Twistor

by Cramer, John; Wolfe, Gene;

  Flash, seated at the Macintosh in Vickie's bedroom, had just entered his fourth Megalith super-mainframe. Things were going better now. After school he had tried his first assault on Megalith, and it had been a near disaster. He'd used the University of Washington HEPNet link, and a system manager on the first Megalith system he'd entered had spotted his activity and demanded to know who he was and how he'd gotten onto the system. He'd disconnected instantly. Then he had to crack the UW system's logging files to erase his tracks before Megalith security could backtrack.

  Over dinner he'd thought about the fiasco and decided that this was no time for sloppy work. He was dealing with the big time, and he was going to have to be much more careful to bring this one off. He'd developed an indirect and untraceable routing through a Canadian university computer. Then, using the access codes posted by the Electron Terrorist, he had networked into another Megalith system. This system was a very large IBM mainframe.

  He had found a user with a high activity level but, on the basis of the files in his directory, no evidence of computer sophistication. The owner was clearly a plodder. Flash had boldly assumed the identity of this user. Pretending to have program problems, he'd asked the system manager to help him and was able to pull off the old Trojan horse scam, which he knew from experience was still workable on IBM operating systems. The system manager had run the innocent-appearing program in question in the system manager's own account and under the blanket of the system manager's own privilege levels. It had been a deceptively simple little program that, among other things, had awarded Flash's account SysOp privileges. He'd then been able to determine that this system was part of a local area network that linked it into other IBMs and a Cray, all located in the San Jose area and used by Megalith engineering groups.

  Soon Flash was the master of all these systems. On the second IBM he'd found a lightly protected file belonging to a word-processing group. The file contained the current network addresses, access codes, and telephone dial-ups for all of Megalith's major computer sites. In this list Flash found a promising DEC HyperVAX located in the corporate headquarters in San Francisco. He dialed in to the VAX, quickly determined the name of the system operator, and logged off. Then, establishing an account in the same name on one of his captive systems, he came back in through DEC Net and found that, as expected, he had captured all the privileges of the VAX SysOp. Essentially, he was wearing the SysOp's skin.

  Scanning the user list, Flash spotted a familiar name: Pierce. Yes! Saxon's reports were addressed to that guy. Pierce should be into some interesting things. His directory was super-protected, set up to be airtight. Even the SysOp was locked out. Well, there was more than one way to skin a snake. Flash typed in a short program written in the language C, composing it from memory, and compiled it. Checking to make sure that Pierce wasn't using his terminal, he allocated the unit and connected his C program to it.

  Then he waited, a spider with its web arrayed neatly in position. It didn't take long. It never does, when you're on a roll.

  Martin Pierce sat at his desk in his San Francisco office, cradling his head in his hands and contemplating his problems. Things were not going well. Before returning to San Francisco, he had arranged for the lease of a secluded lakefront residence near the University of Washington in the fashionable Laurelhurst area. The house he had selected was isolated from nearby residences by distance and large shrubs, was furnished, had a large garage with automatic doors through which unobserved arrivals and departures could be arranged, and even had its own boat dock complete with motorboat. That could prove useful, on the off chance that some disposal work was needed.

  Mandrake and the PSRS personnel had taken Saxon to the house for interrogation. A cover story detailing Saxon's 'emergency trip to Switzerland' had been carefully fabricated. A meticulously constructed trail of Saxon's BitNet communications, airline tickets, and border crossings led from Seattle to Zurich and vanished there.

  At first, Mandrake's reports to Pierce on the progress of the interrogation implied that Allan Saxon was being obstinate in refusing to reveal where the missing equipment had been hidden, how the disappearance trick had been done, and the technical details of the twistor effect. Mandrake had even felt admiration for Saxon's great strength of character in resisting their initial methods of persuasion. It soon became clear, however, that there was another problem. Drugs like neurophagin have proved to be completely reliable in these matters, and against these no strength of character can prevail.

