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the woman staring at her gloved hand holding the jutting elevator door, Greta’s response was anything but playful. “The last thing I need is an expensive silver mirror to remind me to stop eating chocolate.”

She boarded the elevator.

“Why Mrs. Locke, what a pleasant surprise!” said the attractive salesman, all smiles, as Greta approached. He stood before the Steuben crystal room situated at the end of the mercifully subdued second level. Behind him there stood a row of ghostly illuminated glass cases containing spectacular pieces of some of the world’s finest crystal. His modest platinum name badge said he was Mr. William Armond.

“Billy,” Greta said, pausing one step before proceeding past him, “there’s something I’d like to see in the Houston collection.”

“Of course,” Mr. Armond said, trailing her. He glanced at his associate, Ms. Olson, whose territories were the Lalique and Baccarat rooms. Reluctant to catch his eye, she pursed her lips and busied herself at her desk, addressing small, golden catalogs.

Greta Locke was Mr. Armond’s best customer, one of Gump’s best customers, and everyone who worked there knew it. She had spent several hundred thousand dollars at Gump’s in the two years Mr. Armond had had the good fortune of knowing her. Last year she had arranged a deal between Gump’s and Wallaby, Incorporated, to purchase corporate gifts at a special quantity discount. A discount of five percent can be quite sizable, she noted to her husband, when he purchased eight Steuben flower vases last year as Christmas presents for the wives of the Wallaby board members, at four hundred dollars apiece.

She removed her sunglasses and studied the curves and artwork of a large bowl displayed in the glass case. She’d had her eye on it for some time now. It was a James Houston original, engraved with painstaking detail. Circling the bowl’s rim were salmon swimming against an invisible current, surrounded by tiny air bubbles. The piece was breathtaking.

“Perhaps a closer inspection?” Mr. Armond said, producing a small ring of keys. But before he managed to insert the small key into the case’s lock, Greta stopped him.

“Don’t bother. I’ll take it.”

“A splendid piece, Mrs. Locke,” he said. “May I have it gift-wrapped for you?”

“No,” she said, “That’s not necessary.” Without removing her gloves, she deftly slid her credit card out of her wallet and handed it to him. “It’s a gift to me. For all my hard work.” She lingered behind him as he moved to his clerk’s desk. “Anything new?” she asked, over her shoulder.

“There are some lovely new crystal animals,” said Mr. Armond, indicating one of the other cases. The collection consisted of exquisite, palm-size creatures. A dog…a cat…a bird…a bear. All resting peacefully on a black velvet blanket.

She seemed uninterested; she’d gotten what she came for. However, as she was exiting the parlor, a little farther along the display, she saw something, reclining on a green felt pasture, that captivated her attention. Larger than the other pieces, but small enough to hold in two hands, there lay a knobby colt, its translucent mane flared back from its muscular neck, forever frozen in the wind. She thought of her own horse, a gift from Matthew when they had moved to California. Wouldn’t this crystal beauty look wonderful beside her bed, on the night stand….

She remembered her car, double-parked out front. Another day perhaps, she decided, seating herself before Mr. Armond at an antique table while he called downstairs and instructed one of the vault attendants to have the piece brought to her.

“Billy, I’ve worked so hard,” she said, fingering her forehead above her eyebrow. “This is my reward.”

“Of course you have,” Mr. Armond said. “The piece you have purchased is one of a limited number created by Mr. Houston. He’ll be pleased to know it will be enjoyed by you and Mr. Locke.”

“People just don’t know how difficult it is being married to a successful businessman. It absolutely drains a woman. I swear, I feel like half the time I do his thinking.” She removed her right glove and inspected her nails, and, as the credit card machine beeped twice, she casually turned hand over, palm up, to receive the sales slip.

Mr. Armond transcribed the approval code onto the form and handed her the pen. As she signed her name, he mentally calculated his five-percent commission on the sale: $1,200.

Ms. Olson, carrying the small catalogs in a stack that reached from her midriff to her chin, managed a polite nod as she passed.

“Darling,” Greta called, pointing in Ms. Olson’s direction with her index finger.

As the saleswoman turned, her expressionless face metamorphosed into a struggled smile. “Yes?”

“Can I please have one of those?”

“Madam, I am certain you will receive one in the mail shortly,” Ms. Olson said. She blinked delicately, twice.

“I want it now.”

Mr. Armond jumped from his seat. “Of course.” He slid one from the pile. Quickly discarding the little protective jacket, he handed the booklet to Greta, who immediately began flipping through it.

