Twistor (31 page)

David frowned. 'What kind of animal?' he asked. 'How big was it? Maybe it was a relative of that bear-creature I saw last night.' That bear must worry him a lot, she thought.

'
No,' she said, 'it was little and cute, like a brownish-colored kitten.' Melissa smelled something interesting and realized that she was hungry.

Jeff was standing by the fire, stirring a big pot of the mushroom soup, half instant mix and half native mushrooms. She ignored the face that Jeff made at her when David wasn't looking and took the white Styrofoam cup with her name on it. She removed the rock that kept it from blowing away and helped herself to some of the soup.

'We must be very careful here, Melissa,' David said. 'We know very little about the animals that live in these woods, and even the smallest ones could be dangerous. But I guess it's good that there are more animals around. Our instant soup and peanut butter are running pretty low. We're going to have to get more of our meals from the local plants and animals. Do you think maybe we could trap your critter? Is it big enough to make a meal of?'

Melissa abruptly swallowed the hot soup that had been cooling in her mouth. 'No!' she said, louder than she'd intended. 'This one isn't to eat, David! It was like a little brown kitten. It had big round eyes that were a sort of violet color, and cute pointed ears, and a long furry tail . . . and it had hands, David. Little hands with six fingers. It likes minnows, too. I saw it eat one. It seemed smart, like it was just about to talk to me. I want to get it to come here so I can play with it, not eat it.' She smiled her most charming smile, hoping to win him to her point of view. 'Please, David, can I?' she begged.

Towering above her, he looked down, a worried expression on his face. 'Melissa,' he said quietly. 'You must understand something. We're in a very difficult situation right now. I'm trying to figure out how to get us back home, and we must have enough food to live on until I do. When we're safe and have enough food to take care of our own needs, then maybe we can think about having pets. But not now, Melissa. Not now.

'
Remember, this is October. Winter is coming soon. Unless we can find good sources of food and water, we're going to starve.' He paused for a moment, and seemed to be making sure she had heard him. 'And although it may have looked like a sweet little kitten,' he went on, 'it's a wild animal, and it could be dangerous. Animals, even little ones, can scratch and bite. It could hurt you if you got too close or tried to pick it up. So, no pets for now.' He looked stern.

Instead of answering him directly, Melissa told him about the pool of clear water she'd found. David became very excited at the news. Then Melissa led Jeff and David, who brought along the big gun, back to the spring. David also brought a Styrofoam cup to leave there, and they all used it to take long drinks of the delicious cool clear water.

When they returned to the treehouse, David explained that they could make the best use of the new source of water by building a cistern against the side of the tree, in a place where it curved inward. He said they would make a wall of rocks and dirt that extended the curve of the tree into an oval basin. They would put a sheet of plastic inside to make the cistern watertight. It would hold the water they carried here from the pool, and it would also catch rainwater. He assigned the two of them to look in the forest nearby and find the biggest rocks they could carry to the side of the tree. While the children collected rocks, David returned to the table with the drawing.

'Mine's better than yours,' said Jeff as Melissa dropped her rock in the pile. He was being a brat again. She turned to go back to the rocky area she had located, and Jeff ran ahead of her. He kept bragging that the rocks he found were bigger and better than hers, and about how he liked to squash the squirmy things he found underneath them. He wouldn't go off and look for his own rocks. Instead, he'd run ahead in the direction she was walking to find
the
best rocks before she could get them. It made her so mad . . .

She was older and should have better judgment, David had said. Melissa decided to ignore Jeff. She picked up rocks where she found them and thought about the little brown animal. She'd been lost, she realized. She'd been wrong about the direction of the treehouse when she came to the pool. The little animal had led her back here. Had it somehow guessed that she needed help? She couldn't mention this to David without admitting that she'd been lost, but she was sure the brown kitten had understood her problem and had been trying to help her.

She looked carefully in the forest all through the afternoon and into the evening. Sometimes she felt sure that something in the trees was watching her, but she saw no more small brown animals in the woods that day.

19

Friday Afternoon, October 15

Victoria was sitting in her basement bedroom before her ancient Macintosh 512E, typing intently, when William arrived back from another day at Theodore Roosevelt High School.

