Burt sat there and just went cold. He had always laughed at people's description of the blood draining out of their faces and down to his feet, but now he felt it happening to him, and he wasn't laughing. He was no expert on drugs… but this was what either marijuana or hashish looked like when you pressed it down tight and vacuum- packed it: Burt had seen enough news broadcasts featuring seizures of the stuff to have at least this much of a clue about what he was carrying.
Now he broke out in a genuine cold sweat. Burt had told Mr. Vaud that he would never ask questions. At the time he had meant it. But now everything had changed… for everyone knew how carefully flights that came in from Amsterdam were checked. There were old drug connections there that never went away, no matter how the Dutch authorities tried to stamp the trade out. An old tradition of tolerance for the 'soft' side of the culture had created tremendous problems for them, adding to the ones already in place by virtue of the Netherlands' position as a country on the coast.
Why didn't this occur to me before? The answer was simple. Too excited, too glad to get away to think things through…
And what do I do now?!
Burt glanced hastily around him for places he might 'lose' the package… but then he let out a long breath, for there was no way that was going to work. The courier who would be expecting to make his pickup would be waiting for him on the far side of U. S. customs, Vaud had told him. If he didn't have the package… it would be very bad for him. Burt shivered.
Yet at the same time, he was sure that something just as awful would happen to him if he went through U. S. Customs, and if one of the people there, possibly just by looking to see how nervous Burt was, should ask him to stop and be checked. The sniffers they were using these days were delicate and accurate beyond belief: if one of them took a smell of his hands, there would be no question of what Burt had been in contact with, toilet paper or no toilet paper. He would go to jail for about a million years. And Wilma.. what would Wilma think, when she heard about it on the news?
Why have they done this to me?! I was doing what I was told! I cooperated with everything!
Why?
And what do I do now?
Chapter 9
Megan had often suspected her father of some level of affiliation with Net Force that had never been made fully plain to her, and probably wouldn't be for a long time… if ever. It had occurred to her privately that being a writer, with the freedom to go places without warning and investigate almost anything with no better reason than 'I'm writing a book about it,' would be a very useful cover for someone who was actually doing a whole lot more than writing a book about it. But she had never said this to her father, and she wasn't going to start now. She simply got out of the Net, went straight down into his office, and said, 'Daddy, James Winters said I should talk to you.'
He was sitting in the implant chair with his head leaned back, eyes closed, lips moving slightly-she had always teased him about being, not a lip reader, but a 'lip writer.' He liked to dictate, in his own virtual workspace, walking up and down and telling his stories out loud to an audience. Now the lip motions stopped, his eyes opened, and he looked at her with some mild concern. 'About what?'
She told him. It took very little time. The thought of 'the meter running' was very much on her mind.
As Megan talked, her father swung himself around on the seat of the implant chair, so that he was sitting more or less 'sidesaddle,' and looked at her in silence. 'He said if there were any questions, you should call him,' Megan said.
'Well,' her father said. 'I guess the immediate question is, why didn't you give me or your mother a hint that this was going on?'
'Daddy, I know,' Megan said. 'I'm sorry. It's just that all this started happening so fast… if there'd been a little more time I would have told you. But we had to start moving or we would have lost our chance to do anything useful…'
Her dad sat there for a few moments and looked off in an unfocused way into the air. 'You really are worried about Burt, aren't you,' he said. 'It's not just you trying to keep Wilma off your case.'
Megan's eyes went a little wide at that. She had hardly spared a thought for Wilma since this business had started getting really busy. 'Uh. No,' she said. 'Not that. It's just that Burt is… Burt's not used to this kind of thing, Dad! And stopping these people is the best way of finding out what they've done with him and getting him home again. Assuming he wants to come home. But he just ran away because he was unhappy, Dad. He doesn't deserve to get kidnapped or killed because he made an error in judgment!'
Her father didn't say anything for a moment. 'Normally I would consult with your mother about something like this,' he said at last, 'but I get the distinct feeling from you that time is short. And to a certain extent, I agree with you… and there's probably not too much that can happen to you while James is riding herd on you both.'
He chewed his lip for a moment. 'Go on, then, get on with it,' he said, mostly to Megan's back. She was already halfway down the hall to the other machine.
'Thanks, Dad!'
'I'll call school and tell them you won't be in,' he called after her. 'But tell Winters I'd appreciate a call from him when the excitement dies down… '
'I will!'
Megan threw herself into the seat, lined up her implant, and went virtual.
Elsewhere in the virtual realm, Mark Gridley pressed himself up against a wall in the darkness and tried very hard to be still and small and nonexistent, for the monsters were after him.
Naturally they were not really monsters. The physical shapes presently stalking him were symbolic representations of the hunt/trace/immobilize routines that the programmers responsible for Breathing Space's client data storage had erected as protection around their clients' confidential personality-profile and counseling records. The routines had been written in a new release of Caldera II, the Net programming language that Mark knew and liked best. Unfortunately, they also incorporated some of the newer features of Caldera, ones with which Mark was presently not as familiar as he was with the older version of the language. As a result, the dragons had so far chased Mark three times right around the system firewall, knowing that someone was trying to get in and get at the files, but-because of the 'cloak of invisibility' nondetection routine that Mark was wearing, they were unable to do anything more concrete about him than keep on following the 'scent' his attempts to subvert the routines were leaving in the system. You couldn't rewrite code without leaving a trace, and the hunter/stalker guard routines were all too skilled at detecting that trace, that 'scent,' and following it. Every time they detected it, Mark had to move. If the routines actually came in contact with his virtual self, he would be thrown right out of the system, and he didn't have time for that right now. Time was, in fact, getting desperately short.
He kept on trotting around the firewall, which manifested, in an access of some programmer's rather skewed wit, as an actual wall of fire. If there's a big rock in there with a Valkyrie sleeping on it, I'm leaving, Mark thought. But leaving was very low on his list of things to do. He had to get in, and fast. The people he was expecting were certain to be along any time now.
He paused, looking at the fire, watching the pattern of it, the way the flames wavered. Behind him he could hear the dragons snuffling along, getting closer. But for a moment he ignored them. The flames did indeed have a repeating pattern. The anti-incursion routine meant to keep intruders out was cyclic, a single piece of code, recursing itself. The programmer was trying to save space, Mark thought. Not a terrible idea, usually. Could have been very elegant. But he stopped too soon. He should have hooked a random-number generator into it as well. He didn't, though, and the cycle is processing, canceling itself out in places-
The snuffling behind him, around the curve of the firewall, was getting louder. Mark ignored it, concentrated on the pattern. He had seen girls getting ready to jump into a double jump-rope in motion doing this same kind of pattern analysis with the body as well as the mind, looking for the open spot, the rhythm in which it repeated. Miss it and the ropes would clip you hard enough to raise a welt-or, in this case, the firewall routines would grab your Net persona, fling it into a 'holding area' from which there would be no escape, and call the cops. You dumb thing, I
