On his author's desktop, Mike Heppner has provided some fragments from the text of the early version of THE EGG CODE, ones that didn't necessarily make it into the final version of the book, along with a conversation via email that he had with the book's interior designer, Knopf's own Virginia Tan. You can thus here both get a taste of the content of the book and some of its characters along with getting a sense of the physical object that contains the story -- its design and creation, what fonts and why, and how that design may affect a reader's experience of the novel itself.

The Early Days of the Internet: 1967
Bolt Beranek and Newman Get On Board

"Excuse me? Who's talking now?"

"You are, Maestro Bernstein."

Lenny strode to the back of the auditorium and turned to face the stage. Raising both of his hands, he waited until every last member of the orchestra was looking at him. From the footlights, the area under the mezzanine--where Lenny stood--was a black band, a vacant, soupy haze. The orchestra watched the darkness, enraptured by the notion that he was out there.

Lenny tapped the microphone clipped to the lapel of his Nehru jacket and cleared his throat. "We're in a race against time, you and I. We don't know this, but this is happening right now, maybe in another part of the globe. Bar 107--what is Dmitri telling us?" Passing his hand over his face, he began to sway, singing the phrase in a strangely unmelodic voice. "NAAH NAAH N'NAAAH... this is Stalin, right here. The rise of Stalin, the rise of the oppression. The dead fields, the peasants stomping on flat feet. The terror of the cities. The horror of an idea." Seizing his temples, he shook his head. "I've gotta stop. Bernard..." An elderly man with a towel draped over his forearm half-stood in his seat and leaned forward expectantly. "Walk across the plaza. My office upstairs. The ivory netsuke with the scarab on the back. Make sure it's still there." Bernard nodded quickly and scuttled out of the building.

Reaching under the folds of his jacket, Lenny removed a battery pack and turned it over twice in his hands. "How do I do this?" he muttered.

"Sir? M-maestro?" Gimping lightly, Leo Beranek approached the conductor from a few rows down. Lenny hesitated, then relinquished the pack. Nervous around gadgets, the engineer from Bolk Beranek and Newman handled the console and switched it off. "Do that again," said Lenny, and the other man obliged, demonstrating the maneuver with the patience of a school teacher--see Lenny? on? then off? then on again? then... do we see that? The microphone crackled for a moment, then went silent. "Mr. Beranek..." He smiled wearily. "This is what I need sometimes. My life is filled with such despair. And now John Coltrane is dead. The clouds have gathered." Calling over the rows of empty seats, he shouted, "Twenty minutes, people. Let's get some air."

Beranek followed the Maestro out the back door of Philharmonic Hall, where the hot Autumn sun made the entire Lincoln Center complex glow and throb--winking flecks of minerals gleaming in the concrete. A row of reporters waited by the door. Beranek folded his hands and stared at the pavement as Lenny entertained a few questions about the escalating violence in Vietnam.

"I think that... it's a situation where... you've got two people of diverse interests... and when they come into conflict... it raises all sorts of questions. And this is no different from what you're seeing every day... in Boston, in St. Louis, even here in New York, where young black youths are routinely beaten for no cause other than they happen to be wearing a certain item of clothing or what have you."

Lenny and Beranek skipped up the steps to the Julliard School, pausing on the concrete overpass to watch the hot dog sellers standing under their brightly colored parasols, handling greasy links with steel tongs and selling them to violinists in exchange for fifty cents, a quarter. Lenny gestured at the crowd.

"You know what I love most about this city, Mr. Beranek?" He turned away from the rail and raised his collar, causing his scarf to bunch up around his neck. "The compartmentalization. How I get on the subway, and then I get off and I feel like I'm in another city. This is fascinating!" A group of pedestrians gathered, hearing his voice. "This, we don't get enough of in the world. The compartmentalization. We do this, and then we do this, and then we do this," each 'this' was its own compartment, a crisp knife-slash made with the palm of his hand, "And then we're in a situation where, okay, now what do we do?"

Beranek smiled, congratulating himself for standing here in the heart of the Upper West Side, having a private conversation with the composer of West Side Story. Something to tell the boys back at Cambridge. Then again, given the aggravation this Lincoln Center fiasco had cost the company over the past few years, he decided it was best to keep his pride in check. The research partnership of Bolt Beranek and Newman was an agency on the brink of extinction. Everything depended upon the wave of this man's wand (or baton, is what they call it).