'Whew, thank God it's Friday-o,' said Flash, putting down his school notebook. 'Hey Sis, whatcha doin'?' He peered over her shoulder.

She turned to him, trying to block his view of the screen. 'I just came home for some lunch and to get a book I needed for a design problem,' she said. 'William,' she added, attempting to sound casual, 'how did you manage to get into Professor Saxon's files the other day?'

'Why, Sis!' replied Flash with heavy mock chagrin, 'I thought that only naughty hackers concerned themselves with things like that. You wouldn't really want me to disclose clandestine methods for callously invading another person's sacred privacy, would you? That might allow someone to pry into intimate personal files and read lurid private correspondence. You want to do that? My goodness gracious, I'm shocked! My own sister wants to become a hacker! Whatever is this world coming to?'

'Cut the crap, dammit!' said Victoria, feeling warmth as her cheeks grew redder, 'I told you what happened at the lab on Wednesday. Yesterday Allan was acting very devious, as if he were hiding something, and today he's gone off somewhere. He disappeared without telling anyone where he was going. Even Susan, his secretary, doesn't know where he is. I need to look in his protected
files
on the VAX for clues to what's going on. This is important, William.'

'Hmmm,' said Flash, 'this might actually be a bit of the old El Fun-o. I've always wanted to hack in a Noble Cause. OK. Move over, Sis, and let's see what we can find out about Herr Doktor Professor Saxon.' He beetled his eyebrows. 'We have our ways of making computers beg to confess,' Flash said, faking a German accent. He pulled a second chair up to the Macintosh keyboard and started to type.

Suddenly he stopped, looking down at the table beside the computer. There was the small white business card of one Agent Bartley of the FBI, Seattle Office. He looked at his sister suspiciously. 'What's this, Sis, a setup? Did you tell the FBI that I was on the Physics HyperVAX the other day?' His eyes narrowed.

She smiled and patted him on the shoulder. 'Your guilty secrets are safe with me,' she said. 'This person came to the lab the other day to ask about the disappearances, and he gave me his card. I was thinking of calling him to suggest that Allan Saxon knows more than he's telling, but I decided I'd better get more information before doing anything like that.'

Flash paused a moment longer, then nodded and rapidly typed instructions to the VAX. 'Guess we'd better see what's in those encrypted files then,' he said.

'Can you actually read encrypted files?' she asked. 'I thought it was supposed to be impossible to break modern encryption codes.'

'We'll need some help and some luck,' said Flash. 'There are so many possible combinations that you can't just guess at random. In a reasonable time it's impossible to check every guess, and it's sure to tip off the system manager if you try. But we have a little helper-o. See, the system manager on your HyperVAX is very security conscious. He's activated a VMS system surveillance option that makes an entry in an accounting file every
time
there's a bad log-in and every time a bad input generates a system error. It's intended to help him catch hackers. These security freak-os sure make things easy. It's set up so it doesn't record things like good passwords and encryption keys. But if someone mistypes something, it goes right into the file-o. Here's last month's accounting file. I'll copy it into your area, and we'll see what we can find.'

'How can you just copy that log file?' asked Victoria. 'Isn't it protected?'

'It should be,' said Flash, 'but it wasn't automatically protected in some versions of the system software. There's a mandatory patch that your VAX manager was supposed to have installed to make this file unreadable, but I guess he hasn't gotten around to it.' He grinned. 'A busy fella like him can't remember everything.' After the
$
prompt he typed:
COPY SYS$MANAGER:ACCOUNTING.DAT[].
Then he called up the editor and went to work on the
ACCOUNTING.DAT
file.

'See, first I'm searching for incidents that involved Saxon's user code or where the user name before the password was
SAXON.
Here's one where he tried to do a log-in but screwed the dog-o. That's supposed to be his password, but it was mistyped. And see, here's the same thing a couple of days later. And here's another one. The mangled passwords are "DAVISS," "VIS," and "DASVIS." What do you think he was trying to type?'

'It must have been "DAVIS," ' said Victoria. 'That's Allan's middle name, now that I think of it.'

