Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, page 18
Dash finished his coffee, grateful that he’d paid a bit extra for the Actaeon’s kitchen module. That reminded him of the space helmet that he’d left … where? Miss Gardner must still have it, he decided.
He poked his head out of the rocket’s main hatch and called over one of the ornithopters. It came to him, its little steely feathers chiming, and settled on his wrist. “’Morning,” Dash said. “I was wondering if you could fly downstairs and have a look around my windows and the front door.”
The ornithopter circled the roof and disappeared. Dash went back in for another cup of coffee. He still wasn’t sure if the rocket made better coffee than he got in his own kitchen.
He sank into the pilot’s seat and took stock of what he knew.
First off, he still didn’t know much of anything about Pitt’s new switchboard, and that was, after all, the whole reason he’d gotten into this mess. The operators had demonstrated that Rusty’s new robot friend was herself a switchboard operator and that was pretty interesting, he thought, as far as it went. So they did know something about how the switchboard was being run even if they had no idea where it was or what that might mean.
Dash took another sip of his coffee.
On the other hand, he knew that whatever Pitt was building under that power plant site, it wasn’t on the up and up. Otherwise Pitt wouldn’t have made such a rumpus when he found that Dash had gotten in there. He really had been steamed, hadn’t he?
The problem there was that Dash didn’t know what it meant and it wasn’t something he could use to implicate Pitt, seeing as how Dash had broken into the place himself. That would take a bit of explaining, that would.
But Pitt was definitely doing something that he wasn’t supposed to be doing and he was willing to kill anybody who found out about it. So a little bit of care was needed from here on out.
Dash rinsed his coffee cup and snapped it into place in the cupboard. First off he needed to make sure that Nola and the other operators were going to lie low. There was nothing to connect them to Dash, so far as Pitt could know, and it was best it stayed that way.
He stepped outside again and enjoyed the view until the ornithoper came back with its recording. It looked like it was all clear down there. Dash smiled. Well, that’s one thing that’s going my way, he thought. Pitt couldn’t know just who Dash was.
* * *
Downstairs he slipped his clothes into the soniclave and himself into his bathrobe and then he fried up some eggs while he waited for the wash. The two sinister helmets he’d brought back from the Moon were glaring at him. He turned them to face the wall.
There was the televideo phone, blinking at him. He checked his messages while he ate.
Surprisingly, Margaret of O’Malley’s had called to tell him his new helmet would be in around noon. Dash frowned. Well, maybe he’d get to it, if he could locate the broken one before then. There was a late night message from his cousin Dale, but it didn’t make much sense. All Dash could see in the recording was an empty room, and all he could hear was some kind of loud noise coming from off screen. He shook his head. Dale did like his parties.
The soniclave beeped while he was doing the washing up. Dash dressed and dug through the file cabinet for the note that Miss Gardner had given him, with the rate the operators wanted to pay him and her address and televideo number. He smiled: a young lady had given him her number, even if it was in what you would call a professional capacity.
He called and let the videophone ring and ring, but she wasn’t at home. So he set the paper down while he decided what to do next.
There wasn’t any doubt that finding the switchboard was what the job was really about, even if Pitt’s Projectile might be the man’s real weakness. Dash thought it over. His only clue to the switchboard was that robot up at Rusty’s.
Well, he thought. There it is, then.
He locked his apartment and took the stairs two at a time.
* * *
There was no answer at Rusty’s door, but since Dash knew the robot didn’t bother to lock his attic apartment, he cracked it open and peered in. There was the operator robot—motionless again—in front of the window; next to her, Dash’s broken space helmet sat on the workbench. He scooped that up and headed back downstairs.
On the seventh floor landing he remembered the leak in the 7C bathroom, and he felt a sudden shame. With all that was going on he’d forgotten to get the new valves. He’d just have to squeeze that in, he promised himself, and on the sixth floor landing he also remembered to squeeze in some sealer and paint for the ceiling in 6C.
