Now software engineers swarmed the oversized beanbag chairs. Every Veritecher in town had come to watch the company’s debut. There must have been eighty programmers sitting on the floor.
“Take my place,” Alex told Emily, and he gave up his spot on one of the couches to kneel on the rug and open his laptop.
“No, that’s okay,” said Emily. “I’ll find a chair.”
“Please,” said Alex softly, and she smiled and took the seat. He was cute, trying to act chivalrous.
Wild applause. Whoops of delight. Alex was projecting Veritech’s newly minted stock symbol, VERI, on a roll-down movie screen.
Stamping feet and whistles at the graph plotting VERI’s numbers. Six in the morning. The Nasdaq had just opened in New York, and VERI’s price was climbing, scaling jagged peaks from eighteen dollars a share to thirty-six and then eighty-nine. Applause again. Wait. One hundred and three. One hundred and three dollars a share!
Emily held her cup of coffee in two hands and watched Veritech, flying high. Thousands were trading Veritech stock, thousands were paying thousands to buy. A company that had been a couple of rooms and cast-off office furniture was shooting into the stratosphere. Emily knew that Veritech was still a fledgling. She knew her company was not profitable, nowhere near profitable. She knew her start-up floated on millions of dollars of venture capital. She knew all this. She was a sensible young woman. And yet she gazed at the projection on the screen and the numbers were hypnotic. She told herself to look away, but she could not. She felt the first stirrings of a notion strange but compelling: that Veritech’s skyrocketing value reflected the company’s real worth. Emily had never looked at a graph and felt this way before. Although she enjoyed math, her pulse had never quickened at the sight of numbers. Now her heart was racing. Her creation had a price, and then a better price, and then a new price better still. Each number shone brighter than the one before, and she who had always been so rational watched Veritech’s ascent and began to fall in love.
The programmers were cheering like sports fans, like NASA officials at a shuttle launch. High fives. Hugs. Emily and Milton told each other how relieved they were. Yes, relief was the word that felt permissible. Relief after the long, complicated filing and the brief, torturous delays. All along, Alex had worried that the wave might crest before Veritech arrived. Now here they were in November 1999, and the wave was bigger than any of them had imagined. One hundred nineteen dollars a share. They were on track for listing in the top ten IPOs of the year.
Other emotions remained unspoken. While the group rejoiced in its collective fortune, a private calculus commenced. As one of the three company cofounders, with three million shares, Emily had come into a personal fortune on paper of $357 million. Emily’s assistant, Laura, as employee four, owned half a million shares. As of that morning, she had $59.5 million. And so on down the line, for each of Veritech’s 156 employees, from the oldest, with over two years’ seniority, to the newest, who had signed on to work for options. True, everyone’s stock was locked up for six months, after which—who knew? The shares were volatile. Theoretically the whole industry could go up in flames, but on-screen, Veritech continued to rise, breaking new ground, etching a new social order. Newly minted millionaires like company chef, Charlie, gazed with awe and quiet jealousy at Veritech’s cofounders, now fabulously wealthy. Newly comfortable Miguel, the cleaning engineer, gazed quietly at Charlie. And Veritech, which had been a team where everybody was so free and easy, first names only, could no longer pretend to be a classless society.
“All right,” said Alex, after giant cookies had been delivered and more coffee served. “All right, you guys.”
Despite the early hour, the others followed him upstairs to work. No one knew the precise etiquette for becoming wealthy in an instant, but it felt wrong to sit and watch the stock price for more than thirty minutes as a group. From now on the programmers would check Veritech’s progress every thirty seconds on their desktops.
Part Two
Light Trading
Thanksgiving Week 1999
6
George was courting a collection. He wasn’t sure how many books there were. One hundred? One thousand? He had seen only two. The seller was secretive. She said she had inherited a collection of rare books from her uncle, and George assumed the volumes had sentimental value. The two she brought George were intriguing. The first, an 1861 Mrs. Beeton, was not rare by any means, but it was in exceptionally good condition. Beeton’s Book of Household Management was so thick that most copies ended up in three pieces because their bindings didn’t hold. This copy was a good little brick with its red leather binding still intact. The second volume the seller brought was much older. The long title began: The whole duty of a woman, or a guide to the female sex from sixteen to sixty … and included a promise to provide choice receipts in physick and chirugery with the whole art of cookery, preserving, candying, beautifying, etc. The book had been published in London in 1735 and would have been valuable, except that it was so badly worn. The cover was falling off and the pages warped and spotted. The title page was torn.
The Beeton was the sort of book listed in catalogs as a “wonderful gift” for the everyday book lover. It would not tempt a serious collector. George could sell Mrs. Beeton for four or five hundred dollars. He was doubtful about The whole duty.
“This one’s in rough shape.” He showed the volume’s wear to the seller, even as he noted hers. She was about his age, but she looked shattered, as though she had never recovered from some early loss. Gray-eyed, sharp-featured, she was tall and pear-shaped. Her long gray hair fell straight past her narrow shoulders to her waist. She might have been a teacher once, or a social worker, but more likely she was a perpetual student, and a case study all her own. Her name was Sandra McClintock, and she wore faded clothes and cowboy boots, and she walked everywhere. She told George she’d only brought him two books because she didn’t want to carry any more. He did not believe her. “The cover is ripped,” he said. “The pages here are stained….” He turned the leaves deliberately.
Were there others like these? Better? And how were they acquired? He tried to look diffident as he wrote a check, one hundred dollars for the pair.
“Are they all cookbooks?” George asked the seller, but she didn’t want to discuss the matter. “Are you interested in an appraisal?”
“Maybe. I might be.” She didn’t object to the evaluation, but she looked disappointed as she took the check. Clearly she had hoped for more.
George fretted after she left that she would not come back. What if Sandra had something really valuable? He waited three days for her to call, and when she didn’t, he phoned, and asked to see her. She did not want him to come to her, and so he invited her to bring more books to the store. Had she contacted another dealer? He knew all the dealers in the area. He would have heard. Was she setting up an auction? He didn’t ask.
He wanted Jess to hurry up and fly home for Thanksgiving. He was afraid Sandra might arrive while he was out and leave books with Jess, or even allow Jess to open them and ooh and ahh and say, “Those must be worth a fortune!” This scenario seemed unlikely, given Sandra’s cautious approach, but Jess had a way of bounding in at the worst moments. She had asked once, in front of college students with a box of books to sell, why George paid so little for contemporary novels.