Everything but the Squeal (16 page)

Nevertheless, I went through all ten of them, including the one I'd labeled DOS. DOS is short for disk operating system, and it's what you feed the computer first. Until it's digested DOS, you might as well stick your fingers in the drive and ask for a readout on your prints. In short, without DOS, the computer is just something you have to dust. It can't do anything.

Birdie's DOS diskette was the first clue that something was intentionally wrong. You're supposed to put DOS in and then turn the goddamned machine on. After some beeping and some blinking, the screen gives you an enigmatic symbol that looks like this: A>. Then you can load whatever program you want and tell the computer what to do. If you're lucky and if you know what you're doing, it'll behave.

I'd used my own DOS diskette to look at the disks numbered one through nine, and I'd gotten the mathematical salad. In a flash of inspiration, I shut the computer off and slipped in Birdie's DOS diskette. Maybe it was a different DOS, I reasoned. Maybe it could make sense of numbers one through nine.

But when I turned the computer on and hit Enter twice, as I'd learned to do, the reassuring A> was nowhere in sight. Instead, I got a message that said: disk error or nonsystem

DISK. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ANY KEY.

I'd seen that before, and recently: on the screen of Birdie's computer, when I'd forgotten to put a DOS diskette in before firing up the computer. When I'd worked on Birdie's computer I'd used the DOS I'd bought. And that meant that Birdie's DOS diskette wasn't really DOS. Like the other nine disks, it was written in some kind of computer code.

There was nothing to do but try my own DOS diskette again. As before, I got a few words of English before the screen dissolved into the kind of mathematics that gives high-school kids zits. But this time, I noticed the message at the bottom of the screen. It said: disk full.

Well, that was peculiar, because I'd already done a directory on that disk, and the computer had told me that 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 - Slipped Disks

C 
oyotes 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
any
kind of money is new money.

“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?”

“
Mom
,” a little girl's voice said from around the corner. “They're not hungry. They've got things to do.”

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.”

“
Mom
,” Morris squealed in an agony of embarrassment.

“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
Wizard
of
Oz
. The light, as I saw when I entered, came from three computer screens, all up and glowing.

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
computer
!” Jessica sounded like she doubted her ears.

“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.”

“Even if you can do it, what good is it?” Jessica said loftily. “Who wants a phone book arranged by the length of the name? You know, Morris, that's one of the things that's wrong with you. There's enough junk to learn without making up new stuff.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, pushing aside something that was probably vital to some computer in the room, and looked around her with the disinterested air of a deaf person who'd been dragged to a concert.

Morris swallowed the rebuke in silence, but then he reached down and twisted a knob that plunged the offending screen into darkness. He chewed on his lip as the silence lengthened.

“My, my,” I said heartily, looking at a large pair of apparently extraterrestrial landscapes on the wall, an oddly colorless mountain and a shoreline, jumbles of rocks and natural forms, as lifeless as the moon. “Where are these?”

Morris wasn't buying peacemaking from anyone he was jealous of. “To the extent that they're anywhere,” he said tartly, “they're in Benoit Mandelbrot's frontal lobe.”

“Old Bennie,” I said. “I knew they looked familiar.”

“They're fractal landscapes,” Morris continued, ignoring me, “computer-generated mathematical pictures that approximate the natural world. Only less sloppy.”

“I like the world ‘sloppy,’ ” Jessica said. “I don't want some egghead turning it into a bunch of numbers. What
good
is it?”

“It helps us to understand the world,” Morris said doggedly, looking everywhere but at her.

“Ah, we've gotten to fractals,” Elise Gurstein said, com- ing into the room with a glass of red wine in one hand and a Coke in the other.

“I don't know why everybody has to
understand
everything,” Jessica said defiantly. “Why can't we just leave things alone? Can't I like a blue sky without someone like you explaining to me that it's because the air scatters the light waves? When I go body-surfing, do you think I need some schnook in goggles swimming along next to me telling me about the movement of liquids?”

“But you don't understand
anything
,” Morris insisted, holding his ground. His color had heightened, making his eyes even paler. “Don't you want to know how things work?”

“See you,” Elise Gurstein said, leaving the room. “I've heard all this.”

“I can start a car,” Jessica said silkily, turning her hazel eyes on Morris. “I can go shopping. I can read a map and use a calculator and turn on a television set. I can find something in a library if I need to. What else do I need to know?”

Morris gave an exaggerated Gilbert-and-Sullivan shrug, as though he were rolling the weight of the entire globe from one shoulder to another. “Nothing,” he said with a finality that would have been impressive in anything but a soprano. “Just nothing. You're doing great.”

