s head with both hands and wrenched hard, twisting him bodily to the side. The man vomited again; blood sprayed all over the monitors, and over Wauneka. “Suction!” Beverly shouted, pointing to a tube on the wall.
Wauneka tried to hold the old man and grab for the tube, but the floor was slick with blood. He slipped, grabbed at the bed for support.
“Come on, people!” Tsosie shouted. “I need you! Suction!” She was on her knees, shoving her fingers in the man’s mouth, pulling out his tongue. Wauneka scrambled to his feet, saw Nieto holding out a suction line. He grabbed it with blood-slippery fingers, and saw Nieto twist the wall valve. Beverly took the neoprene probe, started sucking out the guy’s mouth and nose. Red blood ran up the tubes. The man gasped, coughed, but he was growing weaker.
“I don’t like this,” Beverly said, “we better—” The monitor alarms changed tone, high-pitched, steady. Cardiac arrest.
“Damn,” she said. There was blood all over her jacket, her blouse. “Paddles! Get the paddles!”
Nieto was standing over the bed, holding the paddles in outstretched arms. Wauneka scrambled back from the bed as Nancy Hood pushed her way through; there were people clustered all around the man now. Wauneka smelled a sharp odor and knew the man’s bowels had released. He suddenly realized the old man was going to die.
“Clear,” Nieto said as he pushed down on the paddles. The body jolted on the table. The bottles on the wall clattered. The monitor alarms continued.
Beverly said, “Close the curtain, Jimmy.”
He looked back, and saw the bespectacled kid across the room, staring, his mouth open. Wauneka yanked the drapes shut.
:
An hour later, an exhausted Beverly Tsosie dropped down at a desk in the corner to write up the case summary. It would have to be unusually complete, because the patient had died. As she thumbed through the chart, Jimmy Wauneka came by with a cup of coffee for her. “Thanks,” she said. “By the way, do you have the phone number for that ITC company? I have to call them.”
“I’ll do that for you,” Wauneka said, resting his hand briefly on her shoulder. “You’ve had a tough day.”
Before she could say anything, Wauneka had gone to the next desk, flipped open his notepad, and started dialing. He smiled at her as he waited for the call to go through.
“ITC Research.”
He identified himself, then said, “I’m calling about your missing employee, Joseph Traub.”
“One moment please, I’ll connect you to our director of human resources.”
He then waited on hold for several minutes. Muzak played. He cupped his hand over the phone, and as casually as he could, said to Beverly, “Are you free for dinner, or are you seeing your granny?”
She continued to write, not looking up from the chart. “I’m seeing Granny.”
He gave a little shrug. “Just thought I’d ask,” he said.
“But she goes to bed early. About eight o’clock.”
“Is that right?”
She smiled, still looking down at her notes. “Yes.”
Wauneka grinned. “Well, okay.”
“Okay.”
The phone clicked again and he heard a woman say, “Hold please, I am putting you through to our senior vice president, Dr. Gordon.”
“Thank you.” He thought, Senior vice president.
Another click, then a gravelly voice: “This is John Gordon speaking.”
“Dr. Gordon, this is James Wauneka of the Gallup Police Department. I’m calling you from McKinley Hospital, in Gallup,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
Seen through the picture windows of the ITC conference room, the yellow afternoon sun gleamed off the five glass and steel laboratory buildings of the Black Rock research complex. In the distance, afternoon thunderclouds were forming over the far desert. But inside the room, the twelve ITC board members were turned away from the view. They were having coffee at a side table, talking to one another while they waited for the meeting to begin. Board meetings always ran into the night, because the ITC president, Robert Doniger, was a notorious insomniac and he scheduled them that way. It was a tribute to Doniger’s brilliance that the board members, all CEOs and major venture capitalists, came anyway.
Right
now, Doniger had yet to make an appearance. John Gordon, Doniger’s burly vice president, thought he knew why. Still talking on a cell phone, Gordon began to make his way toward the door. At one time Gordon had been an Air Force project manager, and he still had a military bearing. His blue business suit was freshly pressed, and his black shoes shone. Holding his cell phone to his ear, he said, “I understand, Officer,” and he slipped out the door.
