Tea with the Black Dragon - Страница 11

The resultant display was impressive. Small cells of white grew over the screen from dots of his placing. These expanded like lichen, and like lichen died away in the middle. Mr. Long grasped the mathematics of it, and also the metaphor. His eyes watched tiny colonies grow, proliferate, compete with one another for space, fail through mysterious inner processes, die… Like societies of men.

It was a game he was quite familiar with, watching mankind from a distance: civilizations, tribes, individuals… As always, he felt a desire to interfere.

He focused on one white speck, no different from any of its fellows. It was one of the rare stable ones, situated in a small pulsing colony. It might continue forever, or at least until the next power failure.

But wait—no. At the far edge of the screen a small, odd-shaped colony was moving sideways. A glider. It left the screen at the right and re-entered from the far left. Its path was going to impact the pulsar in… how many moves?

Mayland Long worked the puzzle in his mind. He saw each move that would bring the attacker toward the small colony. He constructed the impact, and saw in foresight the end of that tiny dot of light, no different from any other on the screen.

He sat motionless and watched, his eyes black, his face impassive. But a moment before the glider intersected the stable colony, his hand struck the keyboard of the computer, freezing the action.

“Live,” he whispered to the dot of light.

He heard movement behind him. Frisch stood there, dangling a green plastic board from his nervous hands. “Ever play that before?” he asked. “Life?”

Long looked around him at the empty store. “Not this… implementation.”

“I suppose everyone’s got one,” the young man admitted. “But this one’s faster. Most of them are written in BASIC. Would you believe that?”

Long did not answer. He stretched out an arm, found another plastic tub chair and pulled it into position beside his own.

Obediently, Frisch sat. “You haven’t found her, I guess.”

Mayland Long smiled ruefully. “Progress has been retrograde. I have now lost the mother.”

Frisch stared. “Maybe she gave up and went home.”

“If she did, she left her luggage behind.” Long’s gesture made circles in the air.

“Mr. Frisch…”

“Fred.”

“Will you answer me a few more questions? I realize you’re busy and I’m a bother…”

Frisch bit his lower lip and pulled on his moustache. “I’m not busy,” he admitted. “And I don’t mind talking. But as I said yesterday, I don’t really know Liz.”

“These are technical questions. You see, I value the breadth of your interest. You understand both methodology and personality. I imagine you know Floyd Rasmussen.”

“RasTech,” answered Frisch promptly, responding to the flattery with innocent eagerness. “I don’t know him, though. Just about him.”

“Go on, please. I know him, you see, but do not know about him.”

The young shop owner took a deep breath. “Rasmussen. He’s a mover. Sharp. Not a technical man, but a great entrepreneur. He’s made a lot of money.”

“On his own?”

Frisch nodded affirmation. “He’s started half-a-dozen firms in the last ten years.”

“Then why was he working for FSS in the position of department manager last year?”

“Oh, he’s lost a lot of money, too. His last couple of ideas went bust: small business systems.’“ Frisch began intensive demolition work upon his moustache, his eyes puckered, staring through the blank window of his shop at the street beyond.

“But I don’t think he was personally hurt either time—just the stockholders. Only I imagine it’s hard to find any more capital after two Chapter Elevens.”

“Evidently he has managed,” interjected Mr. Long. He sighed and murmured, “Interesting.

“Tell me… Fred. Why would a bank want to hire an engineer to write half a security system?”

There was no hesitation in Fred’s reply. “So the right hand won’t know what the left hand is doing. It’s often done that way. Like for the little plastic cards they use nowadays. You know? Supposedly no one knows the algorithm by which the card code is evolved out of the account number, or the customer’s name. That’s because two programmers wrote it. Each knows half.

“A bank’ll go to a lot of trouble to randomize the choice, hiring one man on this end of the country and one in New York, taking two or even three programmers out of different segments of the field—industry, research, schools.”

“Have you ever been involved in such a project Fred?”

“No, not me.” He shook his head, releasing his moustache from its duress. “That’s big league stuff. They don’t look for a hacker with his head full of new ideas and his heart among the hobbyists.”

