The Passage

by David Poyer

  Gradually, he realized that all the men were cowboys—all in western dress, pointed boots of leather or snakeskin or armadillo, heavy silver jewelry, ten-gallon hats, plaid shirts, bandannas. He felt out of place in his suit and tie. He didn’t like to feel conspicuous. He almost left, but then seated himself firmly at the old-fashioned bar and ordered a gin and tonic from a bartender in handlebar mustache and sleeve garters.

  Eventually, his heart rate slacked off. He tapped a quarter on the bar, musing again over the refugee operation. Apparently, he’d made the right decision, taking people aboard—despite the original orders. Because once the storm hit, that was what everybody had done, British, Dutch, Coast Guard. Navy Regulations, Article 0925, and NWP-9 were explicit about what a commander had to do faced with vessels requiring assistance. Not that there were things he’d do differently if they were ordered back to station. For one thing, he needed a different personnel mix—more Spanish speakers, more medical personnel, including a female corpsman. A dedicated habitability load-out-by the time they docked, Barrett was completely out of soap and toilet paper, not to mention sanitary napkins, diapers, and baby supplies, none of them standard stock items aboard U.S. Navy warships. It had all gone into a lessons-learned message he’d shot up to DESRON SIX that morning.

  When he looked up again, everybody was streaming out onto the dance floor. An older man stepped up to a microphone and, yes, it was Square Dancing Night at the Double R. That and the fact that no one at all had spoken to or even looked at him made it easy to pay quietly for his half-finished drink and leave as the do-si-dos began to echo off the rafters and the cowboys, grave and reserved and stiff, nodded to one another and began spinning one another about, heavy boots clunking on the scuffed wooden floor.

  “YOU know Uncle Charlie’s?” he asked the driver of the Yellow. The man, a Cuban, closed his eyes briefly, then opened them. “Byrd Road, U.S. One. A fag joint.”

  Leighty didn’t answer, and after a moment the driver shrugged and pulled out. “So, what you faggots think about the trial?” he said after a mile or so.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The trial, what you think about the trial?”

  “I don’t know. What trial?”

  The cabbie told him there’d been a police-brutality decision due that day, and they’d just found the cop innocent. “For once, they did justice. But the niggers don’t like it.”

  “We heard there was some … racial polarization,” Leighty said carefully.

  “Call it whatever you want, but I ain’t taking no fares to Northwest tonight.”

  They both fell silent as Leighty looked out. Coconut Grove looked paradoxical, oxymoronic, with expensive, grand houses cheek-to-cheek with falling-down shacks. Uncle Charlie’s was across from a Porsche dealership, a peachy brown plain-fronted building, again with no sign at all, no lights out front, no windows, either.

  Yes, he thought the moment he entered, this is more like what I’d hoped to find. No leather, no cowboy affectations. Just tables, soft rock, low lighting, and people talking to one another at the little tables. Women and women, men and men, men and women dancing casually. He went through to the bar, ordered another gin and tonic, and sipped it standing up, listening to scraps of conversation, arguments.

  “Hey, I think Anita’s right. You know? That you can be cured. Only trouble is, I don’t want to be.”

  “Okay, next: Are we going to have the same mimes this year? We have applications from five groups. What kind of feedback did we get about those guys in the green tights?”

  “View the planet as a large brain, along with the racial unconscious—”

  “No, at Bananas. He was standing there looking out at the bay and I came up and said to him, ‘What is that you have on under your slacks—’”

  “I bought it at three fifty; now it’s at six twenty-five. The point is not to hold out for peak, okay? It’s capital gain per quarter you want to use as a measurement.”

  “I have never used one. Amyl nitrate is not good for the human heart—”

  “He said he hated my dog, but he still jumped in to save her when she fell in the pool.”

  But the glances he got were unfriendly—in fact, rather hostile—and the conversations stopped as he went by and eyes flicked up to him and narrowed. So he didn’t try to join any of them, just kept walking, looking for an empty table, but there didn’t seem to be any.

