"That's useful," Winters said. "We'll see how useful in a while." He looked up at Catie again. "But the most important thing. He didn't give you any sense that there's anyone on his team who's been involved with this?"

  "Not at all."

  There was a long silence. "All right," Winters said. "We'll have to take it that way for the moment." He sat back, folding his arms.

  "I should say," Catie said, "that I'm sorry."

  There was a long silence, one that froze her heart. "Yes," Winters said. "You should."

  Catie swallowed.

  "A question, though...I would have thought," Winters said, "that it was mostly the imagery end of things that you would have been looking at."

  "I thought so, too," Catie said. "That's how I started. But it all looked just as it was supposed to. And once I got started, I--"

  "Couldn't let it go," Winters said in unison with Catie.

  She fell silent again.

  "Yes," he said. "It's a familiar theme. I have about ten thousand coworkers with the same problem. It has its place. But that urge has to be controlled, that stubbornness, and used wisely, used responsibly." He frowned. "Catie, you overstepped the mark. And more, you may even have manipulated Mark into letting you do it."

  "I manipulated--?" she started to say, and then stopped herself. If anyone was doing the manipulating, she thought, it was that little Squirt of a Gridley! But that probably wouldn't have been a tactically advantageous thing to say at this point, even if she could have worked up the nerve.

  "Which takes some doing, it has to be admitted," Winters said, in a less annoyed tone of voice. "Mark's precocity tends to blind people to his own weaknesses...of which he has a few. But we'll leave that to one side for the moment. The problem right now is to work out what to do with the information you've found. May I use your system to make a couple of calls?"

  "Please feel free. Space?"

  "Just waiting for you to tell me what to do, boss."

  She saw Winters's eyebrows go up. "Please make Mr. Winters a privacy space, and connect to whatever address he asks you for."

  "Done."

  The air around where Winters was sitting went opaque in the swirling blue pattern that Catie had designed for her mother's "hold" function. For about five minutes she sat there and castigated herself for rampant stupidity, while the blue smoke swirled. Finally it evaporated, and Winters walked out through the blue smokescreen. "Thanks, Catie."

  "You can kill that, Space," Catie said.

  "Yes, O Mistress of All Reality." The smoke vanished.

  Catie scowled, furious. Winters looked startled, and then suddenly started laughing, and didn't stop for some seconds. Catie lost her anger, while at the same time wondering whether she was off the hook.

  "This is what you get for letting Mark Gridley near your machinery," James Winters said, when he finally found his breath again. "I wish you luck getting rid of the 'improvements.'"

  "I can see where I'm going to need it," Catie said.

  Winters looked around him. "You'll forgive me, I hope, if I leave without taking this discussion much further. I have a lot to do.... We've got to independently verify what you found in such a way that it can be salvaged as evidence. I may disagree with your methods, but I'm thankful for your findings, you know."

  "I understand. I'm sorry I caused you trouble."

  "I accept the apology," Winters said. "But, by the way...I quote, 'What do we do now?'..."

  Catie stood silent again, completely nonplussed.

  Winters smiled again...a small, dry smile that was nonetheless a great relief to Catie. "The attitude," he said, "is possibly an augury of things to come. We'll see how you shape up. Talented image wranglers are valuable, yes. And they're a dime a dozen. But what we can always use are people who're willing to stretch outside their specialty and take a risk because they just can't let the job at hand alone, when they know it has to be done."

  Then the smile flashed out fully. "And between you and me," James Winters said, "we can always use people who are followed around by plain dumb luck. There's never enough of that to go around...though by itself, it's fairly useless. Even the best bullet needs a gun barrel around it."

  Catie nodded.

  "Time to get to work," Winters said. "With any kind of luck, someone's knocking on Karen de Beer's door right now, and some of my people are going to be wanting to talk to me shortly."

  "Oh, no...!" Catie said.

  "It's all right," Winters said. "She won't be home. What, did you think we were going to sit around and allow her to be intimidated? That the guy shows up is going to be enough for us to act on. George Brickner will certainly testify, later, that he knew about it beforehand. Meanwhile I have other things to do. That server is going to have to be debugged so that the play-offs can go ahead, while still preserving the contaminated version of the code. We've got our work cut out for us, and not a lot of time to get everything done. If in fact it can be done in time at all. Frankly, I have my doubts."

  He looked at Catie keenly. "But a question for you before I go. Identify the famous graphic artist responsible for this quote: 'There is hope in honest error...none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist.'"

  "Uh," Catie said, and then closed her mouth again, becoming suddenly aware that this was not intended merely as a quote.

  Winters held up his index finger. "One honest error," he said. "All my people know I'll allow them that much. Twice, and you get really yelled at. Make a note."

  "Noted," Catie said, in a somewhat strangled voice.

  "Thanks, Catie," James Winters said, turned, went hurriedly through the door that opened for him in the middle of the Great Hall, and vanished.