For his part, Beranek resented the negative attention, though he shared his feelings with only his nearest colleagues. The press, in covering the debacle at Philharmonic Hall, had treated BBN like a pack of amateurs. Leo Beranek was no amateur. Both he and Richard Bolt had worked as acousticians since the 1940s. Beranek himself had designed the acoustics for movie theaters, concert halls, even office buildings. In conjunction with Bolt, he'd worked on the United Nations project, a job so lucrative that it'd kept the company in business throughout the Eisenhower Administration. Just four years ago (four short, sad years), Beranek and his partners had spent some time in Washington, analyzing the Kennedy tapes on behalf of the Warren Commission. This New York gig was a footnote--an honor, sure, but more of the same--another building, another board of directors, another egomaniacal concert conductor to contend with. It was the egomaniacal conductor--that was the difference. Not every conductor was Leonard Bernstein. And when Bernstein gave a statement to the press, the press generally believed it. That junk about the war? C'mon! He was handsome, sure, a sweet songwriter, without a doubt- Maahh-reeeeeee... okay, it's a pretty tune. But as a physicist, the man was out to lunch.

Scientifically speaking, Bernstein didn't know the first thing about acoustics. He knew what he liked, he knew what he didn't, that was it.

"Let me tell you something about... my art." Lenny pulled down on his cheeks and sighed. Beranek saw that his fingernails were well-manicured; a gold watch made a tight band around his wrist, cutting off the circulation. "My art is a tender beast. It's also a great tradition. It's a tradition which I have intercepted-" He gestured with his hands, intercepting something and passing it over to the other side of his body. "-and which one day--and hopefully many years in the future, though you never know with these migraine headaches--but one day, I too will pass this on, this great tradition, the tradition of music. Of communicating ohne Worte, this is the magic. The celestial... garb. The wide... vacuous... realms." He frowned at the sky, seeing the words, pulling them down in random combinations. "This I seek. This is my grand calling. Grandiloquent. Entropy. Canon. Canonical. Canon. And we hear of this all the time. In the music. We hear of this in the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony by Gustav Mahler, bar 89, when the strings and low woodwinds give us the theme--BAAHH BAAH B'BAAHH--but very softly!" Grabbing the other man's arm, he asked, "Do you want something to eat?"

Beranek shook his head and they continued down the other side of the overpass. Students--girls mostly, girls tootling around with tiny instrument cases, flutes, clarinets, three-quarter size violins--gawked near the entrance to the school, pointing at the maestro, curtseying in their knee-socks (a few, the most star-struck of the bunch, lurked inside the foyer, pretending not to care, sucking on their unlit cigarettes, fixing their Beatle bangs with rapid swipes of the hand). Entering an unmarked door on the side of the building, the two men rode an elevator to the second floor. The cart moved slowly. Lenny stared at the carpet, darkly fascinated by the pattern of wide stripes versus thin. The overhead lights--multi-rows of tiny yellow bulbs--made weird splotches on his skin. The doors opened, and they passed a series of receptionists on their way to the Maestro's office. Once inside, Lenny fixed them both a Scotch, then flopped down in one of the leather recliners near the door.

He pointed at his desk, indicating the unoccupied chair turned toward the window. "That is where I normally sit," he said. "When I'm in a certain frame of mind. But I'm not in that frame of mind right now, so I don't want to sit there."

Beranek sipped at his drink. The taste reminded him of the cheap cologne the geeks at BBN always wore to the office formals at the end of the year. "That's great," he said, taking a seat.

"I have several frames of mind." Lenny downed half of his drink and set the glass next to his chair. "I believe this is true of everyone. Where you go into different modes. One of my frames of mind, I call Burt Baxter. Burt is a hard working man who believes in God and who deeply resents the way the federal government has marginalized the lower classes into a state of economic dependency. Another person--and these are not real people, but simply different ways of looking at aspects of myself--is Priscilla." Lenny's features softened; gazing fondly out the window, he pressed his palm against the side of his face. "Priscilla is a sweet girl who loves white wine and romantic cha-cha music from the 40s and 50s, and who dreams each night of that elusive someone who will cart her away from this daily drudgery and take care of her and rub her feet... and do her taxes, which I haven't even looked at yet."

