Programmed for Peril

Carson flared up then like wizard’s powders thrown into an open fire. California weirdness stranger than her mother had ever dreamed! Memories burst free in her mind. They tumbled and tangled, snagging at her attention with barbed tendrils. They tugged her toward a dark past she had renounced and away from the bright gate of the future. Carson, flame-haired and in full cry! Put aside thoughts of him and those years he ruled like Satan? Yes, she tried, but they came whirling back like boomerangs, threatening to rend to ruin more than her present—possibly her soul itself. Increasingly her relationship with him seemed less a lovers’ interlude than a bargain with the devil.
     

7
     
    “BAAHBA-DU-ZOT!” CROAKED “POPS” ARMSTRONG across the gulfs of races and decades into Nicholas Smith-Patton’s mote-light, $250 earphones. Sing it and play it, Satchmo! I hear you and Stephane and Django, Eubie, Fats, Toots, Duke, Count, Cleanhead, Bird, Max, Monk, Milt, Miles, Mose, Marian McP and Les McC, Cannonball, Hawk, Bongo Mongo, Little Jazz, Big Mama, Ma, Bessie, Lady Day and Ella... Sing to me from the authentic U.S. underbelly—forget Mozart!—imported from nowhere, exported everywhere, even to Japan. Our manufacturers should be so lucky! The satchel mouth worked its wonders. The clean comet riff careened around his brain like laser light at Epcot closing.
    To listen through an entire day, free of all distractions, was a major personal success. He had succeeded many times. He had listened on deserted beaches, boom box at his side. He had stalked through silent woods, Walkman on Waist. He had listened on the bed in his own rarely occupied room in the family home. There woofers coughed like cougars and the highs went through his brain clear as starlight on a transit to Mars.
    He listened in the heat of his chess matches. Hearing jazzmen solve their problems of key and time helped him ponder variations in search of the strongest move. Preparing for a match involved not only review of his best offensive and defensive openings, it meant making fresh, long tapes of the most introspective players, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Tatum.... Long because each of the five-game round robins could reach the maximum four-hour time control.
    He tapped out the beat on the metal welding table he used as a desk. Technically speaking, he was at work. All that meant was that he happened to be in his office, a water tank remodeled by an eccentric into a place of business. Once a visitor, hopefully in good health, climbed the wrought-iron ladder and pushed up the counterweighted trap, he would find himself in the small reception area of Smith-Patton Systems. There Dolly Hummer, if she bothered to come in, would play receptionist/secretary. He had met her at a jazz concert. Though he had never formally hired her, she started climbing the water tank ladder each morning on a fairly regular basis. From time to time he left a fistful of bills by her computer, though she never used the machine. When there she worked double crostics from a spiral-bound book and talked on the phone. She made efforts to organize him and the office but was largely incompetent herself.
    For the most part women didn’t appeal to him. Certainly Dolly didn’t, with her balloon-sized breasts and tight striped T-shirts. He wondered if she had some personal interest in him. If so, such things had happened before. No matter. All women gave up on him after a while. More than ever now he was indifferent to the charms of the legions of ladies.
    He was madly, desperately in love with a beauty as unattainable as world peace.
    “When it’s sleepy time down south...” Nicholas sang along, a gravel-voiced ersatz Satchmo. He got up and moved to one of the six chessboards set up among his electronic equipment. Humming, he let his mind sink into the Pire Opening. The joke was that the long-gone Pire alone could play the opening and win. But Nicholas had done well indeed with it. While he touched the pieces he saw the opening tree in his mind, variation branching to variation, without having to move so much as a pawn. If this, that. If that, then this... Rudimentary programming. One day before long a computer would be built that no grand master could ever conquer.
    He became aware that Dolly had been buzzing him for some time. He shoved the left earphone up and replaced it with the receiver of his portable telephone. “Your sister,” she said. “You always take her