Undo Part 4

Mr. Armond jumped from his seat. "Of course." He slid one from the pile. Quickly discarding the little protective jacket, he handed the booklet to Greta, who immediately began flipping through it.

"Thank you, dear," she said, without looking up.

Mr. Armond returned the addressed, empty coverlet to Ms. Olson's pile and sent her off with a grateful wink. He collected the cord-wrapped box containing her new bowl from a stock attendant, and handed it to Greta. "Anything else today, Mrs. Locke?"

"I think this is all for today."

"Always a pleasure, Mrs. Locke."

She strolled out onto Post Street, the pleasantly heavy box beneath one arm. Her car had been moved several yards up the block and into a loading zone. She waved her scarf to the parking attendant, but he was already on his way to the vehicle.

He held the car door for her, and she placed the box on the pa.s.senger seat and secured it with the seat belt. Tying her scarf, she realized she had forgotten the catalog. She had left it on the clerk's desk. No fuss. She would receive one in the mail soon anyway.

Climbing into the car, she smiled, recalling the day she drove it off the parking lot. Another little gift to herself, for all her hard work.

Now that Matthew Locke was gone from his office, Peter Jones twisted the brightness k.n.o.b on his computer monitor and returned to his work.

Beneath his hand he rolled the mouse and pressed its single b.u.t.ton, causing the screen to scroll. Small connected boxes drawn on the electronic doc.u.ment rolled from the bottom of the display to the top. He stopped when he arrived at the top of the chart.

With the pointer he selected the uppermost box and clicked the mouse twice on the name that currently occupied it. Peter looked at the highlighted name for a moment, then pressed the Delete key. MATTHEW LOCKE disappeared instantly.

Peter smiled to himself at the literalness of this small, effortless action, of deleting from his computer the very man who threatened to ruin its bright future. He typed in his own name into the vacant box and, beneath it, added the word ACTING before the t.i.tle that was already there, PRESIDENT & CEO. Beneath this box were others, connected to the uppermost with straight black lines, each t.i.tled with the name of the corresponding division vice president. His name was t.i.tled in one of these other boxes as, VICE PRESIDENT, JOEY.

The man Peter had hired two years ago to act as his partner had failed. Matthew Locke's role at Wallaby, defined by Peter and Hank Towers, Wallaby's cofounder and vice chairman, was to act as the company's business leader and Peter's a.s.sistant. While Peter understood the power of his own vision and the importance of his skill at inventing remarkable products, he admitted to himself that he lacked the business experience to develop the company from a handful of engineers to a large and profitable organization. Which was why he had decided to hire Matthew Locke.

But something had gone wrong.

Matthew, for all of his management strength, did not fit in at Wallaby the way Peter would have liked. Looking back, he remembered Matthew's suggestion, about a year ago, that perhaps Wallaby's portable computers could become more compatible with ICP's systems. That was what had started Peter wondering if, in the long run, Matthew was right for Wallaby. Dismissing Matthew's idea as a naive insult, Peter only wished now that he had paid better attention. How could Matthew think Wallaby should abandon its founding vision of giving high technology power to the individual with a personal computer or portable interactive a.s.sistant in favor of creating mere peripherals that connected to ICP's dictatorial, impersonal desktop and mainframe computers?

What's more, at about this time their friendship began to deteriorate. Up until the disagreement over the company's direction, the two had spent nearly every Sat.u.r.day afternoon together, going for long walks or drives. Apparently because of Peter's reaction, Matthew stopped spending Sat.u.r.day afternoons with him. When Peter would ring the gate bell at Matthew's mansion, the housekeeper would divulge that Mr. and Mrs. Locke had gone out for the day. Peter had felt wounded. Matthew had been the first person with whom he had experienced any sort of real friendship. Or so he'd thought. Scolding himself for having allowed his feelings to become personal, he displaced his hurt by pouring himself more intensely into his work, in an all-out effort to substantiate his side of the contention that had cost him his only friend.

The real challenge now was to get the Joey Plus quickly out the door and into the user's hands and, put to rest once and for all the criticism the original Joey had received. The Joey personal interactive a.s.sistant was the product of three years of hard work and engineering magic. Peter, the inventor of the original Wallaby Mate personal computer, had created the Joey as a radically different and intuitively designed portable computer.

Named after the Australian word for baby kangaroo, the Joey was compact and thin and easy to transport, and it lasted for days on a single charge. In its simplest configuration, the basic Joey was about the size of a slender hardback book and almost as light, and it slipped easily into a briefcase. It worked as either a traditional notebook computer, or as a keyboard-less slate computer, and its built-in modem made it easy to access on-line services and the Internet, or send and receive faxes.

