Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, page 3
“Gotta Get Up and Go To Work” concluded, to be replaced by “If I Ever Get a Job Again.” Dash felt an urge to get off the phone and go … do something. Something else. He started to wonder how they picked those songs.
His copy of the catalog was on the table next to the two much more sinister helmets he’d taken from the priests of the Spider God. He knew those helmets were perfectly usable, but he didn’t want to be seen in public wearing one: there could be misunderstandings on a grand scale. He could probably cut off the horns, and that would help; but he frowned at his own helmet with its shattered dome.
It was right there on the catalog page:
Aero-Vac Certified Space Helmet, With Self-Cleaning Airways and Indestructible* Dome
The asterisk bothered him. He’d looked for that footnote for the longest time, but it just wasn’t there.
The hold music sputtered out and Dash dove across the room at the televideo before they could hang up on him again.
“O’Malley’s Adventure Outfitters, where we make your dreams of adventure a reality! This is Margaret. How can I help you?”
Dash made it just in time. “This is Dash Kent, that is, this is Kelvin Kent even though everybody calls me Dash, and I’m calling back about order number A06-LLJK89-04/A, which was for an Aero-Vac helmet that’s supposed to be indestructible, and which isn’t. This one, anyway.”
He was holding the helmet out for inspection. Margaret of O’Malley’s smiled at him.
“I’m so sorry that you experienced a problem with your order, Mr. Dashkent. Unfortunately these helmets are certified by their manufacturer, which is…” She looked down at the same catalog Dash had been reading, “Yes! That would be Aero-Vac Accessories, Ltd. I’ll just transfer you.”
“NO!” Dash yelled. “That is, no, please, no, thank you, I’ve already talked to them and they transferred me back to you, on account that I made the purchase from you and you have to handle any returns or exchanges.”
He breathed, finally.
“I see!” said Margaret of O’Malley’s, slightly less brightly than before. “May I have your order number?”
Dash was working his way through the order number again when his doorbell rang. “That’s … L like in lion, followed by another L like in lion, and excuse me for just a moment, please.”
He leaped for the door. Margaret of O’Malley’s said, “What was that after L like in lion, Mr. Dashkent?”
She looked up to see a complete absence of Mr. Dashkent, and said, “Well then, we’re happy to have been of service, and we look forward to your continuing business.”
Behind him Dash heard the snap as she disconnected, and it was for this reason that he was making an unusual face when he opened the door to meet Nola Gardner.
He saw immediately that she may have been expecting something quite different and—a little too late—he rearranged his face. She looked down. “My name is Nola Gardner,” she said. “I think your helmet is broken.” She looked back up. “Are you Dash Kent?”
Dash could tell she was hoping he’d answer, “No, he’s my uncle, let me introduce you.”
He nodded. “That’s me.” It was about then that Dash understood this might be a client, so he swung open the door and gestured inside. “Please, come in!”
* * *
“I was sort of wondering about your advertisement,” she told him once they were seated at the table. “The part that says Lost Entities. What kind of entities do you bring back…?”
Dash nodded. “That’s the standard language, it’s kind of traditional, for finding and recovering just about anybody who’s lost, you know, like a missing person, say, or a…” He coughed into his hand. “… cat.”
“A…?” Miss Gardner repeated. “I didn’t quite…”
Dash faced her squarely. “Or, say, a cat.”
“A cat.”
“Yep, especially in this neighborhood, especially lately, because they seem to come here pretty often to take ’em.”
“They…”
“The priests of the Spider God.”
“The priests of the…”
“Spider God.”
“Oh.” She seemed to be thinking about this pretty hard.
“So, you know, since they seem to be coming here so often, to take the…”
“… the cats…”
“Yep, the cats; I go up there pretty frequently.…”
“Up there?”
“To the Moon, you know, where they take the cats, and then I bring ’em back.”
“The…”
“The cats. I bring back the cats.”
“From the Moon. From the Spider priests of the Moon God, on the Moon.”
“No, Miss, sorry, but it’s the priests of the Spider God. Which are on the Moon. At the, or should I say under, the Marius Crater.”
Miss Gardner pulled something out of her purse. Dash saw that it was a tablet, about the size of a magazine, with a glowing screen just like a televideo’s and a couple of rows of buttons and dials. “Excuse me for a moment,” she said.
Dash watched her turn the dials and push the buttons while she brought up one screen of information after another. She looked surprised, at first, and then she seemed upset by something she saw, and then she raced through several items very quickly, and then she set the tablet down.
Dash waited.
“They really do, don’t they?”
“Miss?”
“The priests of the Spider God. The cats. Whatever do they do with them?”
Dash shook his head. “I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know. I just bring ’em back.”
Miss Gardner looked at him in an entirely new way; a way, in fact, that Dash had always hoped someone would use to look at him.
“Well, that’s a very good thing for you to do.”
Dash thanked her. “But I can’t say I get them all, you know. I certainly do go after all the cats I hear about, and at very reasonable rates, which are negotiable, with the possibility of a payment plan. Do you know where your cat is, Miss Gardner?”
“Do you … your advertisement, though, it wasn’t all about cats, was it? I mean, I don’t have a cat.”
