We had been driving since early morning. Peri offered to take a shift behind the wheel, but I could see how much she needed a nap, so I chivalrously insisted she try to get some Zs in the Travco's small bunk. She had switched on the radio, keeping it down low, saying that the familiar music would help her to sleep.

The Doctor sat on the bunk bed. He was building something back there, and had been for hours. He had interrupted our journey three times to run into stores he spotted out of the window. The bunk was strewn with bits of metal and tools, probably arranged in a careful order that the Doctor understood but which, to anybody else (me, for example) looked like a jumbled mess.

We had dropped Bob off in a motel in Frederick. The Doctor insisted that someone should stay near a phone line while we made our great expedition down the Delamarva Peninsula. Bob would stay connected to his email account via an Anderson Jacobson A211 acoustic coupler a chunky beige modem with padded rests for the phone receiver. He set up the tap on Swan's phone to forward to his home answering machine; if she made a call, it would be recorded; and he could play back the messages by calling the machine. (Before we paid for the room, Bob checked that its phone was touch-tone and not rotary-dial.) Every two hours, we would call to see if our efficient spy had any new information.

It was the tap that had sent us on the long drive eastward.

She had phoned Luis Perez to let him know she'd be away for a day or so. She said she was going to 'visit' Charles Cobb, the deceased collector, in Ocean City (The Doctor was at first disbelieving and then amused when Bob a.s.sured him there is is a place called Ocean City.) Neither Swan nor Luis mentioned what was living in Luis's bathroom: for that sort of exchange, they'd use payphones or a face-to-face meeting. We didn't have a phone book for Ocean City, so I bullied Mondy into coughing up Cobb's address. 'His number's been disconnected,' the phreak reported. 'But I looked at the last couple of bills.' a place called Ocean City.) Neither Swan nor Luis mentioned what was living in Luis's bathroom: for that sort of exchange, they'd use payphones or a face-to-face meeting. We didn't have a phone book for Ocean City, so I bullied Mondy into coughing up Cobb's address. 'His number's been disconnected,' the phreak reported. 'But I looked at the last couple of bills.'

Bob had been happy to stay wired to the network in the motel, but the Doctor had also wanted to leave Peri behind.

'This expedition is going to involve not just a tedious trip from one side of the state to the other, but some real-life breaking and entering,' he told her. 'There's not only the risk of another confrontation with the police, but with Swan. I'd rather you kept Bob company while I confront them.'

'No way,' said Peri. 'I'm not sitting in some motel while you have all the fun. I've never been to Ocean City.'

'Peri!' He could pack her name with a world of irritation.

'It's the middle of winter!'

'You're not leaving me out!'

'I'll never understand you! First you complain about being put into danger, then you're upset because I want to keep you out of it!'

Peri won that one by getting into the pa.s.senger seat and refusing to be budged. The Doctor threw up his hands and got into the back. I took the wheel, remembering the time my dad made me drive my two bickering cousins to Orange. I had solved the problem of their constant noise by dumping them by the side of the road and driving off, returning half an hour later to pick up a couple of very quiet kids. Thankfully we sat in a disgusted silence until Peri balled up her jacket between her head and the window and dropped off.

The Doctor spoke softly, so as not to disturb his slumbering fellow traveller, but I could make out every word.

'Your world is reaching a turning point here, Mr Peters.'

'How do you mean?' I murmured.

'At the moment, any electronics hobbyist worth their salt can hold everything there is to know about a computer in their head. They can know a program intimately, down to the individual lines of machine code even know the system firmware which supports it just as intimately, and the hardware down to the individual circuit paths. One human being can still design an operating system, write a video game, follow all the actions of a microprocessor. They can take the same pride as a Victorian engineer does in oiling every piston and gear of his steam engine. Or a motor enthusiast, who can trace a problem from its largest-scale effects down to the finest detail of a sticking valve.'

I was pleased; not many people have seen past the geek surface. 'I know the guys you mean. The ones with furnaces for brains.'

'It won't last. In just a few years, even the circuit diagrams for an oven or a car will be vast and inscrutable. Huge chunks of logic will be locked inside little black boxes. Chip diagrams will become too huge to trace or grasp. The world becomes as formalised at the microcomputer end as in systems hundreds of times the size of Bob's Apple. Programmers will become teams, teams will become bureaucracies, the ribs of a lean harmonious system will be lost under a layer of flabby toolkits and libraries and protocols. All proper and correct and fully functional, of course but leaving no room for the elegant shortcut, the blinding efficiency of the intuitive leap straight from the large to the small. They can do so much... but nothing with the bare-metal directness of the one who understands. It's a dying art, Mr Peters, a dying art.'

I said, 'That doesn't look like a computer you're designing back there.'

He gave me one of his small, knowing smiles. 'It isn't.'

