If At First You Don't Succeed

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Some people believe that good ideas always rise to the top. They're wrong. Good ideas occasionally rise, but just as many sink into oblivion. Success, in the technology industry in particular, has always depended on having the right product at the right time, not necessarily on having the best product. "A guy named Doug Engelbart invented the mouse, and it didn't make it to the market for 20 years," Morgan told me ruefully. Was the Apple a "better" PC than the IBM? Was Internet Explorer "better" than Netscape -- or vice versa? The real answer is that none of them were all that great; what they were was good enough. Convenience, proximity, the politics of ideas and personalities, all play a greater role in the eventual puissance of an invention than does mere quality. So what if some guy comes up with a way to save lives, or another comes up with a way to make prototype chips in an hour? Living with a frustrated inventor for 40 years has taught me something that I didn't learn even from the cold war, and that is simply this: The scariest thing about the future is that the future isn't necessary.

Leaving the temporary offices of Morgan Connector Company at the end of the day, my father and I climbed into his battered Volvo with 289,000 miles on the odometer and shredded upholstery thanks to Countess Matilda, Judy's rottweiler puppy. "When the investors asked for all this background material I said to your mom, 'My god, I'm really concerned about having to do this, because when it comes down to it, I've never actually done anything." He laughed. "She just rolled her eyes and said, 'You've got to be kidding.' And sure enough, when I wrote it all down, it looked like a lot of stuff."

"Well, yes," I said, "obviously. But I know what you mean. I don't feel like I've done anything with my life, either."

He snorted. My father, to this day, goes to the J section of Powell's Bookstore at least once a week, and if in their stacks of used books there are any copies of my out-of-print novel or essay collection in stock, he rearranges the shelf so that the covers are prominently displayed.

But I do know what he means, as we drive away in the Volvo: All of the good things that are happening hardly seem real. We say we'll believe them when we see them, but we've seen them before. I am pushing 40 now, and my dad is over 60. He has a happy marriage and a new company and I have a family and a job as the editor of an alternative newspaper. But we aren't the same people who talked excitedly about building a dome around the moon or cutting up the sun to use as space fuel, and generally reimagining the future. We are still cursed with an idiotic optimism about the world, but we are brittle and high-strung after so many years of living in a world that so easily says "No." So we ride silently in the car together, our synapses fizzing away in the night.

All of the good things hardly seem real. Morgan might finally make it.

The next day my dad called me from the Burbank Airport, having come out of a key meeting with a prominent biochemist at Cal Tech.

"Oh, I'd say it went pretty well," he said airily. "The guy we met with said my stuff was exciting. But before that we were talking about his work, and he was telling us how he got a probing electron microscope to take a picture of a DNA molecule. I said, 'Well, gee, wouldn't you have to get around the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to do that?' And he said, very modestly mind you, 'Oh, yeah, but we did that.' Now, when a man who can get around the Heisenberg uncertainty principle says your stuff is exciting, well that's exciting!"

I hung up the phone and pinched myself. It hurt. Good. Consulting my inner clock, I found that it was indeed the eleventh hour, and here we were off to the races. I thought about Hedy Lamarr, and about Gene Allen, who did try to become an artist when he grew up, but who never really got there, and died in his forties from a variety of maladies (did they possibly include heartbreak?). And I prayed that these angels, too, would be making an investment in Morgan Johnson this time around.

Hillary Johnson is the editor of the Ventura County Reporter and the author of the novel Physical Culture. She lives on a boat in Ventura, Calif.

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