  It was no longer possible that Saxon was faking ignorance of the location of the equipment or the details of operation of the twistor effect. He truly was ignorant of both, except at the most superficial level. And he seemed to truly believe some bizarre story about shadow universes, perhaps a delusional side effect of the drug. Saxon was worthless as a source of information, but it would still be necessary to keep him out of circulation for a while.

  At the proper time they could drug him, fill his stomach with cheap wine, and dump him in a doorway on a skid row in some eastern city. If and when he was finally identified, it would probably be assumed that he'd suffered a mental breakdown. It was an excellent cover. Even if the irreversible effects of neurophagin left Saxon with enough of his faculties to make accusations, these would be dismissed as paranoid delusions.

  Pierce gritted his teeth with resolution. He had already exceeded his mandate by considerable margin. The Megalith board always favored aggressive actions with a profitable bottom line, but there must be no hint of some cowboy operation that was out of control. He must be very careful. With determination, resolve, and the proper strategy, this enterprise could still be brought to a profitable bottom line. The surveillance recordings indicated that only two people understood the intricacies of the twistor effect: David Harrison, whose disappearance had caused all the present problems, and Victoria Gordon. Since Saxon knew nothing about how the apparatus had been snatched from Pierce's grasp, and since Harrison was missing or hiding out, Gordon was next on the list.

  Last week Pierce had arranged for a Megalith campus recruiter to approach Miss Gordon with an extremely attractive job offer. The strategy had been to get her attention focused on the large salary, then reveal the side condition that she must go to work for Megalith immediately. It had failed. The recruiter had reported that as soon as Gordon discovered the offer was from Megalith she had told him she was definitely not interested and had stalked out. So be it. There were other ways.

  Pierce raised the flat color-graphics screen from its recess in his desk. It was time to discover what could be learned from Miss Gordon by more direct methods. He initiated his standard log-in procedure. Curiously, it took a bit longer than usual for the system start-up messages to appear. But soon he was into the system and uploading detailed instructions to the PSRS VAX for the initial phases of the Gordon operation.

  Victoria hoisted her bike up the ancient wooden stairs of the old house on Densmore and clicked the chain lock around a weathered post. She was tired. The teams she had organized yesterday had been busily going about their tasks today. But everything else depended on her providing a design for the new twistor hardware. That was moving with frustrating slowness.

  It had been a warm day for October, and the sagging front door was ajar. She squeezed past it, walked through the house to the kitchen, and clopped down the worn basement stairway. It was cooler down here. In her bedroom her brother was seated before the dim screen of her Mac. 'Hi, William! What's up?' she asked.

  Flash glanced up. He had an underfed, hollow-eyed look but he was clearly happy. 'El progress-o! Our most important product!' he said. 'I'm getting damn close, Sis. Remember those letters from Saxon to a guy named Martin Pierce at Megalith? Well, I've cracked the system that Pierce uses. It's in San Francisco, and he's got his area protected up the wa-zoo, but I slipped a port feedthrough decoy into the system. I've already got both of Pierce's passwords and one encryption key.'

  'That was fast,' said Vickie. 'H
ow'd you manage it?'

  'Well,' said Flash, Tierce always uses the same terminal port to connect to the computer. It must be hard wired. I got myself SysOp privileges on his system and planted a decoy program in the system that's sitting right on his port line. Whenever Pierce types into his terminal, he's talking to my program, not the system. When he tries to log in, my program creates a new process and logs him on, just as requested. Whatever he says to do, the program passes it along. The only difference is that it makes a file on the disk that records everything he types and everything he reads: passwords, encryption keys, access codes, the works. He's already used it twice today. I checked. Later tonight I'll go into the system again and fetch the full records back here.'

  'William, is there any sign that anyone might have detected your messings-about in their system?' asked Victoria, remembering the stories about Megalith security.

