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together on the chip. It couldn’t go on forever. Eventually, circuits would be so densely packed that the chips would melt from the heat. This implied an upper limit on computer power. Doniger knew that society would demand ever more raw computational power, but he didn’t see any way to accomplish it.
    Frustrated, he returned to an earlier interest, superconducting magnetism. He started a second company, Advanced Magnetics, which owned several patents essential for the new Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines that were starting to revolutionize medicine. Advanced Magnetics was paid a quarter of a million dollars in royalties for every MRI machine made. It was “a cash cow,” Doniger once said, “and about as interesting as milking a cow.” Bored and seeking new challenges, he sold out in 1988. He was then twenty-eight years old, and worth a billion dollars. But in his view, he had yet to make his mark.
    The following year, 1989, he started ITC.
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    One of Doniger’s heroes was the physicist Richard Feynman. In the early eighties, Feynman had speculated that it might be possible to build a computer using the quantum attributes of atoms. Theoretically, such a “quantum computer” would be billions and billions of times more powerful than any computer ever made. But Feynman’s idea implied a genuinely new technology — a technology that had to be built from scratch, a technology that changed all the rules. Because nobody could see a practical way to build a quantum computer, Feynman’s idea was soon forgotten.
    But not by Doniger.
    In 1989, Doniger set out to build the first quantum computer. The idea was so radical — and so risky — that he never publicly announced his intention. He blandly named his new company ITC, for International Technology Corporation. He set up his main offices in Geneva, drawing from the pool of physicists working at CERN.
    For several years afterward, nothing was heard from Doniger, or his company. People assumed he had retired, if they thought of him at all. It was, after all, common for prominent high-tech entrepreneurs to drop from view, after they had made their fortunes.
    In 1994, Time magazine made a list of twenty-five people under the age of forty who were shaping our world. Robert Doniger was not among them. No one cared; no one remembered.
    That same year he moved ITC back to the United States, establishing a laboratory facility in Black Rock, New Mexico, one hour north of Albuquerque. A thoughtful observer might have noticed that he had again moved to a location with a pool of available physicists. But there were no observers, thoughtful or otherwise.
    So no one noticed when during the 1990s, ITC grew steadily in size. More labs were built on the New Mexico site; more physicists were hired. Doniger’s board of directors grew from six to twelve. All were CEOs of companies that had invested in ITC, or venture capitalists. All had signed draconian nondisclosure agreements requiring them to post a significant personal bond in escrow, to submit to a polygraph test on request, and to allow ITC to tap their phones without notice. In addition, Doniger demanded a minimum investment of $300 million. That was, he explained arrogantly, the cost of a seat on the board. “You want to know what I’m up to, you want to be a part of what we’re doing here, it’s a third of a billion dollars. Take it or leave it. I don’t give a damn either way.”
    But of course he did. ITC had a fearsome burn rate: they had gone through more than $3 billion in the last nine years. And Doniger knew he was going to need more.
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    “Problem number one,” Doniger said. “Our capitalization. We’ll need another billion before we see daylight.” He nodded toward the boardroom. “They won’t come up with it. I have to get them to approve three new board members.”
    Gordon said, “That’s a tough sell, in that room.”
    “I know it is,” Doniger said. “They see the burn rate, and they want to know