Jack Ryan, Books 7-12 by Tom Clancy Page B

the right selection. Alpha and Beta were doing their normal work, and could not be disturbed.
    “You’re up on Zulu, Chuck.”
    “Roger that,” Chuck replied with a smile. The pinstriped engineer slid the cartridge into the slot and waited for the proper icon to appear on the screen. He clicked on it, opening a new window to reveal the contents of PORTA-1, his name for the cartridge.
    The new window had only two items in it: INSTALLER and ELECTRA-CLERK-2.4.0. An automatic antivirus program immediately swept through the new files, and after five seconds pronounced them clean.
    “Looking good, Chuck,” the sys-con told him. His supervisor nodded concurrence.
    “Well, gee, Rick, can I deliver the baby now?”
    “Hit it.”
    Chuck Searls selected the INSTALL icon and double-clicked it.
    ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO REPLACE “ELECTRA-CLERK
2.3.1” WITH NEW PROGRAM ”ELECTRA-CLERK 2.4.0”?
    a box asked him. Searls clicked the “YES” box.
    ARE YOU REALLY sure????
    another box asked immediately.
    “Who put that in?”
    “I did,” the sys-con answered with a grin.
    “Funny.” Searls clicked YES again.
    The toaster drive started humming. Searls liked systems that you could hear as they ran, the whip-whip sounds of the moving heads added to the whir of the rotating disk. The program was only fifty megabytes. The transfer took fewer seconds than were needed for him to open his bottle of spring water and take a sip.
    “Well,” Searls asked as he slid his chair back from the console, “you want to see if it works?”
    He turned to look out. The computer room was walled in with glass panels, but beyond them he could see New York Harbor. A cruise liner was heading out; medium size, painted white. Heading where? he wondered. Someplace warm, with white sand and blue skies and a nice bright sun all the time. Someplace a hell of a lot different from New York City, he was sure of that. Nobody took a cruise to a place like the Big Apple. How nice to be on that ship, heading away from the blustery winds of fall. How much nicer still not to return on it, Searls thought with a wistful smile. Well, airplanes were faster, and you didn’t have to ride them back either.
    The sys-con, working on his control console, brought Zulu on-line. At 16:10:00 EST, the backup machine started duplicating the jobs being done by Alpha, and simultaneously backed up by Beta. With one difference. The throughput monitor showed that Zulu was running slightly faster. On a day like this, Zulu normally tended to fall behind, but now it was running so fast that the machine was actually “resting” for a few seconds each minute.
    “Smokin’, Chuck!” the sys-con observed. Searls drained his water bottle, dropped it in the nearest trash bucket, and walked over.
    “Yeah, I cut out about ten thousand lines of code. It wasn’t the machines, it was the program. It just took us a while to figure the right paths through the boards. I think we have it now.”
    “What’s different?” the senior controller asked. He knew quite a bit about software design.
    “I changed the hierarchy system, how it hands things off from one parallel board to another. Still needs a little work on synchronicity, tally isn’t as fast as posting. I think I can beat that in another month or two, cut some fat out of the front end.”
    The sys-con punched a command for the first benchmark test. It came up at once. “Six percent faster than two-point-three-point-one. Not too shabby.”
    “We needed that six percent,” the supervisor said, meaning that he needed more. Trades just ran too heavy sometimes, and like everyone in the Depository Trust Company, he lived in fear of falling behind.
    “Send me some data at the end of the week and maybe I can deliver a few more points to you,” Searls promised.
    “Good job, Chuck.”
    “Thanks, Bud.”
    “Who else uses this?”
    “This version? Nobody. A custom variation runs the machines over at CHIPS.”
    “Well, you’re the man,”