Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, page 29
Interplanetary rockets…? She called Officer da Cunha.
“Why don’t we just call for the Space Patrol?” she asked.
Maria, whose face was completely right side up, sighed. “Would have been nice,” she agreed. “Nobody’s closer than Saturn at the moment. Space pirates.”
“Oh, drat them,” Mrs. Broadvine cursed. “But anyway we’ve located four ASAA officers. They’re all on their way to meet you.”
“That leaves us at least one short.”
Maria looked at somebody offscreen. “At least. Please try to find us one or two more.”
Mrs. Broadvine said she’d do her best.
“Rhonda, my dear?”
The entire line of operators broke discipline and turned, just for an instant. Then their eyes swung back to the switchboard.
“Let’s try a little harder to find these officers. Here, I’ll take over one of the empty stations. If we both work at it I’m sure we’ll turn someone up.”
She sat down on what wasn’t quite a stool, and she went to work.
SATURDAY, 7:44 PM
“What I’m thinking of,” Dash said, “is sort of a Plan B. In case we can’t raise the rockets and pilots we need. I’ll go on ahead in my Actaeon, and it might be I can find someone to help, on what you’d call the other end of things. You send the rest of the rockets out just as soon as you can and we’ll meet up ahead of the Projectile to plan the final trajectory.”
“Yes…” Abner mused. “Now, plotting that trajectory will depend on what force you can assemble out there. It’s a very complex mathematical problem, you understand. I have the project logs here, so we know all we need to know about the mass of the loaded Projectile. But still…”
Dash felt someone poking his thigh. Rusty pointed at his back pack. “What…?”
He slipped off the back pack and handed it to the little robot, who started to rummage through it.
“My stars, an Enigmascope?” Abner said. “However do you keep it—”
“Yeah, it’s a chore.”
Rusty pulled out Dash’s new slide rule. He waved it in the air.
Abner’s brows did unexpected things. “Seriously? This kind of problem is extremely—”
Mr. King raised a hand. Dash was quicker. “If he says he can do it, he can do it,” he said. “So that makes it me and Rusty. We’ll go get the Actaeon and—”
Someone was kicking his ankle now, over on the other side. “Oh, Miss … I mean, Nola, I really don’t think you ought to…”
He could hear her foot tapping the floor.
“Right, sorry, forgot. So that makes three of us then, and…”
He looked around.
“What did I do with my helmet, anyway?”
Maria found it in her rocket’s cockpit, right where he’d left it.
As the three of them piled onto a hover sled she asked the room, “If he can’t keep track of his space helmet on a trip to the Moon … are we going to be okay out there?”
Mr. King nodded. “I have it on good authority that we can rely on Dash Kent.”
So they scattered again on their hurried business.
SATURDAY, 7:58 PM
Pitt dispatched two of his security robots to haul their prisoners back to the cells. That left him sixteen. They had managed to find quite a few refugees in the city streets. According to Pitt’s last intelligence from the Info-Slate system most of the rest were concentrated in two groups: one at the Projectile’s launch site, and another in the Experimental Research District.
The Projectile group—likely led by Pitt’s Adversary—wasn’t a threat at the moment. He’d do best to round up the maniacs in the District first, before they could disperse, and then confront the Adversary. He ordered his robots onto their hover sleds and, with one hand on his slide rule and the other on his hat brim, he urged them forward.
SATURDAY, 8:06 PM
“I wanna go back,” Evan wailed.
Evvie dragged him along behind her. She wasn’t having any of that.
“What, you want to go see Doris? You want to go have your dinner? What is wrong with you? We have to find our robot.”
They edged into Pitt’s hidden control room. It was a big, hushed space, its walls lined with consoles and panels and wide banks of dials and switches. There was a constant electrical hum. Soft lights beamed down from the room’s low ceiling. It felt … safe.
The Campbells stood a little taller once they’d gone inside. “What does this do?” Evan asked as he pulled a lever. Down the hall they heard something big go clunk.
Evvie eyed the Info-Slate. It was trying to ask her questions about who and where she was, and so on. She typed back Rufus T. Firefly. Freedonia.
The screen came alive with more questions, which she ignored. Maybe this thing could find their killer robot. Or something else, anyway. Something interesting.
She started to experiment as, over on her left, so did Evan. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
Smash.
“Whillikers!”
SATURDAY, 8:08 PM
A loud crash echoed from someplace down the tunnels. “This place is falling apart,” Harry grumbled. With Pitt’s former construction crew now dismantling the scaffolds and catwalks, and Kent’s unlikely band off to the Moon, and Harry’s own people doing whatever Mrs. Broadvine was telling them to do, Harry felt a little useless.
Davies was squatting next to the robot who had been so badly damaged. The two of them were making some repairs but—as Harry could see—G-94VA was going to be spending a lot of time in that back room at League headquarters.
“So yes—oh, thank you, that’s much better.…” the robot was saying. “I understand what you’ve told me about these indentures. But this concept of collective bargaining? It sounds very useful, but I’m not sure I.…”
Davies looked up. “Uh, Boss, no offense, but … could you maybe give us a little privacy here?”
