2. What Happens If We Get Caught?
Jesse practically assaulted him. "Well, come on - give!"
"OK, the guy I know in Computer Science says that he thinks he can get us what we need to do it. He's going to look into it and come over tomorrow."
"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" Jesse exulted.
"Indeed," Kim said drily.
"Before you get too carried away, Kim, have you thought about what this might do to the data from the TV experiment? And what happens if we get caught?"
"Yes to both." So much for Lee and Kim's marriage. "All we've got to do is rig a subroutine that causes the output of the TVprocessing program to include Thorsen's facing block at some point. The output is altered, but the input, the actual data, is unaffected, and they can clear things up afterwards."
I interupted to tell him about the replacement of the block with Thorsen himself.
"Better yet. The Almighty on Mars." He sipped beer. "As for getting caught, we can set up the subroutine to commit hara kiri after its run. Poof! Up in a cloud of random numbers. I know that verges on mixed metaphor, Ardee. After the subroutine is gone, all that's left is the tiny insertion in the main program that calls the subroutine in the right circumstances, and that contains no account numbers or anything else to implicate us directly. . . . . .of course, suspicion is apt to be rather heavy."
"You're not British are you, Kim?"
He ignored me. "The only really hard part, aside from getting the subroutine to give a pretty picture, is getting the passwords that let us make that tiny insertion in the main program. But Georgie thinks he may be able to get ahold of them for us; his father is associate chairman of the department."
"Sounds almost foolproof," commented Lee. "And I think Jesse's right, Thorsen will love it, although it may be somewhat difficult to tell at first."
I took a couple of large swallows of beer. "Yeah. . .OK, let's do it."
"Okay." Jesse sounded surprised. She hadn't thought there was anything to be decided.
Kim's tame computer whiz to the lab the next morning. The kid looked about twelve, all pimples and stringy hair, and mostly he looked down at his shoes and mumbled, but he seemed taken with Kim, and he provided the passwords we needed. Those, the dust-covered time-sharing remote computer terminal in the corner of the lab, and the programming expertise Kim had picked up as a math major before switching to exobiology were all we needed. A couple of weeks later, Kim had the subroutine written and was proudly displaying his work on the TV display of the terminal.
"Oh, it's beautiful, Kim." Jesse was ecstatic.
It is, Kim, I agreed. "It's Thorsen right down to the ends of his pointy little mustache. And that's his supercilious head shake too."
"It is pretty good, isn't it." He was really pleased with himself. "Of course, getting it to look like Thorsen was no real trick. The hard part was getting it to appear in the right place at the right time. For instance, I couldn't just have him appear centered in the picture, that might have made him look as if he were floating in the air. And if he simply appeared at some preset time he might suddenly pop into existance in front of some feature of the landscape. No, the way this works, the main program will report to the subroutine every hundred milliseconds. When the subroutine has gotten reports in a sequence that indicates that Marsman is breasting a hill, then it triggers, and Thorsen comes into view as we crest the hill, then vanishes a few seconds later. . .like that." He pointed to the TV display where the subroutine was running over and over, Thorsen appearing over the hill, shaking his head pityingly, then vanishing.
"Doesn't having the main program report to the subroutine require more than a 'tiny insertion'?" Jesse wanted to know.
"Only marginally; and the identifying information still selfdestructs with the subroutine."
Jesse was grinning at the display again. "It's really perfect, just mimsy."
"Shouldn't he be a little nobler about the brow?" a voice behind us wanted to know. A familiar voice. Thorsen's voice.
Kim and I both froze. Jesse rallied to our aid:
"Oh, good, Dr. Thorsen. Take a look at this. We've been thinking of doing some promotional announcements for the educational channel about Marsman. You know: 'No telling what'll turn up on Mars. Don't miss Marsman.' " It was close enough to the truth that I cringed.
"With my face?"
"Well, naturally we needed someone distinctive looking - an ordinary face just wouldn't do. "
I'm pleased to see such initiative, but you'd better leave that sort of thing to the TV experimenters. Our own experiment is far more significant; see what you can dream up for that."
He left looking unconvinced but thoughtful. Kim killed the display on the screen, and as far as any of us knew that was the end of that.
Early the next morning Jesse stuck her head into the cubbyhole I used as an office.