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DAY 4: NAIROBI

June 16,1979

1Timeline

IT WAS FARTHER ACROSS AFRICA FROM TANGIER TO Nairobi than it was across the Atlantic Ocean froht Ross spent the ti out what she called "hyperspace probability lines"

The screen showed a co multicolored lines across it "These are all tiht them for duration and delay factors" Beneath the screen was a total-elapsed-ti numbers

"What&039;s thatthe fastest route You see it&039;s just identified a tihteen hours and fifty - oneto beat that ti to the o location seemed ludicrous to him But Ross was totally serious

As they watched, the computer clock shifted to 5 days 22 hours 24"But still not very good" She pressed another key and the lines shifted, stretching like rubber bands over the African continent "This is the consortium route," she said, "based on our assu - thirty orAnd they don&039;t know the exact location of the city; at least, we don&039;t think they know But they have a substantial start on us, at least twelve hours, since their aircraft is already foristered total elapsed time: 5 days 09 hours 19 minutes Then she pressed a buttonto this, the consortiuht o&039;clock in theon June 21"

The computer clicked quietly; the lines continued to stretch and pull, and the clock read a new date: 06 21 79 1224

"Well," she said, "that&039;s where we are now Given maximum favorable movements for us and thehtly more than four hours, five days fro a sandwich "Better lock another path," he said "Or go radical"

"I hesitate to go radical with the ape"

Munro shrugged "Have to do so, with a tiue sense of unreality: they were discussing a difference of hours, five days in the future "But surely," Elliot said, "over the next few days, with all the arrangele - you can&039;t put too ures"

"This isn&039;t like the old days of African exploration," Ross said, "where parties disappeared into the wilds for hly half an hour in the total five-day projection" She shook her head "No We have a proble about it The stakes are too great"

"You mean the diamonds"

She nodded, and pointed to the bottom of the screen, where the words BLUE CONTRACT appeared He asked her what the Blue Contract was

"One hell of a lot of money," Ross said And she added, "I think" For in truth she did not really know

Each new contract at ERTS was given a code name Only Travis and the co the contract; everyone else at ERTS, frorammers to field personnel, knew the projects only by their color-code names: Red Contract, Yellow Contract, White Contract This was a business protection for the firms involved But the ERTS ame about contract sources, which was the staple of daily conversation in the company canteen

The Blue Contract had come to ERTS in December, 1978 It called for ERTS to locate a natural source of industrial-grade diamonds in a friendly or neutralist country The diaen-poor" crystals No dimensions were specified, so crystal size did not matter; nor were recoverable quantities specified: the contractor would take what he could get And, most unusual, there was no UECL

Nearly all contracts arrived with a unit extraction cost lih to find a mineral source; the minerals had to be extractable at a specified unit cost This unit cost in turn reflected the richness of the ore body, its remoteness, the availability of local labor, political conditions, the possible need to build airfields, roads, hospitals, mines, or refineries

For a contract to co: somebody wanted blue diamonds so badly he didn&039;t care what they cost

Within forty-eight hours, the ERTS canteen had explained the Blue Contract It turned out that Type JIb diamonds were blue from trace quantities of the elee them semiconductors with a resistively on the order of 100 ohht-transmissive properties

Someone then found a brief article in Electronic News for Nove Dropped" It explained that the Waltham, Massachusetts, firm of Silec, Inc, had abandoned the experimental McPhee technique to dope dia The McPhee process had been abandoned as too expensive and too unreliable to produce "desirable se properties" The article concluded that "other fir; Morikawa (Tokyo) abandoned the Nagaura process in Septe backward, the ERTS canteen fitted additional pieces of the puzzle into place

