Sellers inched into the market, eager to accept the quickly appreciating bids. Luca held on as the stock advanced an eighth, a quarter, a half. An eye flicked to the volume chart and a sixth sense told him the stock was running out of steam. Spotting a bid for eighty round lots, or eight thousand shares, that would lock in his half-point profit, he dashed off an order to sell. Bingo! Four grand in the plus column. In and out in twenty minutes.

"Trade, don't invest." The diligent day trader's motto.

Luca turned his attention to his position in Merck as a gaggle of male voices burst out shouting down the aisle. One raucous laugh stood apart from the others. It was Mazursky- or "the Wizard of Warsaw," as he called himself- and he was crowing about taking down three points on a position inside an hour.

"Thirty grand, baby. Thirty fuggin' large! Oh, yeah! The beers are on me tonight, fellas. And whoever wants to buy me the first shot of Jagermeister will be the recipient of my daily tip. Ooh-yeah!"

Luca shuddered at the Pole's shameless bragging. He didn't need to look to know that Mazursky was doing his victory dance, the revolting little number where he clasped his hands behind his head and rotated his hips and potbelly in ever-widening circles.

Luca felt himself being dragged from the zone, his cerebral connection to the ether evaporating. Annoyed, he leaned even closer to his precious screens, clenching his jaw and grinding his molars in a desperate attempt to lock out the distraction. But it was too late. His connection was severed. He was free-falling back to earth and his place among mortals. Ducking a head outside the cubicle, he saw the regulars crowded around Mazursky's hangout- Krumins, Nevins, Gregorio- all giggling like teenagers.

"Hey, Ray, that goes for you, too," said Mazursky, spotting him and waving him over. "First beer's on me."

Surprised, Luca smiled. It wasn't like Mazursky to count him in. Ray Luca wasn't one of the guys. He didn't share tips on what stocks were about to pop. He didn't discuss his trades or offer advice on how others could make as much money as he did. Part of the reason was that he was naturally a timid person who never did well in groups. People often mistook his shyness for aloofness. Another part was that, well, they were right: He did operate on a different level than these ham-and-eggers did. He was a theorist, an inventor, an evangelist. He was the father of the Synertel fiber-optic switch, a cutting-edge technology that almost- almost- revolutionized the web. If he shared a work space with them it was only a temporary measure, a fluke in the cosmic plane.

Standing, he tucked an errant shirttail into his trousers and ventured a wave. As long as he was out of the zone, why not try to socialize a bit? Truth was it got lonely being a theorist and an inventor. "Hey, Maz," he said. "Beer sounds good. Where you guys heading?"

"What? A word from his highness?" cackled Mazursky. "We serfs are touched."

"Come on, Maz," said Luca. "You guys going to El Torito or what?" Luca felt all eyes on him. Don't look away, he told himself as he jammed both hands into his pockets. Keep your chin up. But already he was fighting for the gray, neutral comfort of the carpet, his chin bobbing up and down, the blinking going haywire. "Umm, what time?"

"I'll be happy to tell you," said Mazursky, "just as soon as you put your stuck-up wop nose up my hairy ass and tell me what I had for dinner last night."

The teenagers burst out laughing and the victory dance began. Round went the hips. Jiggle went the belly. Ooh-yeah.

Luca dropped like a stone into his chair, his cheeks afire with humiliation. Instinctually, his eyes began trawling the bank of computer screens, checking stock prices, volume charts, news alerts- anything to lessen the pain of rejection, his shame at wanting to fit in, his anger at himself for not knowing better.

Mazursky, you jerk, he cursed silently. Just you wait. Another month and everything will be different. You'll be begging to buy me a drink, to spend even a minute in the presence of the owner and editor of The Private Eye-PO, the nation's hottest investment newsletter.

And with that he went back to work.

For the past three years, Ray Luca's life had been divided into two halves. Nine to five, he was another "hard-timer" trying to put together a decent grubstake trading the market. It wasn't easy. With alimony claiming six grand a month off his paycheck and child support another three on top of that, he had to make a killing just to keep his head above water. In a good month, he cleared thirty grand. Nine went to his ex-wife, seven to the IRS, and five to settle his penalty to the federal government's Department of Corrections. Living expenses ate up another two grand. Small wonder he was never able to put together a decent capital base.

But every evening he devoted himself to a systematic and thorough dissection of the market for initial public offerings. He educated himself about particular businesses going public. He researched their viability and analyzed their business plans. He compared each upcoming offering against past issues in similar market segments. If the market for IPOs had cooled down, it was to his benefit. Ray Luca was a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian, and he didn't frequent pastures where the grass had been chewed to the roots. Working alone, he was unable to analyze more than two offerings a week. The current market conditions suited him fine. As long as three or four solid new issues hit the street each month, he was on track. His goal was to build a reputation as the nation's foremost prognosticator of IPOs, and on this sunny summer day he could say with equal degrees of modesty and certainty that he had succeeded. Forty thousand hits a day on his website qualified what some might label "hubris" as a mere statement of fact.

Luca sighed, thinking it was a long way from Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto to Cornerstone Trading in Delray Beach. Unlike other casualties of the boom that went bust- the dot-wronged and the dot-bombed- he had no one to blame but himself. He'd been positioned at the right time at the right place with the right technology. Synertel was bulging from two hundred million in VC funding. A white-hot investment bank was set to take the company public. Market capitalization was projected to be eleven billion, leaving Luca's 5 percent stake worth a little more than five hundred million dollars… and that was before the issue hit the market.

The bad news had come one week before the IPO was set to begin trading. Luca was in Milwaukee on the fourteenth day of a sixteen-day road trip. He'd just emerged from his thirty-third face-to-face investor meeting, talking up Synertel and its position as a vanguard in Internet transmission technologies. The fund manager evinced interest and promised to put in for 10 percent of the offering. There was talk of Synertel's stock tripling the first day. In Luca's mind, his five-hundred-million stake had already grown to over a billion dollars. His days as a lab rat were near their end, his years of sixteen-hour days, forgone vacations, and forgotten family about to pay off. Ray Luca was as good as a billionaire, and as such qualified to call himself a visionary, a creator, an evangelist of tomorrow.

And then it was gone.

Out of nowhere a team from Lucent bettered the speed of Luca's fiber-optic dynametric switch by two gigaseconds. Two fuckin' gigs! Less time than an atom took to circle a molecule, but an eternity in the world of high-speed Internet transmissions.

Black Jet Securities shelved the offering, Jett Gavallan, its CEO, publicly calling for a reevaluation of Synertel's technology. Investor interest evaporated faster than rain in the Mojave. Luca was fired. His wife, doomed to another go-round as a start-up spouse, said "Screw this" and took the girls to live with her mother in Boston. In the space of seventy-two hours, Ray Luca went from billionaire-to-be to bum-in-training. Unemployed, unwanted, and unloved, dismissed by everyone and everything that had meant something to him, he was as instantly obsolete as his very own fiber-optic switch.