"It's like reading lips," Nancy said. "With enough experience you can read keyboards. Anyway, when we program games we always put in secret doorways to other games. I hid a game of Tetris inside Ironjaw, a game I wrote for Demain."

"That was yours?" Stoll asked. "That was awesome!"

"It was mine," she said. "No one ever reads the credits at the end. But if you did, you'd have found Tetris. All you had to do was highlight the correct letters sequentially in the fictitious names Ted Roberts and Trish Fallo."

Hood said, "How the hell would anyone ever think to do that?"

"They wouldn't," Nancy smiled. "That's what makes it so much fun. We leak the information through fan magazines and on-line bulletin boards."

Hood said, "But no one would ever think of looking for an activation code in an innocent adventure game."

"Right," said Nancy. "But that's exactly what it takes. A simple activation code. A program in somebody's computer in Jerkwater Township, U.S.A., could unleash a hate game across the entire Internet."

"Why didn't you say anything about this?" Hood asked.

"Frankly, it didn't occur to me until now," she snapped., "I didn't think of somebody sneaking hate games into the world through role-playing programs. Why didn't Matt think of it? He's your computer maven!"

"She's right," Stoll said. "I should've. Like the old joke says, you go hunting for elephant, sometimes you forget to look in the refrigerator."

Hood didn't remember the old joke, and didn't care right now. He said; "So the hate games are hidden. Where do we look for them?"

"And even if we find them," Hausen asked, "can we trace them back to Demain?"

"It's tough to say where to look for them," Stoll said. "He could have had the program passed around like a football-- The Scorpion Strikes to The Phoenix from Space to Claws of the Tiger-Man."

"Would the hate game program have to come to rest in a Demain game?" Hood asked.

"No," said Stoll. "Once it was planted, it's like a virus. Timed to go off at will."

"So there's no smoking gun," Hood said.

"Right," said Stoll. "Even if you could stop the program from being launched, which is debatable since he'd probably have a backup somewhere, there wouldn't be any fingerprints on it."

Ballon said disgustedly, "That doesn't help me. Not a bit."

Hood looked at his watch. "He's going on-line now," he said. "Nancy, are you sure you don't know anything more about this? About his M.O. or about the programmers and how they work?"

"If I did, Paul, I'd have told you."

"I know. I was just thinking maybe something slipped your mind."