Page 103 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Cat’s Paw

contained. Hmm. Curious. I started displaying directories, looking for
anything unexpectedly large. It was the spreadsheets. More than a
megabyte out of line. Why? I loaded one at random and stared at it.
Empty cells take up no space at all; they’re only displayed by the
program as theoretical matricial intersections, ready to be filled in
with variables or algorithms. A small spreadsheet, such as most of
Lesley’s, with data in fewer than a hundred cells, actually occupies
very little storage space; the user can scroll down or across dozens of
rows or columns and the program will show what looks like empty
cells, all taking up no space on the disk because they don’t really exist.
But an empty variable cell is indistinguishable from a cell containing
an algorithm—which doesn’t show on the screen until it is invoked
by a specific key command.
I picked an empty cell way down into the spreadsheet, one which
should have been empty, and looked to see if it concealed an
algorithm. Lo and behold, it had one. And it looked like garbage, a
meaningless character string. I tried another; same result. And that
explained the huge storage requirement for Art Lesley’s spreadsheets:
he had hidden something in plain sight, visible only on demand. He
had, in fact, enough excess in that subdirectory to contain a book,
transformed into cipher and fragmented into a thousand tiny pieces,
each lurking in its own little cell of a multipart honeycomb. Eureka!
From there it was simple. I went through all his BASIC programs
until I found the encrypt/decrypt pair; he shouldn’t have left them
on the hard disk. I ran the decode program, and in ten minutes I had
the missing manuscript on five text files. From there I loaded them
and the encrypt/decrypt programs onto a diskette and scratched the
hard disk versions. My watch said it was almost seven o’clock. Time
to pack it in and claim my reward, I gloated. But first I wanted to take
a look at Lesley’s mysterious book on home security systems. Maybe
I could spot the classified secrets. I began scrolling through the first
file. It was not what I had expected:

HOW TO KILL YOURSELF
AND MAKE IT LOOK LIKE AN ACCIDENT

by Art Lesley

102