Chapter One

"Call your first witness."

"Your Honor, I call Gordon Gould."

Gould pushed back his chair and walked toward the witness stand. The courtroom was not as large as some of the others he had seen. It was modern and low-ceilinged, with blond wood trim and polyester fabric on the chair seats, hardly grand enough, he thought, for the impact the trial would have, one way or another, on his life. But it would do, if only it were the last courtroom he ever had to see.

Six federal court jurors and two alternates watched Gould make his way to the enclosed area beside the judge's bench. They saw a man in his late sixties, sixty-seven to be precise. He wore a two-piece charcoal gray suit — that or blue, his lawyer had told him, no brown, no vests, and for God's sake none of those little thin-soled loafers that look like dancing shoes, wear lace- ... read full excerpt from Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-Year Patent War ebook