Doctor Who (3 page)

The moment they got back to Peri's hotel room, Bob fell face-first onto the bed and started snoring again. He had brought a huge bag of supplies, ranging from an Atari 400 to a half-empty jar of instant coffee. He'd insisted they stop by a 7-Eleven so he could buy two two-gallon bottles of chocolate milk.

Peri sighed, hung up her coat, squeezed the milk into the hotel fridge and got room service to send up a mushroom and avocado sandwich on rye and a grape soda. She thought of asking Bob if he wanted something to eat. His mouth was
slightly open, and he was drooling on the bedcover. She decided he needed his beauty sleep more than he needed his lunch.

Bob Salmon was, obviously, also used to sleeping in odd circumstances. The sleeping bag was a permanent feature of his office, in case a bout of programming stretched into the wee hours and he needed to snatch some shuteye before getting back to the keyboard. Once he had programmed for three days straight, chasing a bug in the university's electronic mail system, turning his monitor from green-on-black to black-on-green so that his burning eyes could go on reading the screen. An alarmed student found him unconscious in the sleeping bag after the marathon session, and almost called an ambulance before the janitor explained it was perfectly normal.

Bob had developed the ability to work for inhumanly long hours while still in high school, so he could study and still have time for computers (or the other way around). His father, a programmer for the military, encouraged his interest but didn't realise just how far it went. More than once Bob had hacked away half the night, and spent the other half cramming for a test.

Programming is not a spectator sport. Bob spent long hours of his teens alone, hunched in front of the monitor in his bedroom. But he also spent hours with his father by his side, thumbing through manuals while Bob hammered away at the keyboard. Mr Salmon was delighted at the prospect of Bob following in his footsteps, and knew it wasn't always the case that teenage boys had something cool to talk about with their fathers. Unusually, his mother would often sit with him as well. Mrs Salmon was no programmer, but she loved puzzles, especially crosswords and chess puzzles. She could often follow the steps Bob took to solve a particular programming problem, despite the arcane tongues of the machines: Unix, VMS, Pascal.

The high school had a TRS-80 connected by phone to a nearby college for a few hours of connect time each week. The keyboard was prone to doubling the letters you typed, producing meaningless syntax errors like NNEW and RUUN. It was Bob who solved the little mystery of why the machine seemed to freeze up altogether when someone inadvertently told the machine to LLIST; the command meant ‘line list', BASIC-speak for ‘print out my program'. Over at the college, the program got stuck in a lengthy print queue. Bob was able to cancel the unwanted printout and get the machine working again. After that the teachers let him stay back after class and work on the TRS-80.

Mr Salmon indulged his son with as much computer equipment as the family could reasonably afford. He even provided him with a limited dial-up account to his ARPAnet-connected machine at work – on the understanding that Bob would never try to break anything or break in anywhere.

The ARPAnet is the Advanced Research Projects Agency network. College, research, and military computers across the US are connected by this vast network: over two hundred individual computers, all talking to one another, swapping files and electronic ‘mail'. ARPAnet has been around since the sixties, but now it's exploding, with another computer joining the network every three weeks. At the current rate, the net will have more than doubled in size by the year 2000.

Bob was the sort of kid who just didn't get into trouble much: the one time he had been sent to the principal's office for talking in class, he actually cried. Nonetheless, the temptation struck Bob many times: alone in the wee hours of the morning, desperately curious about some other machine he could see dangling out there in the imaginary blackness beyond his monitor. But he never dared.

Except once. Bob spent one hot summer at ‘computer camp', staying at a college campus with six other whiz kids. Bob soon found himself providing technical support to the guys who ran the college machines. It was like high school all over again, but this time the teachers knew almost as much as he did.

The day before Bob went home, he broke into the account used by the sysops for most of their test work. A file was displayed every time someone logged in to the test account, showing the home phone numbers of the technical team. Bob located the file and quietly added his own name and phone number to the end of the list.

The sysadmins noticed the addition right away, and amusedly gave Bob a call at home to see if he could fix a bug that was troubling their system. He did it in less than an hour. ‘But please, please don't tell my dad,' he pleaded.

