The Three Investigators
Crimebusters #11
Text by
G. H. Stone
Based on characters created by
Robert Arthur
In the grease pit next to the trailer, Bob’s fellow Investigator Pete Crenshaw whistled happily to himself. Most of Pete had disappeared beneath the hood of the beat-up van he was repairing. He expected to make a bundle this week when he finished fixing up the van and sold it. Pete didn’t want any detective work this week either.
Just then a speeding truck roared in through the open gates of the junkyard. Bob looked around in surprise. Pete jumped up from beneath the hood, almost cracking his head. Who was in such a big hurry?
The truck was one of the yard’s own battered pick-ups. Brakes squealing, it halted in a cloud of dust. Browsing customers scattered in alarm. Wild drivers were rare in the biggest and best junkyard in Rocky Beach, California.
“Hey, it’s Jupe!” Bob yelled to Pete.
“What’s he up to now?” Pete shouted back.
Behind the wheel, the round face of Jupiter Jones was creased with worry. Jupe turned off the engine, jumped out of the pickup, and dashed wordlessly past Bob and Pete toward the trailer. His black hair was mussed, as usual, but his face was ghostly white… Next to starvation, exercise was Jupe’s least favorite thing. When stout Jupe ran, Pete and Bob knew something was up. And by the look on Jupe’s face, this time it was something really bad.
“Jupe! What gives?” called Pete. Wiping his hands on his green Yosemite T-shirt, he chased after him. At six feet one and well-coordinated pounds, Pete could, move fast.
“Who’s after you, Jupe?” Bob yelled, running to catch up. Though not a jock like Pete, the tall, slim, blond guy could move plenty fast himself.
Jupe’s broad backside disappeared into the trailer. Pete and Bob pounded in behind him.
The headquarters of the three seventeen-year-olds was its usual jumble. Papers and empty fast-food containers littered the tops of the desk and file cabinet.
The faint odor of yesterday’s anchovy pizza hung in the air.
As the door banged shut, Jupe whipped off the cover to the Investigators’ PC, Not only was he the brains of the guys’ amateur detective agency, he was also an electronics whiz and a hotshot computer programmer. While Bob and Pete watched, Jupe sat down at the computer, flipped switches, and slid two floppy disks into their slots. The PC whirred quietly.
Jupe took a deep breath and stared tensely at the PC.
“Come on, Jupe,” Pete said. “Spill it!” Bob said.
Jupe shook his head and gestured for them to bug off. He wasn’t ready to talk yet.
Bathed in the glow of the PC’s monitor, the Investigators stared as bright amber letters moved across the black computer screen. Jupe typed a request for the computer to show some information.
Bob was growing impatient. “Speed it up, Jupe. I need the PC so I can finish up my history report. The girls will be here any sec.” He flicked the strings of his tennis racket. He and Pete had a tennis date with Elizabeth Zapata and Kelly Madigan. Bob had just met Elizabeth at a downtown record store, and Kelly was Pete’s steady.
“Yikes!” Pete whooped. “Kelly!” He looked down at his T-shirt and jeans. They were streaked with black automotive grease and white primer paint. “I’ve got to change!”
As Pete bounded off toward his pile of clean clothes at the back of the trailer, the PC gave a sharp, high-pitched beep. Instantly three huge words flashed onto the screen: FATAL DISK ERROR!
“What’s that mean?” Bob demanded suspiciously.
“The pits,” Jupe groaned. “We can’t get our information off the disk. But even worse, it’s what I was afraid of… The virus has infected us, too!”
“What virus?” Pete demanded from the back of the trailer. He’d stripped off his T-shirt and was cleaning his hands and arms with naval jelly. “I feel fine.”
“Not a people virus, Pete,” Jupiter growled. His fingers flew over the keyboard again, trying to convince the computer to find some of the information on the disk. “A computer virus.”
Puzzled, Pete returned to stand over Jupe. Each time Jupe tried a new command, the PC beeped ominously, and FATAL DISK ERROR glared out at the guys.
“What’s a
virus?” Pete finally asked.
“A tiny string of code that copies itself over and over,” Jupiter answered grimly. “It’s really a subprogram that hides inside another computer program or an operating system. Then it eats and scrambles data.”
“Run that by me again,” Pete said, even more puzzled.
“The virus erases information,” Jupe translated. “Or it screws it up so that you don’t know if it’s accurate anymore.”
