MICHAEL CRICHTON

“the biggest thing we’ll see in the next ten years. Whoever finds those diamondshas a jump on the technology for at least five years. Five years. Do you knowwhat that means?”Ross knew what it meant. In an industry where competitive edges weremeasured in months, companies had made fortunes by beating competitors by amatter of weeks with some new techniques or device; Syntel in California hadbeen the first to make a 256K memory chip while everyone else was still making16K chips and dreaming of 64K chips. Syntel kept their advantage for onlysixteen weeks, but realized a profit of more than a hundred and thirty milliondollars.“And we’re talking about five years,” Travis said. “That’s an advantagemeasured in billions of dollars, maybe tens of billions of dollars. If we can get tothose diamonds.”These were the reasons for the extraordinary pressure Ross felt as shecontinued to work with the computer. At the age of twenty-four, she was teamleader in a high-technology race involving a half-dozen nations around the globe,all secretly pitting their business and industrial resources against one another.The stakes made any conventional race seem ludicrous. Travis told her beforeshe left, “Don’t be afraid when the pressure makes you crazy. You have billionsof dollars riding on your shoulders. Just do the best you can.”Doing the best she could, she managed to reduce the expedition timeline byanother three hours and thirty-seven minutes—but they were still slightly behindthe consortium projection. Not too far to make up the time, especially withMunro’s cold-blooded shortcuts, but nevertheless behind— which could meantotal disaster in a winner-take-all race.And then she received bad news.The screen printed PIGGYBACK SLURP / ALL BETS OFF.“Hell,” Ross said. She felt suddenly tired. Because if there really had been apiggyback slurp, their chances of winning the race were vanishing—before any ofthem had even set foot in the rain forests of central Africa.86