Certainly microelectronics did not look like a moribund technology. In 1979, microelectronics was a major industry throughout the industrialized world, accounting for eighty billion dollars annually in the United States alone; six of the top twenty corporations in the Fortune 500 were deeply involved in microelectronics. These companies had a history of extraordinary competition and advance, over a period of less than thirty years.
In 1958, a manufacturer could fit 10 electronic components onto a single silicon chip. By 1970, it was possible to fit 100 units onto a chip of the same size - a tenfold increase in slightly more than a decade.
But by 1972, it was possible to fit 1,000 units on a chip, and by 1974, 10,000 units. It was expected that by 1980, there would be one million units on a single chip the size of a thumbnail, but, using electronic photo projection, this goal was actually realized in 1978. By the spring of 1979, the new goal was ten million units - or, even better, one billion units - on a single silicon chip by 1980. But nobody expected to wait past June or July of 1979 for this development.
Such advances within an industry are unprecedented. Comparison to older manufacturing technologies makes this clear. Detroit was content to make trivial product design changes at three-year intervals, but the electronics industry routinely expected order of magnitude advances in the same time. (To keep pace, Detroit would have had to increase automobile gas mileage from 8 miles per gallon in 1970 to 80,000,000 miles per gallon in 1979. Instead, Detroit went from 8 to 16 miles per gallon during that time, further evidence of the coming demise of the automotive industry as the center of the American economy.)
In such a competitive market, everyone worried about foreign powers, particularly Japan, which since 1973 had maintained a Japanese Cultural Exchange in San Jose - which some considered a cover organization for well-financed industrial espionage.
The Blue Contract could only be understood in the light of an industry making major advances every few months. Travis had said that the Blue Contract was "the biggest thing we'll see in the next ten years. Whoever finds those diamonds has a jump on the technology for at least five years. Five years. Do you know what that means?"
Ross knew what it meant. In an industry where competitive edges were measured in months, companies had made fortunes by beating competitors by a matter of weeks with some new techniques or device; Syntel in California had been the first to make a 256K memory chip while everyone else was still making 16K chips and dreaming of 64K chips. Syntel kept their advantage for only sixteen weeks, but realized a profit of more than a hundred and thirty million dollars.
"And we're talking about five years," Travis said. "That's an advantage measured in billions of dollars, maybe tens of billions of dollars. If we can get to those diamonds."
These were the reasons for the extraordinary pressure Ross felt as she continued to work with the computer. At the age of twenty-four, she was team leader 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 before she left, "Don't be afraid when the pressure makes you crazy. You have billions of dollars riding on your shoulders. Just do the best you can."
Doing the best she could, she managed to reduce the expedition timeline by another three hours and thirty-seven minutes - but they were still slightly behind the consortium projection. Not too far to make up the time, especially with Munro's cold-blooded shortcuts, but nevertheless behind - which could mean total 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 a piggyback slurp, their chances of winning the race were vanishing - before any of them had even set foot in the rain forests of central Africa.
2.Piggyback Slurp
TRAVIS FELT LIKE A FOOL.
He stared at the hard copy from Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
ERTS WHY ARE YOU SENDING US ALL THIS MUKENKO DATA WE DON'T REALLY CARE THANKS ANYWAY.
That had arrived an hour ago from GSFC/Maryland, but it was already too late by more than five hours.
"Damn!" Travis said, staring at the telex.
The first indication to Travis that anything was wrong was when the Japanese and Germans broke off negotiations with Munro in Tangier. One minute they had been willing to pay anything; the next minute they could hardly wait to leave. The break-off had come abruptly, discontinuously; it implied the sudden introduction of new data into the consortium computer files.
New data from where?
There could be only one explanation - and now it was confirmed in the GSFC telex from Greenbelt.
ERTS WHY ARE YOU SENDING ALL THIS MUKENKO DATA
There was a simple answer to that: ERTS wasn't sending any data. At least, not willingly. ERTS and GSFC had an arrangement to exchange data updates - Travis had made that deal in 1978 to obtain cheaper satellite imagery from orbiting Landsats. Satellite imagery was his company's single greatest expense. In return for a look at derived ERTS data, GSFC agreed to supply satellite CCTs at 30 percent below gross rate.
It seemed like a good deal at the time, and the coded locks were specified in the agreement.
But now the potential drawbacks loomed large before Travis; his worst fears were confirmed. Once you put a line over two thousand miles from Houston to Greenbelt, you begged for a piggyback data slurp. Somewhere between Texas and Maryland someone had inserted a terminal linkup - probably in the carrier telephone lines - and had begun to slurp out data on a piggyback terminal. This was the form of industrial espionage they most feared.