'Slide it into him,' he said, 'like a cow-catcher.' Both men took hold of a table leg and pushed it hard into Ellery's jerking body, forcing him away from the Patching Cabinet. As his grip on the wrench was broken, Ellery yelped with pain and one of his thumbs emitted a blue flash that disappeared into the carpet with a puff of acrid smoke. The combined force of the electricity discharging itself from his body and the table ramming into his side was enough to fling him across the corridor, where he collided with the wall and collapsed unconscious on to the floor.
Curtis was on him in a second, like some unsporting wrestler, flipping the man on to his back, tearing open his shirt front and pressing his ear against his chest. 'Is he dead?' said Helen.
Straddling Ellery's thighs, Curtis said nothing and, placing one hand over the other, with elbows locked, he began to press Ellery's heart between his breastbone and spine, trying to find a rhythm in his chest compression that would squirt enough blood out of it to supply the unconscious man's brain.
'Helen,' he said breathlessly, 'find out if Nat's OK. Jenny? Get a blanket, a table cloth, something to keep this man warm. Mitch, call Richardson on the walkie-talkie and let him know what's happening.'
Curtis kept up the compression for another couple of minutes and then leaned forwards, listening for a heartbeat. He shook his head and started to undo Ellery's urine-soaked pants. Jenny returned with a table cloth.
'Pull these down,' he yelled, 'and get a hold of his femoral artery.'
He started the compressions again. Jenny pulled Ellery's pants down. Ignoring the stink of urine, she pushed the scrotum in Ellery's underpants to one side and let her fingers reach for his groin.
'Can you feel it yet?' he grunted. 'Can you feel it when I press his chest?'
'Yes,' she said after a momentary pause. 'I can feel it.'
'That's good. Someone find out what that asshole Beech is doing. Has he managed to pull the plug on this son of a bitch yet?'
Curtis put his ear to Ellery's chest and listened again. This time he heard a feeble heartbeat. The bigger problem was that Willis Ellery's respiratory muscles had seized up and his breathing had not yet restarted.
'You can let go of his crotch now,' he told Jenny. 'Did you speak to Nat?' he asked Helen.
Kneeling by Ellery's side, he pinched the man's nose and started to give him mouth-to-mouth respiration.
'Nat's OK,' Helen told Curtis. 'The water's up to his waist and rising, but he's OK.'
With his mouth pressed periodically to Ellery's there was no time for Curtis to answer her. Not that he had much to say. He told himself he was all out of good ideas. There were no options left that he could think of. It was all down to Beech now.
Ten minutes passed and still Curtis did not give up on Willis Ellery. One of the things he had learned as a young patrolman was that victims often died because the person attempting to resuscitate them gave up too quickly. He knew he just had to keep going. But he was already tiring. He knew he was going to need help.
Between forcing breaths into Ellery's traumatized lungs, Curtis asked Jenny if she could take over for a while. Covering Ellery with the table cloth, she looked at Curtis with tears in her eyes and nodded.
'You know how?'
'I took a first-aid course in college,' she said, and moved alongside Ellery's head.
'Don't give up until I tell you,' he ordered. 'There's the danger of anoxia. Suspended respiration might cause blindness, deafness, palsy, you name it.' But it was plain to see that Jenny would keep going for as long as it took. Curtis stood up stiffly and watched her carry on. Then he went to speak to Beech.
Bob Beech was worried.
The last time he had felt so worried had been in the middle of the 1980s, on his graduate course in computer security at Caltech, when he had constructed his first self-replicating program or, as he had subsequently learned to call all such SRPs, a computer virus. In those days everyone had been writing them, inspired by an article that had appeared in Scientific American.
With three hundred lines of MS-DOS Beech had created TOR, after Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. Beech's idea had been to create a program that would destroy the heresy of pirated MS-DOS software in the Far East, where software piracy was almost endemic, and then to sell the successful result to the Microsoft Corporation. The trouble was that TOR had behaved more like a real computer virus than Beech had ever anticipated and had combined with another virus, NADIR, the existence of which Beech had been quite unaware, to create a new superstrain of virus, later known as
TORNADO. This mutation had acted with catastrophic effects,
destroying not just data written with pirated Microsoft product, but data written with legitimate software too. At the second A-life conference in 1990 at Los Alamos, Beech had heard one delegate estimate the cost of the damage wreaked by TORNADO to be several billion dollars.
Beech had never told anyone that he was the author of TOR. It was his darkest secret. Ten years on, with numerous TORNADO anti-viral programs still on the market, fifth- and sixth-generation mutations of TORNADO continued to survive inside PCs all over the world. He had written a few anti-viral programs himself, one of them for TORNADO, and reckoned he knew as much about disassembling rogue SRPs as anyone.
GABRIEL was the most sophisticated disassembly program — ever since TOR he had disliked the term 'computer virus' — Beech had ever written, based on principles he had learned from epidemiology and biological virology. As a piece of livewire it was, Beech considered, a real bastard. Not only was GABRIEL designed to be completely autonomous, it was also supposed to be extremely aggressive to the infected host. Except for the circumstances in which he now came to trigger GABRIEL, Bob Beech might have been proud of his disassembly program. The only fly in the ointment was that it did not work.
GABRIEL was, as he had told Frank Curtis it would be, slow acting, but even after a few minutes Beech knew that he ought to have seen some sign that GABRIEL was having the desired effect on Abraham's architecture. But there was nothing to indicate that Abraham had suffered so much as a minor thrash, stray, bozo, hung file or line gremlin. Beech had positioned himself at a vantage point within the system-architecture where, like some epidemiologist staring at the progress of a virus under an electron microscope, he ought to have been able to witness Abraham in the very earliest stages of the infection: the clock. GABRIEL had been designed to destroy Abraham's sense of time first of all. As the minutes rolled by on the clock it was plain to see that the DP was inoperative. It was now eleven-fifteen and Abraham was still behaving like the blue-ribbon program Beech had helped to create, with no errors and no bugs. Plainly GABRIEL was impotent, at least as far as Abraham was concerned.
A couple of times he retyped the transactions that would trigger the DP, just in case he had made a mistake, but with no more success. When David Arnon asked him how things were coming along, Beech did not answer. And he hardly noticed the commotion that followed Willis Ellery's electrocution. Stunned, he sat in front of the terminal, motionless, waiting for something to happen, recognizing in his heart of hearts that nothing would. His remarks about the responsibilities of a god struck him as hollow now. It was as if God, having decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, found that his much vaunted fire and brimstone just bounced harmlessly off the city walls.
Turning in his chair, Beech found Frank Curtis standing behind him, wearing an expression so frightful that he was suddenly more afraid of the policeman than he was of the consequences of what had failed to take place in the silicon heart of the machine.