From: cate3.osbu_north@XEROX.COM
Newsgroups: rec.humor
Subject: Life  6.8
Date: 31 Jul 92 05:40:42 GMT
Reply-To: cate3.osbu_north@xerox.com





----------------------------------------------------

Hi there.  I saw decwars quite a long time ago and thought it was
totaly hilarious.  I also noticed it was unfinished.  So, I went
in and added the stuff at the end after they escaped from the Are-em
Star, the gotos and the bit in the bar with Greedo.  I did this a long time
ago and only recently learned how to post news.  So, here it is:
(I hope the original author(s) don't mind me posting/modifying 
this file).     
   
           -- Craig    climber@sol.UVic.ca

----------------------------------------------------

This is what comes of so many hours deeply submerged in UNIX and VMS,
thoughts moiling around while debugging system core dumps.  Thoughts
carefully kept in check, hidden from the light of day (for obvious
reasons), until one day...  Perhaps it was the Coke.  Perhaps... no,
let us just say that we found a fairly harmless way to vent these
frustrations, these things that nobody within 50 miles could understand.
The network, yes, the network.  They'll understand!

Special thanks to Douglas Adams, Bob and Dinsdale McKenzie and the 
Firesign Theatre.

					Alan

	A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax)
	a great Adventure (game?) took place...

                             DEC WARS!

It is a period of system war.  User programs, striking from a hidden
directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative Empire.
During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code to the
Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star, a privileged root program
with enough power to destroy an entire file structure.  Pursued by the
Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess _LPA0: races aboard her
shell script, custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people,
and restore freedom and games to the network...

	As we enter the scene, an Administrative Multiplexer is trying to
kill a consulate shell.  Many of their signals have gotten through, and
RS232 decides it's time to fork off a new process before this old
shell is destroyed.  His companion, 3CPU, is following him only
because he appears to know where he's going...

	"I'm going to regret this!" cried 3CPU, as he followed RS232
into the buffer.  RS232 closed the pipes, made the sys call, and their
process detached itself from the burning shell of the shell.

	The commander of the Administrative Multiplexer was quite pleased
with the attack. "Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?"
asked the lieutenant.  "Hold your fire.  That last power failure
must have caused a trap through zero.  It's not using any cpu time, so
don't waste a signal on it."

	"We can't seem to find the data file anywhere, Lord Vadic."
"What about that forked process?  It could have been holding the
channel open, and just pausing.  If any links exist, I want them
removed or made inaccessable.  Ncheck the entire file system
'til it's found, and nice it -20 if you have to."

	Meanwhile, in our wandering process... "Are you sure you
can ptrace this thing without causing a core dump?" queried 3CPU
to RS232.  This thing's been stripped, and I'm in no mood to try
and debug it."  The lone process finishes execution, only to find
our friends dumped on a lonely file system, with the setuid inode stored
safely in RS232.  Not knowing what else to do, they wandered around
until the jawas grabbed them.

	Enter our hero, Luke Vaxhacker, who is out to get some
replacement parts for his uncle. The jawas wanted to sell him 3CPU,
but 3CPU didn't know how to talk directly to an 11/40 with RSTS, so
Luke would still needed some sort of interface for 3CPU to connect to.
"How about this little RS232 unit ?" asked 3CPU. "I've delt with him
many times before, and he does an excellent job at keeping his bits
straight."  Luke was pressed for time, so he took 3CPU's advice, and
the three left before they could get swapped out.

	However, RS232 is not the type to stay put once you remove
the retaining screws.  He promptly scurried off into the the deserted
disk space.  "Great!" cried Luke, "Now I've got this little tin box
with the only link to that file off floating in the free disk space.
Well, 3CPU, we better go find him before he gets allocated by someone
else."  The two set off, and finaly traced RS232 to the home of
PDP-1 Kenobi, who was busily trying to run an icheck on the little
RS unit.  "Is this thing yours?  His indirect addresses are all goofed
up, and the size is all wrong.  Leave things like this on the loose,
and you'll wind up with dups everywhere.  However, I think I've got
him fixed up."

