Three Days to Never Read Online Free Page B

then used the same hand to snap his lighter at it. He inhaled deeply—it seemed even less likely now that he would have time to die of cancer. He had always heard the saying, You’re scared until the first shot. And that had proved true twenty years ago, in Jerusalem. For a little while, at least.
    He sighed. “Any activity?” he asked as he stood up and carried his coffee cup to the kitchen. His shoes were as silent on the kitchen’s linoleum floor as they had been on the carpet in the living room.
    Bozzaris had hung his gray linen sport coat over the back of the plastic chair and rolled up his sleeves.
    â€œNo unusual activity,” he said, not looking away from the dark green monitor screen and the bright green lines of type scrolling upward, “But we don’t know who else is out there. The one in New Jersey who tried to get into the mainframe Honeywell in Tel Aviv an hour ago uses the Unix disk-operating system on a Vax machine, and, like everybody else, he doesn’t know about the three built-in accounts the machines always come with. I got into his machine by logging on to the ‘Field’ account, default password ‘Service.’”
    He paused to knot his long, thin fingers over the monitor and stretch. “Their e-mails,” he went on, “show nothing but the usual cover-business stuff, assuming it is a cover business—the real guys might be covertly routed through real businesses, like we are. And there’s been no notable increase or decrease in the traffic during this last hour and a half.”
    Bozzaris had insisted that the Institute pay for a new IBM model 80 computer with a 32-bit processor, and a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 that could operate at either 300 or1200 baud. Lepidopt was used to the shoe-type modems that a telephone receiver had to be fitted into.
    â€œAre any of the travel messages suspicious?”
    â€œHow should I know? It’s a travel agency. A number of flights here to L.A., which I’ve copied, but that seems to be usual for them. And of course any of them could be codes. But there hasn’t been any ‘Johnny, this is your mother, take the casserole out of the oven.’”
    â€œAny of them could be codes,” Lepidopt agreed.
    â€œI doubt they’ve got anything more than the Harmonic Convergence static; a hundred thousand New Agers standing on mountaintops, holding hands and blanking their minds all at once to realign the earth’s soul.”
    Static? thought Lepidopt. They’re making a blasphemous Tzimtzum, is what they’re doing. In the beginning En-Sof, the unknowable Infinite Light, contracted itself to make space for the creation of the finite worlds, since without that contraction there would have been no room for anything besides Itself.
    And now these wretched hippies and mystics have all contracted their minds at the same time! What sort of things will spring into existence in this vacuum?
    Bozzaris seemed to answer his thought. “Every sort of critter is likely to be poking its head through from the other side,” the younger man said, “with that kind of door open.”
    â€œThe New Jersey crowd tried to hack Tel Aviv after the noon event.”
    Bozzaris shrugged. “It’s unlikely that they’d have been listening on that, uh, wavelength,” he said. “But I suppose the event might have registered with other media. Of course people do try to hack Tel Aviv, for lots of reasons.”
    â€œAssume it’s not a coincidence,” said Lepidopt.
    He stepped to the kitchen counter and poured hot coffee into his cup, then stared at the cigarette butt floating in it.
    With his left hand he fished the cigarette butt out of the cup and tossed it into the sink, shaking his fingers afterward. Then he sighed and took a sip of the coffee.
    Bozzaris typed H-> to hang up the phone line, then immediately typed in DT and a new telephone number. The modem’s LED