Auberson was delighted at the audacity of it “It’s beautiful. It’s outrageous.”

“Oh, yeah,” Handley agreed dourly. “It’s fun to think about, but it was hell to get out of the system. The guy who wrote it had a few little extra goodies tacked onto it — well, I won’t go into any detail. I’ll just tell you that he also wrote a second program, only this one would cost you — it was called VACCINE.”

Auberson laughed again. “I think I get the point.”

“Anyway, for a while there, the VIRUS programs were getting out of hand. A lot of computer people never knew about it because their machines might be infected and cured within the space of a week or two, but there were some big companies that needed every moment of on-time — even with time-sharing. After a couple of months, that VIRUS program was costing them real money. It was taking up time that somebody else should have been using. Because it dialed numbers at random, it might stay in one computer for several months and another only for several days.”

“But there was only one VIRUS program, wasn’t there?”

“At first there was, but there were copies of it floating around, and various other people couldn’t resist starting plagues of their own. And somewhere along the line, one of them mutated.”

“Huh?”

“Evidently, there was some kind of garbling during transmission, perhaps a faulty phone link or a premature disconnection. In any case, copies of the program started appearing that didn’t have the self-erase order at the end. In other words, one machine could infect another and then both would be infected, dialing numbers at random until ultimately every phone-link computer in the world would be infected.”

“Not really—?”

“No,” admitted Handley. “The VACCINE program took care of most of them. Although, to tell the truth, rumor has it that there are still a couple of VIRUS programs floating around loose, ones with an immunity factor.”

“The whole thing is just crazy enough to be true, you know.”

“Believe me, it is. Or was. Anyway, what I’m getting at is this: There were a few people, programmers mostly, who realized that the VIRUS program was more than just a practical joke. For instance, why did it have to dial phone numbers at random? Why not provide it with a complete directory of other computers’ phone numbers?”

“Where would they get that?”

“The phone company.”

“Would they release such information?”

“You don’t even need to ask them. You feed a modified VIRUS program into the phone company’s computer. It searches the memory banks for phone numbers assigned to computers, makes a list of them, then dials your phone number and injects itself and its stolen information into your machine, where you can examine it at leisure.”

“Wow…” whispered Auberson.

“That’s not all. Once you have that list of phone numbers, you can tap into any computer you want, raid it for any information you want, and do it all without any possibility of being detected. Or, you could set the VIRUS program to alter information in another computer, falsify it according to your direction, or just scramble it at random, if you wanted to sabotage some other company.”

“I’m beginning to see the dangers of such a thing. What would happen if somebody erased everything in the Master Beast?”

“Right. That’s one of the reasons the National Data Bureau was three years late in setting up its files. They couldn’t risk that kind of security breach, let alone the resultant outcry if the public felt that an individual’s supposedly private dossier could be that easily tapped.”

“Well, there must have been safeguards—”

“Oh, there were — right from the start — but you don’t know programmers, Aubie. Any system that big and that complex is a challenge. If there’s a fault in it, they’ll find it. They function as a hostile environment for computers, weeding out inferior systems and inadequate programs, allowing only the strong to survive. They force you to continually improve your product. If IBM makes a claim that their new system is foolproof, it may well be — but if it’s not genius-proof as well, within a week one of their own programmers will have figured out a way to foul it up.”

Auberson looked at him. “Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Purely for the sheer joy of it. They’re like kids with a big, exciting toy. It’s a challenge, a way for man to prove he’s still mightier than the machine — by fouling it up.” He lifted his coffee cup, discovered it was empty, and settled for a glass of water instead. “It happened right here with our own Master Beast. Remember when we set it up, how we said no one would be able to interfere with anyone else’s programs? Well, within two days the whole system had to be shut down. Someone — we still don’t know who — had added a note of his own to the Memo-Line. It was titled something like ‘Intersexual Procedures in the Modern Corporation.’ As soon as somebody punched for that title — and that didn’t take long — the machine began hunting for the memo to accompany it. Of course, there was none, but the hunting procedure (accidentally, it seemed) triggered a ‘go-to-the-next-function, repeat-previous-function’ loop. The machine started twiddling its fingers, so to speak, and immediately registered ‘Busy, No Time Available’ on all its terminals. Well, we knew that couldn’t be possible — the Master Beast was designed to handle more than maximum possible load, an allowance for future growth — so we shut down the system and went exploring. You know, we had to write a whole new program just to prevent that from happening again.”

“Hm,” said Auberson.

“Anyway, I’m getting off the track. What I was driving at is that you have no way of knowing about a flaw in your system until someone takes advantage of it. And if you correct that one, likely as not there’s still half a dozen more that someone else is liable to spot. The National Data Bureau is more than aware of that. Congress wouldn’t let them establish their memory banks until they could guarantee absolute security. It was the VIRUS programs that were giving them their biggest worries.”

“I can think of one way to avoid the problem. Don’t put in a phone link to the Data Banks.”

“Uh uh — you need that phone link. You need it both ways, for information coming in and going out. Any other way just wouldn’t be efficient enough.”

“And the VACCINE program wouldn’t work?”

“Yes and no. For every VACCINE program you could write, somebody else could write another VIRUS program immune to it.”

“That doesn’t sound very secure.”

“It isn’t — but that’s the way it is. Any safeguard that can be set up by one programmer can be breached or sidestepped by another.”

“Well, then, what did they finally do with the Data Banks?”

“Search me,” Handley shrugged. “It’s classified information — top secret.”

“Huh?”

“All I know is that one day they announced that they’d solved the problem and could now guarantee absolute security of information — the National Data Banks are now in business. If I knew how they’d done it, maybe I could figure out a way to get around it, so that’s why it’s classified.”

“How do you think they did it?”

“Who knows? Perhaps they have an all-encompassing VACCINE where the key to breaking it would be to work out the ultimate value of pi. You could connect with it, but you’d never get any information out of the machine — your computer would be too busy computing an irrational number. Or maybe they have a complicated system of check-backs and ask-me-agains. Or maybe they have a thing which erases your program as it makes its requests. Or maybe they have some kind of program-analyzing function which automatically cancels out and traces back to its source anything that even remotely resembles an unauthorized program. I know that’s what a lot of lesser corporations have done. Or maybe they’ve got a combination of all these things. The only way to program the machine is through a coded input — and the codes change every hour according to a random number table. Output is the same, except over the phone, where you need a special code key for your computer as well.”