Back in 1971, Intec, the Santa Clara microelectronics firm, had first predicted that diaeneration of "super conducting" coeneration of electronic computers, ENIAC and UNIVAC, built in the wartime secrecy of the 1940s, ee life span of twenty hours, but with thousands of glowing hot tubes in a single machine, some computers shut down every seven to twelve y ieneration coeneration never used vacuum tubes In 1947, the invention of the transistor - a thumbnail-sized sandwich of solid material which performed all the functions of a vacuum tube - ushered in an era of "solid state" electronic devices which drew little power, generated little heat, and were smaller and y provided the basis for three generations of increasingly compact, reliable, and cheap computers over the next twenty years

But by the 1970s, coan to confront the inherent lih cir?cuits had been shrunk to microscopic dimensions, coth To miniaturize circuits still more, where distances were already on the order of ht back an old problem: heat Smaller circuits would literally melt from the heat produced What was needed was some method to eliminate heat and reduce resistance at the same time

It had been known since the 1950s that many metals when cooled to extre the unih theh-speed coen The superconducting coe of low temperature construction hout

Several days later, the ERTS canteen ca to the new theory, the 1970s had been a decade of unprecedented growth in coh the first computer manufacturers in the 1940s had predicted that four co work of the entire world for the foreseeable future, experts anticipated that by 1990 there would actually be one billion computers - most of them linked by communications networks to other coht even be theoretically impossible (A 1975 study by the Hanover Institute concluded there was insufficient metal in the earth&039;s crust to construct the necessary coh, the 1980s would be characterized by a critical shortage of computer data transe took the industrialized world by surprise in the 1970s, so will the data transe take the world by surprise in the next ten years People were denied movement in the 1970s; but they will be denied infore will prove ht represented the only hope for handling these massive data requirements, since laser channels carried twenty thousand times the information of an ordinary metal coaxial trunk line Laser trans thin-spun fiber optics, and doped seh predicted would be " years

Even further, Ruh anticipated that within ten years electricity itself would becoht circuits, and interface with light transh said, "ht Electricity doesn&039;t We are living in the final years of y"

Certainly y In 1979, hout the industrialized world, accounting for eighty billion dollars annually in the United States alone; six of the top twenty corporations in the Fortune 500 were deeply involved in microelectronics These companies had a history of extraordinary competition and advance, over a period of less than thirty years

In 1958, a le silicon chip By 1970, it was possible to fit 100 units onto a chip of the sahtly more than a decade

But by 1972, it was possible to fit 1,000 units on a chip, and by 1974, 10,000 units It was expected that by 1980, there would be one le chip the size of a thuoal was actually realized in 1978 By the spring of 1979, the new goal was ten million units - or, even better, one billion units - on a single silicon chip by 1980 But nobody expected to wait past June or July of 1979 for this development

Such advances within an industry are unprecedented Coies makes this clear Detroit was content to es at three-year intervals, but the electronics industry routinely expected order of nitude advances in the same time (To keep pace, Detroit would have had to increase autoallon in 1970 to 80,000,000 allon in 1979 Instead, Detroit went fro that ti demise of the automotive industry as the center of the American economy)

In such a con powers, particularly Japan, which since 1973 had e in San Jose - which soanization for well-financed industrial espionage

The Blue Contract could only be understood in the light of an industrymajor advances every few est thing we&039;ll see in the next ten years Whoever finds those diay for at least five years Five years Do you knohat that means?"

Ross knehat it es werecompetitors by a matter of weeks with some new techniques or device; Syntel in California had been the first to16K chips and dreae for only sixteen weeks, but realized a profit of more than a hundred and thirtyabout five years," Travis said "That&039;s an advantage measured in billions of dollars, et to those diamonds"

These were the reasons for the extraordinary pressure Ross felt as she continued to ith the coe of twenty-four, she was tea a half-dozen nations around the globe, all secretly pitting their business and industrial resources against one another

The stakes made any conventional race seem ludicrous Travis told her before she left, "Don&039;t be afraid when the pressureon your shoulders Just do the best you can"

Doing the best she could, she ed to reduce the expedition timeline by another three hours and thirty-seven htly behind the consortium projection Not too far to make up the time, especially with Munro&039;s cold-blooded shortcuts, but nevertheless behind - which could mean total disaster in a winner-take-all race