Just as he had thought, Doniger was in the hallway, pacing up and down like a hyperactive kid, while Diane Kramer, ITC’s head attorney, stood to one side and listened to him. Gordon saw Doniger jabbing his finger in the air at her angrily. Clearly, he was giving her hell.
:
Robert Doniger was thirty-eight years old, a brilliant physicist, and a billionaire. Despite a potbelly and gray hair, his manner remained youthful—or juvenile, depending on whom you talked to. Certainly age had not mellowed him. ITC was his third startup company; he had grown rich from the others, but his management style was as caustic and nasty as ever. Nearly everybody in the company feared him.
In deference to the board meeting, Doniger had put on a blue suit, forgoing his usual khakis and sweats. But he looked uncomfortable in the suit, like a boy whose parents had made him dress up.
“Well, thank you very much, Officer Wauneka,” Gordon said into the cell phone. “We’ll make all the arrangements. Yes. We’ll do that immediately. Thank you again.” Gordon flipped the phone shut, and turned to Doniger. “Traub’s dead, and they’ve identified his body.”
“Where?”
“Gallup. That was a cop calling from the ER.”
“What do they think he died of?”
“They don’t know. They think massive cardiac arrest. But there was a problem with his fingers. A circulatory problem. They’re going to do an autopsy. It’s required by law.”
Doniger waved his hand, a gesture of irritable dismissal. “Big fucking deal. The autopsy won’t show anything. Traub had transcription errors. They’ll never figure it out. Why are you wasting my time with this shit?”
“One of your employees just died, Bob,” Gordon said.
“That’s true,” Doniger said coldly. “And you know what? There’s fuck all I can do about it. I feel sorry. Oh me oh my. Send some flowers. Just handle it, okay?”
:
At moments like this, Gordon would take a deep breath, and remind himself that Doniger was no different from most other aggressive young entrepreneurs. He would remind himself that behind the sarcasm, Doniger was nearly always right. And he would remind himself that in any case, Doniger had behaved this way all his life.
Robert Doniger had shown early signs of genius, taking up engineering textbooks while still in grade school. By the time he was nine, he could fix any electronic appliance—a radio, or a TV—fiddling with the vacuum tubes and wires until he got it working. When his mother expressed concern that he would electrocute himself, he told her, “Don’t be an idiot.” And when his favorite grandmother died, a dry-eyed Doniger informed his mother that the old lady still owed him twenty-seven dollars, and he expected her to make good on it.
After graduating summa cum laude in physics from Stanford at the age of eighteen, Doniger had gone to Fermilab, near Chicago. He quit after six months, telling the director of the lab that “particle physics is for jerkoffs.” He returned to Stanford, where he worked in what he regarded as a more promising area: superconducting magnetism.
This was a time when scientists of all sorts were leaving the university to start companies to exploit their discoveries. Doniger left after a year to found TechGate, a company that made the components for precision chip etching that Doniger had invented in passing. When Stanford protested that he’d made these discoveries while working at the lab, Doniger said, “If you’ve got a problem, sue me. Otherwise shut up.”
It was at TechGate that Doniger’s harsh management style became famous. During meetings with his scientists, he’d sit in the corner, tipped precariously back in his chair, firing off questions. “What about this?” “Why aren’t you doing that?” “What’s the reason for this?” If the answer satisfied him, he’d say, “Maybe. . ..” That was the highest praise anyone ever got from Doniger. But if he didn’t like the answer—and he usually didn’t—he’d snarl, “Are you brain-dead?” “Do you aspire to be an idiot?” “Do you want to die stupid?” “You’re not even a half-wit.” When really annoyed, he threw pencils and notebooks, and screamed, “Assholes! You’re all fucking assholes!”
TechGate employees put up with the tantrums of “Death March Doniger” because he was a brilliant physicist, better than they were; because he knew the problems his teams were facing; and because his criticisms were invariably on point. Unpleasant as it was, this stinging style worked; TechGate made remarkable advances in two years.
In 1984, he sold his company for a hundred million dollars. That same year, Time magazine listed him as one of fifty people under the age of twenty-five “who will shape the rest of the century.” The list also included Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
:
“Goddamn it,” Doniger said, turning to Gordon. “Do I have to do everything myself? Jesus. Where did they find Traub?”
