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       "The line's down again," Howard heard in place of a greeting as he came in the door of the Self-Contained Armored Unit Research suite.

       "Again?" He stared at the row of darkened terminals before turning to his fellow scientists. "So, what are we doing? Stuck fighting everyone and his kid brother for processing time on the local frame?"

       "No," Dr. Spengler corrected, running a hand through his unruly blond hair. "Garmavac -- the name to our gateway mainframe, you now DO remember -- for repairs has been taken down."

       Howard was still trying to decipher the German-influenced syntax when Professor Gridley added his own two bits to his taller colleague's theme. "I told them they should run coaxial to every terminal in the complex from each mainframe," he snapped, looking even more like a cantankerous gnome with no beard than usual, "but no, They said it wasn't cost-effective. Hah! How cost-effective is it now our research is next door to stopped for 'two or three days, we'll send a representative right out'?"

       "Can't we go use one of the labs in the other wings?" Howard asked reasonably. "One not hooked up to Garnivac?"

       "Nope, Harkie already tried that," the professor said. "They're booked solid through Sunday. The review, you know."

       "My name is Harq al-Ada, not 'Harkie,'" the young man in the corner said mildly, "and it is GarMAvac. And, really, it could be worse."

       "The best internal control Mini-Computer we can build for the unit is still too big and costs the earth besides," the professor snorted, long nose twitching, "we're about to be reviewed to see if we're worth the amount of our government contract, our terminals are cut off from BOTH computer lines, and it could be worse?"

       "Well, yes," al-Ada said. "The coffeemaker could be down, too."

       When they had poured themselves cups to make sure that such was not the case, and al-Ada had been designated, as the youngest present, to take the bit between his teeth and scrub out the coffeemaker's stained filter-rest, Howard looked around at the largely empty set of rooms and asked "Where are the others?"

       "Eimi's making a junk-food run," al-Ada said from the sink, scrubbing vigorously with an old and fraying sponge. "There's nothing left but half a bag of pretzels and a deformed chocolate-crisp bar."

       "Our Esteemed Director is talking to our sponsors in Defense Research. Wants to try and get us in ahead of the review," Gridley put in. "And Robinson and Carrow are off at her place working on an interface -- not like THAT, so you two can stop leering." He dumped another packet of cream substitute into his mug.

       "I knew I should have forgotten all about mechanical engineering and gone into cybernetics like my mother wanted," Howard said mock-mournfully, nearly slopping coffee out of his cup. "Maybe if I had, I'd get to spend time with beautiful genius programmers like Dr. Carrow and somebody else would be here drinking department coffee with you geeks."

       "Beautiful?" Harq al-Ada said, eyes widening. "The woman's over the hill and going grey!"

       "So would I be if I darker hair had had," Dr. Spengler said. "But Catherine too -- " he stopped and, with visible effort, continued more grammatically. "But aged or no, Catherine has too much sense to do more than listen to Herr Doktor Robinson's boasts."

       "What, like the story of how he lost his leg in a shell breach?"

       "Or the one about how he was trapped in a free-orbiting satellite for years and spent the time building self-aware robots out of spare parts and extraneous junk," Gridley said. "The word you want is 'tall tales.'"

       "Romantic speculations aside," Howard said, "why are they at Dr. Carrow's place?"

       "Always you forget," Dr. Spengler sighed, face set in mild sorrow; he had never quite managed either despair in or disgust of his fellow-man. "Catherine has a Mini-Computer all to herself, with two terminals and a network connection to our CSP."

       "The things you can afford when you write a revolutionary new shell that everyone wants on your own time," al-Ada said. "Even one with all those cutesy little 'icons.' Really, this is all her fault."

       "How so?" Howard blinked at the younger man.

       "Since she wrote her idiotproof GUI shell, any idiot can use a terminal, and half of them do. And when all those idiots are trying to use the computer at once, lag, lag, lag is the order of the day -- either that or the network gets jammed and goes down. Not to mention that it's more likely to crash the whole computer!"

       "The networks had problems before," Professor Gridley corrected. "And the more people they have, the more accountable they get. I think Caveat Emporium's computers have gone down less since they began running Portals than they did when it was all run by command line."

       "And why we're using a CSP with a name like Caveat Emporium I shudder to think," Howard grumbled. "Even if they do have three mainframes to offer subscribers."

       "We didn't choose it, the government did," al-Ada shrugged. "Ours not to question why, ours but to do or have funding cut out from under our feet."

       Everyone looked at the floor again.