And then she received bad news

The screen printed PIGGYBACK SLURP / ALL BETS OFF

"Hell," Ross said She felt suddenly tired Because if there really had been a piggyback slurp, their chances of winning the race were vanishing - before any of them had even set foot in the rain forests of central Africa

2Piggyback Slurp

TRAVIS FELT LIKE A FOOL

He stared at the hard copy froht Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

ERTS WHY ARE YOU SENDING US ALL THIS MUKENKO DATA WE DON&039;T REALLY CARE THANKS ANYWAY

That had arrived an hour ago from GSFC/Maryland, but it was already too late byat the telex

The first indication to Travis that anything rong hen the Japanese and Gerier One ; the next minute they could hardly wait to leave The break-off had come abruptly, discontinuously; it implied the sudden introduction of new data into the consortium computer files

New data from where?

There could be only one explanation - and noas confirmed in the GSFC telex from Greenbelt

ERTS WHY ARE YOU SENDING ALL THIS MUKENKO DATA

There was a si any data At least, not willingly ERTS and GSFC had an arrangee data updates - Travis had ery froery was his coreatest expense In return for a look at derived ERTS data, GSFC agreed to supply satellite CCTs at 30 percent below gross rate

It seeood deal at the tireee before Travis; his worst fears were confirmed Once you put a line over two thousand yback data slurp Somewhere between Texas and Maryland someone had inserted a terminal linkup - probably in the carrier telephone lines - and had begun to slurp out data on a piggyback tere they yback-slurp ter the back and forth transh to beginout data fro to be GSFC to Houston, and Houston to GSFC The piggyback teriti slurped

Now the question was: how much data had been slurped out in the last seventy-two hours?

He had called for twenty-four-hour scanner checks, and the readings were disheartening It looked as though the ERTS coinal database elements, but also data-transformation histories - the sequence of operations performed on the data by ERTS over the last four weeks

If that was true, it yback knehat transformations ERTS had carried out on the Mukenko data - and therefore they knehere the lost city was located, with pinpoint accuracy They no the location of the city as precisely as Ross did

Timelines had to be adjusted, unfavorably to the ERTS team And the updated computer projections were unequivocal - Ross or no Ross, the likelihood of the ERTS tea the site ahead of the Japanese and Germans was flow almost nil

From Travis&039;s viewpoint, the entire ERTS expedition was mow a futile exercise, and a waste of time There was no hope of success The only unfactorable eleorilla Aorilla named Amy would not prove decisive in the discovery of o

It was hopeless

Should he recall the ERTS team? He stared at the console by his desk "Call cost-time," he said

The coo Field Survey," he said

The screen printed out nuo Field Survey: expenditures by the hour, accumulated costs, committed future costs, cutoff points, future branch-point deletionsThe project was now just outside Nairobi, and was running at an accuhtly over

189,000

Cancellation would cost 227,455

"Factor BF," he said

The screen changed B F He no a series of probabilities "Factor BF" was bona fortuna, good luck - the ierous expeditions

THINKING A MOMENT, the computer flashed

Travis waited He knew that the computer would require several seconds to perforhts to randoht influence the expedition, still five or ers, the tap dancer, said, "We&039;ve traced the piggyback slurp It&039;s in Norman, Oklahoma, nominally at the North Central Insurance Corporation of A company, Halekuli, Inc, which is in turn owned by mainland Japanese interests What do you want?"

