`It's not just you,' Pad tried to reassure the Australians. `Two security people from the US are coming to the UK to try and find out something about someone named Gandalf. Oh, and Gand's mate, who might be called Patrick.' Pad had indeed based his handle on the name Patrick, or Paddy, but that wasn't his real name. No intelligent hacker would use his real name for his handle. Paddy was the name of one of his favourite university lecturers, an Irishman who laughed a good deal. Like Par's name, Pad's handle had coincidentally echoed a second meaning when the British hacker moved into exploring X.25 networks. An X.25 PAD is a packet assembler disassembler, the interface between the X.25 network and a modem or terminal server. Similarly, Gandalf, while being first and foremost the wizard from The Lord of The Rings, also happened to be a terminal server brand name. Despite the gravity of the news that the security community was closing the net around them, none of the hackers lost their wicked sense of humour. `You know,' Pad went on, `Spaf was out of the country when his machine got hacked.' `Was he? Where?' asked Gandalf, who had just joined the conversation. `In Europe.' Electron couldn't resist. `Where was Spaf, Gandalf asks as he hears a knock on his door ...' `Haha,' Gandalf laughed. `<knock> <knock>' Electron went on, hamming it up. `Oh! Hello there, Mr Spafford,' Gandalf typed, playing along. `Hello, I'm Gene and I'm mean!' Alone in their separate homes on different corners of the globe, the four hackers chuckled to themselves. `Hello, and is this the man called Patrick?' Pad jumped in. `Well, Mr Spafford, it seems you're a right fucking idiot for not patching your FTP!' Gandalf proclaimed. `Not to mention the CHFN bug--saved by a Sequent! Or you'd be very fucking embarrassed,' Phoenix added. Phoenix was laughing too, but he was a little nervous about Pad's warning and he turned the conversation back to a serious note. `So, Pad, what else did Shatter tell you?' Phoenix asked anxiously. `Not much. Except that some of the security investigations might be partly because of UCB.' UCB was the University of California at Berkeley. Phoenix had been visiting machines at both Berkeley and LLNL so much recently that the admins seemed to have not only noticed him, but they had pinpointed his handle. One day he had telnetted into dewey.soe.berkeley.edu--the Dewey machine as it was known--and had been startled to find the following message of the day staring him in the face: Phoenix, Get out of Dewey NOW! Also, do not use any of the `soe' machines. Thank you, Daniel Berger Phoenix did a double take when he saw this public warning. Having been in and out of the system so many times, he just zoomed past the words on the login screen. Then, in a delayed reaction, he realised the login message was addressed to him.