Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 15 Orrigen

At midmorning and max ebb we hit the Race-the 7.5-mile eastern venturi of Long Island Sound through which nearly thirty million cubic feet of water flow back and forth every twelve hours-and left Valiant Rock to starboard. Only an hour earlier I'd learned that starboard meant "on your right as you're looking forward." There was little wind, but three-foot standing waves had built up as the water ran fast over boulders and complicated hard-rock topography hundreds of feet below us.

A summer Saturday, there were dozens of boats angling for a piece of the northeastward migration of striped bass. There were dark-skinned working-class men in the most modest of open aluminum-hulled skiffs, boats incapable of surviving a significant turn of the weather. There were fiberglass center-console fishing boats, some with sleek flush-mounted hardware designed to minimize the possibility of snagging a fishing line during a cast or a recovery. Their better-heeled and usually lighter-skinned owners were sometimes accompanied by a wife, a pretty girl, or a child. There were also full-cabined cruisers of forty or even fifty-five feet, with racks of well-maintained rods and reels leaning against a three-story scaffolding topped with an expensively instrumented perch I learned to call a "flying bridge." And there were commercial fishing boats, some with crowded decks of paying passengers, and some with decks piled high with nets and lobster traps; all showing rust and use and insufficient maintenance.

There were also sailboats of all sizes coming and going, some freighters, some ferries, larger commercial fishing boats, yachts, and the occasional super yacht en route to somewhere. The places and the names-Fisher's Island, Montauk, Stonington, Newport, Cuttyhunk, Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod-each had a unique appeal. For every vacationer or sailor or merchant seaman, there was a set of sounds or sights or circumstances evoking memories and feelings of discovery or awe. I, in the fresh air on the foredeck while everyone else was in the HVAC'd splendor of the Lucky Strike's enclosed quarters, was collecting these experiences for the first time and would never forget them.

We made it through the Race, not that there had been any doubt, and entered those not-quite-oceanic waters of Block Island Sound. The wind became light and the sea flattened out before us. Sailboats rocked but made no way, their sails flapping as we ran by them at twenty knots. Low-lying clouds moved in on us and we slowed, soon to a crawl, as we were enveloped in gray gloom. The cold upwelling ocean waters hit the warm and damp summer air, making wet murky haze all around. I'd learn eventually that the same thing happened in San Francisco, but on a much larger and more regular scale. When visibility shrank to a boat length, we stopped.

You could hear foghorns going off on the mainland and from the rocky or pointy corners of Block Island. There was nothing to see. The boat's radar would have sufficed, but Jay had something else in mind.

While Lucy watched TV below decks, and Jay's parents had a late breakfast in their stateroom, and the chef prepared tea and Portuguese soda bread with brandy, Jay and Vladik and I lounged and talked in the glass enclosure of the main deck. Jason had his feet up and half listened. If and when the weather cooperated, the sun would burn off the soupiness by the late morning, and then we'd go sit out on the aft sun deck and wait for the sight of Block Island emerging from the gray murk.

Among the seemingly unconnected things that Jay had had me working on all summer, I was tracking down the résumés of academic faculty from San Diego to St. Petersburg, Russia. They were thought leaders in genomics, of course, and agriculture, of course, but also in large-scale bioreactors, fast-cycle hybridization, micromachines, thermodynamics, economics of energy markets, and liquid fuels.

In each category, Jay had a set of questions he wanted me to answer and attributes he wanted me to characterize. Were they affiliated with the leading large companies, or the hottest small companies in their fields? Who were their students and where were they employed or when were they graduating? Did their networks of friends overlap with his, or with each other's? What patents had they filed, and who had licensed them? Instead of making a movie, in which case he'd have been both producer and director, he was producing, as financier, and then would direct, as ceo, a new venture of some kind.