Users interacted with Joey using either a stylus by "drawing"

directly on its color active-matrix screen, or with the full-size keyboard and trackpad that stealthily slid out from its underside. Or with a combination of both stylus and keyboard, if they preferred. That was what made the Joey so unusual and compelling - its flexibility. Especially when the owner returned with it to the office, or took the Joey home. There, the Joey attached easily to a variety of snap-on peripherals that turned the base unit into a more powerful desktop system. Expanded keyboards. Mice. Monitors. Printers. Scanners. CD-ROM players.

Stereo speakers. Enhanced network peripherals. And most any other peripheral device available for ordinary personal computers.

But the machine had its faults. Though it was technically superior to ICP's portable computers, software developers hesitated to invest the costly technical and human resources required to create new programs for it. Because its design was so new and different, many software developers were fearful of straying beyond the safe boundaries of developing programs for anything but ICP's series of computers, regardless of their plain-vanilla functionality. In the few short years since they had become players in the portable computer industry, ICP had attained an installed base of millions of portable systems worldwide, which dwarfed the few hundred thousand Joey systems Wallaby had sold since its introduction. To a software developer, ICP's user base numbers were too great to ignore, regardless of what the future potential of a device like the Joey might be.

Peter clicked the print b.u.t.ton on the computer screen. The laser printer on his desk hummed. A few moments later the revised company organization chart rolled out of the printer.

Nowhere in the drawing did Matthew Locke's name appear.

In tomorrow's board meeting, Peter intended to surprise the team by proposing his newly drawn organization. Peter himself would temporarily fill the president-and-CEO slot until a qualified replacement was found. Though Peter had spent little time with the members of his executive staff over the past few months, he knew that they had faith in him. He was their leader, the company's crown jewel. In founding his company he had founded an industry, one that had made every member of his senior executive staff a multimillionaire. Without a doubt, their loyalties rested with him. Any other possibility never occurred to him; he had too many more significant issues to contend with, like leaky batteries.

Leaving his office, Peter stopped for a moment to appreciate the sharp and elegant lines of the Joey prototype resting on the shelf beside his desk. In just two months, according to his plan, the world would finally benefit from his original Joey vision: the new Joey Plus. His plan for providing the Joey engineering group with more engineers was precisely what was going to move it off his shelf and onto buyers' desktops.

Peter's secretary Peggy looked past her computer screen as she heard his office door close.

"I'm leaving for the day," he said.

Peggy had worked for Peter since the company began. She had been nineteen years old then, a year younger than Peter, and one of the first employees in the company. Like Peter, she had attained ma.s.sive wealth when the company had had its public stock offering. She wore a colorful Wallaby T-shirt and jeans, and one would never guess that this young woman, worth slightly more than one million dollars, was executive a.s.sistant to the man who had started the fastest growing new market in the computer industry.

However, looking at Peter's longish hair, customary faded blue jeans and Oxford shirt, would anyone guess that he was worth eight hundred million dollars?

Before heading to his car, Peter decided it wouldn't hurt to bolster his confidence in his plan by checking the status of a few key Joey Plus projects.

"How's it coming?" Peter asked, leaning over an engineer's shoulder.

"Good," Paul Trueblood answered. He blew at the trails of smoke that rose before him as he lifted a soldering iron.

"I think I've got the battery problem fixed." The engineer returned his attention to the electronic components scattered about his worktable.

"Great," Peter said, noticing the pile of tiny batteries beside the main Joey unit. Each was charred with a caramel-colored resin. In the original Joey design the battery was located too close to the power recharger unit, and occasionally the excessive heat caused the battery to leak and burn.

Peter had tremendous faith in Paul and his work, and he was one of the first engineers who had started the company with Peter.

The battery problem would be fixed, and thinking about it reminded Peter of a similar problem that Paul had corrected several years ago, in the all-in-one Mate personal computer.

Unlike the Joey's battery, which powered the unit away from the desktop, the Mate's battery was deep inside the computer, and its sole purpose to keep track of the date and time when the computer was turned off. During extended use, the Mate's interior would occasionally reach high temperatures, causing the tiny battery to leak. The obvious solution was to install a small cooling fan inside the computer, like every other brand of computer had. But Peter wouldn't allow it. They said it couldn't be done, that you couldn't build a computer without putting in a small noisy fan to keep it cool. "If they say it can't be done, that's because they're not smart enough to figure out a way to do it," was Peter's standard reply. That was how Peter Jones challenged his engineers to do the impossible. After two days of no sleep, and having sustained himself on soda and popcorn, Paul had revealed to Peter a design that would cool the machine by natural convection.