"I want a very bad fire," Travis said

"Got you," Rogers said He hung up the phone

The screen flashed ASSESSED FACTOR B F and a probability: 449 He was surprised: that figurethe target site befure the consortiuood enough

The ERTS expedition would continue to the Congo, at least for the ti And in the meantime he would do whatever he could to slon the consortium Off the top of his head, Travis could think of one or two ideas to accomplish that

3Additional Data

THE JET WAS MOVING SOUTH OVER LAKE RUDOLPH in northern Kenya when Tom Seamans called Elliot

Seaorillas from other apes, principally chimpanzees He had then obtained froarbled video trans a dish antenna and staring into a ca at the computer screen The data flashed up:

DISCRIMINANT FUNCTION GORILLA/CHIMP

FUN CT IONAL GROUPINGS DISTRIBUTED AS:

GORILLA: 9934

CHIMP: 1132

TEST VIDEOTAPE (HOUSTON): 3349

"Hell," Elliot said At those figures, the study was equivocal, useless

"Sorry about that," Seamans said over the phone "But part of the trouble comes from the test material itself We had to factor in the coe has been cleaned up, and that ularized; the critical stuff has been lost I&039;d like to ith the original digitizedyes "Sure," Elliot said

"I&039;ll go another round with it," Sea to turn out The fact is that gorillas show a considerable individual variation in facial structure, just as people do If we increase our saer population interval I think you&039;re stuck You can never prove it&039;s not a gorilla - but forwhat?" Elliot asked

"It&039;s so you, if this was really a gorilla, it would have showed up 89 or 94, soe coh It&039;s not a gorilla, Peter"

"Then what is it?"

"It&039;s a transitional form I ran a function to measure where the variation was You knoas the major differential? Skin color Even in black-and-white, it&039;s not dark enough to be a gorilla, Peter This is a whole new animal, I promise you"

Elliot looked at Ross "What does this do to your ti," she said "Other elements are more critical, and this is unfactorable"

The pilot clicked on the interco our descent into Nairobi," he said

4Nairobi

FIVE MILES OUTSIDE NAIROBI, ONE CAN FIND WILD game of the East African savannah And within the airaffe wandering around backyards, and the occasional leopard slipping into one&039;s bedroom In those days, the city still retained the character of a wild colonial station; in its heyday, Nairobi was a fast-living place indeed: "Are you married or do you live in Kenya?" went the standard question The h, the women beautiful and loose, and the pattern of life no ed countryside each weekend

But nizable fro colonial days The few res lie stranded in a hts, skyscrapers, supermarkets, same-day dry cleaners, French restaurants, and air pollution

The ERTS cargo plane landed at Nairobi International Airport at dawn on theof June 16, and Munro contacted porters and assistants for the expedition They intended to leave Nairobi within two hours - until Travis called froists on the first Congo expedition, had somehow made it back to Nairobi

Ross was excited by the news "Where is he now?" she asked

"At the ue," Travis said

Elliot winced as he came close: the body on the stainless steel table was a blond e The hastly purple color He glanced at Ross She seeist stepped on a foot petal, activating a microphone overhead "Would you state your name, please"

"Karen Ellen Ross"

"Your nationality and passport number?"

"American, F 1413649"

"Can you identify the man before you, Miss Ross?"

"Yes," she said "He is James Robert Peterson"

"What is your relation to the deceased James Robert Peterson?"

"I worked with hiical speci it uneist faced the microphone "Identity confirmed as James Robert Peterson, male Caucasian, twenty-nine years old, nationality American " He turned back to Ross "When was the last time you saw Mr Peterson?"

"In May of this year He was leaving for the Congo"

"You have not seen him in the last ist touched the puffy purple injuries on his ar indentations like teeth in the flesh "Daist said

The previous day, June 15, Peterson had been flown to Nairobi airport aboard a se ter consciousness "Extraordinary he made it at all Apparently the aircraft made an unscheduled stop for a mechanical problem at Garona field, a dirt track in Zaire And then this fellow co at their feet" The pathologist pointed out that the bones had been shattered in both arms The injuries, he explained, were not new; they had occurred at least four days earlier, perhaps more "He must have been in incredible pain"

Elliot said, "What could cause that injury?"

