“God, am I glad to see you,” de Vaca said. She grabbed his hand briefly as they trotted.
The warmth of her hand, the touch of another person after the long creeping journey in the dark, brought a surge of renewed hope to his soul. He scanned the lava flow that lay before them, a black, jagged line against the horizon.
“Let’s move well into that lava,” he said. “I think I have an idea.”
The object stopped directly in front of him. Levine noticed with disbelief that it seemed to be a small dog, apparently a miniature collie. Levine stared, fascinated, marveling at the lifelike way with which the computer-generated animal wagged its tail and stood at attention. Even the black nose glistened in the otherworldly light that surrounded it.
Who are you? Levine typed.
Phido, the voice said. It raised its head, displaying a collar from which a small name tag hung. Looking closer, Levine saw the engraved words: PHIDO. PROPERTY OF BRENTWOOD SCOPES. Almost despite himself, Levine smiled. Scopes’s interests, after all, had a lot in common with hackers and phone phreaks.
I’m looking for Brent Scopes, Levine wrote.
I see, said the voice.
Can you take me to him?
No.
Why not?
I don’t know where he is.
What are you?
I am a dog.
Levine gritted his teeth.
What kind of program are you? he asked.
I am the front end for an AI-based help system. However, the help system was never enabled, so I’m afraid I really can’t provide any assistance at all.
Then what is your purpose?
Are you interested in my functionality? I am a program, written by Brent Scopes in his own version of C++, which he calls C3. It is an object-oriented language with visual extensions. It is primarily used for three-dimensional modeling, with built-in hooks for polygon shading, light-sourcing, and various rendering tools. It also directly supports wide-area network communications, using a variant of the TCP/IP protocol.
This was getting Levine nowhere. Why can’t you help me? he typed.
As I said, the help subsystem was never implemented. As an object-oriented program, I adhere to the tenets of data encapsulation and inheritance. I can access certain base classes of objects, like the AI subroutines and data-storage algorithms. But I cannot access the internal workings of other objects, just as they cannot access mine without the necessary code.
Levine nodded to himself. He wasn’t surprised that the help system had never been completed; after all, Brent wouldn’t need help himself, and nobody else was supposed to be wandering around his Cypherspace program. Probably Phido was one of the first elements Brent had put together, back in the early days before he’d decided to seal the lid of secrecy on his creation. Before he’d decided to keep this incredible world to himself.
So what good are you? Levine wrote.
From time to time, I keep Mr. Scopes company. I see you are not Mr. Scopes, however.
How do you see that?
Because you are lost. If you were Mr. Scopes—
Never mind. Levine thought it better not to move in that direction. He still did not know what kind of security mechanisms, if any, were built into Cypherspace.
He thought for a minute. Here was an object-oriented companion with artificial-intelligence links. Like the old pseudo-therapeutic program ELIZA, taken to the ultimate limit. Phido. It was Scopes’s idea of a cyberspace dog.
Can’t you do anything? he typed.
I can offer deliriously cynical quotes for your enjoyment.
That made sense. Scopes would never lose his obsessive love of aphorisms.
For example: “If you pick up a starving dog, and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.” Mark Twain. Or: “It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.” Gore—
Please shut up.
Levine could feel his impatience growing. He was here to find Scopes, not bandy words with a program in this endless maze of cyberspace. He glanced at his watch: another half hour wasted. He followed the path to another juncture, then took one of the branching paths, wandering among the immense structures. The small dog followed silently at his heels.
Then Levine saw something unusual: a particularly massive building, set well apart from the others. Despite its immense size and central location, no colored bands of light played from its roof toward the other structures.
What is that building? he asked.
I do not know, Phido replied.
He looked at the building more closely. Although its lines were almost too perfect—the work of a computer’s hand, within a cybernetic world—he recognized the famous silhouette without difficulty.
The GeneDyne Boston building.
An image of the building inside the computer. What did it represent? The answer came to him quickly: it was the cyberspace re-creation of the computer system inside the GeneDyne headquarters. The network, the home-office terminals, even the headquarters security system, would be inside that rendering. The buildings around him represented the various GeneDyne locations throughout the world. No streams of colored light were flowing from the headquarters roof because all outside communications with the other GeneDyne installations had been cut off. Had Mime been able to learn more about the workings of Scopes’s program, perhaps he could have placed Levine inside, saving valuable time.
Levine approached the building curiously, taking a descending pathway to the base of the structure and approaching the front door. As he maneuvered himself against it, the strange music changed to an offensive buzz. The door was locked. Levine peered through the glass into the lobby. There, rendered in breathtaking detail, was the Calder mobile, the security desk. There were no people, but he noted with amazement that banks of CRT screens behind the security desk were displaying images from remote video cameras. And the feed he was viewing was undoubtedly live.
How do I get inside? he asked Phido.
Beats me, Phido said.
Levine thought for a moment, combing his spotty knowledge of modern computing techniques.
Phido. You are a help object.
