“Perms.”
“Permanents, you know? Permanent waves, silly. If your dog needs a permanets, you've got to call forty-eight hours in advance. Got it?”
“Thanks,” I said. “She's a Mexican hairless, but I'll keep it in mind.” I hung up. The next number on the pad was a veterinarian's office. The one after that was a dog hotel, the Bark ’n Wag. Woofers had more appointments than a producer's wife. What I had burgled, apparently, was a Yorkshire terrier's Rolodex.
The fourth number rang forever. The fifth was a disconnect. The sixth was Birdie's colonic therapist. I was not on a hot streak. I worked on the beer for a while and then went back to the phone.
The seventh, just maybe, was something. It rang twice and then a gruff male voice said, “Cap’n’s.”
For lack of anything better, I asked, “Is the captain there?”
There was a long pause, and then the man said, “You've got the wrong number,” and hung up. When I called back, the phone was off the hook. On the whole, I thought, a very odd exchange.
One more disconnect. Then no answer. Then, on number ten, one of the ones with an out-of-state area code, I got a different man, but the same greeting.
“Cap’n’s,” he said.
“Which captain?”
I listened to the cosmic whistle of long distance. “Who is this, anyway?” the man asked.
This time I was ready. “I'm calling for the National Naval Census. We've gotten up to captains.”
“How did you get this number?”
“I told you, I'm calling—”
He disconnected. I tried another out-of-state number. “Cap’n’s,” a new man said. This time I hung up. A small revenge, but mine own.
My, my, my, I thought. I may even have said it out loud. Captains, or, rather, Cap'ns, all over the landscape. Where were all the people who answered the phones when I punched up these numbers? Hammond could have given me addresses, but I figured that calling the cops was out of bounds until Mrs. Sorrell said it was okay. However remote I thought Aimee's chances of getting home standing up might be, I didn't want to do anything to jeopardize them.
What I could do, though, was check the area codes with the operator. One of the Captains was in Arizona, one was in Idaho, and the third was in L.A. It was beginning to sound like the First Interstate Bank.
“Your phone has been busy forever,” Jessica complained when I picked it up on the third ring. “Are you working?” She sounded aggrieved and suspicious.
“Looking for a job,” I said.
“You have a job.”
“Jessica,” I said, “this has been a memorable partnership, but for the moment it's over.”
“Treat me like a baby,” she said bitterly. “I thought we were getting to be friends.”
“As soon as there's anything you can help me with, I'll let you know.”
“In other words, don't call me, I'll call you.”
“Something like that.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I'll be at Blister's.”
“Great idea,” I said. “You can bench-press his nose.”
“You are totally gross,” she said, hanging up.
I tried the remaining numbers and got nothing. There was something else I wanted to do, but it would have to wait until Hollywood's nocturnal population crawled out from under their paving stones. In the meantime, there were the computer disks.
The disks, unfortunately, seemed to be garbage. Every time I tried to find my way into them, I got a bunch of mathematical symbols that looked like a physicist's guess at the perfect universal symmetry that might or might not have existed a millisecond or so before the Big Bang. They booted up okay, but after one or two keystrokes I found myself looking at all that garbled math.
A computer whiz is something I've never claimed to be. I bought the Korean-made micro that takes up most of my desk in a misguidedly upbeat moment after a client had overpaid me almost to the point of sarcasm. That was a couple of years ago, when everybody who claimed to be an expert on the future was talking about the electronic world: people working at home and shooting messages and data back and forth like a bunch of wash hung on a line that traveled at the speed of light. Well, that hadn't happened. Despite the experts, people still wrote in longhand and talked on the phone. The U.S. postal service was still in business. And me, I'd learned to work a simple word-processing program to the point where I could type in my case notes and print them out, and I'd mastered Flight Simulator. I could now land an imaginary airplane at an imaginary airport. Neither of these accomplishments had prepared me for the mathematically coded chaos of Birdie's disks.
