Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, page 22
“Rusty?” Mrs. Broadvine called. But from the doorway she saw a larger, strange robot sitting on a stool next to the mechanical operator. The lamps of his eyes turned to look back at her. He rose and made a slight bow.
“I am also looking for Rusty,” the robot said.
Mrs. Broadvine led her operators into the room. “Am I to suppose that you are a friend of Rusty’s?” she asked.
The blue and white stranger paused. “Yes,” he said at last. “It is prudent to be cautious. My name is Albert King. I am the President of the Retropolis Fraternal League of Robotic Persons.”
He opened a small compartment right about where his ribs weren’t. “My card,” he said, and he handed it to her.
She looked at it, front and back, and sniffed. “Well, it seems to be in order.”
Rhonda Bancroft stepped out of Mrs. Broadvine’s shadow. “It’s true, ma’am,” she said. “I was there last month with some muffins for the bake sale. And all those calls Rusty was making last night? He was trying to reach Mr. King, here.”
Mr. King bowed again. “Very fine muffins,” he said. “Thank you.”
The rest of the operators spread through the room. Freda Detwiler sat next to the little operator robot and waved to her.
Mr. King waited while the ladies sat and then returned to his stool. He shook his head at Freda. “It’s no use,” he said. “I have been trying to communicate with her myself. I’m afraid she may be damaged.”
With a broad smile, Freda said, “Connect the main pane cable to the Events Registry for the Fraternal League of Robotic Persons.”
The little operator spun up to life. She reached up to an imaginary cable in the air in front of her and detached it deftly from its imaginary socket; her finger flicked its imaginary release to the middle position and then she tucked it neatly into place, releasing her finger as it slid home. Then she relaxed again.
“We were thinking of calling her Iris,” Rhonda said from the windowsill.
Freda nodded. “It’s because her eyes are her best feature,” she explained.
Mr. King leaned forward, his eyes on Freda. “Do you know something about this person?” he asked.
Mrs. Broadvine intervened. “We know that she’s a switchboard operator, Mr. King, and a very good one. As are we.”
“She’s one of the operators that Howard Pitt’s used to replace us,” said Rhonda.
“Televideo or Info-Slate?” he asked, and thereby won Mrs. Broadvine’s heart.
“Info-Slate,” she said. “We were all let go early this week. Pitt’s robots seem to have taken our place.”
Mr. King turned from her to the herd of operators, which now, he could see, included the one they were calling Iris.
“Please explain.”
SATURDAY, 2:37 PM
Now that his leg was functioning at 36 percent efficiency, Robot G-94VA was feeling somewhat better and moving at a more acceptable speed. It’s true that he sometimes needed to brace himself against the bulge of the Transport Tube housing—especially when he creaked around the tunnel corners—but on the whole he was functioning well enough that he estimated his arrival at the construction site in an improved four hours and twenty-one minutes.
After forty minutes or so for essential repairs he would be able to rejoin his co-workers and make a substantial contribution to the project. Although once the Plumber arrived with his reinforcements they might have the whole project completed before G-94VA could add much of anything.
That would be all right. Finishing the project on schedule was a priority mandate. Still, he’d like to help.
But how will the Master react when the Plumber returns?
It would be a terrible thing if the Master ordered them all to attack the Plumber. Surely, this had been a mistake? Perhaps G-94VA had misunderstood. Perhaps the Plumber was not the target. Or perhaps the order had been to aid the Plumber, not to attack and detain him.
But G-94VA had not been mistaken. He was certain. Was it possible that the Master had made an error?
The robot knew that this was dangerous territory. If the Master could be wrong …
G-94VA realized that he’d come to a stop. The tunnel stretched into the darkness ahead and behind him and—just for a moment—he didn’t know where he was.
Then he dragged his damaged leg forward and took another step. The good leg followed. And then he did it again.
