UNDERGROUND

30 characters per second - Electron's modem would take five hours to siphon off an entire copy. Using the CAT command, Electron made copies of all the Zardoz issues and bundled them up into one 500 k file. He called the new file .t and stored it in the temporary directory on DITMELA.

Then he considered what to do next. He would mail the Zardoz bundle to another account outside the CSIRO computer, for safe-keeping. But after that he had to make a choice: try to download the thing himself or hang up, call Phoenix and ask him to download it.

Using his 2400 baud modem, Phoenix would be able to download the Zardoz bundle eight times faster than Electron could. On the other hand, Electron didn't particularly want to give Phoenix access to the CSIRO machine. They had both been targeting the machine, but he hadn't told Phoenix that he had actually managed to get in. It wasn't that he planned on withholding Zardoz when he got it. Quite the contrary, Electron wanted Phoenix to read the security file so they could bounce ideas off each other. When it came to accounts, however, Phoenix had a way of messing things up. He talked too much. He was simply not discreet.

While Electron considered his decision, his fingers kept working at the keyboard. He typed quickly, mailing copies of the Zardoz bundle to two hacked student accounts at Melbourne University. With the passwords to both accounts, he could get in whenever he wanted and he wasn't taking any chances with this precious cargo. Two accounts were safer than one - a main account and a back-up in case someone changed the password on the first one.

Then, as the DITMELA machine was still in the process of mailing the Zardoz bundle off to the back-up sites, Electron's connection suddenly died.

The CSIRO machine had hung up on him, which probably meant one thing. The admin had logged him off. Electron was furious. What the hell was a system administrator doing on a computer at this hour? The admin was supposed to be asleep!