And with those reminders of plumbing he thought back on Pitt’s robots. Where was Pitt getting all these mechanical people? They hadn’t looked quite like any other robots Dash had ever seen. There might be something in that, he told himself.
SATURDAY, 9:11 AM
There was something familiar about that little robot, the one that was riding on Evan’s shoulder. Nola was sure she’d seen it before, but she couldn’t recall ever having seen a robot so small. Well, there were the ornithopters in their cote on the roof, but they were about as close to robots as a bird was to a person. They weren’t … complex, or something like that.
She squinted at the little robot while it bobbed up and down on the boy’s shoulder. They had descended from the basement through a hatch—suspiciously sooty and ragged around the edges—and now the subbasement stairs had led them to a tunnel below the streets.
Was it the color of the robot that seemed so familiar? Nola tried to ignore its size and just picture it in a sort of abstract way.
Oh, no.
There was a deep dent in its tiny head. If you imagined that it was very much bigger …
“GACK.”
Its little eyes were following her as it went up and down in time with Evan’s steps. She didn’t think she could see any recognition there. She hoped very much that she never would.
The strange man was watching the robot, too. “I think it’s been damaged somehow,” he whispered.
“Filing cabinet on the head,” she mumbled. “Just don’t ask me how I know.”
The man’s jaw sagged. “Do you know these people?”
Rusty, for his part, was watching the Campbells. Nola could see that he’d pulled something out of a pouch or pocket: it was a little device of some kind, and he was holding it behind his back. His thumb was pressing a button on the device’s face. But she saw that Rusty kept shaking his head, as though he was trying to clear it. Nola wondered if her robot friend was all right.
As they trudged along the man offered his hand to Nola. “Abner Perkins,” he said. “Engineer.”
“Nola Gardner,” she answered, clasping Abner’s hand. “Switchboard operator.”
They continued across the puddled floor.
“And, sort of, adventurer,” she added.
Rusty looked her way. “And that’s Rusty,” she said. “He doesn’t talk, as such.”
The tiny robot kept peering at her face. Its chest tended to turn with its head and that meant that its cannon was following her everywhere. It looked like it was trying to figure something out.
The robot, that is; not the cannon. The cannon looked like it knew everything it needed to know.
SATURDAY, 9:43 AM
Pitt had expanded his search for D. Kent into the internal workings of the Info-Slate system. No one had known he was building in this kind of access: but since he ran the operators, and they ran the system, it hadn’t been difficult for him to establish channels he could use to see what every Info-Slate in Retropolis was doing.
The trouble was that even though few people owned Info-Slates, they used them for a very large number of things. Pitt had been sorting through their messages, requests, and notes for a long time before he hit on something that looked promising.
It was a message from O’Malley’s Adventure Outfitters to one of its suppliers, concerning a replacement space helmet for a customer named Kelvin Dashkent.
Dashkent? Unusual name. Pitt cross-checked all the city directories but he couldn’t find a Dashkent listed anywhere. He leaned back in his chair. Back in his original list of Kents he did see a Kelvin Kent. Well, then.
Pitt started looking up background information on Kelvin Kent, whose address, it turned out, matched O’Malley’s records for Kelvin Dashkent.
All around him his robots continued about their tasks until one of them stopped midway across the room with its eyes on his face because, for the first time in its memory, it could see that he was smiling.
SATURDAY, 10:22 AM
Dash felt a little conspicuous with that broken space helmet on his hip but he did his best to carry it off. It wasn’t as much of a problem as he’d supposed, really, since the sales clerk at Robots in Every Shape! was determined to think he was charming, fashionable, and wealthy.
“These are all real nice,” he said, “especially, you know, the mechanics. They’re pretty swell.” He reached down to the counter and sketched what he could remember of Pitt’s operator robot, and then next to her, and about three times the size, the giant robot that had chased him with Miss Gardner through the city just the day before.
