Part 14 (1/2)

We had been driving since early morning. Peri offered to take a s.h.i.+ft behind the wheel, but I could see how much she needed a nap, so I chivalrously insisted she try to get some Zs in the Travco's small bunk. She had switched on the radio, keeping it down low, saying that the familiar music would help her to sleep.

The Doctor sat on the bunk bed. He was building something back there, and had been for hours. He had interrupted our journey three times to run into stores he spotted out of the window. The bunk was strewn with bits of metal and tools, probably arranged in a careful order that the Doctor understood but which, to anybody else (me, for example) looked like a jumbled mess.

We had dropped Bob off in a motel in Frederick. The Doctor insisted that someone should stay near a phone line while we made our great expedition down the Delamarva Peninsula. Bob would stay connected to his email account via an Anderson Jacobson A211 acoustic coupler a chunky beige modem with padded rests for the phone receiver. He set up the tap on Swan's phone to forward to his home answering machine; if she made a call, it would be recorded; and he could play back the messages by calling the machine. (Before we paid for the room, Bob checked that its phone was touch-tone and not rotary-dial.) Every two hours, we would call to see if our efficient spy had any new information.

It was the tap that had sent us on the long drive eastward.

She had phoned Luis Perez to let him know she'd be away for a day or so. She said she was going to 'visit' Charles Cobb, the deceased collector, in Ocean City (The Doctor was at first disbelieving and then amused when Bob a.s.sured him there is is a place called Ocean City.) Neither Swan nor Luis mentioned what was living in Luis's bathroom: for that sort of exchange, they'd use payphones or a face-to-face meeting. We didn't have a phone book for Ocean City, so I bullied Mondy into coughing up Cobb's address. 'His number's been disconnected,' the phreak reported. 'But I looked at the last couple of bills.' a place called Ocean City.) Neither Swan nor Luis mentioned what was living in Luis's bathroom: for that sort of exchange, they'd use payphones or a face-to-face meeting. We didn't have a phone book for Ocean City, so I bullied Mondy into coughing up Cobb's address. 'His number's been disconnected,' the phreak reported. 'But I looked at the last couple of bills.'

Bob had been happy to stay wired to the network in the motel, but the Doctor had also wanted to leave Peri behind.

'This expedition is going to involve not just a tedious trip from one side of the state to the other, but some real-life breaking and entering,' he told her. 'There's not only the risk of another confrontation with the police, but with Swan. I'd rather you kept Bob company while I confront them.'

'No way,' said Peri. 'I'm not sitting in some motel while you have all the fun. I've never been to Ocean City.'

'Peri!' He could pack her name with a world of irritation.

'It's the middle of winter!'

'You're not leaving me out!'

'I'll never understand you! First you complain about being put into danger, then you're upset because I want to keep you out of it!'

Peri won that one by getting into the pa.s.senger seat and refusing to be budged. The Doctor threw up his hands and got into the back. I took the wheel, remembering the time my dad made me drive my two bickering cousins to Orange. I had solved the problem of their constant noise by dumping them by the side of the road and driving off, returning half an hour later to pick up a couple of very quiet kids. Thankfully we sat in a disgusted silence until Peri balled up her jacket between her head and the window and dropped off.

The Doctor spoke softly, so as not to disturb his slumbering fellow traveller, but I could make out every word.

'Your world is reaching a turning point here, Mr Peters.'

'How do you mean?' I murmured.

'At the moment, any electronics hobbyist worth their salt can hold everything there is to know about a computer in their head. They can know a program intimately, down to the individual lines of machine code even know the system firmware which supports it just as intimately, and the hardware down to the individual circuit paths. One human being can still design an operating system, write a video game, follow all the actions of a microprocessor. They can take the same pride as a Victorian engineer does in oiling every piston and gear of his steam engine. Or a motor enthusiast, who can trace a problem from its largest-scale effects down to the finest detail of a sticking valve.'

I was pleased; not many people have seen past the geek surface. 'I know the guys you mean. The ones with furnaces for brains.'

'It won't last. In just a few years, even the circuit diagrams for an oven or a car will be vast and inscrutable. Huge chunks of logic will be locked inside little black boxes. Chip diagrams will become too huge to trace or grasp. The world becomes as formalised at the microcomputer end as in systems hundreds of times the size of Bob's Apple. Programmers will become teams, teams will become bureaucracies, the ribs of a lean harmonious system will be lost under a layer of flabby toolkits and libraries and protocols. All proper and correct and fully functional, of course but leaving no room for the elegant shortcut, the blinding efficiency of the intuitive leap straight from the large to the small. They can do so much... but nothing with the bare-metal directness of the one who understands. It's a dying art, Mr Peters, a dying art.'

I said, 'That doesn't look like a computer you're designing back there.'

He gave me one of his small, knowing smiles. 'It isn't.'

I switched the radio back on, in time to catch the swirling beginning of Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer.

We stopped somewhere near Annapolis for our first call to Bob. We had just started to lose the DC radio stations in a haze of static. I twiddled the dial, trying to find something worth listening to, while the Doctor and Peri crammed into the phone booth. She fed it coins while the Doctor shouted down the crackling line at Bob.

