Deathworld

Chapter 5

Mark Gridley's workspace this week looked like the old Vehicle Assembly Building down at Cape Canaveral. This was a new one on Charlie, though it didn't exactly surprise him. On earlier visits he had seen it looking like an underground cave full of stalactites and stalagmites, like a single gigantic floor of an office building towering over the Singapore skyline, like the entrance hall of the Museum of Natural History in New York, like the salt flats outside Bonneville, Utah, and like the surface of the Moon-an area not far from the Lunar Appennines, where some astronauts had left their moon buggy. In his own version of that empty, arid place, Mark had constructed a garage for the buggy, one which had also quizzically sheltered a beat-up lawn mower and a folded-up Ping-Pong table. Charlie had come to believe, both at the sight of those workspaces and during some of the events later associated with his visits to them, that it was entirely possible Mark Gridley might have a hinge loose somewhere.

But whether he did or not, there was no ignoring the fact that Mark was possibly the single most dangerous person on the planet, at least as far as the Net was concerned. Whether heredity had anything to do with it, Charlie wasn't sure. Having the head of Net Force for your father and a talented computer tech/heavy-duty philosopher for your mother could certainly predispose you to think more about the Net than a lot of people did. But just thinking about it a lot couldn't possibly endow anybody with the kind of talents Mark had with computers in general and the Net in particular. He was a genius at getting into any kind of computer system, and exploiting it while there. Maj Green had remarked once to Charlie that the Net Fairy had plainly been present at Mark's christening. Charlie wasn't so sure about that, but there was no keeping Mark out of any system he was interested in… and he was interested in everything.

At least, he always had been before. Today Charlie was banking on the idea that nothing had changed.

Charlie headed across the vast concrete floor of the VAB, looking for signs of life. He didn't see any. The huge space, thirty stories tall, was empty. This by itself wasn't so odd: in the real world it had been a long time since spacecraft had been built there, and mostly the building was kept for its history as the assembly area for the first rockets to take man to the Moon, and because demolishing the VAB would have upset the colonies of pygmy Cape buzzards that nested. There and worked the little "pocket" weather system inside the building.

Off in one corner, though, about a quarter mile away, Charlie saw where a beam of sunlight came in through the movable cowling in the roof, and shone down on what looked like a conversation area-various chairs arranged in something like a circle, with a big low hardwood desk off to one side. Charlie made his way toward this, listening to the creaks and cheeps of the buzzards above him as they circled in a mini-updraft near the roof.

"WHO DISTURBS THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ?" thundered a huge voice all through the VAB. The buzzards squeaked in protest and flapped over to the sides of the building, perching and shaking their heads at the noise.

"It is I," Charlie said, rolling his eyes. "I mean, it's me, Squirt. Lay off the 'great and powerful' trip before I choke myself laughing."

"I don't think you take me seriously enough," said a much more normal voice, that of a thirteen-year-old kid again. It echoed in the huge space, but didn't roar as it had a moment before. Mark came into sight now from somewhere behind the "conversation circle," his arms full of e-mail images. He was wearing swim trunks and a MoldToYou T-shirt which was presently showing, one phrase at a time, in bold white letters on black, the message SPACE IS BIG / SPACE IS DARK / IT'S HARD TO FIND / A PLACE TO PARK / BURMA SHAVE.

Charlie blinked at that. Mark was part Thai, but he wasn't sure what Burma had to do with anything. "How is it possible to take you anything but seriously," he said. "You busy?"

"Nothing important," Mark said, dumping the load of e-mails onto his desk of the moment. They scrambled around on the surface of the desk, putting themselves in some prearranged order, and then ascended gently into the air and hovered there, like well-trained bubbles. "Just trying to get down to the bottom of the In-box before the end of the week."

"Why? What's the end of the week?"

Mark snickered and brushed his dark hair out of his eyes. He was due for a haircut, or maybe this was just some new style he was trying out. "My dad's been threatening to take me surf-fishing for about the last year. Well, the stars or whatever must be propitious, because we're going away for the weekend, up to some place on the Jersey shore. Or so he claims." Mark gave Charlie a knowing grin. "I'm betting you something'll come up Sat- urday morning and it'll all be off. But I can't absolutely count on it, so…"

"WAAAH," said something nearby, a raspy upscaling voice that vaguely suggested a soul in torment.

Mark looked over his shoulder. "Yeah, yeah, it'll be dinnertime soon," he said to someone Charlie couldn't see.

"What was that?" Charlie said, looking around. It didn't sound like a buzzard.

"The cat. Theo," Mark said. "Or, as we call him, The Gut Who Walks." Another piercing Siamese-cat shout filled the air, suggesting either that Theo didn't appreciate the characterization, or that this conversation wasn't producing food, or that he was testing the acoustics. "So look, what brings you by? Not that I don't think it's entirely social."

Charlie grinned. Mark had taken some ribbing from the older Net Force Explorers about his age, and his size-he was short and light even for a thirteen-year-old-until they started to discover that the area in which Mark was decidedly no lightweight was his brain, and that he could outthink, and sometimes outmove, any of them. Those who had christened him the Squirt as a joke had since turned it into a title of honor, and kids five or six years older than he was had soon learned not to treat Mark as if he were too young to be taken seriously. Charlie had never been one of these. He knew entirely too much about what it was like to have people decide because of your background that you weren't worth their time.

"Got a problem, Squirt," Charlie said.

Mark looked surprised, and eyed him curiously. "Yeah, you do, don't you?"

"Does it show?"

"You look bothered. What's the matter? Trouble with your folks?"

"Me? No." Charlie laughed, but he wasn't surprised that the sound didn't come out sounding particularly humorous. "Look, I have to ask you something."

"Blaze away."

"I'm not sure it's not illegal."

Mark put up his eyebrows. "Oh? Not your usual mode of operation, Mr. Straight Arrow."

"Don't remind me. I need to get at some information." "You interest me strangely."

