Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [19]
Swan was about to send an electronic message to one of her co-workers elsewhere in the building, and so wanted to see if they were still logged on to the machine or had gone home for the holidays. She typed in a short command: who
And the terminal responded:
sswan pts/0 Dec 24 17:48
jsmith pts/3 Dec 24 19:55
hostmast pts/5 Nov 24 04:07
uucp pts/2 Nov 24 04:05
root pts/4 Dec 24 00:01
Swan stared at the list of users for a moment. Who the hell was jsmith? Only members of the research team had access to the mainframe. (The other ‘users’ were automated programs. )
Swan did some checking. No-one was dialled into the computer, so her intruder wasn’t coming in via a modem. He must have logged in remotely, from another machine on the ARPAnet. Either he had set up an account on her machine, or someone had given him one. He had come from -
- Where had he come from? There was no entry for him in the file that automatically logged visitors to the machine.
Swan kicked jsmith off and deleted the account. She did a quick check of the computer’s files, reassuring herself that the intruder had done no damage. He could only have been logged in for a short time before Swan spotted the illicit access.
Swan made it her policy to tolerate just a little joyriding in the TLA system. After all, she’d spent years doing exactly the same thing herself – seeing what was out there, making her own map of the net. She kicked hackers off her system, no negotiation and no second chances, but she generally didn’t hand out punishments. The intruder hadn’t expected anyone to be around on Christmas Eve. She smiled. She’d probably just given some college boy a good scare.
Still, she thought as she headed down the dimly lit hall to the vending machine, it was an unpleasant coincidence after yesterday. She’d have to keep an eye on things over the next few days.
By the time Swan returned to her chair with a plastic cup of coffee, the intruder was back.
The Doctor was not what I’d been expecting. He was staying in a pricey hotel in downtown Washington, all freshly cleaned carpets and bright lighting. I tapped on the door of his room.
No answer. I double checked: this was the right place. I knocked again. Still nothing. It took me a minute with a credit card to persuade the door to open.
The room was pristine, as though it had just been made up.
For a moment I thought I’d been played for a sucker – nobody had been staying here at all. But then I saw there were clothes hanging in the closet, and a computer sitting on the table next to the free stationery and the Gideon’s.
The cupboard contained one ordinary-looking black suit and one extraordinary coat, a patchwork of colours that made me think of the Pied Piper – “with a gipsy coat of red and yellow”. It wasn’t a clown’s coat, all ragged patchwork, but a garment of substance, well-made and hefty, a gentleman’s coat that just happened to be a kaleidoscope of hippie hues. It would have kept out the worst of the DC cold, but must have stood out like a stained-glass window in the snow. I dipped a hand into the nearest pocket of the coat, hoping for some ID, and instead fished out a dog-eared Roget’s Thesaurus.
The computer was an Apple II Plus. It looked like a big, flattened plastic typewriter with a miniature television set sitting on top of it. Two chunky metal boxes were stacked next to it, one on top of the other: twin drives for five-and-a-half-inch floppy disks. A flat blue cord connected the internal modem through a fist-sized black box to the phone socket.
‘You were expecting something more advanced.’
I jerked sideways, violently, at the unexpected voice, and fell over the bed. I found myself looking up at a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early forties, with an explosion of blonde curls like William