FOR RENOVATIONS.
'Don't tell me she's still in the toilet,' Nita muttered, annoyed. Reading, probably. One of these days she's gonna fall in. She went back the way she had come, past the stairs, to the ladies' room. It was not only cold down here, there was a draft. She grabbed the handle of the door and pulled; it resisted her slightly, and there was a faint hoo noise, air sliding through the door crack as she tugged. 'Dari? Come on, we're leaving!' Nita pulled harder, the door came open.
Air blew hard past her and ruffled her hair into her eyes. Bitter cold smote the front of her, and in it the humidity in the air condensed out instantly, whipping past Nita through the sucking air as stinging, dust-fine snow.
Nita was looking through the doorway into a low rust-red wasteland: notn jng but stones in all sizes, cracked, tumbled, piled, with dun dust blowing between them. Close, much too close to be normal, lay a horizon hazed in blood-brown, shading up through translucent brick color, rose, violet, a hard dark blue, and above everything, black with stars showing. Low in the crystalline rose burned a small pinkish sun, fierce, distant-looking, and cold. Nita flinched from the unsoftened sight of it, from the long, harsh shadows it laid out behind every smallest stone. She slammed the ladies' room door shut. Air kept moaning past her, through the cracks, out into the dry red wasteland. 'Mars,' she breathed, and terror grabbed her heart and squeezed. 'She went to Mars. .'
Escape Key
That morning Dairine had awakened with the Oath's words ringing in her ears to find herself not in a galaxy far far away, but in her own bed. She had lain there for a long few minutes in bitter annoyance before she heard the wheels of the truck in the driveway. It was the computer, of course: and to this lesser excitement she had gratefully surrendered herself.
Dairine was good with computers. It was just one more kind of knowledge, good for using to keep people and the World off your back; and computers were really surprisingly easy to work with once you got it through your head that they were utterly stupid things, unable to do anything you didn't tell them how to do, in language they understood. In her few months' work with the Apples at school, Dairine had become an accomplished hacker.
She utterly disdained the 'phreaking,' the breaking and entering of electronic bulletin boards and systems that interested a few of her malicious classmates. It could get you thrown in jail. What fascinated Dairine was advanced programming, the true hacking-getting a computer to sing, or talk, or play involved and clever games, or make you a sandwich. All these things were possible, with the right peripherals and a smart programmer. That she was; and the computer-tireless listener, absolutely obedient to orders, and endlessly forgiving of mistakes-was the perfect companion. They worked well together. Even her teachers had noticed that the machines 'behaved' better around Dairine than around anyone else. She never noticed this herself, having taken it for granted.
So while her mother and father sat arguing over the manuals, of course Dairine took matters into her own hands. The Apple IIIc+ was easy to set up: a plug and cable for the screen, the printer cable attached to the printer port and the computer's interface; the power cord to the wall. Dairin. slipped a system disk into the drive, shut the drive door, and turned the computer on, 'booted it up'-ready to look for the 'Copy' utility in the disk's directory. The first thing you always did with a brand-new system disk full of programs was copy it; working on the original disk could cost you a lot Of money to replace if you hurt or wiped it accidentally.
The Apple logo came up on the screen, and below it the A> prompt that said the computer's basic operating system, called DOS, was ready to accept commands to its 'A' or onboard disk drive and the disk inside it. Dairine was about to start typing when something about the logo caught her eye. It was the famous striped Apple, all right: but it had no bite out of it.
She stared for a second. Pirated software? she thought, but that was ridiculous. Her dad had bought the computer and its system software from an approved dealer, and the various warranties, manuals and end-user agreements were all over the floor. Huh. Maybe they changed the logo. Oh, well. Let's see the directory. .
DIR A:, she typed on the keyboard, and hit the carriage return.
PASSWORD? said the screen, and sat there apparently waiting for a response, for the A> prompt hadn't come back.
That was no response she'd ever seen on the machines at school, DIR A:, she typed, again, and the carriage return.
PASSWORD?
'Huh,' she said to herself, as possibilities flickered through her head. Did Dad have the software encrypted somehow so that Nita and I can't get into it? But why? He wants us to use it. She let out a breath. Maybe it just wants an ID code for the user-there're some programs that do that. She squinted at the screen a moment, then smiled and typed in a private joke: the code name that a certain untrained farmboy used in his fighter run on the Death Star, a name that suited Dairine since she had inherited her mother's red hair. RED FIVE, she typed, and hit the carriage return.
PASSWORD RED FIVE ACCEPTED. A>
Weird, Dairine thought, and typed again.
DIR A:
The disk drive whirred. The screen wiped itself and displayed a list: mostly Program command files, or data files holding information for the programs, to judge by their suffixes.
ASSIST.COM CHANGE. COM
COPY. COM
COPY.DAT
GO.COM
GO. DAT
HIDE.COM
MANUAL.COM
MANUAL.DAT
22008K 2310K 1032K 4404K 5048K 3580K 1244K 3248K
10662K
MBASIC.COM
MENU.COM
SEEK.COM
SUPPORT.COM
SUPPORT.DAT
A>
7052K 256K 6608K 5120K 3218K
Dairine gazed at the screen, perplexed. A K was a kilobyte, a thousand little pieces or bytes of information; and the disk drive itself was supposed to hold only K. How could the disk possibly have all these files on it, and such big ones?
Maybe this is a bad disk, Dairine thought. It happened sometimes, that a disk was damaged on its way from the factory. Or maybe something was wrong with the directory. Well, let's see if something'll run.
Beside the A> prompt she typed 'COPY' and hit the carriage return.
