The Holy Grail

Phoenix was at his wits' end. This was too much. The most he could hope was that the file had somehow become cor- rupted 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.'

'Arghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!' 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.'

'Oh NO. Bad Bad Bad,' Phoenix moaned. 'Should only be 3 meg. If it's making a million files, it's fucked.'

'Christ,' Pad typed. 'Too painful.'

'I got the makefile - licensing agreement text etc., but the Deszip program itself was corrupted,' Gandalf concluded.

'I don't understand what is wrong with it. ' Phoenix wrote.

'AgonyAgonyAgony,' Electron groaned. 'It'll never never never work.'

'Can we get a copy anywhere else?' Gandalf asked.