Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [68]
‘They’re all exactly eight K,’ said Bob.
‘Maybe it’s camouflage,’ suggested Peri. ‘She’s deliberately sending nonsense messages to confuse us.’
‘Maybe it’s the aliens talking to one another,’ I said. I expected a sarcastic response, but Bob and the Doctor were too intent on their new discovery to notice either of us.
‘It must be some form of encryption,’ mused the Doctor.
‘Oh! Slaps forehead! I know what this is!’ Bob started hammering the keys. ‘It’s uuencoded binary data. No problem.
Just let me uucp a copy of uudecode over to my account.’
We waited while he copied the key program that would turn the garbage back into some kind of information. The Doctor had assured me there was no way their calls could be traced to my number. Tired of running back and forth, he and Bob had come up with a way of confusing their trail through the phone system. Anyone trying to trace them would find a succession of connections between trunk lines, bouncing back and forth like reflections in a hall of mirrors.
‘I think it’s some kind of graphics file,’ said Bob. ‘Wait, see if I can display it in Applesoft: The Apple’s screen manifested something that looked like a spray of coloured dots.
‘I know what it is,’ said Peri. We all turned to look at her.
‘It’s pictures from Swan’s security cameras. Look, that’s the edge of a table, that’s the window over the sink. Move back to where I’m standing and I bet you can see it better.’
She was right. It was like looking at a newspaper photo up close, all those dots and blobs. But with a little distance, and you could make out what the picture really was.
‘Good heavens,’ muttered the Doctor. ‘Swan has invented the Webcarn:
Now we all looked at him. The Doctor fluttered his hands in a ‘never mind’ gesture. ‘It appears Swan has fed the output of her cameras into her personal mainframe It then encodes the images so they’re compatible with email, which can only carry text, and sends them to her work account.’
Bob was decoding one image after another and displaying them on the screen. ‘These are screen dumps from another Apple II. It handles the graphics and the mainframe does the rest.’
Pert said, ‘So she set up the cameras to send her a picture every so often, so she can keep an eye on things while she’s out of the house?’
‘Looks like it,’ said Bob. ‘Look at the time stamps on the messages.’
‘They don’t all match, though,’: said the Doctor. ‘She may be using motion sensors to trigger the emails. If someone broke into the house, she’d see a sudden rush of messages. It would act as a very simple alarm system.’
‘So if Swan isn’t home, what was moving in those extra images?’ said Bob. Again his fingers went chocka-chocka-chocka and brought up one of the rough pictures. There were only six colours in them, making me think of those fluoro hippie posters.
‘Kind of looks like the bathroom,’ said Peri. We all stared into the image, trying to work out what was important about it.
‘It’s a still frame, of course. Wait until I bring up a couple more,’ said Bob.
There was something disturbing about seeing the inside of someone’s house like this. I’ve looked through enough windows and listened in on enough extensions that my stomach no longer tightens when I drop myself invisibly into someone else’s private life. What was creepy was the idea of pointing cameras at your own house. At the front yard, sure.
But the kitchen? The bathroom, for God’s sake? Swan had become her own Big Brother.
‘She could watch herself walking around in there,’ I muttered. ‘See what she did the day before. You know, where did I put my keys? Just rewind the tape and see.’
‘There,’ said Peri. ‘There’s something in the tub.’ She used the same tone of voice you might use to say There’s something in my sock and it’s moving.
A quick succession of possibilities – a corpse – but it’s moving – flies? – a visitor?
‘Look at the timestamps,’ said Bob. ‘Whoever’s sitting in the bathtub, they’ve been there all day. I think the curtain is drawn, over to about here. We get a snapshot whenever they move back far enough