The Fool's Run

gives the story cachet. They’ll be interested, because it’s the kind of thing they expect to find in a newsletter. Then the next day, we send along copies of the letters to the papers’ defense specialist writers.”
    “Think that will break it out?”
    “I think so. It won’t be the biggest story of the year, but it will be a nice one. The front pages of the Post, probably a good inside spot in the Times.”
    “After we get that going,” Maggie said, “we should get in touch with the business magazines about the problems they’re having meeting the Hellwolf schedules. That will have a nasty effect on their stock prices.”
     
    DACE AND LUELLEN usually went out at night, and often spent the night at his apartment. I worked evenings. Maggie talked with Chicago or worked with the other computer terminal, via telephone, with her Chicago office. One night, simultaneously overcome with office fatigue and horniness, we staggered into our bedroom, pulling off clothes, and fell on the bed in a frenzy. Afterward, Maggie showered and dropped into the bed, naked, and was instantly asleep.
    The next morning, I woke first, yawned, slid out of bed, and half-opened the narrow venetian blinds that covered the bedroom window. Light flooded across the bed, illuminating the long valley of her spine and the turn of her hip and shoulders. Her face was turned away, her blond hair spread over the pillow. She was still sleeping soundly. I looked at her a moment, then tiptoed out and got the big pad of parchment paper I use for sketching. When she woke, I’d done a half dozen preliminaries.
    “What are you doing?” she said sleepily.
    “Drawing.”
    She was suddenly awake, alarmed. “Let me see those.” She crawled across the bed and I showed her the pad. She looked at the drawings, and lay back. “Can’t see my face,” she said.
    “I can always put it in,” I joked.
    “Just what I need. A nude picture of myself hanging over the bar. What are you going to do with them?”
    “Probably do a painting—if I can convince you to lie in the light for a few mornings, so I can get your skin.”
    “I don’t know; I’d feel silly. I’m no model,” she said, and seemed genuinely shy.
    That afternoon, by chance, I saw an old-fashioned red-white-and-blue-checked comforter in a shop window, and went in and bought it. Dace and LuEllen were gone again the next morning, and I got her to lie on it, nude, face down, her head turned away, the light streaming in over her shoulders and butt. I spent an hour doing color studies before she put a stop to it.
    “How much do models get paid?” she asked.
    “Depends on how good they are,” I said. “Anything between nine and fifteen dollars an hour.”
    “You owe me fifteen bucks,” she said, pulling up her underpants.
    “‘Fraid not. You’re awful. Five bucks at the most. You kept scratching your back, and you’d move around on that checked background. Drove me nuts.”
    “Awful, huh? So it’s not a fallback if I get fired?”
     
    DACE SAW THE beginnings of the painting that afternoon and whistled.
    “Nice ass, huh?” Maggie said.
    “Nice painting,” he said seriously.
    Maggie looked at me as if she had never seen me before.

    THE CHANGES I sneaked into the Whitemark computers were worked out on editing programs at the apartment. I wrote the code on our machines, tested it, developed the sequence for inserting it at Whitemark, and put it in. I was on-line with Whitemark for only a few minutes—sometimes a matter of seconds.
    As the work progressed I drifted into the traditional programming schedule. The programming and debugging were done at night, and I slept late. Once I even ordered out for a pizza with everything, the only official programmer food.
    The attack programs were inserted into the Whitemark software during the heavy computer-working hours in the morning, when we’d be less likely to be noticed.
    In the afternoons, I’d paint. I’d never worked in Washington, but it was an exceptional place, with its heavy subtropical flora, the water, the varied stone and brick buildings going back two hundred years. The light was almost Italianate, but bluer and clearer. When I went out to paint, often along the Mall, Maggie would come along, bring a book and a blanket, and lie in the sun and read and doze.
    Dace and LuEllen were making plans for Mexico. With the burglaries done, LuEllen had almost nothing to do, and spent the days touring Washington. Scouting