Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, page 24
“Well…”
Nola touched his forearm. “It really is safe,” she told him. “I was here once when there was an accident, and all I heard was this sort of whump noise, and then afterwards we had dinner.”
“Number eight,” Dr. Krajnik recalled. “The Whirling Magnetosphere.”
Dash continued to think it over while Dr. Krajnik smiled and Nola worried.
“Well, okay,” he said at last. “It’d be an awful mess if everybody did it … but I guess you know what you’re doing. I guess.”
“When it comes right down to it,” Dr. Krajnik said, “the whole District is a noisy playground for—mostly—boys, and their noisy toys. I’m glad they’re confined in there, myself. But it’s not for me.”
“So that’s settled!” Nola said brightly. “Now, about our real problems…”
Dr. Krajnik counted on her fingers. “Unlicensed robots, suspicious construction projects, the new Info-Slate switchboard, a murderous Howard Pitt, and the question of what, exactly, he’s up to.”
“No good,” Dash contributed.
“But we can’t report him to the law because they’re shooting at us,” Nola added.
Dr. Krajnik ticked off a finger on her other hand. “Yes, and the ASAA.”
Dash asked, “But what were you saying before about Pitt? That he was always going to be trouble?”
Dr. Krajnik poured herself some coffee. “Howard Pitt …
“Howard Pitt is a brilliant engineer. Top drawer: everyone knows it. He can take a very large problem and reduce it to a series of very small problems, which he solves; and the end result is something very large that no longer has problems. Something as large as a canal, or a viaduct, or a complex system of pneumatic Tubes that can transport people rapidly across a city. He doesn’t think quite the way that other people think. And he doesn’t stop thinking until he’s done. You could say…” She took a sip from her cup. “You could say that his weakness is that he thinks too much. Just doesn’t know when to stop. Until everything he sees is a kind of a problem, and of course then he has to solve it. He can’t help himself. And he’s impatient with anybody whose brain can’t keep up with him.
“He’s so valuable to have around. But, you see, if something were to start him thinking in the wrong way…”
“Like, how people can’t be improved the way he wants,” Dash said. “How to solve the problem of people.”
She tilted her head. “Do you think that’s it? Maybe. Maybe. Anyway, really peculiar deep thinkers have tried to solve the world’s problems many times. They’re usually idealists, strange as that seems when they start to process people into cattle feed, or when they make it a capital crime to have red hair, or … when they do whatever it is they think needs to be done. And then you have to fight a war to get rid of them. Usually.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” she continued. “We owe everything to our idealists. They’re the people who see farther than the rest of us. When we’re paying more attention to our own lives than to the lives of everyone, of our whole society, idealists jab us in the ribs and say Hey! We’re doing this wrong! So we take a look around, and often enough we find that we are doing this wrong. And so we change.
“But idealists aren’t always right. Ideas have about an even chance of being wrong. So your problem—our problem—is what to do when idealists won’t listen to anybody else. When they’re just so positive they’re right that nobody else’s ideas could possibly have any value.”
Dr. Krajnik set her coffee cup down on one of the work tables.
“As I said, Howard Pitt doesn’t have a high opinion of other peoples’ ideas. So if a particular problem gets stuck in his head, and he keeps thinking about it, and he pays no attention to anyone else, then something truly peculiar may happen. Something dramatic.”
She picked up her coffee again, her eyes straying toward the doorway. “It would be a fascinating experiment, in fact: to put an idea into the head of a person like Pitt, and set him off on his path to lunacy.”
Nola’s eyebrow twitched. Dr. Krajnik didn’t acknowledge her, or her eyebrow, but added: “I am not an idealist, of course. I’m just … a curious person.” She took another drink of coffee.
Suddenly Dash wondered what had become of Rusty. He looked around and saw the little robot standing near the door where he watched the baboon, mournful in its pod. Rusty returned Dash’s look and shook his head, very slightly. Then he went back to watching the baboon.
“The law, as you say, doesn’t have to be a very big problem,” Dr. Krajnik went on. “You simply have to get some evidence that Pitt is breaking the law. One of the laws. Say you connect him to those unlicensed robots, for example. At the construction site, or the switchboard.”
“Right,” Dash sighed. “We know. But unless we catch him there we can’t link him to the robots at the construction site—not as real evidence, I mean—and we don’t know where the new switchboard is.”
SATURDAY, 4:18 PM
“It’s definitely over there,” said Mr. King.
They were standing on one of the high, windy platforms of the monorail terminal. The robot pointed down the cavernous street below them.
Mrs. Broadvine tried to look encouraging. “And … about where, exactly?”
Mr. King’s antenna was spinning faster now that it was out in the unobstructed sky. But his head drooped.
“I can’t be sure,” he admitted. “But if we keep heading in that direction, and checking from high ground, I should be able to locate it.
“You ladies may wish to go, however. This is likely to take me some time.”
“Oh, no you don’t!” Freda said. “That switchboard is our business, too, you know.”
Rhonda agreed. “Not to mention poor little Iris!”
Mr. King glanced along the platform. Mrs. Broadvine peered in that direction and saw a line of public televideo booths.
