For some reason, the question took Breen off-guard. He didn’t answer immediately. “It’s valuable to collectors,” he said, but he sounded like a kid in a classroom making a wild guess at the answer.
Alison said, “Even if I could believe Martin stole it, it wouldn’t mean anything to him, I mean it doesn’t contain unusual electronics. It’s a very rough sketch of the central grid, with arrows pointing to input and output paths. Granddad did include equations for a hysteresis curve.”
“Hysteresis?” I repeated. “I can see how computers make you hysterical, but is that how they’re built?”
Alison smiled involuntarily. “That’s what everyone says in their first computer engineering class. Hysteresis is hard to explain, but it has to do with the way you can lag output behind input and use the same site both to read and write memory. One of the biggest problems with early vacuum tube memory was the way tubes amplified distortion in the electronic signal. Granddad’s big breakthrough was understanding that if you used a magnetic core instead of a tube, you could rely on hysteresis to control the distortion. The sketch had equations in the top corner for electronic Fermi surfaces and for hysteresis. They seem to be how Granddad’s thinking led him to a ferromagnetic core.”
“That’s what makes it valuable to a collector,” Breen cut in. “It’s drawn on fragile paper, an old piece of newsprint that Edward had—he probably tore it out of Stars and Stripes when he was in the last big push of the war. He always said he created it under battlefield conditions.
“This Binder jerk wouldn’t know to protect it, which proves the point I’ve been making all day to Alison—she wants to trot around the globe on her own, hobnobbing with the poor and undereducated, but she doesn’t have horse sense. If I’d had somebody keeping an eye on you here at the house while your mother and I were in Bar Harbor, Binder could never have walked away with the sketch.”
“Dad, he didn’t!” Tears were spilling out of the corners of Alison’s amber eyes.
“Oh, Sunny!” Breen got up from his desk and went to put an arm around her. “I’m sorry to make you cry. I’m going nuts, worrying about you and Binder and the Fitora software, and to find Edward’s drawing missing has tipped me over the edge.”
“That’s very touching,” I said, “but it doesn’t help me understand why I needed to be out here.”
Breen looked at me over his daughter’s head. “I wanted to talk to you in person, not over the phone, because I wanted to see your face and how you react. Have you found Binder?”
I shook my head. “Not a whiff of him. How about you?”
He made an impatient gesture. “I told you when I met you last week that I didn’t think you had the skills for this search, and your failure confirms it.”
I smiled. “Unless you’ve shoveled him into a hole in the ground someplace that no one knows about, you’re clueless yourself right now. I gather Homeland Security and the FBI are as well, or they wouldn’t be messing with my home and Alison’s Mexico City program.”
Again, something I’d said unsettled him. It was impossible to know what, but he paused almost imperceptibly, as if power had been switched off in him briefly.
He recovered quickly and added, “Beyond the question of Martin Binder, you need to understand that you must not interfere with my daughter. You crossed a line last night when you took her to that dead woman’s home. You are fortunate that she survived unharmed, but it was irresponsible at best, criminally negligent at worst.”
“Dad!” Alison shook his shoulder. “I went to Vic. I sought her out, she did not try to find me. She was protecting my privacy because I was being a chicken. I should have been brave enough to come out here right away to talk to you, instead of involving her in my problems.”
One of the computers on Breen’s desk pinged. Breen kissed his daughter’s forehead and trotted back to his desk. “Okay, Sunny, okay, we’re all rattled right now. At least you’re showing the spine you’re going to need to run a company.”
His last remarks were offhand; his real attention was on the computer. It was as if that “ping” was what he’d been waiting for all throughout our conversation.
I moved around the desk to see what was so absorbing. At first, I couldn’t make it out, but after a bit I thought I was watching traffic on Chicago’s expressways. There were thousands of streaks of light on the monitor. The Ryan was dense-packed, especially through the Loop, but I-55 was moving fast, as were the outlying toll roads. When the computer dinged, one of the streaks would pulse red.
“Just another of our programs that I’m testing here at home,” Breen said. “No wonder Alison wanders off on her own: I’m not attentive enough, even when I’m angry about her recklessness.”
He closed the tab and switched his attention to another monitor, one that was scrolling lines of code that meant nothing to me.
34
GADGET MUSEUM