The gang escaped in their metal-flaked and lowered Chevrolet. Careering south on the Harbor Freeway at eighty miles an hour, they smoked cigarettes of an acrid-stinking synthetic drug.

When they tired of tossing Maria's baby among themselves like a ball, they threw it out the window.

Lou Stevens listened to his grandson cry. He heard the oak floor creak as his daughter paced the bedroom with the baby in her arms, crooning to quiet his cries.

In the years since his wife died, Stevens had lived alone. Though the neighborhood people knew him as a man unchanging in his daily routine, he welcomed the disruption of his daughter and son-in-law's visit to show him his grandson…

His chairmanship of his corporation did not allow Stevens the time to visit his daughter and son-in-law in the East. Therefore, he had persuaded them to take the money for the air fares and lost wages. Their visit came at an inconvenient time now, but he would not postpone their trip. If the company objected to his limited concentration on the pressing business of microprocessors, let the board vote him into retirement.

In the late night silence, lying alone in the darkness of his bedroom, Stevens listened to his blood pulse in his ears. He felt the rhythm of his heart. Sixty-one years old, he did not imagine himself immortal. After fifty years of work, forty years in electronics, twenty years as a manager in a high-stress industry, he knew he neared the end. He had seen men ten years younger than he was drop on the office floor and die before the paramedics arrived.

But in one lifetime, he had climbed from the gutter to within grabbing distance of the upper class. Self-educated — with the assistance of the U.S. Army Signal Corps and the G.I. Bill — he had learned to design circuits. When companies refused to share the profits of his imagination, he formed his own company dedicated to the opportunity to achieve and to receive a fair reward. His patents and the patents of the young engineers staffing his research and development labs now earned more profits than his company's manufacturing division.