Mark's suddenly delighted expression made Charlie laugh. "Nothing real involved. I need to get at some medical records."

Mark looked bemused. "Thought you'd usually ask your dad about that kind of thing."

"Not just general information. I need to get at some county coroner's files."

"Aha," Mark said, and leaned back in his chair. "Not public files, then."

"Nope. Autopsies."

"Wow, truly disgusting," Mark said, not sounding disgusted in the slightest. "I wanna see, too."

"Not sure it would be good for you to see this stuff," Charlie said, uneasy. "Heck, I don't really even want to see it."

"You're gonna have a hard time getting at it in the first place without me," Mark said, sounding all too matter-of-fact. "Come on, Charlie, I'm not going to look over your shoulder if you're really worried. But it'd make me feel a lot better if you'd tell me what was going on."

Charlie didn't see that he had any choice. He sat down on one of the chairs pulled into the circle and told Mark the basics of his problem, without mentioning any names.

When he was finished, Mark sat down across the circle from him and folded his arms, thinking. "Been a lot of attention on Deathworld, hasn't there?" he said. "Since the last couple of suicides. _ _

"Yeah."

"But you don't need me to break in there, I take it." "Nope. It's just this medical stuff I'm after."

Mark sighed. "Pity," he said. "Deathworld would have been a challenge… But as for this other stuff, we can do it this evening, if you like."

"Really?"

"Shoot, we can do it now."

Mark opened a drawer in his desk, looked at the e-mail "solids" floating around above the desk. "Okay, every- body i "

n…

One after another the icons dropped into the drawer, all but one, a recalcitrant sphere that hung bobbing in the air over the desk and wouldn't budge. "Yes, you, too, get in there!"

"You promised you would deal with this today," said the e-mail, in Jay Gridley's voice.

Charlie's eyebrows went up. Mark flushed pink and grabbed the mail out of the air, stuffing it in his pocket. "No rest for the weary," he said. "Never mind."

Mark dusted his hands off, knocked the drawer shut with his hip. "Okay," he said, "let's see what you've got."

Charlie fished around in his own pocket and came up with a notepad, the icon for a little file full of bureau names that he was carrying with him. He handed it to Mark. Mark tossed it onto the desk, and a window appeared in the air in front of them and displayed the list.

"Mmm," Mark said. "Bangor County Coroner's Office, Collins County Police Coroner, Arlington City Coroner's Department…" There were six offices matched with six victims-the paired suicide, the most recent one, was being handled by two different coroner's offices, as the kids had lived in two different jurisdictions.

Mark stood there with his arms folded, thinking for a moment. "Let's do the county systems first," he said. "Then the police ones. The cops are likely to have better security, and they might take us a little longer."

"You don't think they're likely to alert each other that someone's going after data on the suicides?" Charlie said, beginning to get nervous. He was feeling guilty already.

"I doubt it," said Mark. "There isn't nearly as much cooperation between police forces as there should be if they really want to make their systems secure. Especially regionally. Too much rivalry…" He grinned slightly. "Old habits die hard. Besides, these people don't seem to have been comparing notes in the first place, do they? I mean, just from what you told me now, the fact that all the suicides seem to involve a hanging of one kind or another-no one seems to have picked up on that. At least nothing's been mentioned about it on the news."

"They might be hiding that information," Charlie said, uncertain.

"If they were coordinating, yeah. But we don't have any proof that they are. So let's stir around a little and see what we find. If any of the data you're interested in is trip-wired, or has associational links to similar data in some other police department's network, then that might indicate that they're talking to each other privately about this stuff. Meanwhile"-he looked at the list-"Let's start with Bangor."

Mark looked around him. "Okay," he said to his workspace, "strike the set."

The VAB, the sunlight, the little flickery shadows of the buzzards away up high-it all vanished away in a blink, leaving them in a peculiar sort of darkness in which the two of them were illuminated, but nothing else was. The only other thing visible was the window with the names of the agencies Charlie wanted to raid for information. "Bring up the advanced-level penetration utility," Mark said.

And the floor of Mark's workspace suddenly became visible. More than visible. It was transparent, so that Charlie could see down into it, for what looked like maybe a thousand meters. The space below their feet was full of light, light of every color, columns and lines and pillars of it, some horizontal but mostly vertical, interwoven, sometimes even interpenetrating. This was an expression of a program that Mark had designed for getting into other programs. "What language did you write this in?" Charlie said, very impressed.

"Digamma, it's called. Nasty stuff."

"I believe you." Charlie knew in a general sort of way that every line of the light he saw reaching down to limitless depths beneath him was a statement in computer code of some kind, but there his knowledge stopped. "Man, I'm just getting the hang of Caldera. I thought that was complicated-!"

"Yeah, you wouldn't want to mess with Digamma unless you were seriously unbalanced," Mark said. He looked down into the abysses of light, and the whole deep panorama began moving with great speed underneath him, slipping sideways. Then it was as if the floor on which they stood plunged downward like an elevator, though they weren't actually moving at all-rather, the graphic expression of the "penetration" program was pouring itself up past the two of them into the air around them as ghosts of structures of light. It paused, then pouring sideways again as the program sorted for some specific spot that Mark had in mind. After a moment it stopped, which was a good thing, because Charlie's stomach was bouncing around inside him as if he was on a roller coaster.

" 'Unbalanced,' " Charlie said, trying to get control of himself. "This suggests certain possibilities about you, Mr. Gridley."

"Don't it just," Mark said, sounding distracted for a moment. "Necessary, though. A lot of the Net Force master computers' routines are running in Digamma… you want to work with those, you have to learn it eventually. My dad started teaching it to me when I was seven. I'm just now really getting the hang of _t." He interlaced his fingers, cracked his knuckles. "Okay, now watch this."

He beckoned over the window in which Charlie's "addresses" were written, and poked the first one with his finger. "Identify," he said to his program, "and locate."