The robot turned back to the operators. “You’re right, of course. And your concern for Iris is very moving, if I may say so. It occurs to me that whenever we do find Pitt’s switchboard there are other concerned parties. This might be a good time to let them know what we’re doing.”
He led the operators to the booths and placed a call.
“Harry? It’s Albert.”
Not snooping, exactly, Mrs. Broadvine could see a grim-looking man on the screen. He looked excited when he saw Mr. King’s face on his own display.
“Albert!” he said. “We’ve tracked down the fellow who bought the equipment for the factory! It’s…”
“Howard Pitt,” the robot said.
Harry’s brows drew down into a solid bar. “Oh, well that’s just fine!” he said. “It’s taken me hours.…”
Someone out of the camera’s view coughed quietly. Harry glared in that direction.
“It’s taken them hours to track the man down. And you already knew?”
“I’m sorry, Harry—I found out just a little while ago. I’m narrowing the search for Pitt’s new Info-Slate switchboard—that’s where we’ll find the evidence of his treachery—and I wanted you to know where I’m headed.”
Mr. King gave Harry directions. “You can probably find me up on the Trylon in the square by the time you get here.”
Harry promised to bring whatever technicians he could find on a Saturday afternoon. “And I’ll call in some more!” he finished.
When he’d hung up, Mr. King stood for a moment in front of the blank televideo screen.
“He’s a good human person, is Harry Roy,” he told Mrs. Broadvine. “But at this stage I want my own people with us, too.”
So he made another call.
SATURDAY, 4:29 PM
The Campbell children had waited until they were sure that the matronly woman and her friends had moved on before they led Abner back downstairs. He’d tried to cast a friendly look at the babysitter, Doris, but she was holding a grudge about that business with the chair. It had almost worked; he wished she could be more understanding.
But now they were back in the dim, quiet reaches of the tunnels. The tiny robot’s cannon never strayed from Abner. It had really made up its mind about him this time.
“Do you know where we are?” the little girl asked.
“Yes.”
They walked on for a few more minutes.
“How ’bout now?” the boy asked him. “Where are we now?”
Abner read the markings on the Transport Tube beside them. “We’re just under the ninth circle of the Tube Transport system,” he told them, with total accuracy and no irony at all.
SATURDAY, 4:36 PM
“It’s not too difficult,” Dr. Krajnik told Dash. “I mean, I can find Pitt’s switchboard within an hour, but I’m not sure how I’ll be able to tell you what I’ve found.”
Dash tried to understand the two parts of her sentence together; then he tried them individually. It still didn’t work.
“You can find the switchboard that nobody can find. But then you can’t tell us what you found.”
She nodded. “Yes! You have a fine grasp of the situation.”
“Stop it, Aunt Lillian,” Nola cut in. “Quit torturing him.”
Dash was pretty conscious of the many ways he might be tortured in this room. “You’re just going to have to explain that to me,” he said.
Dr. Krajnik waved at the big capsule near the center of her laboratory. “I can find Pitt’s laboratory in about an hour by using that. But at the end of the hour I may not be able to get a message to you before I … become unavailable.”
“Because, you’re, like … disintegrated.”
“Oh, no! You might say that it’s because I’ll be re-integrated.”
She stepped over to the console at the foot of the capsule’s stairs, where the lightning sparks within the globes lit the sides of her face with blue and white flashes. There was something odd about those electrical discharges, as though what Dash was seeing was what the lightning looked like just before, or possibly just after, it struck: the bright highlights on Dr. Krajnik’s cheekbones seemed wrong and out of step with the world. She bent over the control panel and looked back. “You can see, if you like.”
Everyone but Rusty moved closer.
At the top of the control panel was a plaque that read:
PERSONAL TEMPORAL DIFFRACTION DEVICE
EMERGENCY USE ONLY! (CLASS X)
THE “DIFFRACTONATOR”
RESULTS ARE TEMPORARY, BUT IMMEDIATE AND IRREVERSIBLE
… while below there was the usual bewildering collection of gauges, switches, indicator lights, and one big dial with a pie-shaped cutout in it. A ring of numbers was visible through the cutout; a bright red triangle marked the number 12.
“Okay,” he said. “So, what does it do?”
“The Diffractonator allows me to replicate myself, oh, any number of times, by expending that number of future hours in a controlled temporal fugue.”
There was a long pause.
“All right, let’s try it this way, then. If I were to set this dial to three hundred, I would diffract my next three hundred hours so that three hundred of me would be here for the next one hour. At the end of that hour, all three hundred of my diffracted selves would disappear, and you wouldn’t see me again—that is, the one, usual me—until three hundred hours had passed. You see? I’d spend my next three hundred hours all at the same time.”
There was another pause, almost as long as the earlier one.
“Aunt Lillian … three hundred of you?”
Dr. Krajnik nodded. “Though I haven’t tested more than sixty-four,” she admitted. “There’s a very large discharge of energy, at the higher levels.”
“Then at some time or other … there were sixty-four of you, all at the same time?”
“Yes! Useful, isn’t it?”
There was an additional pause.
