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 information 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
Coyotes 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.