{anya.avalon.net:/3}telnet mutlib.org
Trying....

Magnus got up to get a snack while waiting for the telnet connection to 
complete. It was the one thing he really disliked about living in 
space... the connect time. Sometimes it took as much as fifteen minutes 
to make a simple telnet connection, and that was using Unix-to-Unix 
protocols. Eternal help him if he tried to run a SLIP connection to 
Earth. And forget the Web. It took twenty minutes to download the *text*, 
never mind the graphics.

But he was expecting important e-mail from a team of his Acolytes, out on 
a fact-finding mission. So he dutifully logged on, and dug into a 
microwaved container of last night's beef stroganoff while he waited.

Connected to eyes.mutlib.org.
logon: magnus

In the three minutes it took for the password prompt to come up, Magnus 
finished the beef stroganoff *and* washed the dish.

password: *****

>From experience he knew he had at least a five minute wait ahead of him. 
Quickly determining that there was no way to constructively use a block 
of five minutes, he played a game of Tetris. *Improves eye-hand 
coordination and spatial perception...* Since everything he did had to 
have some justification in terms of his cause, he convinced himself of 
the redeeming values of Tetris, unwilling to admit he just liked playing it.

Hello, Magnus. Last logon 08:31:46 GMT 11 Jan.
You have new mail.
{mutlib.org/magnus:/1}

Well! That was promising. Perhaps it was the hoped-for message from his 
Acolytes. It had to be, actually; who else knew his e-mail address? 

{mutlib.org/magnus:/1}elm

Fifteen minutes later, elm still had not opened up, and Magnus was bored 
out of his mind.

He'd played three games of Tetris, reviewed the duty schedule twice, gone 
through the list of things left to eat in his private refrigerator, OCR'd 
some hardcopy, typed a memo, and rearranged his hard drive's directory 
structure, and he still didn't have the message. It had better be good 
news, after all this waiting.

        Mailbox is '/var/mail/spool/magnus' with 1 messages [ELM 2.4 PL23]

   N  1  Jan 11 usr39@interramp.net (48)   VERY IMPORTANT! READ!!

This was surprising. He didn't remember any of his Acolytes having an 
interramp account. Why hadn't they just used their Mutant Liberation 
e-mail addresses? Magnus frowned, and hit enter to open the mail.

Twenty minutes later he was deep into an analysis of how he could 
conceivably run a cable from Avalon down to Earth when the mail finally 
opened.

DO YOU NEED MONEY?
	WANT TO MAKE SOME QUICK?
	HERE'S HOW!!

Magneto stared at the screen as his precious message, the one he'd just 
wasted close to an hour on getting, turned out to be a piece of junk mail 
promising riches.

*I will not destroy the computer. I will *not* destroy the computer.* 
After all, it wasn't his computer's fault. He would *not* generate an EMP 
and destroy his own computer.

No, no.  He had a better idea.



The program was written off-line; it took three hours to download it to 
an Earthbound machine on Avalon's abysmally slow Earth-to-satellite 
connection, but once there, it worked quickly, and reported baack its 
results in half an hour.

Smiling, Magneto examined the printout. usr39@interramp.net's credit 
history, address, FBI files (they really did have a file on everyone), 
medical history... it was all here.

He thought about hacking into TRW and altering the fool's credit history, 
but again, the connection from Avalon would drive him nuts with its 
slowness. Instead, he used the automapper to pinpoint the exact location 
on Earth where usr39's real address was located... focused his power into 
a very narrow beam...

...and fried every piece of electronic equipment in the hapless spammer's 
household.

"*That*, my friend, is an unfortunate lesson in the consequences of 
spamming the Master of Magnetism!" he cackled.

That taken care of, he turned back to his computer. Surely the e-mail 
from his Acolytes had arrived by *now*...