Well, he thought, with that battery of antennas, there's surely a way to do what has to be done next. . . .
This time he wouldn't waste radio access with Maydays.
9:35 a.m.
As the landing announcement sounded through British Air flight 1101 from London to Athens, Isaac Mannheim took off his thick spectacles, wiped them futilely with a greasy handkerchief, settled them back, and stared down. The plane was now on final approach, and he had already taken down his flight bag and stuffed it under the seat in preparation, ready to march off.
Mannheim was professor emeritus at MIT, Department of Engineering, and he retained the intellectual curiosity of a mischievous schoolboy. He had the flowing white hair of a nineteenth-century European philosopher, the burning eyes of a Jules Verne visionary, the single-minded enthusiasm of a born inventor, the discursive knowledge of a Renaissance man, and the self-assurance of a true genius—which he was.
Wearing a tweedy checked suit, a frayed brown overcoat, smudgy horn-rims, and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, he also looked every bit as eccentric as his reputation said. The baseball cap was tribute to another of his eclectic concerns—the statistics of that particular team. Those he kept on a computer file and subjected to daily updates.
As Issac Mannheim saw it, he was the undisputed father of Project Cyclops; Bill Bates was merely in charge of its delivery room down on Andikythera. It was a half-truth, perhaps, but not entirely untrue either. He had dreamed up the idea and proved in his MIT lab that it could work. The rest, he figured, was merely scaling it up—which any dimwit with half a billion dollars could do with ease. He had already seen to the hard part.
Mannheim liked to check in on his baby every other week, just to make sure that Bates—who was going to make a fortune off his idea—was doing it right. Although the long flight to Athens and then the helicopter ride down to Andikythera were starting to make him feel his seventy-five years, he did not really mind. When you're my age, he'd claim, you don't have time to sit around on your butt all day.
He always flew British Air from London rather than taking a direct Olympic flight from Boston, mainly because he was an Anglophile but also because he wasn't quite sure he trusted Greek maintenance. Isaac Mannheim was old school in all things.