"That will be all, My Lady. Please." He emphasized his request with a polite smile.
Since Bal-Simba was about six-foot-eight and decked out like a 1970s pimp, he was hard to argue with. When he smiled and snowed teeth neatly filed to points the TV crew lost all interest in the little group.
Meanwhile the gorilla’s handlers, recognizing a heaven-sent opportunity, buttonholed the reporters, shoved press kits on them and began to explain Gigantopithecus Software’s latest announcement in multi-part high-decibel technobabble.
"What was that about?" Moira asked as they got free of the knot of people.
"Advertising. He’s promoting something." Jerry paused and looked back and squinted to read the sign on the giant’s back." ’Sasquatch.’ I wonder what that is?
"Forgive me if I do not share your curiosity," Moira snapped. "In fact I can think of nothing which is likely to have less bearing on our search."
"Yeah, but stilclass="underline" "
"It is utterly irrelevant. Now please, let us at least find a place where we can rest for a moment."
Jerry looked closely at her. Even though he wasn’t used to judging the moods of dragons he could see she was tired.
"Sure, Moira. Come on over this way."
Off at the edge of the hall was a space between the booths for a fire door. The guard looked at them suspiciously as they made their way through the crowd into the temporary clearing, but since none of them sat on the floor or otherwise blocked the exit she didn’t say anything.
"Hi there." Jerry turned and found himself right across the table from a couple of guys in the booth bordering the fire exit. He was trapped and he knew it, so he resigned himself to listening to a sales pitch.
He smiled as if he might be interested and studied the pair. One was hefty, slicked back and smarmy and the other was skinny, chinless and frenetic. Jerry couldn’t read their badges so mentally he dubbed them "Leisure Suit Larry" and
"The Squirrel."
"Are you interested in imaging?" Larry began. "If so we’ve got the hottest product at the show."
"It’s truly revolutionary," The Squirrel picked up. "They’re cracking down on adult GIF files on bulletin boards, right? Okay, with Peeping Tom’s Inverse Steganographic technology you don’t need a GIF. Any data file of more than two megabytes is displayed as an X-rated picture."
Jerry nodded in spite of himself. "GIF," of course, was a standard encoding method for storing and transmitting pictures for personal computers. He was trying to piece the rest together when The Squirrel went charging on.
"You know about steganography, right? How you can encode a message in a picture file like a digitized TV picture so it looks like noise or just part of the picture?"
"I’ve heard of it"
"Well," said The Squirrel triumphantly, "this is the same thing only backwards. Instead of specifying the encoding scheme and using the picture as the variable- the cyphertext- to get the plaintext, we take the file as the given and apply various decoding schemes until we get the appropriate plaintext-the picture. With Peeping Tom’s Inverse Stenographic technology, combined with our easy-to-use Windows front end, you select the kind of picture you want as an output from our menu and Peeping Tom goes until it finds it."
"Are you saying," Jerry said slowly, "that you can always find a dirty picture, ah, ’adult GIF’ in any data file?"
"Guaranteed," Leisure Suit Larry boomed.
"Assuming the file’s big enough," The Squirrel added. "Over two megabytes."
"And this is going to avoid censorship?"
"Hey," Larry said virtuously. "Can we help it if those files contain dirty pictures?’
"Yeah," The Squirrel chimed in, "we just decode them."
There was a flaw in that argument, but just then Jerry didn’t have the time to go looking for it However his curiosity was piqued.
"How big is the program?"
It takes ten Meg of disk space," the big one said.
Yeah, but how big’s the executable, the main program file?"
"About five Meg," The Squirrel put in.
"What happens if you feed it the executable?" Jerry asked. "You Know, let the program examine itself?"
"We didn’t put any pictures in there," Larry said. "Nothing but code." The Squirrel, however, looked puzzled. "Hmm. I never thought of that. Let me try it and see."
"We’re running a show special," Larry said as his companion began pounding the keyboard. "Just $199 for the basic package. Runs under 3.1, NT and Windows 95 and: "
"Jesus Christ! The Squirrel yelped. "Hey, take a look at this!"
Sales pitch forgotten, his partner rushed to join him at the screen. "Wow," Larry said reverently after a minute. "I mean I’d heard the expression, but I didn’t think anyone could really do that."
Between their heads Jerry caught a glimpse of the screen and blanched. He didn’t know if you could get busted for pornography in Las Vegas, but what was on that screen had to violate some law and he didn’t want to be around when the cops figured out which one. "Come on, folks," he said to Bal-Simba and Moira, "I think it’s time we moved on."
The rest of the day wasn’t much more productive. People at one or two of the booths they visited had seen Taj the day before, but no one had seen him today. Jerry guessed he was visiting one of the other exhibit halls, but that didn’t help much.
The fact was that they could spend the rest of the week at the show and never catch sight of E.T. Tajikawa. Jerry had known that before they came, but the physical reality of the place drove the point home like a pile driver. Not only was it too big, it was too spread out and too crazy. It was going to take either bund luck or a really clever piece of strategy if they were going to find him. He explained all this to Bal-Simba and Moira on a snippet of lawn outside the exhibit hall. The late-afternoon sun was casting lengthening shadows over the lengthening lines of showgoers who were trying to get seats on a shuttle bus back to their hotels. The buses roared in and out of the rank constantly but still the lines grew.
"Basically, we’re going to have one more shot to try to find him tonight," Jerry told the pair. That’s at this reception downtown." He didn’t say what they’d do if they didn’t find Taj there and the others didn’t ask.
"How shall we get there?’
Jerry looked at the dragon and sighed. "I’m sorry but there’s only one way. We’ll have to walk again."
It was a hike of several miles and they took it slowly, resting every few blocks for Moira’s sake. The sun sank, the shadows deepened and Las Vegas lit up for the night