Doctor Who (7 page)

The cupboard contained one ordinary-looking black suit and one extraordinary coat, a patchwork of colours that made me think of the Pied Piper – “with a gipsy coat of red and yellow”. It wasn't a clown's coat, all ragged patchwork, but a garment of substance, well-made and hefty, a gentleman's coat that just happened to be a kaleidoscope of hippie hues. It would have kept out the worst of the DC cold, but must have stood out like a stained-glass window in the snow. I dipped a hand into the nearest pocket of the coat, hoping for some ID, and instead fished out a dog-eared
Roget's Thesaurus
.

The computer was an Apple II Plus. It looked like a big, flattened plastic typewriter with a miniature television set sitting on top of it. Two chunky metal boxes were stacked next to it, one on top of the other: twin drives for five-and-a-half-inch floppy disks. A flat blue cord connected the internal modem through a fist-sized black box to the phone socket.

‘You were expecting something more advanced.'

I jerked sideways, violently, at the unexpected voice, and fell over the bed. I found myself looking up at a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early forties, with an explosion of blonde curls like William Katt in
The Greatest American Hero
. He loomed, scrutinising me with blue eyes that managed to convey suspicion, humour and weariness all at once.

‘Mr Peters, I presume,' he said.

I hauled myself to my feet with some dignity still intact. ‘Guilty as charged.'

I'd had a mental picture of a cross between an Oxford professor and Sherlock Holmes, delicately sipping tea while he
lounged in a tweed jacket. This guy looked more like a boxer or a
film noir
gangster in his tailored black suit. How the hell had he got into the room without making any noise? He wore a rainbow-coloured tie printed with dozens of little cats, interlocked like figures in an Escher picture.

The Doctor bent slightly so our eyes were almost level. ‘Now, Mr Peters,' he said, looking down his long nose at me. ‘It was your decision to involve yourself in our doings, rather than the other way around. I would rather not have my concentration disturbed by a scribbler asking a lot of questions.' He spoke in a crisp English accent, with relish, as though just pronouncing words was a pleasure in itself.

‘I think I've got enough computer know-how under my belt to follow what you're doing.'

He gave me a curt nod and sat down at the writing desk. ‘Observe.' With a flourish, the Doctor typed ‘Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge my Vow'. The letters popped up on the screen, white on black. When I didn't seem impressed, he explained, ‘You oughtn't to be able to do that. Strictly upper-case only on this model.' He flipped open the lid of the machine. ‘But with a few jumper wires here, run to the 80-column card there, a replacement ROM chip courtesy of my friends at the Apple Pi users group . . . hey presto, eighty columns of mixed case!'

‘So,' I said. ‘Now it can do everything my typewriter can.'

‘Unlike your typewriter, Mr Peters,' said the Doctor dryly, ‘this is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Just look at this: 64K total address space for the processor chip. A mere scrap by the standards of those new-fangled IBM machines. How could this overmatched museum piece ever hope to compete?

‘But the makers knew. They set aside a few locations in the address space, and constructed it so that accessing those memory locations directly affected the hardware. Read from
this address here and – zap! – you swap your ROM space for an extra 12K of RAM. Read from this one over here, and – zap! – swap in a different 4K block. Read here, and – zap! – you've swapped in another bank and turned your 40-column display into an 80-column one. And fiddle with these locations, and you swap the whole blessed memory space, all those banks and sub-banks, and double your available RAM. One hundred twenty-eight kilobytes of memory for the taking.'

OK, this I was familiar with: the hacker's love songs for their machines. ‘It sounds like a lot of trouble to go to.'

‘Oh, it's hideously overcomplicated, compared to getting a 16-bit processor and just having vast acres of memory there at your command. But that's what makes it such a triumph. Anyone can do incredible things if they've got incredible resources. It takes an artist to make poetry out of bits of string and paper clips. Now, if only this heap of junk could connect at faster than 1200 baud.'

‘While we're waiting for it, can I ask you a few questions?'