They stood there in the bright silence for a moment, and suddenly a string of letters and numbers which meant nothing whatsoever to Charlie strung themselves out in the air in front of him and Mark in a blaze of crimson. Around them, the colors of the penetration program went mostly to blues and greens.

"Good," Mark said. "That's the raw Net address. It tells me a little about their security… which frankly, needs to be looked at. These guys must think they're safe from intrusion." He smiled slightly. "Well…"

"Can you get in?" Charlie said.

"In? We're in already." Mark glanced around him. "At least, we're in their system. Now we have to crack their security, preferably without them noticing, and go hunting. Look, the information you want, it'd probably be easier for you to identify as images, yeah?"

"That's the best way for me."

"Okay. Home system. Go graphic."

Everything went dark, then filled with light again, and the two of them found themselves looking at a wall. It reared up as high above them as they could see, and ran off to what seemed infinity in both directions. It appeared to be made of red brick, and some wit had posted up on it a neatly lettered sign that said: FIREWALL.

"Everybody's a comedian," Mark said, walking alongside the wall for a little way, examining it. "Let's see what we've got here. C3? Caldera? Levolor?" He patted the wall, felt one of the bricks. "Nope, it's Fomalhaut. One of the lousiest programming languages of the decade. Why in the world did they use Fomalhaut for this?"

Charlie stood watching Mark kick the wall once or twice in an experimental kind of way. "What's the matter with the language?"

"Terrible structure," Mark muttered. "You have to really like doing things over and over to use Fomalhaut. Look at this-" He glanced up and down the length of the wall. "In any normal virtual programming language, a wall like this would be set up with one command that you then told to repeat itself however many times, and then you would tell it where to stop, or to seal itself up. In Fomalhaut, you have to do every single command separately." Mark shook his head. "Each of these"-he kicked another brick-"represents a separate command. Really dumb."

"So why would they have used it, then?"

Mark shrugged. "Oh, some people might think it was better for security. More trouble, they would think, to have to disassemble a 'wall' brick by brick, you couldn't just subvert one. But plainly it didn't occur to them that sooner or later a more sophisticated way to deal with this protocol might come along. Or that someone else who knew the language really, really well-"

Mark reached out behind him, plucked something out of the empty air. It was a crowbar.

Charlie had to laugh. " 'More sophisticated'?"

"Yeah, don't laugh. You'll see. Meanwhile-" Mark stood there and touched one brick. It lit from within, revealing what looked like a little churning square of boiling alphabet soup, all letters and numbers. "Right." Mark said. "And this one-" He touched another brick, farther down, the wall. It revealed another oblong full of soup. "Uhhuh. One more-"

The third brick revealed the same contents. Mark stood there for a moment. "Someone here," he said with satisfaction, "got real sloppy. These aren't all separately written instructions. They've been cloned from a single one. Jeez, a lazy Fomalhaut programmer. What's the point? Why use an obsessive-compulsive language, and then not obsess?"

Mark shouldered the crowbar and grinned at Charlie. "Never mind," he said, "we're in business."

He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

From some distance away came a tiny sound, like a faraway screech of surprise. "Aha," Mark said, cheerful. "Come on, that's what we're after."

He started to jog to their left, down the wall. Charlie followed him. "Look," he said, "what are our chances of getting caught in here?"

Mark grinned as he trotted along. "No better than one in a hundred at the moment." Charlie instantly broke out in a sweat. He preferred much longer odds. "I mean, think about it, Charlie! Programmers are a spoiled bunch these days. They work what they used to call 'banker's hours.'

Nobody in the coroner's office in some little county building in Maine is going to be hanging over their terminal at eight-thirty in the evening waiting to see if someone breaks in or not! If the system is even housed in the same building, which isn't necessarily the case. And their automatic system security is junk. I know, because I broke through it five minutes ago. I pretended to be its system administrator, and my penetration manager gave it a nice set of circular instructions to play with, based on its own check cycle… so right now it's doing the machine equivalent of staring in the mirror and telling itself that everything is fine. And here we are."

Mark stopped and pointed at a brick high up in the wall. "See that?"

That particular "brick" was glowing red hot. "Kind of hard to miss," Charlie said.

"That's the instruction all these other ones were cloned from. Now then." Mark started to walk up the air as if there were stairs there. With the crowbar he pried out that particular brick and caught it in one hand as it fell.

The wall started to crumble. Charlie jumped back, out of reflex, but as the wall tottered outward toward him, the bricks began to fade: By the time they reached the "floor," they were vanishing like fog in sunlight. A moment later he and Mark were looking out across a vast hall full of thousands of beige filing cabinets.

"Wow, imaginative," Mark said, sounding unusually dry. "Somebody in the data-processing department here really gets off on their work."

He walked down out of the air again, tossing the single glowing red brick in his hand as he did. "We'll hang on to this," Mark said. "We'll want it to put things back the way we found them when we're ready to go." He shoved the brick into the air between them. It vanished.

Charlie started walking among the lines and lines of filing cabinets. "This is the visual paradigm the people who work here have been using?" he said.

"The default, yeah," Mark said. "It may make it easier for you to search. The clerking staff'll probably have left some markers for themselves, to make it easier to find things. But boy, oh, boy," and Mark chuckled, "at times like this, do I ever get seized with the desire to redecorate."

"Please don't," Charlie said, walking among the filing cabinets and looking at the little cards inserted in their drawer-fronts.

"Oh, come on, Charlie. Let me just leave a potted palm in here somewhere. I'll even tie a big red ribbon around it."

"No!" 2004 2005, read one cabinet: 2005–2006… Charlie walked along the line of cabinets, looking for 2024.

"Just kidding," Mark said. Charlie wondered about that. "Aha," he said, and grinned at himself. Mark's turn of phrase was catching. "2020. "

The 2024 cabinet was the fourth one down. Charlie pulled its top drawer open, and suddenly there were five other cabinets standing next to that one. "January through May," he said.