“You mean it can change numbers and words?” Bob said.
“That’s it,” said Jupe. “Viruses are the worst. Some fill a disk with many nonsense numbers that the computer crashes. Others just randomly ruin data. The damage possibilities are endless.”
“But Jupe, how come we didn’t know we had a virus until now?” Bob asked.
“Do you know the moment you catch the flu?” Jupe asked.
“No.” Bob and Pete shook their heads.
“Same thing happens with computer viruses. It all depends on the design. They can screw up your data right away, or they can sit around for months and then
“Wait’ll I tell my math teacher,” Pete said. “Numbers are
everything
Suddenly Bob felt queasy. He grabbed the disk box and handed it to Jupe. “I’ve put blood, sweat, and even a few broken dates into my history report. Tell me it’s okay!”
Jupe turned off the computer and started it again. He slid in Bob’s disk.
Bob leaned close to the screen and held his breath. Jupe called up the report file.
Bob’s luck was the worst:
“It’s gone,” Bob moaned. “I don’t believe it. Gone! I’ll have to write the whole thing all over again. It was
”
“Sorry, guy.” Pete clapped Bob on the shoulder and pulled up chairs for the two of them. “What can we do, Jupe?”
Jupiter was hard at work. “This is a sector editor,” he explained as he waved a disk. “I bought it on the way home. It’s like a high-powered magnifying glass. Watch this.” He switched disks in the computer.
But Bob stood up and walked away. Pete glanced in his direction and saw him searching through a pile of papers on the bookcase. He looked weirded out.
Pete leaned back over Jupe’s shoulder.
“The sector editor lets us look at the data on the disk’s rings,” Jupe said. “There are a lot of rings — three hundred sixty concentric ones on each disk.”
“Like the rings around a CD?”
“Right. And each ring is divided into sectors.” Suddenly rows and rows of random numbers and letters flooded across the screen. “That’s what we’re looking at now — the sectors.”
“I don’t get it,” said Pete. “Am I supposed to be able to read this stuff?”
“Yeah.” Jupe groaned as the minutes passed. “We should be able to see my files, regular English words, but there’s no data left. It’s nothing but garbage! Junk the virus made up. All the data’s gone here, too!”
Just then Bob let out an excited yell. “I’ve got it!” He waved a sheaf of papers. “I thought I printed out a rough draft a couple of days ago, and I did. All I have to do is make my final changes and retype it!”
Bob grinned widely and plopped down beside Pete. “Now I can get back on the vacation track!”
“Yeah, well, get depressed again real fast,” Jupe told him. “We still don’t know what else is missing. That first disk was just a game, so it’s no big deal. But we’ve still got to see whether we’ve lost the junkyard inventory… our Three Investigators data bank… all our case histories… ”
“No-o-o-o!” Pete groaned. “That’s months of work!” Bob complained. “Especially the yard inventory,” moaned Jupe. He’d prepared the inventory for his Aunt Mathilda and Uncle Titus, who owned the salvage yard. It had taken forever to sort through every pile of junk in the place and list each item.
They all looked in disgust at the garbage on the screen. And then their eyes widened as real words suddenly appeared. They were planted at sector zero, on the disk’s innermost ring:
WELCOME TO CHAO$! PAY FIVE MILLION DOLLARS, OR
YOU AND YOUR DATA WILL BE ERASED!
“Somebody wants us to pay
“Somebody who’s gonna be sorry!” Pete growled. “Go slow, Rambo.” Jupiter exchanged disks again to check whether the next one was infected. It was, and he sighed with frustration. “I’m just starting to get a handle on the problem. This all started when a guy from my computer club — Devon Colin — called me a couple of hours ago. He suddenly couldn’t get two of his disks to work.”
“Just like us,” Bob said.
Jupiter nodded. “I went over there. He had a sector editor, so I checked his rings. And right at the zero sector, like on our disk, I found… ”
“The CHAO$ message?” Bob said.
“Yeah.”
“Then the threat’s not aimed at us!”
“Doesn’t look like it,” Jupe agreed. “It was stupid, anyway,” Pete said.
“No way could we cough up five mil!”
“I’d have trouble coughing up ten bucks,” Bob admitted. “Can’t wait for payday!” Not that his part-time job at Rock-Plus paid very much besides free admission to clubs and rock concerts. But Bob needed every cent he could get for his social life. With his blond, blue-eyed good looks and magnetic smile, he attracted girls the way rock stars did fans.