“In the desert. On the Navajo reservation.”
“Where, exactly?”
“All I know is, ten miles north of Corazón. Apparently there’s not much out there.”
“All right,” Doniger said. “Then get Baretto from security to drive Traub’s car out to Corazón, and leave it in the desert. Puncture a tire and walk away.”
Diane Kramer cleared her throat. She was dark-haired, in her early thirties, dressed in a black suit. “I don’t know about that, Bob,” she said, in her best lawyerly tone. “You’re tampering with evidence—”
“Of course I’m tampering with evidence! That’s the whole point! Somebody’s going to ask how Traub got out there. So leave his car for them to find.”
“But we don’t know exactly where—”
“It doesn’t matter exactly where. Just do it.”
“That means Baretto plus somebody else knows about this. . ..”
“And who gives a damn? Nobody. Just do it, Diane.”
There was a short silence. Kramer stared at the floor, frowning, clearly still unhappy.
“Look,” Doniger said, turning to Gordon. “You remember when Garman was going to get the contract and my old company wasn’t? You remember the press leak?”
“I remember,” Gordon said.
“You were so worried about it,” Doniger said, smirking. He explained to Kramer: “Garman was a fat pig. Then he lost a lot of weight because his wife put him on a diet. We leaked that Garman had inoperable cancer and his company was going to fold. He denied it, but nobody believed him, because of the way he looked. We got the contract. I sent a big basket of fruit to his wife.” He laughed. “But the point is, nobody ever traced the leak to us. All’s fair, Diane. Business is business. Get the goddamn car out in the desert.”
She nodded, but she was still looking at the floor.
“And then,” Doniger said, “I want to know how the hell Traub got into the transit room in the first place. Because he’d already made too many trips, and he had accumulated too many transcription defects. He was past his limit. He wasn’t supposed to make any more trips. He wasn’t cleared for transit. We have a lot of security around that room. So how’d he get in?”
“We think he had a maintenance clearance, to work on the machines,” Kramer said. “He waited until evening, between shifts, and took a machine. But we’re checking all that now.”
“I don’t want you to check it,” Doniger said sarcastically. “I want you to fix it, Diane.”
“We’ll fix it, Bob.”
“You better, goddamn it,” Doniger said. “Because this company now faces three significant problems. And Traub is the least of them. The other two are major. Ultra, ultra, major.”
:
Doniger had always had a gift for the lon
g view. Back in 1984, he had sold TechGate because he foresaw that computer chips were going to “hit the wall.” At the time, this seemed nonsensical. Computer chips were doubling in power every eighteen months, while the cost was halved. But Doniger recognized that these advances were made by cramming components closer and closer together on the chip. It couldn’t go on forever. Eventually, circuits would be so densely packed that the chips would melt from the heat. This implied an upper limit on computer power. Doniger knew that society would demand ever more raw computational power, but he didn’t see any way to accomplish it.
Frustrated, he returned to an earlier interest, superconducting magnetism. He started a second company, Advanced Magnetics, which owned several patents essential for the new Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines that were starting to revolutionize medicine. Advanced Magnetics was paid a quarter of a million dollars in royalties for every MRI machine made. It was “a cash cow,” Doniger once said, “and about as interesting as milking a cow.” Bored and seeking new challenges, he sold out in 1988. He was then twenty-eight years old, and worth a billion dollars. But in his view, he had yet to make his mark.
The following year, 1989, he started ITC.
:
One of Doniger’s heroes was the physicist Richard Feynman. In the early eighties, Feynman had speculated that it might be possible to build a computer using the quantum attributes of atoms. Theoretically, such a “quantum computer” would be billions and billions of times more powerful than any computer ever made. But Feynman’s idea implied a genuinely new technology—a technology that had to be built from scratch, a technology that changed all the rules. Because nobody could see a practical way to build a quantum computer, Feynman’s idea was soon forgotten.
But not by Doniger.
In 1989, Doniger set out to build the first quantum computer. The idea was so radical—and so risky—that he never publicly announced his intention. He blandly named his new company ITC, for International Technology Corporation. He set up his main offices in Geneva, drawing from the pool of physicists working at CERN.