He headed for May, opened that cabinet up, and started riffling through the files there. Delano, he thought. Richard Delano. May third…

The file was there, a plain manila folder. Charlie pulled it out.

Instantly the air around him and Mark was full of windows. One of them showed a file structure "tree," full of files all of whose names began with DELANO. Another few windows showed pictures: crime scene shots, pictures of someone's house, probably Delano' s. Then one more window said STATE PATHOLOGIST'S REPORT.

"Yes, indeed," Charlie said softly. "Mark, can I copy these into your workspace?"

"You can copy them right back to yours, if you like. I've still got a link open."

"Both, then. I want to make sure the data's safe." "Consider it done." A big bright gold hoop appeared in the air and set itself on fire. "Chuck anything you want copied through that: It'll make copies both places and then refile itself."

"Good." Charlie glanced at the ring, amused, then reached out and, with one finger, poked the window with the pathologist's report. It opened out into a series of still more windows, with screenfuls and screenfuls of text, and in one window, images of the body at autopsy. Charlie looked at this somberly, then turned his attention to the text.

"He looked real young," Mark said, from behind him, softly.

"Yeah. This was the sixteen-year-old," Charlie said as he read hurriedly down through the report, skimming it, and finding the words he had suspected he would find: Strangulation. Self-inflicted-

"Right," Charlie said, and folded the window down small, and chucked it through the ring. The ring flared. The window vanished. Charlie gathered all the information together again which had come out of the original file, and threw it, too, through the ring. Then he closed the file drawer.

"That it?" Mark said. "You sure you don't need anything else?"

"Not from here. But we've got five other places to hit, still."

"Gonna be a short, dull night for me at this rate," Mark said, sounding disappointed. "Never mind." They walked away from the filing cabinets again to the point where they had first entered, and Mark plucked that red brick out of its hiding place in the air. "Be fruitful and multiply," he told it, and dropped it on the floor.

A moment later there were two of it, and then four, and eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four… Within about thirty seconds the wall had completely rebuilt itself, even to the sign that read FIREWALL. "Mark-" Charlie said warningly, for the sign was now upside down.

"Oh, come on, Charlie! I was real good. I didn't even leave them a potted palm."

"Mark!"

"Oh, all right. Spoilsport."

The sign righted itself. A moment later they were back in Mark's space, where a stack of what appeared to be manila files was floating in midair, and Mark was referencing the "list" window again. "Next-"

The lines and columns and pillars of light dived and swooped around them again, and Charlie closed his eyes after a few seconds of it, since his stomach really did not like this. "Here we are," Mark said, and they found themselves in another walled area, but this time they were inside the painted concrete walls, not outside them.

"Hmm," Mark said. Charlie gulped, wanting to say a lot more than that, for the walls were moving in on them, like something out of an ancient 2-D horror flick… except that these walls were in 3-D, and, as they watched, were slowly sprouting long, cruel, inward-pointing iron spikes.

"Interesting," Mark said. "Those would pin us here, and ID us to the local system administrator, and lock a trace onto my system and any other one affiliated with this search. If we let them." He snapped his fingers, and the pale tracery of his own Digamma routines became more visible around the two of them inside the rapidly shrinking space.

"And we're not gonna let them do that," Charlie said, sweating harder, "are we…?"

"Not a chance. Hush up now, I have to think."

Charlie started to sweat harder and closed his eyes again as once more the Digamma framework around them did its zoom-and-swoosh roller-coaster number.

"They're a little paranoid here," Mark said matter-of-factly. "I wonder if they've had a break-in recently?"

Charlie opened his eyes again. The disorienting slide and swoop of colors had stopped, and Mark was holding in his arms what appeared to be a wide pipe of pure glowing yellow, as thick as the trunk of a tree. He was wedging one end of it against the inward-pushing wall on the left-hand side, and as Charlie watched Mark picked up the other end of the branchless yellow "tree trunk" and began to pull on it. It lengthened as he pulled, until it came right up against the wall on the right-hand side. The walls pushed against it, pushed. The "tree trunk" glowed briefly brighter, bent a little-then braced itself still, bending no more.

"There," Mark said. He watched the walls keep trying to push, but they were making no headway. "Automatic system," Mark said. "No one's watching it-banker's hours, as I said. Or else someone's gone for coffee."

"Any way to tell which?" Charlie said, looking around them for a way out.

"Not without taking a chance that they might notice," said Mark. "Come on, let's find you what you need-" He walked over to the wall, brushed his fingers along it in the same testing sort of gesture he had used with the last one. "Huh," he said. "Thought so. Just Caldera, this time. Here, watch this."

Charlie went over to him, looked over his shoulder. "See this?" Mark said, and pushed his hand right into the "wall." "You can manipulate the programming directly without separate instructions, if you know where to grab each line. And you can exploit the holographic nature of the program-"

Charlie didn't know whether or not he should be relieved that he didn't have the slightest idea what Mark was talking about. A second after Mark thrust his hand into the wall, he pulled it out again, holding a doorknob. "And as I thought," Mark said, "the programmer left herself a nice tidy way back into the main programming space for when she was finished testing this." A door outlined itself in the wall: Mark used the doorknob to open it and stepped through. "Mind your step, here-"

" 'She'?" Charlie asked, stepping through after him. They appeared to be in a dimly lit office that stretched for miles in all directions. "You sure about that?"

"Ninety percent," Mark said, walking through the office and looking around him. "Just something about the feel of it Uh-oh. Somebody's in here. No, don't panic!"

Charlie froze and looked around him. Far off to his right, at what looked like about a mile's distance across this absurdly huge spread of carpeting and desks and office furniture and dividers, he could see a light shining over a desk.