       "There ought to be a way to do it," Professor Gridley grumbled later, flipping through more of the backup printouts that were currently spread all over the office's conference room table. "If we could design some of the OTHER tonnage out -- "

       "We've already thrown out most of the shock absorbers in favor of the operator/driver/pilot/whatever-you-want-to-call-him judging his or her own tolerances by training," Howard snapped. "Which I think will earn you a lot of seriously injured test pilots. Really, they fit a computer into early spacecraft like Apollo, why can't you fit one in here?"

       "Because, for one thing, it cost the earth, and for another, we have to get more in and out!"

       "The Apollo computers only had to do one thing well," Harq al-Ada clarified when it seemed that the professor would strangle on his own indignation before getting more out, "so the only program could go into rope memory -- you know, the stuff you can read but not frobnicate about? Sort of like how a video game machine only knows how to play the one game. But with all the stuff Defense wants us to put in, it's got to do a ton of things well, so the programs have to load into plain-core, and all those cores take up a lot more space, even if the rest of it is all integrated circuits and I-O."

       "And the power supply," Spengler corrected the young programmer. "A power supply you must have."

       "Sorry," Howard said at the same time, throwing up his hands in acknowledgment. "You know the most I have to do with computers is 3-D modelling and playing shoot-em-ups, neither of which require me to actually know how they do whatever. If you say it takes an arcadeful of machines, I suppose it must take an arcadeful of machines."

       "It had one main program and a bunch of subprograms," the professor groused. "But even if we could stuff some of the subprograms on program-chips -- "

       "Program-chips?"

       "A side effect of integrated circuit technology," al-Ada explained. "You can set up -- "

       "What's an integrated circuit?" Howard interrupted.

       Three pairs of eyes stared at him.

       "In a certain kind of plastic circuitry in separate locations is embedded," Dr. Spengler said finally, "and if a certain level of current is run through the plastic will conduct impulses from one to another, and if not, not."

       "Oh, you mean a semiconductor. Sheesh, Harqmeister, why didn't you just say so?"

       "Because I thought of the function rather than the construction. Why don't you call me by my name?"

       "Because you're our protege. Well, I suppose more Robinson's and Carrow's and Grid's than mine, but you're part of our team. We'd give Eimi nicknames too, but there's not much you can do to THAT name."

       Harq al-Ada blinked, twice, cleared his throat, and pretended that he hadn't got sidetracked. "Well, if you have a very small set of directions that you aren't going to change, you can set it up on a piece of semiconductor plastic. They do it for calculators and guided missiles. That's not really programming, though."

       "I a missile's chip can set up," Spengler agreed. "Certainly I have built enough of them."

       "Setting up missile guidance is what they teach you in middle school programming classes," al-Ada nodded.

       "Wonderful," Howard said. "Now I can add a middle-school educated terrorist building a missile in his extrahabitat storage space to my list of nightmares."

       "But no one with the engineering skills would on something so pointless as random destruction waste them," Dr. Spengler comforted him.

       Howard rolled his eyes. Harq al-Ada met them for a moment before looking at Professor Gridley in stunned disbelief.

       "Yeah, well, we like him that way," the professor growled. "Anyway, even if we could shove some of the subprograms out, we still need to load the general programs in and out of core -- and NASA's Apollo could afford 'the best computer money could buy.' We can't."

       "Even Dr. Carrow couldn't," al-Ada agreed. "They still can't get Mini-Computers much smaller than a coffin, and she went for one the size of a bureau."

       "Maybe if we could take a Mini-Computer and put it in the micronizer from Macross," Spengler mused.

       "Yes, and who would build us this micronizer?" Gridley tilted his head back in order to stare at the ceiling as if demanding an answer from on high.

       "Ah, that... is where-it-all-falls-down."

       "One of these days," Howard grumbled, "I'm going to have to see at least some of those old Rocket Age animated shows just so I can figure out what the lot of you are getting at with your jokes."

       "Yes," al-Ada said in a gravelly voice. "Come to the Dark Side, McFly."

       "I told you, kid, forget the last name; it's 'Howard.'"

       "You've seen some of Macross," the professor frowned at him. "You thought the Chinese singer was cute."

       "Oh, that." Howard laced his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. "Yeah, if you like them young and girly."

       "Doesn't everyone?" al-Ada asked.

       The two academics looked at him.

       "Sorry, forgot whom I was talking to."

       When Eimi wandered in, laden with junk food and an eight-pack of Mountain Dew, she was visibly haggard.

       "Go home and get some sleep," Howard told her, taking two bags out of her arms.

       "But you are working... and the review..." the graduate student protested feebly.

       "The line's still down, so we're working at the speed of cold molasses," Professor Gridley told her. "You look like the fourth day of a three-day bender. You'll be no use to us if you keel over in the middle of what we're doing, and worse than useless if you give us whatever you've got. The review isn't till Monday. Work from home if you must, provided the line isn't down at your place. You do remember the bang path to us here on Garmavac?"

