illusion slipped away. The face of the man before her was strong and arresting, full of character and an almost unearthly sweetness. This man was self-confident in the deepest, most private way.
'The others will be here soon,' he said quietly.
She stopped in her tracks. 'Others?'
'We're partners, Susannah. We have to solve this together.'
She experienced a disturbing combination of anger and guilt. 'I gave you a direct order, and you chose to disregard it.'
'Yes.'
'I told you not to talk to anyone until you'd talked to me.'
'It was an improper order, Susannah. Mitch should be here soon. I didn't call Sam, however, until just a few minutes ago. It will take him a while to get here, so the three of us will have a little time to talk first.'
Headlights flashed through the side window as another car pulled in. Moments later Mitch stalked through the door. 'What's this about?' he asked abruptly.
'We have a problem, I'm afraid,' Yank replied.
Mitch's eyes roamed the garage, taking in the computers, the workbench, and coming to rest on her. She hoped he didn't guess that he was here at Yank's invitation, not her own.
Yank cleared his throat and began to speak. 'We produced thirteen test models of the Blaze HI because Sam wanted the computer in use for at least four months before it went on the market.'
She could almost see Mitch mentally counting the machines scattered around the garage. 'I remember. They've performed like champions. A few of the employees had them. Some of our customers. A couple went to elementary schools.'
'Susannah had one in her office,' Yank continued, 'but it disappeared while she was in Greece. When she tried to find it, she discovered that hers wasn't the only one missing.'
'Why didn't you tell me about this?' Mitch asked.
'In light of our other problems, I didn't think it was that important.'
'Our test models disappear, and you don't think it's important?'
'It wasn't like that.' She didn't like the way he was putting her on the defensive, so she recited the sequence of events coldly.
After she told of her phone call from Angela, Yank took over and described what he had found. He mentioned the missing circuit boards on some of the machines and recounted the failure he and Susannah had witnessed in her computer. 'It was an amazing piece of luck for me to actually be able to watch Susannah's machine fail. If that hadn't happened, it would have taken me much longer to understand the problem. All of the trouble has its source in one of the ROM chips.'
ROM-standing for 'read only memory'-was a custom microchip containing instructions that allowed the computer to perform automatically a specific set of tasks. Susannah listened carefully as Yank detailed how he had pinpointed the source of the trouble.
While Mitch questioned him more closely, Susannah mentally reconstructed the process of making a ROM chip. First the SysVal engineers decided what specific jobs the chip was required to perform. Then they wrote a list of instructions for those tasks in machine language. When the instructions were complete, the listing was sent to a ROM chip manufacturing firm where the chip was produced. For years, SysVal had used an Oakland-based firm named Dayle-Wells. The firm was efficient, reliable, and stood by its work.
'We've had chip failures before,' Mitch said, when he was finally satisfied with Yank's explanation. 'It's not something we take lightly, but it certainly doesn't justify all this secrecy.'
Susannah had been thinking the same thing. Each tiny Sen-Sen-sized microchip was housed in a rectangular casing about an inch long. The casing had always reminded her of a caterpillar because it had a series of pointed legs at the bottom that fit into minuscule slots on the computer board. It was a relatively simple matter to unplug a faulty chip and plug in a good one.
Once again Mitch turned his attention to Susannah. 'I assume Sam is behind this. Do you think this is related to his rush to sell the company?'
'I can't imagine what the link is, but it's difficult for me to believe this is coincidental.'
Mitch gestured toward the computers. 'But why all the subterfuge? Just because one batch of chips fails doesn't mean that they're all bad. It's a problem, but it's not unsolvable.'
'Remember that we're dealing with a ROM chip that contains software,' Yank said, 'and the possibility that I find alarming-'
But whatever Yank was about to say was cut short as Sam slammed into the garage. He looked wild, like a man on the brink of losing control. 'Is it coincidence that I'm the last person here, or did my invitation have a different time printed on it from everyone else's?'
Mitch's features hardened. 'You're lucky you got an invitation at all.'
Sam turned on Susannah. For a moment, she almost thought he would strike her. Mitch must have thought so, too, because he took a step forward.
'This is your fault,' Sam shouted. 'You pick away and pick away without the slightest goddamn idea of what you're doing-always second-guessing me, thinking you know better.'
'That's enough,' Mitch interrupted. 'Why don't you just cut through all the crap and tell us what's going on here.'
Sam looked around at the empty cartons and the machines scattered everywhere. The tendons of his neck were stretched taut, his eyebrows drawn so close together they looked like a single line. 'You should have done it my way. Ail of you should have trusted me. I was willing to take the responsibility. You should have let me do it. Why didn't you let me do it?'
'Because it's not your company,' Susannah retorted.
His arm slashed the air. 'It's not going to be yours, either, for very long because it's going up in smoke.'
'A chip failure is hardly the end of the world,' she countered.
'Oh, no? How many Blaze III's have we shipped since we introduced the machine?'
'Nearly two hundred thousand. But just because we have a bad part in the test models doesn't mean the ROM chip in every HI we've manufactured is bad.'
'Wrong again,' Sam sneered.
'How can you know that?' she asked. 'You can't possibly-'
'They're all bad. Every III we've shipped is going to fail after one thousand hours of use. Statistically, that'll average out to about a year-less time under office use, more time under home use.'
'One year!' She caught her breath while Mitch swore softly. She wanted to reject Sam's conclusion, but she couldn't. He would never have predicted something this dire if he weren't absolutely certain.
She tried to sort through the facts logically. They'd faced recalls before, but never one this massive. She began thinking aloud, hoping to reassure herself as she reassured them. 'It'll be a huge headache, but we can deal with it. Dayle-Wells is a reliable firm. If they've made a bad chip, they'll take financial responsibility for it.' In her mind, she was already envisioning the logistics of this kind of recall. Once the outer case was opened, the actual replacement of the ROM chip was a relatively minor procedure. The old one was simply unplugged from its slots and a new one inserted. But the sheer number of machines involved made the recall complex, and it had to be done before the faulty chip physically destroyed the computer by smashing the disk drive head.
'Little Miss Pollyanna,' Sam scoffed. 'Always looking for the bright side. Well, babe, this time there isn't one. Dayle-Wells isn't responsible for the bad chip. We are.'
Mitch's head shot up. Susannah felt as if a cold fist had clutched her spine.
Sam began to pace. 'The ROM listing Dayle-Wells received from us was buggy.'
Mitch spun around. 'That's impossible. We have a dozen safeguards built in to keep that sort of thing from happening.'
'Weil, it happened this time. Five lines-just five lousy lines of bum code out of a hundred-but those five lines programmed a time bomb into the machines. Every Blaze III we've shipped will work for exactly one thousand hours, and then it will fail. The disk drive slams its head back and forth. It destroys itself and burns out the power supply. After that-nothing.' His voice had a harsh, raspy edge. 'One thousand hours from the date the computer is first turned on, every one of those III's is going down.'
Yank spoke thoughtfully. 'The first of those failures will be showing up any day now, if they haven't already.
