Page 30 - Three Adventures

Deflator Mouse

“All right, Doctor Beveledge; thank you for bringing this to my
attention. Now, can you delete this piece of communist propaganda
from the computer before the entire staff has seen it?”
“I’ve already purged it from the active file. That means it still
resides on last night’s back-up tape. I can’t alter that without putting
up a red flag for the auditors.”
Lampson’s bushy blonde eyebrows elevated. “You mean our own
bean-counters? We can take care of them.”
“No, no. I mean the federal bright boys from OMB and DOD.
They audit EDP as well as Accounting. The tail-end of all our
systems, where data is committed to official, production files, is
tamper-proof; it’s not like the White House basement. If this doesn’t
happen again, and nobody got here this morning before I did and
read the damned thing, then maybe it will get lost in the thousands of
memos generated by our top-heavy management team. I certainly
hope it does.”
Their common enemy enforced an uneasy truce between the white
coat and the black shirt. Beveledge, a scientific administrator, did not
like the military aspects of his job to intrude upon the academic hot-
house he carefully constructed around his precious garden of
intellectual flora. Lampson, a hard-boiled commando, did not like
relaxing discipline for the sake of a bunch of pampered eggheads.
Past clashes of crossed swords were, however, forgotten on this
occasion: Deflator Mouse could be the undoing of the entire project,
the precipitator of official disfavor and withdrawal of funding.
“But the front-end terminals, Doctor: aren’t they password-
protected?”
Beveledge reddened as he turned to pace back and forth in front of
Lampson’s desk. “Yes, of course. The last audit gave us a clean bill of
health on our logging procedures. We change passwords every two
weeks, and everyone knows they’re supposed to keep them secret.”
Lampson marched his eyebrow squad into a frown. “Then it was a
good thing we scared him out of using the Xerox anymore; it was too
anonymous even with our sophisticated surveillance. Now: who
logged on to send that message?”
“It was done under my log-on ID, with my password.”

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