Correct.
And you stated you were a front end to other objects and subroutines.
Correct.
And what does that mean, exactly?
I am the interface between the user and the program.
So you receive commands and pass them on to other programs for action.
Yes.
In the form of keystrokes?
That is correct.
And the only person who has used you is Brent Scopes.
Yes.
Do you retain these keystrokes, or have access to them?
Yes.
Have you been to this location before?
Yes.
Please duplicate all the keystrokes that took place here.
Phido spoke: “Insanity: A perfectly rational adjustment to the insane world.” Laing.
There was a chime from the speakers. Then the door clicked open.
Levine smiled, realizing that the aphorisms themselves must be security pass phrases. Yet another use for The Game they had once made their own. Besides, he realized, quotations made excellent passwords; they were long and complicated and could never be hit upon by accident or by a dictionary attack. Scopes knew them by heart, and therefore never had to write them down. It was perfect.
Phido was going to be more helpful than even Phido realized.
Quickly, Levine maneuvered himself inside with the trackball and moved past the guard station. He paused a minute, trying to recall the layout of the headquarters blueprints Mime had downloaded to him earlier in the evening. Then he moved past the main elevator bank toward a secondary security station. Inside the real building, he knew, this station would be heavily manned. Beyond was a smaller bank of elevators. Approaching the closest one, he pressed its call button. As the doors opened, Levine maneuvered himself ins
ide. He typed the number 60 on the numeric keypad of his laptop: the top floor of the GeneDyne headquarters, the location of Scopes’s octagonal room.
Thank you, said the same neutral voice that had controlled his elevator. Please enter the security password now.
Phido, run the keystrokes for this location, Levine typed.
“One should forgive one’s enemies, but not before they are hanged.” Heine.
As the cyberspace elevator rose to the sixtieth floor, Levine tried not to think about the paradoxical situation he was immersed in: sitting cross-legged in an elevator, stopped between floors, jacked into a computer network within which he was moving in another elevator, in simulated three-dimensional space.
The virtual elevator slowed, then stopped. With the trackball, Levine moved out into the corridor beyond. At the end of the long corridor, he could see another guard station under the watchful glare of an immense number of closed-circuit screens. Undoubtedly, every location on the sixtieth floor and the floors immediately beneath was under active video. He approached the monitors, scrutinizing each one in turn. They showed rooms, corridors, massive computer arrays—even the very guard station he was at—but nothing that could be Scopes.
From Mime’s security blueprints, Levine knew that the octagonal room was in the center of the building. No window views for Scopes; the only view he was interested in was the view from a computer screen.
Levine moved past the guard station and veered left down a dimly lit corridor. At the far end was another guard station. Moving past it, Levine found himself in a short hallway, doors flanking both sides. At the far end was a massive door, currently closed.
That door, Levine knew, led to the octagon itself.
With the trackball, Levine maneuvered down the corridor and against the door itself. It was locked.
Phido, he wrote, run the keystrokes for this location.
Are you going to leave me now? the cyber-dog asked. Levine thought he sensed a plaintiveness to the question.
Why do you ask? he typed.
I cannot follow you through that door.
Levine hesitated. I’m sorry, Phido, but I must continue. Please play back the keystrokes for this location.
Very well. “If all the girls who attended the Harvard-Yale game were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.” Dorothy Parker.
With a distinct click, the massive black door sprang ajar. Levine paused, took a deep breath, and steadied his hand on the trackball. Then, very slowly, he maneuvered himself forward into what he knew must be Scopes’s mysterious Cypherspace.
Nye stood in the center of the basin, Muerto’s reins in his hand. The story of his humiliation was written clearly in the sand and grass. Somehow, Carson and the woman must have sensed his presence. They’d snuck over to their horses and led them away—without his hearing a bloody thing. It was almost inconceivable that they could have pulled it off. Yet the tracks did not lie.
He turned. The shadow was still by his sides but when he looked at it directly it seemed to disappear.
He walked to the edge of the basin. The two had headed east toward the lava beds, where, no doubt, they hoped to lose him. Although riding through the lava beds was slow work, Nye would have little trouble tracking them. With two gallons of water, it was only a matter of time before their horses would start to weaken. There was no hurry. The edge of the Jornada desert was still almost one hundred miles away.
Nye swung into the saddle and began to follow. They had walked their horses for a while and then mounted. The tracks gradually separated—was it a trick?—and Nye followed the heavier set of impressions, knowing they must be Carson’s.
The sun broke over the mountains, throwing immense shadows toward the horizon. As it boiled up into the sky, the shadows began to shrink, and the smell of hot sand and creosote bush rose in the air. It was going to be a hot day. A very hot day. And nowhere was it going to be hotter than in the black lava beds of El Malpaís.
He had plenty of water and ammunition. Their hour or so of lead time couldn’t amount to more than four or five miles. That gap would narrow considerably as the lava slowed them down. Though he no longer had the advantage of total surprise, their awareness of his presence would force them to travel during the heat of the day.
