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Airframe Page 75
Author: Michael Crichton

G/S  SPEED ANG                   00000010000

SLAT XSIT T/O                  00000000000

G/S  DEV INV                       00100050001

GND  SPD  INV                       00000021000

TAS   INV                      00001010000

TAT   INV                      00000010000

AUX  1                         00000000000

AUX  2                         00000000000

AUX  3                         00000000000

AUX COA                        01000000000

A/S  ROX-P                     00000010000

RDR  PROX-1                    00001001000

AOA  BTA                       10200000001

FDS  RG                        00000010000

F-CMD MON                      10000020100

She didn't want to do this. She hadn't eaten dinner yet, and she knew she should eat. Anyway, the only questions she had about these fault listings were the AUX readings. She had asked Ron, and he had said the first was the auxiliary power unit, the second and third were unused, and the fourth, AUX COA, was a customer installed line. But there wasn't anything on those lines, Ron said, because a zero reading was normal. It was the default reading.

So she was really finished with this listing.

She was done.

Chapter 18

Casey stood up at her desk, stretched, looked at her watch. It was ten-fifteen. She'd better get some sleep, she thought. After all, she was going to appear on television tomorrow. She didn't want her mother to call afterward saying, "Dear, you looked so tired..."                                                     

Casey folded up the printout, and put it away.                  

Zero, she thought, was the perfect default value. Because that was what she was coming up with, on this particular night's work.

A big zero.

Nothing.

"A big fat zero," she said aloud. "Means nothing on the line."

She didn't want to think what it meant - that time was running out, that her plan to push the investigation had failed, and that she was going to end up in front of a television camera tomorrow afternoon, with the famous Marty Reardon asking her questions, and she would have no good answers to give him. Except the answers that John Marder wanted her to give.

Just lie. Hell with it.

Maybe that was how it was going to turn out.

You 're old enough to know how it works.

Casey turned out her desk light, and started for the door.

She said good night to Esther, the cleaning woman, and went out into the hallway. She got into the elevator, and pushed the button to go down to the ground floor.

The button lit up when she touched it.

Glowing"1"

She yawned as the doors started to close. She was really very tired. It was silly to work this late. She'd make foolish mistakes, overlook things.

She looked at the glowing button.

And then it hit her.

"Forget something?" Esther said, as Casey came back into the office.

"No," Casey said.

She rifled through the sheets on her desk. Fast, searching. Tossing papers in all directions. Letting them flutter to the floor.

Ron had said the default was zero, and therefore when you got a zero you didn't know if the line was used or not. But if there was a 1 ... then that would mean . . . She found the listing, ran her finger down the columns of numbers:

AUX  1                         00000000000

AUX  2                         00000000000

AUX  3                         00000000000

AUX COA                        01000000000

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Michael Crichton's Novels
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» Timeline
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» Congo
» Airframe
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» The Great Train Robbery
» Eaters of the Dead
» The Andromeda Strain
» Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park #1)
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» The Terminal Man
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