V 08 - The Crivit Experiment Read online

  They paused at the Old Well to watch the traffic on Cameron Avenue. Across the street was South Building, and beyond that another quad. They all had time to kill before their next classes, and Peter didn’t have any more until after lunch. But for the moment, classwork was the farthest thing from their minds. They could have avoided going this way, but like probing a canker sore, they had to do it. They crossed Cameron, went around South Building, and went down the middle of the south quad.

  “I think it’s time somebody did something about those lizards,” Peter said. Everybody agreed, especially since, from here, they could see the Courtland Building halfway down the quad on the left, the place where the Visitors had their campus liaison offices.

  “I’m tired of just talking about it,” Edna complained, coming up to walk between Peter and Greta. “We should do something.”

  “That’s just what I said,” Peter told her. He was reluctant to allow anybody else to initiate ideas or actions. “You have something special in mind?”

  Edna didn’t answer.

  “What we need,” Benny said, “is somebody like Mike Donovan, somebody who’s not afraid to stand up to the sonsa’bitches.”

  “What the hell has Donovan done lately?” Dave demanded. “Him and Julie Parrish have both been lying mighty low this last year or so.”

  “How do we know that?” Peter asked, trying to regain control of the conversation. “The Visitors practically control the networks. We wouldn’t hear anything here even if Diana’s Mother Ship fell on L.A.”

  “At least there’s no Mother Ship over our heads,” Greta said.

  “That doesn’t make me feel a hell of a lot better,” Peter snapped. He stepped over the low wall in front of Wilson Library and onto the broad walkway at the foot of the steps.

  “We ought to do something,” Benny said. “But what?”

  Durk Attweiler pulled his battered Ford truck into the last place in front of the Five Star Bar. It had been a long, hard day down at his farm, and he didn’t feel like fixing himself supper. The Five Star was just across the county line, in Orange County, but it was nearer than the Estes Bar and Grill down in Churchill, and he liked the company here better. Down there, he had nobody to talk to except other farmers, most of whom were at least as badly off as he was, though for different reasons. Up here, with Chapel Hill just a few miles away, there were other types. No students or faculty ever came down this far into the country, thank God, but at least a guy got a chance to talk to some hard hats and other good old boys who did more than dig in the clay.

  Walking into the bar was like walking from bright afternoon to late evening. Tom Rogers, the owner and bartender, kept the lights dim, but only partly as a matter of style. Visitors also came down here once in a while, just to lord it over the locals, though they didn’t throw their weight around much. Still, Tom’s wife made the best French dip sandwiches Durk had ever eaten, and the Visitors didn’t intrude too often.

  It was just late enough in the day that most of the people here had already had supper at home. Durk moved through the tables near the door to the end of the bar, and leaned on the dull wood surface, waiting for Tom to take care of another customer The bar itself ran down the left side of the building, with booths opposite, while down the right was the eating area with tables and chairs. The end here was the cash register, and that’s where Tom spent his time when he wasn’t drawing at the taps.

  Durk was a solid man, just under six feet tall, and built like a brick wall. His pale hair was thinning—he was nearly forty and that bothered him—but his hands were strong, his arms bulged through the sleeves of his shirt. His face was dark from the sun, bleached white above the line of his cap, which he now held in his hands. His mother had taught him to take his hat off indoors, and no amount of time in the Army, no number of sloppy old boys could make him not show at least that amount of respect.

  “In kinda early, aren’tcha?” Tom asked, coming over at last. He put down a bottle of Stroh’s and a frosty glass, knowing what Durk’s first order would be.

  “Got a taste for one of Elly’s sandwiches,” Durk said, pouring the beer carefully to minimize the head. “Couldn’t stand my own cooking tonight.”

  “Coming right up. You want it here or at a table?” “Table’d be fine,” Durk said. He carried the glass and bottle over into the far comer of the eating area on the right and sat down, nodding at several acquaintances on the way. He sat, facing the entrance, watching the other people.

