"There's a tremendous amount of Internet activity going on now," says Yigal Erlich, founder and president of Yozma Group, a Tel Aviv VC firm. Erlich is a bright guy; he's Israel's former chief scientist, no small thing in a country like this, and naturally he knows Vardi, who offered him a chance to invest in ICQ. Erlich declined.

So did practically everyone else in Israel. Vardi likes to tick off on his fingers all the experienced Israeli business executives to whom he offered 3 percent to 5 percent of Mirabilis if they would come on board and run the thing. They all said no. Medved, the venture capitalist, also declined to put money in. In fact, everywhere you go in Israel you meet people who passed up a chance to invest in Mirabilis. Dov Lautman, for instance, a businessman with enough gumption to build an underwear factory in Jordan, was offered 3 percent for $300,000, which would have meant $12 million when the company was sold. He too declined.

By now Mirabilis and its many doubters have achieved folklore status. At one point the company that had sold doors to Mirabilis boasted of this in a newspaper ad. Vardi, with that faint smile again, pulls out some Hebrew bumper stickers. The English translation is, "I didn't invest in Mirabilis either."

The founding and sale of Mirabilis, ICQ's parent company, says as much about Israel today as it does about the get-rich-quick culture of the Internet. But it's also the story of an unusual Internet entrepreneur, one who had no trouble moving from chemicals and energy and government service, his former specialties, to the gossamer form of commerce practiced on the Internet.

If you are familiar with the skiing, kayaking, jogging variety of American businessman - the kind who has salad for lunch and wears "casual" clothes so starched they could stand up on their own in his closet - a week with Yossi Vardi will bring tears to your eyes. He was born in Israel in 1942, the year the average Internet entrepreneur's father was born, and in the afternoons, for three full hours, he naps. Almost all the rest of his waking hours are spent at his desk, where he sits surrounded by a proprietary information-retrieval system - stacks of papers teetering on all sides. He can magically access this data from anywhere in the world. "Talma," he says to his wife on the telephone from wherever he happens to be. "Do me a favor..." Let others obsess over sales projections and marketing budgets. Let them have their buzzwords and PalmPilots. None of them has Vardi's gut, that nexus of instinct and intellect and soul that is nourished on ideas as well as cholesterol.

The miracle of Mirabilis started when young Arik Vardi dropped out of high school. His father was aghast. Despite his avuncular manner and droopy clothes, Yossi Vardi holds a doctorate from Technion, reads mountains of books in English and Hebrew on a wide range of subjects and has served in various important government positions. As a young man he cowrote Electric Energy Generation: Economics, Reliability and Rates for MIT Press. He jokes that the book's many incomprehensible equations filled his nonscientist father with pride.

After service in the army, where he and Talma met (both were sergeants), Vardi started a long list of companies beginning with Advanced Technology, which for awhile was Israel's largest software house. As a government official, he also organized and consolidated what became Israel Chemicals. Lasers, energy, environmental technology - Vardi started companies in these fields and more. Yet like most Israelis of his generation, money was secondary. Israel was what counted. Ask him about his father and he pulls out a scrapbook with a document attesting that the elder Vardi donated his wedding ring for the Zionist cause.

That's how things were done over here. At dinner with some of Vardi's cronies, I get a sense of this. "Cronies" in this case means not Kramden and Norton, but the chief executives of Israel's two largest banks and the former head of its phone company, who now runs an electronics conglomerate. The latter also owns a leading Israeli Internet service provider, and one of the banks owns its leading competitor. In other words, I am sitting at a fish restaurant in a minimall with the men who control two-thirds of Israel's banking assets and 80 percent of its Internet users. "In a few years, there will only be three banks left in Israel," predicts Shlomo Nehama, chairman of Bank Hapoalim. Deadpan, Vardi ticks them off: "The sperm bank, the blood bank and the West Bank."

But he'll get his. The guys are tickled at the chance to tell stories on Vardi, all of them embarrassing. Eitan Raff, chairman of Bank Leumi, remembers when Vardi was on the advisory board of Israel's central bank. At one meeting he wanted to talk about a raid on the country's retirement funds, to which he objected. The central bank governor at the time, Jacob Frenkel, kept putting him off and finally adjourned, leaving the topic untouched. Vardi promptly rushed to the door and blocked it with his bulk, in effect kidnapping Israel's answer to Paul Volcker until Frenkel heard what he had to say.