"Just somebody looking at a file, somewhere else in the system," Mark said. "Possibly halfway across the city from where this facility is based. The odds of whoever it is being able to see us, or even being authorized to see us, are minuscule. Don't sweat it, just come on and let's see what the paradigm is-"

It took them only a few minutes to find it. Some of the desks had old-fashioned computer terminals on them, and Mark stopped by one of these and poked at it, a rounded eggy-looking thing done partly in a rather retro turquoise, partly in a translucent white plastic. "Somebody here has a sense of humor," Mark said, "or nice taste in antiques." He bent over to tap at the keyboard. "What's your victim's name in Colorado?"

"Velasquez."

"First initial?"

"J. Jaime."

"Which year?"

"Twenty-three."

"Right-" A moment later a large pile of square virtual datascrips appeared on the desk in front of them, and Mark glanced at them. "Copy again?"

Charlie looked through them. Each scrip, as he picked it up, showed him on its surface what it contained. AUTOPSY SYNOPSIS, Charlie read, RAW DATA, ORGAN ANALYSES, TOXICOLOGY-"Yeah."

Mark tapped at the console again. The datascrips vanished out of Charlie's hands. "Done. Let's beat it and hit the next one-"

They got out of there, Mark carefully removing his "tree trunk" and allowing the squashing walls to start coming together again, while at the same time wiping out any evidence of his and Charlie's intrusion. Then they hit the third facility, the coroner's office in Arlington. It had rather more effective security than the first two, so that Mark had to spend five minutes or so breaking in and making sure they wouldn't leave any trace of their entry behind, but the result was the same as in Bangor and Fort Collins.

The fourth Net-based system, at the coroner's offices in DeKalb County just east of Atlanta, to the astonishment of both of them had no security precautions installed around it whatsoever. Mark was practically dancing with frustration at such carelessness while Charlie raided it for the information he needed, and it was with the greatest of difficulty that Charlie kept Mark from building a security barrier around that system and then locking the DeKalb County staff out of it. Nothing Charlie could do, however, could keep Mark from putting up a big virtual billboard that said KILROY WAS HERE in front of the space.

"Somebody I should know?" Charlie said as he made sure the files were copied back to his space.

"Probably not," Mark said, disgusted, "and probably they won't, either."

"There won't be any trace that it was you doing that, will there?" Charlie said, nervous.

"Are you kidding? Of course not. You think I want my dad to-" Mark gave Charlie a look. "Never mind. Come on. Two more-"

They next hit the data storage system for the coroner's office in Queens. The City of New York system was surrounded with a set of nested security barriers so arcane that they actually kept Mark and Charlie away from the target data for a whole hour. Mark spent the whole time sweating and swearing-first in English, in language that Charlie wouldn't have thought Mark knew, and then in Thai, withgreat vehemence-as he dealt with the barriers, which in this implementation looked like layer after layer of barbed-wire fences, with long stretches of bare ground between them. But finally they fell, and the two of them found themselves making their way into a virtual domain that exactly duplicated the coroner's clerk's offices, right down to the potted plants and the baby pictures. The records Charlie found there were more complete than they had been anywhere else they had raided, and Charlie began thinking that they could have saved time by just raiding this one. But how would we have known? And I need all that other data to make sure the case is watertight…

Charlie was taking a moment to look more closely at one of the files he was carrying while Mark chucked other records one by one through his ring-of-fire "copying" routine. He turned a page, and a great spill of organic-chemistry imaging and visualizations poured out into the air around them, long-chain molecules and imaging of translucent platelets and ribbony blood fractions. "Just look at this toxicology report," Charlie said, overcome with admiration. "Somebody here is a real professional."

"Yeah, well, so are their DP people," Mark said, sounding actively nervous for the first time. "Let's make it quick, huh?"

Charlie started to fold the file up preparatory to tossing it into the ring. This particular file was going to be useful for him. Most of the other coroners' blood and tox results had had rather minimal information about the dead person's blood chemistry. This one listed blood fractions that Charlie had only heard of in his most recent study. Whoever was working tox here was seriously interested in genetic microfractions, as well as-

Charlie stopped and looked curiously at one molecule that was hanging in the air off to one side. It looked familiar. He put the main file aside and went over to it, plucked it out of the air, turned it several different ways, looking at it. "Mark, hang on a minute."

"Okay, but no more than that. Whatcha got?"

"This looks familiar."

"It looks like Tinkertoys," Mark said. "Thought you were a little old for this kind of thing."

Charlie upended the molecule, tried looking at it from another angle. It didn't help. "Squirt, don't push your luck. Home system-"

"Online."

"Let me see this as golf balls."

"Processing."

The construct in his hands changed, got bulkier, and the "sticks" between the colored balls vanished, the chemical bonds now expressing themselves as spots where the balls squashed together. This was the method that his physics teacher had trained him to prefer, almost against Charlie's will, but it did work better than sticks and Ping-Pong balls for him. He turned the molecule over in his hands again, trying to find the best way to hold it. The benzene ring at one end suddenly triggered a memory, and so did the bromate structure sticking out of the middle of it.

"Charlie," Mark said, "you should save this for later… we really oughta get out of here."

Mark, getting nervous? It was worth seeing, though Charlie wasn't willing to linger under the circumstances. Nonetheless, he grinned to himself briefly. "Right. But one thing first. Home system-"

"Ready."

"Orthodox name for the compound."

"Scorbutal cohydrobromate."

Charlie's eyes narrowed. Oh, no. Oh, no. "I hate this," he growled.

Mark looked up at him. Charlie refused to repeat himself. "Come on," he said, folding up the file and chucking it through Mark's copying ring. It vanished, and the ring as well. "Let's get the heck out of here."

They hurriedly backtracked the way they had come, through a shortcut Mark had "wire-cut" to the outer security perimeter. He had to stop to reweave the wire, patching his cuts, but it didn't take him too long… which was as well, for far away, inside the "blockhouse" away inside the wire, Charlie thought he could hear sirens wailing. "Company?" he said.

