Susan Phillips - Hot Shot

"Maybe she's his wet nurse," Susannah whispered, unable to take her eyes off the monumental mammaries.

"Are you kidding?" Mitch whispered back. "He'd suffocate to death."

Yank walked up to them and nodded. He refused to have anything to do with the day-to-day business operations of the company; typically, he didn't ask about their meeting with Hoffman Enterprises, but about a problem they'd been having with their keyboards. "What'd the manufacturer say, Sam? Did you talk to them?"

"Uh… static." The woman's presence seemed to have robbed Sam of his capacity for coherent speech.

Yank looked irritated. "Of course it's static. We've known that for weeks. What do they intend to do about it?"

"Do?"

Susannah stepped in and extended her hand to Yank's companion. "Hi, I'm Susannah Faulconer."

"Kismet," the woman replied in a breathy, affected voice.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Kismet Jade. My numerologist picked it out. You're a Sagittarius, aren't you?"

"Actually, no." Susannah quickly introduced her partners, but Kismet barely spared them a glance. She was too busy cantilevering her left breast over Yank's upper arm.

"I'm hungry, Stud Man," she purred. "You gonna buy me something to eat, or do I have to work for my dinner?" She gave him a wicked, moist-lipped smile that clearly indicated exactly what sort of work she had in mind.

Yank calmly adjusted his glasses on his nose. "I'll be happy to get you something to eat. The pizza is excellent, but the burgers are quite good, too."

"Stud Man?" Mitch muttered at Susannah's side.

"I ordered some pizzas," Susannah said quickly.

Kismet walked two vermilion fingernails up the length of Yank's arm. "Play Victors with me while we wait."

"I'm sorry, Kismet, but I don't play Victors."

Kismet began to pout. "Why not? It's the best arcade game that's come out this year."

Yank looked genuinely distressed. "I'm awfully sorry, Kismet. I really don't like to play Victors. Sam is our champion. He's the best Victors player you've ever seen." He gave Sam a pleading glance. "Would you mind playing a game with Kismet?"

"Uh-sure. No problem."

Mitch abandoned Space Invaders and walked with Susannah to the table. "She certainly is a far cry from Roberta," he said. "Sam's going to have a hard time keeping his eyes on the screen."

"So would you," she pointed out as they slid into the booth.

Kismet released a giggling obscenity as Sam annihilated her before she even reached the second screen. She took the quarter Yank handed her.

Susannah studied them. "Have you spent any time at all thinking about what it will mean if this deal goes through?"

"That's about all I've done lately."

"I don't mean the company. I'm talking about how it will change us personally. On paper, anyway, each one of us will be worth a lot of money."

"I have money now. You've had it before. We know what it's like." She studied Yank and Sam. "They don't." "Nothing ever stays the same, Susannah." "Uhm. I guess you're right." She picked up her beer and took a sip. On the opposite side of the room, Kismet arched her arms around Yank's thin neck, pressed her lips to his, and thrust her long experienced tongue deep within his mouth. Susannah experienced a moment both bittersweet and poignant. Mitch was right. Nothing was ever going to be the same again.

The money came rolling in. Slick, green, fast money. Hot money. New money. Money aching to be spent.

The seventies whirled into the eighties, and the greatest industrial joy ride of the twentieth century picked up speed. Silicon Valley was awash in electronic gold as capitalism struck its finest hour.

Home video games had already captured the imagination of the American family, and by 1982, the idea of having a computer in the house no longer seemed strange at all. Firms sprang up overnight. Some of them collapsed just as quickly, but others left their founders with almost unimaginable riches.

In the posh communities of Los Gatos, Woodside, and Los Altos Hills, the electrical engineers stepped out of their hot tubs, stuffed their plastic pocket protectors into Armani shirts, hopped into their BMW's, and laughed like hell.

By the fall of 1982, the nerds owned the Valley. The bespeckled, pimply-faced, overweight, underweight, dateless, womanless, goofiest of the goofy, were the undisputed, unchallenged kings of the entire freaking Valley!

Man, it was sweet.

Yank pulled his Porsche 911 crookedly into a parking space at SysVal's main building and then headed up the walk toward the main entrance. He nodded absentmindedly at the two female account executives who had stopped in mid-conversation as he approached and gazed wistfully at the retreating back of his leather bomber jacket. Once inside the lobby, he determinedly ignored the security guard stationed behind the elliptical-shaped desk.

Everyone else who worked at SysVal had to show a plastic security badge to be admitted. Even Sam wore a badge. But Yank pretended the badges didn't exist, and Susannah had left orders that the guards were to admit him on sight.

Logically, he understood that those golden days of Homebrew were gone forever-the days of free and open information, of one for all and all for one. It was September of 1982. John Lennon was dead, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and Uncle Sam had just busted up AT &T. The world was changing, and the Valley was filled with industrial spies intent on stealing the latest American technology and selling it to the Japanese, the Russians, or even a new start-up in the next industrial park. SysVal's astounding success had made it a prime target for those roaches of humanity. Yank understood all that. But he still wouldn't wear a security badge.

