* * *
“Okay, Alice, this guy in a gray suit and wearing a collar and tie started talking to you in the club,” Morelli said. They were with a group relaxing and enjoying the sun during the lunch break by the shore of the lake outside the Institute. “What happened?”
“Well, at first I thought it was a pickup,” she told him. “You know, some guy out on the town . . . He looked a bit out of place there, but you get all kinds, I guess.”
“Uh huh . . .go on.”
“But it turned out he really wasn’t interested in me at all,” she said. “Only in the place I worked at. He wanted to know if I worked for a Professor Morelli, who used to specialize in gravitational physics and who had discovered how to force particle annihilations some years back. It was a funny kind of conversation for a place like that. . . . He seemed to be trying to make it sound casual, but it came across all artificial, you know?”
“So what did you tell him?” Morelli asked.
“Well, I said, yes I did, but then he started asking if you were still working on the same thing and how much further you’d gone with it. That was when I got suspicious—really suspicious—and got out. Later on, Larry—he’s a bartender there—said the guy had been asking around all night trying to get ISF people pointed out. I thought you should know.”
“You did the right thing,” Morelli told her. “Don’t worry about it; just forget the whole thing. But if anything similar happens again, you let me know right away. Okay?”
Later that afternoon, Morelli went to find Peter Hughes. “Me being pestered is bad enough, but now they’re starting on the juniors. What in hell is going on?”
* * *
“Sorry, Mr. Hughes, I’m afraid I can’t help you.” The man from the Technical Coordination Bureau in Washington looked dutifully concerned, but somehow the sincerity didn’t come through. “I really don’t know anything about anything like that.”
Hughes stared back at the screen dubiously. “I’m not saying your department is actually doing it,” he said. “I’m simply asking what you know about it.”
“As I said, Mr. Hughes, I know nothing about anything like that,” the Bureau man replied. “I will make inquiries though, I assure you. I’m sure you appreciate that there are many departments that require inputs for statistical purposes and so forth . . . nothing sinister. If any of their people have been a little, shall we say, overzealous, I apologize, and if I can find out who it is and bring some restraining influence to bear, I certainly will. Thank you for calling. If you’ll excuse me, I think I have another call holding.”
Meanwhile, down in the basement room that housed the central node of the Institute’s computer complex, the operations manager was frowning over the weekly activity analysis that had just been dropped on his desk. The numbers on the sheet told him that the surveillance programs running in the preprocessor that interfaced the system to the outside world via the Infonet lines had trapped and aborted no fewer than fifty-seven illegal attempts to gain access to the Sudbury database from anonymous places elsewhere. It had been the same the week before, too, and nearly as bad the week before that. Somebody was trying very hard to find out what information and records were stored in that database.
But all this interference proved nothing more than a distraction—an irritation that didn’t really affect the work on Mark II. Then things took a more serious turn. The first intimation that the project was in trouble came when Mike and Phil drew up a detailed list of required equipment and components and began contacting suppliers for technical information, prices, and delivery estimates.
“I’m sorry,” the secretary to the sales manager of Micromatic Devices, Inc., advised. “But Mr. Williams isn’t in right now. Can I take a message?”
“You’ve taken about a hundred messages already,” Mike told her irritably. “I’ve been trying to talk to him for two days. When will he be back?”
“I really can’t say,” she replied. “He really is busy these days.”