'I've found Cobb's account on a BBS5,' Bob told the Doctor, his voice a mix of excitement and professional cool.

'There was a message from him in those emails of Swan's you downloaded. The number was in his .sig file.'

'Ah; said the Doctor. 'When you say ”found”...'

'Cobb was no hacker,' said Bob. 'His pa.s.sword was ”secret”! I've saved about half of his email onto diskettes. His account hasn't been used for a while Swan must not have reached Ocean City yet. In fact, she may end up not going there at all. She called her friend again to say she was going to meet someone at the Delaware State Fair.'

'The what?' said the Doctor.

'It's in Harrington. Lots closer than Ocean City. Get Chick to look it up on the map. Swan said she wanted lots of people around, for safety. Look up the State Fairgrounds, that's where she'll be. You guys must be an hour ahead of her it was at least an hour between the two calls I taped, so she was still in DC. I'll bet she's still at the fair when you arrive.'

We stood around the van for a few minutes, stretching our legs and puzzling over his new development. 'Who's she meeting?' Peri wanted to know. 'I thought you said that guy was dead.'

'That's right,' said the Doctor. 'Cobb tried to arrange a meeting between one of the Eridani and one of his fellow technology enthusiasts, with appalling consequences. The Eridani still aren't clear on exactly what happened. Certainly someone tried to betray someone else... perhaps Swan is planning to meet the third party.'

5 A Bulletin Board System is a meeting place for computer users. It's not a network, but a single machine: the users can connect via modem, leave public messages and send and read private email and swap files. Bob showed me the BBS in question, a private bulletin board for a clique of technology collectors, with an unlisted number. Since Cobb had inadvertently made it so easy for Bob to break in, I don't think they ever realised he had visited. There must be hundreds of accounts on BBSes and the ARPAnet where the owners never see the footprints of intruders.

'But they couldn't have another one of the components.

Could they?'

'No. The Eridani retrieved it after the disastrous meeting, along with...' The Doctor saw me listening. 'Swan is on a wild goose chase.'

'Well why are we we driving all this way then? Why not just let her waste her time?' driving all this way then? Why not just let her waste her time?'

'For information,' said the Doctor.

'But can't Bob just get that off Cobb's computer?'

'Not if it isn't on on Cobb's computer. Not everything is out there in the great green and black void, you know. Swan had to invade Bob's filing cabinet to get his details. It will be some years before she could rustle up the same information over a phone line.' The Doctor stretched his arms above his head and yawned. 'Besides, I want to meet Swan eye to eye.' Cobb's computer. Not everything is out there in the great green and black void, you know. Swan had to invade Bob's filing cabinet to get his details. It will be some years before she could rustle up the same information over a phone line.' The Doctor stretched his arms above his head and yawned. 'Besides, I want to meet Swan eye to eye.'

'Not if it isn't on on Cobb's computer. Not everything is out there in the great green and black void, you know. Swan had to invade Bob's filing cabinet to get his details. It will be some years before she could rustle up the same information over a phone line: The Doctor stretched his arms above his head and yawned. 'Besides, I want to meet Swan eye to eye: Cobb's computer. Not everything is out there in the great green and black void, you know. Swan had to invade Bob's filing cabinet to get his details. It will be some years before she could rustle up the same information over a phone line: The Doctor stretched his arms above his head and yawned. 'Besides, I want to meet Swan eye to eye: 'Let me guess,' said Peri. 'You figure that if you can talk to her in person, she'll come around to your point of view.'

'It has been known,' said the Doctor, with dignity. 'If nothing else, once we make contact with her, she'll find us very difficult to dislodge. And that will make it harder for her to do anything with us knowing about it or stopping it, if it comes to that.'

I'd never driven over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge before. It's the strangest thing two four-mile ribbons of road floating a couple of hundred feet above the water. It's actually two bridges side by side, so there's a lot of empty air between you and the cars going the other way. The feeling that there's nothing between you and the water is eerie.

'You know,' I told the Doctor, 'when I was a kid, we always spent our holidays driving around the outback, staying in caravan parks. We'd spend all day driving to get somewhere. But it wasn't much like this.'

Despite that, sitting behind the wheel on a trip across the US countryside was, surprisingly, not much different to sitting in the back on a trip across the Australian countryside (or more often, lying down with my bare feet pressed against the window, watching the gum trees rush by). You still ended up in those long, thoughtful silences not quite highway hypnosis, but some relative of it.

I found myself imagining what if would be like if Mr Ghislain's extraterrestrials were real, trying to pursue the consequences of that. (I guess I was looking for a contradiction to catch the Doctor out with.) Imagine if they were out there right now, circling the fifth brightest star in the constellation of Erida.n.u.s. Think of the time scale on which they'd have to operate: their civilisation would function over distances which make Columbus' voyage look like a trip to the soda machine. A better a.n.a.logy: imagine if Columbus had no boats that could harness the speed of the wind imagine if he had to swim to America.