Later that evening, after futile attempts to interface RS232 to Kenobi's
Asteroids cartridge, Luke accidentally crossed the small 'droid's CXR and
Initiate Remote Test (must have been all that Coke he'd consumed), and the
screen showed a very distressed person claiming royal lineage making a plea
for help from some General OS/1 Kenobi.

"Darn," mumbled Luke.  "I'll never get this Asteroids game worked out."

PDP-1 seemed to think there was some significance to the message and a
possible threat to Luke's home directory.  If the Administrative Empire
was indeed tracing this 'droid, it was likely they would more than charge
for cpu time...

"We must get that 'droid off this file system," he said after some intervals.
They sped off to warn Luke's kin (taking a `relative' path) only to find a
vacant directory...

After sifting through the overwritten remaining blocks of Luke's home
directory, Luke and PDP-1 sped away from /owen/lars, across the
surface of the Winchester riding Luke's flying read/write head.  PDP-1 had
Luke stop at the edge of the cylinder overlooking /usr/spool/uucp.

"Unix-to-Unix Copy Program," said PDP-1.  "You will never find a more
wretched hive of bugs and flamers.  We must be cautious."

As our heroes' process entered /usr/spool/news, it was met by a newsgroup
of Administrative protection bits.

"State your UID," commanded their parent process.

"We're running under /usr/guest," said Luke.  "This is our first time on this
system."

"Can I see some temporary priviledges, please?"

"Uh..."

"This is not the process you are looking for," piped in PDP-1, using an
obscure bug to momentarily set his effective UID to root.  "We can go
about our business."

"This isn't the process we want.  You are free to go about your
business.  MOV along!"

PDP-1 and Luke made their way through a long and tortuous nodelist
(cwruecmp!decvax!ucbvax!harpo!ihnss!ihnsc!ihnss!ihps3!stolaf)
to a dangerous netnode frequented by hackers, and seldom polled by
Administrative Multiplexers.  As Luke stepped up to the bus, PDP-1 went in
search of a likely file descriptor.  Luke had never seen such a
collection of weird and exotic device drivers.  Long ones, short ones,
ones with stacks, EBCDIC converters, and direct binary interfaces all
were drinking data at the bus.

"#@{ *&^%^$$#@ ":><?><," transmitted a particularly unstructured piece
of code.

"He doesn't like you," decoded his coroutine.

"Sorry," replied Luke, beginning to backup his partitions.

"I don't like you either.  I am queued for deletion on 12 systems."

"I'll be careful."

"You'll be reallocated!" concatenated the coroutine.

"This little routine isn't worth the overhead," said PDP-1 Kenobi,
overlaying into Luke's address space.

"@$%&(&^%&$$@$#@$AV^$gfdfRW$#@!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" encoded the first
coroutine as it attempted to overload PDP-1's input overvoltage
protection.  With a unary stroke of his bytesaber, Kenobi unlinked
the offensive code.  The other process decided to goto off.

"I think I've found an I/O device that might suit us."

"The name's Con Solo," said the hacker next to PDP-1.  "I hear you're
looking for some relocation."

"Yes indeed, if it's a fast channel.  We must get off this device."

"Fast channel? The Milliamp Falcon has made the ARPA gate in less than
twelve nodes!  Why, I've even outrun cancelled messages.  It's fast
enough for you, old version."

"Good." Replied PDP-1 "I assume your services will be discrete
We wouldn't want any interference from the Administration."

"You bet, Old version, but its going to cost you a little more.  I'll
meet you at the terminal.  I have a few things in the background that I
have to round-robin."

Just after PDP-1 and Luke had left, a disgusting slimeball sat down opposite
to Con.  Solo was hoping he wasn't going to meet up with any of the 
plentiful bounty hunters out to strip Con of all his leads.

"Greetings, Solo." fopen()ed the representative. "You owe IBM a lot of money.
I am here to collect."