Peter leaned in over Paul's shoulder for a closer look. "I'd sure hate to see us go back to the drawing board on that sweet little power recharger..." he said, hanging a mild warning in the burnt-smelling air of the engineer's office.

"No problem," Paul said, and blew out a breath that hinted mild frustration. Not catching the drift, Peter stayed right where he was, perched over the engineer like a hawk. Paul set down the soldering iron and retrieved a Walkman from his drawer. Loading a tape into it, he held the headphones just above his ears and raised his eyebrows at Peter, as if to ask if he had any more comments.

"All right, all right," Peter said, grinning behind raised palms.

"Just making sure we do it right." He left the engineer with his head bobbing rhythmically through little smoke clouds. It was little triumphs like this that excited Peter, doing things people said couldn't be done. The engineers were the only people in the company for whom Peter felt any admiration and respect. And, secretly, awe. They were the conveyers of his visions, the ones who possessed the power to turn his radical ideas into real products.

He swung through the software testing lab. Several test engineers, each seated before a prototype Joey Plus, were running system software programs through their paces. The inhabitants were oblivious to his presence as screens rolled and flashed, styluses scribbled and tapped, speakers chirped, and printers printed.

Satisfied that all was rolling according to plan, Peter exited the building and climbed into his BMW coupe. His natural appreciation for simple and beautifully designed products had prompted his decision to make BMW the company car for senior executives. When Matthew had gone out and ordered the exact same style and color coupe for himself, Peter was flattered. Until their friendship curdled. Now he'd begun to wonder if Matthew had only chosen the car because he was trying to prove to the executive staff that he and Peter were in some way equal.

As he drove down Clyde Avenue he pa.s.sed the many single-story stucco buildings that comprised Wallaby's international headquarters. Eventually he pa.s.sed the larger and more corporate-looking three-story sales and marketing building, where Matthew and the other senior executives resided.

Peter preferred to have his office among his engineers rather than on the third floor of the larger corporate building. Though his t.i.tle was chairman, his job was to create Wallaby's computers, and to do that, he wanted to be right in the trenches with his team. Especially lately. The last thing he wanted was to have to sit near Matthew Locke. If he had been any closer, he might have taken pity on the man he'd hired, and not gone through with his new plan to remove him from the company.

Leaving the complex, he headed for Highway 280. Waiting for the traffic signal to change, he looked in his rear-view mirror at the main corporate building with its Wallaby banner. The Wallaby logo featured a sketched pocket with a baby kangaroo, a joey, poking its head out.

He felt a small gush of pride whenever he looked at the company logo, at the thought of how many pockets he had filled with riches, in how many lives. And though tomorrow he would have to essentially sew shut one of those pockets, he was already beginning to feel the sense of relief that would come very soon, when he regained complete control of the company he had built.

Chapter 2

She stood and admired the bowl from different angles, marveling at how the spotlight shining down on it created rainbow effects and prismatic distortions. She had displayed the object on a simple, waist-high pedestal finished in black lacquer. Maybe I should not have rewarded myself so soon, thought Greta, since the board meeting that would take care of Peter Jones was not until tomorrow. What if something went wrong?

Of course, nothing would go wrong. She knew that Matthew had no choice but to pitch Peter from his position at Wallaby, and not only because she couldn't stand the precocious young founder. She smirked when she thought about the blow Peter would feel after the ax dropped at tomorrow's meeting.

The minute Greta had met him, she knew she was not going to like Peter Jones. He had taken to Matthew instantly, tugging on his arm like a child when he was excited about something, or when Matthew's observations and comments would harmonize with Peter's own thoughts. He would listen intently when Matthew talked about business and buying psychology, things she did not understand and had no desire to know more about. But what she loathed most about Peter, which led to her involvement in his destiny, was that he managed to spend more time with Matthew than she did. Matthew would practically ignore her in Peter's presence, so exhilarated was he by the young man's company. When Matthew arrived home from work, especially in the beginning, it was always "Peter said this," or "Peter did that," so full of marvel was her husband at young headache's braininess. And every Sat.u.r.day, like clockwork, Peter would be at the door before she was out of bed, asking Matthew to come out and play. One morning, while Peter was waiting within earshot in the entrance hall, she loudly protested from their bedroom upstairs that she and Matthew never got to spend time together on Sat.u.r.days, as they used to when they lived in Connecticut. Afterward, Peter stopped coming to the door and took to waiting outside the gate, like a mongrel. Not a bad description, she thought to herself. Greta had once read an article about Peter that told of his life as an orphan. Obviously he saw Matthew as a father figure. Well, too bad.