"When I return," he said, "we will have much to discuss, you and I."
Chapter 15
The supersecret organization, CURE, ran by computer.
In the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium, behind a sealed wall, a bank of mainframes hummed like a grandmother doing her knitting.
For the three decades Dr. Harold W. Smith had overseen the organization, those data banks had grown and grown, absorbing and retaining vast files on every American, every business entity, and every conceivable fact that might be of use to Dr. Smith in his tireless effort to hold in check the forces that threatened to rend America apart.
Smith loved his computers. Although he had seen action during World War II as an OSS operative and later in the CIA, in his declining years Smith preferred the quiet order of his office and its simple terminal that could access virtually any computer on the continent.
Today he had his system up and running, its tentacles reaching out through the phone lines to the mainframe at IDC world headquarters, only a few miles away from Rye, New York.
The blue LANSCII notebook lay propped up beside it.
Smith was conducting a surreptitious search through the IDC data banks for the LANSCII program. The IDC system had succumbed to a brute-force password testing program like a sand castle swept aside by a surf.
He had been doing this for over an hour. Although it should have taken no more than ten minutes to isolate LANSCII if it were there, he kept at it.
"It must be on file. LANSCII is an IDC program," he muttered to himself.
But it seemed not to be.
When at last he was forced to admit defeat, Smith logged off IDC, and picked up the blue notebook. He looked at the cover again.
He knew that LAN was a computer term meaning "local area network." A fancy name for a PC. Assuming it was identical to the end letters of Ascii, the double I would mean "information interchange." Ascii actually stood for Association Standards Committee for Information Interchange.
But this strange configuration had him stumped. Except that it sounded hauntingly familiar. But Smith as yet could not place it in his memory.
"What could the SC stand for?" he muttered.
Cool fall sunlight streamed through the replacement window behind Smith's hunched form. He frowned.
A buzzer buzzed.
"Yes, Mrs. Mikulka?" Smith said absently.
"Dr. Gerling asked me to tell you the new patient remains in stable condition."
Smith looked at his watch. "Thank you. Inform Dr. Gerling I will expect the next update at precisely three-oh-five."
"Yes, Dr. Smith."
Smith went back to the blue notebook. His knowledge of computer systems, in the days when CURE was new, had been as good as anyone's. Superior to most. Over the intervening decades, Smith had kept up with the fabulous developments in the field. But in recent years he had been forced to concede that technology had outpaced his ability to keep abreast of it.
Still, he was able to understand most of the LANSCII program. It was a combination spreadsheet and inventory accounting program. A variation on existing software.
True, some of the rubrics and subsets were odd. But computer terminology had a tendency to be either overly technical or playful to a degree Smith found asinine.
What on earth, he wondered, was meant by VIG? Or LAYOFF? The former appeared to be an employee tracking component, but it was not connected with the configuration surrounding the LAYOFF rubric, which appeared to be some sort of insurance program along the lines of futures trading.
A moment later his secretary buzzed him again.
"Yes?" Smith said, this time a trifle testily.
"Mr. Great is here to see you."
"Who?"
"He says his first name is Chiun. You know, that man."
"I see," said Smith. The Master of Sinanju had been a frequent visitor to Folcroft, and Smith had allowed his secretary to believe that Chiun was a former patient subject to delusions. It covered virtually every outburst the old Korean might make. "Send him in," Smith said crisply.
The door flew open. Chiun came billowing in like a blue-and-silver cloud-the colors of his kimono. He waved a hard disk in the air triumphantly.
"Behold, Emperor! The very prize you seek!"
"You extracted the disk," Smith said, his face falling into long drawn lines of regret.
"Of course," Chiun said proudly. "Was there any doubt?"
"But," sputtered Smith, rising from behind his shabby desk, "hard disks are not supposed to be removed like a common CD. They require delicate handling. A clean-room environment. The data have no doubt been destroyed."
"Why do you say that?" asked Chiun, taken aback by the sheer ingratitude of his employer.
"It's too complicated to explain," said Smith with a sigh. "But suffice it to say that dust and debris on the surface of the disk, no matter how minute and seemingly inconsequential, would obliterate the very magnetic particles that store the data."
Chiun wrinkled his tiny nose at the incomprehensible babbling of his emperor. He raised the disk into the air on the tip of one long-fingered nail. With the other hand he set it to spinning. Faster and faster, he spun the disk.
Then with a touch of the same finger, he brought it to an abrupt halt.
"It is now clean," he said tightly.
Smith blinked. He knew it was hopeless, but he also knew the power of the Master of Sinanju. He came out from behind his desk with his long face quivering with suppressed hope.
"It is worth a try," he said, taking the disk between two fingers.
As Chiun watched, Smith opened a port in his terminal. It was one of two capable of accepting auxiliary hard disks. He inserted the new disk into the drive, closed the port, and engaged the disk.
The drive whined warningly.
"Not a good sign," Smith murmured.
"I endured great personal hardship to recover that object," Chiun pointed out. "Canards and abuses were heaped upon my poor head like cold raindrops." The tone of his voice told Smith that the Master of Sinanju was miffed.
Greenish symbols appeared on the screen. They looked like a combination of English and Chinese. Garbage.