Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, page 20
Rusty still had his thumb planted firmly on his gadget’s button. He was trying to look up toward the daylight, but his head had fallen into some kind of spasm. His glowing eyes seemed to want to look left and right, left and right, in a strange, repeating rhythm. Over and over his face would tilt upward, only to snap back down and shift from left to right, left to right, left to right.…
Nola was so busy worrying about Rusty that she completely missed the fact that Rusty’s head was moving in the exact way that the tiny robot’s head was moving. They were perfectly in sync: left to right, swing back, left to right, swing back.… If she’d seen that, she would have been even more worried. But unless she could also know what was going on inside the head of the world’s smallest giant robot, she still wouldn’t have been worried enough.
Nola, as we have seen, had no idea how miniaturization works.
Mr. Perkins stood with slumped shoulders and a hopeless air. Well, Nola thought, who knows how long they’ve been holding him prisoner? She tried to encourage him by doing interesting things with her eyebrows.
Evvie stepped out onto the street, followed by Evan, who had the little robot riding on his shoulder.
Rusty, and then Nola, followed them onto the empty street.
The children looked up and down the street and seemed satisfied with what they saw. Nola herself wasn’t sure just where they were.
Then Evan turned to wave Mr. Perkins up after them, and it was at this point that things became confused.
The little robot on Evan’s shoulder was swinging right and left as though it was surrounded by enemies. Uh-oh, thought Nola.
Although their way was clear of pedestrians, there were several personal rockets and hover sleds drifting above the street with their high-pitched, coughing sound; someone nearby was playing music, rather loudly, in Nola’s opinion, and a block or so over someone must have been doing some construction work. Loud voices and louder equipment were barking and banging and generally raising a racket.
The little robot swung back and forth; it looked like it was trying to locate the sources of all those sounds. Then its eyes fastened on the stonework of the building behind them and its cannon erupted into flame.
It was trying to subdue the building.
Evan shrieked. Evvie turned and gave the little robot a curious look.
Rusty took his thumb off the gadget’s button and then gave it two quick taps.
Nola heard the familiar ping-ping-ping of ornithopter wings just above them: a swarm of the little mechanical birds descended on Evan and circled his head. They were making chirping sounds.
Rusty grabbed Nola by the hand and took off down the street at a run, and Nola was dragged along behind him for the instant it took for her legs to figure out what was going on.
The tiny robot swarmed up onto Evan’s head, its little legs pumping and its cannon sweeping left and right in an effort to track a dozen ornithopters. It was hard to tell, but the robot almost seemed to be afraid of them.
Nola looked back and had one last glimpse of Abner Perkins’s astonished face. The children tumbled back through the doorway on top of him; the door swung closed; and then only the circling ornithopters were left on the street.
SATURDAY, 12:27 PM
“What’s wrong with your robot? What’s wrong with your robot?” Abner kept asking.
Evan’s left ear had a nasty burn. Evvie was poking it experimentally. The robot, though, had gotten very quiet once they’d shut the door to the street.
“I don’t think you’ll lose it,” Evvie told Evan.
“Can I wear a patch on it?” he asked.
She thought that over.
“Yeah, okay.”
Abner edged closer to the stairs. Evvie gave him a look.
“Hey, robot,” she said. “Don’t let him get away.”
The little robot hesitated, but only for an instant. Its little cannon turned to point at Abner.
“GACK.”
“I need to get an ear patch,” Evan said.
Suddenly Abner could imagine Evan in his ear patch, the lethal little robot on his shoulder as he swayed back and forth on the quarterdeck of a pirate ship. He shook his head, but the image just wouldn’t go away.
* * *
The world’s smallest giant robot was feeling better. The chaos of the street, with its noises, its immense scary stones, and its huge robotic predators, was safely locked outside the tunnels; but more importantly, the robot’s troubling thoughts had begun to seep away. Its brain was fading back to its familiar, simple state: a state of vigilance and purpose.
There were hardly any excess synapses left in its brain. It felt so much better, now that it wasn’t so smart anymore. That had been … unpleasant. But the memory was already a distant one.
It kept the big giant’s face squarely in its sights and it promised itself that this prisoner would not escape.
SATURDAY, 12:27 PM
The Pod had leveled out along the monorail line. Now it descended once again to street level. Dash hung on to the railing and pressed the combination for the next available station. He’d had it: whether or not Pitt could track him he was getting out of the Tube system and he wouldn’t be going back in.
These things really are dangerous, he thought.
The Pod’s missing floor gave him an interesting view of the inside of the Transport Tube system, anyway: he could really appreciate the Pod’s speed now that he could see the Tube supports whiz by below (or behind) it.
The Pod slowed. It turned vertical again with Dash hanging on to the railing as he watched the Tube gape under him. He didn’t much like the view anymore. So he was happy to step out of the Pod when its door finally slid open.
A man pushed past him to get in, and Dash was almost quick enough to stop him.
Oh well, he thought as he walked down the street and away from the passenger’s calls for help. You just oughtta be a little more polite.
