Alan kept that level stare on him. “I don’t get it.”
Flynn looked at him, then turned to Lora, to his left. “You haven’t told him?”
She shook her head, and Flynn understood then that he hadn’t been a popular topic between them. He went on, more or less, in the voice of Mr. Peabody, the time-traveling canine genius. “ ‘Sherman, set the Wayback Machine!’ ” He gave them a dumb-but-happy look. “Five years ago, Kevin Flynn,” he indicated himself and inclined his head modestly, “one of the brightest young software engineers at ENCOM.” Flynn snorted in derision. “He’s so bright that he starts going in there at night, and sets up a private memory file, and begins writing a program for a videogame he’s inventing, called—” with an elaborate wave to one of the games in the room, with its Recognizer stencil, “Space Paranoids!”
Flynn rather enjoyed the astonishment on Alan’s face. Lora, lips pursed, watched the performance with displeasure. Alan demanded, “You invented Space Paranoids?”
Flynn’s smile was lopsided. “Yep. And Vice Squad; a whole slew of ’em.” He held up thumb and forefinger. “I was this close to starting my own little enterprise.”
The hand fell; Flynn became less casual. “But, enter Ed Dillinger. Another software engineer, not so young, not so bright, but very, very sneaky. One night our boy Flynn goes to his terminal, tries to read up his file, and—nothing. A big blank, man!
“We now take you to three months later. Ed Dillinger presents ENCOM with five videogames he has ‘invented’; the slime didn’t even change the names. And he gets a big fat promotion. Thus begins his meteoric rise to—what is he now, executive VP?”
“Senior exec,” Alan supplied. He found himself believing Flynn absolutely, as much because of his own estimate of the man as because of Lora’s confidence in Flynn’s honesty, or Flynn’s engaging style.
Much of the lightness had left Flynn’s voice. “Meanwhile, kids are putting eight million quarters a week in Space Paranoids machines and I’m not seeing one dime except what I can squeeze out here.”
And Dillinger had won a promotion for it, profit shares, stock options—professional success and a personal fortune. Alan set aside the injustice of that for the moment, doggedly keeping the conversation on track. “I still don’t get why you’re trying to break into the System.”
Flynn leaned forward now. “Because somewhere in one of those memories is the evidence. If I get in far enough, I could reconstruct it.” He’d come close before, had only missed because he’d been crashing from an outside terminal. He’d thought of a new avenue of attack; with both Alan and Lora listening sympathetically he began to hope. “My password; Dillinger’s instruction to divert the data—”
Lora cut off the list of evidence. “I’m afraid it’s a little late for that. Dillinger’s shut off all Group Seven access. He must know what you’re up to.” Alan found himself not minding the concern in her tone.
Flynn slumped back, moaning, “Oh, great! So now nothin’ can stop him.” He spread his hands. “Just Dillinger and his Master Control Program, runnin’ things from on high, man!”
“Not if my Tron program was running,” Alan declared excitedly. It surprised him a little, how quickly he’d gone from neutral to sympathizer, from there to ally. But what Dillinger had done to Flynn, what Dillinger was doing now, those things were wrong. “That would seal the System off. If your file’s in there—”
Flynn’s eyes were eager, conspiratorial. “Man, if we were inside, I know how to forge us a Group Six access!”
They looked at one another, Flynn hungry for another shot at the System, Alan reserved but decided, and Lora recognizing the expressions on both their faces from experience. She held up the keys to her van. They twisted and jingled, a challenge.
“Shall we dance?” she invited.
05
DILLINGER WAS SEATED once more at his console desk, with its endless projections of information and images, culled from wire services, industrial and military telecommunications systems, and ENCOM’s far-flung enterprises. But he ignored those now; before him stood Dr. Walter Gibbs.
Dillinger chose to conceal most of his irritation, where he might have hidden it all. In this manner he portrayed a busy man who, needlessly bothered, still behaved with gracious restraint.
Gibbs, for his part, was confused. His dealings with the upper echelons of the corporation he’d helped found had never been so difficult; ENCOM had always acknowledged its debt to him. But he’d come to see, as he’d confronted the maddeningly evasive Dillinger, that matters were no longer as they had been.
Gibbs tried one more time.
“Ed, all I’m saying is, if our own people can’t get access to their programs—” He stopped for a moment. The implications of such a state of affairs seemed so obvious to him that he didn’t understand why Dillinger didn’t leap up at once to rectify it. He couldn’t see how the Senior Operating Executive had allowed the situation to exist in the first place. “You know how frustrating it is when you’re working on a piece of research—”
Dillinger cut in at the precise moment when Gibbs was trying to formulate the end of his sentence, amputating it as a surgeon might. “Walter, I sympathize.” But there wasn’t much in his voice to indicate that he did. “But I have data coming out of the Master Control Program saying there’s something screwy—”
“That MCP; you know,” Gibbs broke into Dillinger’s smooth performance with unexpected heat, “that’s half the problem right—”
“The MCP is the most efficient way of handling what we do,” Dillinger said, by way of regaining the initiative. Above all, he mustn’t let the matter devolve into an attack against Master Control. The thought of what the MCP might do if it felt itself threatened was something that didn’t bear prolonged consideration. Harboring Dillinger’s own fears and insecurities multiplied many times, it would be capable of anything. The thought put even more force into the Senior Executive’s counterattack. “I can’t sit and worry about every little User request that—”
“User requests are what computers are for!” Gibbs railed with absolute certainty; Dillinger saw that the old man was now upon ground where his attitudes were unshakable. There was nothing to do but get tough.
“Doing our business is what computers are for!” he returned icily, then went on in a voice of reason. “Look, Walter. With all respect, ENCOM isn’t the business you started in your garage anymore.”
He sent commands via the touch-sensitive controls on his desk. Like a conjurer, he made of it a mosaic of screens and readouts. Despite himself, Gibbs looked down and saw the displays, upside down from his viewpoint.
They showed him the overwhelming scope of ENCOM: banks of computers, row after row of magnetic disks, and the corporate trademark, a globe spinning in space, covered with a glowing gridwork. Gibbs watched as electronic billing was displayed, myriad accounts receivable and payable. The Carrier used by Sark was shown there as nothing more than a simulation model for a craft in one of ENCOM’s newest videogames. The desk showed them a simulation for another vessel as well, now under development, fashioned after a solar sailing vehicle. It was a delicate, dragonfly ship, regal and swift, pleasing to the eye.
Stacks of numbers appeared: assets, transactions, cash flow, holdings, and personnel—for people, too, were numbers to Dillinger’s desk.
“We’re billing accounts in thirty countries,” Dillinger informed him grandly through it all. “We’ve the largest system in existence.”