‘You can ask,' pronounced the Doctor, without taking his eyes off the screen. I hesitated. ‘That's a little joke.'

‘How long have you known Miss Smith?'

‘Peri and I stumbled into one another's company some time ago,' he said absently. ‘Some months, at a guess. Though at times it definitely seems longer.'

The Doctor spread his hands on the beige plastic that flanked the keyboard, as though gathering his thoughts. Then he typed a short, sharp series of commands into the Apple, sat back, and hit ‘return'.

I heard the modem swing into action. But instead of connecting to another machine, it hung up after maybe six rings, and immediately started dialling again. ‘So exactly what are we up to here, Doc?' I said.

‘What
I
am attempting to do,' he said, ‘is to dial into the mainframe at the TLA building. My computer will continue to dial phone numbers until one of their computers answers.' He paused for emphasis. ‘Oh, and it's Doc.
Tor.
The second syllable is as precious as the first.'

We sat there for maybe a quarter of an hour, listening to the modem dial and dial again and again. The Doctor explained that his program was set up to call numbers that he knew were allocated to TLA's headquarters. Presumably he'd poked around in Ma Bell's computers for a few hints, although he might have guessed the range of numbers from their phone book listing.

At last the modem emitted a squeal of static, the sound of two computers shaking hands.

The Doctor's hands landed on the keyboard at a run. ‘I'm going to try a series of account names,' he said, ‘typically left behind by programmers as back doors into the system for testing.' He could type almost as fast as the modem could send data, so I was able to watch his attempts to break and enter as they piled up on the screen. Each time, he just hit ‘enter' instead of typing a password:

Login: guest

Password:

Username or password incorrect; please try again

Login: public

Password:

Username or password incorrect; please try again

Login: sys

Password:

Username or password incorrect; please try again

At last he sat back with a sharp sigh, and disconnected the modem. ‘It looks as though Swan has nailed shut the back doors into her system.'

‘So how are you going to get a real password?' I said.

‘With a little luck, I still won't need one. A friend of mine has set up a legitimate account for me. I can try to break into Swan's computer again from there.'

I watched as he logged in to the university's computer as doctor. ‘Now,' he said. ‘From here we use a program called telnet to jump to Swan's computer.'

telnet tla2 25

After a few moments, the TLA computer responded with a ready message.
¹
The Doctor's mouth lengthened into a smile. ‘You see?' he said. ‘The computer's not even asking us to log in. Port 25 is its email connection, and it has to be left open at all times.' He was lecturing me, despite his earlier claim that he didn't want to have to explain things. ‘Now, first we use the open port to send a message to ourselves.'

He typed rapidly, drumming his fingers on the pale plastic of the computer whenever he had to wait for the screen to catch up with him. Mail accepted, responded TLA's computer.
And sure enough, a short while later, the email arrived at the doctor account. The Doctor explained, ‘Now that the open port has seen us send a genuine email, it will assume anything else we do is also legitimate.' I nodded, not wanting to interrupt the flow of his genius. ‘And that includes sending an email which will convince the TLA computer to open up a new account for us. One with all the privileges we need.'

He typed in a series of Unix commands, adding a special twist to the address of his ‘message' so that the computer would be forced to execute those commands.

‘Now then; he said.

Login: jsmith

Password:

Ready

tla2#

We were in. The Doctor looked like the cat that had got the cream. ‘Swan may be security-conscious,' he said, ‘but even she hasn't patched every puncture in her mainframe.'

Before he did anything else, the Doctor located the files which kept a record of the ports and logins, and snipped out the lines showing our unauthorised arrival. Then he spent a leisurely half an hour poking around in the guts of the TLA mainframe. Normally each user is locked into their own section of the computer, like residents in an apartment building, each with the key to their own door alone. The Doctor had convinced the computer to hand him the master key to the building, an account with root privileges, just as powerful as Swan's own account. If he'd wanted to, he could have locked every user out of the computer, or have erased every file. A
mistyped command could have catastrophie consequences for the system. Watching a hacker at work was always like watching a tightrope walker.