Dash regrouped. “No, Miss, I am not restricted to cat-related ventures. Was it a person, maybe a…” Dash was distracted, apparently, by something under the table. “… a boyfriend, say? Or a girlfriend?”
Miss Gardner shook her head and told him about the Info-Slate switchboard, the way it had closed, and how no one seemed to know who was operating it anymore.
Dash indicated the Info-Slate. “That’s one of them there, is it?”
Miss Gardner showed him how the Slate worked. She explained about the bank of operators behind the scenes who pulled, re-routed, and connected all the cables that switched the various windows on the Slate from one display to another.
“So it’s just like a televideo,” she explained, “or a whole set of videophones, except that mostly what you’re looking at is information. About just about anything. That’s why the ASAA officers and other civic departments use them so much. They’re a little expensive for people like you or me.”
Dash nodded. “That’s really something. Thanks for showing me.”
He settled back in his chair. “But nobody’s operating it anymore.”
Miss Gardner disagreed. “Somebody must be operating it. But it’s no one who’s ever done the job before. It’s nobody from the televideo switchboard, either. And whoever it is, they won’t talk to you when you press the button for a voice connection.
“And all our jobs, well, they’re just gone,” she finished.
Dash took all of this in.
“Well, that’s sure an interesting puzzle,” he agreed.
Miss Gardner dug deeper into her purse. “So I remembered about you from a Slate inquiry a couple of nights ago and I looked you up, and we—that is, the switchboard operators, and Mrs. Broadvine, she’s my supervisor, we’d all like you to find out what’s going on. We took up a collection…”
She showed Dash a slip of paper. “… and if you’re willing we’d like to hire you to find out why we were all fired, and who’s operating the switchboard now.”
Things had been a little lean of late and so Dash was very interested in the number she had shown him. More than that, though, he had been looking for a way to expand out of the cat business. It was all well and good for a beginning, and he was glad to help out the cats, but he’d always hoped to work his way up to, say, space pirates, or thwarting interplanetary tyrants, or … Dash looked at a stack of magazines on the sideboard. Something more in line with the old family business. With maybe not so many claws.
He turned back to Miss Gardner. “I would be very happy to look into this for you,” he said. “I have just a little thing or two to take care of upstairs, first.”
THURSDAY, 12:43 PM
He’s sure not what I expected, Nola thought. Truth to tell, when he’d opened the door with that peculiar expression, holding a broken space helmet like it was some kind of sacred artifact, she’d really hoped that this was Dash Kent’s nephew. And then there was all that confusion about the cats and the Moon, though that had turned out to be … well, surprising.
He couldn’t be much more than twenty; he might be a year or two younger than she was herself. But he did seem awfully sincere.
And retrieving those cats had to be pretty dangerous work. She had read the Info-Slate’s entries about the priests of the Spider God with genuine dismay. Those poor cats!
She trailed after Dash on the stairs of his apartment building. It was far from being a new building, but what she could see was very clean and well maintained. Some kids on the third floor landing looked knowingly at Nola for reasons that were not obvious. One called out “Hello, Kelvin,” but was shushed by the other. “He’s being Dash now,” the girl said, with an impressive amount of disdain.
That would go far on the switchboard, Nola knew. Disdain was a useful quality.
Dash, or Kelvin, nodded to the children but moved on quickly.
On the fourth floor he paused. “I’ll just be a minute,” he told her.
He knocked on number 4C and greeted its occupant. “It’s just me, Mrs. Nakamura.”
Once he went inside Nola found that the walls, clean as they were, were rather thin. “Let’s just see that old sink, then,” he was saying. She moved away from the door and looked down the stairs. The two children were grinning up at her.
One boy, one girl, and so alike that Nola was sure they were related.
“Get him to show you his rocket,” the boy advised her. “It’s on the roof.”
Nola considered that. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Lots of men keep their rockets on the roof. Nothing special about that.”
The boy looked disappointed. The girl, on the other hand, approved.
“Now,” Nola went on, “say it was something like, oh, I don’t know, maybe an Actaeon Model Fourteen? The one with the extra cabin and the optional viewports? That would be amazing to see on a rooftop. I’d love to see that.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” the little boy cried, his hand shooting up like he was in class where, come to think of it, he probably should be. “You’ve got to go up there! That’s exactly what he’s got!”
The little girl’s brows drew down into a bar of disapproval. She glared at Nola. Nola smiled.
“He’s not coming back,” the little girl said. “That sink’s a goner. Believe me. He’s gonna have to go get a whole new one at the store.”
Nola tried to imagine a half-size switchboard staffed by evil-minded, half-size switchboard operators, each one too filled with disdain to answer a voice call from an Info-Slate. Who knew? It could be as simple as that.
Dash-or-Kelvin came back out of Apartment 4C. He was not carrying an old sink. “So just go a little easy on it, please, till Saturday,” he said through the door. “It oughtta hold up just fine if you don’t put any more popcorn down there.”
He saw Nola and stopped. “I,” he said.
She waited, but there didn’t seem to be anything more.
