Programmed for Peril

to get some information out of the state bureaucracy.”
    She led him to her Volkswagen, affordable transportation for the recently immigrated. “You’ll come over tonight. I’ll be doing,” he said.
    “ ‘Doing’?”
    “I’m always busy. What I do is a pleasure. Sometimes I do for pay, sometimes not. You come over, maybe I can figure a Way for you to join in.”
    ‘Sounds interesting.”
    “More than you can dream,” he said.
    He careened by her on the road out of town. He drove a vehicle like none she had ever seen. Truck or car? Van? Some of each. As it zoomed away on oversized tires she realized he must have assembled it according to his own original design.
    The same was true of his dwelling, she saw with some awe that evening. It wasn’t just a house, but a flexible living machine. She recognized original modular construction and specialized natural and artificial lighting designs. Wandering forward onto a cantilevered ramp, she found no recognizable door. Carson’s voice emerged from an unseen speaker, giving her directions.
    Within she found much of the space was turned over to workshops jammed with lighter tools and electronics. She found Carson in a darkened area where blue laser beams angled off mirrors. He studied results through deeply tinted goggles. He sent her to an adjacent cubbyhole to enter readings into a PC. Over the course of the evening he found out that she had majored in computer science. He asked her penetrating technical questions that she felt challenged to try to answer. She was partially successful.
    With no change in style or expression he moved from the electronics workshop into what Trish was forced to think of as the food workshop, rather than the kitchen. Time-tested devices like sink and fridge were there in new guises. Other food-related machines of Carson’s design and manufacture were distributed with original logistics throughout the area. He maintained the same right-on laser project energy level while producing the asparagus with dill sauce, curry souffle, crusty rolls, and apple tart. She was astonished at the ease with which he cooked. Had he mastered that art, too? Meal over, they hurried back to work.
    Carson didn’t live by the clock. “Internal rhythms decree the best schedule,” he said somewhere after two in the morning.
    “My rhythms are talking sleep,” she said.
    “I need you for at least another hour.”
    Trish smothered a yawn. “If it was a weekend. If I didn’t have to go to work...”
    He shoved his goggles higher onto his forehead. “Quit.”
    “What?”
    “Quit whatever it is you’re doing. Work for me. I’ll pay you.”
    “That sounds ridiculous!”
    Her first lesson then began on the power of Carson’s persuasiveness. She fell into a deep sleep on one of the slumber platforms scattered through “Castle Carson,” as he called it. But not before she had agreed to become his employee and settled on pay—three times what she made as a programmer. No benefits, though. Except his company. Or so it seemed then.
    In the following months she realized her employment carried some rather unusual perks. The first was ongoing, never-flagging education in liberal arts, in their truest meaning. That meant painting the whole rainbow of human knowledge—from art through technology. Carson made a generous living by incessant invention of electromechanical devices that he turned over to some kind of marketing syndicate. Periodically a grossly fat man called Jethro DuMont arrived for an evening of discussion and check passing. Carson’s rights and patents provided a steadily increasing money flow. Some he spent. The rest he invested quite profitably according to statistical models and commodity wave theories of his own conception.
    Both Trish and Carson enjoyed standing shoulder-to-shoulder at a task while he carried on a steady monologue explaining what they were doing. Often she had trouble following him. When she told him so, he said not to worry. She was doing better than any other woman so far.
    When the mood struck he abandoned his projects and, Spending on his destination, selected one of his four Vehicles. Off he raced with her to city or mountain to frolic. To her amazement his energy level never decreased. In time she came to understand the reason: He was always enjoying himself. To keep up with him she was forced to increase her energy. She began to prosper on only six hours of sleep a flight. She awoke eagerly to greet the day’s