Studying a piece of statuary propped against the desk (some fertility relic--huge gonads with a spike through the balls), Beranek dimly wondered whether Lenny realized that his taxes weren't due for another six months. Probably not. These celebrities. The senator who never buys his own groceries, that sort of thing: forty-eight cents for a loaf of bread?! But we need our geniuses--flakes and all. Cupping his palm around the base of his glass, Beranek looked at the fertility doll and then back at Lenny, awed by the immensity of the man's reputation. World-renowned! A feeling of nausea, akin to the time he first met President Johnson, swept over him, and he could taste the Scotch burning in the back of his throat. The concentrated presence of fame. A big shape thrust into a small space. Lenny's every action--the way he turned in his seat, reaching for his glass-- carried with it an almost documentary sense of importance. Slide #4892--Leonard Bernstein relaxing in his Manhattan office, November 8, 1967. Other man, unknown.

"Maestro Bernstein." Beranek coughed into his fist. "I've had a chance to recalculate some of our reverberation times, taking into account the new additions, the canopies over the speakers and so on."

Frowning, Lenny topped his glass with soda water and swirled the ice around. "I don't like those things. They spoil the symmetry on stage." He used his free hand to plot out invisible points in the air--here, here, here. "Me, the orchestra, the rest of the space. It upsets the balance."

"Well," Beranek began patiently. "We can do without the canopies. But then what happens is, you're going to get a long reverberation time. Which is fine, under certain circumstances."

"Can I tell you what I want?" Suddenly very excited, Lenny sat up in his seat, placing his hands on his knees. "Now- this is my dream. And you just listen, and then tell me I'm crazy." Beranek nodded, expecting the eccentric, the impossible to achieve. "I want it where it sounds perfect no matter what." Wide waves. Fanning hands. See how easy? "Where if I'm playing Le Sacre du Printemps, second dance, bar 47--YATduhduhDATduhduhduhDAumDAumDATduhduh-" Lenny made striking gestures, jabbing the air with his index finger. "I want it so the percussion rolls off the back of the auditorium. A deafening howl. The spinning cosmos. The groan of primitive Man. They are there, they are naked, and we are apart. But then-" A new expression. High, arched eyebrows. Heavy lids. Sway... to the left!... and now... to the right! "This is Mozart. The Jupiter. A much smaller sound. The Age of Enlightenment. Courts and palaces. The carriage pulls up. We see the baron getting out of his compartment. His shoes are black with buckles. The ladies nod. May I have this dance? Oh sir, you're being too forward." Ditching the riff, he took a swig of Scotch and held it in his mouth a moment before swallowing. "See, that's where you don't want the long reverberation time. Otherwise you lose what the French horn is telling us. The French horn is telling us a very specific thing. The French horn is saying, look--I know something that they don't know. This is why I say 'E' when they say 'G'. (I'm extemporizing as the French horn now). This is why I do these things--always hinting at the minor. Things are not what they seem. Nationalism. The invention of the steam engine. Now the New World is not so far away. Let's colonize the globe. The Congo. Southeast Asia. This is our destiny, made manifest." Standing now, Lenny walked over to the window and looked out at the complex; huge construction cranes lurked behind the concert hall, frozen in positions of inactivity. "Oh Mr. Beranek," he whispered, his Scotchy breath making a cloud against the glass. "I wish I could go back to that simpler time. The 1920s. Growing up. I can see my mother. Short woman. Always there. The ice box!" His lips crinkled around a nostalgic smile. "Oh, the ice box on the ledge. My shoes. Leather. Worn in the heel. I can almost feel them. The cracked texture. I want to take them in my hands. I want to talk to them. Me, the shoes. Sharing our experiences. The sorrows. Our unrealized ideals. The daily pursuit of a vision."

Beranek set his drink--hardly touched--on the edge of the desk and settled back into his chair. Crossing his legs, he had to turn his ankle to keep from kicking over a Korean vase giddy with peacock feathers. "Well sir," he said, speaking to the Maestro's back. "I think we can do all that... that you mentioned. It's just going to require some modifications to the original plan. And that, of course, is going to incur some additional costs which... may or may not be substantial."

