`I'll go make sure it's still OK. Back in a bit,' Phoenix typed.

Phoenix jumped out of Altos and headed toward NASA. He telnetted into a NASA computer called CSAB at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. He had been in and out of NASA quite a few times and had recently made himself a root account on CSAB. First, he had to check the account was still alive, then he had to make sure the system administrator wasn't logged in.

Whizzing past the official warning sign about unauthorised access in US government computers on the login screen, Phoenix typed in his user name and password.

It worked. He was in. And he had root privileges.

He quickly looked around on the system. The administrator was on-line.

Damn.

Phoenix fled the NASA computer and sprinted back into Altos. Gandalf was there, along with the other two, waiting for him.

`Well?' Electron asked.

`OK. All right. The NASA machine will work. It has anon FTP. And I still have root. We'll use that.'

Gandalf jumped in. `Hang on—does it have Crypt?'

`Argh! Forget to check. I think it must.'

`Better check it, m8!'

`Yeah, OK.'

Phoenix felt exasperated, rushing around trying to find sites that worked. He logged out of Altos and coursed his way back into the NASA machine. The admin was still logged on, but Phoenix was running out of time. He had to find out if the computer had Crypt on it. It did.

Phoenix rushed back to Altos. `Back again. We're in business.'

`Yes!' Electron said, but he quickly jumped in with a word of warning. `Don't say the exact machine at NASA or the account out loud. Whisper it to Gandalf. I think the ops are listening in on my connection.'

`Well,' Phoenix typed slowly, `there's only one problem. The admin is logged on.'

`Arghhh!' Electron shouted.

`Just do it,' Pad said. `No time to worry.'

Phoenix whispered the Internet IP address of the NASA machine to

Gandalf.

`OK, m8, I'll anon FTP it to NASA. I'll come back here and tell you the new filename. Then you go in and decrypt it and uncompress the file. W8 for me here.'

Ten minutes later, Gandalf returned. `Mission accomplished. The file is there!'

`Now, go go Pheeny!' Electron said.

`Gand, whisper the filename to me,' Phoenix said.

`The file's called "d" and it's in the pub directory,' Gandalf whispered.

`OK, folks. Here we go!' Phoenix said as he logged off.

Phoenix dashed to the NASA computer, logged in and looked for the file named `d'. He couldn't find it. He couldn't even find the pub directory. He began hunting around the rest of the file system. Where was the damn thing?

Uh oh. Phoenix noticed the system administrator, Sharon Beskenis, was still logged in. She was connected from Phoebe, another NASA machine. There was only one other user besides himself logged into the CSAB machine, someone called Carrie. As if that wasn't bad enough, Phoenix realised his username stood out a like a sore thumb. If the admin looked at who was on-line she would see herself, Carrie and a user called `friend', an account he had created for himself. How many legitimate accounts on NASA computers had that name?

Worse, Phoenix noticed that he had forgotten to cover his login trail. `Friend' was telnetting into the NASA computer from the University of Texas. No, no, he thought, that would definitely have to go. He disconnected from NASA, bounced back to the university and then logged in to NASA again. Good grief. Now the damn NASA machine showed two people logged in as `friend'. The computer hadn't properly killed his previous login. Stress.

Phoenix tried frantically to clear out his first login by killing its process number. The NASA computer responded that there was no such process number. Increasingly nervous, Phoenix figured he must have typed in the wrong number. Unhinged, he grabbed one of the other process numbers and killed that.

Christ! That was the admin's process number. Phoenix had just disconnected Sharon from her own machine. Things were not going well.

Now he was under serious pressure. He didn't dare logout, because Sharon would no doubt find his `friend' account, kill it and close up the security hole he had originally used to get in. Even if she didn't find Deszip on her own machine, he might not be able to get back in again to retrieve it.

After another frenzied minute hunting around the machine, Phoenix finally unearthed Gandalf's copy of Deszip. Now, the moment of truth.

He tried the passphrase. It worked! All he had to do was uncompress Deszip and get it out of there. He typed, `uncompress deszip.tar.z', but he didn't like how the NASA computer answered his command:

corrupt input

Something was wrong, terribly wrong. The file appeared to be partially destroyed. It was too painful a possibility to contemplate. Even if only a small part of the main Deszip program had been damaged, none of it would be useable.

Rubbing sweat from his palms, Phoenix hoped that maybe the file had just been damaged as he attempted to uncompress it. He had kept the original, so he went back to that and tried decrypting and uncompressing it again. The NASA computer gave him the same ugly response. Urgently, he tried yet again, but this time attempted to uncompress the file in a different way. Same problem.

Phoenix was at his wits' end. This was too much. The most he could hope was that the file had somehow become corrupted in the transfer from Gandalf's JANET machine. He logged out of NASA and returned to Altos. The other three were waiting impatiently for him.

Electron, still logged in as the mystery Guest, leaped in. `Did it work?'

`No. Decrypted OK, but the file was corrupted when I tried to decompress it.'

`Arghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!' Gandalf exclaimed.

`Fuckfuckfuck,' Electron wrote. `Doomed to fail.'

`Sigh Sigh Sigh,' Pad typed.

Gandalf and Electron quizzed Phoenix in detail about each command he had used, but in the end there seemed only one hope. Move a copy of the decryption program to the JANET computer in the UK and try decrypting and uncompressing Deszip there.

Phoenix gave Gandalf a copy of Crypt and the British hacker went to work on the JANET computer. A little later he rendezvoused on Altos again.

Phoenix was beside himself by this stage. `Gand! Work???'

`Well, I decrypted it using the program you gave me …'

`And And And???' Electron was practically jumping out of his seat at his computer.

`Tried to uncompress it. It was taking a LONG time. Kept going—expanded to 8 megabytes.'