‘You know, I'm rather enjoying myself,' the Doctor said. ‘I haven't played with technology this simple for a very long time. It's rather like discovering your old toys at the back of the cupboard. I'm not having much luck with these files.' He tapped a fingernail against the glass of the display. ‘I think it might be easier to read through some of Swan's email. Perhaps she's discussed what I need to know with some of her colleagues.'

Breaking and entering computers is still a grey area of the law. But the law aside, there was something a little itchy about reading other people's mail. But before the Doctor could start purloining any letters, we were suddenly and decisively kicked off the TLA system.

‘Someone's noticed us,' said the Doctor.

I had spent a few minutes in a half-panic, expecting the police to descend on the hotel room. When someone knocked at the door, I just about dived under the bed. But it was room service, with a three-course meal and a bottle of champagne.

The Doctor knew that whoever had slammed the door in our face had no way of telling which direction we'd come from. So we did it all again: another genuine email message followed by a, uh, doctored one. The Doctor typed with one hand while he sampled his dinner with the other. I cracked open the champagne and had a badly needed half-glass. The system opened up to us again in less than five minutes. ‘It will take them days to puzzle out how we're getting in.' This time his username was jeoffrey. ‘For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command,' non-explained the Doctor.

He used the who command to see who else was online at
TLA. ‘Sarah Swan herself,' he said. ‘Undoubtedly it was she who invited us to leave.'

‘How long before she notices we're back?'

‘No time at all,' said the Doctor, already sitting forward in his seat and tapping intensely at the keys. ‘So, turn about being fair play, I'm going to log her out before she can do the same to us. There.' A few more commands, and the Doctor's bit of magic was running in the background – a time bomb quietly ticking. While she puzzles over that, I'm going to download a copy of all her email. Then we can read it at our leisure.'

I've sat and watched a lot of hackers at work. Whether driven by curiosity or greed – or a little bit of each – they all treat their ‘hobby' as a game. Hackers match wits with systems and system operators, dumb and smart. They pit their skills and know-how – and more often, their sheer bloody-minded determination – against the people who want to keep them out of their chosen playground.

The Doctor treated his hacking mission just the same way. He reminded me of the enthusiastic kids in my high-school chess club, taking a piece with a twist of the wrist, a clack of colliding wood, and a triumphant quip. The difference was that he gave me the overwhelming impression that this
was
just a game. Nothing as sophisticated as chess: more like an adult stooping to sit in the dirt and flick marbles with a pre-schooler. More like a human being deigning to throw a tennis ball again and again for a dog.

My guess is that the Doctor spends most of his time with computers far superior to the humble Apple II – presumably the multi-million-dollar mainframes that hackers itch to have illicit access to. And yet, I can't help but feel that if the Doctor were confronted with the latest Cray supercomputer, it would just be another half-chewed tennis ball to him.

When Swan saw that her intruder was back again, she slammed her coffee down on her desk and grabbed for the log files. She must have managed to back them up before the Doctor could erase our fingerprints, because her next step was to try to break into the university's computer. Swan was not the sort to waste time reporting burglars to system administrators who knew less about their machines than she did. Besides, to be fair, it was unlikely anyone would be in the office at that hour.

If there
had
been anyone in the office, of course, it would have been Bob Salmon. It was Bob's account Swan wanted – although she still had no idea he was the man who'd delivered her a Lisp Machine just the day before. She simply wanted the abilities of his root account so that she could find out who was sniffing around her mainframe.

Swan was halfway through a series of guesses at Bob's password when the system slowed to a crawl, and then abruptly and rudely tossed her out.

She let fly with a series of curses that would have made the Ayatollah blush, and immediately tried to log back in. The mainframe let her in for a moment – and then logged her right back out again. After trying this three times, and having the door slammed in her face each time by her own machine, Swan was ready to commit mayhem.