He lay there staring at the ceiling. Time didn't matter anymore. Every now and then he took a gulp of Scotch from the bottle he had opened after Ivy left. Normally he never drank hard liquor. But today it seemed like the most natural thing to do. He needed something to help him escape from his own mind, something that would inevitably force him into sleep, where he could hide, even if just for a couple of hours, from his dilemma. It was too soon to try and think things through. Through? How, he wondered, does one think through being through? With every swallow from the bottle the reality of it all slipped a little farther away.
What he wanted to know was, what would they do for the future? His instinctive reaction to anything that threatened Wallaby - in this case, his being flung from the company - provoked fear and anxiety for its future, beyond the potential misery of his personal fate.
He had given nearly ten years of his life to Wallaby. The time when it all began seemed like a lifetime ago.
He drifted.
Never socializing with the jocks, pot-heads, or any other group, Peter Jones was considered an oddball student. He had been an orphan most of his life, living in a Los Gatos home governed by an elderly couple. He was used to spending time alone, reading or going for walks in the nearby woods, imagining he was Henry David Thoreau, observing nature, lost in his own thoughts. Whenever he was forced to spend a few trial days with potential foster parents, he affected a sullen and despondent mood, saving a tantrum or explosive outburst for the last day of the test period. He had gotten by just fine on his own, and he didn't need anyone, or anything, except maybe his science fiction novels.
Clayton and Clara Dodson, the owners of the orphanage, had had their hands full with Peter. Eventually they stopped sending him off to potential homes. The youngster pretty much took care of himself and was always willing to help out around the orphanage. One day the Dodsons's acceptance of Peter went from resigned to delighted when he burst into the house and told them he had invented the world's first truly portable computer. Peter had recently begun to hang around with the "gear heads," students who were involved in clubs fostering fans of rockets, automobile engines, and electronics. At the club meetings he met several kids like himself - bright, introverted; some of them would eventually become his first employees at Wallaby, right out of high school. During his senior year, while checking out some of the other student projects an hour before the science fair, Peter met two gawky fellows who had built a device they called the All-In-One Computer. The invention was primitive at best, but all the right parts were there: keyboard, screen, disk drive. Captivated, and without a project of his own, Peter persuaded the boys to include him in their project which, five minutes before the show began, he renamed the Portable Personal Computer.
The project won first prize, and after the show an older gentleman named Mr. Towers introduced himself. He told the boys that they were on to something and that they should give him a call sometime if they advanced the design of the box. Peter shoved the man's business card in his pocket.
Peter became more and more intrigued with the concept of a computer you could take with you wherever you went. Theirs came close, but it required a wall socket to power it so the only place you could really take it was from room to room. During the summer after his high school graduation he reread all of his science fiction books featuring robots and computers as their main characters. In his mind's eye he fashioned a small computer that could be his friend, like the ones in the books. He imagined taking his computer with him for walks in the woods, telling the computer about the things he saw, and what he thought. His computer would keep these things in its memory, and the more it learned about him and the world, the more loyal and dependable a friend it would become. He would make a lot of them, inexpensively, so that everyone could afford one and use it for whatever they wanted. He envisioned the computer and how it would work, how people would approach it and work with it. When he felt he had realized the computer as clearly as if he already owned one, he sat down to start designing. But when he picked up his pen, he could do little more than sketch crude boxes with screens and keyboards. He realized that he didn't know how to design the circuits and parts necessary to actually fabricate the machine. He called the two boys from the science fair, Paul Trueblood and Rick Boardman, and invited them over to the orphanage one afternoon. When he described his idea, the boys grew excited. Pushing his eyeglasses up on his nose, Paul began rambling about how he could do the hardware part, maybe even squeeze in a modem for calling up other computers, and Rick described how he could write a integrated program for the computer so that it could do real work for people, like keep track of important names and addresses, right out of the box.
Three months later the three boys stood in front of their first prototype, the Mate, and ran their first program, an all-in-one organizer and word processor and communications program that they dubbed Easy Does It.
When the Mates development was well underway, Peter contacted Mr. Towers, the man he had met a few months before at the science fair. Towers invited him to his nearby office. Two hours later, Towers had become the primary investor in the Mate's development, and overseer of the startup of a new company.