Even if she didn't
find Deszip on her own machine, he might not be able to get back in
again to retrieve it.
After another frenzied minute hunting around the machine, Phoenix
finally unearthed Gandalf's copy of Deszip. Now, the moment of truth.
He tried the passphrase. It worked! All he had to do
was uncompress Deszip and get it out of there. He typed, `uncompress
deszip.tar.z', but he didn't like how the NASA computer answered his
command:
corrupt input
Something was wrong, terribly wrong. The file appeared to be partially
destroyed. It was too painful a possibility to contemplate. Even if
only a small part of the main Deszip program had been damaged, none of
it would be useable.
Rubbing sweat from his palms, Phoenix hoped that maybe the file had
just been damaged as he attempted to uncompress it. He had kept the
original, so he went back to that and tried decrypting and
uncompressing it again. The NASA computer gave him the same ugly
response. Urgently, he tried yet again, but this time attempted to
uncompress the file in a different way. Same problem.
Phoenix was at his wits' end. This was too much. The most he could
hope was that the file had somehow become corrupted in the transfer
from Gandalf's JANET machine.
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