Everything but the Squeal

25

“Tell me about the scanner,” I said. It hadn't been I much of a drive, but I felt like I'd run a triathlon. Woofers skulked next to me, keeping very close to my feet. She'd begun to cry when I'd tried to leave her in the car.

Morris looked down at her, blinking in semaphore, obviously rattled by my unannounced appearance at nine p.m., obviously wishing Jessica were there. Unless a good woman straightened him out, Morris was always going to be the kind of guy who needed moral support.

“The scanner?” he asked Woofers. He pronounced it as though it were a word he'd memorized phonetically from a foreign language.

“That gizmo,” I said impatiently, “that doodad that you were fooling around with the first day I was here. The Yellow Pages, remember?”

“The scanner,” he said. “Why didn't you say so?” His room was the usual technological mare's nest. Upstairs his mother was working on a full-size loom to the accompaniment of Dvorak's NewWorldSymphony. It was a family whose members kept to themselves.

“Morris,” I said gently, “forgive me. I'm not a technical whiz like you.”

He scratched the back of his head while he mentally replayed the conversation. There was a child's scrabbled drawing of grass above the pocket of his shirt where he'd repeatedly put away his pens without retracting the points. “You did say scanner, didn't you?”

“Just tell me about the goddamn thing.” I was desperate enough to be slightly menacing.

“It's very simple,” he said, not noticing. “It just absorbs graphic information, digitizes it, and then inputs it onto disk. It has to interface with your software, of course. And your EGA board, if you're not scanning print.”

Wondering what it was about teenagers that made people want to find the ones who disappeared, I drew back my hands-which had stretched involuntarily toward his neck- and said, “Morris. Morris, we're both going to make an effort now. I'm going to try to speak plain old English and you're going to try to understand it. Are we together so far?” I cracked my knuckles.

He started to say something and then looked at me more closely. Then he looked down at my hands, which, I was surprised to see, had moved again and grasped the points of his shirt collar. He shut his mouth and nodded. His Adam's apple did a little bob.

“Good,” I said, pulling my hands back and forcing them into my pockets. “Good beginning. Now, using the scanner, if I follow you, you can take a picture off a piece of paper, put it into a computer, and then print it out again. Is that right?”

“That girl,” he said nervously. “That Japanese girl who was on that lady's client list. The picture I showed you at your house was a scanned image. It was kind of low-res, remember?”

“Morris,” I said threateningly, pulling out my right hand. It balled itself into a fist as we both watched.

He took a step back. “Low resolution. Like, dotty, you know?”

“It was good enough,” I said.

“Good enough for what?”

“Okay,” I said, ignoring his question. “Now, can you send these pictures around somehow, or do they have to be on a piece of paper?”

“I'm not sure I know what you mean. Do you want some coffee?”

“Your mother already offered me some coffee. Thanks, anyway.”

“So what do you mean, send them?” he asked.

I tried to think of a way to explain what I meant. My train of thought was chugging slowly uphill when Morris derailed it.

“How about some wine?” Morris had the makings of a good host, in the unlikely eventuality that he'd live long enough to have a house of his own.

“The picture, Morris. Is there some way of sending it, like over the phone?”

“A modem,” he said. He held up a hasty hand. “That's a digital decoder that works over a phone line. It reads the disk and then sends out the little ones and zeros-that's all a computer deals in, you know, ones and zeros-and the modem at the other end puts the code back together and stores the picture in the computer.”

It sounded right to me. “I asked you before if you could get into that data base and fool around with it.”

“Piece of cake,” he said. “I could screw it up so bad that they'd never be able to figure out what hit them. By the time I was finished, they'd think they'd ordered four thousand girls' fingers to use as Coke stirrers, and no chicken.” He made a dry, twiggy little sound in appreciation of his own wit.

“You can fool with the records,” I said. “But what about the whaddyacallit, the interface?”

He furrowed his brow. “You mean could I change what happens when they call in?”

“Exactly,” I said, almost weak with gratitude that we hadn't hit another semantic stone wall.

“That's more complicated,” he said, dashing my hopes. “I mean, to do that I'd have to get inside the bulletin board.”

I sat down on his bed and closed my eyes. Woofers sat on my left foot. An image of Birdie, his intestines coiled around him, bled into my consciousness.

“I'm not trying to be difficult/’ Morris said, shifting from foot to foot and twisting his fingers apologetically. “I mean, let's talk about the bulletin board, which is what this program is. A bulletin board is just, you know, data by phone. People call in and make requests or whatever, and the program answers them and then stores the dialogue in the data base. Well, the first thing that comes up on the screen when the person calls in is something called a menu. The interface, like you said.”

“You said there were dating services that work that way.”

“Um,” he said, blushing again. “They're more like an electronic post office. You know, you call in and leave a message for some type of person and wait for an answer. Not that they ever answer.”

Poor Morris. “You can specify what type of person?”

“Well, sure,” he said, looking like someone on the verge of pleading the Fifth Amendment.

“Like how?”

He scratched the back of his neck again. “Like, you know, what sex, what age. Like, for example, you can rule out a rhinoceros in its forties, right?”

“Right. Got it. And that's the menu?”

“Sure. That's the program going through its tricks. It takes your request and searches the data base. And it's harder to screw with.”

“Why?”

“Because you have to rewrite the program.”

“I don't have any doubt that it's hard. But you could do it?”

He chewed on an already ragged thumbnail. “Sure,” he finally said. “I could do it on these disks.”

“Then we're in business.”

