UNDERGROUND

The castle also offered the perfect protection for further hacking activities. Who could chase him? Even if someone managed to follow him through the convoluted routing system he might set up to pass through a half dozen computer systems, the pursuer would never get past the battlements. Mendax could just disappear behind the firewall. He could be any one of $60\,000$ NorTel employees on any one of $11\,000$ computer systems.

Mendax telnetted out to the Internet and explored a few sites, including the main computer system of Encore, a large computer manufacturer. He had seen Encore computers before inside at least one university in Melbourne. In his travels, he met up with Corrupt, the American hacker who told Par he had read Theorem's mail.

Corrupt was intrigued by Mendax's extensive knowledge of different computer systems. When he learned that the Australian hacker was coming from inside the NorTel firewall, he was impressed.

The hackers began talking regularly, often when Mendax was coming from inside NorTel. The black street fighter from inner-city Brooklyn and the white intellectual from a leafy outer Melbourne suburb bridged the gap in the anonymity of cyber- space. Sometime during their conversations Corrupt must have decided that Mendax was a worthy hacker, because he gave Mendax a few stolen passwords to Cray accounts.

In the computer underground in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a Cray computer account had all the prestige of a platinum charge card. The sort of home computer most hackers could afford at that time had all the grunt of a golf cart engine, but a Cray was the Rolls-Royce of computers. Crays were the biggest, fastest computers in the world. Institutions such as large universities would shell out millions of dollars on a Cray so the astronomy or physics departments could solve enormous math- ematical problems in a fraction of the time it would take on a normal computer. A Cray never sat idle overnight or during holiday periods. Cray time was billed out by the minute. Crays were elite.