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  CHAPTER 30

  It felt really strange toting Susan and both kids to the lab. The front parking lot was empty, Dan saw. Still he drove slowly around to the back. Nothing there either, except Joe Rucker's beat-up T-Bird with its handicapped license plate. And Jace's bike. Yes, it was there. Dan felt his teeth clamp together. I've got to face him down and find out what the hell he's done. I've got to. Can't let him off the hook this time. Can't let him push me around, either. I've got to get the truth out of him. Lives depend on it and there's nobody else to get it done except me. I've got to do it. Got to.

  Dan parked his bird-spattered Honda under one of the oaks.

  As Susan got out on her side she said, "You really ought to wash this car one of these days, Dan. Look at the bird droppings!"

  "I know," he said, opening the rear door for Angela. "I've been hoping it'll rain."

  She made a small smile. "If you wash the car, it might break the drought."

  "Guaranteed," Dan muttered.

  He had told Susan nothing about what had happened at Wright-Patt. Nothing about his near-certainty that somehow, in some weird way, Jace was at the bottom of the problem there.

  "Brung the whole family, did ye!" Joe Rucker's voice called across the parking lot as Dan tugged Phil's car seat from the back of the Honda.

  "Hello, Joe. Happy Thanksgiving." Rucker limped across the lot, touched the bill of his cap as he smiled at Susan. "Mornin, Mizz Santorini."

  "I thought I was the only one working today," Dan said as he headed for the rear door, lugging the car seat and a slim briefcase.

  Rucker took the bag of toys that Susan was holding and, with the bag dangling from his hand, pointed toward the bicycle leaning against the loading dock wall. "Nope. Ol' Jace is here, workin' his head off. And me, o' course. Place needs guardin' even on Thanksgiving."

  Angela stared at Rucker. She had never seen a one-armed man before.

  "I'll have to make out visitor's badges for y'all," Rucker said as he limped toward the rear entrance. "Can't go into th' building 'less you've got a badge. 'Cept fer the front lobby, o' course."

  "There ought to be a consultant's badge for Mrs. Santorini," Dan said as they reached the door.

  "I'll check in the security office," said Rucker.

  Dan led the little procession down to the pit, the computer center, where Rucker left them and shambled up the corridor. He was back moments later with a red consultant's badge and green temporary badges for Angela and the baby. Susan peeled the back off Angie's badge and let her stick it onto her blouse. She put Philip's badge in her purse.

  "I reckon that's all right," Rucker said, "seein' how he's too little to wear it regular-like." Satisfied that the company's security regulations had been followed, he left them in the Pit and headed back to his post at the front door.

  "He looks familiar," Susan said. "Wasn't he one of the guards at Wright-Patterson?"

  "Couldn't have been," Dan said.

  "I'm sure I saw him there a couple of years ago."

  "They wouldn't hire a cripple for guard duty," Dan said. "They use the Air Police."

  "I saw him somewhere," Susan insisted. "I know I did."

  Dan passed it off as he set Susan up at one of the desks in the computer center. It was a square room big enough for a dozen people to work in simultaneously. Along the back wall stood the big IBM and DEC mainframes, tall and blocky as refrigerators. The Cray supercomputer was against the side wall. No windows. The whole ceiling was covered with glareless light panels. The tile flooring was slightly spongy, easy on the feet.

  Angela immediately went to the copying machine. "This is bigger than the one in your old lab, Daddy," she said.

  Dan grunted agreement as he unfolded Philip's playpen and put the baby into it while Sue unpacked a hamper full of Phil's toys and dumped them in with him.

  Both Susan and Angela were in jeans; their Thanksgiving dresses were hanging in the back seat of the car.

  Dan pecked his wife on the cheek and marched toward Jace's cluttered lab like a soldier heading for the battle front.

  "Back from the wars, huh?" Jace barely looked up from the desktop computer he was hunched over, bony knees poking up almost to the keyboard's level. The other machines were silent, their screens blank.

