Dead Certain

action, there was a danger that one of my partners would snag them for another assignment, leaving me scrambling if things with Icon suddenly heated back up.
    Afterward I asked Jeff Tannenbaum to stay behind. Jeff was an experienced associate who’d been working Wlth me on Delirium from the beginning. Together we toed to figure out a way to reach out to Gabriel Hurt and rekindle his lust for Delirium’s new technology. I used the word lust deliberately.
    The truth is, even I had to admit that what Bill Delius had developed was sexy. It was a new integrated language-based input device designed to free the computer user from having to use a keyboard or mouse. A tiny video camera mounted on the edge of the monitor tracked the user’s voice and movements and, using proprietary software, translated the visual and auditory information into commands the computer could understand. You could literally look at an icon on the screen and command the computer to open it.
    Developing the technology had been a tremendous undertaking, Bill Delius’s personal grail, the altar upon which he’d sacrificed everything: his marriage, his life savings, and sometimes, I feared, his sanity. Now its success or failure rested at the whim of a sole eccentric billionaire whose people wouldn’t even return my calls. I was beginning to feel as though the term computer business was an oxymoron.
    My thoughts kept turning back to sex. Maybe it was because it was the only thing I could think of that came close to the intensity and desire that fueled high-tech companies’ search for the next big thing. Or maybe it was because I knew that it would take something besides stiletto heels and a leather miniskirt to capture a man like Icon’s founder’s attention. Besides, I wasn’t interested in Hurt’s body—I don’t think anyone was—what I wanted was to catch his eye and kindle his desire.
    I had Jeff pull out the file of clippings I’d had him compile on Hurt. We divided it in half and silently pawed through them, looking for anything that might be used as a lever.
    I was about to give up when an old article about Hurt’s days at MIT caught my eye. Describing those sleepless, seminal days as a graduate student whose Ph.D. dissertation would revolutionize software and the world, Hurt described his existence as a code-writing marathon punctuated only by pizza delivery and impromptu pinball tournaments. The interview included a two-paragraph quote in which he waxed with a mixture of lyricism and nostalgia about the Dark Invader pinball game he and his roommate played in the basement.
    It took Jeff under twenty minutes to find one of the pinball machines on an Internet auction site that could be, by paying an obscene premium, delivered to Chicago by afternoon. I knew it didn’t qualify as a great idea, but it was the only one I had, so I handed Jeff my American Express card and sat down to draft a letter to Hurt. Taping the interview to the bottom of my computer screen, I found myself looking at the photograph of Hurt that had run with the article. I knew he had to be in his twenties when it was taken, but he still looked like a little kid, the nerdy kind who accumulates a little cloud of spittle at the corner of his mouth and never gets picked to play baseball even though he knows every box score. Perhaps because he looked so goofy, I decided to go with an oddball approach. In less than an hour I’d composed a poem in iambic pentameter equating Delirium’s quest for a joint venture with Icon to the quest of the hero of the Dark Invader game.
    “No guts, no glory,” I said out loud to myself as I typed in the command that sent it to the printer. “Now if only I could find something to rhyme with orange.”
     
    While Cheryl and Jeff tried to figure out the logistics of wrapping a pinball machine and having it delivered to the Four Seasons, I slipped out for lunch. After all, partnership does have its privileges. Besides, Joan Bornstein never asked me out to lunch without an ulterior motive, and as usual, I was dying to find out what it was.
    Joan was a litigator, a high-priced, high-profile medical-malpractice attorney whose skill at defending prominent physicians and hospitals accused of wrongdoing was surpassed only by her talent for promoting herself. Joan had picked Nick’s Fishmarket, a see-and-be-seen power-lunch spot whose deep, secluded booths have long been favored by LaSalle Street deal makers. It was the kind of place that