  Catie got out of her space, and out of virtuality, and let Hal have the machine without even arguing about it, and went on down to her room and just sat there for a while, with the door shut, feeling terrible. I can't believe how completely I've screwed everything up! Yet as a little time passed, and she started to recover from the shock of what had just happened, Catie was forced to admit to herself that the screw up hadn't been total. Winters had actually been slightly pleased with her...which, frankly, was a better outcome than she had hoped for. It wasn't that the bouquet he'd handed her hadn't mostly been thorns, but they were ones that she deserved, and the two or three rather shredded blossoms concealed among them were, Catie supposed, worth it in the end.

  She came out of hiding after three-quarters of an hour or so, to find her brother still using the Net machine in the family room. Catie knew she was going to have to talk to George Brickner shortly, but she wasn't in any hurry about it. She wanted to make sure her composure was back in place. She rooted around in the fridge briefly, came up with a couple of chicken breasts, and made herself a fast meal that was a favorite of her mother's: the chicken breasts sauteed with butter and a chopped-up onion, and the whole business "deglazed" with balsamic vinegar. In the middle of her cooking, Hal came out of the family room looking slightly glazed himself.

  "You seen the news lately?" he said.

  Catie shook her head. "I've been busy."

  "You'd better go have a look at it."

  "Huh? Why?"

  "The sports news. Take my word for it."

  "What?"

  Hal just shook his head. "I'll watch this for you. Go take a look."

  She blinked at that, for it was usually hard to stop Hal from giving you a nearly word-by-word narration of whatever news he'd heard recently, whether you wanted to hear it or not. Catie handed Hal the spatula with which she had been stirring the sauce around while it boiled down, and went in to sit down in the implant chair again.

  Once into the Great Hall, she said, "Space?"

  "I told him everything," her workspace manager said. "If you leave now, you may still have time to get out of the country before they seal the borders."

  "Thanks loads. CNNSI, please. Sports headlines, rolling. Latest."

  A moment later the effusive young guy with the wild hairstyle who was doing afternoon and evening news on CNNSI lately was standing behind a desk in front of Catie. "--In an unusual move apparently made for operational reasons, the International Spatball Federation has changed its scheduling for this year's spatball play-offs." Behind the anchor, the "background" showed an impressive-looking lineup of implant chairs and very high-end Net boxes and terminals. "The management of Manchester United High announced today that software trouble at their newly installed, multimillion-pound Professional Play Center at Anfield has made it impossible for them to meet the originally scheduled play date of this Thursday. Since the ISF was informed within the mandated twelve-hour emergency notification limit, the team will not forfeit its match with the Chicago Fire. That match has been rescheduled to Saturday, and the Saturday match between the South Florida Spat Association and Xamax Zurich has been moved to Thursday evening by agreement with those two teams."

  "Oh, no," Catie said softly. They'll never be ready in time.

  Worse. The server will never be debugged in time!

  The game is going to have to go ahead...and the people who wanted to ruin the Banana Slugs' chances to win are going to do just that--

  She came back to herself to hear the sportscaster saying, "--this is the third major software failure in two months to assail the new installation at Anfield, which has been dogged from inception to installation by cost overruns and then by hardware glitches, as well as by problems with the new MaximumVolume software and operating system which was developed for Manchester. The first two failures of the system, late in the 'scheduled' season, caused one forfeit and one loss due to the failure of center forward Alan Bellingham's custom player suite during the third half of United's crucial preplay-off game with Tokyo Juuban and Ottawa. Manchester United shareholders have once again called for an independent inquiry into the team's dealings with sports-simming software giant Camond, the president of the shareholders' association once again asserting that--"

  Catie sat there in unbelieving dismay, her dinner forgotten. "Space..."

  "I was only following orders."

  "Yeah, right. Is George Brickner available?"

  "Trying his space for you now."

  There was a brief pause. "Who's there?"

  "It's Catie."

  "Oh." Another pause. "Just a minute."

  It was more like a couple of minutes. She waited. When he walked into her space, George took one look at the shocked expression on her face, and paused, and then he just nodded. "You heard."

  "Yeah."

  He sat down in the chair which had been left there for James Winters. She plopped down in the Comfy Chair, but for once it brought her little comfort. "You talked to James Winters...."

  "Among various other people," George said, rubbing his face, "yes." He looked very tired.

  Catie knew how he felt, all of a sudden. "George, why did you do it?"

  "Agree to change the schedule, you mean? Because the ISF asked us to. And we didn't have a good reason to say no."

  "But you did! If you--"

  "Catie," George said, "if we refused to allow the change in schedule--and it was a perfectly reasonable request on the ISF's part--you know what would happen. People would have started asking questions. Why were we so reluctant? What was going on? And soon enough, someone would have found out. Or else one of the people involved with what was done to the ISF spat-volume server would have started to suspect something...and they would all have folded their little operation up and gone into hiding. After all this trouble, nothing would be solved."

  It was her own argument, twisted into a horrible shape that she had never imagined, and it stunned Catie into silence. George was quiet for a few moments, too.

  "You think I don't know what you're thinking?" George said. "Believe me, I feel the same way. It would have been great to get in there and have a chance at winning this tournament, to do a thing that would make spat-ball history. Even a chance of making it to the semifinals--that would have been something to tell our grandchildren about. But if we don't stop what's happening to spat, stop it right now, there'll be no sport to tell our grandchildren about.... Not one worth playing, anyway." He swallowed. "Sports is about making sacrifices, sometimes. This is one of those times. The team agrees with me."