  Dan took off his suit jacket, hung it on the peg behind the lab's door, then plunked his briefcase down on the table beside Jace.

  "Briefcase?" Jace looked surprised. "You going executive, kiddo?"

  "Got a fresh shirt and a tie in it," Dan explained tightly.

  "Taking the family out to dinner around four o'clock." Jace laughed. "The joys of married life, huh?"

  "Ralph's still alive; if that's of any interest to you," Dan said.

  "Too bad. He could've been a hero if he had sense enough to die."

  "Jesus! Even if he lives he's going to be crippled for the rest of his life! He can't even talk, for God's sake."

  "Tough."

  Before Dan could answer, he saw what was on Jace's display screen: a videotape of last year's economic summit meeting in Copenhagen. "Hey! That's the Washington program. That's my work!"

  "Not any more, pal." Jace hooked a gangly arm over the back of his chair. "I talked Smith and Muncrief into letting me do it. You concentrate on the stuttering program."

  "But I was supposed to be—"

  "You ran off to play with the flyboys. Smith needs his job by February first, remember? So now I'm doing it. It's fun, really. I'm putting in a few wrinkles you would've never thought of."

  Dan pulled up one of the wheeled secretary's chairs and sat down next to Jace.

  "Watch this," said Jace. He flicked his fingers across the keyboard and three of the men sitting around the broad conference table disappeared, replaced by women. Dan recognized each one of them.

  "They're movie stars."

  "Uh-huh." With a jack-o-lantern grin; Jace tapped the keyboard again and each of the women was suddenly nude.

  The men continued their earnest discussions, oblivious to Jace's manipulations.

  Dan shook his head, more in disappointment than awe. "You sure know how to waste your time," he said.

  "Like hell," Jace snapped. He pecked a single key and the scene returned to its original form. "The whole point of this program, Danno, is to manipulate the data."

  "Smith wants to be able to handle the data efficiently, not manipulate it," Dan said.

  Jace gave him a sorrowful look. "Dan, you're so square you've got edges on you. When Smith says 'handle,' what he really means is 'manipulate.' "

  "There's a difference."

  "Damn right. Control a guy's information input and you control the decisions he makes."

  "Everybody knows that."

  "Sure." Jace hunched closer to Dan, brimming with excitement. "But with VR we can make the guy experience the results of his decisions, right? We can show the President of the friggin' United States what would happen if he told the economic summit to go take a flying leap into the nearest toilet bowl. We can show him how the leaders of the other nations would react."

  Shaking his head strongly, Dan said, "We could only show the President how his aides think the other leaders would react."

  "Oh yeah? With a VR system we could make the aides' guesses so real the President would swallow 'em hook, line and sinker."

  Dan felt a surge of something close to anger. "That's why it's important to do this job right, with no messing around. If what we do is going to go to the president, then we've got to make certain he's getting the absolute straight stuff. Not somebody's biased version."

  "Aw, come off it, pal," Jace countered. "There ain't no such thing as a totally unbiased version of anything. You know that! Everybody manipulates the data, one way or the other."

  Dan sank back in the little chair. It rolled slightly backward, wheels squeaking. against the concrete floor. "But then you're not just manipulating the data. You'd be manipulating the President."

  "Now you've got it." Ja
ce patted Dan's knee the way a teacher would when a slow pupil finally arrived at the right answer.

  "But that's not legal!"

  "It's not against the law," said Jace.

  "It's not right!"

  Jace made a pitying smile. "I looked it all up. I did a computer search. There's nothing in the Constitution or anywhere else that says the President's aides have got to give him straight, unbiased information. Hell, I even spent all last night looking up old TV documentaries about Presidents: Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam years, Nixon and Watergate, all that stuff. Most presidents want their aides to massage the raw data for them. They want to be told what they want to hear, man! Ever since good ol' George Washington."

  "That still doesn't make it right," Dan insisted.