Frisch frowned as he spoke, but his eyes remained vague, reflecting the sky through the window: detached, speculative, feeling his grievances against the world only superficially. He was very young. Mayland Long found him interesting. His own brown eyes, watching Frisch, were anything but vague.

“But Peccolo has done security. He contracted for one while I was at Stanford. I remember. It was for North Bay Savings.”

Long stirred in his chair. “While you were at Stanford. That must be—oh—two years ago, then? You’ve not done badly, being only two years out of school. This shop filled with expensive toys, contacts in all fields of electronics…”

Frisch linked his hands together behind his head and cracked all his knuckles at once, exhaling loudly through his moustache as he did so. “Well, I guess not. This shop? Yeah, it’s something.”

The young man got up and regarded the row of screens before him. Some of them were dusty. Some dotted with fingerprints. He turned to the wall of esoteric journals, and the counter filled with boxes of components, spools of bright ribbon cable, and small chips laid like dead roaches on their backs, brass legs sparkling under glass. “Seems I never sell anything, though. I just have interesting conversations.”

Long laughed at Fred Frisch and then, unexpectedly, he bowed to him, hands together across his middle, thumbs lightly touching. “May you have many more such,” he said, his accent shifting slightly from Oxford to the East. “And may they be of equal value to the people with which you have them.”

He took his leave. As the door closed behind him, Fred Frisch leaned over to the console and hit the return key. The program resumed, the glider touched the small pulsing colony, and one particular dot of light went out.

No one saw who cared.

Chapter 6

There were clouds toward the north, over the city. These darkened the rear-view mirror, while Mayland Long drove into the late afternoon sun. They reminded him that autumn was approaching: autumn and the rain.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. His left arm lay along the sill of the open window. His bare hand sprawled out over the dark green enamel of the car door: too dark for the sun to burn.

Fire was Mr. Long’s chosen element; he had no sympathy with the rain. Yet he knew water was preordained to win, in the end. In mans end, at least. No vault or sepulcher could keep out the damp forever, and even ashes dissolved. But if he stared at the mirror with a bleak eye, driving south on Alma Street in the dusty shade of trees, it was not such philosophical speculation which disturbed him.

He parked out of the line of sight of anyone coming from or going toward RasTech, and strolled down the street. Mathilda Avenue was wide and choked with traffic. The earth around it—like the entire Valley—was flat and dry, only partially won from desert. In Long’s eyes it was an unworthy victory, too. The cheap concrete architecture depressed him; it seemed to spring out of nowhere, like the sudden idea of some not-very-imaginative child: all boxes and cylinders, not even colored with crayon.

Each bare-fronted building had its tiny, begrudged rectangle of green and a huge parking lot. The only other shrubbery on the street consisted of the occasional ivy bed, and a few sapling olive trees which struggled for life at the corner, where the words Sunnyvale Industrial Park were engraved on a sign cut from an immense slice out of a redwood tree. RasTech itself was featureless as a shoebox, except for heavy concrete buttresses along the side of each window and which made a sort of porch before the front entrance.

This landscape offered very little concealment to a man seeking concealment—especially a man as distinctive in appearance as Mayland Long. Nonetheless he concealed himself,- standing motionless in the afternoon shadows cast by the overhang of the entrance. Behind him rose the slab wall of the building. To his left was the lintel of the doorway. In front of him, further obscuring him from sight, stood a lattice overwhelmed by mounds of Algerian ivy. His clothes were dark; so was he. The shadow slowly grew.

People issued from the building—it was nearly five o’clock. RasTech employees accounted for only a fraction of the workers who dashed out or paused on the walk before the door, expanding in the open air for a moment before confronting the traffic. Long searched them all from the darkness; his eyes were very good.

He waited for Rasmussen, knowing he might well have a long wait. He wanted information from the president of RasTech, the last known employer of Elizabeth Macnamara. He did not think he would obtain that information by asking the man. He planned to follow him.