  "Do they know...?"

  He looked at her. "They know enough," George said. "The Net Force people have been in to check their machines. They've been sabotaged, Catie. We can't touch that, either. We can't change anything. If we do, the people behind the sabotage will know, and they'll go to ground somewhere. And who knows, maybe we'll win...but the sport will lose. And all the people like us who play it for joy, they'll lose, too."

  Catie looked at George with an ache in her middle that she couldn't have described in any words. "It's bad enough that you're so good-looking," Catie said after a while, maybe more bitterly than she intended, "but do you have to be a hero, too? It's just not fair."

  "Things aren't usually," George said. "But there's no harm in trying to make them fair for the next guy along."

  Catie could think of no reply to that.

  "It's not going to be so bad," George said.

  "Yes, it is," said Catie.

  George's face twisted into a pained shape Catie didn't particularly like to see on it. "All right," he said, "yes! It is! But we can't let that stop us. We're going to give them a fight like they've never seen before. We're going to show the people who put the fix in that the only way to stop us is to fix the game in ways that have never been seen before...and even if we lose, we're going to play like no one's ever seen a spat team play before. We're going to play so well that everyone who sees the game we're about to lose will shake their heads and wonder what the heck went wrong. Then when they see Chicago play at the weekend, those same people are going to shake their heads and say, 'They should never have made it this far. Someone must have been cheating the system somehow.' And that's the best way for us to respond, the only way that also helps Net Force do what it needs to do about this situation. I don't like it much. It's not at all the ending for this season that I dreamed of. The team doesn't like it much, either. It doesn't match their dreams. But we're not going to go quietly. I promise you that!"

  They both sat quiet for a few moments, looking in different directions. Then George looked over at the chess-board. "I see you've got me in a knight fork," he said.

  "I've had you there for three moves," Catie said.

  "You gonna do anything about it?"

  "I've started doing something about it," Catie said. "Your bishop."

  "I'm not worried about that," George said, and gave her a superior look. "Not after the way you threw that last knight away. Anyway, I'm going to take your queen in three moves."

  "No, you're not," Catie said.

  "Yes, I am," George said.

  "You can't. There's no way--" Catie got up and stalked over to the chessboard, glad of an excuse not to have to look at George. She was upset; upset at the unfairness of life, which was about to cheat this guy and his friends of a victory that they deserved. And she hated to have people see her when she was upset.

  "There," she said, and picked up one of her bishops and moved it. The window hanging in the air with the notation of the game changed itself to reflect the move.

  George got up and wandered over to the chessboard, looking over Catie's shoulder at the board's center area. "Getting messy in there," he said.

  "Not nearly as messy as some places," Catie said, heart-sore. In her mind all she could see was that great piled-up tangle of code in the ISF server, intricate, complex, and rotten at its core.

  George was silent for a moment. "Catie," he said. "You did the best you could. It's out of our hands now--your hands and mine. All we can do now is play the game through to the end, and try to do it with some dignity. And in the meantime...I appreciate that you were trying to help. I really do."

  Catie nodded. "Do you have a move?" she said.

  He looked at the board one more time. "Not tonight," he said. "I'll have a couple for you tomorrow, before we go off to practice. And then one more later."

  "All right," she said.

  George went back to his doorway, went through it, vanished. Catie didn't turn to watch him go, just looked at the bishop she had moved, and found herself suddenly wishing that the game she had so much been looking forward to would never happen at all.

  The last contact between them before the game, on Wednesday night, was made over a voice-only line. They would not now speak again until after the game on Thursday.

  "...The neighbors said she left early to pick up her daughter at school," Darjan said, "and she didn't come back. She went off to hide somewhere, apparently. She hasn't come back yet."

  "You going to let her get away with that?"

  Darjan laughed. "It's not vital. There are four other people being worked on in other cities. We've got other fish to fry, anyway. When they changed the schedule, everybody had to scurry to make sure that the mirror was working right. There'll be some people pleased, anyway. The Slugs'll be out of the running that much faster. How about your end of things? All the South Florida players' servers taken care of?"

  "All handled now."

  "Fine. Let's go over all the other arrangements one last time."

  Heming laughed. "Always the perfectionist, huh, Armin?"

  "Always," Darjan said. "Just call me fond of keeping my skin in one piece."

  "They don't pay you enough for the amount you worry," Heming said.

  "No," said Darjan, "they don't. Let's start at the top...."

  Chapter 8.

  Despite Catie's preferences, Thursday eventually came. The game was scheduled for nine P.M. Eastern time, and Catie went to her mom and dad to make sure that both the Net machines in the house were going to be available for her and Hal. But her mother and father already knew about the scheduling, and seemed surprised that she was bothering to ask.

  "With all the coverage there's been about this in the last couple of days, honey," her mother said, "you know we wouldn't deprive you!" She was unloading another pile of books onto the kitchen table, this batch, from the looks of it, was heavy on the classics again, but mostly sixteenth-and seventeenth-century French literature.