  'Nary a ripple-o,' said Flash. 'I got off to a bad start, but since then I've been very careful, Sis. No flashy stuff, just smooth subterranean hacking. The program's invisible unless the SysOp is specifically looking for it, and anyhow there's no way my network linkups could be backtracked here. And we're almost in the clear. I've already downloaded lots of Pierce's suspicious encrypted files to the Mac, so I only need to go into his system one more time. I've got three floppies full of his files, a few megabytes' worth. We can decrypt them right here and read them. But not 'til I get that one last encryption key. Then we'll see what foul deeds Mr Pierce has been up to.' He smiled.

  'OK, come on, Hacker Hero,' she said, patting him on the shoulder. 'Put your toys away and get dressed. I'm taking you over to the Pizza Haven in the Broadway district for one of those loathsome pepperoni-and-anchovy pizzas you're addicted to. You deserve some good old R and R. And I'll stand treat for the arcade games and pinball too.'

  Flash shut down the Mac and headed for the door.

  When Vickie and Flash returned from the Broadway district much later that evening, a nondescript panel truck was parked nearby on Densmore next to a utility pole. There was nothing about the truck that would have drawn the attention of a casual observer. But if one had been able to see in the near infrared region of the optical spectrum, as certain insects can, thin beams of IR light would have been visible linking the truck with inconspicuous reflectors on several windows of a nearby house and with a small gray module attached to a telephone terminal box high on the utility pole.

  21

  Wednesday, October 20

  Victoria got up at six forty-five, showered, dressed. She burned her finger cooking the bacon for breakfast. William had been hacking until quite late and didn't want to get up at all. She had to pull the covers from his bed and threaten him with a drenching if he didn't get up immediately. They'd eaten breakfast quickly, and he had to run to catch the school bus.

  She unlocked her bike from the porch. It was raining hard, she realized, and went back into the house for her rain gear. Finally, slicker clad, she eased her bicycle down Densmore.

  She'd just reached the Burke-Gilman Trail when she noticed that her rear tire was going flat. She always carried a spare tube and a set of mounting levers in her pack. But dismounting the tire, locating the nail, mounting the new tube in the old tire, and inflating it with her hand pump, all done in the wet semidarkness and rain while squatting beside the trail, was not a pleasant experience. Morning bikers dinged their bells and splashed her as they went by, and the joggers made misguided attempts at humorous commentary.

  By the time she arrived at Physics Hall, the fast oscilloscope she needed had already been borrowed by another group, and the CAD/CAM design computer hooked up to the NC mill in the student shop was already in use and had grown a long waiting list.

  She washed the stale residue from her coffee cup, refilled it from the coffee pot in the machine shop, and went to the basement room that her group was using to assemble the new twistor apparatus. No one else was here yet. It had been a low-ceilinged storage area, practically a broom closet, but she'd prevailed upon Sam to relocate its contents so her group could work here. There wasn't really much room to work. Surplus equipment, parts, and components were stacked everywhere. Two vertical racks holding electronics chassis occupied the center of the room. Their many empty slots, a smile with missing teeth, were a silent reminder of problems yet unsolved.

  She consulted the long MacProject III task chart taped along one wall. Many of the tasks were checked off as done, but too many in critical places along the path lines were lagging. Most of these involved designs that she had yet to complete. There were just not enough hours in the day. Her helpers were very conscientious and hard working so far, but she was the only one with the experience to tell them what to do. And often it required more time to give detailed instructions and then correct mistakes than to do it yourself. She had the feeling that all the burdens of the world rested squarely on her shoulders. She took a deep breath.

  Once more she thought of David, stranded in another universe, perhaps dying . . . She got to work.

  David, standing at the makeshift table at the base of their tree, poured the steaming milk-white liquid into the first of a row of white paper tubes. A stick across the top of each tube supported a thick string hanging down the center line. 'Cross your fingers, Jeff,' he said. 'We may soon have ourselves a new light source.' Yesterday Jeff had discovered some waxy white berries growing on one of the bushes near the pool. He'd brought them to David, saying that they smelled like candles. David had found that their waxy outer coating melted when heated, hardened when cooled, and burned smokelessly when soaked into paper.