       Eimi nodded.

       "Then go home and REST."

       She went.

       "You're good at getting young overachievers to listen to your limits," al-Ada said after the door shut behind her.

       "Practice," the professor scoffed. "You'll pick it up too one of these days."

       When the telephone rang, it was unanimously decided that Professor Gridley should answer it, as the only one present who did not have cheese residue all over his hands.

       "Yes?! -- Oh, hello, Director -- "

       The other three members of SCAU-R&D hastily busied themselves with printouts and drafting paper, attempting to look as if they weren't listening.

       " -- No, really? -- What? -- Hah!"

       Spengler, Howard, and Harq al-Ada nearly jumped at the professor's shout of laughter.

       "How did -- no, I don't think I want to know. Still, we -- well, that's good news. All we need is to think one up, hey? -- Yes, anything they can come up with will be of help. -- Yes, the ETA on the fix was five minutes ago, so Garmavac should be up Real Soon Now. -- Well, it might. -- See you tomorrow."

       There was a silence after the professor hung up.

       "So," Dr. Spengler said at last, being the one least likely to have his head bitten off.

       "The Director called," Gridley answered him, "to tell us that he's called in some favors. IF we can come up with some theoretical alternate computer concept that we're allegedly using, they won't give it to those clowns down in Massachusetts no matter what the rest of it looks like."

       "Do we actually have to try to develop it?" al-Ada asked.

       "Given how stuck we are, we might as well, Harks. Who knows, we might find something by the wayside to make those two's job easier."

       "HARQ," said Harq al-Ada, running a finger along his mustache.

       "It would greatly be appreciated," Dr. Spengler ignored him.

       "I'll say," Howard said. "Bad enough they want us to figure out a way to make a giant robot practicable, but then they want us to come up with one any decent modern army can't immobilize in ten seconds flat."

       "But it's a giant robot," his colleagues said in ragged unison.

       Howard rolled his eyes. "Fanboys."

       "And speaking of which," the professor said, eyes sparkling under his thicket of bangs, "the brass accepted the Director's suggestion of a code name for our project."

       "So we're NOT building a scow, thank goodness," al-Ada said. "What is the result going to be now?"

       "A mobile suit."

       There was a moment of silence.

       "A code name, you said." Dr. Spengler looked flabbergasted.

       "Great," Howard muttered. "All that brings to mind are those robot pants from that stop-motion animation thing."

       "It doesn't suggest 'piloted giant robot' to you?" Harq al-Ada stared at him.

       "Should it?"

       "It was used as such," Gridley said at last, "in a very influential Rocket Age mech show."

       "Fanboys," Howard repeated.

       "The question of computers still remains," Dr. Spengler said.

       "Bleagh," Gridley answered. "Pass the pretzels."

       "This is all -- " al-Ada began two hours later.

       "If you say it is all Carrow's fault again," Gridley muttered, "I will cut your mustache off and shove it in your ear."

       "Actually," Dr. Spengler said, scratching the back of his head with a pencil, "none of this would ever have arisen had the American military not in Common Era nineteen-forty-something patented the digital stored-program computer."

       "How's that again?" Howard blinked.

       Gridley lifted his face to the ceiling again with a sigh -- apparently he had heard that one before.

       "If they hadn't," al-Ada ventured, "they wouldn't have made a ridiculous amount of money and the Alliance would have formed differently?"

       "No, not quite..."

       "If they hadn't," Howard said, "they wouldn't have become practically self-supporting, so the American government wouldn't have had the spare budget to throw into their NASA, nor would NASA have been waived licensing fees as a government-internal favor, so the history of space travel would have been set back for decades, and we might not have the dubious pleasure of sitting around on our thumbs in a lab in an artificial habitat on the dark side of the moon -- "

       "FAR side," the two academics corrected him.

       "Whatever. The point is, instead of one on the surface of the Earth where we could just hop in a car and drive to some other lab hooked up to some other CSP?"

       "Of that," Spengler finally said, "I had not thought at all."

       "Then what did you mean?" Harq al-Ada tugged on the right end of his mustache.

       "If von Neumann," the blond scientist answered mildly, "or those other two men whose names I can never remember had won the patent, the precedent that patent rights belonged to the developer rather than the underwriter would have been established. And if that so had been, the greater part of us a far greater chance of having enough money, like Catherine, to pick and choose our researches rather than of Defense seek would have stood."

       "In English?" Howard said.

       "Look. Back then, the digital stored-program computer was invented by Pres Eckert and John Mauchly," Professor Gridley began, sitting straight up and brightening at the prospect of explaining something to the temporarily ignorant. "With a little help from von Neumann, I suppose, but he was not responsible, no matter what Robinson says."