“Can we go up to the roof?” she asked. “It’s just, I understand you keep an Actaeon Model Fourteen up there and I’d just love to see it.”
She didn’t look back. But she knew she’d made an enemy for life.
“Nice kids,” she said, and Dash nodded carefully.
“The Campbells,” he told her. “Evan and Evvie.”
“Shouldn’t they be in school, though?”
He nodded again but he left it there, so Nola did, too.
They stopped on the sixth floor, where Dash investigated a suspicious stain on the ceiling; and then on the seventh, where he discovered its source and made a note in a little notebook; and then on the ninth, where they had tea with Miss Roth and where Nola met Princess Fedora, who was now, for the time being, an indoor cat.
“Until Kelvin does something about those terrible Spider God people,” Miss Roth whispered.
“They do sound just awful,” Nola whispered back. “What do they do with…”
Miss Roth stopped her. “Don’t even ask,” she said. Nola understood from this that she didn’t know, either.
After Miss Roth, it was a clear run straight up to the roof, where Nola saw the Actaeon Model Fourteen. It was just as huge and interplanetary as it was supposed to be, and it truly was unusual to see it on the roof of an apartment building. She marveled.
Besides the rocket, there was a sort of a shooting range up on the roof, along with an area ringed by sand bags and scorched with the memories of old explosions, and a shack with one large door and dozens of small, open windows.
“That’ll be the ornithopter cote,” Dash explained. “Mind your head.”
The view up here was just wonderful. Nola looked along the monorail tracks high overhead, where they hung between their massive pylons; she could just make out the much smaller Transport Tubes that piggybacked along the line. The monorail’s Red Line rumbled. The train swept up into view, thundering mightily, and then was gone at once as it flew along its single rail toward destinations unknown, at least to anyone without a train schedule.
Nola could have looked it up on her Info-Slate if it really mattered. She preferred not to know.
Several airships floated, here or there, across the skyline. Nola watched a gridlike pattern of ASAA rockets make their patrols above the city. She wondered how many of them had been clients on her own panel, back at the switchboard, and it wasn’t until that moment that she felt the full, painful loss that she’d suffered that morning. Never again.
But all she said was, “It’s beautiful up here.”
She got no argument from Dash. “Here’s the shooting range, of course; there’s where I test explosives. I’ve got a laboratory down in the basement”—Nola looked alarmed—“no, no, nothing like what they do in the Experimental Research District. It’s just for, you know, analyzing chemicals and all. It’s safe.”
Nola hoped so. A lot of people lived in this building, and the zoning laws were there for a reason. Well, for most people, anyway. She felt a certain familiar guilt.
“So I guess this must be your building, then, Mr. Kent?”
“Ha! No, not mine, not exactly. It all belongs to the Trust. Fact is, I just work for them.”
His smile evaporated.
“I mean, I pitch in here, as a kind of a temporary sideline while the adventuring business takes off. It was all my father’s, you see, until he…”
Nola nodded. “I guess he was in the adventuring business, too?”
Dash laughed again. “No, not him,” he said. “Dad was a magazine publisher.”
SATURDAY, 5:04 PM
Doctor Lillian Krajnik stepped up to the Constellation Boulevard office of the Retropolis Travel Bureau, opened the door, and after a swift examination of the outer rooms she plunged past the agents and into the inner offices. One by one, she opened the doors off the hallway and poked her head inside. She didn’t seem pleased with anything she saw.
In each office she held out the picture and she asked the question.
Her bearing was so determined that no one, in any one of those offices, had even thought to protest before she’d shut the door and moved on. At the end of the hall she shook her head at the potted plant she found there and whipped around.
The agents at the front desks watched her return with anxious faces. Lillian sniffed. They were no help, either.
She shoved the doors open and stepped outside again, turned left, and approached the office next door. Maybe in here, she thought. It would all work, provided she was thorough.
3
EYRIE OF THE HAIRLESS ENGINEER
THURSDAY, 2:11 PM
“Well, Abner,” Herbert said, “you know I’d be glad to help if it was possible. Or even probable. But the way things are, I couldn’t even fill an order for a couple of cubic feet of inertrium. You can see how bad it is.”
Abner could see: the evidence was all around him, though mainly it was above him.
An inertrium warehouse, like an inertrium foundry, is exactly like any other kind of warehouse or foundry provided that you look at one of them upside down. Inertrium warehouses have all of the same bins, pallets, and cranes as a warehouse that stores steel, for example, except that the inventory in an inertrium warehouse is bumping up against the ceiling. The cranes are also arranged very differently since they’re positioned to pick up a gravity-resistant block of inertrium and drag it down to the floor. Otherwise, though, the whole business was just like any other, just inverted.
You do find some pretty well-engineered ceilings in the inertrium trade. The risk of a whole warehouse tearing loose from its foundations and floating away into space is something the insurance companies take pretty seriously.
Abner could see that this warehouse—the largest of its kind in the city—was almost completely empty. A few small inertrium blocks of the kind that are sold to hobbyists were available in little numbered bins overhead. There were some bags of powdered inertrium hanging upward like balloons next to Herbert’s desk. But the great cranes, winches, and gantries were still. The warehouse was as quiet as a museum.