  Shrugging, Jace answered, "So what? Nobody's talking nuclear war anymore."

  "Look," Dan said, "one of the input tapes I was working with dealt with the rain forests in South America—"

  "Yeah, yeah," said Jace impatiently. "The environmentalists want us to muscle those countries and make them stop chopping down the trees."

  "But suppose the lumber interests, the people who make money out of chopping down the trees, suppose they get control of the VR system. They could play scenarios for the President that downgrade the environmental impact and support the economic benefits of stripping the forests bare!"

  "Right."

  "And the President would believe it!"

  "Damned right."

  "But that's wrong!" Dan nearly shouted.

  "Who the fuck cares? I'm going to be manipulating the friggin' President! Me! I'm gonna make him jump through hoops, pal. Just wait and see."

  "But Jace, with that kind of power comes responsibility. This isn't a game anymore."

  "Sure it is. Don't take everything so seriously."

  "But VR's powerful, Jace," said Dan. "You know that!"

  Jace grinned knowingly. "You mean like that gunfight sim that you won't get into anymore?"

  Dan sat there blinking at his friend for several moments. "You really want to manipulate the President."

  "Why not?"

  "But why should you? What do you want—"

  "For the hell of it," Jace said, almost gleefully. "Just to see how it feels. And besides, Smitty can get me all kinds of good stuff for whatever else I wanna do. I'll be able to get my hands on anything the government's got. Think of it, Danno! Whole computer networks! Think of what I could do with that!"

  "You can't be serious."

  "The hell I'm not."

  "But . . . the President of the United States."

  Jace tapped him on the knee again. "Listen kiddo, why do you think Smith's in such a friggin' sweat to have this system on-line by the first of February?"

  Before Dan could respond Jace gave the answer, "Because the President gives his State of the Union speech in February. Right? Right."

  Susan knew that she could have ensconced herself and the children in Dan's office instead of the computer center. For that matter, she could have done the work she claimed she was doing from her little kitchen alcove at home. But she had told Dan that she had to have access to ParaReality's computer center and her husband—too preoccupied with his own problems to pay that much attention to her—had delivered her unquestioningly to the company's nerve hub.

  Ostensibly, Susan was hunting down every possible reference to nerve physiology that she could find in the literature on sports medicine and cross-referencing them by author, subject, and the places where the authors did their work. And she actually was doing that task, using one of the computer center's modem-equipped machines to tirelessly track down the literature, based on a long string of key words that she had found in a search she'd done the week before.

  But in addition to the task she was getting paid to do, the task that her husband had asked her to do, Susan was at the computer center for a reason of her own. The literature search was going on, the computer doggedly tracking down every reference that could be supplied by the National Research and Education Network, plus half a dozen more specialized medical information services. Susan hardly glanced at that machine as page after page of journal entries flickered across its screen almost faster than the human eye could register.

  Her real concentration was on performing a delicate bit of electronic burglary, or trying to. It was not easy, because she did not want to leave any trace of her intrusion into the files of ParaReality's personnel chief, Victoria Kessel.

  Phil suddenly wailed and Susan snapped her attention from the display screen in front of her to her baby. Angie, happily making color copies of her own drawings, turned from the copying machine toward her brother. The baby bad thrown each and every one of his cuddly toys out of the playpen and now wanted somebody to give them back to him. Susan smiled at the incongruity of the scene: a howling baby sitting in a blanket-lined playpen in front of a row of desktop computers.

  Angela dashed from the copying machine to Philip's playpen. "I'll pick them up," she said to her mother.

  "Thanks, Angel," said Susan.

  Scooping up an armful of the soft animal shapes, Angela said firmly to her brother, "Well if you throw them all away, silly, then you won't have anything left to play with."

  She's playing mother, Susan thought. I guess that's what I sound like. Not too bad, I suppose.

  Angela took her thumb-sized Amanda doll from the toy box she had brought and handed it to her brother.

