Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [54]
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 assume 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! God, 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.
The computer’s owners had lost their grip on it somewhere in West Virginia, close to the border with Maryland. (Cobb had no information on where it might have been before that.) Somewhere in the countryside, apparently; although the emails were vague on this point, Swan guessed that a vehicle carrying the device had run off the road, and a local – possibly a farmer
– had got hold of the pieces of the machine. There were five parts. Swan guessed input, storage, CPU, memory, output –
although if this really was a new kind of computer, the old architecture might have been irrelevant. Which parts had she and Luis bought?
The hypothetical farmer had looked to make a quick buck from his find. It hadn’t been quick after all. Swan had long been familiar with the underground of collectors, spies, and suspicious types who traded in esoteric and forbidden technology, but of course the farmer had never heard of them.
His initial efforts to sell the components had got him nowhere.
It was almost two years before news of their existence