“No, it’s nothing I’ve heard you or anybody else say. It—well, it’s the way you’ve acted today. All of a sudden you’re confident. I can literally scent it. I think maybe you’ve found the confidence to trust people.”
His voice shook a little. “I hope I have. Because if I can’t trust them … But I think I can, and I think you’re right to say I’ve finally learned how. Bless you, Kate. It was you who taught me. Wise woman!”
“Is this a safe place? The one from which you can’t be dragged back to Tarnover?”
“They promised me it would be.”
“Who did?”
“Ted, and Suzy, and Sweetwater. And Brynhilde.”
“What?”
“It was like this. …”
They had been invited for dinner by Josh and Lorna. Josh loved to cook; now and then he took over at Fenelli’s for the hell of it, feeding fifty people in an evening. Tonight he’d settled for ten, but when the company was sitting around in the garden afterward other people wandered up, by ones and twos, and accepted a glass of wine or a mug of beer and eventually there was a full-sized party numbering at least forty.
For a long time he stood by himself in a dark corner. Then Ted Horovitz and Suzy came toward him, intending—he gathered—to join Sweetwater, who was just arriving on her own. Catching sight of him, Ted said, “Sandy, you settling in okay?”
It was a moment of decision. He took that decision. He squared his shoulders and stepped from shadow.
“I’d like a word with you. And I guess it ought to be with Brad, too.”
They exchanged glances. Suzy said, “Brad won’t be here—he’s listening. But Sweetwater’s the first alternate councilman.”
“Fine.”
His palms sweated, his belly was taut, but in his head there was a great cool calm. The four of them found chairs and sat down a little apart from the rest of the party.
“Well, what is it?” Ted rumbled eventually.
Sandy drew a deep breath. He said, “I realized a few hours ago that I know something about Precipice that you don’t.”
They waited.
“Tell me first, though: am I right in thinking Hearing Aid is defended by a tapeworm?”
After a brief hesitation Sweetwater said with a shrug, “I’d have thought that was self-evident.”
“The Fedcomps are getting set to kill it.”
That provoked a reaction. All three of his listeners jolted forward on their chairs; Ted had been about to light his favorite pipe, and it was instantly forgotten.
“But they can’t without—” Suzy began.
“I don’t want the details,” Sandy interrupted. “I’m just assuming that you have the biggest-ever worm loose in the net, and that it automatically sabotages any attempt to monitor a call to the ten nines. If I’d had to tackle the job, back when they first tied the home-phone service into the net, I’d have written the worm as an explosive scrambler, probably about half a million bits long, with a backup virus facility and a last-ditch infinitely replicating tail. It should just about have been possible to hang that sort of tail on a worm by 2005. I don’t know whether yours has one or not and it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that while I was a systems rash with G2S recently I moused around the net considerably more than my employers required of me, and I ran across something I only today spotted as significant.”
They were hanging on his every word now.
“For about eighteen months they’ve been routinely copying Class-A Star data from G2S and every other hypercorporation with a maximum-national-advantage rating and lifting the copies clear of the net for storage. I thought maybe they were tired of hypercorp execs pulling the White House Trick and other similar gimmicks, so they needed a standard reference to appeal to. It didn’t occur to me that this might be the preliminary stages of a worm-killing job. I never guessed that big a worm was free and running. Now I see the implications, and I guess you do too, hm?”
Very pale, Ted said, “Too true! That makes nonsense of the virus facility, let alone the simple scrambler aspect. And in fact our worm doesn’t have the kind of tail you mentioned. Later, we were vaguely hoping we could add one … but Washington’s tolerance of Hearing Aid was wearing thin, and we didn’t want to irritate the authorities.”
“They must hate us,” Sweetwater said. “Really, they must loathe Precipice.”
“They’re scared of us, that’s what it is,” Suzy corrected. “But … Oh, I find it hard to believe they’d be willing to clear up the sort of mess our worm could cause. I’ve always understood it works in two stages: if someone tries to monitor a call to Hearing Aid it scrambles the nearest major nexus, and if they did try to kill it, they’d find over thirty billion bits of data garbled randomly but not know where the damage had been done. It might be years before the returns all came in. We never found out whether that virus facility actually works, but the front end—the scrambler—that works fine, and the BDP once proved it to their cost.”
Sandy nodded. “But they’re prepared to cope with the virus aspect now. Like I said, they’ve lifted the max-nat-ad stuff out of the net altogether, ready to be slotted in again afterward.”
He leaned back, reaching for his glass.
“We’re obliged to you, Sandy,” Sweetwater said after a brief silence. “I guess we better put on our thinking caps and see what we can—”
He cut her short. “No, I’ll do it. What you need is a worm with a completely different structure. The type they call a replicating phage. And the first thing you must give it to eat is your original worm.”
“A replicating phage?” Suzy repeated. “I never heard that term before.”
“Not surprising. They’re kind of dangerous. Plenty of them have been used in restricted situations. Like, come election time, you disguise one and slip it into the membership list of the opposition party, hoping they don’t have duplicate records. But there are very few in the continental net, and the only big one is inactive until called for. In case you’re interested, it was devised at a place called Electric Skillet, and its function is to shut the net down and prevent it being exploited by a conquering army. They think the job would be complete in thirty seconds.”
Ted frowned. “How come you talk about these phages with authority?” he demanded.
“Well …” Sandy hesitated, then took the plunge. “Well, I’ve had mine running behind me for over six years, and it’s stood me in good stead. I don’t see why one shouldn’t do the same for Hearing Aid.”
“So what the hell do you use one for?”
Keeping his voice level with immense effort, he told them. They listened. And then Ted did an extraordinary thing.
He whistled shrilly. From where she kept her watch Brynhilde rose and ambled over.
“Is this poker lying?” Ted inquired.
She snuffed at Sandy’s crotch—diffidently as though reluctant to take such liberties—shook her head, and went back the way she had come.
“Okay,” Suzy said. “What exactly will you need, and how long will it take?”
DOGGED
“Out of the question,” said Dr. Joel Bosch. “He must be lying.”
Acutely aware he was sitting in the same office, perhaps even in the same chair, as Nickie Haflinger the day he encountered the late Miranda, Freeman said patiently, “But our techniques eliminate all possibility of deliberate falsehood.”
“Clearly that cannot be the case.” Bosch’s tone was brisk. “I’m very well acquainted with Lilleberg’s work. It’s true he produced some spectacular anomalous results. His explanations of them, however, amounted to no more than doubletalk. We know now what processes must be applied to produce that kind of effect, and Lilleberg never even pretended to use them. They simply didn’t exist when he retired.”
“There was considerable controversy over the so-called Lilleberg Hypothesis,” Freeman persisted.