Deathworld

them know what it was about.

Instead, Nick made his way back into Charlie's workspace. 'Hello…' he said, hoping to wake up the system.

'Hi, Nick,' said the soft woman's voice that represented Charlie's 'system manager.' 'Charlie says, 'Make yourself at home and use whatever you have to.' '

'Uh, good. I need to leave him a message.'

'I can record virtual voice, virtual image and voice, or text.

Tell me what you prefer.'

'Virtual image and voice.'

'Go ahead. Stop for five seconds and then say 'Fin- ished' when you're done.'

'Charlie…' Nick said. 'I have to tell you about this. I ran into some people in Deathworld… they knew a couple of the people who committed suicide. But they think something's going on, something odd… '

He went on to lay out everything Khasm and Spile had told him… especially the part about drugs being involved. Then he summed up what he'd found when he searched the message database. Nothing much… but it might make it clear to Charlie why he was feeling a little weird about what was going on.

Finally he trailed off, not knowing what else to add. 'Just comm me at home, if you can,' Nick said. 'Not too late… Dad's been working weird hours the past week or so. The studio had to send him to California for something… don't ask me why he couldn't just go there virtually.' He tried to think if there was something else he should mention. He had the feeling that he'd forgotten something. 'Okay? Comm me. And listen… be careful.'

Nick paused. 'Finished,' he said.

'Thank you, Nick,' Charlie's system said. 'I will pass this on to Charlie as soon as he checks in.'

'You have any idea where he is?'

'Not at the moment. I'm sorry.'

Nick nodded. 'Thanks…'

He wandered back up the steps again, not without pausing to look back at those images of kids his age, or a little older or a little younger. Wondering, he turned and headed back to his own workspace, trying to figure out what to do next…

In the VAB, dusk was drawing in, and the big sodium lights hanging from the cross-gantries in the ceiling were turned on, flooding the concrete with a harsh, bright glare. 'Okay,' Mark said to Charlie, coming across the floor to him. 'Here you are.'

He held up what he carried, white and shimmering in that fierce light. Charlie looked at it in bemusement. 'It's a jacket,' he said.

Mark rolled his eyes. ' 'It's a jacket,' he says. Do you know how much programming there is in this thing? This is not just any jacket!'

'Okay,' Charlie said, 'it's a magic jacket. Do I have to wear a bow tie with it? And does the tie have to be magic, too?'

'I swear,' Mark muttered, 'once we both get somewhere physical at the same time, I'm going to whack you a good one with something that can't just be deleted. Here, put it on.'

He helped Charlie into the jacket, a rather formal-looking one of the kind a gentleman might wear to dinner. To Charlie, it felt completely normal. 'Nice material,' he said, patting it down.

Mark stood back from him. 'It should be,' he said, rather sourly, 'considering what it would cost you per hour if someone, I should use the word loosely, 'professional' had built this for you.'

'I feel like a waiter,' Charlie said. 'Probably I look like one, too. So where's the switch?'

Mark sat on the Rolls and shook his head. ' 'Switch'?' he said. 'Please. And if you look like anything, you look like a doctor. And you'll probably make a great one someday, as long as you don't try understanding anything more complicated than a stethoscope, okay?… Look, there aren't any switches. You just wear it into Deathworld. You wear it out again. Make sure you don't take it off-not only because you won't be able to record anything you're perceiving, but because it's set up to work only when it's in circuit with your own virtual account and your own implant. I haven't been able to implement a whole lot of fail-safes, partly because I still don't completely understand how to subvert all their systems. But there's a real good chance that if the jacket comes out of circuit with you, with your implant I mean, every alarm in that place will go off. This would be a bad thing, because immediately afterward, every security op associated with Joey Bane Enterprises, not to mention every lawyer they've got, thousands of them probably, will be chasing you down the labyrinthine ways. You're getting all this?'

'Uh, yes,' Charlie said. He was also enjoying it. It was always fun to get Mark annoyed about something. 'Had a bad time getting the details worked out?' he asked.

Mark glowered at him. 'I spent the better part of five hours analyzing Deathworld's security systems,' he said.

'Oh, well, five hours,' Charlie said.

'And if you think I enjoyed it, you're-'

Charlie started laughing. He couldn't help it. 'Of course you enjoyed it!' he said. 'You're a pirate at heart, Gridley. That's why it drives you nuts to be your father's son.' He laughed some more, unable to stop.

Mark gave him a crooked smile. 'Yeah, yeah, Mr. Psychoanalyst,' he said. 'Well, you can't help it, I guess, it's your mom's side of the family. Look, never mind that. Just don't let this thing off your back, okay? You can wear a 'seeming' over it-in fact, probably it'd be smart if you did.'

'Okay,' Charlie said.

'I had to do some jury-rigging,' Mark said. 'The security systems in Deathworld are really complex, and to keep the flow of information moving out of there and into your space, I had to do spectrum-fission on it, scatter it up and down several different kinds of in-Net communication then reweave it to `singleband' throughput on the outside.'

'I hope that wasn't meant to make some kind of sense to me,' Charlie said, checking the jacket to see if it had an inside pocket. It did.

'That's data storage, in there,' Mark said. 'Meanwhile, just think of the outbound signal as white light broken down to a spectrum, then 'welded' back to white again,' Mark said. 'The important thing is, it worked when I tested it.' He raised his eyebrows. 'Though the first couple of test cycles were interesting. What matters is that what you see and hear will go back to your site and store themselves there. One thing: When you're done with the jacket, don't leave it in your workspace. Leave it in mine.'

'Oh? How come?'

Mark gave him another of those endearing it's-like-thisstupid expressions. 'If something goes wrong,' he said, 'or on the other hand, if something goes right, and in the unlikely event that someone gets cranky afterward about what's been done-you want the Deathworld people to take you to court for theft of intellectual property and copyright violations, thus ruining your not-even-startedyet brilliant medical career for ever after? Or do you want them to come after me for it, and let me take the heat as the Brilliant But Slightly Unstable Genius Son of the Director of Net Force?'

Phrased that way, the answer more or less made itself obvious. 'Uh,' Charlie said.

'Exactly, `uh,' ' said Mark. 'So I've left my space open for you, day and night. As soon as you're done with a run, leave the jacket here. Over the desk. When you've done that and left, the logs at my end will wipe, leaving no 'electron trail' to your workspace. That much I managed with no trouble. But the rest of it remains technically a little fragile, so as I said, don't lose that jacket, don't take it off… '

'Right.'

'As for the rest of it,' Mark said, 'per our discussion about what you think's going to start to happen later, I've `trip wired' the outside of your own workspace. I think I can safely say that no one will be able to detect that trip wiring. The minute someone tries to hack into any of your accounts-either yours or your folks' alarms will go off here in my space, and my system will start a traceback on whoever's trying to get at your files. When that happens, your own space will alert you, if you're in Death-world, through the links I've built into the jacket. For times when you're not virtual, you'll want to install some other alert method, to your home comms or whatever-I've left the 'hot ends' of the alert routines visible for you, in your space. Hook them up whatever wayyou like, then camouflage them. After that, we'll have the information we need to send Net Force after whoever it is. And then you and I will be covered with glory.'