“Go for a little walk and read it,” Svoboda said. “Then maybe call me at home tonight if you want to talk about it any more, okay?”
He grinned and touched two fingers to the side of his head in a quick salute, and went back inside.
Rhodes, frowning, returned to his own area of the building. He thought of going into the washroom to read Svoboda’s note, but on reflection he considered that there was no place in the building more likely to have a secret scanner eye mounted in the wall than in a washroom. Instead he simply leaned against the wall outside his office and opened the folded scrap, cupping it in his hand, and held it up in front of his face, very close, as if trying to read his own palm.
It said, in heavy block letters:
THIS IS A JOB OFFER. TELLING YOU THEY WANT TO SELL YOU A HOUSE MEANS THAT THEY WANT TO HIRE YOU.
Instantly Rhodes felt adrenaline beginning to surge. His heart was thumping with frightening force. What the hell was this?
THIS IS A JOB OFFER.
From whom? Why?
He read the note again, read it two or three times, and then balled it up and stuffed it deep into his pocket.
THEY WANT TO HIRE YOU.
They? Who were they?
TO HIRE YOU. THEY WANT.
There had been a pretty good earthquake in the Bay Area three years ago, six-point-something on the Richter scale. The whole building had swayed for two and a half minutes then. This felt like that.
Rhodes was trembling. He tried to control it, and failed.
THIS IS A JOB OFFER.
Forget it, he told himself.
You don’t want to mess around with anything like this. You already have a job. It’s a good one. You have a fine department, plenty of good people working for you, nice pay, steady upward slope. You have never worked for anybody but Samurai Industries in your life. You have never wanted to work for anybody but Samurai Industries.
He reached into his pocket and touched the crumpled bit of paper.
Throw it away, Nick. Throw it away.
Rhodes went back into his office. More things were blinking on all the inputs, but he ignored them. He poured himself a drink, a pretty significant one.
He thought about what it might be like to work for another company.
Certainly he was stymied at Samurai by his own ambivalences and hesitations. Just as he was, also, in his relationship with Isabelle. Only a little while ago he had been thinking about the need for change in his life, and all that came roaring back through him now, the great surge of vague resentments, something turbulent, almost explosive, stirring inside him. It hadn’t been very long ago that he had told Paul Carpenter how deeply he feared giving Samurai Industries a monopoly over human adapto technology. And Paul had come right back at him with the solution to that. Quit Santachiara and go over to somebody like Kyocera-Merck. Take your whole department with you. Turn your gene technology over to the competition. Let Samurai and K-M fight it out for world domination.
Was he being handed a chance to do just that?
Then he should grab it, he thought.
At least find out what this is all about, he urged himself. Call Nakamura. Arrange to see him.
“Get me Mr. Nakamura, at East Bay Realty,” Rhodes told the annunciator giddily.
It was like making a date, he thought, that could lead to some kind of adulterous romance.
It took quite a while to get through. You would think realty agents would be eager to talk with potential customers, but evidently returning a call to Mr. Nakamura wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. Then finally lights began to flash and a Japanese face looked back at him from the visor. The standard inscrutability: flat inexpressive gaze, androidal smile. Somehow the face looked Japanese rather than Japanese-American, Rhodes thought, on no evidence at all. That was interesting.
“I am Mr. Kurashiki,” the face said. “Mr. Nakamura is deeply grateful for your response to his call. He is available to see you at any of the following times today or tomorrow.”
A menu appeared on the visor: noon, two P.M., four P.M., nine or eleven in the morning tomorrow.
Rhodes felt a faint chill. He wondered if he ever actually would meet Mr. Nakamura, whether there was a real Mr. Nakamura at all, even whether there was a real Mr. Kurashiki. Mr. Kurashiki looked and sounded more like a simulation than a person.
But then Rhodes told himself that he was being silly. Kurashiki was the appointments secretary, that was all; and he was real, all right, as real as any of these Japs ever could be. Svoboda had called it correctly: this was serious business, an actual job offer coming from an actual rival megacorp.
“Noon today,” Rhodes said. He would have to leave almost at once. But that was one way to keep his legendary unpunctualily from fouling things up. It was probably wisest to be on.time for this one. “If you’ll give me the driving directions—”
“You will be coming from Berkeley? The Santachiara Technologies tower?”
“Yes.”
“The trip will take you fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. As you enter Highway 24, instruct your car that the route module code is H112.03/accessWR52.”
Rhodes tapped for thirty seconds’ worth of data recall and the number came rolling out of the annunciator’s printout slot. He thanked Kurashiki and broke the contact.
“Cancel my afternoon appointments,” Rhodes told the annunicator. “I’m going out.”
The Diablos were still blowing when his car came up from the garage: a tangible wind, a palpable wind, hard and knife-sharp and maybe fifty miles an hour, and he would be driving right into it. You actually could see the wind. It was traveling visibly through the larger continuum of the atmosphere. It had the form of an eerie golden aura, a kind of urinous tint: a fast-moving organic haze, a virulent phosphorescent swirl of airborne industrial contaminants sailing westward out of the factory zone on the far side ofWalnut Creek The air was so full of the stuff that it seemed fertile, capable of impregnating anything it encountered on its way toward the ocean. Rhodes thought of Van Vliet’s new theory, the floating soup of amino acids out of which wondrously virulent bacteria would be generated. Maybe this wind was the key factor that would kindle into life, this very afternoon, the jolly new chemical configuration that Van Vliet said was soon due to take form in the seas.
Rhodes hated to let his car brain do the thinking. But in this case he didn’t know where the hell he was going, only that the route module code was H112.03/accessWR52, somewhere out in the vicinity of Walnut Creek.
“Take me to H112.03/accessWR52,” Rhodes told the car.
The car obediently repeated the numbers.
“And, by the way, where is that, exactly?” Rhodes asked.
But all the car could do was give him the route module code all over again. For the car brain, the location of H112.03/ accessWR52 was a place known as H112.03/accessWR52, period.
The vehicle held the road very nicely, considering the velocity of the oncoming wind. It took Rhodes with barely a wobble through the ancient Caldecott Tunnel and into the bleached, torched-looking countryside east of the hills, where the temperature was always twenty degrees warmer because the cool breeze off the Pacific was unable to make it that far inland, even on days when the Diablos weren’t roaring. Today, with the hot east wind blowing, the temperature differential was probably much greater: true desert heat out there, Rhodes thought, hot as a furnace, fry you like an omelet in half a minute. But he was secure inside the cozy sealed bubble of his car, which was taking him swiftly down the freeway, on past the venerable high-rise towers of the old quiet suburban towns, Orinda, Lafayette, Pleasant Valley, toward the sprawling ramshackle metropolis of Walnut Creek—and then, just before the Walnut Creek interchange, a zig and a zag and a departure from the trunk road, the car swinging now up into the hills. It was absolutely empty country up there, amazingly empty, dotted with the occasional gnarly form of an oak tree standing in the midst of sun-scorched grass. The car went onward through a security gate and then another, and then past a checkpoint that made the first two gates look like barriers made of cheesecloth.