As he headed down the hallway toward the multimillion-dollar lab that had been built especially for him, he had the nagging sensation that he had forgotten something very important. But he dismissed his worry. What could be more important than solving the problem with the trace lines of solder on their new circuit board? They were too close. He had an idea…

Ten miles away, in the gilt and brocade bedroom of his Portola Valley home, lingerie model Tiffani Wade's carefully arranged seductive pose was ruined by the frown marring her forehead. "Yank? Yank, you can come back in now. I'm ready."

She called out three more times before she realized that no one was going to answer, then she sagged back into the pillows. "You son of a bitch," she muttered. "You've done it to me again."

Susannah shut off the Blaze III that rested on the credenza behind her desk and stretched. Somewhere in the building one of the employees fired off an air horn. She barely noticed. At SysVal, people were always firing off air horns or calling out Bingo numbers over the loudspeaker system, just so no one ever made the mistake of confusing them with IBM or FBT.

As if someone had overheard her thoughts, the loudspeaker began to squawk. "Mayday, Mayday. The Japanese have just attacked the parking lot. All employees driving domestic cars should immediately take cover. This is not a drill. I repeat. This is not a drill."

Susannah rolled her eyes. God forbid they should ever have a real emergency. No one would believe it.

SysVal's employees were primarily men in their twenties, and they prided themselves on being bad. In the six years since the company was founded, Sam Gamble's personality had become their model. Even the whiz kids at Apple Computer weren't as raunchy, as brazen, as wild as the rowdy bunch at SysVal. At Apple they held Friday afternoon beer blasts, but at SysVal they showed stag movies, too. The boys of SysVal strutted their stuff-their youth, their audaciousness, their sense of destiny. They were the ones who had made the magical little Blaze available to the world and helped humanity learn the beauty of personal computing. Like their brash, charismatic founder, they were young, invincible, immortal.

Taking off her glasses, Susannah rubbed the bridge of her nose, then looked across her office at a much-abused dart board with the Apple logo painted on it. She thought about the five of them-Jobs and Woz, Sam, Yank, herself. All of them college dropouts. Freaks, nerds, rebels, and one overly polite socialite. In the five years that had passed since the West Coast Computer Faire, everything they touched had turned to gold. It was as if the gods had blessed them with youth, brains, and unlimited good luck. On paper, anyway, she and her partners were worth over a hundred million dollars each, while at Apple, Steve Jobs was worth more than three hundred million. Sometimes the enormity of their success scared Susannah to death.

The battered Apple dart board gave visual evidence of the early rivalry between the two young companies, but in the past few years that had changed. With trie dawning of the 1980s, the Big Boys had finally lifted their heads and realized that they had been left behind. Late in 1981, IBM had introduced the IBM-PC. Apple Computer, in a display of bravado that Susannah still wished SysVal had thought of first, had taken out a full-page ad in the nation's newspapers. The ad said, WELCOME IBM. SERIOUSLY. A paragraph of copy had followed in which the brash young upstarts at Apple had assumed the role of the wise old men of the industry and spelled out for Mighty IBM all of the glories of personal computing-as if IBM were too inexperienced, too stupid, too wet-behind-the-ears, to figure it out for themselves. The sheer audacity of it had kept the business community laughing for months.

A custom-designed radio-controlled car zoomed into her office, did a three sixty in the middle of her carpet and zoomed out again with no sign of a human operator. SysVal's engineers were entertaining themselves again.

Rubbing her eyes, she pushed a stray lock of hair away from her face. Her hair was shorter now, cut in a breezy style that feathered around her cheeks and softened the sharp, aristocratic features of her face. Since no important meetings were on her docket for that day, she had dressed informally in a coral cowl-neck sweater and tight, straight-legged jeans. Two slim gold bangles glittered at one wrist and a wide gold cuff hugged the other. The third finger of her right hand sported a two-karat marquis-cut diamond that she had bought for herself. More, she had definitely concluded, was better than less.

On impulse, she reached for her telephone and dialed the number that connected her directly with Mitch's private office. But before the phone could ring, he walked through her door.

"Mental telepathy," she said, some of her tension slipping away merely at the sight of his solid, comforting presence. "I was just calling you."

He slumped wearily into the chair opposite her desk. "Somebody left a bra in the hallway."

"As long as the person who lost it isn't running around bare-chested, don't complain."

Of them all, Mitch had changed the least. The blunt planes of his face had hardened a bit, and a few strands of gray had begun to weave through the sandy hair at his temples. But his body hadn't lost any of its tone. At thirty-seven, SysVal's Executive Vice-President of Sales and Marketing was still as solid as the Buckeye wide receiver who had won a place in Woody Hayes's heart.

Mitch was the most respectable corporate officer SysVal had, a wonderful piece of white bread who thought nothing of flying across the country to watch one of his kids play soccer, and was recently honored as the Bay Area Jaycees' Man of the Year for his civic contributions. Over the years, he and Susannah had developed a deep friendship.

She saw at once that he was exhausted. He had been driving himself for months, trying to win a multimillion-dollar contract with the state of California to install the Blaze III in hundreds of its state offices. The contract would provide the capitalization SysVal needed to finish up the work on the Wildfire and launch their new business computer ahead of the competition. Unfortunately, SysVal's competition for the contract was FBT, and Cal Theroux had been lobbying hard for the Falcon 101, FBT's new personal computer. Although the entry of giant corporations like IBM and FBT had legitimized the personal computer, it had also made things a lot tougher.