Tom Foran Clark

The California home Lars Donnelly grew up in was close to the ocean -- within walking distance. It was the 1950s, when families wore matching outfits and flip-flops to the beach, and so it was with the four Donnellys -- Connell, Astrid, Sid, and Lars. Under clear skies and the hot sun, they swam, collected stones and shells, built sand castles, dug for crabs, searched for exotic marine life forms in the tidal pools among the rocks -- it was a glorious rocky territory, Laguna Beach -- or just sat on the sand contemplating the waves coming in and the waters returning under, going back out.

This last had been his favorite thing: the sea's motions spoke to Lars. Sitting quietly on the shore, regarding the waters, he felt a deep principle -- reality -- how the world works actually, beneath the surface, behind the scenes. This was truly magical. Lars felt that sitting still, looking at the ocean, feeling its rhythms deep within himself, was the richest, finest human act, linking all people in all places for all time. He felt perhaps a million years was not much more than a split second -- eternity not different than a moment.

The Donnellys always returned inland to the hills badly sunburned. After the mother's meals -- after she had cleared the table, while she washed the dishes in the kitchen -- the father, a telephone man, stayed seated at the dining room table amid his papers and pencils, making intricate technical drawings employing familiar switching devices, relay gizmos, and all sorts of magical electrical doo-dads Lars had seen on his father's messy workbench. In the drawings, the parts were joined in fun new ways. Next to each individual part used in the designs, the father, Connell, wrote down their names. Lars and Sid leaned in lovingly on their father's shoulders, adoring these works -- also studying them. Sid later became passionate about electrical engineering and computers; Lars immersed himself in words.

In 1955 -- Sid was five, Lars four -- a rocket was built in Anaheim, an astonishing advertisement easily seen from all the highways in the area, announcing the birth of a huge new park under construction at the time. Lars was in the family car with his father on the freeway when they passed by it. Completely baffled by the sight, Lars asked his dad if he knew what this thing was for. More important, what was it called? “Well, Lars, that’s a rocket in a big amusement park that's going to be called Disneyland,” his dad told him. He had probably read all about it in the papers, but this was all the father had to say to his son. Lars knew how quiet his father could be -- he knew he’d just have to be patient, wait and see. When the park finally opened, the Donnellys were among the first families to visit. The amusements of the Magic Kingdom were divided evenly between the past and the future. Though Sid was obviously crazy about Tomorrowland, Lars recognized his own leanings were more toward Frontierland.

At the beginning of 1964, with the assassination of the optimistic, youthful president, John F. Kennedy, still fresh in everyone's minds, Sid Donnelly's best friend, Barry Storrs -- a very sharp kid already expert in taking apart and putting back together telephones, radios, televisions, and mini-bike and go-cart motors -- began showing signs of sudden aging, dwindling powers, slowing down. Mysteriously, Sid's good buddy, only fourteen, had taken ill. Barry's former spritely ways of walking and talking came to a sudden end. Previously athletic, always energetic, Barry was now sluggish, often clumsy. It wasn't very long before speaking came only with difficulty. Then it got so he could hardly write things down. People noticed strange eye movements. Barry next lost his sense of smell, then he began having difficulty swallowing food. Finally, he entered a season of terrible tremors and seizures.

Doctors at Laguna's South Coast Medical Center said it could be anything. They suspected a brain tumor -- but the bones of skulls kept brain tumors well-hidden, so they couldn't say for sure. After several routine examinations, Barry underwent more thorough neurological examinations. Using rubber hammers, doctors checked Barry's reflexes. They looked into his eyes and studied their movements and reactions and reflexes under changing conditions. They checked his facial muscles, tongue movement, gag reflexes, head movement, balance, coordination, memory, powers of abstract thinking, and his mental alertness.

