Doctor Who (23 page)

‘To do that, we need to analyse what Swan's got. That's why I went in there.'

‘All right,' said his father. ‘But Xerxes' trapdoor would only have affected computers running the new software. Sounds like Swan's program, or whatever it is, will only affect computers on the ARPAnet. That's only a couple hundred machines.'

‘But it's growing all the time,' said Bob. ‘In the future, there could be hundreds more, even thousands of them connected through the network. Imagine if someone was prepared to wait twenty or forty years to take over all the military and science computers. They'd have a backdoor into every computer on the net – all that tactical and research information. Or they could simply cripple the net. Kill all those projects, and the military's alternative communications capability.'

Bob's father nodded slowly, digesting that. ‘If we can prove what Swan is doing, the charge against you will look like a well-meaning mistake instead of a crime. I may be able to pull some strings to get a search warrant. But I'd need some solid evidence. Have you got that?'

Bob shook his head. ‘Nothing that would convince the police. I mean, that's what I was there to get.'

‘Then what can I do to help?'

Bob said, ‘Let me keep helping the Doctor. He needs a programmer he knows he can rely on.'

Mr Salmon took a good, long look at his son. ‘I don't want to have to bail you out again,' he said.

Bob gave him a shy grin. ‘I don't want to have to be bailed out again.'

‘Do we have an agreement?'

They shook hands. Bob's dad went to the freezer to fish out some frozen Chinese food for the pair of them.

‘I'm glad I don't have to deal with that on a regular basis,' said the Doctor.

Peri agreed. ‘My parents would've strangled you ages ago.'

The Doctor had been unusually quiet on the journey back to my apartment. Letting Bob take risks was one thing, but having to deal with an angry dad was quite another. I wondered if the
Doctor just didn't think of the danger, or if he trusted his sidekicks with their missions enough to let them face it. More likely, I thought, the magnitude of the problem wiped any thought of personal consequences from his field of view.

There was an email for the Doctor waiting in Bob's university account. It was Swan, making her gambit:

Trespassing can easily lead to industrial espionage. I'll forgive your trespasses if you'll, hand over the instruction manual (or point me to it).

The Doctor barked with laughter. ‘She doesn't know what to do with it! She's asking us!'

Peri was chewing on the lid of her highlighter pen. ‘Hey,' she said. ‘Why does she think you would have the manual? Doesn't she know it's from another planet?'

‘She must assume it's a product of military research,' mused the Doctor. ‘In which case, she's probably searching the ARPAnet for information about it.'

I said, ‘She must know they wouldn't leave classified info lying around on ARPAnet where anyone could get at it.'

‘Hence her demand that we tell her where to look,' said the Doctor. ‘But she would also know that if she searches long and hard enough on the unclassified systems, she might put together enough clues to tell her where to look off the net. I doubt even a classified military computer would be a great challenge for Swan.'

‘Then why ask us at all?' said Peri.

‘It would be far more efficient if we just coughed up the info,' I said.

‘The crucial thing is that she doesn't know what she has or
what she can do with it. Not yet. The Savant hasn't told her. Which is interesting in itself . . . ah.'

A new email had arrived in Bob's account. The Doctor opened it up: it was from Swan, but this time, it was just a list of Internet addresses. Each of the curt acronyms represented one machine, one node on the net.

‘What's she trying to tell us now?' said Peri.

The Doctor looked like the cream-swiping cat. ‘Bob's mission was a success after all,' he purred. ‘This is a copy of a file which Swan saved in coded form a few minutes ago. Before she caught him, Bob installed a program on her system which quietly sends us a readable copy of any file she encrypts.'

‘So we get to read anything she doesn't want us to read?' said Peri.

‘Exactly.'

‘We're gonna need more diskettes,' said Peri.

The Doctor was saying, ‘In this case, I assume we're looking at a list of the Internet sites she's already searched.' He ran his finger down the screen. ‘Which would mean . . .' he began to hammer at the keyboard in earnest.

