Password To The Morgue

With Son of RAM captured and Hannibal Spectre nowhere to be found, I had as little to do as the Nortel workers who soon will be laid off, once the $9 billion acquisition of Bay Networks is completed.

I was investigating the best way to mix Old Token Ring Bourbon with coffee, trying to find a ratio that would blend as well as Omni Communications' new technology for mixing voice and data traffic over ATM, to be announced next week.

Then, into my office walked Milo Megahertz, a fast-talking 8-bit monkey for ThunderThud Networking. Milo was as two-faced as a dual-boot PC, as slippery as a buttered Ethernet cable and as fast as the new wireless transmission system that WaveSpan plans to unveil next week that can send data at 10 Mbps up to five miles over the 5.8-gigahertz unlicensed band.

"What do you want from me, Milo?" I asked, groaning.

"Now, Case, is that a nice way to talk to me? I've done plenty of things for you. Maybe I'm here to pass along some information. For instance, did you know that Seagate Software is thinking about buying HighGround Systems?"

"That's swell of you, Milo, passing along that information. I should never have thought so harshly of you," I grinned.

"Well, um, actually, I do need a little favor, Case, ol' buddy, ol' pal. I lost the password to my E-mail account and I need it to finish my very important secret project."

"Forget it, Milo, I'm not your help desk."

"I'll pay." The sum he offered wasn't much larger than a micropayment. On the other hand, my bank account was as empty as a PDP-10 user group meeting, so I couldn't afford to turn down a job.

"All right, I'll do it," I said.

"Great!" Milo enthused. "Here's the deal: I'm pretty sure that I wrote the password on the cover of the manual of my old 2400-baud Hayes modem. All you have to do is go to my house, find the manual and that's it. I'd do it myself but I'm awfully busy on this top-secret important project."

Milo lived in a nondescript two-bedroom bungalow. It was a mess--dirty laundry, dirty dishes, empty pizza boxes, cables and the burned-out husks of disk drives, modems and routers. It was worse than Milo's usual slovenliness--it looked like the place had been trashed. I figured the best place to start looking for the manual was in Milo's home office.

Milo's office wasn't empty. There was a man inside, dressed in black trousers, black sneakers, a black sweater and black ski mask. He looked as surprised to see me as I was to see him, and he turned his big, black gun on me.

To get out of this one, I knew that I needed to talk fast--as fast as Charles F "Rick" Rule, a former Justice Department antitrust chief, under President Reagan, who's now legal advisor to Microsoft and who will do some pretrial spin-doctoring at a press conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C.