The Day Before Midnight

computers inside it keep running.” He was aware he was ranting like a pedant. “The question is the shield.”

Peter bent to it. A solid Plexiglas sheet covered the keyboard and the screen. Now, if they were smart and had the time, they’d have jimmied the mechanism on the screen access itself, so that before he had to solve the door, he’d have to hack or bash or cut his way through the protective screen. With a screwdriver they could have won. But he thought no, no, not this Russian. This Russian thinks he’s smarter than me. He’s going to beat me at my own game.

Peter touched the red plastic button just under the terminal.

With a quiet grind the Plexiglas shield unlimbered from the keyboard and lifted like a praying mantis rising from the grass. It folded itself back and out of the way.

Two words stood on the blank screen.

ENTER PROMPT they said, two gleaming little green words in the bottom left of the screen.

So far, for two words.

Peter swiftly typed ACCESS and pressed the enter button.

The machine responded ENTER PERMISSIVE ACTION LINK CODE.

Eleven hyphens blinked beneath the mandate and the prompt stood in front of the leftmost.

So here it is.

You punch in twelve numbers. No more, no less. To make it interesting, there’s no limit on the integers between the hyphens. Thus the code may be twelve numbers long, or it may be twelve million; it just has to have eleven hyphens in it. And then you push Enter.

If you are wrong, the machine will shout STRIKE ONE.

If you are wrong again, the machine will shout STRIKE TWO.

If you are wrong a third time, the machine will figure out that somebody who doesn’t know is trying to guess his way in, and it will shout ACCESS DENIED and arbitrarily assign twelve new numbers that only it knows and that only another computer can figure out in about 135 work hours.

“Can you do it?” asked Skazy. “Peter, I came a long way for this party. I brought a lot of people with me. Can you do it?”

He thinks all this is about him, Peter thought.

“Shhh,” said Puller. “Peter, we could move away if it would help.”

“No,” said Peter. He bent to the keys, took a deep breath. Focus. Where’s my focus? Just shine my focus on it and work it through. He knew it would help him to talk.

“Here’s the trick. Pashin thinks he’s me. He had to become me to beat me, that’s his game. It’s obvious, really. He dropped his patronymic in November of ‘eighty-two because that was the month I published my famous piece in Foreign Affairs about how a well-based MX could give us more than parity. That’s when he starts: he’s working through my life, processing my information, trying to become me to destroy me. He’s obsessing on me, looking for my code. He wants to crack my code. So he starts with something stupid. He gets rid of his middle name. Why? Because numbers are important to me, so they’re important to him. And that left him with twelve letters in his name. Just like mine. ARKADY PASHIN becomes PETER THIOKOL.”

He looked at them. Their faces were dumb.

“And twelve letters just happens to be the length of a Category F PAL code. That’s the kind of perverse correspondence that would appeal to him. So if you give each of the letters in my name a simple arithmetic value, with A as one and Z as twenty-six, you get a twelve-unit entry code that stands for me.” He gave a little chuckle, and his fingers tapped the numbers in.

He pushed Enter.

The opening was gigantic, or so it seemed. It was big enough for a man to get his hand into.

“Yes,” croaked the general. “Yes, now, move aside.”

Jack Hummel felt himself being shoved aside.

“Now, yes,” said the general, “now we are there.”

Jack saw him bend and plunge his arm into the deep gash in the metal he had opened.

“Yes,” he said, his face enflamed with the effort of it. “Yes, I’m in the gap, I can feel the damned thing, Yasotay, I can feel it, ah, oh, I can’t quite get a grasp on — Yasotay, is there a man here with small hands, extremely small, a woman’s-size hands?”

Yasotay spoke quickly in Russian to an NCO, and there was a brief conference and a name was called out and—

Sirens started howling. Lights began flashing.

Jack Hummel jumped, turned in panic; he felt the men around him panic.

“Now, now, Mr. Hummel,” came the reassuring voice of the general. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

Suddenly, the room was filled with the laconic yet lovely voice of a woman.

“Warning,” she said in her slow, unhurried prerecorded voice, “there has been an unsuccessful attempt at access.”

“He’s up there,” the general said to Alex. “My old friend Peter Thiokol, he’s up there, trying to get inside. Peter, you’ll never make it, my friend,” the general said.

STRIKE ONE, the computer said.

“It didn’t work,” said Skazy.

“No, it didn’t,” said Peter.

“You’re sure you did it right?” asked Puller, his voice suddenly older and weaker. “You didn’t—”

“No, no, the code isn’t right. We try again.”

He crouched, and his fingers flew back to the keys.

“So maybe he’s an arrogant son of a bitch and he’s not quite willing to give up totally on his own identity. Not quite. So he’s got the twelve numbers, but they’re the numbers that correspond to his name, the egotistical bastard.”

He computed swiftly, and typed it in.

Then he pressed Enter.

She was called Betty. She was the voice of the computer. She spoke from perfect preordained wisdom. She knew everything except fear and passion.

“Warning,” she repeated. “There has been a second attempt at access.”

“He thought of everything, didn’t he, Alex?” said the general. “You see, it warns them when interlopers are coming. It gives silo personnel plenty of time to call SAC, and if they are in danger of being overrun, they can either fire the missile or dispose of their keys. He is so very, very smart, Peter. So very smart. A genius.”

* * *

STRIKE TWO, the computer told him.

Peter let his breath slide out in a hiss of compressed disappointment. He sought to replace it but couldn’t get anything in because his chest was so tight.

WARNING, the computer told him, ONE MORE STRIKE AND YOU’RE OUT.

“It didn’t work either,” said Skazy with something like a whimper.

Puller had sat down by himself. He said nothing. Around them soldiers stood stupidly.

“We could still try to hit the bird as it goes out the silo,” said Skazy. “We could rig our 60s and hit it in a crossfire and—”

“Major,” said Peter, “it’s titanium. No bullet, no explosive is going to bring it down.”

“Shit,” said Skazy. “Well, get the C-4. Get all the C-4 we’ve got, well try to blow the door open. Then, if we’ve still got some time, we’ll call in some real heavy air strikes and maybe—”

“No,” said Peter. “No, forget it.”

He stared at the keys. He’d always been the smartest boy in the class. Everywhere. Every time. All his life.

“Pashin really wants to become me,” he said again, almost in astonishment. Then he gave a little laugh, rich with contempt. He thought about his wife and threw his worst secret out for them.