Surgeons conducted a biopsy. They drilled a burr hole into Barry's skull. A needle was passed through and, from the core of the needle, tissue was removed. Pediatric neurosurgeons and oncologists studying the sample under a microscope concurred. Barry had a tumor, but the tumor might not yet be embedded so deep within his brain's gray matter as to make it inaccessible. It was possible they could disentangle the tumor and, without severe neurological damage, cut it out -- not a partial removal (debulking), but a total craniotomy -- the complete removal of the tumor.

Sid, fearing brain tumors were contagious, took to long crying jags. Soon he was showing head tumor symptoms of his own -- dizziness accompanied by ringing and buzzing in his ears.

Lars coped with the situation by walking downtown to the public library, there gathering together as much information about brain tumors as he could. He learned that Barry's increasingly clumsy and uncoordinated way of walking had a name: ataxic gait. Barry's difficulty swallowing food was called dysphagia. Science similarly had a name for difficulty speaking: dysarthria. Difficulty writing was called agraphia. Abnormal eye movement: nystagmus. Barry's vanished sense of smell was classic anosmia. Even Sid's sympathetic symptoms had formal scentific names: the ringing and buzzing in his ears was called tinnitus, and the dizziness was vertigo.

The Donnellys got together at their dining room table for a family meeting. The parents wanted to try to illuminate this tragic situation for their sons, and to console them. The mother, Astrid, even more than her son Sid, Barry's closest friend, cried through the entire session. The father, Connell, holding his head in his hands, spoke as best he could on this difficult and touchy subject. He hoped his words, though few, would be clear and helpful to his sons.

After, in the spooky darkness of their shared bedroom, Sid got down on his knees, asking God to help his sick friend Barry and to fix his stupid mother and father! He blamed his parents bitterly for just standing by. Sid accused them of being idiots! -- they knew nothing!

Lars knelt down next to his sorrowing, almost crushed older brother, and tried to impress him with the big words he'd learned lately -- vertigo, tinnitus, anosmia, dysphagia, agraphia, and so on. "You know nothing!" Sid accused. Lars then asked his older brother, Mister-Know-It-All , to tell him what he thought was going on with Barry. Suddenly, Sid stopped crying. Lars could see his brother was glad of the opportunity to tell his little brother something so sad, irrefutable, immortal, and hard. "The cells in Barry's head have gone berserk," Sid said, grasping his little brother's shoulders tenderly. "They've taken over his brain. They're reproducing uncontrollably. He's going to die."

Barry's tumor was of the kind called primary. The tumor had started in Barry's brain -- it had not entered his brain from anywhere else in his body. Lars knew now that malignant tumors arising from the skin or from the lining of the digestive, respiratory, or urogenital tracts were called carcinoma, and that malignant tumors arising from blood vessels or the lymph system were called sarcoma.

Lars' research revealed Barry's tumor was probably pressing against and even displacing the soft, spongy masses of nerve and supportive brain tissue that controlled his vital body functions. The normally harmonious sending and receiving of information from Barry's brain out to his nerves and back again had, as Sid said, gone amuck. Barry's ataxic gait, dysphagia, dysarthria, headaches, tremors, and seizures all stemmed from the cancerous mass increasing within the rigid bones of Barry's skull (intracranial pressure) and from blockage to the regular flowing of his cerebrospinal fluid (hydrocephalus).

A team of neurosurgeons at Pasadena's Huntington Memorial Hospital made a large incision into Barry's scalp. They removed a piece of bone, and exposed the part of the brain covering the tumor. They quickly found the tumor, but saw it lacked distinct borders. Beyond the tumor's enormity, the cancer was widespread -- critically invasive. The surgeons performed resection, surgical removal, as best they could. Replacing Barry's skull bones wasn't necessary. The skin that had covered his skull was not re-sewn together. Barry died on the operating table.

"Don't be surprised if I die, too," Sid warned, and that was all he'd say about it.

