The Second Saladin - Страница 71

Fe Hung, he ordered.

A concise word-list and phrase catalogue of Hungarian — placed in the machine’s memory in case an analyst who didn’t speak the language came across a word in it and needed translation fast — sailed up before Lanahan. He looked at it quickly, then clicked the machine off.

He walked back to his own terminal. Why did he feel he was being observed?

He was so close now; if he could just bluff it through another two or three minutes.

He sat back at his own terminal, called up the SHU directory and looked again at the code groupings.

Fe Egy, Miles ordered.

Egy: one.

Another directory rose.

Miles glanced through it until he found the proper code.

Fe Ketto, he ordered.

Fetch two.

Another directory.

Fe Harom

Another.

Fe Negy

Another.

FE OT

One, two, three, four, five. He was in the fifth directory now. Where would it end? He was within a directory within a directory within a directory within a directory within a directory. Was this a Möbius strip of a code, an Escher drawing of a code, that would go on forever, twisty and clever?

The screen went blank.

The machine stared at him, mutely stupid.

Long moments lagged. Had the whole thing collapsed? He knew he’d have no time to dig this deep into it again.

The screen’s emptiness mocked him.

Then a message with a long tail dragged into view:

This material will appear only on your screen if searched for. It will be stored with service level designators priority code a (advance) category c (standing item). It cannot be destroyed or altered. We will begin transmission upon receipt of six-letter security code.

Enter six-letter security code here

In all his hours before the screen, Miles had never seen a communication like this one. Service Level Designator? Now what the hell did that mean? Priority Code, Category Code?

But he knew he’d tapped the mother lode.

Enter six-letter security code here

He stared at it. Another hurdle, a last one. Oh, come on, Frenchy, Jesus, Frenchy, you hid it so good. God, Frenchy, you must have been a clever bastard. Miles reached across the years to love Frenchy Short, who was so smart. Burying it so deep, so well; and now there was only this last obstacle.

Enter six-letter security code here

Oh, Frenchy. Miles stared at it. Six letters between himself and Frenchy.

He tried to concentrate.

Was it SHOES, or some variation on the HSU-SHU axis? No, not enough letters, unless you rolled them up into one.

He instructed the machine:

Fe Shuhsu

His fingers stroked the send command button, but he did not depress it.

Do it, he told himself.

But he could not.

If he was wrong, he might lose the whole chain, he might be back up top, back up at HSU again. He might be forced to dig through all the levels. And also, suppose — it was a good supposition — suppose there was some sort of alarm mechanism built into the system? That is, if you tried to penetrate this final level and displayed a kind of tentativeness, an awkwardness, a hesitancy, suppose the machine was programmed to recognize these inadequacies for the profile of a thief, recognize your guilt? The machine was notoriously literal-minded: it had no imagination, no capacity for sympathy; its ethics were coldly binary. It would blow the whistle on you.

Sitting there, Miles knew the machine would betray him if he disappointed it.

This awareness almost paralyzed him. He suddenly hated the thing. He stared at it and was afraid.

Enter six-letter security code here?

“Mr. Lanahan?”

He looked up, startled.

It was Bluestein.

“How are you coming?”

“Ah, oh, all right. Surprising how long it takes you to get it back, though.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to pull that disc pretty soon. The other systems are beginning to top up and the stuff from upstairs is really pouring in. We need the system space. You know how it is.”

“I see,” said Miles.

“It’s not that I want to play the hard guy; it’s that—”

“Sure.”

Miles thought: Come on, altar boy. Come on, little priest. Come on you stinking pimply suck-ass: Do something! Say something!

“Just a minute more, okay, Mike? I just have to wrap this.”

“Miles, people are waiting and—”

“I’ll owe you one. I always pay off. I can help you. A lot. You know what I mean? I can help you upstairs. Cover for me.”

“Miles, I just can’t. I gave you a big break and—”

“Mike, just let me say one thing. I appreciate what you did for me. I really do. You’re a decent guy. I won’t give you any trouble.”