I switched the radio back on, in time to catch the swirling beginning of Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer.

We stopped somewhere near Annapolis for our first call to Bob. We had just started to lose the DC radio stations in a haze of static. I twiddled the dial, trying to find something worth listening to, while the Doctor and Peri crammed into the phone booth. She fed it coins while the Doctor shouted down the crackling line at Bob.

'I've found Cobb's account on a BBS5,' Bob told the Doctor, his voice a mix of excitement and professional cool.

'There was a message from him in those emails of Swan's you downloaded. The number was in his .sig file.'

'Ah; said the Doctor. 'When you say "found"...'

'Cobb was no hacker,' said Bob. 'His pa.s.sword was "secret"! I've saved about half of his email onto diskettes. His account hasn't been used for a while Swan must not have reached Ocean City yet. In fact, she may end up not going there at all. She called her friend again to say she was going to meet someone at the Delaware State Fair.'

'The what?' said the Doctor.

'It's in Harrington. Lots closer than Ocean City. Get Chick to look it up on the map. Swan said she wanted lots of people around, for safety. Look up the State Fairgrounds, that's where she'll be. You guys must be an hour ahead of her it was at least an hour between the two calls I taped, so she was still in DC. I'll bet she's still at the fair when you arrive.'

We stood around the van for a few minutes, stretching our legs and puzzling over his new development. 'Who's she meeting?' Peri wanted to know. 'I thought you said that guy was dead.'

'That's right,' said the Doctor. 'Cobb tried to arrange a meeting between one of the Eridani and one of his fellow technology enthusiasts, with appalling consequences. The Eridani still aren't clear on exactly what happened. Certainly someone tried to betray someone else... perhaps Swan is planning to meet the third party.'

5 A Bulletin Board System is a meeting place for computer users. It's not a network, but a single machine: the users can connect via modem, leave public messages and send and read private email and swap files. Bob showed me the BBS in question, a private bulletin board for a clique of technology collectors, with an unlisted number. Since Cobb had inadvertently made it so easy for Bob to break in, I don't think they ever realised he had visited. There must be hundreds of accounts on BBSes and the ARPAnet where the owners never see the footprints of intruders.

'But they couldn't have another one of the components.

Could they?'

'No. The Eridani retrieved it after the disastrous meeting, along with...' The Doctor saw me listening. 'Swan is on a wild goose chase.'

'Well why are we we driving all this way then? Why not just let her waste her time?' driving all this way then? Why not just let her waste her time?'

'For information,' said the Doctor.

'But can't Bob just get that off Cobb's computer?'

'Not if it isn't on on Cobb's computer. Not everything is out there in the great green and black void, you know. Swan had to invade Bob's filing cabinet to get his details. It will be some years before she could rustle up the same information over a phone line.' The Doctor stretched his arms above his head and yawned. 'Besides, I want to meet Swan eye to eye.' Cobb's computer. Not everything is out there in the great green and black void, you know. Swan had to invade Bob's filing cabinet to get his details. It will be some years before she could rustle up the same information over a phone line.' The Doctor stretched his arms above his head and yawned. 'Besides, I want to meet Swan eye to eye.'

'Not if it isn't on on Cobb's computer. Not everything is out there in the great green and black void, you know. Swan had to invade Bob's filing cabinet to get his details. It will be some years before she could rustle up the same information over a phone line: The Doctor stretched his arms above his head and yawned. 'Besides, I want to meet Swan eye to eye: Cobb's computer. Not everything is out there in the great green and black void, you know. Swan had to invade Bob's filing cabinet to get his details. It will be some years before she could rustle up the same information over a phone line: The Doctor stretched his arms above his head and yawned. 'Besides, I want to meet Swan eye to eye: 'Let me guess,' said Peri. 'You figure that if you can talk to her in person, she'll come around to your point of view.'

'It has been known,' said the Doctor, with dignity. 'If nothing else, once we make contact with her, she'll find us very difficult to dislodge. And that will make it harder for her to do anything with us knowing about it or stopping it, if it comes to that.'

I'd never driven over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge before. It's the strangest thing two four-mile ribbons of road floating a couple of hundred feet above the water. It's actually two bridges side by side, so there's a lot of empty air between you and the cars going the other way. The feeling that there's nothing between you and the water is eerie.

'You know,' I told the Doctor, 'when I was a kid, we always spent our holidays driving around the outback, staying in caravan parks. We'd spend all day driving to get somewhere. But it wasn't much like this.'

Despite that, sitting behind the wheel on a trip across the US countryside was, surprisingly, not much different to sitting in the back on a trip across the Australian countryside (or more often, lying down with my bare feet pressed against the window, watching the gum trees rush by). You still ended up in those long, thoughtful silences not quite highway hypnosis, but some relative of it.