  “Hi. How are you? My name is Evans.”

  He turned to a younger man with sandy hair over his ears, direct, slightly sad blue eyes, pouting lips, and teeth that should have been straightened. The Palm Beach look, white shoes, white belt, arms muscular under a tennis sweater with the sleeves pushed up, heavy gold link ID bracelet, gold Rolex.

  “Hi. Thomas.”

  “How are you, Thomas? I haven’t seen you here before.”

  “Haven’t been here before. New in town.”

  “Uh-huh. Are you a cop?”

  Leighty smiled. So that was it. “You’re direct, aren’t you? No, I’m not a cop.”

  “Something about you, the way you hold yourself. Something … authoritative. You’re military, aren’t you? There are a lot of retired Air Force here, older guys. They came down here during the war and liked it and came back when they retired.”

  “Why do you need to know anything about me? I just came in for a drink. I’ll never be back.”

  “The ship,” said Evans suddenly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “There’s a Navy ship just docked today. You’re off it, aren’t you? I was in the Army myself. Artillery, in Germany.” As he started to respond, Evans held up his hand. “Wait … I understand, all right? Say no more. Have your drink. Circulate. Enjoy your night on the town. Have you had dinner yet?”

  “Thanks, I’m okay.”

  Evans patted his back and moved away, nodding to the others, exchanging quick hugs. Leighty stood there feeling threatened, warned, vulnerable. Maybe it would be better to go, after all, if he was that conspicuous that someone could pick him out like that, tell exactly who he was and where he’d come from.

  He was strolling toward the door when Evans returned and took him into the back, to a table in the dimness, and introduced him to a couple of people and then left. Jason and Kurt, if he caught their names right. “These are some of the Air Force people I told you about. Tom here is Navy, guys. You can tell each other war stories, okay?” Patting him again, Evans dashed off.

  And actually that was what they did, tell war stories, and gradually he relaxed and eventually even had a good time. But he didn’t feel anything for them, or meet anyone interesting until he was leaving the club and heard footsteps behind him. He turned, going tense, ready—for what, he didn’t know.

  He was younger than Leighty, a bit chubby, friendly and anxious. He said his name was Vernon. “I think we’re complementary,” he said. “I like older men. Not that you’re old, but you have a presence, you know? I saw it when you came in. Did you see me? By the door? Then I saw you talking with Evans, but I knew you wouldn’t hit it off with him … well, I just knew. What do you like to do? I pretty much like to do just about anything. I’m pretty flexible, but I don’t like anything rough.”

  He stood in the dark, listening to the other persuading, hearing the anxious tone in his voice. “Want to go to the Sailing Club? I’m a member; I have a friend who leaves his boat unlocked. Or we could go into the park.”

  He stared at the pale face hovering in the dark. He both wanted the boy and did not, was both attracted and repelled. Another onenight stand, or not even that, half-hour acquaintance. After which he would feel both complete and incomplete, satiated but guilty. While at home, he had someone who cared, a family … . He thought with reflective sadness that he was caught between two eras. Thirty years ago, he could have denied what he was, even to himself. Thirty years from now, he could probably be free … . But this was a time of transition, of change, and no matter what he did or how he lived, he would probably a
lways have this feeling of uncertainty and impending retribution. And nothing he did or did not do would ever change that.

  The seesaw whine of sirens sounded in the distance, crying over the dark streets. “All right, Vern,” he said, touching his wallet and keys lightly through his slacks. “Show me the way to the park.”

  40

  STARING up at the grooved steel, Hank Shrobo wiped his hands on his shorts. Wet hands were dangerous, the guys told him. Could make the bar slip. Interesting how a small amount of moisture increased the coefficient of friction, while more lowered it. Without a word, the man behind him handed him a piece of rosin.

  “Okay, how much?” Shrobo asked him.

  Iron clanked. “Try her with this. Hundred and fifty pounds.”

  “Too heavy. I’ve never done that much before.”