Harry stalked off. Oh, yes, by all means get rid of Management. He just wished he had something to manage, was all.
A couple of ASAA officers were huddled with Officer da Cunha. The pilots, he guessed. Albert King was conferring with Perkins—good man, Perkins—over the plans for the Great Net. They seemed to be trying to work something out, so Harry ambled in their direction.
It was that question of material again. All up and down the gigantic chamber, robot crews were taking apart all the supports they’d used while the Projectile was under construction. There was a lot of steel, a lot of rope, and a lot of pretty much everything else. But Perkins seemed to think they were going to need more.
“How about the site up overhead?” Harry wondered. “I mean, we’re in a construction site that’s under a construction site, aren’t we? What have we got up there?”
Perkins slid a list of materials across their worktable. “It’s about like this. Not as much as we have down here … but with the advantage that it’s already where we want it to be. It’s just not enough.”
“Get me a list of what you need, then. I’m at loose ends here anyhow, it’s making me crazy. I’ll go topside and see what I can find nearby.”
On his way out Harry could hear G-94VA and Davies still going at it.
“No, see, that’s what we have contracts for. When the contract expires you have a chance to renegotiate.”
“What is negotiation, again?”
It’s the dawn of a new day in Retropolis. Harry wondered whether he was going to enjoy it.
He looked up through the site’s shattered roof. The sky was deepening toward night. I guess we need to get most of Retropolis back here, first.
SATURDAY, 8:42 PM
Their day had just never gotten better. Around six o’clock Delbert Kent and Dennis Kent had been joined in the cramped compartment by two more people, Blanche and Henry, and then just after seven there had been all sorts of confusion when something had actually smashed into their, well, whatever they were in, and then they were definitely moving, and now Delbert, Dennis, Blanche, and Henry were all floating weightlessly in the middle of the room.
“Sorry, sorry,” Henry said. He pulled his knee back into his own general area. “I think I dozed off there.”
It was hard for Dennis to imagine how he could doze off since he was still wearing nothing but a towel, and the introduction of Blanche into the compartment had raised the stakes for The Towel Problem. This lack of gravity wasn’t doing a thing to help.
“It must be space,” Blanche observed. “I stepped into a Tube Pod, and ended up here, and now here is … in space.”
Henry snorted. “I am never getting into one of those things again.”
Dennis heard the sound of someone pounding on the other side of one of the walls. It looked like they weren’t alone in … there it was again. Where exactly were they?
“I’m just glad we got out of the city before that disaster,” Blanche said.
That was another thing. The two new arrivals hadn’t been kidnapped, as he and Delbert had been; they’d gotten into Transport Tubes during some kind of evacuation. None of it was making any sense.
There went the pounding on the wall again. Dennis floated over and pounded back. “Hey, Delbert? Why don’t you try the other wall?”
Before long the muffled noise of pounding seemed to come from every direction, even up and down. “I think there’s a lot of us in here,” Henry concluded.
“Does anybody know Morse code?”
“Just S.O.S.”
This was apparently true of everyone. The muffled thumps of three shorts, three longs, and three shorts started to shake the walls, the ceiling, and the floor.
It sounded like an awful lot of trouble.
SATURDAY, 9:00 PM
This wasn’t as easy as he’d expected, Pitt could see.
He’d lost two of his security robots within five minutes of entering the Experimental Research District; another had now fallen on his right. Though “fallen” was perhaps not the right word. It had been enveloped by a whirling helix of light that emitted sparks, an irritating whine, and what looked like trombones but were almost certainly something else. Streamers of gray lead had formed a web of transmutation on the robot’s armor, and when enough of its alloys had been converted it suddenly crumpled at the knees and collapsed under its own weight.
This had looked simple. The streets of the District—the already scorched and rubble-strewn streets of the District—were lined with individual buildings, compounds, and laboratories, each one holding a lone scientist who was looking out suspiciously at all the others. So it had looked like a simple house-to-house operation.
But these were not simple houses. The very first one had turned into a battleground. When Pitt’s robots had finally pulled Dr. Horatio Fenwick III out of the wreckage and started to lead him down the street, though, Pitt discovered that there was one thing that could draw all these separate anarchists into a unified front.
A common enemy.
Pitt’s force fought every inch of the way. Currently, that way was “backward.”
He ducked behind the broad back of one of his robots just in time to see a flash of purple light sear the street where he’d been standing. Little puffs of smoke rose from the scarred pavement. There was a noise like sleigh bells.
“Pull together!” he commanded. “Form up around me!”
It looked like an alley was coming up on the left, just a few yards behind them. Once they were in there his robots could form a phalanx in front of him that would, he hoped, be indestructible.
Glass spheres shattered all around them. Out of the shards of each sphere, something began to uncoil.
SATURDAY, 9:23 PM
Nola kept looking at the space helmet in her lap. “I don’t know.…”
“I know it looks … kind of what you’d call threatening,” Dash told her. “But it’s the only spare I’ve got.” He was finishing up whatever little jobs you have to do before you launch an Actaeon Model Fourteen. “If you like, we could swap.”
“No, it’ll be fine,” she said. “I’m just glad the other girls won’t see me.”
