Kurt looked ready to cry again. Adam had no idea what to say.
“Okay,” Kurt said. “Fine.” He finished his beer in silence and slunk away.
But it wasn’t fine, and Kurt wouldn’t give it up. He kept on beating his head against the blank wall, and every time Alan saw him, he was grimmer than the last.
“Let it go,” Adam said. “I’ve done a deal with the vacuum-cleaner repair guy across the street.” A weird-but-sweet old Polish Holocaust survivor who’d listened attentively to Andy’s pitch before announcing that he’d been watching all the hardware go up around the Market and had simply been waiting to be included in the club. “That’ll cover that corner just fine.”
“I’m going to throw a party,” Kurt said. “Here, in the shop. No, I’ll rent out one of the warehouses on Oxford. I’ll invite them, the kids, everyone who’s let us put up an access point, a big mill-and-swill. Buy a couple kegs. No one can resist free beer.”
Alan had started off frustrated and angry with Kurt, but this drew him up and turned him around. “That is a fine idea,” he said. “We’ll invite Lyman.”
Lyman had taken to showing up on Alan’s stoop in the morning sometimes, on his way to work, for a cup of coffee. He’d taken to showing up at Kurt’s shop in the afternoon, sometimes, on his way home from work, to marvel at the kids’ industry. His graybeard had written some code that analyzed packet loss and tried to make guesses about the crowd density in different parts of the Market, and Lyman took a proprietary interest in it, standing out by Bikes on Wheels or the Portuguese furniture store and watching the data on his PDA, comparing it with the actual crowds on the street.
He’d only hesitated for a second when Andrew asked him to be the inaugural advisor on ParasiteNet’s board, and once he’d said yes, it became clear to everyone that he was endlessly fascinated by their little adhocracy and its experimental telco potential.