"No kidding. Their security program woke up. Took it long enough-" The implementation was getting louder, as if closing in on them, and Charlie had no desire to see what form it was going to take when it finally appeared in their neighborhood. The last hole chopped into the outermost fence rewove itself. it!" Mark said to his penetration program, and then he and Charlie were once more standing in the darkness of his own workspace, surrounded by the light-forest of the Digamma penetration program.

Mark let out a long breath, and suddenly looked very thirteen. "These guys had it a little more on the ball than the others," he said.

Charlie grinned. "Not necessarily a bad thing. But Mark, you're not afraid of getting caught, are you?"

"Not much. I mean, no, of course not. It's just that, you know…"

"That that one was closer than you like to get." Charlie looked at him. "You want to call it quits?"

"No. Let's finish."

"Good," Charlie said, because they were shy only one set of information now, and it would be a shame to have to stop without it. There would alWays be that nagging doubt that some single important thing had been missed, the one piece of data which would have clinched the case…

But Charlie rather thought it was clinched already. It would only be a matter of taking all this information home, sitting down with it and comparing everything very carefully. All he needed was the data from their last stop, the coroner's clerk's office in Forestville, Maryland. There the security was almost as nonexistent as it had been in Atlanta, and there Charlie picked up and copied the set of records belonging to the second kid involved in the recent "double" suicide. They were nowhere near as complete as the New York records had been, but they would have to do. The final raid took them fifteen minutes. At fifteen minutes and ten seconds they were standing in Mark's workspace again, with the forest of light sinking into the virtual floor under their feet. Mark let out a long breath of relief.

"Mark," Charlie said, "you're a hero."

"I'm modest, too," Mark said, wiping his forehead. "Ask me about it sometime." He plopped down in one of the chairs. "Lights!" he said to his workspace, and the VAB reasserted itself, the angle of the sun having changed slightly, but everything else as it had been before. From high up in the air, the creaky voices of buzzards could be heard, and beside Charlie, piled up on the floor, was a stack of manila files nearly as tall as he was. "It's all there," Mark said. "I'll keep copies secure for you, if you like."

"I'd appreciate it," Charlie said.

"No problem. But just what was that you found back in New York?"

Charlie shook his head. "Bad stuff," he said softly. "Ask me later."

"Mark?" a man's voice said from out of the air around them.

"Ohmigosh, get out of here, it's my dad," Mark said hurriedly. "Probably with a brain full of bait." He leaped for the pile of files, scooped them up and started stuffing them into one of his desk drawers. "These are encrypting. But I need to wipe my logs of these, and you, before he comes in. Go on, blast out of here!"

Charlie hurriedly headed for his doorway into Mark's space, which appeared a few feet away. "Mark-thanks!"

"Yeah, yeah, thank me later. When I get back, gimme a shout and tell me what you find!"

"I will!"

Mark vanished. Charlie was left standing in his workspace with a pile of files.

"Son," he heard his father say from outside in the real world. "You've been in there for an elephant's age. Want a sandwich?"

"Absolutely," Charlie muttered. He checked to make sure that the files were saved, and then closed down his workspace and returned to the real world, where his stomach was growling fiercely… but not so much so that it drowned out the nervous muttering in his head.

Scorbutal hydrobromate.

Were these really suicides…?

Late the next afternoon Nick stood out in the softly falling ash, and held very still, listening for something beside the screams of the Damned. He didn't immediately hear the sound he was waiting for, but he was willing to wait for a good while. If there was anything he had been learning in the last couple of days, it was patience.

He was in no hurry to get back to the spot he had finally reached during the session before last, the first "subbasement" of the Dark Artificer's Keep… even though his money was getting close to running out, even though his folks were getting increasingly interested in "sitting down and having a talk" with him. Nick had the secrets of the Eighth Circle seriously on his mind, for he was beginning to suspect that there was more to play for, a lot more, than just lifts of new songs and the possibility that you might meet one of the clone-Banes down here.

Nick had decided to follow a hunch. He had gone back to do what Shade told him she'd been doing: to talk to others he found wandering around the ashy wilderness on the far side of the Lake of Tears, and guide them through. At first he wondered whether this had been such a great idea, for the environment responded badly to it. It was as if the crevasses started to target Nick, going out of their way to stitch themselves straight at him as he made his way through the knee-deep ash. He had had a couple of extremely close calls over the first few hours, as the ground stubbornly, even maliciously, opened again and again under his feet. Once, if this had been reality, he would have left the skin of the palms of both hands on the jagged outcropping of rock that was all that kept him from plunging into the lava-filled abyss below. But Nick kept doing what he had decided to do. It was sheer stubbornness, at first. If the environment was going to target him, he was going to outlast it.

After five or six hours of this, things got a little better. The environment started getting less dangerous… or maybe Nick just got better at anticipating it. But he also stopped noticing quite so acutely what it was doing, for he started getting interested in the conversations he was having with the people he was guiding through. Their responses to the situation in which they suddenly found themselves varied from complete confusion to annoyance that they were no longer in control of their path through the darkness. But one way or another, they were all glad of the help, though some of them plainly would have choked rather than admit it. Some of them were wearing virtual "seemings" that were meant to make them look very impressive and self-sufficient indeed-tall shapes cowled in darkness, like the image of Joey Bane in the "front door" to the Orpheus, Don't Look Back! virteo collection, or barbarian heroes, or statuesque women wearing space-babe slicktights and toting projectile weapons the size of their upper bodies, or giant snarling beasts slinking along through the fiery night and trying to look independently deadly. Some of them protested at being saved from falling into a hole in the ground by a skinny high school kid in neodenims and a beat-up Mets batting helmet. Most of them "forgot" to thank him. But none of them, Nick noticed, told him to go away while he was actually helping them out.

At the end of his last session Nick had gone home exhausted and collapsed into bed too weary to even be annoyed with his mother, who had been waiting up for him. He had taken care of his homework before he'd left, so he wasn't sure why she was waiting, and she gave him an odd look as he passed through the front room on his way to bed.