As for Lars, he decided he'd be a brain surgeon. He withdrew into a mythic, symbolic, metaphoric fantasy world of health, sickness, medical institutions, universities, degrees, and doctors. He called himself Doctor Lax, a brilliant scientist who specialized in megavoltage accelerated therapy. The distinguished Doctor Lax had designed a famous complicated gadget -- one which Lars in fact did build (from cardboard, wires, plugs, and miscellaneous telephone parts contributed by his father) -- a machine he said employed electrodes in treating disruptions of normal electrical activity between brain tissue and nerves.

Doctor Lax had not only a PhD for his groundbreaking work on neurofibromatosis, also called von Recklinghausen's Disease, he had also a second PhD for his discoveries concerning Tuberous Sclerosis, also called Bourneville's Disease. Expert in the use of investigational immunotherapy treatments, stereotactic radiosurgery, and craniotomies, Doctor Lax famously removed tumors of every kind. Each tumor was given a unique name. Doctor Lax operated on metastatic brain tumors (the tumors formed by cancer cells arising elsewhere in the body but then spreading to the brain, which Doctor Lax dubbed brats), craniopharyngioma (crats), optic nerve glioma (glats), cerebellar tumors (blats), and posterior fossa tumors (frats).

These challenges only whet the appetite of the indefatiguable Doctor Lax who, walking the steady path of objectivity and precision, undertook to know the ways people represented existing in this world -- how people thought and worked and lived. Beyond saving millions of lives, he would transform human society. In his world-famous laboratory, Doctor Lax uncovered systems and methods of thought through which words, symbols, and meanings brought relief from pain and confusion.

These investigations led Doctor Lax to the Dewey Decimal System, which now opened up before him -- from generalities, knowledge, data processing, computers, bibliographies, dictionaries, libraries, personnel administration, reading, encyclopedias, serials, indexes, museums, and news media through fallacies, syllogisms, hypotheses, argument, persuasion, analogy, moral philosophy, systems, doctrines, politics, and sophistry to fishing, hunting, shooting, literature, geography, history, and even extraterrestrial worlds. But Doctor Lax felt no temptation to leave the medical profession in order to pursue the world of the professional librarian. When Lars took work at the public library as a humble page, merely putting everything in proper order on the bookshelves, the overambitious Doctor Lax suffered a stroke and fell into a coma.

In the middle of 1968 (after first Martin Luther King was shot to death, then Robert Kennedy), facing the prospect of her sons going to war in Vietnam (some said merely at the prospect of their leaving home), Lars and Sid's mother died of a heart attack (some said of a broken heart). At the end of 1969, a selective service lottery drawing determined the order of military induction for men born between 1944 and 1950. This was followed in July 1970 with a second lottery determining the order of induction for men born in 1951. Because Sid and Lars drew high numbers, they did not go to war. By the end of 1970, bald and weary Connell Donnelly, always a quiet man, seemed to have nothing left to say to anyone. The father and the sons had drifted apart. They knew he loved them, but what they aimed to be, those days, was cool, and cool people never spoke of such things. The brothers brushed their father off; they moved ahead.

As an undergraduate, Lars studied hard. It didn't take a university to teach him to be interested in the world -- to be curious about it. He'd already learned, outside the university, that the place for reading was -- anywhere. Inside the confines of the university, he was taught the value of philolo­gy, the study of language and literature. Philology was almost foremost in the programs and enterprises supported by the university -- second only to institutional politics.

What had attracted Lars to the school in the first place had been the vigorous touting of its cutting-edge electronic educational environment, with an array of technological resources adding significant pedagogical value. He'd felt drawn to the Department of Communications, Philology, and Semantics, chaired by Professor Graham Felle, a pioneer in the field of Biosemiotics, the study of communication and signification in living systems, and the author of "Transforming Sophistry and Hermeneutics: The Eros of Rhetoric."

Lars majored in Semantics, the study of how words mean things. He focused his attention on Labeling Theory, which looked at the ways humans both shaped and narrowed the world through their persistence in calling things and people names. It thrilled Lars to hear enterprising scientists proposing that thought, knowledge, and rhetoric had made the world. His advisor, Professor Felle himself, insisted "the Eros in Rhetoric" -- e-rhetoric he had dubbed it -- was not only basic in human thinking, it was at the very foundation of all knowledge, understanding, and meaning -- e-rhetoric was fundamental even to existence itself. At the heart of existence, Felle lectured, lay e-rhetoric, the communicated exchange of desires, which came before every other kind of communication.

