Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, page 19
G-94VA looked up and down the street: there was still no sign of a human with an Aero-Vac space helmet. His torso swiveled down from what we will call his hips. A tiny torch lit up at the end of one of his fingers.
G-94VA watched the insufficient welds and the metal around them heat up to a dull red glow. He took a rod of filler out of one of his compartments and waited for the heat to grow to a bright cherry red.
* * *
Dash absently sidestepped a working robot on his way down the street. His mind was focused on Pitt, Miss Gardner, and the operators, and his other problems.
There was a Tube Transport station a few yards away. The little indicator light on its door glowed green, which Dash knew meant that there was a vacant Pod docked there. Perfect!
* * *
G-94VA swiveled his torso back up from what we are still calling his hips. He felt relieved at the sight of the new, perfect weld. It was his nature to feel uncomfortable around shoddy work but much more comfortable, as now, when he had performed a task to specification.
Then he recalled that he was here on another kind of duty. He felt uneasy again because he realized that he was not performing that task in accordance with his instructions.
He looked furtively down the street: all clear.
Then he turned his entire upper body to get a view up the street, and that’s when he saw Dash—holding the new space helmet—about to step into a Transport Pod.
The little welding torch on his finger shot out a long and white-hot flame that just missed Dash’s head and scorched a ragged line across the Pod door, which slid shut with a hiss.
* * *
Dash smelled the bitter, dry odor of hot metal. He turned in time to see a line of smoking slag sketch itself down the Pod door. The line took an abrupt turn upward when the Pod dropped into the Tube network and left whatever had burned it up above, on the street.
Dash scratched his head. What the blazes had that been?
* * *
G-94VA’s discomfort became acute and acquired an entirely new flavor.
It’s difficult to describe, to humans, the emotions that a robot feels in a situation like this. You need first to understand that a robot’s entire sense of self worth is tied to its job performance. A welding robot welds, and is uncomfortable in the face of bad welding. A service robot cleans and repairs: broken, dirty things offend it on a deep and profound level. A giant robot smashes things, and unsmashed things, to a giant robot, look incomplete and disturbing.
Although G-94VA was not by nature a security robot, that’s the job he had been assigned to do today and he had not done it well. You might make allowances for G-94VA, but G-94VA didn’t know how to make allowances for himself. He had failed.
G-94VA was horrified. He stamped forward on his big, flat feet and moaned to himself, waving the welding torch—which by now he had forgotten—in a random, searing arc. In a wide circle around G-94VA pedestrians dove for cover like the petals of a great big flower in a Busby Berkeley musical.
When G-94VA reached the Transport Tube station he ripped its door off. The empty Tube yawned in its housing. G-94VA groaned, gathered his stumpy legs under him, and jumped in.
SATURDAY, 12:09 PM
Harry Roy glared at the tops of the heads of the twelve accountants he’d called in to the Ferriss plant on their free Saturday. He had no idea how they did the things they did, but in Harry’s view their speed could only be improved by glaring at them. So he glared.
The accountants, who were sweating heavily despite the air conditioning, had each been given a list of company names. They were paging through their lists with sweaty fingertips in an effort to figure out just who owned what, and how often, and where, and what it all might mean. The companies were a twisted nest of shells, fronts, trusts, and foundations, slowly forming a kind of a family tree that—they hoped—would reveal its root before dinnertime.
Harry glared.
Rows of desks distributed their load of accountancy across the room. On one of these desks a televideo phone rang; a rather nervous accountant spoke quietly into the screen for a few moments. Then she leaned over to the accountant next to her and whispered, “Bavaria.”
That accountant looked alarmed. He shuffled through his own stack of papers. “Not Sri Lanka? Are you sure?”
He looked up to receive the full force of Harry’s glare. Three new drops of sweat plopped down onto his paperwork. He scribbled something out and shook his head in wonder.
Harry’s televideo set rang like an echo of the first one. It was Albert King on the line.
“They’re making progress.” Harry looked over the accountants. “Very slow progress, I mean. But the companies that are buying up all those spare parts do seem to be related. I’m hoping we’ll find the common denominator this afternoon.”
Albert’s face on the screen was unreadable, as always.
“I hope that you’re right, Harry. My own resources haven’t been able to add anything, so your people are the best hope we have.”
Harry’s people relaxed, very slightly. Harry glared at them.
King tapped a finger on his distant desk. “Have you heard anything from Rusty? It seems he tried to call me several times last night. I can’t reach him this morning.”
Harry frowned. “I didn’t bother to check my messages here,” he said. “Any idea what it was about?”
Albert had no idea. “It’s unusual for him to call. But he’d have gotten in touch this morning if it was an important matter.”
Harry tried to imagine taking a call from Rusty. It would be like a game of charades.
“Probably nothing then,” he said. “When he’s not with you he’s usually at the Civilian Conservation Corps, or something.” He flushed. “Actually I have some pretty detailed reports, now that I think of it. I could check to see what he does on the weekends.”
“If you have a moment to spare,” said Albert.
Harry hung up and increased the intensity of his glare. He hoped it was working.