A couple of weeks later Bob's father asked him for a very serious piece of help: locating a trapdoor maliciously planted in the software he was helping to develop. That was when Bob met the Doctor.

The phone rang. Bob fell off the bed. Peri snatched up the receiver. ‘Doctor?'

‘Were you able to locate young Mr Salmon?' said the Doctor.

‘He's not so young any more,' retorted Peri, but Bob was already begging for the phone.

‘Hey, Doctor?' he said, cradling the receiver in both hands. His face split into an excited grin. ‘It's me. Uh-huh. I did get into college. But I spent so much time working in the compute centre that they made me sysop, so I'm taking a year off my studies. How about you? Uh-huh. Uh-huh.' Suddenly, he froze. ‘You want us to do what?' There was a long pause while he listened. ‘Are you sure about this? OK. OK.' He grabbed a pen.
Peri pushed the hotel stationery across the desk towards him, but he was already writing something on his skinny arm. ‘OK. Talk to you later.'

Peri was reaching for the receiver when Bob hung it up. ‘He did not want to stay on the line,' he said.

‘Well, what did he tell you?'

‘He wants us to find a computer component so we can steal it,' said Bob. ‘You won't believe where he wants us to steal it from.'

‘Where?' said Peri. ‘The Russian Embassy? The Iranian Embassy? Do we even have those? NASA?'

‘TLA
¹
,' said Bob, in a hushed voice. ‘He wants us to go to the TLA building and steal something from Sarah Swan.'

¹
Not its real acronym

SARAH SWAN'S FIRST
love wasn't computers, but telephones. Her first ever phone crime was tapping her parents' line, using a broken-down old tape-deck and a pair of earphones. A dedicated ‘phone phreak' by the age of twelve, she built her own blue box from scratch out of Radio Shack components: a palm-sized brick of black plastic studded with buttons, it generated tones which fooled the phone system into giving her free long-distance calls. She traded tips and technology with other phreaks, mostly blind teenagers she spoke to over improvised party lines.

Fishing in a telco trash can for phone system manuals, a teenage Sarah came across a list of phone numbers for the company's computers. With a few hints from her sightless friends, she broke in and looked up her own home number. She discovered she could trim back her phone bill, add services to her home phone, change her number, give herself an unlisted number – anything the telco could do, she could do. And if she could change her own phone service, why not other people's? Soon she was selling “free” calls to her friends, editing their phone bills for a percentage of the money they saved.

Sarah was gripped by the idea of borrowing the power of a machine that didn't just let you talk to other people – it let you change the way they lived their lives. She found ways into other people's phone records and school records, all from a four-hundred-dollar Altair 8800 in her bedroom. College gave her
access to bigger and better computers. Finally, TLA unwittingly let her get her hands not just on a VAX mainframe, but to computers all over the country: as a defence contractor, TLA was eligible for connection to the ARPAnet.

You did not cross Swan. You did not argue with her on the computer bulletin boards where hackers discussed their adventures. You did not flame her on the new-born discussion networks, Usenet and BITnet. Because if you did, Swan would do something to your phone. She might change its listing in Ma Bell's database to a payphone, so that when you tried to make a call from your own living room your phone demanded a quarter. She might forward your home number to her own phone (and heap abuse on your callers), or to the weather recording, or to a pizza parlour. Or maybe she would break into your school's computer and change all your grades to an F. These were not the negative power trips of a mere vandal; Swan's bullying was calculated and precise, tit for tat. Just how many of these horror stories actually happened, and how many were awed speculation about Swan's magical powers, I'm still not sure. But:

A PDP-11 at a certain pharmaceuticals company was wrecked in 1978 by a simple program that created one subdirectory after another until it filled the entire disk drive, forcing every program, every researcher's work to grind to a halt. The wrench in the computer's machinery was a mindlessly simple three-line program – nothing any daring computer criminal would be proud of sneaking onto an enemy system. The punchline was that there was a second program, this one only two lines long, which had been disguised as the system's own “list files” command. When the technical staff tried to find out what had gone wrong with their computer, naturally they tried to list the files, setting off the second bomb. This one filled
the computer's RAM, its working memory, with dozens of “background processes”, programs all demanding a slice of the computer's memory; and each of those background processes started up more background processes of its own, and each of those . . .