  “I’ll safe for you. You were pumping a hundred and forty yesterday. You been at this a while; you ought to be scaling up. Come on, give it a try. Just remember, don’t try this without a spotter, okay? Specially when the ship’s rolling.”

  He stared up at Williams’s inverted face, then muttered, “All right.” He reached up and got his hands set, then yanked the weight off the stands.

  It came down hard, almost crushing his chest before he got his arms set and started pushing back. To his surprise, it went up. Not easily, but it rose as his muscles strained. His elbows locked and he steadied it above his clenched teeth, arms trembling.

  “Relax your jaw; that doesn’t help you lift. Go on, do a few reps. Till it hurts. You got to tear them muscle fibers; then your body fixes them twice as strong. Go on … . That’s good, another … . Okay, I got it.” Williams’s strong hands closed like leather gloves over his and guided the bar back into place on the rests. “Take a break.”

  Panting, he sat up, and the exercise room’s stark white walls, the well-used Nautilus machine, the racks of weights in welded brackets along the bulkheads, all returned to vertical. Others worked in tense self-absorption on the inclined board and the treadmill, and the punching bag made a steady machinelike rattle. He knew their names now, or at least the nicknames they went by among themselves as they grunted under masses of iron: Hemmie, Lightbulb, Baby J. Williams had introduced him, and although he felt inadequate around them, weak and pale beside their swelling chests and dark massive arms, they seemed to accept him.

  “How’d I do?”

  “Real good, Doc.” Williams squatted in boxing shorts and Nikes and poked him painfully. “You know, you getting some development. Keep this up when you get back shoreside and you’ll be more comfortable walking around in that body of yours.”

  “I never felt uncomfortable.”

  “I know, I know. Okay, let’s grab a shower, see if any of the guys want to hit the beach.”

  AS he pivoted slowly under the hot water, his mind turned, as it did almost every waking minute and most sleeping minutes, too, to the problem at hand.

  Since his last discussion with the captain and the assembled officers, he and Williams and Dawson and the other DSs and ETs had been full-time on the Crud. Or at least they’d started off full-time. But gradually, the others had dropped behind as he entered a shadowy forest of theoretics and speculation. First the chiefs, then the others had made excuses or found something else to do, until finally only Matt Williams was with him.

  He was more and more impressed with Williams. The slowspoken petty officer had no real education beyond the rather sketchy Navy data systems training, but he made up for it with an uncanny insight into programming. He wrote the search routines that Shrobo sketched out directly in assembly language, skipping the CMS-2 compiler. That wasn’t so extraordinary. He had several people fluent in ULTRA-32 back at Vartech. But then he’d seen the kid stare, tranced, at the rippling, winking lights on the face of the computer and push the stop button at the exact instant the operating system handed off to the navigational module. He’d realized in that stunned second that he’d seen a human being read machine language in real time. Still, he reassured himself, it was more of a trick, like being able to multiply large sums in your head, than a valid intellectual achievement.

  Which was what he’d felt he was on the brink of in the last few days: a breakthrough, something far more radical, more fundamental, and more far-reaching than patching up Elmo to aim the missiles properly again.

  Standing motionless under the hot water, he went over it all again in his mind.

  A week before—how long ago it seemed—he’d first recognized that the virus operated in a five-step sequence. One: It wrote its basic program, the “infector,” to memory. Two: It “unzipped” itself to activate the hostile portion of the program, and wrote it to additional areas of operating memory. Three: Running in bursts of approximately three-hundredths of a second, so rapidly that it wasn’t visible to the operator, it destroyed data by deleting portions of the existing code. Four: It replaced the erased code with randomly generated garbage, mimicking the format of the original data.

  And step five, unlike any program he’d ever heard of before: It rezipped itself to the spore form and wrote the infector to several other portions of the tape, continuing the insidious process of destruction at the next reboot.

  Since then, while the ship’s officers had been distracted by this refugee thing—he heard about it, but it wasn’t his concern what the ship did or where it went; he had not even breathed open air for days—hour by hour, night after night, he’d hammered at the elusive virus’s structure.