He could probably shake Pitt’s surveillance out here on the street. But he definitely couldn’t go home. If Pitt knew he was going to be at O’Malleys then he certainly knew where Dash lived. It was a puzzle, all right. He really needed to warn Miss Gardner to tell all the operators to lie low.
He took off his helmet and sat down for a minute to sort things out.
If he couldn’t go home, and he wasn’t sure where Miss Gardner was, then his only choice was Rusty. And his only way to reach Rusty, he decided, was through the League.
Dash walked up to the corner and looked at the street signs. Okay, then: he knew where he was. He set off for the headquarters of the Fraternal League of Robotic Persons.
SATURDAY, 12:32 PM
As eager as Rusty was to be off and take care of his mysterious business, Nola forced him to wait while she entered an urgent message into her Info-Slate. The message was going out on an emergency channel that would warn the Air Safety and Astronautics corps about Mr. Perkins and those awful children. They couldn’t have gotten very far away yet, she hoped.
Rusty seemed almost glad of the delay. He kept shaking his head and looking around him as though he was lost. But at least he wasn’t doing that scary left to right thing anymore.
Nola had hardly signed off when she saw the first ASAA rocket swoop down from overhead.
My, that was fast, she thought, right before the officer in the rocket pulled out a ray gun and started to shoot at her.
13
ONSLAUGHT OF THE RAMPAGING ROCKETS
SATURDAY, 5:58 PM
Lillian’s time had just about run out. She looked up, scanning for ornithopters, and saw just one of them. It was circling patiently on the next block down. So: there hadn’t been any success, not anywhere near here, anyway.
There wasn’t even anyone left to ask. All the pedestrians had rushed away (where?) and left the streets empty all around her. She’d never seen the city when it wasn’t crowded with people; it was an odd sight. Interesting.
No! Not empty after all. Lillian saw the deliberate movement of a Ferriss Sweep-O-Matic, casually sweeping the empty streets as though nothing in them was out of the ordinary … in spite of the fact that pretty much everything was.
Could Sweep-O-Matics speak? She wasn’t sure. She approached the robot anyway and she was just about to ask the question when, with that unsettling sideways shift she remembered, she understood that she had run out of time.
SATURDAY, 12:33 PM
Pitt’s neck was bent backward almost beyond its tolerances, and he still couldn’t take in the whole magnificent length of the Projectile. Although the robots were still running behind, the Projectile was almost entirely skinned. It bobbed up above Pitt’s head and buoyed the roof of the cavern like a dream prepared to take flight, which was, in fact, what the Projectile was.
Pitt commended Robot R-54KG on the work. The impassive face of the robot turned upward as it told him, “We still hope to complete the project on schedule, sir.”
Pitt’s eyebrow twitched. That sounded like irrationality, again. “How the blazes could you possibly make up the time?” he asked, but before R-54KG could explain Pitt heard the muffled chime of his Info-Slate.
It was a message from the robot he’d detailed to watch out for Kent in front of O’Malley’s Adventure Outfitters.
Pitt read the message with a deepening sense of dismay.
Kent had eluded the robot in—of all things!—the Tube Transport network. It looked as though the robot had been badly damaged. Pitt instructed it to return to the site.
Just then he heard the Slate chime again: the ASAA were responding to one of Pitt’s shoot-on-sight orders. So far they were only pursuing the operator, Nola Gardner. Kent was still at large.
Pitt pulled his slide rule out of its holster. His fingers flashed back and forth as he calculated the current state of the project. He scowled at the results and slid the slide rule back onto his hip.
It was still too soon.
He kept frowning all the way back to the control room. Still …
He looked over the numbers again. He could accelerate his takeover of the Info-Slate system. That should prevent the ASAA or anybody else from learning what he was doing. This would work best if he started simply, he decided, and so he tapped out instructions for his operators.
Now they would intercept any communications about the Tube Transport system and Info-Slate operations; any messages on these subjects would be routed to Pitt’s own Info-Slate. After a moment’s thought, he added any inquiries about his shoot-on-sight orders. There.
Now he sat back and looked over the controls.
He’d start slow. In fact he had a perfect group of test subjects near at hand.
SATURDAY, 12:34 PM
Nola was flabbergasted. She hadn’t even known that the ASAA carried firearms and the idea that they would simply shoot people on sight was—or would have been—beyond belief.
But that’s definitely what they were doing. They were seeing her and then they were shooting at her. Four of them, so far.
Rusty had led her through a confusing series of doorways, both in and out, and along three different alleyways, and then down some stairs into a park where the two of them now crouched underneath a tree. Maybe the excitement had been good for Rusty. He seemed alert again and in spite of everything he seemed to be more comfortable.
Nola decided that the underground tunnels just weren’t for everybody. Including me, she added. She squeezed Rusty’s hand.
“Why are they trying to kill us?”
He just shook his head, his eyes never straying from the sky.
She could hear the soft coughing of the ASAA rockets even though she couldn’t see them through the branches above. There had to be a reason for it. What could they have done that would have made them seem so … so guilty? So dangerous?
“It’s Pitt,” she said. “Somehow, he’s convinced them that we have to be eliminated.”
Rusty looked at her.
