MICHAEL CRICHTON

But now the potential drawbacks loomed large before Travis; his worst fearswere confirmed. Once you put a line over two thousand miles from Houston toGreenbelt, you begged for a piggyback data slurp. Somewhere between Texasand Maryland someone had inserted a terminal linkup—probably in the carriertelephone lines—and had begun to slurp out data on a piggyback terminal. Thiswas the form of industrial espionage they most feared.A piggyback-slurp terminal tapped in between two legitimate terminals,monitoring the back and forth transmissions. After a time, the piggyback operatorknew enough to begin making transmissions on line, slurping out data from bothends, pretending to be GSFC to Houston, and Houston to GSFC. The piggybackterminal could continue to function until one or both legitimate terminals realizedthat they were being slurped.Now the question was: how much data had been slurped out in the lastseventy-two hours?He had called for twenty-four-hour scanner checks, and the readings weredisheartening. It looked as though the ERTS computer had yielded up not onlyoriginal database elements, but also data-transformation histories—the sequenceof operations performed on the data by ERTS over the last four weeks.If that was true, it meant that the Euro-Japanese consortium piggyback knewwhat transformations ERTS had carried out on the Mukenko data—and thereforethey knew where the lost city was located, with pinpoint accuracy. They nowknew the location of the city as precisely as Ross did.Timelines had to be adjusted, unfavorably to the ERTS team. And the updatedcomputer projections were unequivocal—Ross or no Ross, the likelihood of theERTS team reaching the site ahead of the Japanese and Germans was flowalmost nil.From Travis’s viewpoint, the entire ERTS expedition was mow a futile exercise,and a waste of time. There was no hope of success. The only unfactorableelement was the gorilla Amy, and Travis’s instincts told him that a gorilla namedAmy would not prove decisive in the discovery of mineral deposits in thenortheastern Congo.It was hopeless.Should he recall the ERTS team? He stared at the console by his desk. “Callcost-time,” he said.The computer blinked COST—TIME AVAILABLE.“Congo Field Survey,” he said.88