I found myself imagining what if would be like if Mr Ghislain's extraterrestrials were real, trying to pursue the consequences of that. (I guess I was looking for a contradiction to catch the Doctor out with.) Imagine if they were out there right now, circling the fifth brightest star in the constellation of Erida.n.u.s. Think of the time scale on which they'd have to operate: their civilisation would function over distances which make Columbus' voyage look like a trip to the soda machine. A better a.n.a.logy: imagine if Columbus had no boats that could harness the speed of the wind imagine if he had to swim to America.

So does that mean they're incredibly long lived even immortal? Do they shoot one of their 'slow packets' out into s.p.a.ce the way we would post a letter confident that it will be delivered and replied to quickly enough to make it worth the effort of licking the stamp? Or is it a monumental event, a moonshot?

Ghislain claimed they had to hire a faster boat from another bunch of aliens, ones who did know the secret of faster-than-light travel. Are the Eridani jealous of their neighbours? Can't they sc.r.a.pe up enough cash to buy their own starships? Or do they scoff at those hotrods, the way we might smirk as a teenager roars down our street in his first hoon-mobile? I can't imagine human beings carrying out a mission that spanned centuries politicians can barely see past the next election.

I found myself trying to imagine the great, cold minds who could operate at that speed, and had to snap myself out of the reverie. 'What is that thing you're building?'

'You've heard of elegance in software design,' said the Doctor. 'Programs which rely on cleverness to solve problems in the quickest, cleanest way possible.' He hefted the machine he had built. 'This represents the opposite of that approach.'

'Brute force,' I said.

'Just in case we need it.'

When we got to Harrington, we drove around for half an hour trying to find the State Fairgrounds. There were grounds, all right, but no Fair. We all looked at one another. 'I guess we better ask someone,' said Peri.

A gas station attendant looked at us as though we'd asked for directions to the Martian Emba.s.sy. 'The State Fair is only on in July,' he explained. 'You're kind of late. Or maybe kind of early.'

Peri said, 'Maybe she meant she was going to meet someone at the fairgrounds, not the Fair.'

'We drove all over,' said Bob. 'There was n.o.body there.

Have we ever been had. What a bunch of hosers.'

'Swan has discovered the tap on her phone' said the Doctor. 'We'll have to let Bob know there's not much point in monitoring her calls if she's going to use them for disinformation. Blast. That's quite a useful resource, gone!'

Peri and I exchanged glances. I wonder if she was feeling a little relief that we wouldn't be using the tap again, the same as I was. Computer crime is too new to give you the creeps the same way that eavesdropping on someone's phone does.

'So, after that little diversion, it's on to Ocean City,' said the Doctor.

'We're on our way,' I said.

'She knows we're going there,' said Peri. 'lf she found the tap on her phone, then she must know we heard her earlier calls.'

The Doctor didn't have a reply to that. 'Do you want to take that turn behind the wheel?' I asked Peri. We pulled over and they both got into the front. I stretched out in the back seat. I wished I could take my shoes off and press my feet against the window.

Ocean City is basically one long street, several miles running down the finger of a peninsula, with cross-streets travelling just two or three blocks from the oceanfront to the bay. In December it's almost but not quite a ghost town there are still cars, but far too few to justify eight lanes of road... closed miniature golf courses, boarded-up diners. The average age of the people in this town goes up twenty years in the off-season, and every one of those years seems to be added to the age of the town itself. The sky is grey, the houses are grey, the sea is a slab of slate.

Cobb's house was a faded clapboard relic of the '50s, off on the bay-side down near the Route 50 bridge standalone, but not much elbow room between it and the neighbours: land is scarce and pricey on a glorified sandbar. More and more of the sand is being eaten away on the ocean side: eventually the big hotels are going to end up on stilts. Back in the '30s a hurricane actually carved a channel through the peninsula, the sea charging in to reach the bay, turning the lost bit into an island that's gradually fleeing south over the years.

Swan knew she was risking a wasted trip. It was likely that Cobb's house would have been picked clean by now, emptied and swept out ready for resale. She parked in the driveway and used her home remote to roll up the garage door. There were no cars parked inside, and she could see through the windows of the house that at least some of the furniture had been taken.

Swan put on her gloves, took a crowbar from the garage, went in the back of the house and jemmied open the kitchen door. Inside, she flicked the light switch just once, to make sure the power was still on. She put the crowbar down on the counter, then slipped a tight sportsband onto her left wrist and slid a small flashlight under it. She kept the light pointed at the floor as she moved around the dead man's house.

She picked up the phone in the living room. No dial tone; Cobb's relatives had done that much, at least, unless the phone company had cut him off for non-payment. The shelves in the living room and study were still packed with Cobb's possessions. Swan wondered idly what percentage of the books mostly chunky hardbacks he had actually read. She hadn't even bothered to unpack most of the books she'd moved with in her house in McLean.