Lars attended classes, studied hard, and did all right. It was a co-ed campus, but Lars wasn't there for the girls. He wanted to pick everybody's brains -- all the boys, girls, and professors of both sexes -- all of varying kinds and degrees of sadness, lightheartedness, character, and charm. This school was for him in every way a paradise for collecting, cataloging, indexing, storing, and retrieving data. Lars was avid for conversing with his peers. He loved the long discursive binges -- all-night discourse with the best of them.

One day Lars noticed that however innocent the substance of a conversation appeared on the surface, inevitably it proved imbued or tainted with the opinions, judgments, biases, and constraints of the intellectual community -- namely, Professor Graham Felle's school. Embedded in the institution's puzzling politics, Lars found an almost valueless pursuit of technological and pedagogical mastery for its own sake.

Felle told his students, "The practice of rhetoric has too long been simply what everyone was doing when they engaged with the world through encounter, interpretation, and exchange. That world, built from rhetorical foundations, is ended. E-rhetoric is more. Those knowledgeable about the laws of nature; those calling themselves scientists; those illuminating the world to any who inquire; those lighting the way for any in darkness; those correcting any in the wrong: you will know e-rhetoric for what it is: true."

Behind Professor Felle's seemingly harmless rhetoric lurked a virulent and massive power play: If existence itself had been constructed through e-rhetoric, then those who should properly be in power would be those who were e-rhetorically "in the know." Though, yes, e-rhetoric could to a point be understood within the traditions and discourse practices of standard rhetorical theory and philosophy, those now "truly in the know" -- the elite keepers of the keys -- were only the Felleians. To them one now would have to turn for dispensation of true knowledge, insight, and grace. Every social issue would need to be re-explored via the e-rhetorician's tools-in-trade. Felle knew the opportunity here! -- the attendant prestige, celebrity, power, and money.

Ideas straying from the star professor's ideology were not encouraged. Under the sway of his certainly powerful ideas, students ceased examining their own values, believing in the fine apolitical objectivity of the newly learned discourse. The shared concepts came to seem normal to them -- as plain and true as common sense. Running with the ruling paradigm was cool -- and nobody wanted to be uncool.

Though claims of objectivity rose up in a chorus from professors and students, Lars could see the conversations were ideologically positioned -- none were neutral -- masking someone's consolidating and perpetuating something for some purpose. Certain banners for certain political and ideological values were to be carried by everyone on campus -- and off campus, too. Unsanctioned discourse would not be tolerated.

Lars felt no inclination to succumb to political pressure or follow anybody into a dead end. Though he could almost taste the pleasure of being accepted by Professor Felle, his colleagues, and Lars' own peers -- how he wanted to identify with that professional image so often held out to him! -- he'd been offered a golden key, and a golden path to go down -- he opted out. He felt no compulsion to act antagonistically, but he knew intelligence was given people for something better than to collude with the reigning guardians of the Academy. With intelligence came a responsibility -- to resist marching in step.

It was in this season of tribulation that Lars met, and instantly fell in love with, Andrea Storrs -- the little sister of his brother Sid's closest childhood friend, Barry, deceased. Their eyes met.

“Lars!” she said. “It's you.

This struck him as being a thing so completely plain and true, he wanted to cry. Talk about the Eros in Rhetoric! -- e-rhetoric. Here she was. He understood at once how fundamental she was. She was at the heart of existence.

He took to taking long walks on the beach with her. Lars wrote poems to her; he drew her; he painted life-size portraits of her. In 1973, Andrea received a Bachelors degree in Physics; Lars got a Bachelors degree in English Composition. They were married by Thanksgiving.