       "From whom?" Howard said.

       "Pres?" al-Ada said.

       "I forget what it's short for, Harkie. Eckert and Mauchly were at the University of Pennsylvania and being paid by the U. S. Army to invent a better computer. So first they invented one where you had to replug a gazillion wires every time you wanted it to do a new problem, and the Army used it to figure out ballistics and invent atomic bombs and such. Then they started working on one called EDVAC where the program was held in the registers.

       "John von Neumann was a big-name mathematician who got involved near the end of the first project. He and a bunch of others wrote up a description of the EDVAC, all full of metaphors about memory and such that everyone still uses because they're useful. Then von Neumann went off and published it under his name."

       "I take it this is bad?" Howard said.

       "It is not nice," Dr. Spengler said sadly. "If I should publish our internal reports about our mobile suit without your names, it that I had done all the work would imply."

       "Who would believe that?" Howard blinked at the mild-mannered scientist.

       "Robinson," said Gridley.

       "I don't think Dr. Robinson would believe that his own programs had been written by a doctor of engineering specializing in missile research," Harq al-Ada said thoughtfully.

       "People might not believe that our Raymond Spengler meant to," Gridley shrugged, "but von Neumann tried to patent the idea of a stored-memory computer based on that paper, so it's hard to believe he didn't mean to. Eckert and Mauchly tried to patent the idea, too. So did the engineering school at Pennsylvania they were working at, since they were building it with the help of half the faculty. So did the U.S. Army, given that it was funding the whole project.

       "As the two of you were just saying, the American military won the patent rights, managed to ram through a bill doubling patent length while they had it, did their best to enforce it internationally, and spent their not-quite-twoscore years dominating the computing industry and making money hand over fist. Stifling creativity like mad, too; you know the Mini-Computer wasn't invented until thirty years after the technology went public, and they still haven't figured out a way to make it cheap enough for offices or labs to just run out and get one. Not unless they're getting much more government funding than we are. Kind of defeats the purpose of a Mini-Computer, doesn't it?

       "But suppose Eckert and Mauchly, or even von Neumann, had won the patent fight. That would have established that licensing rights went to the inventor, not the funder," Professor Gridley said. "Then most of us would have a much better chance of having made enough money for a decent reserve by now. We wouldn't be stuck having to lurch from government contract to government contract. See?"

       "Tell me about it," al-Ada grumbled. "When was the last time any of us invented something on a civilian clock?"

       "The calculators, was it not?" Spengler asked the professor.

       "Yeah, those dam' fiddly processors," Gridley agreed. "Cuthbert hires me now and again to design new program-chips for their scientific calculators. It's boring and it's not what I want to do, so last February I sat down and designed a little programmable 'chip.' Now, next time they want one, they can buy it and hire someone else to write the program."

       "Oh," Howard said. "Like a little tiny computer."

       "No, not like a -- " Professor Gridley stopped dead.

       "Grids?" Howard leaned forward.

       "Well, what the hell," the professor began again, running a hand through his mop of graying hair. "Of course, you couldn't fit so much as a moderately sized video game on one of them, but if we ran them in parallel, it ought to hang together at least well enough to impress the Powers That Be." He grabbed one of Howard's spare pads of drafting paper and began scribbling frantically.

       "If Real Soon Now is not by tomorrow," Dr. Spengler said, eyes lighting, "we shall storm the East Wing, seize a terminal, and model it on Kcilivac before you forget what it is you meant to write."

       "I do not BELIEVE this," Harq al-Ada said. "You propose to run a giant robot on a couple of blank calculator chips for a computer? Nobody's going to swallow that, not even the people who believe Dr. Robinson when he says he was held captive and forced to watch and comment on really bad movies."

       "What, by Elvira?" Howard said. "I knew I should have gone into cybernetics like my mother wanted."

       "Of course we've got more space to work with," the professor ignored them completely, "so maybe we could make them twice as big -- nah, cost too much to get them made that special, maybe if we frob the connections into a matrix, not as if you really need a long word length as long as your stack can go on forever anyway -- "

       "Oh well," al-Ada gave in. "If the Director buys this, I'll go along. I'd rather go out with a bang than a whimper anyway."

       "Of course he'll buy it, why shouldn't he?" The professor scowled at his illegible notes. "Now, I think we'll put the array of extra-mini-computers -- sub-mini-computers -- whatever, we'll put it in the lower torso, since we always wanted it almost as well-protected as the pilot if possible -- "

       "Having in the micronizer been put, as I said," Dr. Spengler laughed.

       "Thank you, Raymond," Professor Gridley said. "The lower torso will house the micronized-computer-array, directly below... "

       "Fanboys," Howard said with a shake of his head, and went back to working on the problem of engine shielding.