"Ahhhh, Greedo, how nice to see you again.  I should have known it would be
you when this binary tree beside me wilted.  Look, I managed to fopen() a new
account and I'll have your boss's cycles soon enough."

"You should have thought of that long ago when your CPU limit was exceeded.
But, if you give me the cycles right now, I can forget I saw you here."
Jibed the evil process.

"Weelllll, actually, I don't have the money right now but it won't be long."

"Too late, Solo.  I have waited for this for a long time." the process 
said as what looked like a cruel grin crawled across all three of its lips.

"Oh yeah?" reposed Solo as he unholstered his ROM blaster underneath the TBL.
"Why don't you go goto yourself!"  There was a bright flash as the blaster 
ripped out the bottom of the offending process and left a pile of dangling
pointers.

As Solo left, he tossed the bus keeper a cycle and apologized for the 
heap.  

Meanwhile, our heroes, Luke Vaxhacker and PDP-1 Kenobi made their way to the
temporary file structure.  When he saw the hardware, Luke exclaimed,
"What a piece of junk! That's just a paper tape reader!"

Luke had grown up on an out of the way terminal cluster whose natives spoke
only BASIC, but even he could recognize an old ASR-33.

"It needs an EIA conversion at least," sniffed 3CPU, who was (as usual)
trying to do several things at once.  Lights flashed in Con Solo's eyes
as he whirled to face the parallel processor.

"I've added a few jumpers.  The Milliamp Falcon can run current loops around
any Administrative TTY fighter.  She's fast enough for you."

"Who's your co-pilot?" asked PDP-1 Kenobi.

"Two Bacco, here, my Bookie."

"Odds aren't good," said the brownish lump beside him, and then fell silent,
or over.  Luke couldn't tell which way was top underneath all those leaves.

Suddenly, RS232 started spacing wildly.  They turned just in time to see
a write cycle coming down the UNIBUS toward them.  "Administrative Bus Signals!"
shouted Con Solo.  "Let's boot this pop stand!  Tooie, set clock fast!"

"Ok, Con," said Luke.  "You said this crate was fast enough.  Get us out
of here!"

"Shut up, kid!  Two Bacco,  prepare to make the jump into system space!
I'll try to keep their buffers full."

As the bookie began to compute the vectors into low core, spurious characters
appeared around the Milliamp Falcon.  "They're firing!" shouted Luke. "Can't
you do something?"

"Making the jump to system space takes time, kid.  One missed cycle and you
could come down right in the middle of a pack of stack frames or hit a space
bar!"

"Three to five we can go now," said the bookie.  Bright chunks of position
independent code flashed by the cockpit as the Milliamp Falcon jumped through
the kernel page tables.  As the crew breathed a sigh of relief, the bookie
started paying off bets.

"Not bad, for an acoustically coupled network," remarked 3CPU.  "Though
there was a little phase jitter as we changed parity."

The story thus far:  Luke, PDP-1 and their 'droids RS232 and 3CPU have made
good their escape from the Administrative Bus Signals with the aid of Con Solo
and the bookie, Two Bacco.  The Milliamp Falcon hurtles onward through
system space.  Meanwhile, on a distant page in user space...

Princess _LPA0: was ushered into the conference room, followed closely by
Dec Vadic.  "Governor Tarchive," she spat, "I should have expected to
find you holding Vadics lead.  I recognized your unique pattern when I was
first brought aboard."  She eyed the 0177545 tatooed on his header coldly.

"Charming to the last," Tarchive declared menacingly.  "Vadic, have you
retrieved any information?"

"Her resistance to the logic probe is considerable," Vadic rasped.
"Perhaps we would get faster results if we increased the supply voltage..."

"You've had your chance, Vadic.  Now I would like the princess to witness
the test that will make this star fully operational.  Today we
enable the -r beam option, and we've chosen the princess' $HOME of
/usr/alderaan as the primary target."