In the summer of 1974, the year Lars and Andrea moved to New England, Lars' brother Sid, after earning an undergraduate degree in electronic engineering followed by a Masters in Business Administration, went to work for a genius, Colin Carr, at Los Angeles based Fertuity Computers, Inc.

In Boston, while Andrea pursued a medical career, Lars achieved a graduate degree in Information Science. The two lingered on in Massachusetts, Andrea working as a physical therapist and Lars getting work as the director of a village library just northwest of Framingham. In the mid-1980s, the couple bought a house, then the kids came along -- a son, then twin daughters.

Lars knew what he had -- a beautiful wife; their precious son; the remarkable twins. Lars revealed this deep sentiment to his wife one night after they'd hired a babysitter and gone out to enjoy a quiet restaurant meal with wine by candlelight.

"Is it everything you ever dreamed of?" Andrea asked

“I still dream often that I save your brother's life,” Lars confessed, the wine loosening the locks on that taboo subject.

“Lars, it's the way the world works," she said, touching her husband's hands clasped together worriedly atop the exquisite cross-grain cut oak table. Then, taking her wine glass with her, Andrea stood and went around the table to sit down next to him. She proposed a toast: "Let's be grateful we're alive, and for our having found each other," she said. "And let's be grateful for our healthy kids."

Had Lars been superstitious, he might have knocked a few times on the tabletop. “Do you have everything you ever dreamed of?" Lars asked, turning the question back on her.

“I've wanted many things," Andrea whispered, smiling as she took her husband's right hand and placed it surreptitiously on her exposed thigh. "Mostly, I think, looking back now, I wanted to marry a good man and to have lots of children.” she said. “Of course I also wanted that the man should be a good father to the children,” she said.

Lars wished he could talk with her about her brother's death -- the seizures, his intracranial pressure, the ataxic gait, hydrocephalus, sarcoma, carcinoma -- and Doctor Lax. “Am I a good father?" he worried aloud.

"You are," she affirmed, her shining azure eyes brightening. The two left the restaurant, returned home and, after Lars took the babysitter home, they made sure the kids' doors were closed and enjoyed almost an all-nighter. "I love you, I love you, I love you," Andrea Storrs-Donnelly cried out again and again and again. "Give me kids! I want kids! Oh God, I love these kids!" she shrieked. It wasn't until around three in the morning that she finally fell asleep in her husband's arms. Lars was wide awake.

He hoped he was a good father -- he tried to be. It struck him how everything had changed so much since he was a kid.

One night Sean, four years old, about bowled Lars over. Father and son had said prayers together, and Lars was tucking him in. The little boy's eyes brightened as his voice sank. "Daddy, why isn't there just nothing?" On another occasion, Sean had sighed, wondering aloud, "Daddy, what are we going to do about me?" Lars knew there was nothing in particular his boy was worrying about, it was just a general feeling of being out of focus. Sean patiently awaited his being fine tuned. Lars embraced the boy warmly, speaking most reassuringly. "You're fine," he said. "Everything's going to be fine." But Sean's question did get under his skin. It hit home. What would Lars and Andrea to do with a house full of kids? What would come of all the kids? How were they going to grow up okay, what with all the crazy commotion going on in the world? What was going to be done about everything and everyone?

You looked around you, there were all these wildly beckoning things -- insane web sites, pointless computer games, noisy download programs, intrusive viruses, mad hijackers -- this electronic world was one of almost endless, unresolveable complications. Ditto for the quotidian world. You could leave Lars Donnelly's house, get in a car, and travel on the surrounding highways in a huge network of roads in which the house was situated like a speck of dust caught in an intricate maze or web. All along those highways were resurrected factories containing the offices of the major players in the Computer Revolution, the Internet Revolution, the Dot.Com Revolution, and the eBook Revolution.

These tempting revolutions called to Lars, who left the library field in 1997, intending never to look back. Having worked in public libraries for twenty-five years, Lars now ventured into the emerging eBook industry, going to work for Nate Groves, the founder of eBookNow, Inc. in Marlboro, Massachusetts. A few years after that, when Nate left eBookNow to join Rich Segal at eBookStacks, which Rich had founded in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, the two invited Lars to be on their team there.

