The dagger he saw before him was one that Chrissy could see no reason for him not to plant firmly in Hunter’s back. Money had turned his nervously cheerful, basically shy, nerd of a wife into Lady Macbeth, and yet it was Hunter who had made them prosperous, some would say rich. He was paying Saul more as a consultant to Digitas than he was being paid as a tenured professor at Caltech. With Chrissy lined up for tenure in the neuroscience department, they had long shot past the half-million-dollar income that had once been their Eldorado of deferred contentment but now seemed crushingly inadequate, what with the frenzied drive to acquire a seafront property, the kids’ education, the luxurious new cars, the credit card debts, the state and federal taxes and, perhaps, above all, the corrupting exposure to the habits of the truly rich. Poverty was knocking at the door again, dressed in silk rather than cotton rags, but still insisting that there was not enough, not enough to relax when real enjoyment and security were just around the next bend.

Ah, here was the roadside viewing point that his navigation system, under normal conditions, always told him was twenty-seven minutes from the gates of Apocalypse. Yes! Twenty-seven minutes: no rockslides or traffic jams ahead. Although it was a self-inflicted pressure, Saul felt that for his own peace of mind he must attempt to reach a decision before he arrived. At the start of their collaboration, Hunter had set up a tantalising scheme that triggered a one-off, five per cent bonus for Saul when any of the start-ups he had worked on reached a valuation of one hundred million. Saul could picture a future in which packages of five-million-dollar cargo floated down now and again and landed in his bank account over the rest of his career, like supplies parachuted to the besieged Marines at the Battle of Khe Sanh. If Brainwaves took off in the way that he expected, the first package should arrive soon after the launch. In that sense, it was a terrible time to make a move for independence, but Chrissy was insisting that this was the moment to break away, now that he was finding so many promising projects; break away and put their marriage once and for all beyond the reach of insufficiency and envy. In theory, if he stuck with Hunter, he might end up with a beautiful seaside home, a few acres of garden, a boat in the harbour, an apartment in New York and three kids at Harvard. Not bad, but would there be enough for the golden retirement that he and Chrissy deserved? Was it enough and was it fair? If Happy Helmets went viral, his five million would be the kind of rip-off that would have strangers falling off stools in airport bars while he recounted again and again the story of how he had been cheated of his intellectual property by a wily businessman.