10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

The weather wasn't going to budge.

At 1.18 p.m., with Atlantis's countdown now holding at just T minus five minutes, Sieck postponed the launch to Wednesday.

❖

Back at the SPAN centre, things were becoming hectic. The worm was spreading through more and more systems and the phones were beginning to ring every few minutes. NASA computers were getting hit all over the place.

The SPAN project staff needed more arms. They were simultaneously trying to calm callers and concentrate on developing an analysis of the alien program. Was the thing a practical joke or a time bomb just waiting to go off? Who was behind this?

NASA was working in an information void when it came to WANK. Some staff knew of the protesters' action down at the Space Center, but nothing could have prepared them for this. NASA officials were confident enough about a link between the protests against Galileo and the attack on NASA's computers to speculate publicly that the two were related. It seemed a reasonable likelihood, but there were still plenty of unanswered questions.

Callers coming into the SPAN office were worried. People at the other end of the phone were scared. Many of the calls came from network managers who took care of a piece of SPAN at a specific NASA site, such as the Marshall Space Flight Center. Some were panicking; others spoke in a sort of monotone, flat- tened by a morning of calls from 25 different hysterical system administrators. A manager could lose his job over something like this.

Most of the callers to the SPAN head office were starved for information. How did this rogue worm get into their com- puters? Was it malicious? Would it destroy all the scientific data it came into contact with? What could be done to kill it?