SATURDAY, 2:42 PM
Evan pulled the basement door open—just a crack—with one eye on the robot that rode his shoulder. Abner felt all his muscles clench. That berserk fit the tiny robot had pitched last time they left the tunnels was going to feature nightly in Abner’s dreams for months to come.
“It looks okay,” Evvie said. She was casually standing where Abner’s body shielded her from the robot’s cannon.
Evan pulled the door about halfway open. They waited. The little robot’s head swiveled back and forth, covering Abner and then the doorway. There was no sign of the panic it had shown when they came out on the street.
Abner tried to remember what he knew about agoraphobia. Could robots suffer from anxiety disorders?
The two children led him up the same stairway where they’d encountered the robot and woman who had later escaped onto the street. Abner was nearly overcome by an urge to pound on the apartment doors but he contained himself while they padded up the stairs, landing by landing, the miniature robot’s head swiveling all the while. It always lingered for a moment when it aimed itself at Abner.
Abner could hear a murmur of conversation; it was far overhead, maybe on the top floor. Please, he thought, please help me. Please be somebody who can control these horrible children. Please come down the stairs.
There was one deep, resonant voice, and what sounded like several women responding to it. Abner couldn’t make out any of the words.
Evvie pushed past him and unlocked an apartment door. Evan and the tiny robot encouraged Abner to follow her inside.
The first thing Abner noticed was a big pink sheet of paper tacked up by the door.
Doris: We’ll be back on Monday!!! Remember, bedtime is 9 o’clock!!! Be sure to see them off to school every weekday!!! (All the way to school!!!) Thanks!!!
—Mr. And Mrs. Campbell
Abner read the note thoughtfully. That’s why nothing else in the room surprised him.
It was tidier than he might have expected, but the children hadn’t spent much time in here recently, had they? The drapes were drawn over the narrow windows; the dish drainer, which he could see through the kitchen door, was stacked with plates and pans. A radio was playing dance music, quietly enough that it wouldn’t bother the neighbors, but loudly enough to overpower the muffled moans and cries of the babysitter.
She was tied to a chair and gagged with a cloth of some kind. The cloth was printed with little teddy bears. Above the gag, her eyes pleaded with Abner. He knew exactly how she felt.
There was a complicated device strapped to her head: a bulbous glass jar, counterweighted by a toy train, with a flexible straw that led into the gag. Evvie bustled into the kitchen and returned with a pitcher of water. She emptied the pitcher into the jar. “There you go, Doris,” she said.
Doris kept her eyes locked on Abner’s. He shook his head with a gesture at the robot, now covering the door, the babysitter, and Abner himself. “If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them,” he told her.
Doris reacted as well as you can with a teddy bear gag covering half your face. She rolled her eyes.
“Sorry,” Abner said. “Yes. I see.”
Evan stationed himself by the door while Evvie busied herself around the apartment.
Little bubbles rose in the jar when Doris finally gave in and started to suck on the straw.
“Should we leave him with Doris?” Evan asked, but Evvie shook her head.
“He knows stuff,” she said. “I think we can use him.”
This might have been good news. Honestly, Abner just couldn’t decide.
SATURDAY, 2:56 PM
“… and so Dash and our Nola are out there trying to find out where Pitt’s new switchboard is,” Mrs. Broadvine finished. “Or at least that’s what we think they’re doing. We haven’t heard a thing since last night.”
Albert King nodded slowly and looked out the window. “So you know that Howard Pitt has a large construction project below the ground, though you’re not sure where it is…?”
Freda flinched a little. “Nola told us, but I’m not sure. It was under some big building site.”
She looked around. “Anybody?”
No one could quite remember where. They’d been so involved with Iris that they just hadn’t taken it in.
Mr. King turned back to Iris. “But we are sure that Pitt is using these robots to operate the new Info-Slate switchboard?”
Rhonda blurted “It was a big round building site.”
The blue and white robot waited.
