And kept pouring it on. He was threatening the integrity of Andy’s implant, going at him down on the microcosmic level, attacking the molecules themselves. Fiddling around with electron shells, reversing charges and mucking up valences, clogging his gates, turning his circuits to soup. The computer that had been implanted in Andy’s body was nothing but a lot of organic chemistry, after all. So was his brain. If he kept this up the biocomputer would go, and the brain to which it was linked would follow.
This wasn’t a sporting contest. This was murder.
Andy reached for the reserves, throwing up all the defensive blockages he could invent. Things he had never had to use in his life; but they were there when he needed them, and they did slow his opponent down. For a moment he was able to halt the onslaught and even push the other man back a little, giving himself the breathing space to set up a few offensive combinations of his own. But before he could get them running, the little man shut Andy down once more and started to drive him toward crashville all over again. The guy was unbelievable.
Andy blocked him. He came back again. Andy hit him hard and the little man threw the punch into some other neural channel altogether and it went fizzling away.
Andy hit him again, harder. Again his thrust was blocked.
Then the little man hit Andy with a force that was far beyond anything he had used before, enough to send him reeling and staggering. Andy was about three nanoseconds from the edge of the abyss when he managed, but by no more than a whisker and a half, to pull himself back.
Groggily, he began to set up a new combination. But even as he did it, he was reading the tone of the other man’s data, and what Andy was getting was absolute cool confidence. The little man was waiting for him. He was ready for anything Andy could throw. He was in that realm of utter certainty that lies beyond mere self- confidence.
What it was coming down to was this, Andy saw. He was able to keep the little man from ruining him, but only just barely, and he wasn’t able to lay a glove on him at all. And the little man seemed to have infinite resources behind him. Andy didn’t worry him. The fellow was tireless. He didn’t appear to degrade at all. He just took all Andy could give and kept throwing new stuff at him, coming at him from six sides at once.
Now Andy understood for the first time what it must have felt like for all the hackers he had beaten over the years. Some of them must have felt pretty cocky, he supposed, until they had run into him. It costs more to lose when you think you’re good. When you know you’re good. People like that, when they lose, they have to reprogram their whole sense of their relation to the universe.
He had two choices now. He could go on fighting until the little man wore him down and crashed him. Or he could give up right now. Those were the only real choices he had.
In the end, Andy thought, everything always comes down to that, doesn’t it? Two choices: yes or no, on or off, one or zero.
He took a deep breath. He was looking straight into chaos.
“All right,” he said. “I’m beaten. I quit.” Words he had never thought he would hear himself say.
He wrenched his wrist free of his opponent’s implant, trembled, swayed, went toppling down on the ground.
A minute later five LACON cops sprang out of nowhere and jumped him and trussed him up like a turkey and hauled him away, with his implant arm sticking out of the package and a security lock wrapped around his wrist, as if they were afraid he was going to start pulling data right out of the air.
Steve Gannett said, coming out on the patio where Anson was sitting in the Colonel’s old chair, “Look at this, will you, Anson?”
He put a long sheet of glossy green paper into Anson’s hand. Anson stared at it uncomprehendingly. It was all arrows and squig-gles, Greek letters, a lot of indecipherable computer nonsense.
“You know that I don’t understand this goddamned stuff,” Anson said sharply. He realized it was wrong to speak to Steve that way; but his patience grew thinner every day. Anson was thirty-nine years old and felt like fifty. He had been full of big plans, once, when he was young and full of juice and certain that he would be the one to free the world from its serenely tyrannical alien overlords; but everything had gone awry, leaving him with a chilly hollow zone within him that was gradually expanding and expanding and expanding until it seemed to him that there was very little of Anson left around it. For years, now—ever since the failure of the great Prime expedition—he had lived a life that felt as though it had neither past nor future. There was only the endless gray present. He schemed no schemes, dreamed no dreams. “What am I looking at, here?”
“Andy’s fingerprints, I think.”
“His fingerprints?”
“His on-line coding profile. His personal touch. You could compare it to a person’s fingerprints, yes. Or his handwriting. I think this is Andy’s.”
“Truly? Where’d you get it from?”
“It came out of Los Angeles, picked up by a random line scan by one of our stringers down there. It’s new. If he’s there, he must have gone back there quite recently.”
Anson examined the printout again. Arrows and squiggles, still. A hopeless maze. Something was beginning to throb within him that he had not felt in years, but he forced it back. He shrugged and said, “What makes you think this is Andy’s?”
“Intuition, maybe. I’ve been looking for him for five years, and by now I think I know what to expect. This sheet yells ‘Andy’ to me, somehow. He used to use codes like these when he was a kid. I remember his explaining them to me, but I never had a clue about what he was trying to say. That was when he was ten, eleven years old. I have a feeling he’s started falling back on this stuff in the time that he’s been on the run. Reverting to his own private lingo. We’ve gone back in and set up a trace for it, and now we see that whoever’s been using it has been moving steadily westward across the country all year, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona. And now L.A. The hacker whose codes these are is working as a pardoner down there right this minute. A freelancer, operating outside the guild, from the looks of things. I’m sure it’s Andy.”
Anson looked up into his cousin’s round, sincere, pudgy face. There was an expression of complete conviction on it. Anson was surprised to find himself swept by a sudden rush of admiration, even love, for him.
Steve was fifteen years his senior and should have been the leader of the clan by now. But Steve had never wanted to be a leader. He wanted only to keep on plugging away at the things that mattered to him, sitting there in the communications center all day and half the night, pulling in data from everywhere in the world.
Whereas he himself—
The throbbing inside him was growing stronger, now. It would not be suppressed.
“Tell me this,” Anson said. “Do you think you actually could track him down, on the basis of this stuff?”
“That I can’t say. Andy’s very, very tricky, you know. I hardly need to tell you. He moves around fast. Simply picking up his trail gives us no guarantee that we could catch up with him. But we can try.”
“We can try, yes. Christ, let’s give it a try, all right? Find him, bring him here, put him to use. That crazy mutant son of yours.”
“Mutant?”
“A wild man. Undisciplined, amoral, self-centered, egomaniacal—where did he get that stuff from, Steve? From you? From Lisa? I doubt it. And certainly not from the fraction of him that’s Carmichael. So he has to be a mutant. A mutant, yes. With enormous special skills for which we happen to have a great need. A gigantic need. If only he would deign to employ them on our behalf.”
Steve said nothing. Anson wondered what Steve was thinking; but he had no reading, none at all. His mild chubby face was utterly blank. The silence stretched uncomfortably, and stretched some more, until it became unbearable. Anson rose and walked to the edge of the patio, gripping the rail and staring out into the great green gorge below. And found himself beginning to tremble.
He knew what had happened. The grand old ambition had started suddenly to rise up in him again, the glorious dream of leading a successful crusade against the aliens, striking down Prime and shattering their dominion with a single blow. Ever since Tony’s ill-fated trip to Los Angeles, Anson had had all that locked away in some storage vault of his soul. But now it had broken loose, somehow; and with it, now, came fear, doubt, dark gloom, an agonizing shaft of fresh guilt over the way he had sent Tony foolishly to his death—a whole host of pessimistic self-accusing bleaknesses.
He stood there, taking deep, slow breaths, trying to calm himself as he looked out into the tangled post-