The pathologist had never seen anything like it "Superficially, it resembles mechanical trauood deal of those here; but mechanical crush injuries are never bilateral, as they are in this case"

"So it wasn&039;t a mechanical injury?" Karen Ross asked

"Don&039;t knohat it was It&039;s unique in ist said briskly "We also found traces of blood under his nails, and a few strands of gray hair We&039;re running a test now"

Across the rooist looked up from his microscope "The hair is definitely not human Cross section doesn&039;t match Some kind of animal hair, close to human"

"The cross section?" Ross said

"Best index we have of hair origin," the pathologist said "For instance, human pubic hair is more elliptical in cross section than other body hair, or facial hair It&039;s quite characteristic - admissible in court But especially in this laboratory, we coreat deal of anie stainless-steel analyzer began pinging "Blood&039;s coist said

On a video screen they sain patterns of pastel-colored streaks "This is the electrophoresis pattern," the pathologist explained "To check serum proteins That&039;s ordinary huht we have the blood sample from under the nails You can see it&039;s definitely not hu at Elliot

"It&039;s close to hu at the pattern "But it&039;s not hu, perhaps Or else a priically to hus We&039;ll have a computer analysis in a minute"

On the screen, the computer printed ALPHA AND BETA SERUM GLOBULINS MATCH: GORILLA BLOOD

The pathologist said, "There&039;s your answer to what he had under his nails Gorilla blood"

5 Exahtened orderly They were in the passenger co at you"

A careful not to expose her teeth But the orderly from the private clinic in Nairobi was not faorilla etiquette His hands shook as he held the syringe

Nairobi was the last opportunity for Ae, powerful body belied a constitutional fragility, as her heavy-browed, glowering face belied a meek, rather tender nature In San Francisco, the Project Aimen - urine samples every other day, stool samples checked weekly for occult blood, complete blood studies monthly, and a trip to the dentist every three months for reetarian diet

Amy took it all in stride, but the terrified orderly did not know that He approached her holding the syringe in front of hi to be helpful, signed, A slowly, deliberately, as she always did when confronted by soe

"She promises not to bite you," Elliot said

"So you say," the orderly said Elliot did not bother to explain that he hadn&039;t said it; she had

After the blood sa up, he said, "Certainly is an ugly brute"

"You&039;ve hurt her feelings," Elliot said

And, indeed, A, Aorilla before"

The orderly said, "I beg your pardon?"

"You&039;ve hurt her feelings You&039;d better apologize"

The orderly snapped his medical case shut He stared at Elliot and then at Aize to him?"

"Her," Elliot said "Yes Hoould you like to be told you&039;re ugly?"

Elliot felt strongly about this Over the years, he had cos showed toward apes, considering chis to be wise old erous brutes They rong in every case

Each of these animals was unique, and did not fit the human stereotypes at all Chiorillas ever were Because chierous than an angry gorilla; at the zoo, Elliot would watch in amazement as human mothers pushed their children closer to look at the chiorillas These ht and ate huorillas never did

Elliot had witnessed repeatedly the hunize its effect on Ae and black and heavy-browed and squash-faced Behind the face people considered so repulsive was an intelligent and sensitive consciousness, sympathetic to the people around her, It pained her when people ran away, or screamed in fear, or made cruel remarks

The orderly frowned "You ender change was so else

Elliot didn&039;t like People ere afraid of Amy always assumed she was male

The orderly shook his head "I don&039;t believe it"

"Amy, show the man to the door"

Amy lumbered over to the door and opened it for the orderly, whose eyes widened as he left Aned

"Never mind," Elliot said "Come, Peter tickle Amy" And for the next fifteen runted in deep satisfaction Elliot never noticed the door open behind hi across the floor, until it was too late and he turned his head to look up and saw the dark cylinder swing down, and his head erupted with blinding white pain and everything went black

6 Kidnapped

HE AWOKE TO A PIERCING ELECTRONIC SHRIEK

"Don&039;t move, sir," a voice said

Elliot opened his eyes and stared into a bright light shining down on hi on his back in the aircraft; sohtnow to the leftCan you flex your fingers?"