That was at 11:55 A.M.

At noon, the horror struck him.

There was no lunch on the table. At 12:05 p.m., Norbert Peasewell vowed he was never going to suffer like this again.

He hitchhiked a ride to the center of Silicon Valley, that section of California where most computer work is done, and with beads dangling around his neck, ambled into a reception room that looked like an art gallery. It was 12:45 p.m.

"Work. I need work," gasped Norbert. "Anything. Guided missiles. Napalm. Baby incinerators. Genocide. Mass murder. Whatever you need. I'll do anything."

"What're your qualifications?" ;

"Ph.D. Stanford, advanced philosophy of computer science."

He got the job. It was not unusual to hire someone who looked as if he had been living on mescaline for a month. Most advanced computer scientists had their own idiosyncrasies. If one of them came up with just one good idea in his lifetime, he could justify the employment of a whole laboratory.

But when Norbert started work, it was 1:07 P.M. He had been more than an hour without his lunch.

Crazed Norbert could think of only one thing. Total 3

revenge on the world that had done this to him. He would never be hungry again.

Norbert understood that one needed money for food, and so obsessed by this was he that he isolated the one thing that created money. And that was profit.

Being a research scientist, Norbert had great freedom in his laboratory, and he decided to isolate all the wisdom about making profit, earning money, increasing wealth, and compile it into one single body of knowledge. He would re-create that profit-making motive.