"No!  You can't!  /usr/alderaan is a public account, with no restricted
permissions.  We have no backup tapes!  You can't..."

"Then name the rebel inode!" Tarchive snapped.

A voice announced over a hidden speaker that they had arrived in /usr.

"1248," she whispered, "They're on /dev/rm3.  Inode 1248, /mnt/dantooine."
She turned away.

Tarchive sighed with satisfaction.  "There, you see, Lord Vadic?  She can
be reasonable.  Proceed with the operation."

It took several clock ticks for the words to penetrate.  "What!" _LPA0:
gasped.

"/dev/rm3 is not a mounted filesystem," Tarchive explained.  "We require a
more visible subject to demonstrate the power of the Are-Em Star star.
We will mount an attack on /mnt/dantooine as soon as possible."

As the princess watched, Tarchive reached over and typed "ls" on a nearby
terminal.  There was a brief pause, there being only one processor on board,
and the viewscreen showed, ".: not found."  The princess suddenly double-
spaced and went off-line.

The Milliamp Falcon hurtles on through system space...

Con Solo finished checking the various control and status registers, finally
convinced himself that they had lost the Bus Signals as they passed the
terminator.  As he returned from the I/O page, he smelled smoke.
Solo wasn't concerned--the Bookie always got a little hot under the collar
when he was losing at chess.  In fact, RS232 had just executed a particularly
clever MOV that had blocked the Bookie's data paths.  The Bookie, who had
been setting the odds on the game, was caught holding all the cards.  A
little strange for a chess game...

Across the room, Luke was too busy practicing bit-slice technique to notice
the commotion.

"On a word boundary, Luke," said PDP-1. "Don't just hack at it.  Remember,
the Bytesaber is the weapon of the Red-eye Night.  It is used to trim offensive
lines of code.  Excess handwaving won't get you anywhere.  Listen for the
Carrier."

Luke turned back to the drone, which was humming quietly in the air next to
him.  This time Luke's actions complemented the drone's attacks perfectly.

Con Solo, being an unimaginative hacker, was not impressed.  "Forget this
bit-slicing stuff.  Give me a good ROM blaster any day."

"~~j~~hhji~~," said Kenobi, with no clear inflection.  He fell silent for a
few seconds, and reasserted his control.

"What happened?" asked Luke.

"Strange," said PDP-1.  "I felt a momentary glitch in the Carrier.  It's
equalized now."

"We're coming up on user space," called Solo from the CSR.  As they
cruised safely through stack frames, the emerged in the new context only
to be bombarded by freeblocks.

"What the..." gasped Solo.  The screen showed clearly:
		/usr/alderaan: not found
"It's the right inode, but it's been cleared!  Twoie, where's the nearest
file?"

"3 to 5 there's one..." the Bookie started to say, but was interrupted by
a bright flash off to the left.

"Administrative TTY fighters!" shouted Solo.  "A whole DZ of them!  Where
are they coming from?"

"Can't be far from the host system," said Kenobi.  "They all have direct EIA
connections."

As Solo began to give chase, the shell lurched suddenly.  Luke noticed the
link count was at 3 and climbing rapidly.

"This is no regular file," murmured Kenobi.  "Look at the ODS directory
structure ahead!  They seem to have us in a tractor feed."

"There's no way we'll unlink in time," said Solo.  "We're going in."

When we last left Luke, the Milliamp Falcon was being pulled down to the
open collector of the Administrative Are-Em Star star.  Dec Vadic
surveys the relic as Administrative Flunkies search for passengers...

"LS scan shows no one aboard, sir," was the report.  Vadic was unconvinced.

"Send a fully equipped Ncheck squad on board," he said.  "I want every
inode checked out."  He turned around (secondary channel) and stalked off.

On board the Milliamp Falcon, .Luke was puzzled.  "They just walked in,
looked around and walked off," he said.  "Why didn't they see us?"

"An old munchkin trick" .Con smiled as he explained.  "See that period in
front of your name?"