We watched as he spent a few moments breaking into a poorly guarded college computer. ‘Not here,' he said. ‘Then . . .' He used the telnet command to leap from that machine to another. This one had no protection at all; he simply logged into a maintenance account with root privileges. He stabbed a finger at the screen. ‘There,' he said. One of the users listed on the system was our friend fionnuala. She hadn't even bothered to disguise her presence.

The Doctor sent her a text message: ‘You won't find a manual because there is no manual.'

I could imagine Swan's response – surprise, followed by hindbrain rage. Whatever she was feeling, she let none of it
show on the screen. ‘Hand it over or you know who will suffer the consequences.'

The Doctor responded by sending a message to the sysop, warning him of intruders on his system. The sysadmin took the message seriously: a few minutes later, while Swan was in the middle of searching through the system's files, both she and the Doctor were kicked off.

The Doctor glanced at Swan's list of computers again, and compared it to Bob's map of the net. ‘Logically,' he said, ‘her next destination should be . . . here.'

He jumped to the next computer, took a moment to break in, and started searching for signs of Swan's presence. ‘She's set up an orderly search pattern,' he muttered to himself. ‘I doubt she has the imagination to break out of it now. There.'

This time Swan had hidden herself from the list of users currently logged on, but the Doctor found her through the tell-tale signs of her activity. ‘No-one knows how to use that thing safely,' he told her, again in a text message. ‘Least of all myself.'

Swan shot back ‘GO AWAY!!!' It was the first time we'd seen her be anything but reptile cold. The Doctor was starting to get under her skin.

She jumped again. The Doctor followed her again. It took him two tries – ten minutes – to find the system she was on. She was in the list of users again, working carelessly and fast, rummaging through the files for anything that might give her a clue as to what she could do with the Savant.

It went on that way for an hour. The Doctor would lecture Swan, Swan would leap away to another computer somewhere on the net, the Doctor would find her again. Her text responses became more abusive, then stopped all together. She simply could not believe that he could find her again and again, following her through the maze like Theseus guided by his
string.

I couldn't help thinking of the time I'd watched Stray Cat playing with a mouse she caught out on the balcony. Instead of just killing it, she kept patting it, or pretending to ignore it – all to see if it had any energy left. Even a mouse can give a cat a potentially fatal bite if it isn't exhausted before the cat goes in for the kill – I saw it go for her face more than once. Stray Cat kept her head well back, and used her paw to tap it and tap it again, wearing it down until it couldn't fight back any more.

Swan broke her search pattern and started jumping around randomly; that only meant it took him a little longer to track her down. Outside the fortress of her own mainframe, she was less like a god of the net and more like a rabbit on the run. In the end she sent him an obscene email and logged out in disgust.

‘Are you really sure that was such a good idea?' said Peri. ‘Won't she get mad and land Bob in hot water?'

‘I can't let her hold that over us. I mustn't.'

‘But –'

‘I have no intention of letting her harm Bob,' said the Doctor. ‘I must make her see that's she's helpless. As soon as she accepts that she needs my help, this miniature catastrophe will be over.'

‘What about the Savant's grip on her mind?' I asked. ‘Can she get past that?'

‘Swan's an intelligent woman,' said the Doctor. ‘Single-minded and malicious with a dash of megalomania, but intelligent. She must be aware of what's happening to her. In a way, her demand for an instruction book is a cry for help.' He looked up at his companion. ‘We're almost there, Peri. We're
this
close.'

My phone rang. I hit ‘answer' and told the speakerphone, ‘Shoot, it's your dime.' Then I flinched, expecting Mr Salmon.

Christ help me, it was she. ‘Mr Peters,' she said, sounding a
little hoarse. ‘This is Sarah Swan. I'd like your help with something.'

‘Uhhhhhhh.' I said. It was the plummeting moment of stage fright when your lines are just
gone
.

‘I don't trust the phone right now.' It should have sounded like knowing cynicism, but instead, it sounded like weary fright. ‘Let's meet.'

The Doctor opened his mouth, and Peri just about shoved her fist into it. He subsided onto the couch. Swan had no idea they were there. I said, ‘Uh, at your house?'