“The Info-Slates! He’s in control of the Info-Slates!”
If Pitt could insert his own commands into the ASAA’s Info-Slate feeds then he could make them do anything. They’d think they were under orders.
Apart from her fear, which was understandable, Nola felt something else. Pitt was taking the switchboard—a thing that had been the center of Nola’s life just a week ago—and he was twisting it into a weapon that could hurt people … that was trying to hurt her. She looked up through the leaves.
“That man makes me so angry,” she said.
Rusty held one finger up to what wasn’t quite his mouth. Nola understood. He’d been listening to the sounds of the rockets overhead and nodding rhythmically. One passed by them, its noise deadened by the building to one side, and Rusty kept nodding while another one circled in the other direction. Still nodding to that same beat, Rusty rose and pulled her up beside him. The rockets went through their pattern one more time. Once the first of them had passed Rusty pulled Nola after him in a dash across the park where they stooped again under another tree.
The rockets continued to circle overhead. Whenever Rusty’s head-nodding reached just the right point he would lead Nola a little farther. It was terrifying, but at least no one was shooting at them right now.
SATURDAY, 12:45 PM
Delbert Kent was unhappy. He was sitting on the floor of his cell directly across from Dennis Kent, who was just as unhappy as Delbert.
They had exhausted all the conversation they had about three hours earlier. It wasn’t much of a loss because up to then their conversation had been, more or less, “I am unhappy. Are you, also, unhappy? Because I sure am.”
They’d been pulled from their homes in the middle of the night by large and sinister robots who had sedated them, thrown them onto a hover sled, and then decanted them into jail cells where only one very bald man in a hat had even looked in on them.
That man didn’t have any conversation at all, beyond a dissatisfied grunt at the sight of them. He had looked pretty unhappy, too.
It just hadn’t been a very happy morning down here in Cell 17C.
There was a sound like wind, or like rainfall outside a window. It was coming from the Transport Tube Pod across from the door.
“Something’s happening,” Dennis Kent told him.
“It’s not going to make us happy,” said Delbert.
The sound became very much louder. Now Delbert could actually feel a rush of air hurry into the Transport Pod. The Pod started to rattle.
Then the rushing air turned into a really powerful wind that pulled the blankets off the cot and ripped Dennis’s towel right off him, and this made them both more unhappy because Dennis had been stepping out of the shower when he was taken by the robots. The blankets and the towel flattened against the far wall of the Transport Pod.
Then the wind got quite a bit stronger.
SATURDAY, 12:48 PM
Rusty led Nola across the skyway over Lem Lane just south of Rue du Rur and above the Constellation Ballroom. The skyway’s ceiling was probably hiding them from above, Nola hoped. On the other side they entered a building and moved briskly through its hallways to the far side, where another skyway led across and over the street below. She knew that she was casting nervous looks over her shoulder and she thought it might be a good idea to stop; when the blue and gray length of an ASAA rocket passed overhead she fixed her eyes on the far doorway and pretended that she didn’t care what was up there.
Rusty led her through the door. Nola knew with every inch of her skin, though, that the rocket was coming back around for a second look.
SATURDAY, 12:50 PM
Delbert and Dennis bounced from one side of the Transport Tube to the other, with frequent apologies. Delbert was happy that Dennis had been able to get his towel back; and so, as it happened, was Dennis.
The net unhappiness of the day had been reduced by a small but comforting amount. That trend, unfortunately for the Kents, was not going to continue.
The immense wind that had built up in the Transport Tube system flung their Pod forward like a rocket. It was an astonishing amount of air pressure.
They felt the Pod slow down, at least a little, just before it ripped around a corner and dropped straight down; then the floor detached on a concealed hinge and the two Kents fell out of the Pod into a small room with a cot and a few simple amenities.
A circular hatch in the ceiling snapped shut. They heard the sound of their Transport Pod slipping away back into the Tube system.
They looked around.
This room looked almost exactly like the cell they’d come from except that one wall bulged outward in a gentle curve. Delbert tried the door: it was locked, just like the last one.
Dennis held on to his towel and opened a cabinet. “Hey, look!” he said. “There’s food.”
The cabinet was stocked with enough supplies to last them for a couple of weeks. Delbert wondered whether that ought to make him happy. He had a feeling that it wouldn’t.
SATURDAY, 12:50 PM
Officer Maria da Cunha tapped angrily on her Info-Slate. She knew that she should be joining the pursuit, but something about this felt completely wrong to her.
Not very many people knew that ASAA officers carried ray guns. The reason why so few people knew was that ASAA officers never used them. Their pistols were locked into hidden compartments in their rockets and they stayed hidden because the officers just never needed to take them out.
So this morning’s shoot-on-sight orders hadn’t just surprised her: they had astonished her, and they had angered her. This was not the way things were done. She was an officer of the law. She didn’t shoot people.
There had been a long delay before she’d gotten an answer back. Maybe it was some new problem in the Info-Slate system. She knew that something was different in the system because no one had picked up the line when she tried to establish a voice connection to the operator.
That was completely different from her last call, when she’d spoken to that arrogant engineer and to the operator, Miss Gardner.