“Thanks, Miles. I really appreciate your co-op—”

“And I’ll go to your supervisor first thing Monday morning to tell him you violated security procedure, Mike.”

Miles smiled at him evenly.

“Form Twelve, Mike. I’m in here without a Form Twelve, Mike. You could be in big—”

“Goddamn you. You little—”

“Just back off, Jewboy. Just back the fuck off, and you get your career back. Otherwise, you’re on your way to Siberia.”

He glared at him in smug triumph. Miles could really be quite evil — he had the capacity for it — and he watched the tall young man buckle under the pressure.

“Five more minutes, Miles. Goddamn you, they said you were a prick!”

He rushed off into the dark.

Miles turned back to the screen. He could not escape it.

Enter six-letter security code here

Frenchy, you son-of-a-bitch. You old bastard.

Old Frenchy. Smart old Frenchy.

Then it arrived, from nowhere.

He commanded:

Fe Cowboy

He could see a labyrinth of pillars and acres and acres of the rawest space under a low ceiling. It was an abstraction too, an infinitely open-ended maze. Tunnels and chambers and warrens spilled everywhere in gloomy subterranean abundance. Every fourth or fifth pillar had its own lighted EXIT arrow, stenciled orange, three-quarters of the way up. Did Borges invent this place? Did Kafka? Did Beckett? No, of course not. It was any underground parking garage anyplace in America any time in the ’60s or ’70s or ’80s.

No trace of human motion met his eyes as they probed the aisles and ranks, though in any of a hundred or a thousand dark places, in shadows, in vent openings, in ducts, in stairwells — in any of them — a man could hide.

Danzig’s fear blossomed anew, exotic, an ice-blue orchid inside his chest. It seemed a phenomenon of his gastrointestinal system, crippling and weakening his own interior ducts and vents. He wanted to be sick and could feel bile in his throat. His heart was running hard. He fought for air and found it foul with ancient auto exhaust. He steadied himself. He wished he did not have to be so brave.

The first theory of modern statecraft — so basic, really, it never saw print — was that you paid people to be brave for you. A class of man existed for just such exigencies. Yet here was Danzig, no longer bold by surrogate, required himself to step into the arena.

I am not brave; few enough are. Soldiers sense this intuitively, as if they can sniff it. Civilian, they sneer in contempt, meaning: coward. Meaning also, in his case: Jew. Kike. They were the elect: courage was their election. They held themselves apart, arrogant, hard. He’d seen the look in their eyes, in Chardy’s too; he’d been reading it in a certain Gentile set of eyes for half a century now.

Danzig stepped out, hearing the door hush closed on its pneumatic pump and click (lock?) behind him.

He stepped forward. His shoes echoed under the low ceiling.

“Chardy? I’m here, Mr. Chardy,” he called.

Ulu Beg could see him. He had a shot of close to one hundred yards, through a dozen sets of pillars, long for the pistol round that the Skorpion threw.

“You must be close,” they’d said.

He began to draw nearer. This was not difficult. The fat man was very frightened and kept yelling for Chardy and it was easy to stay in the shadows and yet feel the voice growing louder and louder. He began to count. He would count to one hundred.

55

A sheen of images rose to fill the screen. Numbers.

Service Level Directory

3839857495………2094875903

2884110485………0594847324

And on and on and on.

He hit the scroll button and the numbers rolled up, a rising tide of integers that climbed to the top of the screen and then disappeared.

He kept the button down until the numbers didn’t move.

MO, it said. More.

He commanded more:

Fe Mo

Yes, more, more. I want MO. Give me MO.

He descended through a sea of green numbers.

He felt he had to hold his breath. He dreamed he was swimming in math.

Am I going insane?

The marine imagery continued to dominate his imagination as the numbers gurgled past, and he had to FE MO into three more segments of the Service Directory.

And then it began to slow on him.

The numbers rolled sluggishly. The system was going to crash on him. The warning light would flash on, high on the wall: sorry, brain temporarily out of order. And it would all be over for Lanahan; he’d never find his way down here again.