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Finally, he decided to send the admin a note saying he was leaving the system for good.

Within days, Phoenix was back in the Dewey machine, weaving in and out of it as if nothing had happened. After all, he had broken into the system, and managed to get root through his own wit. He had earned the right to be in the computer. He might send the admin a note to put him at ease, but Phoenix wasn't going to give up accessing Berkeley's com- puters just because it upset Daniel Berger.

'See,' Pad continued, 'I think the UCB people kept stuff on their systems that wasn't supposed to be there. Secret things.'

Classified military material wasn't supposed to be stored on non-classified network computers. However, Pad guessed that sometimes researchers broke rules and took short cuts because they were busy thinking about their research and not the security implications.

'Some of the stuff might have been illegal,' Pad told his captive audience. 'And then they find out some of you guys have been in there . . .'

'Shit,' Phoenix said.

'So, well, if it APPEARED like someone was inside trying to get at those secrets . . .' Pad paused. 'Then you can guess what happened. It seems they really want to get whoever was inside their machines.'

There was momentary silence while the other hackers digested all that Pad had told them. As a personality on Altos, Pad remained ever so slightly withdrawn from the other hackers, even the Australians whom he considered mates. This reserved quality gave his warning a certain sobriety, which seeped into the very fabric of Altos that day.

Eventually, Electron responded to Pad's warning by typing a comment directed at Phoenix: 'I told you talking to security guys is nothing but trouble.'

It irritated Electron more and more that Phoenix felt com- pelled to talk to white hats in the security industry. In Electron's view, drawing attention to yourself was just a bad idea all around