The zenith angle (37 page)

That made him an important man. Him, Tom DeFanti: a frantic business hustler who had stuck together a Houston aerospace company on a wing, a prayer, and some very quiet yachts packed with bales of Acapulco gold. He’d done some crazy things, for some desperate reasons. But he’d always had one business goal in mind: his own personal charge card for the Deep Black. Because the Deep Black budget for spy satellites was twice the size of the CIA’s budget. And the Congress never ran any audits there. The spy-sat community never advertised in
Aviation Week.
Once you became a trusted Deep Black supplier, though, you were a made man. If you could deliver their hardware on time, quietly, and within specs, you were a miracle for them. You were a major asset and to hell with the so-called budget. Six-thousand-dollar hammers; only to be expected. Ten-thousand-dollar toilet seats; go enjoy yourself. To launder his Deep Black money, to try to make his own taxes make sense, DeFanti had started a cable company, and then a microwave phone network. He’d never guessed that cable TV would spread like crabgrass, or that cell phones would web Planet Earth with their white roadside antennas. Time passed. Tom DeFanti grew older in his boardrooms. The wives cycled through his bedrooms, and his kids grew up and left. The Space Age gently faded into the yellowing pages of
Life
magazine. By the 1990s, aerospace jobs were fading away by double-digit percentages, while the Cyberspace Age exploded in the NASDAQ and a million Web sites. Business and the profit motive ruled the heavens and the earth.

But now, breaking his thoughts, here came the ugly racket of a trail bike. It was, of course, the Dot-Commie. The Dot-Commie was making a beeline for DeFanti’s hidden cabin. He must have ridden the motorbike straight down his jet’s embarkation stairs.

The Dot-Commie waved cheerfully as his bike veered wildly up the stony, darkening slope. The Dot-Commie wore a tartan shirt, jeans, boots, and an Australian outback hat. He looked both rugged and tidy. Jet lag never bothered the Dot-Commie. He ate like a weasel and he slept like a tomcat. The Dot-Commie pulled up with a squeal of brand-new brakes. He hunted for the off switch on his spotless Japanese toy. Despite his fondness for fancy transportation, the Dot-Commie was no man of action. He tended toward pallor and plumpness. He would have shuddered at a horse. The kid leaned the spotless bike against the gray wooden hulk of the dead man’s abandoned observatory. The dead banker’s old telescope had long since gone blind. His doors to the zenith had rusted shut on their iron pulleys and chains. The place had been used as a hay barn for decades. DeFanti had never altered the dead man’s observatory, he had always just let it be. Now that the red Kawasaki trail bike leaned against its patient sides, he realized how much he loved that old building. What an affront that was.

“
Komban-wa,
Chairman-san!” said the Dot-Commie.

The Dot-Commie had a nice tapered chin and a smooth, tall genius forehead. He was the ladies’ man version of a geek. Determined to avoid the kid’s eager handshake, DeFanti absently patted the barrel of his faithful old Questar. The gingko was hitting his brain with a hot quiet rush now. The Dot-Commie had something big on his mind, and it would be complicated. It would be way too complicated. The Dot-Commie’s personal schemes always included lots of extra gears and switches, just for their geeky coolness.

“So, kid, how’d it go across the big water?”

“Oh, Tom, in Tokyo, they are So Over. They just don’t Get It.” The Dot-Commie removed his Australian hat. His hair looked like a nice toupee on a solid stone egg. He flipped the hat and tossed it over. “This is for you, Tom.”

DeFanti caught the hat, startled. “I don’t need this,” he lied.

“I bought it for you in Sydney. It’s brand-new. It’s fully adjustable, see? You just pull that little tab in the back.”

DeFanti groaned in disbelief. Then he settled the kid’s body-heated hatband around his own chilled scalp. The hat felt pretty good, really. The hat felt great. DeFanti always wore a hat when observing. Mountain nights were bitterly cold.

“Cell phones, the Japanese get,” said the Dot-Commie. He opened his black laptop bag. “Cameras and faxes and stereos, the Japanese get. E-commerce, that stuff the Japanese never get.” From an interior pocket of the bag he removed a two-ounce plastic windbreaker. He peeled it open with the delicacy of a man folding an origami crane.

“I saw the Super-Kamiokande,” the Dot-Commie announced. “That was this trip’s high point. That neutrino observatory. Tom, it’s all you said it was, and it’s more. It is insanely great.”

“So, what, they gave you the lunch tour? Take this hat back.”

