The Impossible Fortress(20)
I laughed. “I’m not going to win the PS/2.”
“When you win the PS/2,” she repeated, “you’ll give me your old 64. So I can have my own computer at home. Does that seem fair?”
She put out her hand to close the deal. Each of Mary’s fingernails was painted a different color and detailed with zeros and ones—a rainbow of binary digits arching over her hands, 01111101010. We shook on the agreement, and a shock of static snapped between us.
“Twelve days isn’t a lot of time,” I said.
“I have a great book we can use.” She jumped up, grabbed a heavy tome from the shelf, and showed me the cover: How to Learn Machine Language in 30 Days.
“Thirty days?” I asked.
“We’ll read it really fast,” she explained.
800 REM *** DRAW GUARD 1 SPRITE ***
810 POKE 52,48:POKE 56,48
820 FOR GU=0 TO 62:READ G
830 POKE 12352+GU,G
840 NEXT GU
850 POKE 2041,193:POKE V+21,2
860 POKE V+40,2
870 POKE V+2,6X
880 POKE V+3,6Y
890 RETURN
ZELINSKY KICKED ME OUT at exactly seven o’clock so Mary could finish her homework. Alf and Clark were waiting outside the store, perched on their dirt bikes and eating slices of pizza off greasy paper plates.
“Finally!” Clark exclaimed.
“Did you get the code?” Alf asked.
I had forgotten all about my mission. “Not yet. I told you I’m gonna need some time.”
Clark reminded me that I’d rushed to the store straight after school, that I’d been in the showroom for nearly four hours. “What the hell were you doing back there?”
“Computer stuff.”
Alf grinned, like this was some new euphemism for sexual activity. “Did you show her your joystick?”
“No—”
“Did you squeeze her software?”
I tried to explain myself, but Alf had stumbled upon a deep well of techno-innuendo and he wouldn’t quit until it was all mined out. Just five minutes earlier, I’d been getting a decent grasp on hexadecimal numbers, but now I felt all of my knowledge slipping away, as if merely being in Alf’s presence was making me dumber.
“Did you feel her Q-Berts?” Alf asked.
Clark joined in the fun. “Did she fondle your Zaxxon?”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” I told them. “You’re just replacing body parts with names of arcade games.”
They didn’t care. They were laughing like crazy, staggering all over the sidewalk like drunks. All around us, commuters from the train station were giving us a wide berth. Alf grabbed a lamppost to keep from falling over, and pretty soon I was laughing along with them. I couldn’t help myself. The guys were contagious.
“I don’t want to brag,” I told them, “but I did load a couple bytes into her accumulator.”
Alf stopped laughing. “What?”
“I don’t get it,” Clark said.
“It’s a machine language joke,” I explained. “An accumulator is a register where you store data—”
“Never mind that,” Alf said. Suddenly he was all business. “We’ve got a problem with Operation Vanna.”
We walked west on Main Street, past the travel agency and the bike shop, and then we arrived at our destination: General Tso’s Mount Everest restaurant. The name on the sign promised a sort of grandeur, but inside it was just a regular Chinese restaurant with red carpet, greasy noodle dishes, and paper place mats illustrating the Chinese zodiac.
We could see General Tso through the window, dressed in his usual black tuxedo, escorting some customers to their table. He was owner, ma?tre d’, and head chef of the restaurant, and he worked 365 days a year without fail. Years later I’d learn that his real name was Hiraku, he was born in Oregon, and he and his wife were both Japanese.
Alf and Clark led us through the narrow alley separating General Tso’s from the bike shop next door. There wasn’t much behind the buildings—just a few parking spaces for employees, a narrow access road, and then a much larger commuter parking lot, a sea of Buicks and Oldsmobiles. We ducked behind a Grand Marquis and then turned to study the rear of General Tso’s.
At the base of the building was a large metal Dumpster and a back door for deliveries. On the second floor were two curtained windows and a rusty fire ladder ascending between them. The sun was setting, but there was still plenty of daylight, enough to get a good look at everything.
“Last night, me and Clark took a practice run up the ladder,” Alf explained. “We wanted to get the lay of the land. Check out the rooftop. Maybe get a closer look at the hatch. See what tools we need to pack.”
“Only we never found out,” Clark explained. “We got five rungs up the ladder and Schwarzenegger freaked out.”
“Arnold Schwarzenegger?” I asked. “The Terminator?”
Alf pressed binoculars into my hands. “Second-floor window,” he said. “Take a look.”
I pressed the lenses to my face and scanned the building, but all I saw were red drapes ornamented with gold dragons.
“I don’t see anything.”