But to be available to his stricken coworkers, Van needed fast, efficient Internet access, all across America. This sounded pretty simple. But it wasn’t simple. It was impossible. Most of the East Coast was okay for high-speed Net access, except for lower Manhattan, which was on fire now. If Van phoned ahead and called in some favors, he could drive in to campuses and computer centers, to hook up on the superfast Internet2 grid. Van was a regular veteran at the Joint Techs conference, the cabal of geeks and wonks who were building the Next Generation Internet. The sysadmins of Internet2 were very much Van’s kind of people.