Gideon’s Sword

tingling. It had happened again: he’d gotten so engrossed in the Python data-handling extension he’d been coding that he’d “wrapped around” the previous night and totally forgotten to sleep.

He stood up with a groan and massaged his legs. Food: that would wake him up.

Sliding a Sacramentum CD into the player and cranking it up, he padded into the kitchen. Pushing away piles of dirty dishes to make a work space, he pulled a baguette from its paper sheath and cut it lengthwise. Quickly he assembled a sandwich: peanut butter, sliced banana, mini marshmallows. A few slices of deli pickle added the final touch. He pressed the two halves of the sandwich together, tucked it under one arm, plucked a liter bottle of Dr Pepper from the fridge, and headed back toward his office.

He neighed in surprise and dismay at the sight of a man in his living room. Bottle and sandwich fell to the floor in unison, marshmallows and pickles flying everywhere. Then he saw it was Gideon Crew.

“Stop doing that!” he yelled at his friend. “If I die of a heart attack, who’s going to solve your little problem?” He knelt down and began reassembling the sandwich, picking cat hairs off the pickles.

“Don’t tell me you’re still eating peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches,” Gideon said. “Not interested in living to enjoy your Social Security, I guess.”

“Don’t you worry about me. I’m not the one being chased by half the spooks in Langley.” He scowled. “I haven’t had time to do any more work on those numbers.”

“No? Why not?”

“Unlike some people, I have to work for a living.”

“Yeah. Assistant lecturer at Columbia. When are you going to stop being a perennial grad student and actually earn that degree?”

“And face the real world?” He took a bite of the sandwich and headed into his office, Gideon following. “Look, it’s not just my work. It’s the nature of your problem. I told you, it’s like having a recipe without the ingredients. Three tablespoons of X, two ounces of Y, and a pinch of Z. Without the ingredients, I can’t do squat!”

“There’s something else I need your help on.”

“Do I get another thousand?”

Gideon ignored this, reaching into his coat and pulling out a DVD. “There’s a video capture on this. I need you to blow up and enhance an image for me.”

O’Brien took it and felt his face light up. “Oh. That’s easy.”

Gideon pointed at the music player with a pained expression. “Before we get started, mind turning that off? If any music could be carcinogenic, that’s it.”

O’Brien glanced at him in mock horror. “You don’t like blackened death metal?”

“Not even when it’s the blue plate special.” Gideon looked around for a place to sit, but there was only one chair in the tiny, impossibly crowded office and O’Brien was already in it. “I’ve never seen so much junk crammed into so little space. When are you going to clear some of this crap out?”

“Junk? Crap?” O’Brien sniffed as he turned down the volume of his player. “Everything in here is absolutely necessary to my work. For instance.” And wheeling his chair around, he plucked a gray metal device the size of a shoe box from its precarious perch atop an ancient UNIX terminal, placed it on his desk, plugged it in, and attached it to his PC.

“What’s that?” Gideon asked.

“It’s a VDT.”

“I repeat: what’s that?”

“A virtual digital telecine. Normally used to transfer different kinds of video stock from one format to another. But this particular model is very useful for forensic video work.” Turning it on, he pressed a few buttons on the tiny LED screen, then slid Gideon’s DVD into the slot. As the machine whirred, he took a huge bite of his sandwich, double-clicked an icon on the computer desktop. “I’m firing up the VDT’s host application.”

A large window appeared on the screen, surrounded by several smaller windows that included fine-grained transport controls, gamma correction, and utilities for image manipulation. “Where is it?”

“Just start playback. I’ll tell you when you reach the target image.”

O’Brien clicked the forward button in the transport control window, and an image appeared on the screen. “An airport,” O’Brien said. “Shit. It’s a security tape.”

“So?”

“Their quality sucks. Heavily compressed, too.”

They watched in silence for a minute as a worried-looking Asian man crossed the screen and made his way through a tangle of passengers.

“It’s been hard-telecined,” O’Brien said, staring at the monitor. “A hair under thirty fps—”

“There.” Gideon pointed at the screen. “Back up just a bit, then go forward, frame by frame.”

O’Brien returned playback to the moment the man encountered the group of passengers, then moved forward again.

“Slower, please.”

O’Brien took a lengthy pull of the Dr Pepper, worked the transport controls. “One frame per second.”

They watched together as a boy in the crowd dropped a teddy bear, a woman beside him picked it up, handed it back.

“Pause,” said Gideon. “Now, you see the satchel that boy is carrying?”

“Yup,” O’Brien said, peering at the flickering screen.

“I want you to find the clearest frame of that satchel, then enhance it. It’s got a blurry logo of some kind. I want to know what it is.”

“Sure thing.” O’Brien went backward through the frames, then forward, until he found the clearest shot of the satchel.

“Blurry as hell,” he muttered. “Whoever demultiplexed this for you did a lousy job.”

“They were in a hurry.”

“I’ll have to de-interlace the image or the combing will kill us.” O’Brien’s fingers ran over the keyboard. The image in the main window faded, grew larger.

“What are those bars across the image?” Gideon asked.

“That’s 2:3 pulldown. I’m trying to compensate.” Again he typed a rapid-fire series of commands. The image brightened, stabilized. “That’s better. Let me apply some unsharp masking.” O’Brien moused through a series of sub-menus.

“It’s a shield with a motto,” Gideon said, staring.

O’Brien worked the machine, further refining the image.

“Pectus Est Quod Disertos Facit,” Gideon read from the screen.

“What the hell’s that? Latin?”

“It is the heart that makes men eloquent,” said Gideon.

“What a crock,” said O’Brien, shaking his head sadly at the supreme idiocy of the sentiment. “Who the hell said that?”

“It’s from Quintilian’s Orations. But it’s just pompous and vacuous enough that it might be a private school motto.” He stood up. “Thanks, Tom.”

“Hey. What about that other thousand bucks?”

“Enjoy your sandwich. I’ll be in touch.” He paused just before going out the door. “You haven’t heard from that doctor yet, I suppose?”

“Oh yeah. I did. I meant to tell you about that.”

“And?”

“I hope the guy in those X-rays isn’t really a friend of yours.”

Gideon looked at him. “Why do you say that?”

“According to the doc, he’s fucked.”

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