  Most of them were men, laborers and a few farmers, janitors from the university and a couple of old boys who hadn’t held a job in the last twenty years, as far as he could remember.

  He slouched down in his chair and sipped his beer. The door beside his table opened and Wendel Fenister came out of the back, zipping his fly.

  “Hey,” Wendel said, “how you doing?”

  “If it isn’t clay,” Durk said, “it’s quartz, and if it isn’t rocks, it’s sand. If I had a mortgage on the place, they’d foreclose tomorrow.”

  “Goin’ up to Pisgah in a couple weeks,” Wendel said. “Drink a little shine, poach a little deer. Care to come along?”

  “Love to, but no way. Gotta get the ditches clear before it rains again.”

  “If you change your mind, lemme know. Got room for one more in the van.”

  “I’ll do that,” Durk said. Wendel nodded and went on to join his other friends sitting at a table toward the front.

  Durk took a long pull from his beer. He envied Wendel his freedom of movement. Fenister was always going hunting somewhere, and paid little attention to the fish and game laws. But, then, Wendel’s farm was doing well; he had good land instead of the almost barren soil Durk had to contend with.

  His reverie was broken by the sound of a familiar voice coming from the end of the bar. A moment later a huge black man, yellow hard hat perched on top of his head, came around the comer with a bottle and glass in one hand and a plate in the other.

  “Yo, George,” Durk called. George Monty saw him at once and came over.

  “Here’s your sandwich,” George said, putting the plate down in front of Durk. “Tom’s getting a little lazy.” He pulled a chair out and sat down. George was one of the few men with whom Durk would tolerate that kind of familiarity.

  “How’s the highway?” Durk asked before taking a bite of the French dip.

  “Got rocks in it, just like your farm,” George answered. He poured his beer so the head overflowed and he had to bend over to slurp it off. “Broke the blade on a big dozer yesterday, hitting one of those boulders.”

  “Gonna make you pay for it?” Durk asked around a mouthful.

  “Hell, no, I just dig where they tell me.” He drank off half his beer and refilled his glass.

  “Musta been a big rock.”

  “ ’Bout the size of the dozer. Hell, man, what they want me to do? Had to get a dynamite crew in to blow it up. Ground’s nearly as hard.”

  Durk felt comfortable with the big road worker. They both worked in dirt, though with different tools and toward different ends. Durk had known George Monty for nearly twelve years, and had liked the younger man from the start. It never occurred to him that he treated George differently from the other black “boys” he was polite to but ignored.

  “Saw the damnedest thing this afternoon,” Durk said after he’d finished his sandwich and allowed George to buy a pitcher to split. “1 was cleaning ditches up at the northeast comer—”

  “Know the place,” George said. “Sand pits.”

  “Damn near enough sand to put in a beach if you had any water nearby. So there 1 am, the trencher going like crazy, least I get no beer cans up there like Murphy on the other side down by the county road. Anyway, I’m looking across the fence into the scrub and there’s this deer.”

  “Goddamn,” George said, and turned around to look where Wendel Fenister and his friends were sitting. “Wen-del hear that? He’ll be down on your place like a shot.” “Didn’t tell him.
Wouldn’t do him any good anyway, because the deer’s gone.”

  “You run ’m off?”

  “Nope. Deer’s about two hundred yards away, moving around in the low bush, and all of a sudden it goes down. Didn’t fall, it just sank. Fast. Threw its head up—four points, I reckon—and woulda yelled if it coulda. I got off the tractor and walked over to where it was, right by a scrawny pine no bigger’n a stick, and there’s nothing there. Just a kinda hollow place in the sand.”

  “Quicksand?”

  “ ’At’s what I figure, though how that could be with it being so dry and all I don’t know. Didn’t stick around. Figured I didn’t wanna go down myself. Sure was strange, though.”

  Durk and George were into their third pitcher when the Five Star went quiet. George turned around so he could see the door.

  Four Visitors, their red uniforms starkly out of place, stood near the end of the bar.

