Part 21 (2/2)

Bob said, 'Let me keep helping the Doctor. He needs a programmer he knows he can rely on.'

Mr Salmon took a good, long look at his son. 'I don't want to have to bail you out again,' he said.

Bob gave him a shy grin. 'I don't want to have to be bailed out again.'

'Do we have an agreement?'

They shook hands. Bob's dad went to the freezer to fish out some frozen Chinese food for the pair of them.

'I'm glad I don't have to deal with that on a regular basis,'

said the Doctor.

Peri agreed. 'My parents would've strangled you ages ago.'

The Doctor had been unusually quiet on the journey back to my apartment. Letting Bob take risks was one thing, but having to deal with an angry dad was quite another. I wondered if the Doctor just didn't think of the danger, or if he hosted his sidekicks with their missions enough to let them face it. More likely, I thought, the magnitude of the problem wiped any thought of personal consequences from his field of view.

There was an email for the Doctor waiting in Bob's university account. It was Swan, making her gambit: Trespa.s.sing can easily lead to industrial espionage. I'll forgive your trespa.s.ses if you'll hand over the instruction manual (or point me to it).

The Doctor barked with laughter. 'She doesn't know what to do with it! She's asking us!'

Peri was chewing on the lid of her highlighter pen. 'Hey,'

she said. 'Why does she think you would have the manual?

Doesn't she know it's from another planet?'

'She must a.s.sume it's a product of military research,'

mused the Doctor. 'In which case, she's probably searching the ARPAnet for information about it.'

I said, 'She must know they wouldn't leave cla.s.sified info lying around on ARPAnet where anyone could get at it'

'Hence her demand that we tell her where to look,' said the Doctor. 'But she would also know that if she searches long and hard enough on the uncla.s.sified systems, she might put together enough clues to tell her where to look off the net. I doubt even a cla.s.sified military computer would be a great challenge for Swan.'

'Then why ask us at all?' said Peri.

'It would be far more efficient if we just coughed up the info,' I said.

'The crucial thing is that she doesn't know what she has or what she can do with it. Not yet. The Savant hasn't told her.

Which is interesting in itself... ah.'

A new email had arrived in Bob's account. The Doctor opened it up: it was from Swan, but this time, it was just a list of Internet addresses. Each of the curt acronyms represented one machine, one node on the net.

'What's she trying to tell us now?' said Peri.

The Doctor looked like the cream-swiping cat. 'Bob's mission was a success after all,' he purred. 'This is a copy of a file which Swan saved in coded form a few minutes ago.

Before she caught him, Bob installed a program on her system which quietly sends us a readable copy of any file she encrypts.'

'So we get to read anything she doesn't want us to read?'

said Peri.

'Exactly.'

'We're gonna need more diskettes,' said Peri.

The Doctor was saying, 'In this case, I a.s.sume we're looking at a list of the Internet sites she's already searched. He ran his finger down the screen. 'Which would mean...' he began to hammer at the keyboard in earnest.

We watched as he spent a few moments breaking into a poorly guarded college computer. 'Not here,' he said. 'Then...'

He used the telnet command to leap from that machine to another. This one had no protection at all; he simply logged into a maintenance account with root privileges. He stabbed a finger at the screen. 'There,' he said. One of the users listed on the system was our friend fionnuala. She hadn't even bothered to disguise her presence.

The Doctor sent her a text message: 'You won't find a manual because there is no manual.'

I could imagine Swan's response surprise, followed by hindbrain rage. Whatever she was feeling, she let none of it show on the screen. 'Hand it over or you know who will suffer the consequences.'

The Doctor responded by sending a message to the sysop, warning him of intruders on his system. The sysadmin took the message seriously: a few minutes later, while Swan was in the middle of searching through the system's files, both she and the Doctor were kicked off.

The Doctor glanced at Swan's list of computers again, and compared it to Bob's map of the net. 'Logically, he said,'her next destination should be... here.'

He jumped to the next computer, took a moment to break in, and started searching for signs of Swan's presence. 'She's set up an orderly search pattern,' he muttered to himself. 'I doubt she has the imagination to break out of it now. There.'

This time Swan had hidden herself from the list of users currently logged on, but the Doctor found her through the tell-tale signs of her activity. 'None knows how to use that thing safely,' he told her, again in a text message. 'Least of all myself.'

Swan shot back 'GO AWAY!!!' It was the first time we'd seen her be anything but reptile cold. The Doctor was starting to get under her skin.

She jumped again. The Doctor followed her again. It took him two tries ten minutes to find the system she was on.

She was in the list of users again, working carelessly and fast, rummaging through the files for anything that might give her a clue as to what she could do with the Savant.

It went on that way for an hour. The Doctor would lecture Swan, Swan would leap away to another computer somewhere on the net, the Doctor would find her again. Her text responses became more abusive, then stopped all together. She simply could not believe that he could find her again and again, following her through the maze like Theseus guided by his string.

I couldn't help thinking of the time I'd watched Stray Cat playing with a mouse she caught out on the balcony. Instead of just killing it, she kept patting it, or pretending to ignore it all to see if it had any energy left. Even a mouse can give a cat a potentially fatal bite if it isn't exhausted before the cat goes in for the kill I saw it go for her face more than once. Stray Cat kept her head well back, and used her paw to tap it and tap it again, wearing it down until it couldn't fight back any more.

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