full-size keyboard and trackpad that stealthily slid out from its underside. Or with a combination of both stylus and keyboard, if they preferred. That was what made the Joey so unusual and compelling - its flexibility. Especially when the owner returned with it to the office, or took the Joey home. There, the Joey attached easily to a variety of snap-on peripherals that turned the base unit into a more powerful desktop system. Expanded keyboards. Mice. Monitors. Printers. Scanners. CD-ROM players. Stereo speakers. Enhanced network peripherals. And most any other peripheral device available for ordinary personal computers.

But the machine had its faults. Though it was technically superior to ICP's portable computers, software developers hesitated to invest the costly technical and human resources required to create new programs for it. Because its design was so new and different, many software developers were fearful of straying beyond the safe boundaries of developing programs for anything but ICP's series of computers, regardless of their plain-vanilla functionality. In the few short years since they had become players in the portable computer industry, ICP had attained an installed base of millions of portable systems worldwide, which dwarfed the few hundred thousand Joey systems Wallaby had sold since its introduction. To a software developer, ICP's user base numbers were too great to ignore, regardless of what the future potential of a device like the Joey might be.

Peter clicked the print button on the computer screen. The laser printer on his desk hummed. A few moments later the revised company organization chart rolled out of the printer.

Nowhere in the drawing did Matthew Locke's name appear.

In tomorrow's board meeting, Peter intended to surprise the team by proposing his newly drawn organization. Peter himself would temporarily fill the president-and-CEO slot until a qualified replacement was found. Though Peter had spent little time with the members of his executive staff over the past few months, he knew that they had faith in him. He was their leader, the company's crown jewel. In founding his company he had founded an industry, one that had made every member of his senior executive staff a multimillionaire. Without a doubt, their loyalties rested with him. Any other possibility never occurred to him; he had too many more significant issues to contend with, like leaky batteries.

Leaving his office, Peter stopped for a moment to appreciate the sharp and elegant lines of the Joey prototype resting on the shelf beside his desk. In just two months, according to his plan, the world would finally benefit from his original Joey vision: the new Joey Plus. His plan for providing the Joey engineering group with more engineers was precisely what was going to move it off his shelf and onto buyers' desktops.

Peter's secretary Peggy looked past her computer screen as she heard his office door close.

"I'm leaving for the day," he said.

Peggy had worked for Peter since the company began. She had been nineteen years old then, a year younger than Peter, and one of the first employees in the company. Like Peter, she had attained massive wealth when the company had had its public stock offering. She wore a colorful Wallaby T-shirt and jeans, and one would never guess that this young woman, worth slightly more than one million dollars, was executive assistant to the man who had started the fastest growing new market in the computer industry. However, looking at Peter's longish hair, customary faded blue jeans and Oxford shirt, would anyone guess that he was worth eight hundred million dollars?

Before heading to his car, Peter decided it wouldn't hurt to bolster his confidence in his plan by checking the status of a few key Joey Plus projects.

"How's it coming?" Peter asked, leaning over an engineer's shoulder.

"Good," Paul Trueblood answered. He blew at the trails of smoke that rose before him as he lifted a soldering iron.

"I think I've got the battery problem fixed." The engineer returned his attention to the electronic components scattered about his worktable.

"Great," Peter said, noticing the pile of tiny batteries beside the main Joey unit. Each was charred with a caramel-colored resin. In the original Joey design the battery was located too close to the power recharger unit, and occasionally the excessive heat caused the battery to leak and burn.

Peter had tremendous faith in Paul and his work, and he was one of the first engineers who had started the company with Peter. The battery problem would be fixed, and thinking about it reminded Peter of a similar problem that Paul had corrected several years ago, in the all-in-one Mate personal computer. Unlike the Joey's battery, which powered the unit away from the desktop, the Mate's battery was deep inside the computer, and its sole purpose to keep track of the date and time when the computer was turned off. During extended use, the Mate's interior would occasionally reach high temperatures, causing the tiny battery to leak. The obvious solution was to install a small cooling fan inside the computer, like every other brand of computer had. But Peter wouldn't allow it. They said it couldn't be done, that you couldn't build a computer without putting in a small noisy fan to keep it cool. "If they say it can't be done, that's because they're not smart enough to figure out a way to do it," was Peter's standard reply. That was how Peter Jones challenged his engineers to do the impossible. After two days of no sleep, and having sustained himself on soda and popcorn, Paul had revealed to Peter a design that would cool the machine by natural convection.

Peter leaned in over Paul's shoulder for a closer look. "I'd sure hate to see us go back to the drawing board on that sweet little power recharger…" he said, hanging a mild warning in the burnt-smelling air of the engineer's office.

"No problem," Paul said, and blew out a breath that hinted mild frustration. Not catching the drift, Peter stayed right where he was, perched over the engineer like a hawk. Paul set down the soldering iron and retrieved a Walkman from his drawer. Loading a tape into it, he held the headphones just above his ears and raised his eyebrows at Peter, as if to ask if he had any more comments.

"All right, all right," Peter said, grinning behind raised palms. "Just making sure we do it right." He left the engineer with his head bobbing rhythmically through little smoke clouds. It was little triumphs like this that excited Peter, doing things people said couldn't be done. The engineers were the only people in the company for whom Peter felt any admiration and respect. And, secretly, awe. They were the conveyers of his visions, the ones who possessed the power to turn his radical ideas into real products.