“The name of DeFanti-san opens every door in astronomy! They loved me at Kamiokande. Keep the hat, Tom. The acolyte wears no hat when the Master lacks a hat.” The Dot-Commie tunneled into his plastic windbreaker. It featured a snug little drawstring hood. He yanked the hood over his big egg head and grinned winningly. He looked like a plastic elf.

“At Kamiokande, they’re underground and galactic at the same time!” the Dot-Commie crowed, dancing in place a little to shake off the cold. “About a billion photon tubes down there. They catch neutrinos inside giant tubs of water. The Japanese are underground, underwater, and observing the galaxy. All at the same time!”

“That scheme works out for them, does it?”

“They get major results!” The Dot-Commie dug into his magic black bag and retrieved his gleaming silver laptop. “So, which is bigger, DeFanti-sensei? The universe, or the screen that shows us the universe?”

“It’s all about the screens now, kid.”

“You bet, Ascended Master! You are beyond Zen!”

DeFanti chewed mournfully at his grizzled lower lip. “Quit bragging. It’s more of the same, that’s all. That LINEAR nonsense. And NEAT, and LONEOS, and SPACEWATCH. Shipping astronomy on Internet routers. Why in hell did I ever pay for those things?”

“They can search every pixel in the sky, Tom.”

DeFanti ignored him. “Nowadays, an amateur couldn’t spot a fresh comet to save his life! Those stupid scanning machines will always beat him to that. God damn it, I always wanted to bag my own comet. Always. ‘Comet DeFanti’!”

DeFanti put his twitching eyelid to the chilly rubber eyepiece of his Questar. He knew very well that the sky was being mapped with ruthless digital detail. That wasn’t the part that scared him. No, the scary part was what space telescopes had done to the Earth. Pinecrest Ranch was easily visible from space. Any passing cosmonaut could see the place with the naked eye. The National Reconnaissance Office, as a meaningful gesture to a favorite supplier, had sent DeFanti a digital map of his whole Colorado spread. The NRO had given Pinecrest Ranch the same loving attention that they gave to the garish palaces of Saddam Hussein. All the NRO data was stuffed inside DeFanti’s laptop now. It wasn’t just a flat simple map, oh, no. It was an interactive, topographic, 3-D computer model map, military-style, just like the Delta Force studied before they parachuted into some hellhole in the middle of nowhere. Tom DeFanti could ride across his Colorado spread with a mouse instead of a horse. He dreaded the day when he would really prefer life that way.

The Dot-Commie turned with solemn interest to DeFanti’s second telescope. “So, Tom, what’s with the tarp on this cool new hardware?”

DeFanti felt a pill-driven mental pang. He scratched below the hat brim. “I don’t much care for that one, kid.”

“Why not?”

“Because it auto-aligns to the zenith angle. It’s got a forty-thousand-object stellar database built in. That’s not a telescope. That thing’s a damn Nintendo.”

“Nintendo, the Japanese get! So, mind if I boot this baby up? Looks like terrific seeing up here tonight. The clarity of those skies!”

DeFanti clenched his chilly, wrinkled hands. “Yeah, except for your jet trail! That’s a cloud of burning kerosene! You add that filth to the smog from the drought, and those wildfires on federal land . . . What has a man got to do?”

The Dot-Commie touched a fat black switch on the base of the telescope. The digital instrument perked up with an instant click and an obedient hum. “Wow, sweet! So, Tom, what’s on our viewing agenda tonight?”

DeFanti glanced at the screen of his laptop. “An Iridium will flash at 9:17. There’s a wonky old Soviet booster I’ve been keeping an eye on—pretty soon, it burns out big time. And after midnight, they’re parking a MAGNUM/VORTEX in its graveyard orbit. We might catch a little glimpse of that, if we’re lucky.” He looked up. “Were you ever cleared for that one? MAGNUM/VORTEX?”

“Oh, sure. I’m cleared. I’m Mr. Cleared. We got some time to kill, huh? Can I show you something, Tom? It’s important.” The Dot-Commie deftly spun his laptop and confronted DeFanti with the glowing screen.

It was a long, dense computer image, all colored nodes and knobs. It looked like a galaxy, or maybe a globular cluster, violently ripped to shreds.

“Okay, so you’re showing this to me.”

“Tom, this is your intranet’s traceroute map.”

“And?”

The Dot-Commie sighed and changed gears. “Okay. The board of directors. Our latest member. That guy named Derek Vandeveer.”