Nevertheless, I went through all ten of them, including the one I'd labeled DOS. DOS is short for disk operating system, and it's what you feed the computer first. Until it's digested DOS, you might as well stick your fingers in the drive and ask for a readout on your prints. In short, without DOS, the computer is just something you have to dust. It can't do anything.
Birdie's DOS diskette was the first clue that something was intentionally wrong. You're supposed to put DOS in and then turn the goddamned machine on. After some beeping and some blinking, the screen gives you an enigmatic symbol that looks like this: A>. Then you can load whatever program you want and tell the computer what to do. If you're lucky and if you know what you're doing, it'll behave.
I'd used my own DOS diskette to look at the disks numbered one through nine, and I'd gotten the mathematical salad. In a flash of inspiration, I shut the computer off and slipped in Birdie's DOS diskette. Maybe it was a different DOS, I reasoned. Maybe it could make sense of numbers one through nine.
But when I turned the computer on and hit Enter twice, as I'd learned to do, the reassuring A> was nowhere in sight. Instead, I got a message that said: disk error or nonsystem
DISK. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ANY KEY.
I'd seen that before, and recently: on the screen of Birdie's computer, when I'd forgotten to put a DOS diskette in before firing up the computer. When I'd worked on Birdie's computer I'd used the DOS I'd bought. And that meant that Birdie's DOS diskette wasn't really DOS. Like the other nine disks, it was written in some kind of computer code.
There was nothing to do but try my own DOS diskette again. As before, I got a few words of English before the screen dissolved into the kind of mathematics that gives high-school kids zits. But this time, I noticed the message at the bottom of the screen. It said: disk full.
Well, that was peculiar, because I'd already done a directory on that disk, and the computer had told me that there was lots of space left. When you do a directory, you just type DIR, and the screen fills up with the names of the files or documents that are taking up space on the disk, and at the bottom is a number that tells you how much space remains. I did it again now. According to the directory, there was enough space left on the disk for a biography of Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy lived to be eighty-two.
But when I went back into the English and tried to type a word or two, I got the disk full message again. What that meant, in plain English, was that I was in over my head. Whatever the hell was on the disk had been hidden somehow, and it would require someone a lot more conversant with the perverse ways of computers to figure out what was going on.
The problem was, I didn't know anyone more conversant with computers than I was. Most of my friends said a cheerful good-bye to technology in the early seventies, about the time they noticed that most airplanes didn't have propellers anymore. They regarded computers as Big Brother's uncle.
I had just discovered a new use for mine—resting my head on the keyboard—when the phone rang. It was, for the ninth or tenth time that day, Jessica.
“Any progress?” she said, making an easy assumption that I'd been lying to her since morning.
It seemed pointless to tell another one. “What I am,” I said, “is stonewalled. Find a new godfather.”
“I like the one I've got,” she said a trifle shyly. “What's the problem?”
“The i
nformation revolution.”
“Computers?” she said promptly.
“Exactly.”
“You need help with computers?”
“You've grasped the challenge.”
“What time is it?”
“Around seven.”
“Come over,” she said. “Bring your problem. Have I got a boy for you.”
16 - Slipped Disks
C oyotes were beginning to wow and flutter at the rising moon when we pulled off Old Topanga Canyon and up a driveway that was almost as vertical as mine. This one, though, was wide and graded and nicely paved, with stone Japanese lanterns blinking every ten feet to tell you when you were about to drive off the cliff.
“New money,” I said. Topanga has been a freaks' refuge for decades, and anyone with any kind of money is new money.
“Pull to the right at the top of the hill,” Jessica said. “There's room for a hundred cars.”
The house was cedar and pine, a rambling affair that had a view of the lights of the San Fernando Valley off to the northeast. The door was opened by a nice-looking woman in her middle thirties in blue jeans and a man's ruffled tuxedo shirt. She had a glass of red wine in her hand, and her feet were bare. One of the Mozart horn concerti made its way, sweetly geometrical, from speakers somewhere in the house.