  “Shit,” George said—softly.

  The Visitors spoke to Tom a moment, then came into the room. Two were women, one a tall Chinese, the other a very blond Nordic. The men were a black and an Italian or Greek. As they looked around, it was obvious they wanted a table to themselves. Several patrons accommodated them by getting up to move to other tables.

  The lights, already low, were dimmed even further as the Visitors made their choice. Elly Rogers came out from the bar and cleaned off the table quickly and straightened the chairs for them. The Visitors sat, making themselves at home. People started talking again, but at a lower level than before.

  Tom came out this time, with a large decanter of red wine and a cage of small animals. The Visitors accepted this, and even paid for it, as if such service was only to be expected. Which here, apparently, it was.

  George turned back to Durk, so as not to stare. In truth, he didn’t want to watch the Visitors eat their prey. Durk, half concealed behind the large man’s body, couldn’t keep his eyes off the four disguised aliens. The animals in the cage, he discovered, were just white rats, probably from the university, or maybe from the zoological testing center up at the Research Triangle Park. There were at least a dozen of the unfortunate creatures.

  Watching the aliens eat did not disgust Durk, as it did many of the other patrons. He’d watched a black snake devour a rat and cheered the reptile on. After all, rats were a serious pest to a farmer, and black snakes and com snakes were valued for eating them.

  Rather, he got angry. The Visitors knew that most humans found their eating habits unpleasant. That they flaunted them here was a sign of their arrogance and condescension. The Visitors were enjoying their meal not for itself, but for the discomfort it caused the other patrons, a discomfort the patrons could do nothing about.

  “I think I’ve had enough,” George said. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin.

  “Eating rats ain’t so bad,” Durk said quietly, looking at his friend.

  “My cat eats rats,” George whispered intensely, leaning across the table toward Durk, “but not at my table, and not in my presence. I’m going home.”

  “Maybe a good idea,” Durk said quietly. George got up, dropped a dollar on the table, and left. Durk watched him leave, and then began to realize what it meant to be made a nigger by those with the upper hand. He kept his eyes dutifully off the Visitors as he got up and walked toward the front door.

  Data Tronix was one of the smaller computer science industries in the Research Triangle Park, and one of the most diverse in its products. They did not manufacture chips, but they designed them and the hardware to use them and the software to ran them, specializing in data manipulation, transmission, and transformation.

  Like all the companies in the Park, their building was set among carefully landscaped lawns and woods, occupying only five percent of the land they owned. It was invisible from the road, and not very prepossessing when one drove up the long driveway to the parking lot. It stood only two stories tall, starkly rectangular, unlike some of the others. But there were three floors underground, and service cellars below that.

  On level A-1, the ground floor, were the reception area, the staff lounge, cafeteria, and public conference rooms. Administrative offices and special conference rooms occupied level A-2 above it. B-l, the first underground floor, was the domain of the software developers, B-2 was where the engineers worked, and B-3, airy and light in spite of being thirty feet underground, was the manufacturing facility.

  Below that was C-l, which housed the physical plant— heating, cooling, power, and all necessary to the survival of the building. C-2, deep in the Carolina clay and gravel, was used only for long-term storage, one or two special silicon annealing furnaces, the high-power X-ray machines, and similar apparatus best kept out of sight, including one lab that had not been a part of the original design. Here, crowded into what had once been a storage room, were desk-top computers, a minimainframe, CRTs of all sizes and capabilities, and a new data line. All the CRT monitors were on, though most of them showed only garbage.

  At one console sat Lester Ortega. Standing behind him were Mark Casey and a computer technician named Paul Freedman. Paul was in his fifties, weatherbeaten and gray but a man who took care of himself with plenty of exercise.

  “Tapping the phone company was easy,” Lester explained. They’d done that a week ago, just three days after their raid on the Visitor headquarters.

