barking out instructions like a drill sergeant. By the time he was finished, the field was remarkably silent. Magozzi looked around and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. There had to be at least fifty people standing in a ragged semicircle around a building that looked as benign and harmless as a thousand other old farm buildings dotting the mid-western countryside. Nobody was doing anything; nobody was saying anything. They were all just staring at the door, waiting for it to open.
INSIDE the machine shed, Grace, Annie, and Harley hunched around Roadrunner at the computer, every unblinking eye fixed on the screen as pages of command codes scrolled by. A sheen of sweat washed Roadrunner's face as his twisted fingers talked to the keys, and then suddenly, his fingers froze and the scrolling stopped.'What?' Harley demanded. 'Did you find it? Is that the abort?' Roadrunner closed his eyes for a moment, then swiveled his chair to face them all. 'There is no abort,' he said quietly.
OUTSIDE the machine shed, the semicircle of silently waiting people let out a collective gasp as Harley came barreling out the door. He was moving at a perfectly amazing speed for a man that size, a blur of beard and tattoos and black leather as he raced past all of them into the RV. He came out five seconds later waving a disk and hollering, 'There's no abort-we've gotta try something else!' He was back in the building so fast that it was hard to believe he'dever been out. Everyone was standing up, hearts pounding, legs ready to run somewhere if they only had a little direction.
'What do you suppose was on that disk?' Knudsen asked.
'God knows,' Gino said.
'I'm going back in there,' Magozzi said abruptly, heading for the door. He had license, he reasoned. He'd been in there before when things were really tense and hadn't messed anything up. Besides, this was driving him crazy. He had to know what was going on. He had to feel like he was part of it. He'd be very quiet. They'd never know he was there.
Sharon stared after him for a moment, muttered, 'Well this is just bullshit,' and followed him.
It was as if she had taken a cork out of a bottle. One by one, everyone in the field started to move toward the building and slip silently through the door.
ROADRUNNER'S LYCRA SUIT was soaked with sweat, and his leg jiggled furiously under the desk while he pushed the disk Harley had retrieved from the RV into the computer drive.
Grace eyed him worriedly. 'Anything you want to run by us before you try this thing, Roadrunner?'
He shook his head hard and fast, keeping his fingers over the keyboard and his eyes fixed on the screen. 'No time.'
'Is this what you wouldn't let me get a look at in the office yesterday?'
'Yeah. It's just something Harley and I have been working on.'
Annie forced herself to take a breath and blew the exhale up toward her bangs. 'Are you saying you don't even know if itworks?'
'Are you kidding me?' Harley rumbled. 'Of course it's going to work.' He clapped Roadrunner on the back. 'Go for it, my little chickadee.'
Roadrunner pushed a few keys and started the disk loading, but Grace's eyes were on Harley. His voice had sounded strong and full of confidence, but there were bloodless white lines tracing around his moustache and down into his beard, and his eyes looked sad, almost hopeless.
'How much time does it take to load?' she asked quietly when Roadrunner had finished typing.
He punched a single key and brought up a time bar that started filling with blue color, millimeter by millimeter. 'Five minutes, maybe. I don't know. We only did one test run.'
'And then how long to execute?'
'I don't know.' Roadrunner pulled his hands away from the keyboard and stared at the time bar. Everyone else was staring at the red countdown clock in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen.
37:22:19... 18... 17...
Jesus,Magozzi thought, moving a little closer to Grace, sensing her rather than seeing her because his eyes were fixed at the damn clock as it ticked down.It had to be wrong. It was going too damn fast.
'Well, what the hell is this thing?' Annie demanded harshly, but her hands were on Roadrunner's shoulders, kneading through bunched muscles that felt like tangled tree roots.
'Uh . . , sort of a virus . . .'
'What?You wrote avirus? You went to the dark side?'
'No, no, no, it's not like that.' Roadrunner's mangled fingers were twisting together. 'It's not really a virus. Well, it is, but it's not a bad virus. It's a good virus.'
Annie dropped her hands from his shoulders. 'There are no good viruses. That's why we call them viruses, for God's sake.'
'It's not contagious,' Harley broke in. 'We only direct it to specific sites, and it can't go any farther. All it does is just eat away the guts of the computer we send it to, while the computer doesn't know it's getting eaten. It doesn't replicate, the recipient computer can't send it to anyone else-it's perfect.'
'But it destroys computers.'
'Boy, does it ever.'
Magozzi's eyebrows shot up. Behind him, in the back of the vast room, a lot of other eyebrows were doing the same thing.
'Oh, for God's sake, you guys,' Annie chastised them. 'Who were you sending this to?'
Roadrunner muttered something unintelligible down at his lap.
'What?'
Harley was staring at the countdown clock, and then at the time bar, shifting back and forth on his worn- down boots. 'Oh, for Chris-sake, it's no big deal. We send it to the kiddie-porn sites. Shut down a big one last night.'
Annie thought about it for a minute, and then said, 'Oh. Cool.'
Grace was looking down at the floor, saving up a smile for later. When she looked up again, the time bar was almost entirely filled with blue, and the countdown clock was at twenty-nine minutes.
IN A SUBURB of Detroit, Michigan, a Good Health Dairies truck sat outside the entrance of a vast, sprawling building. Hundreds of people were skirting the truck as they went inside, eyeing it curiously, irritated by the group of playful neighborhood children who were gathered around the truck. They were climbing the running boards, pressing their noses against the window glass, chattering, and squealing in a most inappropriate manner.
The oldest of these children, a boy closing in on eleven years, fixed his gaze inside the truck cab and gestured to a friend. 'There's a computer in there,' he whispered, tapping his finger against the glass, pointing to the glowing screen that was flashing numbers in bright blue pixels. 'That's gotta be worth a bundle.'
His friend shaded his eyes and peered inside. 'What do you suppose those numbers mean?'
'Hell, I don't know. You want to bust the window and do a grab-and-run?'
His friend looked around at all the people streaming past and the cars still pulling into the lot. 'Too many people around. Wait 'til they all get inside.'
They both climbed down and sat on the running board to wait, guarding their treasure.
MAGOZZI WAS frantic, watching that goddamned clock count down second by second. Finally, the last slice of blue ticked into the time bar, filling it completely, and he couldn't stand it any longer. He broke the promise he had made to himself to stay silent and out of the way. 'Is that it? Is it finished? Is it over?'
Harley glanced quickly in his direction and registered a little surprise to see him there. The computer screen had been his total focus for so long that he hadn't noticed anything going on around him. None of them had. 'It's loaded.'
Roadrunner's fingers suddenly started flying over the keys. Grace and Annie were leaning over his shoulders, watching the text appear on the screen as Roadrunner typed.
Magozzi nodded rapidly. 'Great. That's great. It's loaded. Now you execute, right?' He jumped when Grace reached back and touched his hand.