“Hello, Jessica,” she said, blowing back a lock of hair.
“Hi, Mrs. Gurstein,” Jessica said. “Morris knows we're coming.”
Mrs. Gurstein gave me a politely inquisitive glance, and Jessica said, “This is my godfather, Simeon. He's too old to understand computers. Morris is going to help him out.”
“Elise Gurstein,” Elise Gurstein said, holding out a hand and stepping aside to let us in. I took the hand. “If Morris can't help you, no one can. Would you like a glass of wine?”
“Wouldn't I?” I said.
“You're the detective,” she said. “Ho, and then ho again. I know Annie. We're both on the PTA. She's told me more about you than you'd like to have in the papers. Coke, Jessica? Are you hungry?”
“Mom,” a little girl's voice said from around the corner. “They're not hungry. They've got things to do.”
The little girl hove into view behind her mother and turned into a little boy, maybe Jessica's age chronologically. Boys, as I learned in excruciating slow motion in junior high school, mature more slowly than girls. Also more awkwardly. This little boy had made it all the way into awkward hyperspace. He had a long, narrow head, carrot-colored hair with an unmanageable cowlick that seemed to bring his skull to a point, a fringe of fine, pale eyelashes, and thin, high shoulders. His shirt was buttoned at the neck and his khaki pants had a crease in them that was straighter than a plumb line. He gave Jessica what was supposed to be a casual glance and blushed to the roots of his hair. “Hi, Jessica,” he said. He barely got it out.
“Hey, Morris,” Jessica said negligently. “Ready to go?”
Morris swallowed. “All set up,” he said, trying for her casual air. He gave me a red little glance that reeked of jealousy.
“No food, then,” Elise Gurstein said. “I'll bring you some wine in a minute. All I've got is cabernet.”
“Cabernet is fine.”
“And a Coke for little Jessica.”
“Mom,” Morris squealed in an agony of embarrassment.
“Fine, fine. Then I'll leave you to Morris.”
Morris, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, led us broodingly through a living room filled with modern, or maybe postmodern, shapes: hard-looking rectangles of white that probably posed as furniture as long as people were awake and then turned into giant sugar cubes. Mozart winged its way around the room, and what looked like copies of Klee and Kathe Kollwitz hung coolly on the wall. Thirties art and eighties furniture. Jessica touched my arm and pointed at Morris’ rear end: he had a patch on the rump of his pants that featured a bright red apple and the legend take a byte. He led us down a flight of stairs.
At the bottom, Morris—who hadn't looked back at either of us—threw open a door, and we entered a room that was lit by the shade of green they painted Margaret Hamilton's face in The Wizard of Oz. The light, as I saw when I entered, came from three computer screens, all up and glowing.
The screens were only part of the picture. Computers, or parts of computers, were everywhere: on the floor, in the middle of the mussed-up single bed, on the big desk that had been made from a door and two sawhorses, and stacked on top of the filing closets that lined one wall.
“Floppies or flippies?” Morris asked, gazing in a preoccupied fashion at one of the screens. It was tossing up a frantic jumble of data, scrolling past far too fast to read.
“Beg pardon?” I asked.
“Floppies,” Morris said, closing his eyes with the air of a man whose patience is being tried, “or Hippies?”
“These,” I said, holding up the disks.
“Floppies,” Morris said with modulated disdain. “Nobody uses them anymore.”
“I stole them,” I said defensively. “I just want to know what's on them.”
“What's all this stuff?” Jessica asked, watching the screen with the flying data.
“The Yellow Pages,” Morris said in a completely different tone. If it was possible to say the words “The Yellow Pages” in a tone of abject adoration, Morris had just managed it.
“You copied the Yellow Pages into a computer!” Jessica sounded like she doubted her ears.