SATURDAY, 12:13 PM
Whatever gadget it was that Rusty was holding behind his back, Nola hoped that it was going to do something dramatic. Something that would get them out of there, away from the Campbells and their tiny, dangerous robot. Its gaze swept over her, and Rusty, and Mr. Perkins, in a monotonous sweep that seemed somehow to end up on Nola more often than it should have.
By now she’d seen what its cannon could do to a rat, a spider’s nest, a rusted hatch, and a few rocks that the Campbells had decided to subdue. Even at this size the formerly giant robot was nothing to sneeze at.
It must have been something that had hit it back in the Experimental Research District. In that improbable hail of scientific progress there must have been some kind of miniaturization device.
How does that even work? she wondered.
* * *
Happily for the world’s smallest giant robot, the miniaturization ray was continuing to work quite well. Of course, the ray only needed to work once: in that moment when the robot’s atoms were dispersed across a very large number of alternate universes while their correspondence with each other was maintained in what was, frankly, a brilliant solution to the problem. The atoms in this particular universe were squeezed oh-so-slightly closer together than they used to be—though nowhere near so close as to cause unwanted side effects, like nuclear fission—but this, as the reader knows by now, is just a bit of icing on the cake. The cake itself is that careful dispersal throughout the dimensions.
The scientists of the Experimental Research District believe, to a person, in learning by doing. This is supplemented by a related method that might be called “learning by other people’s doing” or, and this is probably more accurate, “learning by looking into the smoking wreckage of that lab that used to be next door.”
The scientists of Retropolis have never really taken to the idea of Alpha testing. They have decided that smoking craters are all the testing you’ll ever need.
So the miniaturization ray that had so skillfully shrunk the world’s smallest giant robot had not been tested beyond the smoking craters stage. If you pointed the ray at something and then you pulled the trigger, that thing would become very much smaller and there would not be a smoking crater. Done.
In other universes (one of which even now was hosting about 673,728 of the atoms belonging to the formerly giant robot) there are people who believe in more extensive testing. Those people experiment with different situations, a variety of initial conditions, and the interactions between one experiment and another or, as in this case, between one experiment and another instance of itself.
So although no one in the group that was making its way through the tunnels below Retropolis was aware of this, the dispersed atoms of the world’s smallest giant robot were now mixing and commingling with a surprising number of very similar atoms that had also been dispersed across the dimensions.
And because of the nature of those very similar atoms, something was happening inside the head of the world’s smallest giant robot.
It was getting … smarter.
This was quite a nice side effect, as these things go. The world’s smallest giant robot had not been built for intelligence. Any boost in that department should have been an improvement.
But the world’s smallest giant robot had also been damaged in the head; a critical area that—just as in a human being—was where its intelligence made its home. Its suddenly smarter brain was also a regrettably damaged brain. And very smart but damaged brains can cause difficulties.
SATURDAY, 12:14 PM
Dash lurched from one side rail of the Pod to the other while it picked up speed in the main Tube line. He could see that the damaged area of the door was still quite hot, and so he tried not to lurch anywhere near it.
He hadn’t used the Pods much. Still, he was pretty sure that death rays didn’t usually try to cut the doors in half when you entered them. Things being what they were, it seemed as though somebody was mad at him. There wasn’t much doubt in his mind about who that might be.
So Pitt knew who he was. Pitt knew where he was.
His hand hovered over the Pod controls. He could change his destination, if he …
His fingers curled tightly into his palm. Pitt had designed the Pod system. There was a pretty good chance that he had his eyes on it. Dash now regretted his decision to ride the Pod home. But it was a little late for that now.
The Pod had nearly reached its maximum speed when Dash—now almost prone against its walls—felt the shock of something striking the Pod from behind, which from his point of view was somewhere near his feet.
Eight dents crumpled the skin of the Pod’s floor. They pushed in and the metal began to creak under the strain.
They looked a lot like fingertips.
* * *
Robot G-94VA forced his fingers into the Pod’s shell while the tunnel walls streaked past him. He was feeling a little better, with the quarry now so close. He struggled to forge handholds in the Pod’s casing with his fingertips.
The whistling wind of the Tube system’s air pressure built up behind the Pod and forced it, with G-94VA clinging to its base, toward a curve that would soon climb the pylons of the monorail. The air built up in a kind of cushion behind G-94VA. The robot shifted, digging his fingers in with the help of the pneumatic wind.
The Pod began to rise.
* * *
Dash could see the depressions in the Pod floor curve inward as though they were being shaped by hooks; he could picture the robot’s fingers just on the other side of the thin flooring. Then he found himself sliding toward the floor. The Pod had reached the base of a monorail pylon and now it tilted up, ready to climb who knew how high before leveling out alongside the track.
Dash slipped out of his back pack’s straps and shuffled through the pack’s contents.
Somewhere, he was sure, somewhere in here he had it with him.
* * *
With one hand rooted in the Pod’s body, G-94VA pulled the other one back, just a little, and fired up his fingertip welding torch. The flame narrowed into a slender cutting beam, and G-94VA started to draw a circle in the bottom of the Pod.