Andrea wasn't convinced he was doing the right thing. “It just feels to me like a big bubble that's going to just get impossibly big and then -- POP!"

Lars tried to explain it to his wife. "I don't want my kids to be asking me in future years, 'What did you do in the Internet Revolution, daddy?' and have to tell them that I'd just played it safe -- that I'd shown cowardice," he said.

"Will it pay the bills?” his wife asked angrily, stamping a foot hard on the floor with each syllable.

"A man has got to do what a man has got to do," Lars stood his ground, avoiding eye contact. "You have to reach for what you know is in you."

“I'm just going to have to trust you on this." She took her husband by the ears and made him look at her. Lars saw her lips were quivering. "Will they be able to let us have vacations?” she squeaked.

"We'll go to California" Lars promised. "We'll visit Sid in Hollywood and go see how my dad is doing in Oceanside."

Andrea shook her head. “Maybe,” she said. “Let's see what happens.”

"Let's see," Lars nodded. "Maybe."

In the summer of the year 2000, the computer guru Colin Carr left Fertuity Computers to go to work for the Disney Company. He did not take along with him his past Fertuity team, which had included Sid Donnelly, who was heartbroken. Though his brother Lars' heart went out to Sid for his being left behind by Carr, Lars was excited about Carr's own prospects -- Carr who over the years had grown into the leading international spokesman for the inevitible end of paper book publishing as the march of electronic books went forward. Lars felt this new affiliation gave clear indication of a strong new wave. Lars felt he could now better defend his own having somewhat whimsically left his job as a public library director to go to work at eBookNow and eBookStacks, what with the eBook guru Colin Carr himself going to work for Walt Disney.

In the autumn of 2000, the year Colin Carr went to work for Disney, Lar's only son, Sean, a college freshman studying Information Technology, crossed the country to California with his father. Lars' two bosses at eBookStacks had paid in advance for their own attending, in mid-October, a big “Libraries and eBooks” conference in Anaheim, but now the two were called away to New York on business. With only a little wheedling, Lars got their conference and plane tickets -- free. Right away he called his brother Sid, then living in San Diego. Sid said he'd reserve a room for Lars and Sean at the Inn at Laguna Beach where he, his former boss the rising eBook Revolution guru Colin Carr, and Carr's people all were staying.

"I trust you won't do anything that's going to embarass me," Sean said, red-faced, once they'd boarded the plane. Lars was struggling to fasten his seatbelt. "What is it with you and simple mechanical devices?" the teen muttered resignedly, buckling up his father. The two were flying to Orange County. They'd land at the John Wayne Airport after nightfall, rent a car, and make their way to the North Coast Highway, then head down to the Inn at Laguna.

They arrived at the Inn after midnight. The place was quiet. The desk clerk told them Colin Carr had turned in early, and his people had done likewise. Sid had left a note for his brother and nephew informing them when and where they ought best to connect with him in the morning. They slept less than five hours. Sean got up first -- bright and early. Eager to spend time with his uncle, he was already showering even before the alarm clock went off. While Lars showered, Sean wove his way through the Inn, going in search of his uncle, his uncle's legendary mentor, and the mentor's mentees. Sid told him Colin Carr had arranged for the big bunch of his people to go together to the conference in a bus, and that Sean was more than welcome to tag along.

Sid joined Lars in his rental car, the two traveling from Laguna over to the Anaheim Convention Center. "This is going to be a great day," Sid commented, turning on the radio, searching for a golden oldies station.

"Sean is really up for this," Lars said. "Hey, I wanted to tell you. I'm really sorry about what happened betwen you and Carr."

"Don't go there," Sid spoke softly. Lars could see his brother bravely mustering confidence, tapping his fingers heavily on the dashboard in syncopation with the music. "It's not over till it's over."