“But that's not going to do you any good.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would only be here. To make a difference in the way the real bulletin board works, I'd have to be able to upload it to the original computer and overwrite the applications program.”

“Why is that hard?”

“Jeez,” he said, “how do I find the original computer?”

“Well,” I said, “is that so difficult? I know where it is.”

“You mean you want me to go there?” His eyes were wide.

“No,” I said. “I certainly don't.”

“Then I'd have to call it,” he said. “You know, on the modem? And I haven't got the phone number.”

I sat up and pulled a piece of paper out of my pocket. Birdie had given me something, after all. On the paper it said: 555-0645. “Morris,” I said, “how about that wine?”

He got the wine from his mother and gave it to me, and I drank part of it, and then he climbed onto his stool and fed the phone number into his modem and we both waited. There was some high-speed beeping as the modem dialed the number, and then a sustained shrill pitch. Some text appeared on the screen.

“We're in,” Morris announced.

The screen said: hope every little thing is okay, y/n?

“What's y/n?” I asked.

“Yes or no,” Morris said.

“Hit Y,” I said.

He did. The screen cleared, and new words appeared.

Enter code, it said. The cursor blinked in front of a row of dashes waiting to be filled in.

“Now it gets dicey,” Morris said.

“We know some codes,” I said. “Try turkey.”

Morris typed turkey. The computer beeped again and one of the disk drives whirred. “Look,” Morris said. “It's writing to our computer.”

“So?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

“It means that we've got a carbon-copy system going. Whatever we ask for gets bounced back onto our b: drive, right after it goes into their system.”

“Why would they do that?”

‘They must have some sort of automatic callback to confirm an order.” He was chewing on the inside of his cheek. “Like if Turkey, whoever that is, orders something special, the computer on the other end calls back as soon as Turkey rings off to make sure that the order is legit.”

“Don't touch any keys,” I said.

He rubbed his wrists. “Why not?”

“Because you're not Turkey. If we place an order and their machine calls Turkey back, the order won't be on his computer.”

“Whoopsy-daisy,” Morris said softly, his hands poised above the keyboard like someone about to attack a Chopin polonaise. “So how the hell do we get out?”

“You're asking me?”

“I've only fooled with this bulletin-board stuff,” he said. “You know, blond girl, long legs, wants to meet short dark guy? Not that there's ever anything like that, but that's what you always hope for.”

“Why long legs?” I asked, curious in spite of myself.

“Awww,” he said, “you don't have to ask that.”

“Okay,” I said. “Suppose there's only short-legged dark-haired girls?” Actually that would probably have been my preference, but it didn't seem important at the moment. “How do you get out?”

“Ummm,” Morris said.

“Without leaving a fingerprint, so to speak.”

“You hang up.” He sounded reluctant.

“So hang up.”

“But we just got in,” he said doggedly.

“The wrong way. Hang up.”

He gave me a stubborn glance. “Jeez,” he said.

“Hang up.”

He did something to the keyboard, and we were looking at a blank screen again.

“I don't know,” he said, pushing the wheeled stool back from the computer. He scratched his head.

“Me too. Do you think anyone knows we dialed the number?”

His mouth twitched to the left and he transferred the chewing operation to the inside of his lower lip. “Well, we didn't place an order. Probably not, unless the sysop was on-line.”

My fingers began to itch again. “What's the sysop?”

“System operator,” he said. “We probably didn't write to the disk on the other end because we didn't ask for anything, but if the sysop was on the line, you know, sitting there watching the computer, he knows that someone calling himself Turkey tried to get in.”

I got up off the bed, shoved my hands into the rear pockets of my jeans, and paced the messy little room. Woofers followed anxiously, cocking her head up at me to see where I was going next. Unless I was badly mistaken, the sysop was sitting in West Hollywood in the center of a baroque coil of intestines. “So there's something missing,” I said.

“I wasn't thinking.” Morris looked shamefaced. “We need the sysop's code name. Without it, we're just some schmuck trying to place an unauthorized order.”

“And with it?”

“Are you kidding? With it, we can fool around with everything. The computer on the other end will think we're the boss.”

“Morris,” I said, “let's assume we can solve the problem. Here's what I want. I want everyone who dials his computer into the data base to get something other than the menu. First thing when they connect, I want them to get the picture we're going to put into your scanner. What's more, I want a message to go with the picture you're going to scan. And I don't want just one picture, I want four, and I want them to follow each other at twenty-second intervals, with a different written message under each one. Now, tell me, can you do it or not?”

“Piece of cake,” he said. It was one of his favorite phrases, “But only on these disks.”

“You've got the phone number,” I said. “With the phone number you could do it on the other end.”

“But I haven't got the sysop's code name.”

“If you had the code, you could do it?”

“Sure. Like I said, if I had that, the system would be open to me. I could rewrite the whole applications system.”

“I think you've got it,” I said.

“The sysop's code name?”

“Think about it,” I said. “I could be wrong, but think about it.”

He concentrated hard enough to look middle-aged. “I don't know,” he finally said. “I don't know what it could be.”

“What was missing?” I asked.

He had looked puzzled before; now he looked bewildered. “Missing from what?”

“The lyric. The lyric to Turkey in the Straw.’ ”

He squinted at the ceiling. “We had Turkey,’ ” he said. “We had ’Inthe.’ We had ‘Straw.’ ”

“Jessica's lyric,” I said.

He hummed for a moment, and then, for the first time in my hearing, he said, “Oh, shit.” He looked down at the keyboard and said, “Worth a try. Should I dial the number?”

“Code name?” I said.

He gave me a big teenage grin.

“Chickie,” he said.