No. Unfortunately, the man with the blue eyes had pulled a muscle in his leg at his modern dance class, but Ralph should go ahead; it would
give him pleasure to see Ralph dancing, and Ralph found a nice young man in a leather vest without a shirt and walked to the dance floor with him.
And when Ralph Dickey's back was turned, the man with the smashing blue eyes, Mikhail Andreyev Istoropovich, rifled Ralph's wallet, which was in his shoulder bag under the table, took out the magnetic pass for the computer lab, and left.
He waited in the parking lot outside the UCLA software center until he saw Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes reel out of the building. She seemed to identify cars by feel because she bumped into four of them before she found what she was looking for, a brown Edsel whose tailpipe and muffler were dragging on the ground under the car. After three minutes, she found her car key, and four minutes later she had the door open. The Edsel started with a roar like a B-52, and then there was the screech of burning rubber as the professor peeled away. Her window was down and as her car roared by Istoropovich's, he heard her singing in a lusty baritone:
Gotta get me some
Gotta get me some
Gotta get me some
And I don't care what.
Five minutes of silence later, Istoropovich let himself into the lab using Ralph Dickey's pass card. He moved quickly. In the center of the room, resting atop a long steel table, sat four metal cubes the size of orange crates. The supercomputer, the LC 111—so-called because there had been 110 primitive models before Payton-