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uncertain tone of her voice, as she tried to piece together the past. “By the way, how far back do we have office records? Correspondence, and cal books?”
    “I'd have to check. I know I have about three years.”
    “And what about earlier?”
    “Earlier? How much earlier?”
    “Ten years ago,” he said.
    “Gee, that'd be when you were in Cupertino. Do they have that stuff in storage down there? Did they put it on fiche, or was it just thrown out?”
    “I don't know.”
    “You want me to check?”
    “Not now,” he said, and clicked off: He didn't want her making any inquiries in Cupertino now. Not right now.
    Sanders rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. His thoughts drifting back over time.
    Again, he saw the stained-glass flower. It was oversize, bright, banal. Sanders had always been embarrassed by the banality of it. In those days, he had lived in one of the apartment complexes on Merano Drive. Twenty units clustered around a chil y little swimming pool. Everybody in the building worked for a high-tech company. Nobody ever went in the pool. And Sanders wasn't around much.
    Those were the days when he flew with Garvin to Korea twice a month. The days when they al flew coach. They couldn't even afford business class.
    And he remembered how he would come home, exhausted from the long flight, and the first thing he would see when he got to his apartment was that damned stainedglass flower on the door.
    And Meredith, in those days, was partial to white stockings, a white garter belt, little white flowers on the snaps with
    “Tom?” He looked up. Cindy was at the doorway. She said, “If you want to see Don Cherry, you'd better go now because you have a ten-thirty with Gary Bosak.”
    He felt as if she was treating him like an invalid. “Cindy, I'm fine.”
    “I know. Just a reminder.”
    “Okay, I'l go now.”
    As he hurried down the stairs to the third floor, he felt relieved at the distraction.
    Cindy was right to get him out of the office. And he was curious to see what Cherry's team had done with the Corridor.
    The Corridor was what everyone at DigiCom cal ed VIE: the Virtual Information Environment. VIE was the companion piece to Twinkle, the second major element in the emerging future of digital information as envisioned by DigiCom.
    In the future, information was going to be stored on disks, or made available in large databases that users would dial into over telephone lines. At the moment, users saw information displayed on flat screenseither televisions or computer screens. That had been the traditional way of handling information for the last thirty years. But soon, there would be new ways to present information. The most radical, and the most exciting, was virtual environments. Users wore special glasses to see computer-generated, threedimensional environments which al owed them to feel as though they were literal y moving through another world.
    Dozens of high-tech companies were racing to develop virtual environments. It was exciting, but very difficult, technology. At DigiCom, VIE was one of Garvin's pet projects; he had thrown a lot of money at it; he had had Don Cherry's programmers working on it around the clock for two years.
    And so far, it had been nothing but trouble.
    The sign on the door said “VIE” and underneath, “When Reality Is Not Enough.”
    Sanders inserted his card in the slot, and the door clicked open. He passed through an anteroom, hearing a halfdozen voices shouting from the main equipment room beyond. Even in the anteroom, he noticed a distinctly nauseating odor in the air.
    Entering the main room, he came upon a scene of utter chaos. The windows were thrown wide; there was the astringent smel of cleaning fluid. Most of the programmers were on the floor, working with disassembled equipment. The VIE
    units lay scattered in pieces, amid a tangle of multicolored cables. Even the black circular walker pads had been taken apart, the rubber bearings being cleaned one by one.