The priests of the Spider God went in for ominous headgear, no doubt about that. She pulled the helmet over her head and fastened the straps. The dashboard lights cast a sinister shadow on the Actaeon’s hull. She bobbed her head and watched the shadow of the helmet’s horns drop low, threatening all the other shadows. “Do I look all evil now?”
He spared her just a glance. “You look fine, Nola.” He turned back to the controls. “You look good.”
Rusty looked from Nola to Dash and back again. He shrugged.
Nola made her most horrible priest of the Spider God expression at Dash’s back. She really didn’t expect him to turn around.
“Yikes!”
She rearranged her features and decided that it hadn’t happened. “So are we going where I think we’re going?”
“I expect we are, Nola. You’re pretty quick on the uptake.”
Well, that was something, anyway.
Rusty bobbed his head.
And what was it with the robot, anyway? He’d been so … well, not quiet; Rusty was always quiet; but he’d pretty much stayed out of their way ever since they’d met Aunt Lillian. He just didn’t seem to be himself. But then he’d seemed in a bad way back there in the tunnels with Clan Campbell and Mr. Perkins. Maybe something was wrong with him. She took the helmet off again.
“How about you, Rusty? Everything okay?”
Dash got out of his chair and climbed down the ladder to the Actaeon’s middle level. She could hear him talking to the ornithopters through the rocket’s open hatch.
Rusty shrugged again, this time in a completely different way that meant I’ve been better, of course (haven’t we all had better days?) and the fact is that something’s on my mind, but taken all together? Not too bad. Thanks for asking.
Nola smiled. I wonder how he does that?
Dash came back up the ladder. “They’re all set down there,” he said, and he settled back in his chair. He picked up the radio handset.
“Officer? You there?”
After a moment Nola heard Officer da Cunha on the speaker. “Maria here. Looks like we’ve got four pilots, so far, and several of the rockets are checking out. We may be all set in a couple of hours. Over.”
“Six of us. How many does Mr. Perkins say we need now? Uh, over.”
“We need at least seven. Eight would be a lot better. We’ll be coming up behind you with whatever we’ve got. Hope to meet you around three o’clock in the morning. Wishing you luck, over.”
They signed off. Dash let out a big sigh. Then he went back down the ladder and called, “Let ’er go on ten, boys,” and came back up to the cockpit.
Nola leaned over to the porthole. Outside, six ornithopters were hovering over the Actaeon’s restraint cables. When their countdown ended they each released a cable and the rocket began to float upward. Nola waved.
Dash pulled a lever to start up a little thrust, but so far the inertrium hull was doing most of the heavy lifting.
“That’s it,” he said. “We’re on our way.”
19
THE FIVEFOLD SCINTILLATION OF SIRIUS
SATURDAY, 11:22 PM
His cellmates had been of very little use to Edward until it turned out that Nityananda had a screwdriver in his carryall. Once Edward had the screwdriver he was able to unfasten the hood over the air vent that no one (apart from Edward J. Bellin) had believed was there.
“There are always air vents,” he told them. “And the air vents are invariably just large enough for the protagonist.”
The others eyed the vent.
“You’d need a pretty small protagonist,” said Nityananda.
But Edward disagreed. “Oh, a clever designer will always use visual cues to make an air vent seem smaller than it is. The main problem is the shoulders, and possibly the hips.”
And, in fact, after hunching his shoulders and squirming Edward and the carryall did get as far as Edward’s hips before they needed assistance. “Just a bit of a shove,” he called. “I can take it from there.”
They shoved; Edward squirmed; and he arrived, eventually, at the air vent for the hallway outside. Here he found no screw heads, just the pointed ends of the vent screws. One after another he got a grip on them with Nityananda’s pliers and kept turning until each screw fell out of the vent, on the other side; then he pulled out his notebook and pen and made another note before he floated back along the wall, and opened the cell door from the outside.
Screwheads likely to be on wrong side, he had written. That was a detail that had never occurred to him before.
His three cellmates decided that they were his friends. They apologized for their doubts and Edward accepted their apologies with good grace, as though he did this sort of thing all the time.
They were in a bare white hallway that was lined with doors exactly like the door of their own cell. Edward and Nityananda floated down the hall in one direction, while his other friends Naomi and Oliver went the other way. All up and down the hall, doors opened, and prisoners emerged. And then there were stairs, and after the stairs there were more hallways. And then there were more stairs.
The curious thing about this structure was that there were no rooms larger than the cells; even after sixty floors of hallways—and more, no doubt, beyond—there was nothing but hallways and cells and since there was no place to gather, the population of their prison was spread out across several floors of narrow halls.
Edward J. Bellin introduced himself to each cell’s occupants while he set them free. To be more accurate, he introduced himself as Edward J. Bellin, author of The Fivefold Scintillation of Sirius, and other stories. Because opportunities like this, in Edward’s experience, were a rare gift to a writer.
SUNDAY, 12:14 AM
Nola’s first trip to the Moon had been a very fast one: almost too fast for the Actaeon’s old engines. She’d managed to catch a few short naps during the trip but, because Dash kept having to climb below and bang on things with a wrench, her sleep had been pretty fitful.
