"All right." I had three thousand in my pocket; I took it out and started counting. He looked at it greedily. I stopped counting for a second.

"Look, Phil, I know all about your money problems. But don't think about taking this away from me, okay? I'd just beat the shit out of you."

"Hey, man.

I handed him a thousand and he counted it, folded it, and put it in his front pants pocket and sat back.

"Okay. So here's what I know. And this was why I was so happy to hear from you. 'Cause all I can tell you is that you can't get in. Even if you put a gun to my head, and marched me in there, and made me sign on, and we got in, it wouldn't do you any good. Things are so tight that almost nothing moves anymore. It's all voice-backup and it's all one-way. We dump it into a computer on the other end that's physically separated from the main data banks. Then they've got operators to put all of the data up on the screen from the dump bank, and they scan it for code. Only when they're sure it's clean, they call up the main bank on their own internal line and dump it. There's no way in from the outside."

"What if you need to go interactive with something in the main banks?"

"Well, they're trying not to let that happen. If it's really serious, then they'll download the interactive program to the remote computer; you'll interact there. They sterilize the input before they ship it back to the main banks. I mean, there's one way to break it: you have to get to the systems programmers. And that won't happen. I'll tell you, man, this is a pretty good company, but they've got some rough customers roaming around. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah. I think so."

"Just in case you don't, let me lay it out in a couple of sentences. Their top systems programmers are taking home maybe a hundred grand a year, plus options and benefits and bonuses. That's good money. That's the golden goose. If they get greedy and go for some small change from you, they'd be fired and blackballed and maybe, you know, hurt. The chances of those guys taking your money are slim and fat, and slim is out of town." He took a gulp of Bud.

"So why are you talking to me?" I asked.

"Because you gave me a grand. And because about two seconds after you leave here, I'm going to call them up on the phone and tell them you came to see me. I won't mention the grand, though. I'll tell them I told you to take a hike."

I stood up to leave. "You ought to think about that for a while, Phil. Like you said, there are some hard guys with Anshiser. They might not believe you, and you'll wind up in an oil barrel on the bottom of Biscayne Bay. Because if you call them, and they come after me before I can get out of Miami International, I'll tell them you got ten grand and suggested a couple ways I might get in. And they just won't want to take the chance with you, will they?" I slapped him lightly on the cheek. "Thanks for the information. It was worth a grand."

I left him standing there with an empty beer can and two bites of pie. He scared me, though, and an hour later I took the first plane to anywhere out of Fort Lauderdale. As it happened, it was going to Tampa. From there I flew to Atlanta and then back to St. Louis.

What?

Talked to Anshiser guy about system, it's no go for now, may have to find different route.

Let us know.

I spent three days at Lake of the Ozarks, fishing out of a rented boat, letting the problem cook. In the evenings, I'd sit on the porch of my rented cabin, look out at the lake, and drink beer. If I didn't find anything, it wouldn't be the end of the world. I could go underground for a while, call Emily, arrange for her to take care of the cat, pay the bills. In a couple of years, three or four years, I might even be able to go back.

But it was a sour solution and sent me to bed half drunk. I couldn't sleep on it, but lay awake twisting the sheets around my legs, flopping around on the bed like a beached carp.

On the third night, I got out the cards, and instead of game-playing the problem, I laid out a magic spread, the Celtic Cross. I did it three times, and three times the Tower of Destruction came up in association with the Magician. The Magician I'd always related to computer freaks-the power of thought in all its forms, including mechanical. The Tower of Destruction is usually interpreted as meaning disaster or crisis, although it can mean a sudden awakening or awareness.

It was all hopeless bullshit. I dropped the cards on the table and went for another beer, walked back, and looked down at them. The Tower showed a medieval stone tower shattered by a bolt of lightning, with two men falling from the top. The woman who taught me to read the cards warned me not always to depend on book interpretations, or even on her interpretations.

"Sometimes," she said, "you just have to look at the cards."

I looked at the cards. the magician, the tower, the bolt of lightning.

"Sonofabitch," I said.

What?

Igot it.

You got it?

The answer was typically tarot: outside what I'd considered the parameters of the problem, elegant, and slightly twisted. It took two days to confirm that it would work. It took three weeks-all four of us working twelve to fourteen hours a night-to get the code written, tested, and shipped out.

For the first two weeks I wandered aimlessly up and down the Mississippi River valley, sleeping late, painting in the afternoons, writing code at night. Twice I sent tubes of paintings to Emily in St. Paul to hold for me. I always mailed them from places I was leaving. In the third week, I turned west, across Arkansas, Oklahoma, a piece of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, heading for Las Vegas.

My rational tarot was talking, now that the possibilities were finite, and I spent a lot of time thinking about the cards. The time wasn't too bad, except for the loneliness. I was fond of my life in St. Paul, the apartment, my friends, even the cat. I wanted to get back.

We close now.

Youdebug last batch?

Stanford doing that. He close.

We should run command tests.

Yes. Start tonight.

We ran the tests. There were a few final bugs to hunt down, and then the attack programs worked fine. I was in Phoenix, in a nondescript motel off Interstate 10. It was hot, and the air conditioner smelled like somebody had dropped an aging cheeseburger on the compressor unit. I sat in my underwear and sweated and ran the tarot.

If you run the cards long enough, everything comes up; it's all meaningless. But it seemed that I saw a lot of the battle cards, the Five of Wands, the Seven of Wands, the Seven of Swords. None showed defeat, but none projected a clear victory, either. I finally turned the deck around and tried to run a spread from Maggie's point of view. That's not supposed to work. I came up with an Eight of Swords as the outcome, a woman blindfolded with her arms bound, surrounded by swords stuck point-down in the earth. That was good enough, and I quit.

The next day was a Wednesday, the last in October. It would be getting cold up north, but if I could back off the Anshiser crowd, I might be able to get my boat over to Vilas County, Wisconsin, for the November muskie rush. It's not that there's a rush of muskies; there's a rush of muskie fishermen, crowding in before ice-up. I decided to call Maggie the next day.