‘No!' She named a shop at Tyson's Corner. ‘Right now,' she said. ‘I'll be waiting for you.'

‘I'll be there.'

I hung up the phone. The Doctor exhaled loudly. ‘I'll go,' he said.

‘You know, I think it might be better if I go,' I said. The Doctor put his hands on his hips. ‘She still thinks I'm neutral in all this.'

‘And are you neutral, Mr Peters?' said the Doctor, looming over me. ‘After everything you've seen?'

‘I guess I am.' I lit up, obliging him to get out of my face. ‘I'm still an observer.' The Doctor always looks grouchy, but Peri's disappointed glance cut to the quick. ‘Someone has to be,' I insisted. ‘Or there wouldn't
be
any meeting with Swan. I'll see what I can get out of her.'

Mr Salmon dropped Bob off at my apartment, and Peri let him in. She said, ‘How was your dad?'

Bob blew out a combination sigh and whistle and rolled his eyes. ‘I think he'll let us live.' The Doctor showed Bob the email he'd received from an unknowing Swan. ‘The more cautious she becomes, the more information she'll give away.'

He insisted on waiting until they heard from me, but the lack
of action was driving the Doctor buggy. He straightened out the papers on my desk (wrecking my filing system), played a couple of games of chess with Bob (substituting pennies for the pawns missing from my set), inspected my fridge (a bottle of ketchup, half a lemon, a packet of cornflakes), scratched Stray Cat's rump while she dragged herself about on the carpet with her claws, and finally went back to the Apple, to try to trace Luis based on the information he'd given away during the MUD session.

Peri tried to comfort a depressed Bob. ‘You could come with us, you know.'

Bob's eyes got very big. ‘Really?'

‘I don't think the Doctor would take much persuading. We've got plenty of room.'

‘You know, he asked me,' said Bob. ‘Back in '77. He asked if I wanted to travel with him. It was a crazy question. My mom would have had kittens.' Peri had to grin. Bob said, ‘So he told me he'd return for me in a few years and ask again. When you turned up at my office, I thought it was because he'd come back for me.'

Peri's grin softened into a smile. ‘So how about it?'

‘I don't want to miss the next ten years of computing!' Peri thought about that. Ten years of living in the same place, watching it change around you a day at a time. She had never had ten years in a row like that. ‘History is happening right now, and I've got my hands on it.' He mimed typing at a keyboard. ‘It's too exciting to go right now. Maybe in ten years?'

‘Maybe,' said Peri. She gave him a pat on the arm.

Bob hovered at the Doctor's elbow until he came out of his computer trance. ‘Er,' said Bob. ‘I drew this up for you. For protection. Just in case.'

He handed the Doctor a slip of paper on which he had constructed an elaborate occult symbol. The Doctor unfolded
the paper, raised an eyebrow, examined the complex diagram drawn with ruler and compass and ringed with angelic names and alchcmical marks, carefully folded it up again, and inserted it into his coat pocket.

‘Thank you, Bob,' he said. ‘That was very thoughtful of you.'

‘Uh, Doctor?' said Bob. He was pointing at the screen of the Apple. Letters and numbers were flowing across its screen in a flood of symbols. ‘I have never seen anything like this. What'd you do to it?'

‘It's not me,' said the Doctor. ‘It's something on Swan's Eclipse. I was trying to make her system crash to root, and suddenly something reached out and grabbed the modem.'

‘Well, disconnect it!'

The Doctor caught Bob's hand before he could yank the modem's plug. ‘Just a moment. Look at it. What's it doing?'

Bob said, ‘It looks like it's running the same instructions over and over again. You know, it looks like a diagnostic test . . . a program checking out the Apple's system, poking into all the nooks and crannies. I do not like this.'

The scribble on the screen meant nothing to Peri. Everything she had seen up to that point had been in kind of stunted English, the high-level command languages which let human beings talk to the machine: a translator takes words like PRINT or RUN and turns them into the microcode that the computer can understand. Now the Apple was receiving instructions in its own tongue, and gleefully running them through its little circuits just as fast as it could.