“Since both of Devon’s disks were infected,” Jupiter continued, “we figured it had to be a virus. That freaked me out because of a virus case I remembered from a few years ago. It started with a college student who said he designed a virus to prove a national computer network had security problems. But he made a mistake in its design, and the virus went berserk. It crashed six thousand computers and caused almost a hundred million dollars in damage!”
Pete whistled. “Big bucks!”
“You know it.” Jupe nodded. “So I started worrying about where Devon’s virus had spread. One of his disks was completely erased. It probably had the virus longest and infected the rest of his disks. But if that was right, then everyone in our computer club could have it too.”
“You shared the disk?” Bob asked.
“Yeah,” Jupe said miserably. “It was a game disk, and we all made copies of it. So Devon got on the phone to warn everyone, and I split to check our PC.”
“But where did Devon catch the virus in the first place?” Pete wondered.
Just then there was a tap on the trailer’s door, and a girl’s voice shouted, “Pete! Oh, Pete!”
“Yow!” Pete leaped out of his chair and dashed for the bathroom at the back of the trailer, where he could change. “It’s Kelly. Cover for me!”
“Chicken!” Jupe called after him. He and Bob had long ago decided that Kelly had big Pete wrapped around her little finger.
“You owe us for this one, guy,” Bob called.
“Bob, is that you?” a second girl shouted from outside. “We’re ready for tennis!”
Bob opened the door. He beamed his dazzling smile at the two girls. “Ladies,” he said with a sweep of his hand. “Please come in.”
Swinging their tennis rackets, Kelly Madigan and Elizabeth Zapata trooped through the door. They wore pastel tank tops and little white skirts. Both had tied back their long brown hair with ribbons.
Elizabeth grinned up at Bob. “I’ve been looking forward to this.”
He grinned right back. “Me too.”
“So, where’s Pete?”
Kelly looked around.
“He’s not ready,” Bob told her.
“What!” Kelly’s green eyes flashed.
“But he’s really stressed about it,” Bob assured her. “He’d rather be here with you than anywhere else. Right, Jupe?”
“Huh?” In his mind Jupe saw nasty strings of code gobbling beautiful data. He was separating infected disks from healthy ones by checking for the CHAO$ message at each disk’s zero sector.
“Well… ” Kelly said, amused.
“You
“Pete knows about computers?” Kelly said. “Gee, I didn’t think he knew anything about them. I’m impressed!”
“Hey, Kell.” Pete emerged from the bathroom in a clean white U2 T-shirt and shorts. He ran his fingers through his tousled reddish-brown hair and grinned at her. “Forgive me?”
She slid her arm through his. “Maybe this time!”
“Let’s go,” Elizabeth said, and headed for the door with Bob right behind her.
“Just a second.” Jupiter lifted his head. “I’ve got a body count.”
Bob stopped, his hand on the knob. “What’s the bad news?”
“Two completely erased,” Jupe said somberly, “and partial erasures on three others. The invasion could’ve been a lot worse.”
“What’s he talking about?” Elizabeth asked Bob.
“A lot of work we’re gonna have to do. What’d we lose, Jupe?”
“The game disk and the disk with our most recent case histories. Plus some chunks here and there of the junkyard’s inventory. No point in replacing the game, but the rest… ”
“What about the backup disks?” Bob asked hopefully. “I remember you making them.”
“At least once a week.” Jupe pushed away from the console. “But my count includes the backups. It looks to me like everything we worked on in the last week’s been infected.” He opened his desk drawer and took out a fat stack of business cards. He rolled off the rubber band and fished through them.
Bob snapped his fingers. “There goes vacation!”
“There’s one other person I need to contact,” Jupe said, waving a folded paper from the stack. “Norton Rome. He’s a programmer. He was our club’s guest speaker last week. He gave Devon the game disk because that’s what his talk was about — programming a game. His system’s got to be infected too.”
“Call him. Spread the good news.” Bob handed the phone to Jupe.
“I know where he works, but today’s Sunday.” Jupe dialed. “Hope he’s at home.” As the phone rang Jupe opened a jar of chunky peanut butter, stuck in his finger, pulled out a huge gob, and began eating it off. It was his latest crash diet — peanut butter and bananas.