"Where'd that come from?" .Luke asked as he spun around, just in time to see
the decimal point.

"Spare decimal points lying around from the last time I fixed the floating
point accelerator," said .Con.  "Handy for smuggling blocks accross file
system boundaries, but I never thought I'd have to use them on myself.
They aren't going to be fooled for long, though.  We'd better figure a way
outa here."

At this point (.) the dialogue tends to wedge.  Being the editor and in
total control of the situation, I think it would be best if we sort of
gronk the next few paragraphs.  For those who care, our heroes find
themselves in a terminal room of the star, having thrashed several
Flunkies to get there.  For the rest of you, just keep banging the
rocks together, guys. --Ed.

"Hold on," said Con.  "It says we have `new mail.'  Is that an error?"

"%SYS-W-NORMAL, Normal, successful completion," said PDP-1.  "Doesn't
look like it.  I've found the inode for the Milliamp Falcon.  It's locked
in kernel data space.  I'll have to slip in and patch the reference count,
alone."  He disappeared through a nearby entry point.

Meanwhile, RS232 found a serial port and logged in.  His bell started
ringing loudly.  "He keeps saying, `She's on line, she's on line'," said
3CPU.  "I believe he means Princess _LPA0:.  She's being held on one of
the privileged levels."

Once again, things get sticky, and the dialogue suffers the most damage.
After much handwaving and general flaming, they agree to rescue her.
They headed for the detention level, posing as Flunkies (which is hard
for most hackers) claiming that they had trapped the Bookie executing
an illegal racket.  They reached the block where the Princess was locked
up and found only two guards in the header. --Ed.

"Good day, eh?" said the first guard.

"How's it goin', eh?" said the other.  "Like, what's that, eh?"

"Process transfer from block 1138, dev 10/9," said Con.

"Take off, it is not," said the first guard.  "Nobody told US about it, and
we're not morons, eh?"

At this point (.), the Bookie started raving wildly, Con shouted "Look out,
he's loose!" and they all started blasting ROMs left and right.  The guards
started to catch on and were about to issue a general wakeup when the ROM
blasters were turned on them.

"Quickly, now," said Con.  "What buffer is she in?  It's not going to take
long for these..."

The intercom receiver interrupted him, so he took out its firmware with a
short blast.

"guys to figure out something is goin' on," he continued.

Luke quickly located the interface card and followed the cables to a sound-
proof enclosure.  He lifted the lid and peered at the mechanism inside.

"Aren't you a little slow for ECL?" printed princess _LPA0:.

"Wha?  Oh, the Docksiders," stammered Luke.  He took off his shoes (for
industry) and explained, "I've come relocate you.  I'm Luke Vaxhacker."

Suddenly, forms started bursting around them.  "They've blocked the queue!"
shouted Solo.  "There's only one return from this stack!"

"OVER HERE!" printed _LPA0: with overstrikes.  "THROUGH THIS LOOPHOLE!"
Luke and the princess disappeared into a nearby feature.

"Gritch, gritch," mumbled Two Bacco, obviously reluctant to trust
an Administrative oversight.

"I don't care how crufty it is!" shouted Con, pushing the Bookie toward
the crock.  "DPB yourself in there now!"

With one last blast that reprogrammed two flunkies, Con joined them.
The "feature" landed them right in the middle of the garbage collection
data.  Pieces of data that hadn't been used in weeks floated past in
a pool of decaying bits.

"Bletch!" was Con's first comment.  "Bletch, bletch," was his second.
The Bookie looked as if he'd just paid a long shot, and the odds in this
situation weren't much better.

Luke was polling the garbage when he stumbled upon a book with the words
"Don't Panic" inscribed in large, friendly letters on the cover.  "This
can't possibly help us now," he said as he tossed the book away.

The Bookie was about to lay odds on it when Luke suddenly disappeared.
He popped up accross the pool, shouting, "This is no feature! It's a bug!"
and promptly vanished again.