Shrugging with nervous energy, Lenny whirled around and stormed back to his chair. "I don't see why it can't just... happen! Magically!" Beranek frowned, mulling it over. "Well, things don't just happen magically. I... I wish they did-"

Lenny interrupted, raising a finger. "I saw it once... where they had it... in a film, it was. It was a German film with..." He looked away, clucking his tongue. "I don't happen to recall, but I'll have my secretary look it up." He pressed a button mounted to the wall, and in a moment a young woman appeared at the door, holding a pot of coffee in one hand and a watering can in the other. The watering can was a porcelain bust of Alban Berg, complete with a spout wedged between the composer's lips.

"Maestro?"

"Christine..." He snapped his fingers. "...the German film..."

"German...?"

"The one where... the little people..."

The secretary made a red bud with her lips, poised on the verge of speaking, of uttering a letter, possibly a 'U', possibly a 'G'.

Lenny went on: "They're in a glade... you know what a glade is?"

Christine nodded; a steaming trail of hot coffee trickled over the side of the pot. "They're in a glade, and their village has just been destroyed by evil winds. (It might've been Marlene Dietrich, but I don't think so). So what they do is, they get together and they elect a representative. And that representative--who is the lead in the picture--climbs out of the glade, and it's a beautiful sequence, with Berlioz I think, through the woods, past the glen until he finally gets to an open field. And it's there in the field, where he gets down and he prays to the magic beings--which is where we come in," he added, pointing at Beranek, who instantly perked up, daunted by the prospect of somehow fitting into this Teutonic scenario. "And he prays, and he says 'oh ye spirits, save us from this great harm that has befallen us'--all in German, you have to hear it in the original. And as he sleeps, these glimmering beads come down..." He made the glimmering beads with his fingers, waving each one independently in a raindrop motion. "And they converge over the land, swarming in great swirls, until by morning the entire village has been rebuilt in all of its pristine glory, and right over the entrance there's a sign that reads..." He squinted, trying to see the sign, the Gothic letters, the arcane message. "'...that I should come again... that I should come again, let it be known that a pure man...'" His voice trailed off, lost in a look of dreamy bliss. "This came out in the nineteen thirties, I'm almost sure." Both Beranek and the secretary held their positions, unable to guess. "Not distributed in the States," Lenny added, but it was no good, and so he dismissed the woman with a wave. Pulling on his jacket, he took a moment to compose himself, then smiled at his guest. "So this is my point. What you're telling me, what you're not telling me- I don't know. That's your situation. My role in this is more cathartic. I am the wild flint. My feet strike the hard earth."

Beranek clenched his jaw, focusing on the conductor's words, searching for something concrete, something real to respond to. Lacking an alternative, he returned to his original theme. "I understand that, Maestro, but what I'm saying is this. When I first took over this project, I worked with the architect, I said okay, we need to do this, this and this. And the result is that now we've got a performance space with a nice mid-range, but the rest is not so hot." Lenny's face was blank, a nothing expression. "This is why we design it this way," Beranek explained, feeling a strange need to defend himself. "That way you can change the acoustics according to your needs. If you need to block out certain frequencies, you hang reflectors from the ceiling. That's all. There's no magic." Feeling his confidence grow, he reached for his drink. The ice had melted part-way, cutting the bite of the whiskey. "Or you redesign, which can cost millions of dollars and hold you back another eighteen months."

"And millions of dollars is not something we have." Lenny flicked a piece of fluff from the knee of his slacks. Beranek had seen that gesture before. The impatient gesture. Not just Lenny--other clients as well. Still, he hadn't lost a contract before. This was new. A bad kind of new. The word 'retire' flashed across his brain.

"And I wouldn't want you to do that, sir, because we're already committed to this project, and we want you to be happy with the work we've done."

Beranek watched Lenny's face for clues--a twitch, a new wrinkle, a small break beneath the surface. The conductor stroked his eyebrows, mussing up the hairs and then pushing them back in place with his thumb. Finally he got up and set his empty glass on a tea tray. Adjusting the hang of his silk scarf, he stood in front of a mirror and checked his look, the way his hair--now starting to gray--traveled in graceful spit curls across his forehead. "All right, then," he said, turning around. "We'll let the accounting department handle it. They never liked me, anyway." Beranek nodded, feeling dismissed. Lenny seemed to change; cold business left him with nothing, no hidden meaning to enlarge. The two men futzed around for a few minutes. They chatted about the BSO, the Pops, a new recording of the Ives' Fourth. At two o'clock, Beranek left the Maestro's office; crowded on the elevator, he felt abandoned, returned to earth.

