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Postmortem(102)



A peaceful warmth had settled over both of us. I said into her hair, “Someone asked me a question the other day.”

“About what?”

“About trust. Someone asked me who I trusted more than anybody else in the world. And you know what?”

She leaned her head back, looking up at me.

“I think that person is you.”

“Do you really?” she asked, incredulously. “More than anybody?”

I nodded and quietly went on, “That being the case, I’m going to ask you to help me with something.”

She sat up and stared at me, her eyes alert and utterly thrilled. “Oh, sure! Just ask me! I’ll help you, Auntie Kay!”

“I need to figure out how someone managed to break into the computer downtown . . .”

“I didn’t do it,” she instantly blurted out, a stricken look on her face. “I already told you I didn’t.”

“I believe you. But someone did it, Lucy. Maybe you can help me figure it out?”

I didn’t think she could but had felt an impulse to give her a chance.

Energized and excited again, she said confidently, “Anybody could do it because it’s easy.”

“Easy?” I had to smile.

“Because of System/Manager.”

I stared at her in open astonishment. “How do you know about System/Manager?”

“It’s in the book. He’s God.”

At times like these I was reminded, if not unnerved. Lucy’s IQ. The first time she was given an IQ test she scored so high the counselor insisted on testing her again because there had to be “some mistake.” There was. The second time Lucy scored ten points higher.

“That’s how you get into SQL to begin with,” she was rattling on. “See, you can’t create any grants unless you got one to start with. That’s why you’ve got System/Manager. God. You get into SQL with Him, and then you can create anything you want.”

Anything you want, it dawned on me. Such as all of the user names and passwords assigned to my offices. This was a terrible revelation, so simplistic it had never occurred to me. I supposed it never occurred to Margaret either.

“All someone’s got to do is get in,” Lucy matter-of-factly went on. “And if he knows about God, he can create any grant he wants, make it the DBA, and then he can get into your data base.”

In my office, the data base administrator, or DBA, was ”DEEP/THROAT.” Margaret did have a sense of humor now and then.

“So you get into SQL by connecting System/Manager, then you type in: GRANT CONNECT, RESOURCE, DBA TO AUNTIE IDENTIFIED BY KAY.”

“Maybe that’s what happened,” I thought out loud. “And with the DBA, someone not only could view but actually alter the data.”

“Sure! He could do anything because God’s told him he can. The DBA is Jesus.”

Her theological allusions were so outrageous I laughed in spite of myself.

“That’s how I got into SQL to begin with,” she confessed. “Since you didn’t tell me any passwords or anything. I wanted to get into SQL so I could try out some of the commands in the book. I just gave your DBA user name a password I made up so I could get in.”

“Wait a minute,” I slowed her down. “Wait a minute! What do you mean you assigned a password you made up to my DBA user name? How did you know what my user name is? I didn’t tell you.”

She explained, “It’s in your grants file. I found it in the Home directory where you have all the INP’s for the tables you created. You have a file called ’Grants.SQL’ where you created all the public synonyms for your tables.”

Actually, I hadn’t created those tables. Margaret did last year and I loaded my home computer with the boxes of backup diskettes she gave me. Was it possible there was a similar “Grants” file in the OCME computer?

I took hold of Lucy’s hand and we got up from the couch. Eagerly, she followed me into my office. I sat her down in front of the computer and pulled up the ottoman.

We got into the communications software package and typed in the number for Margaret’s office downtown. We watched the countdown at the bottom of the screen as the computer dialed. Almost immediately it announced we were connected, and several commands later the screen was dark and flashing with a green C prompt. My computer suddenly was a looking glass. On the other side were the secrets of my office ten miles from here.

It made me slightly uneasy to know that even as we worked the call was being traced. I’d have to remember to tell Wesley so he didn’t waste his time figuring out that the perpetrator, in this instance, was me.

“Do a find file,” I said, “for anything that might be called ’Grants.’ ”