“But, yes,” Mrs. Broadvine agreed. “Somewhere—we don’t know where—Pitt’s new switchboard is running with these mechanical operators … which, if I understand this, you say are illegal robots?”
“Quite illegal, I’m afraid. He has been building them in a black market factory for use at the switchboard as well as at this construction project. If we can locate some of these robots and tie them to Pitt, then Mr. Pitt will find himself in a great deal of trouble with the law.”
He paused. “And, in fact, with me.”
“Well,” Mrs. Broadvine said, “I think the switchboard’s your best bet, then. There’s no doubt that the new Info-Slate switchboard is Howard Pitt’s responsibility. I suppose that if we wait here, Dash and Nola will be back—sooner or later—and they can tell us where the switchboard is.”
The robot stood up. Mrs. Broadvine hadn’t thought that he was a very tall mechanical person, but now his head seemed to brush against the rafters of the attic.
“We may not need to wait,” he told her.
The top of his head popped open to reveal a small parabolic antenna. The antenna started to revolve. “If one of you can oblige me by using an Info-Slate, I believe that I should be able to locate this new switchboard.”
Freda pulled an Info-Slate out of her handbag. Her fingers flew over the display.
Mr. King stepped to the window, leaning over to aim the antenna outside.
“No, not in here,” he concluded. “We’ll need to move down to the street.”
They gathered up their things and, leaving Iris alone by the window, they trooped down the stairs.
SATURDAY, 3:02 PM
Abner could hear the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. There were several light footfalls and one ponderous, heavy pair of feet. His mind raced. He looked at Doris: the babysitter’s eyes were intent on the door.
Evvie padded back into the room and hissed at Evan. “Watch them!”
Then she pulled a chair over to the door and peered through its peephole.
The footsteps sounded out on the landing above and turned, coming down this way.
Evvie jerked back from the peephole. “Myrmidon!”
Evan was impressed. “MK I or MK II?”
She looked back through the peephole.
“Is there a MK III?”
Evan grinned. “Wow!”
Just as the footfalls were about to reach the door, Abner made his move.
He’d never been a very physical person. Most of Abner’s moves had to do with brilliant flourishes on a drawing board. But he gave this one everything he had.
Abner dropped to the floor, extending his feet behind him to kick Evvie’s chair right over; with both hands, he grabbed Doris’s chair and flipped it onto its back. Doris hadn’t even had a chance to grunt an accusation before Abner had rolled to the right, hitting the volume knob on the radio to spin it all the way up. With what was left of his momentum he somersaulted forward and spun left just before the tiny robot’s cannon blew the leg off a sideboard exactly where his head had just been. The radio, which had been on the sideboard, fell with a crash; the music died.
This left Abner curled into a ball behind the couch.
“Stop!” Evan whispered to the robot on his shoulder. “Just stop!”
To anyone outside in the hall, these events went something like this:
A loud crash and an exclamation; a louder crash followed by a muted, accusing grunt; a supremely loud burst of dance music; and what might have been a controlled burst of gunfire. It was hard to tell, due to the horn section.
Then, silence.
Because Evan had streaked across the room, planted himself on Abner’s folded knees, and was staring into his eyes with fierce determination. “If he makes a sound,” Evan told the robot in a low voice, filled with menace, “smoke ’im!”
The footsteps outside had stopped. After a moment there was a knock on the door.
“Hello?” called a matronly voice. “Is everything all right in there?”
“Yes, thank you, ma’am,” Evvie answered.
There was a pause.
“Why don’t we just have a look, then?”
Evan perched the little robot on Abner’s knee, from which vantage it glared down at him. Then the boy started to pull Doris’s chair toward the kitchen. Abner, trapped behind the couch, couldn’t tell where Evan went from there. Anyway since the robot’s little cannon was only inches from his nose he found that his attention was divided, at best. He opened his mouth to yell; the tiny cannon leaned forward eagerly. Abner’s mouth snapped shut again.
