As the landing announcement sounded through British Air flight 1101
from London to Athens, Isaac Mannheim took off his thick spectacles,
wiped them futilely with a greasy handkerchief, settled them back, and
stared down. The plane was now on final approach, and he had already
taken down his flight bag and stuffed it under the seat in preparation,
ready to march off.
Mannheim was professor emeritus at MIT, Department of Engineering, and
he retained the intellectual curiosity of a mischievous schoolboy. He
had the flowing white hair of a nineteenth-century European
philosopher, the burning eyes of a Jules Verne visionary, the single-
minded enthusiasm of a born inventor, the discursive knowledge of a
Renaissance man, and the self-assurance of a true genius--which he was.
Wearing a tweedy checked suit, a frayed brown overcoat, smudgy horn-
rims, and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, he also looked every bit as
eccentric as his reputation said. The baseball cap was tribute to
another of his eclectic concerns--the statistics of that particular
team. Those he kept on a computer file and subjected to daily updates.
As Issac Mannheim saw it, he was the undisputed father of Project
Cyclops; Bill Bates was merely in charge of its delivery room down on
Andikythera. It was a half-truth, perhaps, but not entirely untrue
either. He had dreamed up the idea and proved in his MIT lab that it
could work. The rest, he figured, was merely scaling it up--which any
dimwit with half a billion dollars could do with ease. He had already
seen to the hard part.
Mannheim liked to check in on his baby every other week, just to make
sure that Bates--who was going to make a fortune off his idea--was doing
it right. Although the long flight to Athens and then the helicopter
ride down to Andikythera were starting to make him feel his seventy-
five years, he did not really mind. When you're my age, he'd claim, you
don't have time to sit around on your butt all day.
He always flew British Air from London rather than taking a direct
Olympic flight from Boston, mainly because he was an Anglophile but
also because he wasn't quite sure he trusted Greek maintenance. Isaac
Mannheim was old school in all things.
As the tires screeched onto the asphalt, he glanced out the window
again, marveling how small the Athens airport was. But then his mind
quickly traveled on to other pressing matters: namely, the day's
agenda. He was anxious to go over the power-up data number by number
with Georges LeFarge. The young French Canadian had been his best
student in Cambridge, ten years ago, and Isaac Mannheim was secretly
pleased, very pleased, that Georges had been given a leading role in
the project. Together, years ago, they had ironed out many of the
technical problems in the system. The work back then had been done on a
lab bench, and a shoestring, but LeFarge knew everything that could go
wrong. With Georges as Director of Computer Systems here, Mannheim knew
the project was in good hands, at least the crucial computer part of
it.
When the doors opened, he was one of the first to step out of the BA
757 and down the steel stairway onto the runway. He reflected that he'd
had a good flight this time, with only an hour layover in Heathrow's
infamously crowded Terminal Four. Now, as the airport bus arrived to
carry the bleary-eyed London passengers into the Athens terminal, he
anticipated getting an early start on the day.
He glanced down toward the far end of the airport, the civilian
aviation terminal, expecting to catch sight of Bates' blue-and-white-
striped Agusta helicopter. Funny, he couldn't see it today; usually you
could.
It was odd; they were always here, waiting. Customary promptness was
just one more example of how well that young Dr. Andros was handling
the project. He chafed to admit it, but she was pretty damned good.
Although he had long scoffed at the idea that women could compete
successfully with male engineers, he had to admit she was as
professional as any male project manager he'd ever worked with.
Carrying his overstuffed black briefcase in his left hand and his
tattered nylon flight bag in his right, he waited till the airport bus
was almost full before stepping on. Airport buses, he noted as an
engineer, operated on the old-time LIFO computer storage principle:
last in, first out. No random access.
And he was indeed first out as they pulled into the sheltered awning of
the terminal. The Athens morning sun was already burning through the
growing layer of brown haze. He thought ruefully how it would look from
the south, down around Piraeus, as they flew out. From there Athens
seemed to be encased in an ugly brown tomb.
World air quality was yet another of the topics weighing on his mind
these days. It was, in fact, a frequent subject of the long letters he
addressed to another former student, an average-IQ Danish boy majoring
in physics whom he had seen fit to flunk in junior-year thermodynamics.
Afterward Mannheim had taken the lad aside and bluntly suggested he
might wish to consider a less intellectually demanding career path.
The advice had been heeded, and these days he was doing reasonably well
at his cushy new job, down in Washington. Still, Isaac Mannheim felt it
necessary to post the boy long typewritten letters from time to time
concerning various avenues for self-improvement.
Yes, he had turned out reasonably well after all, considering, but he
still needed to work harder. Don't be a slacker, John; nobody ever got
ahead that way. The forty-second President of the United States, Johan
Hansen, read his old professor's missives, usually written on the back
of semi-log graph paper or whatever was handy, and dutifully answered
every one of them. Maybe he was afraid he'd get another "F" and a
humiliating lecture.
Isaac Mannheim stared around the half-filled terminal, wondering. The
SatCom pilot usually met him right at the gate, but today nobody was
there. Incompetent Greeks. This one, in fact, was particularly
feckless: just out of the Greek Air Force with no real grasp of the
value of time.
Or had Dr. Andros forgotten he was arriving? That was hard to imagine,
since he had talked with her just before he left Cambridge. One thing
you had to say for her, she never forgot appointments. Strange.
No helicopter. No pilot. Damned peculiar. He had no alternative but to
phone Dr. Andros on her private line.
He walked over to the booth near the entrance to the terminal lobby and
got some drachmas. Then he located a pay phone and placed the call.
She answered on the first ring. Good.
"Cally, what in blazes is going on down there?" He tried to open the
conversation as diplomatically as he knew how. "I'm here, sitting on my
butt in the Athens airport, as though I had nothing else to do. I don't
see Alex anywhere. Or the Agusta. You're going to have to get rid of
that boy if this happens again. Where in hell are they?"
A long uncomfortable pause ensued, and it sounded as though she was
listening to someone else. Finally she answered in a shaky voice.
"Dr. Mannheim, it's been a very long night here. Maybe you--"
"Well, how did the power-up go? I need to go over the data with Georges
right away."
"Dr. Mannheim, maybe--" The phone seemed to go dead. Then she came back
on. "The Mark II is temporarily out of service. Can you take the
ferry?"
"What! You know perfectly well that damned thing only runs once a week.
And that was yesterday. Now what about the Agusta?"
"It's . . . it's just not possible. So--"
'Tell you what, then, I'll just rent one here. It'll cost a few
dollars, but I can't wait around all day."
"Isaac, I--" She never used his first name, at least not to him, but he
took no notice.
"Don't worry about it. It'll just go into project overhead. Be a tax
write-off for Bates." He laughed, without noticeable humor. "He
understands all about such things."
'That's awfully expensive," she said, her voice still sounding strange.
"Maybe it'd be better to wait--"
"Damn it. I'll be there in a couple of hours."
"Dr. Mannheim . . ." Her voice would have sounded an alarm to most
people. But then most people listened. Isaac Mannheim rarely bothered.
Especially where women were concerned. You simply did what had to be
done. It was that simple, but most women seemed unable to fathom
matters of such obvious transparency.
He slammed down the phone and strode out into the morning sunshine. The
private aviation terminal was about a half mile down an ill-paved road,
but he decided the walk would do him good. The breeze would feel
refreshing after the smoky, stuffy terminal. The problem was, Athens
was already getting hot. That's why he liked the islands. They were
always cooler this time of year.