DeFanti said nothing. He’d been having a whole lot of trouble remembering proper names lately. Not even the ginkgo helped him.

“The big blond guy. Beard. Glasses. Shy, endearing type. Stares into space a lot. Doodles whenever other people talk to him. Everybody calls him ‘Van.’ ”

“ ‘Van.’ Yeah, I know Van. The big geek.”

“That’s our man. Dr. Derek Vandeveer, star computer scientist, widely noted security expert. Van was a Stanford professor. He’s the VP for research at Mondiale. Van won the Turing Prize in 1994. The Vandeveer Algorithm was named after Van. Okay? We recruited Van, we put Van on our board. Because Van is our token super-geek. And Derek Vandeveer just made this map that I’m showing you.”

“I knew that crazy bastard would be trouble. Is that what this is all about? This little visit of yours tonight?”

“Tom, I love it here in Colorado. I love satellites, I love an Iridium flashing. But yes, Tom. This is an emergency.”

DeFanti levered the scope aside. “All right, then spill it.”

“Corporate networks are complex and dynamically changing. We’ve got supply-chain and legacy partnerships, mergers and acquisitions activity, and a lot of staff turnover. The people come and go, and the deals come and go. But the machines just sit there. They’re getting more and more cluttered as time goes on. It’s the nervous system of the enterprise, that network and all its connections, and it’s a living, growing thing, Tom. It’s like it’s got its own agenda.”

“Yeah. I know that. Its agenda is to break our budget.”

“Well, we didn’t keep up with it properly. We let our corporate intranet grow just like the Internet grows, like a briar patch. So check out all these unauthorized connections into our enterprise network. Look at these bad links that Van found. He’s outlined them for us in red here. They’re mostly free connections that our people gave out for handshakes and goodwill, back when the Net was still new. This is a very interesting business structure that Van has revealed to us here, Tom. I don’t think anybody has ever mapped your business activities to quite this level of detail.”

DeFanti pulled down on the brim of his new hat. “Am I supposed to like this? I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I. Tom, you divested Pacific Data a good six years ago. But there are still IP host links in our system that date back to 1993. They still tie into Net machines that are running your news magazine’s online presence, and running your charity foundation . . . Tom, your nonprofit people are
incredible.
Those clowns give away Internet access to
everybody they know.
Worldwide. They are tied into Russians, Czechs and Germans, the U.N., Gorbachev’s foundations, Jimmy Carter’s charities . . . They are tied into
Greenpeace,
Tom. We’ve got Exorbital and its deep-black projects tied into a network that is also open to Greenpeace. If the NSA ever gets wind of that, they’ll go ballistic.”

DeFanti peered at the densely crowded screen. “So, this yellow yarn-ball here. Which one is that?”

“That yellow one is Visual Research Labs. That’s a spin-off, too. VRL is owned by the French now. But Vandeveer’s global IP traceroute mapping has opened up VRL like a can of tuna fish. We could stroll through every machine they’ve got. Because VRL may be based in Paris now, but they’re still running their graphics code off our Sun workstations in San Diego. Not one cent do they pay us for that service, either. They’re freeloading on us!”

DeFanti said nothing. He hated virtual reality people. They were chock-full of crazy hype. They always had weird hair and peculiar shoes. And the French virtual reality crowd was, of course, much worse.

“We never knew the French were still hanging around in there, until Vandeveer started looking. Nobody ever asked our permission to come and go. It’s just the old-school Net. They just linked up to us, and whenever they moved, nobody ever unplugged them.”

“So who is carrying the damn flag here, them or us?”

“That’s the big question, and so far, luckily, it’s still us. In hackerspeak, we ‘own’ them. I mean, I’m no Derek Vandeveer. I don’t hack, I’m a conceptualist. But with this traceroute map in my hands, yeah, basically I
am
their Internet. With a little work, I could pose as their system administrators, and download every confidential file they’ve got. And if they catch on to this bad-security situation, then that’s much worse, of course. Because then they would ‘own’ us.”

“I get it now. Cut to the chase. Who knows about this mess?”

“I do. And Derek Vandeveer. And now you, Mr. Chairman.”

“Let me drive.” DeFanti took the Dot-Commie’s laptop. He spooled across the clustered tangle of Net connections. Vandeveer’s map was the size of a bathroom carpet: tens of thousands of machines, spreading from busy hubs and linked into long, snaky webs. The networks were neatly labeled with pop-up company names and numeric IP addresses. DeFanti’s Internet backbone company ran straight through the body of it, like the cloudy spine of the Milky Way.