It was possible, he decided, that he had exhausted his store of heroism.
“Just a minute,” Evvie was saying through the door. “I think I broke the table.”
Abner could hear Doris’s chair scraping over the kitchen threshold. “Okay,” Evan whispered.
There was the sound of a door opening.
“What happened?” asked the matronly voice.
It’s a pity that Abner wasn’t able to see Evvie’s performance.
* * *
She had her hands clasped behind her back and she peered up into Mrs. Broadvine’s face with the kind of wide-eyed innocence that you only expect to see in a small, moderately priced ceramic statuette.
“I was practicing,” said Evvie, “and I knocked the table over. I’m just mortified.”
“And what, I wonder, were you practicing?”
“Gymnastics, ma’am. I’m trying out for the school team and those other girls are just so way ahead of me that I’m afraid I might not be good enough. So I practice every day.”
After a moment: “And your parents, dear?”
“They should be home from work real soon, ma’am, and I sure want to have this cleaned up before they get here. Along with my regular chores, I mean.”
After another moment: “Wasn’t that an explosion?”
Evvie looked around. One finger was now hanging from her lip. “Oh, dear, I don’t think so. But when I knocked the radio over there was all sorts of racket, wasn’t there?”
There was a substantially longer moment. “I don’t suppose I might have a look inside?”
Evvie was apologetic. “Oh, no, ma’am. Mommy’s very strict about letting people indoors when she isn’t here.”
After the longest moment yet: “Well, my dear, let’s make sure this doesn’t happen again, shall we?”
Evvie smiled as only cherubs can. “I should sure hope not! Thank you, ma’am, and good-bye!”
* * *
The door snicked shut again. After a brief pause Abner could hear the people on the stairs make their way down to the next landing and so down, eventually, to the street.
Evan dragged Doris back into the living room and set her upright. When Abner was allowed to come out from behind the couch he could see that Doris was not going to forget this at any time in the near future.
He looked around. No, no one else was going to forget it, either.
SATURDAY, 3:06 PM
“What a little angel she was,” Rhonda cooed.
They were walking down the street. Mr. King’s antenna—which was quite becoming, Mrs. Broadvine had decided—was spinning smoothly as he searched for the signal from the new switchboard.
“It has been my experience,” said Mrs. Broadvine, “that no one is that angelic.”
But they didn’t have the time to get to the bottom of that business, whatever it was. At least nothing had actually been on fire.
“Again, please,” said Mr. King.
Freda obliged him by keying up a new inquiry on her Info-Slate. Mr. King waited while his antenna turned. “Yes,” he decided. “Farther that way, perhaps one and one half miles.”
They trailed down the street behind him.
SATURDAY, 3:14 PM
For simplicity’s sake, Maria had removed the insulation from her radio wires and attached them loosely to the ignition line. This ensured that any radio traffic would be overwhelmed by static without further effort on her part.
Maria had flown these particular skies before.
After her first three training assignments, Sarge no longer assigned new recruits to Maria: they always seemed to learn what Sarge considered the wrong lessons.
Consequently, she didn’t have to deal with too many interruptions while she cruised high over Retropolis. As she wove between the monorail tracks and avoided the occasional rocket, she was able to observe the progress that Rusty, the Big Lug, and their mysterious cargo were making through the streets and under the sheltering trees of the city’s parkways. She was high enough that there was no chance they’d hear the sound of her engine.
Her radio complained with a furious burst of static. She turned down the volume.
Rusty and his friends were working their way steadily Northeast through a wide greenbelt between two neighborhoods. She caught only glimpses of their progress under the canopies of the apple trees.
Once they reached the end of the greenbelt they’d have just two options: continue down the wide expanse of Hypatia Street (which, although open, was broken by a lot of useful alleys) or turn into the much narrower, more direct way that was Lovelace Street. The Experimental Research District was at Maria’s eight o’clock.
