Free The Lost Island by Douglas Preston Page A

someone who’s going to do right by this discovery—not some corporation that’ll just turn it into a billion-dollar profit center.”
    “I feel the same way.”
    “It makes me wonder if the client is unsavory.”
    Gideon shook his head. “Glinn has talked about these computer programs of his that can predict human behavior. Is that for real?”
    Garza’s third beer arrived. “Yes.”
    “How does that work?”
    “Eli founded Effective Engineering Solutions as a company specializing in ‘failure analysis.’ We’d get hired to come in after some cluster-fuck. Our job was to figure out what went wrong, and why. Not a nice business, because often you end up blaming your own client.”
    “Making it hard to get paid.”
    “Oh, Eli always gets the money up front. The bigger problem is that, once we’ve completed our work, sometimes the client wants to deep-six the report. And the people who prepared it.”
    “Tough business.”
    “You’re not kidding. But Eli’s the toughest man I know. Any normal person would have died from the injuries he sustained on that shipwreck.”
    Gideon shifted in his chair. “So what about these computer programs?”
    “Eli developed them. The human factor is always the most important in any engineering project. So these programs can predict, to a certain extent, human behavior. He calls it QBA—Quantitative Behavioral Analysis.”
    “Sounds like science fiction.”
    Garza laughed. “It started out as science fiction. Glinn got the idea from reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Remember Hari Seldon and the discipline of ‘psychohistory’?”
    Gideon shook his head. He hated science fiction.
    “Asimov invented a new science that combined history, sociology, and statistics. Psychohistorians could make predictions about the behavior of groups of people. With QBA, Glinn took psychohistory out of fiction and made it fact. His programs make predictions, not about groups, but about how a single person will react, in a given set of circumstances.” He took a sip of his beer. “You can bet that both you and I have had thorough QBAs done on us.”
    “How comforting.”
    “In an odd way, it is. Eli knows more about you than you do yourself.”
    Gideon thought back to the time when he first encountered Glinn—and the extraordinary amount of information the man had already dug up on him, including his terminal condition. “So how did Glinn get from failure analysis to engineering?”
    “Failure analysis is one side of the coin,” Garza said. “Engineering’s the other. Engineering is the science of not failing—of doing something right. It isn’t enough to figure out how to do something right. You also have to figure out how not to do something wrong. You have to analyze every possible path to failure. Only then can you be sure of success.”
    “Like the meteorite disaster.”
    “That was our only failure—although I concede it was a big one. Up to that point EES had never failed, ever. It was our trademark.”
    “So you’re confident we’ll succeed with Project Phorkys?”
    Garza stared moodily at the IPA bottle, and then chuckled to himself. “A simple Caribbean cruise? With Glinn’s fanatical attention to every detail, every possible avenue of eventuality? Oh, yeah, Gideon. We’ll succeed, all right.”

15
    V ERY LATE THE following night, Eli Glinn sat in his wheelchair, alone in the silent vastness of the central EES laboratory, thumbing through a tattered, burned, and half-destroyed book of poems by W. H. Auden. It was almost five o’clock in the morning, and his entire body ached with the old ache that never left him.
    Tucking the book into a pocket, he directed his wheelchair out of the laboratory and to the elevators. The doors opened, and he placed his hand on a digital reader; a moment later the doors closed again, and an LED display indicated the elevator was ascending to the penthouse.
    When the doors reopened, Glinn rolled out. Three years earlier,