  Susan watched, fascinated, as her daughter said to the baby: "Now this is a very special friend. You take good care of her, understand?"

  Phillip grasped the little doll and immediately stuck it in his mouth. Angie shook her head in disappointment, then turned to her mother.

  "It's all right, Mommy. He can't hurt Amanda."

  Marveling at her daughter's forbearance, Susan turned her attention back to her work. All the school's VR games were controlled by Vickie from her office. which meant that there was a program in the ParaReality system somewhere that operated the school games. Vickie could send a certain game to a certain VR booth at the school with a few strokes on the keyboard in her office. Susan was searching for that program, and for the complete list of games.

  She was certain that there were different variations of the games, certain as only a mother can be. Faced with a choice between her pubescent daughter's distressed tales and the repeated assurances of her husband's employer, Susan knew with absolute conviction that her daughter was telling the truth and the others were lying. She did not know why. At this stage she had not really given that much thought. She was driven to prove that her daughter was not overreacting, not imagining things, not hypersensitive to the suggestions of an ordinary VR game that had not affected any of the other children in the school. Angie's a normal, healthy child, Susan assured herself. If there's something wrong here, it's not her. It's the games that Vickie programs into the school's equipment.

  She needed to do this snooping into ParaReality's files from the company's own computer center because she did not want Vickie to discover that she had been rummaging through the files. Susan had taken the precaution of altering the mainframe's internal clock, so that if Vickie or anyone else saw that their files had been accessed, the computer would tell them it had been done in the middle of the afternoon two days earlier, a normal working day when dozens of different employees had access to the computer center.

  Got to remember to re-set the clock before we leave, Susan reminded herself for the fortieth time.

  She glanced at Phil. The baby seemed happy enough, sitting in the midst of his toys. He had a stuffed tiger by one rear leg and was pounding it merrily on the back of frayed-looking teddy bear. It doesn't take much to keep a baby happy, Susan thought. Or a twelve-year-old, for that matter. Angie had spread her papers and colorful felt-tip pens on the floor and was busily drawing pictures. The list of school games she had found showed no variants. Yet Susan was certain there must be some. She accessed Vickie's personal files and fo
und that most of them were locked from her view. She needed special code words to open these files.

  Susan stared at the list like a burglar studying a growling Doberman. It's such a long list, she said to herself. How can Vickie possibly remember all the code words for each individual file? She must have a separate file of code names. But what would she call it?

  Susan was no hacker. She tried straightforward possibilities such as "file codes" and "list names." Nothing. The screen remained stubbornly blank, except for a message line across its bottom: ERROR. FILE NOT FOUND.

  She was no hacker. But she had patience. And access to some of the best computer hardware in the world. Susan got up from her chair and walked across the room toward the big bulky mainframes. Glancing at the children, she saw that Angie was now folding the papers she had been drawing on, turning them into lopsided origami figures of birds and animals, and dropping them into Philip's playpen. The baby delightedly batted at them with his dimpled fists.

  Susan leaned over the keyboard of the big IBM and booted it up. It hummed to life, lights winking across its front panel. Still standing at the keyboard, Susan looked over the menu of options on its display screen. This is like using a nuclear weapon to kill a mosquito, she thought, as she plugged Vickie's entire set of files into the mainframe.

  FILES LOADED, the screen reported.

  Susan returned to the machine's basic menu and scanned the list for two items. She found neither one of them. "Okay," she muttered to herself, "we can fix that."

  Pulling up a typist's chair, Susan used the IBM to search for Vickie's word-processing program. She found it: WordPerfect 9.0. Good. She accessed the program. The screen showed a string of symbols across the top, information on how to use the program. she touched the LIST FILES key.

  The screen filled with a brief list of words and symbols. Fourteen file names. One of them, Susan knew, was the file that contained Vickie's code names. she ran down the list, seeking the word that would unlock Vickie's secret code words. But each time she tried to gain entry into one of the files the screen asked: ACCESS CODE? And would go no further.