A half mile from the lava, the two tracks joined again. Nye followed them to the base of the flow. Without even dismounting, he could see the whitish marks on the basalt where the iron shoes had scrabbled onto the rock. Now that the sun was up, following these marks would be easy.
It was still early morning, and the temperature was a comfortable eighty degrees. In an hour it would be a hundred; in another hour, a hundred and five. At four thousand feet of altitude, with a clear sky, the sun’s heat would be overwhelming in its intensity. The only shade anywhere was the shadow under a horse’s belly. If he didn’t get them by nightfall, the desert would.
The lava bed lay ahead in great ropy masses, stretching into the limitless distance. In places there were pits of broken lava, fractured hexagonal blocks where the roofs of subterranean tubes had collapsed. In other areas there were pressure ridges where the ancient flow had shoved up rafts and blocks of lava into enormous piles. Already the ground was shimmering as the black basalt absorbed the sunlight, reemitting it as heat.
Muerto picked his way across the flow with care. The horse’s hooves rang and clattered among the rocks. A lizard shot off into a crack. Thinking about Carson and de Vaca in this heat with so little water made Nye thirsty. He took a satisfying drink from one of the water bags. The water was still cold and had a faint, pleasing taste of flax.
The shadow was still there, walking tirelessly beside his horse, visible only indirectly. It had not spoken again. Nye found himself taking comfort in its presence.
After a few miles, he dismounted to follow the marks with greater ease.
Carson and de Vaca had continued eastward toward a low cinder cone. The cone was open at the west end and almost flush with the lava flow, its sides rising like two points into the fierce blue sky. The tracks headed straight for the low opening.
Nye felt a spreading flush of triumph. Carson and the woman would be going into the cinder cone for only one reason: to take refuge. They thought they had shaken Nye by retreating back into the lava. Realizing that crossing the desert during daylight was suicide, they were going to wait in the cinder cone until darkness, and continue their journey under cover of night.
Then he noticed a wisp of smoke curling up from the inner side of the cinder cone. Nye stopped, staring in disbelief. Carson must have caught something, most likely a rabbit, and they were busy feasting. He examined the trail very carefully, and then cut for sign, checking for any possible tracks or tricks. Carson had proven to be resourceful. Perhaps there was a trail out on the far side.
Leaving Muerto at a safe distance, Nye moved cautiously, with infinite patience, remaining hidden as he circled the cinder cone. The smoke, the tracks, could be a trap of some kind.
But there was no sign of a trap. And there were no tracks leading away. The two had ridden into the cinder cone and not come out.
Immediately, Nye knew what he must do. Climb the back side of the cinder cone, where the walls of lava reared upward in jagged thrusts. From that height, he could shoot down anywhere into the cone. There would be no place to take cover.
Returning for Muerto, he moved in a slow arc, leading the horse around to the southeastern end of the cone. There, in the close and silent shadows, he ordered Muerto to stand. With great care, Nye began to creep up the side of the cinder cone, his rifle slung over his back and an extra box of ammunition in his pocket. The cinders were small and hot beneath his hands, and they rustled as he moved up the slope, but he knew that the noise would not reach inside.
Within minutes, he neared the lip of the cone. Easing the safety off the Holland & Holland, he crawled to the edge.
A hundred feet below, he could make out a smoldering fire. Draped on a chamisa bus
h was a bandanna that had apparently been washed and let out to dry. A T-shirt was hanging next to it. It was definitely their camp, and they had not moved on. But where the hell were they?
He glanced around. There was a hole in the side of the cinder cone, lying in deep shadow. They must be resting in the shade. And the horses? Carson would have left them hobbled some distance away to graze.
Nye sat down to wait, easing the curve of his cheek into the rifle stock. When they came out of the shade, he would pick them off.
Forty minutes went by. Then Nye saw the shadow that was now always at his side begin to stir impatiently.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“You are a fool,” the voice whispered. “You are a fool, a fool, a—”
“What?” Nye whispered.
“A man and a woman, dying of thirst, use their last water to wash a bandanna,” the voice said in a mocking tone. “In the hundred-degree heat, they light a fire. Fool, fool, fool ...”
Nye felt a prickly sensation race up his neck. The voice was right. The rotter, the bloody thieving rotter, had managed to slip away a second time. Nye stood with a curse and slid down the inside of the cinder cone, no longer making any attempt to conceal his presence. The shadowy hole in the side of the cone was empty. Nye walked around the camp, taking in at first hand its obvious phoniness. The bandanna and the T-shirt were two expendable items, designed to make him think the camp was occupied. There was no evidence that Carson and de Vaca had stopped at all, although he could see marks indicating that horses had been inside for a brief period. The fire had been hastily built with green sticks of greasewood, guaranteed to smoke.
They were now an hour and forty minutes ahead. Or perhaps a little less, considering the time it must have taken to arrange this irritating little tableau.
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