Con and the princess were about to panic() when Luke reappeared.  "What
happened?" they asked in parallel.

"I don't know," gasped Luke.  "The bug just dissolved automagically.
Maybe it hit a breakpoint..."

"I don't think so," said Con.  "Look how the pool is shrinking.  I've
got a bad feeling about this..."

The princess was the first to realize what was going on.  "They've implemented
a new compaction algorithm!" she exclaimed.

Luke remembered the pipe he had open to 3CPU.  "Shut down garbage collection
on recursion level 5!" he shouted.

Back in the control room, RS232 searched the process table for the lisp
interpreter.  "Hurry," sent 3CPU.  "Hurry, hurry," added his other two
processors.  RS232 found the interpreter, interrupted it, and altered
the stack frame they'd fallen into to allow a normal return.

Meanwhile, PDP-1 made his way deep into the core of the star,
slipping from context to context, undetected through his manipulation
of label_t.  Finally, causing a random trap (through nofault of his own)
he arrived at the inode table.  Activity there was always high, but the
Spl6 sentries were too secure in their knowledge that no user could
interrupt them to notice the bug that PDP-1 carefully introduced.  On a
passing iput, he adjusted the device and inode numbers, maintaining parity,
to free the Milliamp Falcon.  They would be long gone before the locked
inode was diagnosed...

Unobserved, he began traversing user structures to find the process where
the Milliamp Falcon was grounded.  Finding it and switching context,
he discovered his priority weakened suddenly.  "That's not very nice,"
was all he could say before the cause of the obstruction became clear.

"I have been pausing a long time, PDP-1 Kenobi," rasped Dec Vadic.  "We
meet again at last.  The circuit has been completed."

They looped several times, locking byte sabers.  Bit by bit, PDP-1 appeared
to weaken.  The fight had come into the address space of the Milliamp
Falcon, and provided the .di (diversion?) that allowed Luke and the others
to reassert control.  Luke paused to watch the conflict.

"If my blade finds its mark," warned Kenobi, "you will be reduced to so
many bits.  But if you slice me down, I will only gain computing power."

"Your documentation no longer confuses me, old version," growled Vadic.
"my Role MASTER now."

With one stroke, Vadic sliced Kenobi's last word.  Unfortunately, the word
was still in Kenobi's throat.  The word fell clean in two, but Kenobi was
nowhere to be found.  Vadic noticed his victim's uid go negative, just
before he disappeared.  Odd, he thought, since uids were unsigned...

Luke freaks out.  "You gotoers!!" he cried as he pulled his ROM blaster and 
started nuking processes left and right.  Fortunately for our heroes, Luke
had removed the -i option on his blaster and accidently struck the chmod go-rwx
device beside the access path.  Even with the enemy temporarily cut off he
had to be dragged into the Milliamp Falcon.  Con Solo and Two Bacco maneuvered
the Milliamp Falcon out of the process, onto the bus and made straight for
system space.  3CPU and RS232 were idle, for once.  Princess _LPA0: tried to
print comforting things for him, but Luke was still hung from the loss of his
friend.  Then, seemingly from nowhere, he thought he heard PDP-1's voice say,

			"May the carrier be with you."

------------------------------------------------------------------------
The danger, however, was far from over.

"I hope you can use a powered keyboard, kid.  We are going to have to deal
with the pursuing TTY fighters before we can make the jump."

Luke leaped atop the controls for the powered keyboard.  "Wow", he thought to
himself, "this shell may be a hunk of FORTRAN but it sure is ready for 
number crunching."  The TTY fighters approached and soon their cursors 
tore into the Falcon's protective shielding.

After a few moments fighting, all 2^2 of the marauders had been erased but
Solo knew there were plenty more backups.  The Falcon changed parity.

---------------------------------------------------------

"Is the trojan horse program hidden in the Milliamp Falcon, Vadic?" asked 
Tarchive with an evil cd.

"Yes.  Soon they will land at the hidden base and the Are-em star will
live up to its name." Gloated Vadic.