She had made a mental list of the most likely places to look for the device. If he wasn't worried about keeping it a secret, then it would probably be in his study there was no workshop in the garage or bas.e.m.e.nt. The filing cabinet was locked; she retrieved the crowbar and opened each of the drawers. Nothing but personal papers, the acc.u.mulated paperwork of life. If he was worried about keeping it a secret, then try under the bed, under a floorboard beneath a rug no chance there, everything was carpeted except the kitchen and bathroom. Less likely were the boxes in the closets. A problem was that she didn't know precisely what she was looking for, even how large it would be, although she was guessing it would be around the same size as she and Luis's original purchases. Smaller than a breadbox, she thought. Around the size of her fist.

Swan worked patiently down her list. She didn't put the boxes back in the closet, but she didn't throw them around, either. Only people frustrated Swan. Even a chunky computer system or a badly written program couldn't faze her: she dropped into what she thought of as her work mode, and systematically tackled whatever tangled mess she had been presented with. Chip Cobb's house was merely another problem that required a systematic approach.

All right. Either the device wasn't here, or Cobb had hidden it too well for her to find it in a casual search; they were both possibilities. Cobb was no longer around to ask, but that didn't mean he hadn't left the information where she could find it.

The study was a veranda what the Yanks call a porch. A brand new IBM PC adorned Cobb's tidy study desk, its Pastel Denim Binders standing to attention on a miniature bookshelf.

Swan glanced at the modem: there was a dial tone. The family hadn't thought to disconnect Cobb's second line.

She pushed the DOS disk into the A drive, and flipped the big red switch. She went to the kitchen to make herself some coffee while It booted up.

Cobb had written the pa.s.sword to his BBS account on the inside of the DOS manual. Swan systematically read through his email, including his sent-mail, which included messages to her. There were several messages which mentioned an item which had to be the third component. Swan sat forward, putting down the coffee cup.

There was mention of meetings and money. Cobb had been helping someone calling themselves The River find the missing item for a hefty fee. Had he delivered the item before he had died? Had he put it in safekeeping somewhere? There was no mention of an agreed drop, but the device might be in a safety deposit box.

Swan paged through a box of five and a quarter inch diskettes on Cobb's desk. Each was labelled with a range of dates. She slid one into the PC, and confirmed her guess: this was a record of Cobb's correspondence, downloaded from the Internet where it would be safe from hacking eyes. He had never been able to download the last week or so's worth of mail.

Swan smiled wryly to herself. Only recently had she learned what it was like to have someone else rummaging through your private email and files: a lot of people had tried, but only the Doctor and his friends had succeeded. It seemed as though there was no safe place for communications, not the network, certainly not the phone system. With no laws to stop hackers, you had to a.s.sume everything was an open book.

From now on, she would keep all her messages and files encrypted. One day those laws might come into existence, and she no more wanted the Feds reading her disks than the Doctor. But in any case, reading Cobb's email couldn't do him any harm now Still... the little hairs on the back of Swan's neck were bristling. She had the deep and instinctive feeling of being watched. She found a blank diskette, slapped it into the drive, and waited impatiently while the last of Cobb's mail came down the modem.

When she had it all, she made a backup, swapping diskettes back and forth in the single drive. Then she deleted all of the remaining email, including all of the copies of messages Cobb had sent. She could have gone on to disconnect the machine from the ARPANet, to make absolutely sure no-one else could get at the goodies; but that would have been enormously conspicuous, at least to the local users of the machine and its sysop. No, she had what she wanted, and now she could read it at her leisure.

When we next called Bob, he had the exciting and unexpected news that Swan had discovered the tap on her phone (she had called herself and left a filthy message on his answering machine). 'Where have you been?' he demanded. 'I've been dying for you guys to call! G.o.d, we should have got a phone for that car!'

'We couldn't find a public telephone before now,' said the Doctor. 'We've been driving all over the Delaware countryside trying to find one.'

'Well why didn't you just knock on some farmer's door?'

'We were just about ready to try that,' admitted the Doctor. 'Then we came across this life-saving petrol station.

But when we did call, your number was engaged!'

'Well, I'd given up and logged back in, hadn't I! It's not like I have more than one phone line to choose from.'

Peri had arrived bearing melts. I knew what a mess the sandwiches made and didn't want to start mine until we were back on the road, but she was already tucking into hers, getting onions and grease all over her face and hands. The Doctor put his into the pocket of his jacket and smacked the receiver against his forehead. 'How frustrating it is to have the laws of physics dictate how you can move and communicate!'

he sighed.

Two.

Piece by piece, diskette by diskette, Swan put together the story of the supercomputer and its components.