Outside, the wind had picked up. Lunch carts retracted their umbrellas and rolled behind doorways to get out of the breeze. Paper wrappers swirled down Broadway, getting stuck in hedges, cast iron fences. Leo slipped into a phone booth, closing the door behind him. Surrounded by this column of steel and glass, he could hear very little of the outside roar. New acoustics, see. Science in action! Rooting through his pockets for change, he heard the sound of chinking copper as it reflected against the cheap frame. Acoustically speaking, the phone booth was a dead space. Leonard Bernstein would not have approved. Leonard Bernstein required larger vistas, grand caverns to fill with his voice, his great ambition. For Leo Beranek, this was enough. Small rooms, small sounds. Leo, come in. How was New York? Smack! Slippers sticking to the linoleum floor. The creak of furniture under his tired body. Ice in the glass. Clink. Pop! The fizz of carbonation. Pssshhhhh (sparkling moisture against his cheek, neck, ear).

Beranek dropped his change into the coin slot and dialed his partner's office in Cambridge. Richard Bolt answered in a flurry of excitement--not what he'd expected, given the mood around the office these past few weeks.

"Richard, what's happening?"

"Where are you in relation to the train station?"

The steel phone cord twined around Beranek's shoulders as he looked first toward and then away from the Empire State Building. "Ahhh... I don't know."

"Come back to Boston. This afternoon."

"Uh, okay." Opening his wallet, he found eighteen dollars in wadded bills--just enough for the express fare. "What's going on?"

"Leo, I just talked to Bob Kahn. Do you know Larry Roberts over at the Pentagon?"

"Shu-sure." Beranek rubbed his eyes. More nausea. First Leonard Bernstein, now the Pentagon. Too much for one life.

"Larry works for the DoD. Larry says... now listen..."

"I'm standing in a public phone booth..."

"Stand on my rear end, this is important." Richard Bolt, normally a very dapper man, also had the unfortunate habit of incorporating his rear end into nearly every topic of conversation. "Larry tells Bob, come next year, the Department of Defense is going to fund a nationwide network, four sites, four terminals. They're going to run it out of the Advanced Research Projects Agency. You know that place. That's Lick's old stomping ground."

Lick- J.C.R. Licklider--was a psycho-acoustician whose ties to BBN dated back to the late 1950s. He'd taken control of the R&D wing at the Defense Department in 1962, leaving two years later to pursue his own research. It was Lick who'd first urged Bolt and Beranek to purchase a cruddy LGP-30 for $25,000, using it to explore his theories on human/computer interfaces. This was Lick's great vision--a computer interface that accurately reflected man's own sensory processes. No more zeros and ones. Let's get past the numbers, he would tell his incredulous colleagues. To Bolt--not a computer guy himself--the enterprise made good business sense. When in doubt, diversify.

"So what do you want me to do, Richard?" Tired, Beranek leaned against the door. Outside, a colored banner--LENNY!--swung from the roof of Philharmonic Hall.

"Take the train and drive up to Cambridge. I want this bid. I want to build it. We need to start recruiting right away."

"What for? We're in the red."

"Leo. Simulate interest in this, okay?" Beranek held the phone away from his ear. Through the mesh of tiny holes, Bolt's voice seemed distant, artificial. Such a strange way for people to communicate. Beranek believed in handshakes, eye contact. The impersonal nature of the telephone system had always bothered him. He felt out-dated, part of the old world.

"I am interested. I'm exhausted, that's all. I just had a depressing conversation with Leonard Bernstein." The absurd quality of that last statement made him smile in spite of himself. "I think we're going to lose this job." "Who cares? Pop the champagne! That's what I say!" Beranek set the phone down on the ledge under the call box and stretched his back. His partner was yelling now, and he could hear his voice even from several feet away--a big noise thrust into a small space, the only sound in New York City, shouting above the silent roar of buses and crowds and mega-booming symphony orchestras. "Who needs them? This is the real money, Leo. Fuck classical music. We're going into the computer business!"