  This morning both children had gone berry picking and come back with a surprisingly large quantity of the 'candle-berries.' David had heated their harvest over the fire in an old coffee can and was now pouring a milky stream of melted berry-wax into a makeshift mold. So far, so good. The liquid filled the first paper tube to the top. David moved on to the next tube in line. After the candles cooled, he and Jeff would see if the things actually burned like candles.

  Another experiment was in progress by the fire pit. Melissa was smoking fish. Monday had dawned cool and clear after the storm of the night before. They had cooked their first catch, and, for the first time since their arrival, they'd had enough to eat.

  Now there was even something of a fish surplus, and Melissa was experimenting with preserving the catch by suspending fish fillets inside a wire-reinforced, aluminum foil 'umbrella' over a smoky air-starved fire. The technique seemed to be working, and as an added bonus the swarms of small blue insect-creatures that had been attracted by the fish smell were driven away by the smoke.

  When the last tube was filled with wax, David put down the can and aimed the CCD camera, recording Jeff with the candles and Melissa at work with the fish. This morning he was feeling more optimistic. The children were, for a change, getting along and working well together. He wondered why. Perhaps the stress of their new situation was diminishing, and they had interesting work to keep them occupied. The basics, thought David. They had structured work, preserved food, nearby water, a latrine, a source of illumination at night, a dry place to sleep.

  It was likely they would survive for now, if nothing went seriously wrong and the winter was not too severe. The animal life and edible plants in this world were abundant enough that, at least for the moment, they could live off the land. But there were certainly differences here.

  Opening Melissa's first fish to clean it had been a great surprise. Superficially, it had seemed an ordinary fish. There were too many fins in the wrong places, perhaps, but on the outside it was still just a fish.

  Inside was another story. The internal organs had completely different structures and organization. There were two stomachs, no identifiable liver, the intestines were organized as a network rather than as a folded tube, and there was a bewildering array of other organs with functions David couldn't even guess. He wished he could recall more details from that messy biology lab he'd taken in college.<
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  And the birds. He glanced up to where the treebird was working its way along the tree trunk. The birds seemed to come in two groups. Those like the treebird divided the basic six-appendage body design into two wings, two walking feet, and two manipulator feet used for food gathering and perhaps also for fighting and defense. So far these were all large pelican-size birds, few in number and quite territorial.

  He looked higher, to the flyer activity at the forest canopy. Up there were the four-wingers. Their design involved two pairs of wings with a muscle structure that made one pair go up while the other pair went down. That counterbalanced wing movement seemed to be a very efficient design. Birds as large as robins were able to hover like hummingbirds. They were fascinating to watch. Perhaps he'd set up a bird feeder near the treehouse so he and the children could study them more.

  He was still very concerned for the children's safety. Many times a day they had to climb to a dangerous height to get to the treehouse, they were eating plants and fish with unfamiliar characteristics that might contain toxic biochemicals, and there were large and dangerous carniverous animals in the forest.

  There was now some evidence that the big carnivores hunted only at night. They'd been here for a week now, and in that time David had seen the large bearlike animals only at night. But he still carried the gun whenever they explored new parts of the forest.

  David had had some initial misgivings about his capability for dealing full time with the Ernst children. He was much relieved to find that he was able to take care of them without major traumas on either side. He was glad they were with him, actually. They could do useful things, and they were good company. Looking after them kept him from devoting too much time to brooding about their biggest problem: to find a way home.

  It was ultimately a problem of electrical power. They had all the complex apparatus, the microprocessors and power supplies and multipole coils, needed to operate the twistor apparatus and return them to their proper universe. David had everything, but the hydroelectric dams, the transformer stations, and the transmission lines to deliver electrical power to the university to feed the breaker boxes to power the equipment to make the twistor field to take them home. The big sources of electrical power now lay a universe away. And the twistor equipment required many kilowatts of power.