'Connect-o!' said Flash, and wrote something on a pad. 'Now, we search on errors that involved the system encryption utility. He uses it more than anyone else. Ah, here's one. See, he typed "HOLOSDPINWAVE." The entry was supposed to be a maximum of twelve characters and he'd typed thirteen, so it was logged as an error.'

'You can stop there,' said Victoria. 'His encryption key has to be "HOLOSPINWAVE." That's the area of
condensed-
matter physics he's been working in for the last several years. I guess his finger made an extra "D" when he typed the "S." '

'Great!' said Flash. 'Now, Victoria my dear, we can delve into your Professor Saxon's innermost secrets. He is now com-plete-ly in our pow-waaa! Ain't hackin' fun-o!' He grinned.

David sighted up through the forest canopy. Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the cover of branches and leaves overhead. He could see blue sky, with a few clouds sliding slowly by in a direction he judged to be north. There was a south wind. He could feel it cooling the light beading of sweat on his face and neck. At home in Seattle a south wind usually meant that bad weather was coming, that a low-pressure area parked out in the Pacific was spiraling a storm front in from the south. David wondered if the topography of this planet was similar enough for the same weather rules to work. If a storm front was on the way, their new cistern would soon be ready for it.

He picked up the makeshift shovel again, an aluminum plate clamped with a lever-jaw wrench to a piece of pipe, and lifted more dirt from the floor of the scooped-out area, spreading it against the rough rock wall. Beside him Jeff was smoothing and packing the dirt in place against the wall with his hands.

'David,' said Jeff.

'Yeah,' David answered as he worked the shovel blade into the dirt again.

'I think I know where those colors on the ground come from,' Jeff said. 'You know, the ones around the tree that are all in a line.'

'Yes,' said David. 'So where do they come from?'

'Those colors're treebird poop,' Jeff said, then giggled.

David stopped and looked at the boy. 'How do you know?' he asked.

'
This morning I was dragging a big dead branch up for the fire, and when it dragged across the line of colors, I noticed that it kinda rubbed them out. I didn't think much about it until I saw the treebird fly down from the tree and land just where I'd dragged the branch. It kinda walked around, pecking at the ground and scratching it with its front claws. Then it sorta did a waddle dance along the line, and I noticed that it was making poop on the ground. David, it can poop in colors!'

David looked at Jeff, then speculatively up at the tree. He could see the green treebird at work, busily grooming the bark along the broad wall of the trunk. The line must be a border,' he said.

'You mean like countries have?' Jeff asked.

'Yeah,' said David. 'It's to mark and claim territory. Have you noticed how each tree has only one treebird? It must be that they mark off their territories with these colored lines, surrounding their own tree with a color-coded circle to warn other treebirds that this tree is taken and off limits. On Earth, birds make birdcalls in the morning for the same purpose. In this world Nature seems to have found, er, another method.'

Jeff nodded and began again to pat the dirt into the wall. Melissa was leveling the dug-out floor, stamping it down with her feet. There was a kind of logic to it, he thought. The healthier and more successful the bird was in its ecological niche as tree groomer and insect eater, the more vigorously and distinctly it would be able to mark off its territory and discourage intruders. David paused to survey their own border-work, a curving rock wall delineating the wide dirt-lined basin against the side of the big tree. He swatted ineffectually at a blue flying insect that seemed interested in him.

'That will just about do it, kids,' he said, smoothing the dirt he had just shoveled. 'I'll go up and get the plastic liner and some tools, and you two can finish the smoothing over here.'

'
OK,' said Jeff, patting more dirt with his hands. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

'Oomph,' Melissa grunted as she stamped. 'I'm glad we're almost done.' She lifted a pink jewel-headed worm from the loose dirt and tossed it over the wall. Then she stamped again.

David vaulted the low rock wall and walked to the foot of the ladder hanging from the treehouse door-hole. He started upward. As he climbed, something flickered at the edge of his peripheral vision. There might have been a brown something moving in a nearby tree. He turned toward it, but there was nothing. He blinked, then continued the climb to the treehouse. At the door-hole he tied a long wire around the folded sheet of five-mil black polyethylene he'd placed there and lowered it to the ground. Then he gathered hammer, nails, wood strips salvaged from the old Helmholz coil supports, and a few other items, and climbed back down.