The name is Rowe. Mack Rowe. Private consultant.

I was returning from another difficult case--the sucker had actually tried to launch a DOS game from inside Windows 95 with the modem running. I was approaching my office building when two ugly mugs in trench coats stepped out of the shadows.

"Mack Rowe?" one of them asked.

I decided to be cautious. "No. I’m his brother, Mike Rowe."

"That’s too bad. We’ve got a big assignment for Mack Rowe. A lot of money in it for him."

Ah, I figured, my kind of people. "In that case, I’m your man."

They hit me with a two-by-four, put a sack over my head, and stuffed me into the trunk of a black Chevy.

Yep. My kind of people.

I came to in a big office, a well-dressed man smiling at me. "Good evening, Mr. Rowe. I hope my men didn’t rough you up to much. What do you like in your scotch?"

"I take it with bourbon," I answered.

"Do you know who I am, Mr. Rowe?" he asked as he handed me a Jolt Cola.

"Sure. You’re Steve Cased, president of America Onhold. But what do you want with me?"

"Someone," he explained, "has been using my network so much that no one else can get online. I want you to find out who it is. I’ll pay you $500 a day, plus expenses. Bring in the culprit in less than three days, and as a bonus I’ll give you a hundred AOH Startup Disks."

I accepted his offer and was taken home the same way I’d been brought in. "Man," I thought as I pushed the spare tire aside, "this guy has a real I/O problem."

The next day I dropped in at the office of Sam Spam, a confidence man who runs an email racket. Just to let him know I wasn’t scared, I sat down in Spam’s favorite chair. Then I got up and let him get out of it.

"What da ya want, Rowe?"

"Well, Sam," I said, putting out my cigarette on the latest American Heart Association CD-ROM, "I understand you’ve been cloggin’ up America Onhold."

"It’s legit," he replied. "There’s no law against sending everyone ads for Foster’s Fantastic Nosehair Clippers."

"Really? Steve Cased may think otherwise."

"Rowe, if I ever hear from you again, I’ll have your neck rerouted to Timbuktu."

I figured he was innocent and left.

Next I dropped in at the home of my friend Rick McKlick, noted information junky and bagpipe player. As usual, he was sitting at his computer when I arrived.

"Hi, Mack," he greeted me without looking up. "Did you know that only ten years after the mutiny on the Bounty, only one of the original mutineers was still alive?" Then he added, by way of explanation, "I just stumbled onto the Pitcarn Island Web site."

"Been surfing a lot lately?" I asked.

"No, I seldom get outside, these days. Too much good stuff on the Web." I noticed his bagpipes in the corner, gathering dust.

"Isn’t it great!" he continued. "Now that America Onhold charges a flat fee with no hourly costs, I can spend all my time here. Hey, look--the gross and net earnings for every one of Sonny Tuft’s films!"

"So America Onhold charges a flat fee and you figure you have to be on all the time?" I asked.

Rick turned around and looked at me, a bit surprised. "Well, it’s either that or I..."

Suddenly he had the face of a pencil-pusher who had just formatted his boss’ hard disk. He spun around and examined the monitor. "Oh, no! Five seconds away from the keyboard and AOH closed my connection. It could take three hours to get back on again!" He looked at me. "Sorry, Mack, but I can’t talk right now."

As I left he was attempting to log on but only getting a busy signal.

The next day I visited Isadora S. Pinout, proprietor of a local ISP who owed me a few favors. I found her in a small room full of Unix workstations. The air smelled heavily of overheating cables.

I got down to business. "What da ya know about AOH’s troubles?"

She stiffened at the name. "Nothing," she said, "except that they’re trying to muscle into our territory. AOH can’t stand the little guys and wants to swallow us all up."

"They’re in deep water," I added.

"Good," she said. "Let them suffer." Suddenly, she looked at me suspiciously. "Who you working for these days, Rowe?"

I smiled and left the room as quickly as possible.

Steve Cased was waiting for me at my office. "Well," he asked, "who’s responsible? "

"You are," I said. "You started a policy of giving online time away, and what do you know? People took it. You tried to get more and more people online, but you didn’t have a place to put them. You appealed to their greed, and didn’t take into account that they might be greedy."

He smiled. "Well, Mr. Rowe, you figured it out. And if you could figure out, so can anyone else. Thank you, Mr. Rowe; that’s all I needed to know."

He got up and started to leave. "Wait a minute," I said. "You owe me $1000."

"Of course," he said. "Can I give it to you in online hours?"