“It's a test,” Morris said, licking nervously at his lower lip. “I've been working with a scanner—you know, it reads a page and feeds it into the system?—and I thought I'd try to link it up with a data base. So I scanned about two hundred pages of the Yellow Pages, and reworked them into the data-base language and told the data base to rearrange them, by length of entry instead of alphabetically. I'll know in an hour or so whether it works.”
“Why bother?” Jessica said, moving on to the next screen.
“Just to see if I can do it,” Morris said, giving a tiny shrug. He looked at the flashing screen with new doubt. “I'll work out an application later.”
“Even if you can do it, what good is it?” Jessica said loftily. “Who wants a phone book arranged by the length of the name? You know, Morris, that's one of the things that's wrong with you. There's enough junk to learn without making up new stuff.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, pushing aside something that was probably vital to some computer in the room, and looked around her with the disinterested air of a deaf person who'd been dragged to a concert.
Morris swallowed the rebuke in silence, but then he reached down and twisted a knob that plunged the offending screen into darkness. He chewed on his lip as the silence lengthened.
“My, my,” I said heartily, looking at a large pair of apparently extraterrestrial landscapes on the wall, an oddly colorless mountain and a shoreline, jumbles of rocks and natural forms, as lifeless as the moon. “Where are these?”
Morris wasn't buying peacemaking from anyone he was jealous of. “To the extent that they're anywhere,” he said tartly, “they're in Benoit Mandelbrot's frontal lobe.”
“Old Bennie,” I said. “I knew they looked familiar.”
“They're fractal landscapes,” Morris continued, ignoring me, “computer-generated mathematical pictures that approximate the natural world. Only less sloppy.”
“I like the world ‘sloppy,’ ” Jessica said. “I don't want some egghead turning it into a bunch of numbers. What good is it?”
“It helps us to understand the world,” Morris said doggedly, looking everywhere but at her.
“Ah, we've gotten to fractals,” Elise Gurstein said, com- ing into the room with a glass of red wine in one hand and a Coke in the other.
“I don't know why everybody has to understand everything,” Jessica said defiantly. “Why can't we just leave things alone? Can't I like a blue sky without someone like you explaining to me that it's because the air scatters the light waves? When I go body-surfing, do you thi
nk I need some schnook in goggles swimming along next to me telling me about the movement of liquids?”
“But you don't understand anything,” Morris insisted, holding his ground. His color had heightened, making his eyes even paler. “Don't you want to know how things work?”
“See you,” Elise Gurstein said, leaving the room. “I've heard all this.”
“I can start a car,” Jessica said silkily, turning her hazel eyes on Morris. “I can go shopping. I can read a map and use a calculator and turn on a television set. I can find something in a library if I need to. What else do I need to know?”
Morris gave an exaggerated Gilbert-and-Sullivan shrug, as though he were rolling the weight of the entire globe from one shoulder to another. “Nothing,” he said with a finality that would have been impressive in anything but a soprano. “Just nothing. You're doing great.”
“There are already people who know all the stuff you're talking about. That's their job. Haven't you heard, Morris? It's called specialization.”
“You want to know what's wrong with the world?” Morris said to me. “Attitudes like that.”
“Oh, talk to each other,” Jessica snarled. “You're both so much smarter than me.” She lay back on the bed, rolled over, and faced the wall.
“Than I,” Morris said, looking longingly at her back.
“Find the appropriate orifice, Morris,” Jessica said, plumping one of Morris’ wrinkled pillows and curling herself around the computer.
“Listen,” I said, “this could go on all night.” I waved the disks in the air. “The floppies.”
“I'm not sure Morris is interested in the floppies,” Jessica said to the wall.
“Of course I'm interested,” Morris said, shamefaced.
“Then do something, Morris,” Jessica said in a voice that was pure saccharine. “Show us what a genius you are. Who knows, maybe you'll inspire me to learn something myself.”
Morris wedged his hands back into his pockets and then realized that I was holding the disks out. He pulled out one hand with some difficulty and took them from me. “What are they?” he said.
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