Outside the vibrating windowpane, the narrow trunks of palm trees swayed in the hard sun glare over the glittering traffic on La Brea Avenue. This was south of Olympic, south of the dressy stores around Melrose with black or green awnings out front, and way south of Charlie Chaplin's old studio up at Sunset where you could see the individual houses on the green Hollywood hills; down here it was car washes and Chinese fast food and one-hour photo booths and old apartment buildings, like this one, with fenced-in front lawns. The apartment was stuffy, and reeked of coffee and cigarette smoke.
Oren Lepidopt had crushed out his latest cigarette in the coffee cup on the blocky living room table, and he held the telephone receiver tight to his ear. Answer the page, he thought. It's a land line, obviously it's something I don't want broadcast.
The only sound in the apartment aside from the faint music at the window was the soft rattle of keystrokes on an electronic keyboard in the kitchen.
At last Malk's voice came on the line — "Hello?" — and Lepidopt leaned back against the couch cushions.
"Bert," he said. "It's daylight here."
There was a pause, then Malk said, "I thought it was daylight here too."
"Well I think it's… brighter, here. Now. We got another installment from the ether. I think more is going on here than where you were going."
"I probably can't get a refund on the ticket."
"Screw the ticket. You need to hear Sam's new tape."
"Ala bab Allah," sighed Malk.
Lepidopt laughed at the ironic use of the Arabic phrase — it meant, more or less, "What will be will be." "So get back here now. Full APAM dry-cleaning while you're driving too — stops and double backs, watch for multiple cars, and if you can even see a helicopter, drive on by and lose the car."
"Okay. Don't start the John Wayne stuff till I get there."
Lepidopt's elbows jerked in against his ribs in a sudden shudder.
The line went dead, and Lepidopt's face was cold as he replaced the receiver in its cradle.
Don't start the John Wayne stuff till I get there. Bert, Bert, he thought, so carelessly and unknowingly you shorten my life! Or show me a new, even closer boundary of it, anyway.
He made himself take a deep breath and then let it out.
The faint clicking of the keyboard had stopped. "You were laughing," said young Ernie Bozzaris from the table in the kitchen, "and then you look as if you saw a demon. What did he say?"
Lepidopt waved his left hand in a dismissive gesture. "I shouldn't have borscht for lunch," he said gruffly. "He's coming back here, not getting on the plane. Should be here in half an hour or less." Suddenly self-conscious, he slid his maimed right hand into his pocket.
Bozzaris stared at him for another moment, then shrugged and returned his attention to his computer monitor. He was in his late twenties, fresh from the Midrasha academy; there was no gray in his black hair yet, and though he shaved several times a day, his lean jaw always seemed to be dark. "It's not the borscht," he said absently, "it's the Tabasco you pour into it."
With his left hand Lepidopt shook out another Camel from the pack, then used the same hand to snap his lighter at it. He inhaled deeply — it seemed even less likely now that he would have time to die of cancer. He had always heard the saying, You're scared until the first shot. And that had proved true twenty years ago, in Jerusalem. For a little while, at least.
He sighed. "Any activity? " he asked as he stood up and carried his coffee cup to the kitchen. His shoes were as silent on the kitchen's linoleum floor as they had been on the carpet in the living room.
Bozzaris had hung his gray linen sport coat over the back of the plastic chair and rolled up his sleeves.
"No unusual activity," he said, not looking away from the dark green monitor screen and the bright green lines of type scrolling upward, "But we don't know who else is out there. The one in New Jersey who tried to get into the mainframe Honeywell in Tel Aviv an hour ago uses the Unix disk-operating system on a Vax machine, and, like everybody else, he doesn't know about the three built-in accounts the machines always come with. I got into his machine by logging on to the 'Field' account, default password 'Service.'"
He paused to knot his long, thin fingers over the monitor and stretch. "Their e-mails," he went on, "show nothing but the usual cover-business stuff, assuming it is a cover business — the real guys might be covertly routed through real businesses, like we are. And there's been no notable increase or decrease in the traffic during this last hour and a half."
Bozzaris had insisted that the Institute pay for a new IBM model 80 computer with a 32-bit processor, and a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 that could operate at either 300 or 1200 baud. Lepidopt was used to the shoe-type modems that a telephone receiver had to be fitted into.
"Are any of the travel messages suspicious?"
"How should I know? It's a travel agency. A number of flights here to L.A., which I've copied, but that seems to be usual for them. And of course any of them could be codes. But there hasn't been any 'Johnny, this is your mother, take the casserole out of the oven.'"
"Any of them could be codes," Lepidopt agreed.
"I doubt they've got anything more than the Harmonic Convergence static; a hundred thousand New Agers standing on mountain-tops, holding hands and blanking their minds all at once to realign the earth's soul."
Static? thought Lepidopt. They're making a blasphemous Tzimt-zum, is what they're doing. In the beginning En-Sof, the unknowable Infinite Light, contracted itself to make space for the creation of the finite worlds, since without that contraction there would have been no room for anything besides Itself.
And now these wretched hippies and mystics have all contracted their minds at the same time! What sort of things will spring into existence in this vacuum?
Bozzaris seemed to answer his thought. "Every sort of critter is likely to be poking its head through from the other side," the younger man said, "with that kind of door open."
"The New Jersey crowd tried to hack Tel Aviv after the noon event."
Bozzaris shrugged. "It's unlikely that they'd have been listening on that, uh, wavelength," he said. "But I suppose the event might have registered with other media. Of course people do try to hack Tel Aviv, for lots of reasons."
"Assume it's not a coincidence," said Lepidopt.
He stepped to the kitchen counter and poured hot coffee into his cup, then stared at the cigarette butt floating in it.
With his left hand he fished the cigarette butt out of the cup and tossed it into the sink, shaking his fingers afterward. Then he sighed and took a sip of the coffee.
Bozzaris typed H-> to hang up the phone line, then immediately typed in DT and a new telephone number. The modem's LED lights flickered.
Lepidopt sipped his coffee and looked nervously toward the front window while Bozzaris clicked his way through now familiar passwords and directories. This telephone line was routed through a number of locations, and if Bozzaris's intrusions were fingered by the National Security Agency, there would probably be a warning soon enough for them to abandon this safe house.
And Bozzaris, for all his youth, was meticulous about security, always checking his computers for unsuspected "back doors" and intrusions. Only Bozzaris touched the machine, but he had told Lepidopt about all sorts of computer perils, such as programs that would mimic the IBM opening screen and ask for the user's password, and when the password had been entered would store it, and then flash "INVALID PASSWORD. TRY AGAIN," so that the user would assume he had typed the password wrong, and enter it again, at which point the real log-in sequence would start, and the user would never know that the intruder had copied his password. Bozzaris watched for intrusive programs and changed his passwords all the time. He even made allowances for the possibility of microphones in the room, and made sure to hit each key of his passwords in a measured pace, not hitting a double letter with two fast clicks; and, just to make any inquisitive listeners think his passwords included more characters than they actually did, he always hit a couple of random keys after pressing carriage-return.