“I was thinking about these two. I saw them this week. This one,” as he pointed at the operator, “is just about three feet tall, on account of she sort of stops at the hips, and this one,” with a finger on the giant robot, “well, he’s a real bruiser, about ten or twelve feet tall, with something like this,” as he sketched in the robot’s cannon, “smack dab in the middle of his chest.”
The sales clerk looked apologetic.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “but I’ve never seen anything like these.”
She looked out across the showroom. “But as you can see, we’ve got Robots in Every Shape! here, and I’m sure that if you have a look around you’ll find something that meets your needs.”
At the end of the nearest aisle a display robot looked up from his magazine, saw that Dash was still talking to the clerk, and then went back to his reading. It was this month’s Hearts and Pistons.
Dash tapped his sketches. “Well, the thing is, Miss, I’m kind of trying to find out where these robots come from.”
She turned to watch her manager step into the shop’s back room. Then she sized Dash up and leaned forward. “Look, we handle all the major manufacturers here, and nobody builds anything quite like these. Are you sure this is what they look like? Where did you see them?”
Dash sized her up right back, all five and a half feet of her, from her too-stylish shoes that had to be killing her to the top of her head, and he took note of her name badge in between.
“Okay, Evelyn. Somebody owns robots like these, and he’s not a very nice person.” He pointed back at his sketch of the giant robot. “This one tried to vaporize me yesterday. And the other one, she’s kind of a custom job that seems to be made to work at a switchboard. There’s something about this fellow that’s just not right and I’m trying to find out what that is. And I’m Dash, by the way. Dash Kent.”
Evelyn took the weight off her too-stylishly clad feet on a stool behind the counter.
“It’s a kind of a mystery, then?”
He nodded and then handed her his business card. “Yes, Miss, that’s exactly what it is. It’s a mystery.”
She ran her eyes over the card and slipped it into a stylishly invisible pocket. “Well, I never.”
Dash smiled some more.
Evelyn pulled out some sample books and showed him the latest models from Ferriss Moto-Man, Volto-Vac, and Robots By Maria. He had to agree that these were not a match.
“But you see the arms on your little operator robot? They look just like the arms on the Robots By Maria Châtelaine model. The legs on this big one look a lot like the legs on a Volto-Vac Submersible—see, there’s one by the window? And its head could just be a head from the Ferriss Smeltomator. We don’t carry those.”
Dash frowned down at the catalogs. “You think they’re made from spare parts, then?”
Evelyn nodded happily. “We don’t talk about this,” she confided, “but it’s possible for someone to make a whole robot from replacement parts. They just sort of cobble them together, you see, and if they can make some custom fittings to assemble all those parts together, well, there you go. Unlicensed robot.”
She beamed at him.
“Unlicensed…”
Evelyn pulled a stack of forms from behind the counter. “When we sell a robot,” she said, “it’s a sort of a lease; you can’t own a robot, ’cause it’s a person. You own its indenture. That’s kind of like a loan. When it does enough work for you so it’s paid off the indenture, well, then it’s a free agent. From then on you have to pay it wages or else get a new one and send the old one on its way.”
Dash nodded slowly. He guessed he’d heard about this. Had Rusty gone through that? Dash supposed he must have.
“But if you build ’em on the sly…?” he wondered.
Evelyn checked the shop again. Apart from the sample models, she and Dash were all alone in there. She leaned closer.
“Then they don’t know about indentures at all,” she whispered. “And if nobody ever finds out about it, they’ll end up working for you forever.”
Dash looked out over the showroom. The robot who’d been reading was watching him now. You could never know just what they were thinking.
“They’d be slaves,” Dash said, quietly. “And no one would ever know.”
Evelyn nodded.
“People really do that?” he asked.
“Some have,” she said primly. “It’s all quite illegal.”
“Well, I should hope so,” Dash agreed.
He looked over the catalogs again, and back at his sketches.