"Honey," she said, in an unusually neutral tone of voice for her, "your friend Charlie called earlier."

"Yeah?"

"He was asking about something called a 'walk-through.' Would you know what he wanted?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah, I'll take care of it tomorrow." That caught Nick a little by surprise. Charlie wasn't much of a gamer, preferring to do "solid construction" sims, the more concrete kind of virtual experience. All the same, if he's getting interested…

Nick looked for Charlie the next day at school, but didn't see him. Either he'd had to swap his lunch periods to take care of some study commitment, or something else had happened to throw their schedules out of synch. Nick went through the day more or less on automatic, as he had done for the last couple of days, since things started to get really interesting back in Deathworld. That afternoon he headed back into the WorldBooths public Net-access center down at the Square in an unusually good mood, despite the fact that his money was getting so short. At the end of the week he would have some more allowance coming, and be able to really get back into the swing of Deathworld over the weekend. Nick had spent the day getting ahead of schedule on his homework, which his folks had been checking with unusual care. They'd have no excuse to bother him for two whole days.

And after that, when the money does run out… For two full days of gameplay would exhaust what he had.

Nick sighed, paid at the cashier's booth in front, took his recharged cash card, and headed back to his usual booth right at the rear, locking himself in and settling into the implant chair and slapping the card into it. Have to deal with that when it happens, Nick thought, and blinked his workspace into being around him.

It was still bare. He hadn't felt like spending the time to get his redecorating done. But off to one side, standing there, was a simulacrum of Charlie, in end-of-the-day shinesweats, arms folded, smiling that wry smile he wore sometimes, an expression that suggested he was feeling foolish about something.

"Go," Nick said to the simulacrum.

"Sorry I missed you," it said immediately, in Charlie's voice. "I was up late last night doing some research.- Look, all work and no play, you know the drill… I was wondering if you had any walk-throughs of Deathworld. I wanted to have a look through, but I don't want to spend six weeks dragging around in the upper levels. You have something that can get me about halfway down? Give me a yell, or leave me a message."

The image froze again. Nick was caught between two impulses-to catch Charlie "live" right now, if possible, and take him down into Deathworld himself, or to leave him a message. The second impulse won.

"System," Nick said, "record reply…"

"Ready," the system said in its plain-vanilla voice. Nick raised his eyebrows. He really should get some Bane audio in here, if nothing else.

"Charlie. sorry I missed you, too," he said, getting up out of the "chair" on the virtual side and going over to the doorway where his files were stored at the moment. He opened it and looked in. "File access. Deathworld," he said, "press material, walk-through… Yeah, that one. Transfer to Charlie Davis's machine."

He turned back to the simulacrum of Charlie. "Here," he said. "This one came out of the 'Last Train Out' review environment about a month and a half ago… the data for the first three levels is still good, as far as I know. The company's been swapping in new material from about Four down, to defeat the older walk-throughs there out there, but this should still be a help. Let me know if you have any problems. I'll talk to you later… "

The simulacrum, having been answered, vanished. Nick breathed out, then closed the door and opened the second one, his automated login gateway to Deathworld.

He had implemented a "shortcut" entry that let him in to pick up where he had left off. The Deathworld system still showed him the copyright statement burning crimson in the air for a few seconds-there was no getting away from that, no matter how many times a day you might come in here and then Nick walked through into the darkness awaiting him on the other side.

Falling ash, the volcano in the distance… Nick reached up into the air and re-created the "asbestos" golf umbrella he normally carried, and then started making his way toward the keep, to see who he might meet along the way. As he looked around, he was a little surprised by how few players seemed to be around. This was an unusually quiet period for this time of day. Normally Death-world started to get noticeably busier around the time that high school and college classes let out in North America, though obviously there would have been plenty of Europeans and Asians in over the earlier part of the day.

Nick shrugged and made his way along through the black ash "snow," keeping an eye open for crevasses. For the moment they seemed to be avoiding him, though he saw what looked like a huge one opening away across the plain, and faintly he thought he heard some yells of surprise from that direction. It was a little too far for him to do any good. By the time he got there, everybody involved would either have saved themselves and each other, or fallen in.

He kept going, making for the Keep of the Dark Artificer. Shade's warning about the size of the place had been a useful one. Its interior was, Nick thought, probably bigger than the whole gigantic plain that surrounded it. This posed problems of topology that he didn't bother his head about, for the attraction of the Keep lay in the music that was in there, and also in the exploration of the countless dark rooms, deep caverns, and hidden towers associated with it, and (most important, Nick thought) the solution of the great Maze at the Keep's heart. He couldn't get rid of the feeling that the access to the fabled Ninth Circle had to do with that maze. Probably nothing so simple as just getting to the middle of it. Nick was sure you needed to do more than that, or have some specific piece of information once you arrived.

Nick skirted around the lake and headed for the doors of the Keep. The demons on guard there-little blackleather-skinned, batwinged guys about five feet tall, wearing ornate doormen's costumes and affable gargoyle faces-saw him coming and started pulling on the giant braided bronze ropes that opened the doors. He waved at them, in what was beginning to be a ritual. "Hey, there, boys," Nick said to the two nearest demons, "how're things going?"

"They stink," said the demons nearest the doors, in the ritual answer. One of them, pausing from the work, wiped his forehead with a big smudgy hankie and added, "And the boss turned down the union's request for the pay raise."

Nick made tsk, tsk noises as he passed them by, walking in over the shiny dark pavement, which some beneficent agency kept clear of the ash that was always falling outside. "Keep working on it, fellas… " he said.

The doors closed behind him, and Nick paused there in the huge "front hall," looking around to see who else might be there. The Keep's vast entryway, lit by a huge crystal and onyx chandelier shaped like one more stalactite hanging from the great dome of the ceiling, routinely held a surprise or two. You might hear a snatch of music here that you hadn't caught elsewhere, or meet someone who would do your quest some good. At the moment, though, it was nearly as quiet inside as it had been outside. The place was practically empty. A slack period, Nick thought. Coincidence.

