Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, page 25
The door opened again. Rusty came out, leading by the hand a baboon whose expression showed great relief. Dr. Krajnik leaned on the doorframe.
“That’s got it,” she said. “The three of you should go down the stairs. Just in case.”
She smiled up at the circling ornithopters. “Wonderful creatures. Anyway, look for a message from me within an hour of … well, keep an eye on the house. You’ll know when. And I’ll see you both in fifteen thousand hours!”
She closed the door, but popped right out again. “Oh, and Nola—when you get a chance, look in the envelope on the sideboard by the door. If you follow the instructions my new workshop will be ready for me when I come back.”
And then she was gone. Dash, Nola, and Rusty started down the stairs to the street. The baboon set off with a grateful hoot between the trees, toward the rest of its own rather remarkable story.
“She just gave us two years of her life,” Nola said.
SATURDAY, 4:56 PM
They’re going away for a long time.
That was about all her sergeant had had to say in spite of all the information Maria had tried to give him. The whole Info-Slate system might have been compromised; no one could tell exactly where the ASAA’s shoot-on-sight order had even come from; two civilians without criminal records were being hunted through the streets; and the only known link between those civilians was that they were participants in an Info-Slate search that she, Maria, had made.
But in the end, it just came down to they’re going away for a long time.
Sarge had put Maria behind a desk until she could be debriefed about her contact with Miss Gardner and Dash Kent. There was a turbulent flow of uniforms all around her, with dispatches on the way out, and reports on the way in, but she could tell that nobody, anywhere, had any idea where Rusty and the fugitives had gone.
She found herself looking at her Info-Slate. Ordinarily Maria would have been tapping in zoning and residency queries for the address on Lovelace Street. But not today: she didn’t think she could trust anything the Slate was telling her. And the last thing she wanted was to give it—or its operator—any ideas.
She picked it up, though, in case anyone might try to reach her, and called over her shoulder, “I’ll be down in Records if anybody needs me.”
SATURDAY, 4:59 PM
From the foot of the stairs down on Lovelace Street Dr. Krajnik’s house looked like a tower on a medieval hill. The Moon was floating just next to it, and what with the trees that framed the stairway the whole thing was like a scene on a calendar.
Rusty took Nola’s hand.
“That must be it,” Nola said.
The whole tall house had trembled slightly. Near the top floor a shutter swung open and closed again; from its ledge, Dash saw a potted plant start its long, last dive toward the ground far below.
They heard a muffled thump. Wisps of smoke puffed out of the few windows that had been left open.
“Well,” Dash said as he turned to Nola. “Now I guess we just need to wait.”
The ornithopters spread out. Their little wingbeats drove them precisely into a search grid that would embrace the entire city.
* * *
And across the city, in a much different grid, Lillian Krajniks puffed into being in 15,000 places. Each Lillian clutched a photograph of Howard Pitt.
The Lillians took stock of their surroundings, checked the skies to see if their ornithopters had arrived, and then went forth on their mission of discovery.
16
HOUR OF THE DIFFRACTED DOCTOR
SATURDAY, 5:01 PM
Robot G-94VA came to a sudden stop. He’d nearly collided with a small human person who’d darted from the south side of the Transport Tube junction.
“I beg your pardon, little girl,” he said.
She squinted into his face. “You’re all messed up, aren’t you?”
G-94VA’s personality design compelled him to courtesy. “I have been severely damaged by, I think, the Plumber.”
A frightened man and another small human person came up behind her. On the little boy’s shoulder G-94VA could see a miniature security robot who resembled several robots known to G-94VA from the Projectile’s underground complex. It was strange, though, to see such a tiny one.
“SURRENDGACK OR BE DISINTEGGRED.”
There was a small, but proportionately large, dent in the tiny robot’s head. This was a matter for concern in view of its small, but disproportionately deadly, armament.
“I am not sure I understand,” tried G-94VA.
The little boy surged up to G-94VA’s knee. “He says if you don’t surrender he’s gonna disintegrate you.”
“But I am needed at the project site,” he explained. “We must complete the Projectile as quickly as possible and we are behind our schedule.”
The tiny robot’s chest seemed to swell. It spared a glance for the man behind it, but its cannon was now centered on G-94VA’s head.
The man stepped up. “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice in the matter. I’ve seen … I’ve seen what happens to anything that fails to surrender. And anyway, think about this: once you’ve been disintegrated you won’t be able to complete your work, will you?”
The little girl had been listening carefully. “What’s the Projectile thing you want to get back to?”
While the tiny robot watched, G-94VA described the Projectile.
The frightened man forgot, for a moment, to be frightened. “It’s a large, hollow construct built almost entirely of inertrium, in an underground construction site? Who is its designer?”
“The Master,” G-94VA told him with some gratitude. Possibly one of this group was not deranged.
“And does the Master wear a hat at all times, on top of his hairless head?”
The big robot nodded happily. “Yes! Do you know the Master?”
The man didn’t answer. He turned instead to the peculiar little humans and told them that a large construction site was far too dangerous for children. That it was filled with big, perilous machines that might accidentally explode, or turn on their operators with brutal speed, and which the children should in no way, and not for any reason, approach.