“Well,” Dash allowed, “I guess that would come in handy. I mean, if I could do that at just the right time, then I could sweep through the whole Temple of the Spider God and clear out all the cats in one hour, couldn’t I?”
This time it was Dr. Krajnik who paused.
“I’m not sure what that means,” she said at last, “but it sounds about right. If you’re willing not to be around for a few hundred or a few thousand hours, then yes: that’s about right.”
She turned to Nola. “Is that a game, or something? The Temple of the Spider God, and the cats?”
“Oh, no. He’s completely serious, Aunt Lillian. And it would be a very good thing to do, in my opinion.”
Dr. Krajnik accepted this. “Then yes. You’d have to have the device in place, and you’d need an excellent power source, and then, of course, you’d have to be prepared for the explosion.”
Science.
“That would be the ‘Class X’ explosion?” Dash asked. “Which would mean, say…”
“As I said, there’s a large discharge of energy at the higher levels. For what we need, that would probably mean the complete destruction of my laboratory.”
Nola looked back at the hatch. “But the house, the house would be all right?”
“Depending on the number of diffractions, yes. Almost certainly.”
Once again, there was a pause.
“Well,” she explained, “there’s always an element of risk, at the higher diffraction levels.”
Which you haven’t tested, Dash added silently.
“Well, look,” he said, “this is really serious to me, on account of Pitt is trying to kill me and everything, and it’s really important to Nola and her switchboard operators, because they want their jobs back, and it’s really important to all those black market robots because they don’t even know that they’re slaves, which is what they are. So we really want to put the guy away. But … your whole laboratory…”
… and maybe your whole neighborhood.…
Dr. Krajnik turned the pie-shaped dial way over until the arrow pointed at the number 15,000. Nola’s eyes went wide.
“Nola, Dash … whatever Howard Pitt is doing, it’s big. Because his ideas are big. It’s big enough that he’s built an inertrium object that could contain whole stadiums filled with people. Big enough that … well, I think it’s safe for us to say that whatever Pitt is doing is a big, immediate danger to everyone in Retropolis.
“Pitt is extremely dangerous. Howard Pitt is the kind of man who can dream up absolutely wonderful things that improve people’s lives, and then he can build those things. But if he’s turned inward, and becomes … twisted, as he seems to have done, then he’s also the kind of man who can dream big, horrible dreams. And he can build those big, terrible things, too.
“I’m convinced that this is what he’s doing right now. And from what you’ve told me, no one has any idea what’s going on, and you’re the only people who are trying to stop him. I’m sure of that because of the extraordinary things he’s doing to stop you.
“So … yes. Let me explode my laboratory for you. It will be my pleasure.”
Dash and Nola nodded slowly.
“Still,” Dr. Krajnik continued, “there remains the problem of how—once I’ve located the switchboard—I can get that information back to you. If it takes me nearly the whole hour, you see, I might run out of time—and I won’t be back for fifteen thousand hours. So we must have some way to communicate, and we need it for a very large number of … me.”
“So, let me see…” Dash started. “fifteen thousand of you will go through the city…”
“… and question people in every building—or at least in every neighborhood—until I find someone who’s seen Pitt in a place where he shouldn’t be. It will be some out of the way place, secluded. I’ll need fifteen thousand pictures of Pitt.…”
She walked over to another console and flicked some dials, called up a photograph of Howard Pitt, and pressed a button.
“But, as it happens, I’ll only have to print one. We still need some way for me to contact you, immediately, when I discover the location of the new switchboard.”
Dash grinned and shrugged off his back pack. “I think I can cover you there,” he told her.
He spilled the back pack’s contents out on a worktable. “What’s that?” Nola asked.
He picked it up. “Oh, just something I picked up when I was at O’Malley’s.”
It was a slide rule.
“You have an Enigmascope!” Dr. Krajnik cried. “How wonderful!”
“Yeah, but it’s just a devil to keep clean. No, this here is what we need.”
He picked up his ornithopter call.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, out on the porch, the ornithopters were all circling overhead. It looked like a couple hundred of them.
“How can that be enough?” Nola wanted to know.
“I’m gonna set them to patrol in a grid—kind of like the ASAA rockets—with instructions to keep an eye on every … every one of your aunts, I guess, that they can see. If they keep moving and keep track of her, or I mean them, then any one of her should be able to call them down and give ’em the message.
“And, see, because the ornithopters’ memories aren’t very long, I’ve set ’em to rebroadcast their orders every two minutes.”
Nola nodded, but she wasn’t paying a lot of attention. Rusty had followed them outside. He still seemed subdued.
Dr. Krajnik stepped out on the porch. “I’m just about ready,” she said. “You’ll want to keep your distance.”
She looked down at Rusty, who was looking someplace else.
“Rusty, I wonder if you could step inside for a moment? I’d like to have a word.”
The door closed behind them. Dash heard Dr. Krajnik’s voice grow fainter as they walked toward her workshop.
“Something’s going on with those two,” he observed. “Any idea?”
“No. I didn’t even know they were acquainted.”
A few minutes passed. Dash fiddled with the instructions for the ornithopters; Nola just admired the view. The Moon, still nearly full, had risen up in the late afternoon sky. It made a lovely scene.
