Silicon Valley, the land of hot tubs and Ferraris for the electronic tribe, right? Right indeed, but something's amiss.

No longer does every young chip designer worth his substrate hanker for the Promised Land. For a start he can't afford a house in the Valley; secondly, the Valley is taking on a darker reputation that is more the stuff of nightmares than the good life.

House prices in sought-after sections like Los Altos Hills and Portola Valley have gone through $300,000 for the basic californian ranch house with three actres. This is at least twice what you'd pay in the most expensive suburbs back East. Nobody can afford that unless they're earning $100,000 or so, and thus companies in the Valley find it hard to recruit: to one former Valley-dweller it looks this way: "The engineer who had a $75,000 place by a lake in Minnesota can't buy anything here."

Meanwhile those already there are producing the sort of statistics to make sadistic psychologists drool. The divorce rate is among the highest in the country. Child abuse, drug abuse and alcoholism have become commonplace. Dads come home from 80 hour weeks working on the next generation of wonder machine in an atmosphere of entrepreneurial excitation and "it's like coming down off a cloud," to quote Judith Larsen, who has interviewed hundreds of Valley women. "They just can't handle the boredom."

"It's killing most of them," asserts a psychologisy familiar with the scene. Everyone is driven to succeed by the news of neighbours who just went public on Wall Street and made millions. They're caught up in the Silicon Gold Rush. Nobody can sleep as a result.

Life-style emulation has $60,000 a year engineers out on spending sprees on the strength of the millions they know they will make in just a couple of yoars. Speaking of this phenomenon Dr. Regina Kriss, a family therapist in Palo Alto, says: "They are spending $500 on a night out - the best wines, perfect children, perfect dress... Meanwhile at home they're fighting like dogs."

Even worse for many is the cloud of paranoia and suspicion that has settled over the Valley in the wake of sundry spy sensations. Who's bugging who? In some companies employees regularly de-bug their own offices - big companies that grew from small firms founded by defectors from other companies are wary of allowing the same thing to happen to them. They demand loyalty and will enforce it in court. Nobody knows who they can trust. IBM and Intel, among others, have taken vengeful action against inside traitors.

Anyone involved in a breakthrough project these days must move cautiously indeed.

Nor is there much safety outside the office. Spies are everywhere, serving everyone from the KGB to the Japanese computer concerns, and where there are spies there is the FBI. In addition, all manner of hustlers and con-artists float through the Valley social scene seeking their prey. The rule might be expressed thus: the more cocaine in the room, the more likely it is that some of the parties are not who they seem... and that someone is filming the proceedings.

One ID that Many Silicon Valley people would love to know is that of 'The Shadow' - the perpetrator of the micro industry's first chain letter which boots the AIBMUGO (Anti IBM Undergound Guerilla Organisation) that exhorts its readers to 'contaminate IBM's database' and claims that "if the PC Jr is a rifle aimed at Apple's IIe Cash Cow, then networked 68000s are cannons aimed at IBM's mainframe dogs". To join AIMUGO write to Fourth Court, Hermona Beach, California 90254.

But if Silicon Valley people face formidable obstacles in their pursuit of wealth and happiness they are also the first to be offered a computer driven sensory deprivation tank as a lifestyle aid. Psykon of Palo Alto charges $20 an hour for a two hour session lying in a brine-filled tank while an Apple II drives a video system floating in the dark above your head, to feed your brain such images as the perfect backhand over and over, in video and slowmo, with compugraphics - until you get it right.