“Thank you, dear,” she said, without looking up.

Mr. Armond returned the addressed, empty coverlet to Ms. Olson’s pile and sent her off with a grateful wink. He collected the cord-wrapped box containing her new bowl from a stock attendant, and handed it to Greta. “Anything else today, Mrs. Locke?”

“I think this is all for today.”

“Always a pleasure, Mrs. Locke.”

She strolled out onto Post Street, the pleasantly heavy box beneath one arm. Her car had been moved several yards up the block and into a loading zone. She waved her scarf to the parking attendant, but he was already on his way to the vehicle.

He held the car door for her, and she placed the box on the passenger seat and secured it with the seat belt. Tying her scarf, she realized she had forgotten the catalog. She had left it on the clerk’s desk. No fuss. She would receive one in the mail soon anyway.

Climbing into the car, she smiled, recalling the day she drove it off the parking lot. Another little gift to herself, for all her hard work.

 

*

 

Now that Matthew Locke was gone from his office, Peter Jones twisted the brightness knob on his computer monitor and returned to his work.

Beneath his hand he rolled the mouse and pressed its single button, causing the screen to scroll. Small connected boxes drawn on the electronic document rolled from the bottom of the display to the top. He stopped when he arrived at the top of the chart. With the pointer he selected the uppermost box and clicked the mouse twice on the name that currently occupied it. Peter looked at the highlighted name for a moment, then pressed the Delete key. MATTHEW LOCKE disappeared instantly.

Peter smiled to himself at the literalness of this small, effortless action, of deleting from his computer the very man who threatened to ruin its bright future. He typed in his own name into the vacant box and, beneath it, added the word ACTING before the title that was already there, PRESIDENT & CEO. Beneath this box were others, connected to the uppermost with straight black lines, each titled with the name of the corresponding division vice president. His name was titled in one of these other boxes as, VICE PRESIDENT, JOEY.

The man Peter had hired two years ago to act as his partner had failed. Matthew Locke’s role at Wallaby, defined by Peter and Hank Towers, Wallaby’s cofounder and vice chairman, was to act as the company’s business leader and Peter’s assistant. While Peter understood the power of his own vision and the importance of his skill at inventing remarkable products, he admitted to himself that he lacked the business experience to develop the company from a handful of engineers to a large and profitable organization. Which was why he had decided to hire Matthew Locke.

But something had gone wrong.

Matthew, for all of his management strength, did not fit in at Wallaby the way Peter would have liked. Looking back, he remembered Matthew’s suggestion, about a year ago, that perhaps Wallaby’s portable computers could become more compatible with ICP’s systems. That was what had started Peter wondering if, in the long run, Matthew was right for Wallaby. Dismissing Matthew’s idea as a naive insult, Peter only wished now that he had paid better attention. How could Matthew think Wallaby should abandon its founding vision of giving high technology power to the individual with a personal computer or portable interactive assistant in favor of creating mere peripherals that connected to ICP’s dictatorial, impersonal desktop and mainframe computers? What’s more, at about this time their friendship began to deteriorate. Up until the disagreement over the company’s direction, the two had spent nearly every Saturday afternoon together, going for long walks or drives. Apparently because of Peter’s reaction, Matthew stopped spending Saturday afternoons with him. When Peter would ring the gate bell at Matthew’s mansion, the housekeeper would divulge that Mr. and Mrs. Locke had gone out for the day. Peter had felt wounded. Matthew had been the first person with whom he had experienced any sort of real friendship. Or so he’d thought. Scolding himself for having allowed his feelings to become personal, he displaced his hurt by pouring himself more intensely into his work, in an all-out effort to substantiate his side of the contention that had cost him his only friend.

The real challenge now was to get the Joey Plus quickly out the door and into the user’s hands and, put to rest once and for all the criticism the original Joey had received. The Joey personal interactive assistant was the product of three years of hard work and engineering magic. Peter, the inventor of the original Wallaby Mate personal computer, had created the Joey as a radically different and intuitively designed portable computer. Named after the Australian word for baby kangaroo, the Joey was compact and thin and easy to transport, and it lasted for days on a single charge. In its simplest configuration, the basic Joey was about the size of a slender hardback book and almost as light, and it slipped easily into a briefcase. It worked as either a traditional notebook computer, or as a keyboard-less slate computer, and its built-in modem made it easy to access on-line services and the Internet, or send and receive faxes. Users interacted with Joey using either a stylus by “drawing” directly on its color active-matrix screen, or with the 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