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we have a lot of garbage cans to fill. There's going to be a party here
tonight."
"A party?"
"Naturally. You never heard of Doubting Thomas? Besides, students are a gabby
lot. What you've done is going to be on all strands of the net by this time
tomorrow. I want it on the mouth-to-mouth circuit too."
"But you know damn well I've written in a program that will call a press
conference "
"At noon the day after the balloon goes up," she cut in. "Nick, Sandy,
whatever the hell, darling
, the avalanche you plan to start may have swept us into limbo long
beforehand. If you're going to hurt them as much as you think, you and I can't
safely plan so far ahead."
He thought about that for a long moment. When he answered his voice shook a
little.
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"I know. I just haven't faced the idea. Right, leave the clearing-up to me.
Get on that phone and contact everybody you can. And you might as well enroll
Ina's help, get her to bring some friends from G2S."
"I already thought of that," she said with composure, and punched her mother's
code.
THE HATCHING OF THE WORM
On her way to visit friends for dinner, Dr. Zoë Sideropoulos paused before her
home computer terminal long enough to activate a link to the continental net
and strike a cluster of three digits on the board. Then she went out to her
car.
Returning from an evening seminar, Professor Joachim Yent remembered what day
it was and punched three digits into the board of his computer terminal.
Dean Prudence McCourtenay was in bed with a cold; she was a martyr to them
every winter. But she had five veephones in her seven-room house, one being at
her bedside.
Dr. Chase R. Dellinger took five from unexpected work at his lab something
suspect about a batch of newly imported mushroom spawn, perhaps contaminated
with a mutant strain and on his way back paused at a computer remote and
tapped three digits into the net.
Nerice Compton misdialed a phone call and swore convincingly; she and Rush had
friends in for drinks tonight.
Judge Virgil Horovitz had had a heart attack. At his age, that was not wholly
unexpected. Besides, it had happened twice before. On returning from the
hospital, his housekeeper remembered to activate the computer terminal and
press three digital keys.
At a party with friends, Helga and Nigel Townes demonstrated some amusing
tricks one could play with a computer remote. One aborted after three digits.
The rest worked perfectly.
In any case, a complete emergency backup program was available which would
have done the job by itself. However, many times in the history of Hearing Aid
it had been proven that certain key data were better stored externally to the
net.
By about 2300 EST the worm needed only fertilization to start laying its
unprecedented eggs.
PARTY LINE
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"I'll be damned!
Paul!
Well, it's great to see you. Come on in."
Blinking shyly, Freeman complied. Kate's apartment was alive with guests,
mostly young and in brilliant clothes, but with a mix of more soberly clad
people from G2S and the UMKC faculty. A portable coley unit had been set up
and a trio of dancers were cautiously sticking to the chords of a simple
traditional blues prior to launching a collective sequence of variations; as
yet, they were still feeling out the unit's tone-color bias.
"How did you know we were here? And what are you doing in KC, anyway? I
understood you went to
Precipice."
"In a metaphorical sense." Freeman gave a grin that made him look oddly
boyish, as though he had shed twenty years with his formal working garb. "But
it's an awfully big place when you learn to recognize it. . . . No, in fact I
figured out weeks ago that you were sure to be back sooner or later. I asked
myself what the least likely place would be for me to find you, and uh
took away the number I first thought of."
"It's alarming to think someone found my carefully randomized path so
predictable. Ah, here comes
Kate."
Freeman stiffened as though to prepare for a blow, but she greeted him
cordially, asked what he wanted to drink, and departed again to bring him
beer.
"Isn't that her mother?" Freeman muttered, having scanned the visible area of
the apartment. "Over there in red and green?"
"Yes. You met her, didn't you? And the man she's talking to."
"Rico Posta, isn't that his name?"
"Right."
"Hmm . . . What precisely is going on?"
"We had kind of a big temblor for a while, because of course once the news
broke that Kate was back and she actually was kidnaped by a government agent
as the students have been claiming, they were set to go tribal the campus. We
put that idea into freeze, after a lot of argument, by hinting at all sorts of
dire recriminations. And that's what we're discussing at the moment. Come and
join us."
"Such as "
"Well, we'll start by deeveeing Tarnover."
Freeman stopped dead in midstride, and a pretty girl banged into him and
spilled half a drink and there was a period of apologies. Then:
"What?"
"It's an obvious first step. A full Congressional inquiry should follow
publication in the media of the
Tarnover and Crediton Hill budgets. The others are in the pipeline, with
Weychopee last because it's hardest to crack open. And as well as financial
revelations, naturally, there will be pictures of Miranda and her successors,
and the fatality rates among the experimental children, and so on."
"That looks like Paul Freeman!" Ina exclaimed, rising. She sounded alarmed.
"Yes indeed. And a bit dazed. I just began to tell him what we're up to."
Kate arrived with the promised beer, delivered it, sat down on the arm of the
chair Ina was using. Rico
Posta stood at her side.
"Dazed," Freeman repeated after a pause. "Yes, I am. What's the purpose of
attacking Tarnover first?"
"To trigger a landslide of emotionalism. I guess you, coming fresh from an
environment dedicated to rationality, doubt it's a good policy. But it's
exactly what we need, and records from Tarnover are a short means to make it
happen. Lots of things make people angry, but political graft and the notion
of
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deliberately maltreating children are among the most powerful. One taps the
conscious, the other the subconscious."
"Oh, both hit the subconscious," Ina said. "Rico has the same nightmare I do,
about finding someone got to my credit records and deeveed everything I worked
for all my life. And I don't stand a prayer of finding out who's responsible."
She turned to face her daughter squarely. "What's more . . . Kate, I never
dared tell you this before, but when I was pregnant with you I was so
terrified you might not uh
come out right, I "
"You overloaded a few years later, and after that you were obsessively worried
about me, and when I
grew up you still worried because I'm a nonconformist. And I'm plain too. So
what? I'm bright and I
bounce. I'm a credit to any mother. Ask Nick," she added with a mischievous
grin.
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