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  “I guess you’re right,” Elliot said to Ross. “He’s sending them away.”

  But Ross was frowning, her face grim. “They can’t do this,” she said. “They can’t just quit this way.”

  Elliot was confused again. “I thought you wanted them to quit.”

  “Damn,” Ross said. “We’ve been screwed.” She whispered into the telephone, talking to Houston.

  Elliot didn’t understand it at all. And his confusion was not resolved when Munro locked the door behind the last of the departing men, then came back to Elliot and Ross to say that supper was served.

  They ate Moroccan-style, sitting on the floor and eating with their fingers. The first course was a pigeon pie, and it was followed by some sort of stew.

  “So you sent the Japanese off?” Ross said. “Told them no?”

  “Oh, no,” Munro said. “That would be impolite. I told

  them I would think about it. And I will.”

  “Then why did they leave?”

  Munro shrugged. “Not my doing, I assure you. I think they heard something on the telephone which changed their whole plan.”

  Karen Ross glanced at her watch, making a note of the time. “Very good stew,” she said. She was doing her best to be agreeable.

  “Glad you like it. It’s tajin. Camel meat.”

  Karen Ross coughed. Peter Elliot noticed that his own appetite had diminished. Munro turned to him. “So you have the gorilla, Professor Elliot?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “The Japanese told me. The Japanese are fascinated by your gorilla. Can’t figure the point of it, drives them mad. A young man with a gorilla, arid a young woman who is searching for—”

  “Industrial-grade diamonds,” Karen Ross said.

  “Ah, industrial-grade diamonds.” He turned to Elliot. “I enjoy a frank conversation. Diamonds, fascinating.” His manner suggested that he had been told nothing of importance.

  Ross said, “You’ve got to take us in, Munro.”

  “World’s full of industrial-grade diamonds,” Munro said. “You can find them in Africa, India, Russia, Brazil, Canada, even in America—Arkansas, New York, Kentucky— everywhere you look. But you’re going to the Congo.”

  The obvious question hung in the air.

  “We are looking for Type Jib boron-coated blue diamonds,” Karen Ross said, “which have semi conducting properties important to microelectronics applications.”

  Munro stroked his mustache. “Blue diamonds,” he said, nodding. “It makes sense.”

  Ross said that of course it made sense.

  “You can’t dope them?” Munro asked.

  “No. It’s been tried. There was a commercial boron-doping process, but it was too unreliable. The Americans had one and so did the Japanese. Everyone gave it up as hopeless

  “So you’ve got to find a natural source.”

  “That’s right. I want to get there as soon as possible,” Ross said, staring at him, her voice flat.

  “I’m sure you do,” Munro said. “Nothing but business for our Dr. Ross, eh?” He crossed the room and, leaning against one of the arches, looked out on the dark Tangier night. “I’m not surprised at all,” he said. “As a matter of—”

  At the first blast of machine-gun fire, Munro dived for cover, the glassware on the table splattered, one of the girls screamed, and Elliot and Ross threw themselves to the marble floor as the bullets whined around them, chipping the plaster overhead, raining plaster dust down upon them. The blast lasted thirty seconds or so, and it was followed by complete silence.

  When it was over, they got up hesitantly, staring at one another.

  “The consortium plays for keeps.” Munro grinned. “Just my sort of people.”

  Ross brushed plaster dust off her clothes. She turned to Munro. “Five point two against the first two hundred, no deductions, in Swiss francs, adjusted.”

  “Five point seven, and you have me.”

  “Five point seven. Done.”

  Munro shook hands with them, then announced that he would need a few minutes to pack his things before leaving for Nairobi.

  “Just like that?” Ross asked. She seemed suddenly concerned, glancing again at her watch.

  “What’s your problem?” Munro asked.

  “Czech AK-47s,” she said. “In your warehouse.”

  Munro showed no surprise. “Better get them out,” he said. “The consortium undoubtedly has something similar in the works, and we’ve got a lot to do in the next few hours.” As he spoke, they heard the police Kiaxons approaching from a distance. Munro said, “We’ll take the back stair.”

  An hour later, they were airborne, heading toward Nai­robi.

  DAY 4: NAIROBI

  June 16,1979

  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 th
ink.” 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.r />
  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.