there was lots of space left. When you do a directory, you just type DIR, and the screen fills up with the names of the files or documents that are taking up space on the disk, and at the bottom is a number that tells you how much space remains. I did it again now. According to the directory, there was enough space left on the disk for a biography of Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy lived to be eighty-two.
But when I went back into the English and tried to type a word or two, I got the disk full message again. What that meant, in plain English, was that I was in over my head. Whatever the hell was on the disk had been hidden somehow, and it would require someone a lot more conversant with the perverse ways of computers to figure out what was going on.
The problem was, I didn't know anyone more conversant with computers than I was. Most of my friends said a cheerful good-bye to technology in the early seventies, about the time they noticed that most airplanes didn't have propellers anymore. They regarded computers as Big Brother's uncle.
I had just discovered a new use for mine-resting my head on the keyboard-when the phone rang. It was, for the ninth or tenth time that day, Jessica.
“Any progress?” she said, making an easy assumption that I'd been lying to her since morning.
It seemed pointless to tell another one. “What I am,” I said, “is stonewalled. Find a new godfather.”
“I like the one I've got,” she said a trifle shyly. “What's the problem?”
“The information revolution.”
“Computers?” she said promptly.
“Exactly.”
“You need help with computers?”
“You've grasped the challenge.”
“What time is it?”
“Around seven.”
“Come over,” she said. “Bring your problem. Have I got a boy for you.”
16
Coyotes were beginning to wow and flutter at the rising moon when we pulled off Old Topanga Canyon and up a driveway that was almost as vertical as mine. This one, though, was wide and graded and nicely paved, with stone Japanese lanterns blinking every ten feet to tell you when you were about to drive off the cliff.
“New money,” I said. Topanga has been a freaks' refuge for decades, and anyone with
“Pull to the right at the top of the hill,” Jessica said. “There's room for a hundred cars.”
The house was cedar and pine, a rambling affair that had a view of the lights of the San Fernando Valley off to the northeast. The door was opened by a nice-looking woman in her middle thirties in blue jeans and a man's ruffled tuxedo shirt. She had a glass of red wine in her hand, and her feet were bare. One of the Mozart horn concerti made its way, sweetly geometrical, from speakers somewhere in the house.
“Hello, Jessica,” she said, blowing back a lock of hair.
“Hi, Mrs. Gurstein,” Jessica said. “Morris knows we're coming.”
Mrs. Gurstein gave me a politely inquisitive glance, and Jessica said, “This is my godfather, Simeon. He's too old to understand computers. Morris is going to help him out.”
“Elise Gurstein,” Elise Gurstein said, holding out a hand and stepping aside to let us in. I took the hand. “If Morris can't help you, no one can. Would you like a glass of wine?”
“Wouldn't I?” I said.
“You're the detective,” she said. “Ho, and then ho again. I know Annie. We're both on the PTA. She's told me more about you than you'd like to have in the papers. Coke, Jessica? Are you hungry?”
“
The little girl hove into view behind her mother and turned into a little boy, maybe Jessica's age chronologically. Boys, as I learned in excruciating slow motion in junior high school, mature more slowly than girls. Also more awkwardly. This little boy had made it all the way into awkward hyperspace. He had a long, narrow head, carrot-colored hair with an unmanageable cowlick that seemed to bring his skull to a point, a fringe of fine, pale eyelashes, and thin, high shoulders. His shirt was buttoned at the neck and his khaki pants had a crease in them that was straighter than a plumb line. He gave Jessica what was supposed to be a casual glance and blushed to the roots of his hair. “Hi, Jessica,” he said. He barely got it out.
“Hey, Morris,” Jessica said negligently. “Ready to go?”
Morris swallowed. “All set up,” he said, trying for her casual air. He gave me a red little glance that reeked of jealousy.
“No food, then,” Elise Gurstein said. “I'll bring you some wine in a minute. All I've got is cabernet.”
“Cabernet is fine.”
“And a Coke for little Jessica.”
“
“Fine, fine. Then I'll leave you to Morris.”
Morris, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, led us broodingly through a living room filled with modern, or maybe postmodern, shapes: hard-looking rectangles of white that probably posed as furniture as long as people were awake and then turned into giant sugar cubes. Mozart winged its way around the room, and what looked like copies of Klee and Kathe Kollwitz hung coolly on the wall. Thirties art and eighties furniture. Jessica touched my arm and pointed at Morris’ rear end: he had a patch on the rump of his pants that featured a bright red apple and the legend take a byte. He led us down a flight of stairs.
At the bottom, Morris-who hadn't looked back at either of us-threw open a door, and we entered a room that was lit by the shade of green they painted Margaret Hamilton's face in
The screens were only part of the picture. Computers, or parts of computers, were everywhere: on the floor, in the middle of the mussed-up single bed, on the big desk that had been made from a door and two sawhorses, and stacked on top of the filing closets that lined one wall.
“Floppies or flippies?” Morris asked, gazing in a preoccupied fashion at one of the screens. It was tossing up a frantic jumble of data, scrolling past far too fast to read.
“Beg pardon?” I asked.
“Floppies,” Morris said, closing his eyes with the air of a man whose patience is being tried, “or Hippies?”
“These,” I said, holding up the disks.
“Floppies,” Morris said with modulated disdain. “Nobody uses them anymore.”
“I stole them,” I said defensively. “I just want to know what's on them.”
“What's all this stuff?” Jessica asked, watching the screen with the flying data.
“The Yellow Pages,” Morris said in a completely different tone. If it was possible to say the words “The Yellow Pages” in a tone of abject adoration, Morris had just managed it.
“You copied the Yellow Pages into a
“It's a test,” Morris said, licking nervously at his lower lip. “I've been working with a scanner-you know, it reads a page and feeds it into the system? — and I thought I'd try to link it up with a data base. So I scanned about two hundred pages of the Yellow Pages, and reworked them into the data-base language and told the data base to rearrange them, by length of entry instead of alphabetically. I'll know in an hour or so whether it works.”
“Why bother?” Jessica said, moving on to the next screen.
“Just to see if I can do it,” Morris said, giving a tiny shrug. He looked at the flashing screen with new doubt. “I'll work out an application later.”
