Algorithm - Book 1 - The Medallion

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

            The Brookhaven National Laboratories occupy about six square miles of Upton, a small rural community in the center of Long Island.  The Labs were built on the site of an old Army base in 1947 in collaboration between academic researchers and the government to promote basic research in selected aspects of the atomic sciences.  Adam remembered that much from a high school field trip to the Labs.  He especially remembered the eye-opening demonstrations: sparking Tesla coils and humongous cyclotrons, which left his teenage mind with a lasting impression—a place full of disheveled and wide-eyed mad scientists. Quivering electric arcs surrounded them while they staggered about in their cluttered laboratories, switching on all manner of convoluted, dark and noisy machinery.

And then of course, there was the sewn up body lying lifelessly on a belted gurney.

            "How much farther?"

            Adam blinked his eyes. "Just a few minutes more and we'll be at the front gate."

            Linda shook her head. "What were you thinking about?"

            "The last time I was here … as a student in high school. It was on a field trip. Did you know who made the first video game?"

            "Wasn't that one of the first Atari games? Pong? Maybe around the 1970s?"

            "Yeah, good guess, but Atari wasn't the first."

            Linda rolled her eyes and Adam added, "Some people think it was Magnavox, with their Odyssey systems in the mid-seventies." 

            Linda shrugged her shoulders and eased back into her seat as Adam went on. "Actually, I saw the first video game here at Brookhaven on that high school field trip.  It was 'Tennis for Two', invented by a guy named Higginbottom, or something like that.  It was an analog computer system, knobs and dials, and all of it took place on a five-inch oscilloscope screen. And that was back around 1958, almost twenty years before Atari or Magnavox."

            Linda interrupted his soliloquy with apparent disinterest, which in a subtle kind of way disappointed Adam. "We're here."

            A large sign indicated the entrance to the Labs.  As they turned into the driveway leading to a gatehouse, Linda said, "It was Higginbotham."

            Adam gave her a double take. He pulled down his window to greet the gatehouse guard. 

She's amazing.

***

            Dr. Percy Wild pulled up at the gatehouse in a golf cart and stopped just in front of the two waiting there.