“What you’ve got there,” Evelyn told him, “are black market robots.”
He nodded slowly. “Well, like I said, he’s not a very nice guy.”
Just then Evelyn’s manager came out of the back room and started to look interested, so Dash bent over the catalogs. Now that he knew what to look for he thought he could recognize the arms, legs, torsos, and heads of some of the construction robots he’d run into down below the power station site. He thought about all those robots working away down there in the dark.
Pitt was running a huge operation there with an army of black market robots. And if Dash could prove it … he just might have found a way to get Pitt thrown into jail.
SATURDAY, 10:22 AM
Howard Pitt consulted his notes for a final time. His D. Kent, also known as Kelvin, had made recent calls to O’Malley’s and to a woman named Nola Gardner. That name, Pitt recalled, belonged to one of the operators from the old Info-Slate switchboard.
Pitt grunted. The switchboard must be the spot where Kent’s unseen master had placed him on Pitt’s chessboard. And now that Kent had spoken to her the operator must be considered a liability, too.
He handed Info-Slates to the two robots who were about to leave: one for O’Malley’s, and one for Kent’s apartment building. He’d use the Slates to stay in constant touch with them. If Kent were foolish enough to go home, or to keep his appointment at O’Malley’s, that’s when Pitt would have him.
But in case his robots missed Kent and Nola Gardner, he’d have to make sure that they were eliminated in another way.
Pitt used his private access to the Info-Slate system one more time.
12
BATTLE IN THE PNEUMATIC WIND
SATURDAY, 11:42 AM
Dash propped his helmet up on a convenient pillar while he stowed the new valves for Apartment 7C inside his back pack. He felt a minor pang of guilt; but those old valves weren’t going to hold up, and anyway if Miss Gardner wanted to hear from him she’d have been at home, or maybe at Dash’s apartment, and so far she hadn’t been to either one. Anyway he could put the valves and other issues of plumbing out of his mind for now.
In fact he was just a few blocks from the main monorail terminal. If he swung by O’Malley’s on his way he could have all his other business settled by the time he finally reached Miss Gardner and the operators.
Then maybe he could figure out how to prove that Pitt was in the middle of the black market robot trade.
He picked up his helmet again and balanced it against his hip. That illegal robot racket was an ugly business. It was making him mad just to think about it, and between the expression on his face and the broken space helmet he looked just like the kind of person that the other pedestrians wanted to avoid, which is what they did; and so Dash made very good time on his way to the terminal.
Once inside O’Malley’s he walked right up to the counter and set the helmet down.
“Kelvin Kent, Aero-Vac helmet, Indestructible* Dome,” he told Margaret.
She shuffled through some order forms. “Mr. Kent?” she asked. “Mr. Kelvin Kent?”
Dash nodded. She could give him her worst. He really didn’t care anymore. “Also known as Dash Kent, sometimes written as Kelvin Dashkent. That’s me.”
Margaret of O’Malley’s frowned.
“This is very irregular. Do you have some identification? I’m only supposed to give this to Mr. Dashkent, personally.”
Things progressed in Margaret’s usual way until, a few minutes later, Dash stepped back from the counter with his new, highly polished, and—he hoped—Indestructible* helmet. But something hanging in front of the counter caught his eye. “You know … I think I’ll have one of these, too.”
It slid right into his back pack alongside the Enigmascope.
* * *
Robot G-94VA was not, by occupation, a security robot. The sight of Pitt’s security robots might have alarmed Dash before Pitt intended for him to feel alarmed; so it was a couple of the construction robots he’d detailed to find, follow, and capture Dash.
G-94VA wasn’t accustomed to this kind of duty. He arrived on station outside the terminal and stood there, completely motionless, watching for any sign of a young man with a space helmet. No such young man was in view. G-94VA automatically scanned the welds on the bench in front of him and felt a slight discomfort. The bench’s welds showed some unprofessional voids; in addition, their beads were not uniform.