They reached the convention center around half past eight, giving them plenty of time to take advantage of the free Continental Breakfast while hob-nobbing, or not, with the growing throngs of librarians, library trustees, heads of library Friends groups, chief executive officers, directors of operations, product managers, senior and junior business development managers, senior and junior systems analysts, and a broad swath of consultants, hackers, geeks, and gawkers.

At nine sharp, attendees piled into the auditorium for formal Opening Remarks, including a review of the eBook industry and its growing relationship with public, academic, and school libraries. America's resilient libraries were coming to the rescue of the dying eBook movement even as the growing eBook Movement was coming to the rescue of America's dying libraries. At the close of these rousing initial observations, conference attendees dispersed to adjoining smaller chambers for assorted break-up sessions -- workshops, lectures, presentations, and panel discussions.

Lars left Sean in the care of Sid and went alone to meetings -- “Two Backs to Wash,” (libraries facing "slashed budgets, reduced hours, staff cutbacks, depleted book budgets" even as the eBook industry faced a "lack of customers, a shrinking pool of backers, and growing industry malaise"); “Eminently Available, Downloadable, Brandable, and Loanable” (illuminating a virtual worldwide bookstore offering "a million eBooks from a million trade publishers" and a new means for circulating the material); and “Pitching eBooks in the Digital Field” (presenters hawking their many and varying digital media systems solutions for expanding service to libraries through aggregating and managing digital content for patron use, mainstreaming copyrighted eBook content).

At noon, Lars met up with his son, his brother, and Colin Carr and joined in a kind of grand procession carrying Carr and his people to their reserved seats at the head table in the Great Hall where, after lunch, between one and two o'clock, the legendary eBook spokesman would be the post-luncheon featured speaker, him talking on "Books, eBooks, and Future Interactions Among Publishers, Technology Providers, and Libraries.”

The legend of Colin Carr had grown out of his having seen, early on in the game, what he'd called "obvious links" (not so obvious to others) between the history of printing, the advent of the Computer Age, and the (then) coming eBook Revolution. He’d long maintained the invention of the computer was the second greatest thing in history -- after the invention of the book. Computers connected to the Internet were like huge libraries full of books, vast communications systems that were continuously updatable and accessible from anywhere on earth. Though Colin Carr had long seen the important role libraries would play in the evolution of eBooks, he’d been largely ignored, through nearly an entire decade, on this point. When, in the late 1990s, it had become clear to eBook industry leaders that they'd themselves kept the revolution dampened down -- had assured the eBook revolution would happen in very slow motion -- they'd suddenly woken up to Carr’s insight. All along he’d been saying the natural home for eBooks would be eBook filling stations -- namely, modern libraries. No other agent or service could expand the market for writers and eContent providers so well as public libraries.

Carr, speaking eloquently of the Internet, libraries, eBook filling stations, and the important role Walt Disney would continue to play in worlds still to be imagined and achieved, about brought the house down. In the afterglow of the great man's speech, Sid took Sean around and introduced him to more of his former colleagues and associates while Lars dropped in on two panel discussions, one featuring eBook industry leaders arguing over the production and cataloging of electronic and digital media, the other illuminating eBook pricing (eBook publishing representatives shouting one another down, each explaining why he or she had the one absolute fair and balanced eBook pricing model, created in the best interests of copyright holders, publishers, and eBooksellers while best serving the needs of libraries in providing value to their patrons, and so on).

The whole shebang came to an end in the Convention Center Ballroom, where the conference's last stragglers were met with a vast array of food spread over several tables -- cheeses, fruits, vegetables, dips, and drinks -- all on the house. As Carr and his people were itching to get back to Laguna Beach, Lars strode quickly through the room behind Sid, Sean, and retinue out of the gorgeous house of glass to the parking lot, where their cars and the bus were waiting to carry everybody back to Laguna.

