Eureka by Jim Lehrer Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t refuse. But on a personal level, there were problems. He had never really lived by himself, and he was already weary of the unsettling silence that greeted him at his Kansas door and at the refrigerator, at the dinner table, in the backyard, in the bathroom—in the bedroom.
    All he had were his Jeeps. He kept them in the garage of his 1950s one-story brick rambler in the middle of an acre of flatlandin southwest Eureka. There was the new Wrangler, which he drove to and from the clinic and around town. It was a special Sahara edition—the exterior color was officially called desert sand; the interior was camel. There was also an olive-drab original, made in 1942 in Toledo, Ohio, by Willys-Overland; it had spent World War II at Fort Benning in Georgia. The other two were a flashy red Jeepster convertible, from the late forties, and a little red-white-and-blue right-hand-drive postal Jeep from the 1960s.
    Yes
, he thought after Otis left, /
have my wheels, too. But not much more than that right now except for some interesting patients. First there was the number two man at the large insurance company who hates his life, and here, now, comes his boss, who seems to hate
his
even more.

HE ISSUE WAS whether KCF&C should launch a special insurance for computer-dependent businesses and industries. Otis had assigned a task force under Pete Wetmore to study the risks and feasibility of entering this new line. There was to be a full report by this afternoon.
    So at 2:35, within thirty minutes after he returned from Ashland Clinic, Otis began the meeting with Pete in the executive conference room on the top floor high above downtown and all of Eureka. The fourteen-story KCF&C Building had long dominated the Eureka skyline. The building’s ornate beige brick structure was the landmark toward which all eyes, traffic, and commerce moved.
    Eureka was the fourth largest city in Kansas—behind Wichita, Kansas City, and Topeka. Its seventy-three thousand people in the middle of the state were a mix of professors and students at Central Kansas State College; farm boys and girls who worked at various so-called light-industry plants that did everything from make fertilizer to assemble small jitney-style buses for airport use; and well-educated white-collar folks who ran and manned KCF&C, the banks, and several sizable accountingand law firms. Ninety percent of the population was white, and 80 percent of the adults had at least a high school education. The public schools were considered among the best in the state, as were the police, the welfare system, the libraries, the health care facilities, and most everything else. Eureka, in other words, lived up to its name on most counts. And it was always easy to find, sitting in the middle of the flat prairie without even a small hill for twenty-five miles in any direction.
    Mush. His and Sally’s word for Pete. That was all Otis, sitting here atop Eureka, could think of as Pete talked. Mush. The man
is
mush, his mind is mush. What in the hell is this company going to do when I retire? How in the hell can this piece of mush take over the company?
    Otis looked out the window to the western reaches of Eureka and beyond. Sometimes, recently, on days when he was feeling warm and well about his BB gun and toy fire truck and Cushman Pacemaker, Otis swore he could see the Grand Canyon or maybe Los Angeles, way, way out there somewhere.
    Right now he swore those were the Rockies, west of Denver, that he saw on the clear blue horizon. And hey, isn’t that Pagosa Springs, home of the Red Ryder museum, out there?
    Pete mushed on and on: “The basis for the premise is that computers sometimes malperform or, in computer language, crash. Computer crashes can cause severe business harm and loss to a particular firm or company. A brokerage firm unable to process its stock transactions could lose millions of dollars. An airline reservation and scheduling system presents similar downside potential. So