  His terminal showed twelve windows, each with four lines of code. “Each of these,” he went on, pointing at the screen, “is one of the lines coming out of Visitor headquarters. Ma Bell doesn’t even know the signals are there. Not costing her anything, of course, since they aren’t going anywhere but here.”

  “Looks like trash to me,” Paul said. The twelve windows showed not only alphanumerics, but other odd symbols and graphic characters.

  “It is, so fai;” Lester said. “That’s what you and Bill and Shirley and I have to sort out.” The other two, Bill Gray and Shirley Patchek, looked up on hearing their names.

  “I’m going to run the splitter now,” Bill said. He was a young black man, barely into his twenties, who’d been hired by Data Tronix when they’d discovered him using his personal computer to break into their personal data files three years ago. He was a sloppy worker but prone to fits of brilliance which more than compensated for that. He typed something in at his keyboard and twelve monitors around the room cleared, each one now showing one of the sets of code on Lester’s monitor.

  “Let’s see if they’re truly independent,” Shirley said. She sat in front of one of the monitors and started typing. The image expanded to show a full twenty-four lines plus one status line. Nothing else changed.

  “I told you it would work,” Bill said. He’d designed the splitter program, but Shirley had done the actual writing and coding. Her perfectionism and lack of imagination complemented Bill’s brilliance and eccentricity perfectly.

  “Looks good,” Mark said. “The first thing to do is to find out what each signal is.”

  “We’ve got several signals superimposed in each case,” Lester said. “But I think we can write filters so that we can look at what we want.”

  “No problem,” Bill said, “we’ll just check the wave forms and run a statistical analysis.” He flipped a switch and the top line on Lester’s monitor went into reverse video at the same time that a separate monitor came to life, displaying a complicated wave pattern like an EKG readout.

  “Just don’t tell the people up in statistics what we’re working on,” Mark cautioned.

  “Not to worry,” Paul said. “As far as anybody upstairs knows, we’re working on a subcontract from JPL to untangle the data from the Galileo probe.”

  “Is Anne covering that?” Mark asked.

  “She’s even got letters from Kline and Bergholm to that effect,” Paul said. “In fact, given thirty seconds’ warning, we can even switch to real Galileo tapes.”

  “And,” Lester said, “unless the Visitors can trace the signals from their main buses through the p
hone lines to us, which even Ma Bell can’t do, there’s no way they can know we’re involved at all.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got it knocked,” Mark said as the one phone rang on a table in the middle of the room. He reached for it, listened a moment, and then hung up.

  “Steve’s going to be all right,” he said, and a certain

  extraneous amount of tension went out of the room. “That was Memorial,” naming the huge teaching hospital in Chapel Hill. “Steve’s out of critical condition, and he’s going to hurt when he laughs, but he’ll be back on the job in a couple days.”

  “Damn,” Lester said, and leaned his head in his hand with relief.

  “All right then,” Mark said. “I’ll leave you people to it. Just a minor miracle, that’s all I’m asking.”

  “We’ve done’m before,” Paul said. Mark nodded and left them to their jobs.

  The three were a team and got results very quickly. Paul could understand signals, knew information theory, and had a knack for distinguishing garbage from useful data. Bill, taking Paul’s suggestions, figured out ways to implement them, while Shirley, who wrote assembly language in her sleep, worked up the programs to do what Bill suggested to achieve what Paul wanted.

  But it was not a trivial problem. They were more than satisfied when, after four hours, they knew which of the signals were just fluctuations in power lines, which were telephone lines, both internal and external, and which were other signals including the Visitors’ many computers.

  It was the phone lines that Bill and Shirley were most interested in. Their plan was to separate the external calls from the in-house numbers, and convert the analogue signals into sounds so they could eavesdrop on anything any Visitor said to anybody else, either at their headquarters or elsewhere. But Paul kept looking at the filtered-out power signals.

  “They aren’t using a steady draw,” Paul said, interrupting the other two in the midst of an argument. “And if what you’ve done to separate the lines has any meaning, then I think we can do something with that.”