It was late evening when they got back to the Inn. The sun was going down. Lars, his son, his brother, Colin Carr, and Carr’s coterie of followers all filled their cups and plates with food and drinks from the hotel’s dining room buffet. Lars sat outside with Sid and Carr and ate and talked about times gone by. The three recalled how, in the old days, there’d been a man with a long beard who'd welcomed all the cars coming into Laguna on the Pacific Coast road, which then had been the only way in to the town. Eiler Larsen was his name. He’d come to America from Aarhus, Denmark. He’d been a gardener, but he’d spent most of his time just welcoming people -- The Laguna Greeter. He'd been an old man even then, in the 1950s and 60s, but he'd lived on all the way into the 1970s and had died a very old man.

Now Sid and Carr were talking about computers and the Internet and worlds still waiting to be invented. Suddenly Sid stood and slapped Lars on the back, saying something like Brother, this is going to be one great long night. Lars knew Sid was going to go to work on Carr, trying to win his old job back -- or some new version of it. Sid said he was glad Sean was so enjoying the good company of Carr's people. He was so glad Lars and Sean had flown out. Did Lars want to join him and Carr in getting stronger drinks at the bar?

Lars excused himself, saying he wanted to go check out a room at the Inn where it had been advertised some dancing would be going on -- Rumanian folk dances. Flyers on telephone poles around town had announced its being open to everyone. About thirty people had showed up. Lars danced with them for nearly an hour. Then, fairly winded, he slipped out.

In another room, Sean had been mixing and mingling with Colin Carr’s brilliant young adherents or followers or zombies or whatever else you cared to call these geeks in beanbags with their laptops, swigging whiskey straight from bottles. Assemblages of even benign cells, infiltrating vital areas, can cause malignant outcomes, Lars pondered, weakening. Get a grip, he told himself. He knew how Sean had been looking forward to staying up late, all night if need be, to get new insights and learn insider tricks of the trade from the brilliant young disciples of Colin Carr.

Lars passed by the open doorway of the room and saw his son out of the corner of his eye. Sean was sitting in the midst of the guru’s people, smiling. The father entered the room, advancing toward his son just to say hello and show interest, but Sean waved his dad away -- as the sons of fathers often do. Sean didn’t want to be interrupted -- he didn’t want his old dad, bald Lars, stepping up and making a big fool of himself, bumbling and fumbling in the company of Sean's excellent peers.

He went up to his room and lay down. Restless, Lars got back up and searched through a few drawers, hoping to find a Gideon’s Bible, but the drawers were all empty. He took out his handheld computer and started looking at an eBook he’d uploaded back in Massachusetts, just prior to leaving the house. Cancerous cells can spread or seed (metastasize) and destroy healthy tissue, so they cannot function properly, Lars read there. Malignant tumors strive to reach the farthest depths and regions of the brain. He clicked out of this depressing medical text, searching his handheld PDA for e-mail now, to see if any news from his wife or daughters had come in. Seeing none, he e-mailed them quickly, leaving messages saying everything was fine. "Just come back safely," he knew his wife would say.

Lars went down to the Inn’s front lobby to see about getting the day’s paper. They were completely out of papers so Lars just stood a little while, killing time, staring at a tall display rack stuffed with proliferating colorful promotional brochures advertising Disneyland and other area attractions. Then he went back up and went to bed.

Just after three in the morning, Sid ran into Lars' room yelling, shaking his brother roughly. “Lars!" he pleaded. "Wake up! Something’s happened It’s Sean!”

Lars sprang to his feet.

In a dark corner of one of the Inn’s rooms, they were working over his body. The medics had no idea what killed him. It had happened fast. Sean had taken some exotic substance or other and swilled it down with whiskey with the best of them. The concoction, whatever it was, had stopped Sean's heart. “They’re saying he may as well have injected dry ice into his blood stream,” Sid whispered, touching his brother's shoulder lightly. In Colin Carr's view, death had come as quickly as one clicks on a link going from one web site to another.

In the dark chamber, among the geniuses, the son -- even this son -- was there one moment, gone the next. Under a full moon. In sight of the sea.