“There are
already
people who know all the stuff you're talking about. That's their job. Haven't you heard, Morris? It's called specialization.”

“You want to know what's wrong with the world?” Morris said to me. “Attitudes like that.”

“Oh, talk to each other,” Jessica snarled. “You're both so much smarter than me.” She lay back on the bed, rolled over, and faced the wall.

“Than I,” Morris said, looking longingly at her back.

“Find the appropriate orifice, Morris,” Jessica said, plumping one of Morris’ wrinkled pillows and curling herself around the computer.

“Listen,” I said, “this could go on all night.” I waved the disks in the air. “The floppies.”

“I'm not sure Morris is interested in the floppies,” Jessica said to the wall.

“Of course I'm interested,” Morris said, shamefaced.

“Then do something, Morris,” Jessica said in a voice that was pure saccharine. “Show us what a genius you are. Who knows, maybe you'll inspire me to learn something myself.”

Morris wedged his hands back into his pockets and then realized that I was holding the disks out. He pulled out one hand with some difficulty and took them from me. “What are they?” he said.

“Some kind of code. It looks like algorithms or something. Lots of numbers and calculus signs. Some stuff that looks like Greek.”

“Hmmm,” Morris said, slipping one disk into the drive of the nearest computer. He sat down on a stool and peered at the screen. “You don't know what language they're in?”

“The beginning is English,” I said.

He was tapping the keys. “What computer language, I mean.”

“Well,” I said, feeling dumb again, “no.”

“There are only so many,” he said. He banged at the keys faster than Horowitz doing scales and looked at the result on the screen. It was the same junk I'd seen.

“Who knows?” he said to himself. Seated at the keyboard, he was back in his element. He yanked out the first one and slid in the next. “What are these numbers on the labels?” he asked.

“I don't know. I just copied the numbers on the originals.”

He looked up at me. “These aren't the originals?”

“I told you, I stole them,” I said. “If I'd taken the originals, they'd have missed them.”

I heard Jessica draw in her breath behind me. “Simeon,” she said, “you mean, they're—”

“It doesn't matter where they came from,” I said quickly. “Morris doesn't need to know where I got them to figure out what they are.”

Morris gave me a glance that was full of curiosity. “That depends,” he said. “Are they from some kind of scientific facility?”

“No.”

“Math? Computer specialists?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Well,” he said, looking back to the screen, “they're specialized somehow. Are they all like this?”

“I don't know if they're identical. All I know is that they all come up in English when you boot them, and then they turn into gibberish. Also, they seem to have lots of space on them when you do a directory, but after you type a few words into the English part they come up with a disk full message.”

“Very interesting,” Morris said. “Very,
very
interesting. Some kind of hidden files, then. Or else somebody's just balled them up.”

“I don't think so,” I said. “I think whoever created them knew exactly what he was doing.”

“Or she,” Jessica said. She was sitting up on the bed now, staring at the screen as Morris tried some more wizardry.

“Let's assume you're right,” he said, tapping away. “Let's assume that somebody has hidden information on these things. What do you think it is?”

“Illegal,” Jessica said.

“No, I mean, what kind of application? Is it language, or math, or what?”

“I think it's some kind of data base,” I said.

“Well,” Morris said, looking at me as though I were a performing monkey who wasn't performing very well, “why didn't you say so?” He moved crablike across the room on the stool, which, I saw, had wheels, and pulled open a drawer in one of the filing cabinets. “Data bases,” he said, gesturing at the drawer.

It was absolutely jammed with bootlegged software, stacks of photocopied manuals wedged in every which way, sandwiched between disks. He grabbed a handful of disks and wheeled back to the computer. “This could take a while,” he said.

I sat down on the bed, next to Jessica. For forty-five minutes or so, Morris tried one program after another, humming happily to himself. It was like watching submarine races. I had absolutely no idea what was happening. Jessica dozed off, emitting zippery little snores.

“This is pretty neat,” Morris said at last.

Jessica started and opened her eyes. “What is it?” I asked.

“That's what's neat,” Morris said. “I haven't got the faintest idea.” Jessica made a small groaning sound. “It's pretty cute, though, whatever it is,” Morris said, his eyes glued to the screen.

I looked at my watch. It was almost nine, and I had somewhere to go. “Can I leave them with you?” I asked.

“Sure, sure,” Morris said without looking around at me. “I'll call you when I figure it out. Maybe tomorrow sometime.”

I stood up, and Jessica stood next to me, yawning. “Don't bother leaving your number,” Morris said. “I'll get it from Jessica when I need it.” He darted an anxious look at her and then turned back to the screen. He was clacking away at the keys when we left the room.