Instantly every laser was diverted to the little card and Swept backwards and forwards over it and in it, examining and reading every molecule.
Then, just as suddenly, they stopped.
The entire flock of little virtual inspectors snapped to attention.
`Nice to see you, Mr Harl,’ they said in smarmy unison. `Is there anything we can do for you?’
Ford smiled a slow and vicious smile. ` Do you know,’ he said, `I rather think there is?’
Five minutes later he was out of there.
About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred ownership of the entire organisation into his own name, but he doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn’t want it anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights at the office, not to mention massive and time-consuming fraud investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted something that nobody other than the computer would notice: that was the bit that took thirty seconds.
The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything.
It had to want not to know about what Ford was up to, and then he could safely leave the computer to rationalise its own defences against the information ever emerging. It was a pro- gramming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to high political office.
The other minute was spent discovering that the computer system already had a mental block. A big one.
He would never have discovered it if he hadn’t been busy engineering a mental block himself. He came across a whole slew of smooth and plausible denial procedures and diversionary subroutines exactly where he had been planning to install his own. The computer denied all knowledge of them, of course, then blankly refused to accept that there was anything even to deny knowledge of, and was generally so convincing that even Ford almost found himself thinking he must have made a mistake.
He was impressed.
He was so impressed, in fact, that he didn’t bother to install his own mental block procedures, he just set up calls to the ones that were already there, which then called themselves when ques- tioned, and so on.
He quickly set about debugging the little bits of code he had installed himself, only to discover they weren’t there. Cursing, he searched all over for them, but could find no trace of them at all.
He was just about to start installing them all over again when he realised that the reason he couldn’t find them was that they were working already.
He grinned with satisfaction.
He tried to discover what the computer’s other mental block was all about, but it seemed, not unnaturally, to have a mental block about it. He could no longer find any trace of it at all, in fact; it was that good. He wondered if he had been imagining it. He wondered if he had been imagining that it was something to do with something in the building, and something to do with the number 13. He ran a few tests. Yes, he had obviously been imagining it.
No time for fancy routes now, there was obviously a major security alert in progress. Ford took the elevator up to the ground floor to change to the express elevators. He had somehow to get the Ident-i-Eeze back into Harl’s pocket before it was missed. How, he didn’t know.
The doors of the elevator slid open to reveal a large posse of security guards and robots poised waiting for it and brandishing filthy looking weapons.
They ordered him out.
With a shrug he stepped forward. They all pushed rudely past him into the elevator which took them down to continue their search for him on the lower levels.
This was fun, thought Ford, giving Colin a friendly pat. Colin was about the first genuinely useful robot Ford had ever encountered. Colin bobbed along in the air in front of him in a lather of cheerful ecstasy. Ford was glad he’d named him after a dog.