Swan was widely credited with the attack, supposedly because a juicy job at the company had gone to someone else. I don't know if it was her work, but I was able to confirm that it really happened. Repeated attacks rendered the Unix machine useless for days, costing the company thousands of dollars in lost time. No-one was ever able to prove that Swan was behind anything. She never denied anything. The reputation of power, after all, is power. And in the computer world, no-one can know who you really are; your reputation is all you have.

Bob's car was a pea green '79 Pontiac Grand LeMans. The back seat was buried in junk, mostly books and empty plastic milk bottles. He and Peri sat in the car in a Crystal City parking lot across from the TLA building: a two-storey cube in brushed concrete and grey brick flanked by a public library and a small park. Somewhere inside was the component the Doctor wanted. The first step was to find out exactly where: was there a high-security lab, a top-secret office?

‘Couldn't we just break into their computers and find out?' said Peri. ‘You're an expert on that, right?'

Bob scrunched down in the driver's seat. ‘No,' he said. ‘We can forget about hacking their systems. Swan is poison. If we mess with her, we can forget about ever making a phone call again, unless we want to talk to an operator in Djibouti.'

‘Reporters,' said Peri. ‘We could pretend we're reporters. See if we can get a tour of the place.'

‘Not bad,' said Bob. ‘But they are not going to let reporters near sensitive technical stuff.'

‘I guess you're right.'

‘If they were a bigger company, we could bluff our way in as employees. We could make up a couple of fake badges.'

Peri said, ‘They've basically got just one really big computer, right?' Bob nodded. ‘Well, where do they keep that? Do they keep all their computer stuff in the same place?'

Bob squinted for a moment, and then broke into a grin. ‘I have a nice idea,' he said. ‘Let's buy the lady a present.'

‘Do you do this sort of thing a lot?' said Peri.

‘You should have seen what we got up to in '75.'

Peri had made her share of phoney phone calls as a kid. But this was not the same thing. She kept picking up the phone, getting out of breath, and putting it back down again. ‘Remember, they don't know where the hell you're calling from,' said Bob. ‘They can't see you, they don't know who you are.' Easy for him to say. All he'd done was dial up the college computer and spend fifteen minutes messing around before he unplugged his computer and handed her the receiver.

You've faced a lot worse than this, Peri told herself. But none of her adventures on the road seemed as real right now as ripping off a computer supplies company.

You ask for what you want, and you get it. She punched in the number. ‘TLA,' announced a cheerful voice. ‘This is Alice speaking.'

‘Well hello,' said Peri. ‘I'm calling from Gallifrey Computer Supplies. We're new in the area, and we were wondering if you'd be interested in trying out some of our new specials.'

‘I'm afraid we already have a contract with a supplier,' said the receptionist smoothly.

‘Oh – can I ask who that is?' Peri scribbled down the name: Keyworth Computers. ‘Well, if you're ever shopping around for great prices, just give us a call.'

She put the phone down, grinning like a teenager on champagne. ‘Piece of cake,' said Bob.

But now there was a much more difficult call to make. Peri chewed on her bottom lip while Bob flipped through the White Pages. ‘They can't see you,' he reminded her.

‘I'm OK,' said Peri, dialling. ‘Hi,' she said faintly when a voice answered. She cleared her throat. ‘Hi, Trina. This is Alice calling from TLA. We need a Lisp Machine right away. I mean, like five minutes ago.'

She put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘She's checking if they have one,' she hissed. ‘What are we gonna do if they don't have one?' Bob just shook his head, waving his hands at the phone. ‘Hello? You've got one in stock. Great. Look, can I send one of our technicians over to collect it? It's super urgent. The boss is really riding me on this one.'