“Nor was I. I’d have liked to run longer and do more. But they’re no fools, the people who monitor the Fedcomps. Already I’m pretty sure they have an inkling of what’s about to crash on them. Before they react, we have to capitalize our last resources. You’re still a cause célèbre around KC; and judging by how she looked and sounded Ina is boiling with eagerness to put a good heavy G2S code between us and disaster.”
“I’m sure you’re right. Your logic is flawless. Even so—”
“You don’t have to live by logic. You’re wise. And that can transcend logic. No matter how logical your choice may seem in retrospect.”
“I was going to say: even so it’ll feel strange to go in and not have Bagheera come to rub against my ankles.”
The apt had been searched by experts. That aside, it was unchanged, though dusty. Kate picked up the paintbrush she had been using when “Fessier” called and grimaced at its clogged bristles.
“Anything missing?” he inquired, and she made a fast check.
“Nothing much. Some letters, my address-and-code book … Things I can live without. Most are still furnishing my head. But”—she wrinkled her nose—“the power was off for some time, wasn’t it, before you had it restored?”
“Sure, from the day after you were ’naped.”
“In that case, the moment I open the refrigerator the apt will be uninhabitable. I distinctly recall I’d laid in two dozen extra eggs. Come on, we have a lot of garbage cans to fill. There’s going to be a party here tonight.”
“A party?”
“Naturally. You never heard of Doubting Thomas? Besides, students are a gabby lot. What you’ve done is going to be on all strands of the net by this time tomorrow. I want it on the mouth-to-mouth circuit too.”
“But you know damn well I’ve written in a program that will call a press conference—”
“At noon the day after the balloon goes up,” she cut in. “Nick, Sandy, whatever the hell, darling, the avalanche you plan to start may have swept us into limbo long beforehand. If you’re going to hurt them as much as you think, you and I can’t safely plan so far ahead.”
He thought about that for a long moment. When he answered his voice shook a little.
“I know. I just haven’t faced the idea. Right, leave the clearing-up to me. Get on that phone and contact everybody you can. And you might as well enroll Ina’s help, get her to bring some friends from G2S.”
“I already thought of that,” she said with composure, and punched her mother’s code.
THE HATCHING OF THE WORM
On her way to visit friends for dinner, Dr. Zoë Sideropoulos paused before her home computer terminal long enough to activate a link to the continental net and strike a cluster of three digits on the board. Then she went out to her car.
Returning from an evening seminar, Professor Joachim Yent remembered what day it was and punched three digits into the board of his computer terminal.
Dean Prudence McCourtenay was in bed with a cold; she was a martyr to them every winter. But she had five veephones in her seven-room house, one being at her bedside.
Dr. Chase R. Dellinger took five from unexpected work at his lab—something suspect about a batch of newly imported mushroom spawn, perhaps contaminated with a mutant strain—and on his way back paused at a computer remote and tapped three digits into the net.
Nerice Compton misdialed a phone call and swore convincingly; she and Rush had friends in for drinks tonight.
Judge Virgil Horovitz had had a heart attack. At his age, that was not wholly unexpected. Besides, it had happened twice before. On returning from the hospital, his housekeeper remembered to activate the computer terminal and press three digital keys.
At a party with friends, Helga and Nigel Townes demonstrated some amusing tricks one could play with a computer remote. One aborted after three digits. The rest worked perfectly.
In any case, a complete emergency backup program was available which would have done the job by itself. However, many times in the history of Hearing Aid it had been proven that certain key data were better stored externally to the net.
By about 2300 EST the worm needed only fertilization to start laying its unprecedented eggs.
PARTY LINE
“I’ll be damned! Paul! Well, it’s great to see you. Come on in.”
Blinking shyly, Freeman complied. Kate’s apartment was alive with guests, mostly young and in brilliant clothes, but with a mix of more soberly clad people from G2S and the UMKC faculty. A portable coley unit had been set up and a trio of dancers were cautiously sticking to the chords of a simple traditional blues prior to launching a collective sequence of variations; as yet, they were still feeling out the unit’s tone-color bias.
“How did you know we were here? And what are you doing in KC, anyway? I understood you went to Precipice.”
“In a metaphorical sense.” Freeman gave a grin that made him look oddly boyish, as though he had shed twenty years with his formal working garb. “But it’s an awfully big place when you learn to recognize it. … No, in fact I figured out weeks ago that you were sure to be back sooner or later. I asked myself what the least likely place would be for me to find you, and—uh—took away the number I first thought of.”
“It’s alarming to think someone found my carefully randomized path so predictable. Ah, here comes Kate.”
Freeman stiffened as though to prepare for a blow, but she greeted him cordially, asked what he wanted to drink, and departed again to bring him beer.
“Isn’t that her mother?” Freeman muttered, having scanned the visible area of the apartment. “Over there in red and green?”
“Yes. You met her, didn’t you? And the man she’s talking to.”
“Rico Posta, isn’t that his name?”
“Right.”
“Hmm … What precisely is going on?”
“We had kind of a big temblor for a while, because of course once the news broke that Kate was back and she actually was kidnaped by a government agent as the students have been claiming, they were set to go tribal the campus. We put that idea into freeze, after a lot of argument, by hinting at all sorts of dire recriminations. And that’s what we’re discussing at the moment. Come and join us.”
“Such as—”
“Well, we’ll start by deeveeing Tarnover.”
Freeman stopped dead in midstride, and a pretty girl banged into him and spilled half a drink and there was a period of apologies. Then: “What?”
“It’s an obvious first step. A full Congressional inquiry should follow publication in the media of the Tarnover and Crediton Hill budgets. The others are in the pipeline, with Weychopee last because it’s hardest to crack open. And as well as financial revelations, naturally, there will be pictures of Miranda and her successors, and the fatality rates among the experimental children, and so on.”
“That looks like Paul Freeman!” Ina exclaimed, rising. She sounded alarmed.
“Yes indeed. And a bit dazed. I just began to tell him what we’re up to.”
Kate arrived with the promised beer, delivered it, sat down on the arm of the chair Ina was using. Rico Posta stood at her side.
“Dazed,” Freeman repeated after a pause. “Yes, I am. What’s the purpose of attacking Tarnover first?”
“To trigger a landslide of emotionalism. I guess you, coming fresh from an environment dedicated to rationality, doubt it’s a good policy. But it’s exactly what we need, and records from Tarnover are a short means to make it happen. Lots of things make people angry, but political graft and the notion of deliberately maltreating children are among the most powerful. One taps the conscious, the other the subconscious.”