G-94VA started to correct him: the site was in full compliance with strict safety guidelines and there had never been an accident. But the man cut him off.
“No, really; I work at construction sites all the time. They’re no place for children. And in any case no construction project would ever allow children on the premises. Not ever.”
The little boy and the little girl exchanged a look.
The tiny security robot raised its cannon a little higher.
“If you surrender,” said the little girl, “we’ll take you there.”
G-94VA leaned against the wall, taking the weight off his damaged leg. “Then I surrender without reservation, and unconditionally,” he said. “I am delighted to surrender. Surrendering is the best thing that has happened to me all day.”
The humans all seemed satisfied. The tiny, deadly robot, though, was clearly not happy.
The two children examined G-94VA. They took, and subsequently quarreled over, the Info-Slate that had been strapped to his chest. “I want to see what it does,” insisted the little girl.
The boy batted her over the head with it. “It does this!” he yelled.
And all the while, the formerly frightened man was eyeing G-94VA with great interest. “Shouldn’t we get moving?” he asked.
It was odd, though of course this whole meeting had been odd. But it had seemed to G-94VA that the man wanted to stay away from the Projectile site.
Humans were very difficult to understand.
SATURDAY, 5:02 PM
She could tell by her location which one of her she was. A look up showed Lillian that the ornithopters hadn’t arrived yet; that was no problem, though. There was still plenty of time.
But there was no point in wasting it. She stopped the pedestrians who were passing and showed them Pitt’s picture. “Have you seen this man?” she asked, over and over. No one had.
She was standing in front of the Constellation Boulevard office of the Retropolis Travel Bureau. Well, she’d better get started on the buildings, then, hadn’t she?
So she did. And all across the sprawling, high-towered city of Retropolis 14,999 other Lillians had come to the same conclusion.
SATURDAY, 5:07 PM
Info-Slate requests had been increasing rapidly for the whole afternoon; this was especially true of the requests from ASAA officers, whose inquiries were often routed to the dead zone that was Howard Pitt’s personal console. The operators at the switchboard had done their best—which was very good, really—to keep up with the traffic. But they could tell that their response times were beginning to lag behind.
So an unspoken but universal sense of discomfort had worked its way down the whole length of Pitt’s hidden switchboard chamber.
The operators knew that they were not, well, operating. Not to the extent that was expected of them, anyway. From time to time one would raise her softly illuminated eyes to exchange a glance with her neighbor. No words would pass between them because, after all, they weren’t equipped for speech. But those glances communicated their shared sense of being less than optimal.
And being optimal, to one of these operators, was an essential state of being.
The operator who had been handling the very few requests from the Info-Slate assigned to Robot G-94VA found, quite suddenly, that the Slate was overwhelming her resources. She dutifully switched the Slate’s sidebar pane, upper right, to display videos of famous explosions; the left lower sidebar pane now showed a list of recent industrial accidents; the upper left sidebar, not to be outdone, presented information about large construction projects.
It wasn’t until she received a request for the Slate’s main pane about the properties of inertrium that all these combined searches and requests triggered a security alert that raised Pitt’s threat level assessment to its threshold. Her left hand swept down to tap the warning button as, with her right, she tried to keep up with the very busy user of G-94VA’s Info-Slate.
The operator next to her saw this flurry of activity and gave her a sympathetic look. They were all having their very first very bad day.
* * *
His hat brim shot upward, impelled by his eyebrows, when Pitt received the warning message. One of his robots had been compromised!
G-94VA was the damaged robot that had failed to capture Dash Kent. Kent had now managed to elude the full force of the ASAA and, so far as anyone knew, had disappeared. Kent must have reported the damaged robot to his hidden master—Pitt’s nemesis—and the robot had now been captured.
Pitt’s finger hovered over the switch that would disconnect G-94VA’s Info-Slate from the system. But no … it would be much better, much more useful, to observe what Pitt’s enemy was trying to learn.
He scanned the requests that had deluged the switchboard operator. So rapid! And …
So sinister. Properties of inertrium, explosions, industrial accidents, and—now—whether it was possible to make Transport Pods collide at full speed. Pitt’s nemesis, if these requests had anything to say about it, was a ruthless and uncompromising opponent. He was so focused on understanding the enemy’s plan that Pitt didn’t even realize that he felt energized, elated … and happy.
SATURDAY, 5:13 PM
Harry followed Albert King’s directions to the letter. But he had reached—and then circled—the Trylon in the middle of the Perisquare and he still couldn’t find his new friend. They might easily have missed each other. In view of Harry’s retinue, though, he preferred to radiate certainty.
There had only been eight technicians on duty at the Ferriss Moto-Man works. Harry had brought them all. The rest of his twelve followers were—and this had surprised Harry—four of the accountants who’d been hounding Pitt’s paper trail through the day. Apparently the paper chase had roused their mathematical blood. Harry knew that he should appreciate this, but it was so unexpected that he hadn’t quite come to grips with it.