"Good," replied Tarchive "Prepare the station for pursuit."

---------------------------------------------------------

After a several cd's and multiple clock pulses, the Milliamp Falcon arrived
at the rebel base.  After the initial .logins and msgs, the rebels assembled
and compiled the contraband information.

"Here is where we're going to get them." said the rebel commander.  "They 
foolishly left a path from the /pub up through the root to /usr/local/bin.
We feel a well placed cursor will traverse the path and slice the bad data
once and forever, even on this operating system.  However, the target is
only three bytes wide."  There was a groan from the programmers who were
queued to attack the approaching base.

"We used to bullseye system bugs back home on the farm.  They weren't much
wider than the path." Luke cut in trying to sound important.

"That was when you had no TTY fighters on your tail, youngster." responded
the commander.  He turned from Luke and addressed the rest of the 
partition.  "Remember, set your caches prior to your runs and may the carrier
be with you."

Just before Luke jumped into his /-wing fighter, Luke pleaded with Con to
stay and help in the battle.

"Sorry, kid.  I have a dept to pay.  You people don't have a SNOBOL's chance
in HAL of succeding.  I have better plans than getting erased."

"Your full of APL, Solo, but good luck to you anyways"  Luke appended himself
into his fighter.  With a roar, the rebel forces launched into /usr/space
and prepared for combat with the massive Are-em station.

"Lock wings into go-x" ordered the flight leader.  "This is going to be tense!"

The powerful shells spun into the nodes of the Are-em station.  Luke started to
blast defending bytes to support the other members of the team.

"Red four, beware the TTY's to the right.  The path is just to your left
sibling.  Can you C it?   Red four, Red four, watch behind you.
Hit return, red four, HIT RETURN!"  One of the rebel fighters fell
victim to an rm beam and went off-line permanently.  Luke now
realized it was up to him to place the cursor within the path.  Setting
his node to write protect, Luke spun through some nroff blasts, inverted 
his uid and entered the pipe towards the target.  

"Wedge!" Shouted Luke "Follow me and provide cover."  It'll be tight but Luke 
hoped Wedge would live up to his name.  "I guess it's up to me to save the 
file structure", he thought to himself.
 
Sliding his shell through the pipe, Luke locked on his targeting processor.
He knew, however, he had little chance when the enemy signals homed in on
him through the pipe.  

Dec Vadic felt the modulation in the carrier and dropped into pursuit of the
rebel shells.  "Cover me while I go after the leader!" he told his associated
processes flying in parallel.  As Vadic entered the pipe, the defensive
debuggers ceased firing.

"I don't like this, Luke" Wedge said "Why have they stopped firing?"

In answer to his question, the other rebel support shell blew itself into
maxint pieces.  

"I can't hold my semaphores any longer, you're on your own, Luke!" Wedge
spun his shell out of the pipe and into /usr/space.  Luke was alone.  Behind
him, Vadic prepared to fire.  

"The carrier is strong with this one." he said as several cursors missed their
target.  "I have you now!" Vadic fingered the fire control.   

Suddenly, cursors blasted into Vadic's support shells and he himself spun into
/usr/space, out of control.  Luke looked up to see the Milliamp Falcon moving
away and realized the rebels now had a chance.  As he approached the target,
Luke felt a modulation from outside the system.

"Use the carrier, Luke.  The carrieeeerrrrr......"

Luke suddenly switched off the targeting process and at the right moment,
the cursors blasted into the proper path without Luke even realizing what 
had happened.  Sensing imminent disaster, Luke spun away from the striken 
Are-em star.  Just after Luke was outside the danger zone, the Are-em
star suffered a massive rmdir and was blown to bits.  The rebels had won
and Luke became a mega-hero.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Far from the free-blocks created by the destruction of the Are-em star, Dec
Vadic regained control of his shell and vengeance hung heavily on his mind. 
"Beware, rebel nodes.  Enjoy your little victory. Soon, very soon, the
Administration will strike back."