  But the deeper he went, the more difficult further progress became. For one thing, the UYK-7s were the first militarized thirty-two-bit machines. Unlike most computers, they used a binary logic procedure called the “1’s complement.” Each bit in the original word was complemented to invert the register contents. One drawback of a 1’s-complement machine was that it was possible, under certain conditions, to register a negative zero. This was an illogical thought, and computers finding themselves thinking illogical thoughts created an error condition that was very difficult to debug. The virus took advantage of this to mask itself. Not only that, it seemed to have privileges that pointed to a spawning out of the executive program. It knew the demand entrances; it used cycle stealing to move itself around.

  But gradually, as day followed night, he’d crept into the initializing code. This preceded the zipped portion, and though it wasn’t easy, it was possible to decipher it gradually, with patience.

  And he knew now he had to. He and Williams had gotten some of the modules cleared and running in isolation. But that was only a temporary fix. They couldn’t sterilize the programming and expect it to run clean for more than a few hours. They could compare code with listing, cut and patch and paste till their eyes fell out and rolled around on the deck, but as soon as they ran a data tape, the virus would emerge from one of its fiendishly chosen hiding places and reinfect, degrade, destroy.

  Isolation was not the final answer.

  He had to read the virus, all of it, in order to build a program that would prevent it from ever returning.

  This was because his ultimate aim was to create a search string for the Crud.

  A “string”, in computer jargon, was any given sequence of characters, whether instructions or numerical data. A “search” string was a program that ran through the machine like a rat-catching snake, looking for that particular sequence. If he could break and read the virus’s infector, then he could write a search string that would automatically scan the contents of the computer’s memory for it—like reading the Bible with a Hi-Liter in hand, marking a given word wherever it appeared. Except that a computer could do it far more rapidly. A relatively simple search routine could rapidly locate a given string wherever it was hidden, even amid hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and insert break points to stop the program there.

  And just now it occurred to him that once he had that, it would be relatively simple to add programming to delete and overwrite the virus automatically, then mark the module and
line so that the DSs could patch what would now be simply a blank space in the code.

  He smiled under the needling water; sometimes ideas came that way, instantaneously, from nowhere. Once you knew everything about the problem and had concentrated on it for days, answers came mysteriously, generated by some deep processing that went on whether you were awake or asleep, only lighting an occasional indicator in the high-level interface that was the conscious mind.

  But the next moment, he frowned. He was getting ahead of himself. In order to write a search string, he had to be able to read the virus. And after a certain point, he couldn’t. Whenever he tried to unzip it, it erased, vanished utterly as a dream, leaving only meaningless and dysfunctional nonsense where before had stood the stark inhuman beauty of machine language.

  Even more unsettling, he still had no idea what the zipped code actually did—except for one thing.

  He suspected now that what lay curled at its inmost heart, a black spore in a tightly spun shell of trick and trap and encipherment, was a 1’s-complement negative-zero random-number generator, a blasphemous and demonic incantation that was the ultimate negation of all logic, all rationality, all causality, and all order.

  No doubt about it, whatever twisted and evil mind had come up with this thing, it was clever.

  After days of trying unsuccessfully to slip past the Crud’s defenses, he’d gone back to the weight room and started walking on the treadmill. He’d walked for four straight hours. And gradually he had reverse-engineered the virus himself, redesigned it from scratch, as if he was the hacker, trying not to defend but to penetrate the AN/UYK-7 and its resident programs.

  He decided that he would have built the virus as follows. The first part of the program would be an execute instruction that would trick the host computer into unzipping and running the infector. Second would be the infector proper. And the third part would be the self-eraser, the portion of code which re-spored the infector, scattered it through the host programming, then deleted the original virus. Williams, when he explained this to him, had pointed out that the first section probably also included an instruction that went immediately to the self-erasing feature if the inserting mechanism was interrupted or tampered with. That was what had frustrated their efforts to read it.