Midnight

Shaddack pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He blotted his eyes. Soon his tears dried up.

He smiled at the nightscape revealed through the windshield. He sighed. He glanced at Runningdeer.

The Indian was staring forward, silent.

Shaddack said, 'Of course, without you, I might never have been a child of the moonhawk.'

11

The computer lab was on the ground floor, in the center of the building, near a confluence of corridors. Windows looked out on a courtyard but could not be seen from any street, which allowed Sam to switch on the overhead lights.

It was a large chamber, laid out like a language lab, with each VDT in its own three-sided cubicle. Thirty computers — upper end, hard-disk systems — were lined up along three walls and in a back-to-back row down the middle of the room.

Looking around at the wealth of hardware, Tessa said, 'New Wave sure was generous, huh?'

'Maybe 'thorough' is a better word,' Sam said.

He walked along a row of VDTs, looking for telephone lines and modems, but he found none.

Tessa and Chrissie stayed back by the open lab door, peering out at the dark hallway.

Sam sat down at one of the machines and switched it on. The New Wave logo appeared in the center of the screen.

With no telephones, no modems, maybe the computers really had been given to the school for student training, without the additional intention of tying the kids to New Wave during some stage of the Moonhawk Project.

The logo blinked off, and a menu appeared on the screen. Because they were hard-disk machines with tremendous capacity, their programs were already loaded and ready to go as soon as the system was powered up. The menu offered him five choices:

A. TRAINING 1 B. TRAINING 2 C. WORD PROCESSING D. ACCOUNTING E. OTHER

He hesitated, not because he couldn't decide what letter to push but because he was suddenly afraid of using the machine. He vividly remembered the Coltranes. Though it had seemed to him that they had elected to meld with their computers, that their transformation began within them, he had no way of knowing for sure that it had not been the other way around.

Maybe the computers had somehow reached out and seized them. That seemed impossible. Besides, thanks to Harry's observations, they knew that people in Moonlight Cove were being converted by an injection, not by some insidious force that passed semimagically through computer keys into the pads of their fingers. He was hesitant nevertheless. Finally he pressed E and got a list of school subjects:

A. ALL LANGUAGES B. MATH C. ALL SCIENCES D. HISTORY E. ENGLISH F. OTHER

He pressed F. A third menu appeared, and the process continued until he finally got a menu on which the final selection was NEW WAVE. When he keyed in that choice, words began to march across the screen.

HELLO, STUDENT. YOU ARE NOW IN CONTACT WITH THE SUPERCOMPUTER AT NEW WAVE MICRO TECHNOLOGY. MY NAME IS SUN. I AM HERE TO SERVE YOU.

The school machines were wired directly to New Wave. Modems were unnecessary.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE MENUS? OR WILL YOU SPECIFY INTEREST?

Considering the wealth of menus in the police department's system alone, which he had reviewed last night in the patrol car, he figured he could sit here all evening just looking at menu after menu after submenu before he found what he wanted. He typed in: MOONLIGHT COVE POLICE DEPARTMENT.

THIS FILE RESTRICTED. PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PROCEED WITHOUT THE ASSISTANCE OF YOUR TEACHER.

He supposed that the teachers had individual code numbers that, depending on whether or not they were converted, would allow them to access otherwise restricted data. The only way to hit on one of their codes was to begin trying random combinations of digits, but since he didn't even know how many numbers were in a code, there were millions if not billions of possibilities. He could sit there until his hair turned white and his teeth fell out, and not luck into a good number.

Last night he had used Officer Reese Dorn's personal computer-access code, and he wondered whether it worked only on a designated police-department VDT or whether any computer tied to Sun would accept it. Nothing lost for trying. He typed in 262699.

The screen cleared. Then: HELLO, OFFICER DORN.

Again he requested the police-department data system.

This time it was given to him.

CHOOSE ONE A. DISPATCHER B. CENTRAL FILES C. BULLETIN BOARD D. OUTSYSTEM MODEM

He pressed D.

He was shown a list of computers nationwide with which he could link through the police-department's modem.

His hands were suddenly damp with sweat. He was sure something was going to go wrong, if only because nothing had been easy thus far, not from the minute he had driven into town.

He glanced at Tessa. 'Everything okay?'

She squinted at the dark hallway, then blinked at him. 'Seems to be. Any luck?'

'Yeah … maybe.' He turned to the computer again and said softly, 'Please. …'

He scanned the long roster of possible outsystem links. He found FBI KEY, which was the name of the latest and most sophisticated of the Bureau's computer networks — a highly secure, interoffice data-storage, — retrieval, and — transmission system housed at headquarters in Washington, which had been installed only within the past year. Supposedly no one but approved agents at the home office and in the Bureau's field offices, accessing with their own special codes, were able to use FBI KEY.

So much for high security.

Still expecting trouble, Sam selected FBI KEY. The menu disappeared. The screen remained blank for a moment. Then, on the display, which proved to be a full-color monitor, the FBI shield appeared in blue and gold. The word KEY appeared below it.

Next, a series of questions was flashed on the screen — WHAT IS YOUR BUREAU ID NUMBER? NAME? DATE OF BIRTH?

DATE OF BUREAU INDUCTION? MOTHER'S MAIDEN NAME? — and when he answered those, he was rewarded with access.

'Bingo!' he said, daring to be optimistic.

Tessa said, 'What's happened?'

'I'm in the Bureau's main system in D.C.'

'You're a hacker,' Chrissie said.

'I'm a fumbler. But I'm in.'