He walked on in, looking around at the bizarre portraiture that hung on the walls of the entryway. They were supposed to be images of gameplayers who had passed on successfully to Nine, Nick knew, normal people living in his own time. But the portraits made them all look like crazed royalty of two or three centuries back, in rococo clothes and wigs that looked like they might come alive and crawl off their wearers' heads. He wondered what his own portrait would wind up looking like if-When. When they did it.

Nick smiled slightly and headed in toward the doorway on the far side of the entry hall. Past that door was where things got interesting. Six staircases apparently designed by Escher led off toward the roof, and six more toward the basement, though none of them felt particularly like "up" or "down" when you were climbing them. Somewhere in this vast pile, in which none of the normal directions mattered, the Maze was hidden-a huge tangle of paths and walkways, arched and open, covering all six of the walls of a great cube of space somewhere in the Keep. Nick had actually found it accidentally, once, when he was first in here and just wandering around in the place trying to get a feel for it. Then he'd lost the Maze again while trying to work out how he'd found it to begin with. A whim of the system, he thought. Never mind. Over the weekend there'll be time to start doing some proper searching-

"Hey, Nick…"

He turned quickly at the sound of a slightly familiar voice. It was Shade again. In here she looked a little less like her name, but only a little less,justa young girl of maybe fifteen, in a long black outer coat, a short dark purple skirt, and a black sweater, dark purple hair, and eyes that shaded from violet to almost black depending on how much light there was. Those big dark eyes, and the somber set of her mouth, suggested some old sorrow hanging over her. She was pale. In this light, almost right under the great chandelier, Nick could see much better how frail she looked, how fragile. Not that Nick was so foolish as to be misled by appearances down here. As in most virtual environments, anyone could look like anything they pleased. For all he knew, up in the Real World, Shade was a six-foot-six, two hundred-and-eighty-pound football player. Somehow, though, Nick doubted it. There was a brittle feel to conversations with her that made him wonder if she was either a plant from Joey Bane Enterprises, someone used to see how players treated each other, or someone who wasn't really cut out for this particular virtual experience, but was just too stubborn to give it up.

"Hey, Shade," he said. "You doing okay?"

She sighed. Most of her conversations seemed to start with a sigh, or contain several of them. "I guess so," she said. "It's quiet today… you'd almost think everybody was scared off by something… "

Nick shrugged. "Not me." The whole business with the Angels of the Pit had rolled off his back pretty quickly once he got into the Keep and started working on the business of solving it.

"I don't know… " Shade said. "I wonder if maybe there's something to it."

"To what?"

She shrugged, gazing up and about her. "What they did…" She turned those violet eyes on him. "I keep wondering if it's really so terrible. When everything's going wrong. "

The way she trailed off, Nick had a feeling that she was about to tell him how everything was wrong for her, if he didn't stop her. He shook his head. "Some people might think it isn't," he said slowly. "I guess there are times when everything really does seem to stink. But that's not where I am at the moment."

"Things are better for you, then, at home?"

"I don't know about better," Nick said. "A little quieter, maybe." Certainly his father had been letting him alone… whether he was unwilling to restart their fight, or not, Nick wasn't sure. Just the news that Nick had a job lined up for the summer seemed to have quieted things down somewhat. For the rest of it, it was as if his mother and father had declared a truce for the moment. The lightening of the atmosphere in the house had been noticeable. "I'm not thinking about that right now, Shade. I'm on my way to the Maze… "

"Aren't we all," Shade said, and laughed a little. "But I haven't finished exploring the Keep yet. There's still a lot of ground that I haven't covered yet… "

Nick laughed. "You sound like you enjoy rummaging around in here for its own sake. Not me! I want the music."

"Oh, I do, too… "

"Well, then, come on and help me find the Maze! That's the way down to Nine, and Nine's where the good music's supposed to be, the 'unknown' lifts. And Joey himself…"

Shade gave him an odd look, almost nervous. "Oh, I don't mind hanging around up here," she said. "Besides, they say that once you leave Eight for Nine, you can't come back."

That surprised him. "Who says?"

"Other people up here." Shade glanced around her, although those "other people" were not much in evidence right now. "All the time, in the Upper Circles, you see people from as far down as Eight wandering around. Slumming… helping the newbies, or torturing them with news of the lifts you can get down lower."

Nick nodded. He'd seen enough of this as he worked his way down. One and Two were pafticularly bad in this regard-a lot of the people from the circles between Three and Six seemed to enjoy coming up there and making the new Banies nuts. "But have you noticed," she said, "that you never see anyone from Nine?"

Nick nodded. This might have been why rumors about Nine were very few and far between. It left another question, of course: If nobody from there comes back to tell us what's happening, then how are there any rumors at all? But rumors didn't need reality to get started. That was one of the things this level was about, as he had been discovering.

"You hear anything else about how to get down there?" Nick said to Shade.

She shook her head. "Nothing that's done me any good," she said. "But I wish you luck."

"Yeah," Nick said, "thanks. Look, I'll see you on the way out, maybe?"

"Maybe you will."

She turned away.

"Hey, Shade-"

She glanced back at him.

"Thanks for helping, the other day."

"I didn't help," she said. "Not really." That faint air of sorrow seemed to come down on her again.

Shade headed for the doors, which swung back to let her out into the darkness. Nick watched her go, thinking, Poor kid, I wonder what her problem is? But then, if he asked her, he had the awful feeling he'd find out… and right now, he had enough problems of his own. Besides, tonight was about enjoyment… because he wasn't going to be able to afford much more of it.

Nick turned and made for the door at the back, the entry to the Stairwell of Doom, to pick a stair and see where it took him.

In the doorway a dark shape watched him for a few moments, then shrugged and turned away.