Davies was shadowing Harry on his trip around the Trylon. Harry could tell that Davies’ view of the accountants was about the same as his own. They heard a distant voice calling “Yoo-hoo! Mr. Roy! We’re up above!”
Harry and Davies looked up the height of the Trylon. A three-sided wedge, the Trylon was the sort of monument you’d get if you somehow stretched a pyramid to six times its original height. A couple of pyramids up Harry could see a middle-aged woman who was waving down at them.
“Friend of yours?” asked Davies.
Harry grunted. “Whoever she is it looks like she’s waiting for us,” he said, and with a brisk wave he motioned his retinue to follow him inside.
The Trylon’s interior was completely hollow and supported a long stairway which, hugging the three faces of the monument, led past landing after landing on its way to the Trylon’s peak. There were short broad unglazed windows set at each third landing. In front of each window was a rank of coin-operated telescopes for the convenience of visitors.
Near one of those windows Harry and Davies found Albert, with an antenna on his head; it was spinning like a propeller. Ranged around him were seven women. Each one was feeding coins into the scopes. When Harry’s group joined them there were still a couple of telescopes free, but even the accountants were trying to maintain their dignity.
Albert greeted Harry. “We’ve managed to track the switchboard signal this far, by checking it from high altitudes from time to time. Now that most of us are here we may proceed at least as far as the Square.”
Harry didn’t miss that “most of us,” but he figured he’d find out what that meant before long. In the meantime Albert introduced Mrs. Broadvine and her operators, and Harry did the same for his crew. They were more than twenty strong now, even if most of them were office workers; that might not be enough to defeat whatever forces Pitt had gathered but it was, anyhow, enough to more than fill the Trylon’s landing. So once Albert was sure of his signal’s bearing they started the climb downstairs.
SATURDAY, 5:22 PM
“You know what we need?” Dash asked. “We need a rocket, or a hovercar. Then when we get your aunt’s message we can get to the switchboard just as fast as we like.”
Nola could see the sense in that, but Dash’s interplanetary Actaeon—miles away, now—wasn’t the kind of vehicle you could use to fly around the city. No, they needed something smaller, a little personal rocket like the ASAA cruisers.
“They might not be expecting to see us in the sky,” she said.
Rusty shrugged and looked significantly around them.
“I guess we could steal one…?” she ventured.
The others seemed surprised.
“I’m not just a switchboard operator anymore,” she explained. “I’m a desperate, hunted felon. You can’t put anything past me.”
“I don’t like stealing,” Dash said. “And I’m sure not going to wave a gun in anybody’s face to get one.”
“Then what you’re after is a valuable, unattended rocket that nobody else wants.”
Nobody seemed to favor the odds of that.
“Say, does your aunt have a rocket?”
Nola didn’t know. “We could go back up and look in the hangar, I suppose. The house should be perfectly safe by now.”
She was surprised to see Rusty bound back up the stairs. He took them three at a time. He’d been so, well, he’d seemed so unhappy to be there earlier, when Aunt Lillian had been at home.
Dash and Nola followed after him.
SATURDAY, 5:23 PM
Abner climbed the tunnel stairs with a new sense of purpose. The horrible children had led him quite by accident back onto Pitt’s trail, since surely the Master G-94VA had spoken of was Howard Pitt; and surely the “Projectile” was the project for which Pitt had needed such great quantities of inertrium. As big as a floating city!
Not even the tiny malevolent robot could dampen Abner’s spirits.
He offered his arm to G-94VA, who was having some trouble navigating the stairway. “Thank you, sir.”
“No need for all that formality,” Abner told him. “I’m just plain old Abner Perkins. Engineer.”
“Really?” asked the robot. “An admirable calling.”
“That’s why I’m so curious about your Projectile project. Such an ambitious undertaking. What, exactly, is its purpose?”
When G-94VA told him, Abner tripped and fell backward down the stairs.
“No time for playing around,” Evvie snarled. Then she turned back to the Info-Slate. Evan had seized the moment and was tapping away on its screen.
“Look at this!” he said. “You can skin a cat in twenty-seven ways!”
They thought that over. “I think I know where we can find eleven cats,” Evvie said. “But the other sixteen, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“There’s Princess Fedora…”
“Of course there’s Princess Fedora. She was number one.”
Abner leaned toward G-94VA. “And when is the Projectile supposed to be finished?”
“All too soon, Mr. Perkins. But if the Plumber hasn’t arrived yet with help … I don’t know how it can be ready in time.”
“The … Plumber?”
“There’s got to be a mess of cats someplace. You just have to find them all in one place, is all. Like a, like a cat shelter. Or a cat hospital.”
Evan looked unsure. “You don’t want sick cats.”
“Then someplace where a lot of cats…”
The Campbells thought hard. For a moment, all Abner could hear was the soft whir of the tiny robot’s head as it turned back and forth between Abner and G-94VA.
“Where is it that Dash goes, again?” asked Evan.
They grinned at each other. “There’s lots of cats there. With Spider Gods.”
Evan kept the grin on his face but it seemed to Abner that something about “Spider Gods” was not what the little hooligan had wanted to hear. His sister was too busy bending over the Info-Slate to notice, though.
