“Denny?”
The boy did not answer.
“Denny!”
An odd, soft clicking and electronic pulsing sounds came from the computer.
Reluctantly, Loman entered the room and walked to the desk. He looked down at his son and shuddered.
Denny’s mouth hung open. Saliva drooled down his chin. He had become so enraptured by his contact with the computer that he had not bothered to get up and eat or go to the bathroom; he had urinated in his pants.
His eyes were gone. In their place were what appeared to be twin spheres of molten silver as shiny as mirrors. They reflected the data that swarmed across the screen in front of them.
The pulsing sounds, soft electronic oscillations, were not coming from the computer but from Denny.
15
The eggs were good, the pancakes were better, and the coffee was strong enough to endanger the porcelain finish of the cups but not so strong that it had to be chewed. As they ate, Sam outlined the method he had devised for getting a message out of town to the Bureau.
“Your phone’s still dead, Harry. I tried it this morning. And I don’t think we can risk heading out to the interstate on foot or by car, not with the patrols and roadblocks they’ve established; that’ll have to be a last resort. After all, as far as we know, we’re the only people who realize that something truly … twisted is happening here and that the need to stop it is urgent. Us and maybe the Foster girl, the one the cops talked about in their VDT conversation last night.”
“If she’s literally a girl,” Tessa said, “just a child, even if she’s a teenager, she won’t have much of a chance against them. We’ve got to figure they’ll catch her if they haven’t already.”
Sam nodded. “And if they nail us, too, while we’re trying to get out of town, there’ll be no one left to do the job. So first we’ve got to try a low-risk course of action.”
“Is any option low risk?” Harry wondered as he mopped up some egg yolk with a piece of toast, eating slowly and with a touching precision necessitated by his having only one useful hand.
Pouring a little more maple syrup over his pancakes, surprised by how much he was eating, attributing his appetite to the possibility that this was his last meal, Sam said, “See … this is a wired town.”
“Wired?”
“Computer-linked. New Wave gave computers to the police, so they’d be tied into the web—”
“And the schools,” Harry said. “I remember reading about it in the paper last spring or early summer. They gave a lot of computers and software to both the elementary and the high schools. A gesture of civic involvement, they called it.”
“Seems more ominous than that now, doesn’t it?” Tessa said.
“Sure as hell does.”
Tessa said, “Seems now like maybe they wanted their computers in the schools for the same reason they wanted the cops computerized—to tie them all in tightly with New Wave, to monitor and control.”
Sam put down his fork. “New Wave employs, what, about a third of the people in town?”
“Probably that,” Harry said. “Moonlight Cove really grew after New Wave moved in ten years ago. In some ways it’s an old-fashioned company town-life here isn’t just dependent upon the main employer but pretty much socially centered around it too.”
After sipping some coffee so strong it was nearly as bracing as brandy, Sam said, “A third of the people … which works out to maybe forty percent or so of the adults.”
Harry said, “I guess so.”
“And you’ve got to figure everyone at New Wave is part of the conspiracy, that they were among the first to be … converted.”
Tessa nodded. “I’d say that’s a given.”
“And they’re even more than usually interested in computers, of course, because they’re working in that industry, so it’s a good bet most or all of them have computers in their homes.”
Harry agreed.
“And no doubt many if not all of their home computers can be tied by modem directly to New Wave, so they can work at home in the evening or on weekends if they have to. And now, with this conversion scheme nearing a conclusion, I’ll bet they’re working round the clock; data must be flying back and forth over their phone lines half the night. If Harry can tell me of someone within a block of here who works for New Wave—”