“Who’s Charlie Bowen?” Danny asked.
“Someone Wiz used to work with at Seer Software,” Jerry told him, abstractedly. “Another programmer.”
“A real hotshot, huh?”
“No, that’s the funny thing. He was a lousy programmer. He wrote their accounts payable routine and he made a royal mess of it. The module kept fouling up assigning purchase order numbers, choking on invoices and if there was the least little problem in the paperwork, it kicked the thing out and it had to be processed manually. It was taking Seer Software six or eight months to pay even a simple bill and they kept having to explain to everyone it was the software’s fault.”
Danny took a swig of tea. “So did they fire him?”
“That’s the other funny thing,” Jerry said. “They promoted him.”
Just then Moira came dashing into the room, face flushed and flour up to her elbows. “You’ve heard from Wiz!” she panted.
Jerry gestured to the message on the screen. She craned forward to read it over Jerry’s shoulder. As she read her face fell and then she started to frown, deeper and deeper as she read along. By the time she reached the bottom she was scowling.
“There is something very wrong here. Why didn’t he tell us where he is?”
Jerry shrugged. “He said he didn’t want us to know.”
“He also said he did not want us to worry,” Moira said grimly. “Those are mutually exclusive and he knows that.”
“Then maybe,” Danny said slowly, “he can’t tell us.”
Jerry frowned. “You mean he doesn’t know where he is? That’s crazy. Wiz’s magic could tell him in an instant.”
“So maybe he knows and can’t tell us,” Danny said, groping.
“A geas!” Moira exclaimed. “Of course! He cannot tell us because he is magically forbidden to do so.”
“He doesn’t sound like anything is stopping him,” Jerry objected. “It sounds more like he’s being secretive of his own free will.”
“That is the problem with a geas,” Moira told him. “You do not necessarily know you are under it. Everything seems normal to you and you think you have the best reasons in the world for doing what you do, no matter how badly you want to do the opposite.”
Jerry rubbed his chin. “Well, it sure fits with Wiz’s behavior. He wants to tell us, so he contacts us. But he can’t so he comes in through the net and then won’t say where he is.”
“Is there any way to trace him?” the hedge witch asked. She gestured at the message header. “Wiz told me once that gives the location of the sender.”
“Normally it does,” Jerry said. “But take a look at it.”
Danny frowned as he ran his finger along the line. The further he went, the deeper his frown became. “That can’t be natural,” he said at last.
“It isn’t! That isn’t a routing path, it’s a shaggy dog story.”
“Meaning what?” Moira demanded.
“Meaning he deliberately set up this routing to be as difficult and obscure as he could make it,” Danny said before Jerry could answer. “See, normally a message is routed automatically by the most efficient path-given the location of the source, location of the destination, topology of the net and the amount of traffic. But you can force the route by using bang paths.”
Moira didn’t understand much of that, but she was game. “Bang paths?”
“Yeah. Site names separated by bangs.” He pointed to an exclamation point between two names. “That’s a bang.” He studied the list for an instant and pointed at one sequence. “Here he’s going from a U.S. site belonging to a Danish industrial concern to the Los Lobos League for Love and Understanding, the sex researchers. So that part of the path is bang!llulu.”
Jerry groaned. “I wonder how long he searched to come up with that one?”
Moira glared at him for the distraction.
“Anyway,” Danny went on hastily, “I don’t recognize all these site names but from the looks of it this message traveled a couple of times around the planet. Here’s a site in Ukraine. That one’s in the science city just outside of Tokyo. This one is the Coke machine at Rochester Institute of Technology-they put the Coke machine on the Internet so the computer science majors could find out if there were any sodas in the machine without having to walk all the way to it.”
“Personally I always preferred the one at Carnegie-Mellon,” Jerry said.
“It’s the original and it’s got a graphical user interface.”
Moira wasn’t about to let the conversation wander off into a comparison of computerized vending machines. “Well, can you trace him or not?”
Jerry rubbed his chin. “That’s hard. See, the path shown on a message isn’t completely reliable. You can fake some of it. It’s going to be hard to figure out where he’s connecting to the net, much less where he is in our world.”
“Maybe not,” Danny said. “If we can rig up a little perl script and plant it on all these sites we may be able to trace him back to where he’s really connecting.”
Moira’s face lit up. “Can you do that?”
“Well, we’re going to have to get into a pile of computers, including that Coke machine, but . . .” His eyes focused on something far away. “Let me think about this and see what I can come up with. But we should be able to do it.”
“And then?” Jerry asked.
“Then,” said Moira grimly, “we go to his rescue whether he wants it or not.”