He was feeling much better now.
SATURDAY, 12:17 PM
The world’s smallest giant robot was having some trouble. For reasons that it couldn’t know its brain was now racing; without the least inclination to do so it found itself calculating the distance between the tunnel’s arches, their angles to the walls, and every sort of measurement imaginable, up to the shoe sizes of the giants that were accompanying it (237 Wide, in Abner’s case).
The measurements added up, but that didn’t mean that they made any sense.
The world’s smallest giant robot couldn’t remember how, or when, it had blundered into this world of giant human people. Up to now it hadn’t worried about this. Now, however, with a limitless flood of calculations flowing through its damaged cranium, it devoted a part of its brain to resolving that question.
It knew that it had been sleeping for 39.4 days when it had awoken in the storage room. There had been intruders, and it had acted accordingly. Then … something had happened.
Its brain hovered around that something. On either side of the Incident it had still been in its usual world where things were of a familiar size. Therefore the robot tabled the Incident; it was interesting, since the robot’s thinking seemed to be impaired afterward, but there was no explanation there for its presence in a new and bigger world.
While its eyes and cannon revolved in a circuit that lasted for 11.4 seconds in each direction, the world’s smallest giant robot tried to remember just what had happened after its thinking had become unreliable.
Another 57.6-foot archway was left behind. A puddle containing an astonishing 122.15 quarts of water, or something that was very much like water, passed below. The world’s smallest giant robot paid only the slightest attention to these facts. It was concentrating.
SATURDAY, 12:18 PM
Dash hung on to the Pod railing with his left hand while he gripped the handle of his pistol in his right. Because those were all the hands he had, he was wearing the helmet on his head. The Pod was almost vertical now and so its floor had once again become the floor, according to Dash’s senses; and a glowing hot circle, about a foot and a half in diameter, was almost complete.
This was the tricky bit: it would be better to do it now, before the robot had broken through the floor.
Dash let go of the railing and slid down until his feet actually touched the floor about eight inches from the flame of the robot’s welding torch. Then he reached down to his belt and hooked a thumb through it. With one finger he pressed the belt stud that enabled his electromagnet.
Dash jumped up when the button clicked into place and at once he could feel the pull, all around him, of the Pod’s steel body. The magnetized wires in his clothing tried to pull his arms and legs to the Pod walls, but he strained against them and aimed his pistol at the floor. He thumbed the dial on the ray gun to its highest setting and pulled the trigger.
While the robot tried to burn through the last four inches of its hole, Dash began to cut out a much larger hole that ran around the robot’s handholds.
The robot’s welding torch sputtered and stopped for an instant. Then its flame shot out farther and hotter. It began to cut more rapidly.
SATURDAY, 12:19 PM
There had been a pursuit. The world’s smallest giant robot was certain about that much. The intruders had refused to surrender, and of course that was annoying, although not unexpected; it had managed to catch up with them and it was at this point, it found, that its memories became extremely confused.
There had been quite a lot of noise and bright flashes of light and energy; possibly, there had been elephants.
The robot considered that for a moment. Very small elephants.
But it couldn’t recall any particular change in scale for about five more minutes. It couldn’t recall much of anything during those five minutes. It was just after that when it had found itself walking through a titanic tunnel and it had encountered something that was rather like a very, very large squid. The squid had refused to surrender.
And from that point on, the world’s smallest giant robot concluded, it had been walking through a world full of immense human people, along with rodents of remarkable height and quite a lot of rocks that had also refused to surrender themselves to it.
Its little brain buzzed. Yes, that was true: this world was peopled with intelligent, intruding rocks; savage rocks; defiant rocks; rocks that defied capture. Its little eyes (and, strangely, Rusty’s eyes) flew to the masonry that lined the tunnel. Scary rocks.
“SPRDLFGHL!”
SATURDAY, 12:20 PM
When the robot’s arm came through the bottom of the Pod, Dash still hadn’t finished his own cut through the floor. He could just see the robot’s face hanging down below; its arm reached all around the Pod floor in search of a place to anchor itself. Dash’s tongue crept out of the corner of his mouth and lodged there while he labored to finish his own work on the Pod.
Fortunately he didn’t need to finish it. The robot’s weight was hanging from what by now was just a loose flap of steel: the flap started to bend back with a creak. The robot’s arm flailed wildly around the compartment. Dash tucked his legs up under him to stay out of its way.
His pistol cut a final inch around the robot’s handholds and then, he saw, it was all over. The floor of the Pod gave way. The robot hung there, staring up at him, and then it seemed to get much smaller very, very quickly, because they were about halfway up a monorail pylon and there was a considerable distance to fall.
Strange, though: in that instant when the robot had been hanging there its eyes had suddenly blazed brightly and he was sure he’d heard it say, “You! The Plumber!”
SATURDAY, 12:21 PM
Nola kept an eye on Rusty while they climbed a rough, damp stairway to a hatch that Evvie opened with caution. The sounds of a city street came from the other side.
