It was maddening. The frustration was unbearable. Each time they had Deszip just within their grasp, it slipped away and disappeared. Yet each time they lost their grip, it only deepened their desire to capture the elusive prize. Deszip was fast becoming an all-consuming obsession for Phoenix and Electron. Their one last hope was the second copy of the encrypted Dartmouth Deszip file they had given to Gandalf, but that hope did not burn brightly. After all, if the Australians' copy had been deleted, there was every likelihood that the Brit's copy had suffered the same fate. Gandalf's copy hadn't been stored on his own computer. He had put it on some dark corner of a machine in Britain. Electron and Phoenix logged onto Altos and waited for Pad or Gandalf to show up. Phoenix typed .s for a list of who was on-line. He saw that Pad was logged on: No Chan User 0 Guest 1 Phoenix 2 Pad Guest 0 was Electron. He usually logged on as Guest, partly because he was so paranoid about being busted and because he believed operators monitored his connections if they knew it was Electron logging in. They seemed to take great joy in sniffing the password to his own account on Altos. Then, when he had logged off, they logged in and changed his password so he couldn't get back under the name Electron. Nothing was more annoying. Phoenix typed, `Hey, Pad. How's it going?' Pad wrote back, `Feeny! Heya.' `Do you and Gand still have that encrypted copy of Deszip we gave you a few months ago?' `Encrypted copy ... hmm. Thinking.' Pad paused. He and Gandalf hacked dozens of computer systems regularly. Sometimes it was difficult to recall just where they had stored things. `Yeah, I know what you mean. I don't know. It was on a system on JANET,' Pad said. Britain's Joint Academic Network was the equivalent of Australia's AARNET, an early Internet based largely on a backbone of universities and research centres. `I can't remember which system it was on,' Pad continued. If the Brits couldn't recall the institution, let alone the machine where they had hidden Deszip, it was time to give up all hope. JANET comprised hundreds, maybe thousands, of machines. It was far too big a place to randomly hunt around for a file which Gandalf would no doubt have tried to disguise in the first place. `But the file was encrypted, and you didn't have the password,' Pad wrote. `How come you want it?' `Because we found the password. <smile>' That was the etiquette on Altos. If you wanted to suggest an action, you put it in < >. `Gr8!' Pad answered. That was Pad and Gandalf's on-line style. The number eight was the British hackers' hallmark, since their group was called 8lgm, and they used it instead of letters. Words like `great', `mate' and `later' became `gr8', `m8' and `l8r'.