Hexing With Decimals Part 2

part 1, part 2, part 3

I need not trouble the reader with the mundane details which fill the gaps between the important episodes of this story. It will suffice to indicate that several weeks went by before Mr. Ritter was able to attend to the box he had purchased. The effort consumed an hour, and at the end of it he was certain his remuneration would be measured in copper, not silver. When he had pulled the last plastic case from the box, he discovered something else, however. It was a case for a magnetic tape, of a design he had not encountered in many years. He extracted it and turned it over. Written in large, capital letters on the label was a single word: “DESTROY”, followed by three or four exclamation points.

Mr. Ritter wondered at the tape’s continued existence in light of the emphatic imperative jotted on its cover. The tape itself appeared to be in good condition, but as is common with digital storage media older than five years, my friend owned no equipment capable of reading what was on it. The tape’s discovery piqued Ritter’s interest once again in its owner and he spent a few minutes searching the internet. He was surprised that there was not more information available concerning a man of such means who bore a relatively unusual appellation. He did find the man’s name mentioned on a very old (one might say dusty) web page for a now defunct software company. Mr. Ritter could not trace the man or the firm beyond 1997, but he supposed Poultern must have made his fortune in the .com bubble at the turn of the century.

The box from the estate sale reminded my friend that Miss Pulch had not e-mailed him in the intervening weeks. He expressed the amount of regret appropriate to such a slight encounter, and noted the poet’s wisdom in likening these transactions to ships passing in the night, etc. He deposited the discs into the rubbish, but absent-mindedly tucked the tape away in a corner of his desk.

An interval of not a few more days elapsed. Mr. Ritter and I were in an establishment specializing in computer equipage. The merchant devoted a small section of his emporium to previously owned materials and my friend expressed an interest in browsing the collection. I assented and we spent some minutes pawing through the stuff.

Ritter suddenly exclaimed, “I say! Here is an old QIC drive. Old Poultern’s tape was quarter inch. I wonder whether this would answer.”

I replied, “Friend, examine the interface. It’s antique SCSI. I doubt very much you’ve a computer to match.”

Ritter smiled back and answered, “Not so. I’ve an old Macintosh in the WC, which props up one end of the toilet. I’m fairly certain it still functions.”

This brief appearance of your narrator now ends for the moment. Ritter returned to his home with the tape drive and with some difficulty recovered the data from tape and transferred it from the lavoratory computer to a more modern device. On that, he was able to quickly ascertain that the contents of the tape were a set of instructions to assemble a computer program, commonly known to computer machanicians as “source code”. The program was written in a programming language called “C” and is quite familiar to computer professionals of a certain generation.

The intrigue entangled in the tape now heightened, Ritter immediately set about learning what he could of this program. Unfortunately, Mr. Poultern had not taken care to describe the direction of his thoughts as he constructed his program, as is customary and expected in the trade. This made the task of interpreting the instructions doubly arduous. At the end of two hours of difficult labor, my friend had only the vaguest notion of its purpose. He finally decided to simply compile the program into a usable form and execute it, to see what it would accomplish. This required another couple of hours of effort, to adapt the source code to an alien environment. The results of the execution were a series of seemingly random and meaningless numbers on the display. He repeated the program’s run one more time, but nothing changed. Weary after so much fruitless travail, my friend retired to bed.

The next morning, before he left for his office, Ritter ran Poultern’s program a few more times. The results were slightly different, and he couldn’t make anything of the numbers and departed for work. While enjoying a desk side luncheon, he had the notion to track down someone who had worked at Poultern’s company in the 90’s. After a bit of research, the internet produced the name and contact information of a person likely to have spent some time with the man. An e-mail was dispatched and Ritter forgot about it once again as the press of the day’s events resumed.

That same evening, my friend received an e-mails at home. It came from Poultern’s colleague.

part 1, part 2, part 3