Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, page 4
Herbert and Abner were old friends. Usually their business could be transacted by televideo, but since this was an unofficial inquiry Abner had come down in person.
“I’ve sent most of my workers home on leave until we can get more stock in,” Herbert told him. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“So,” Abner said, “if I were to place an order for about fifty cubic feet of processed inertrium, how long would I have to wait?”
“Fifty cubic feet! Fifty? What are you building, an airship?” Herbert didn’t even need to look at his ledger. “I couldn’t fill an order like that for at least three weeks. We’ve had such a spike in demand this month that the foundries have depleted their stocks of ore, and you know that means we have to wait till the new ore’s dragged in from the asteroid belt.” He shook his head. “It’s just the kind of thing you dread, Abner, a temporary burst of demand. You can’t increase your production to match it because in another month or so you’d be overproducing.”
Abner nodded. He’d had a pretty good idea how things stood.
“And this is all due to the orders from the Transit Authority? For the Tube Transport system?”
“No, no, it’s not just that.” Herbert paged through his ledger. “See, there’s also this large order from Monday, a really large one, for renovations to the Info-Slate system; and here…” He flipped back another page. “… yes, there it is: another order, a few days earlier, from Ray-O-Zap, for some kind of new corporate headquarters.”
They looked down at the orders.
“That sure is a lot of inertrium,” Abner concluded.
Herbert snapped shut his ledger. “Enough to build a city, is my guess. And you’ve got to to ask why, don’t you? Is Ray-O-Zap building some kind of floating headquarters like, like the Palace of Paramagnetism? And what the blazes does Info-Slate need with inertrium, for that matter?”
Abner had been asking himself the same thing. These three projects, all on their own, had exhausted the city’s supply of the lighter-than-air metal.
“What about overseas?” he asked.
“Same thing. No one, and I do mean no one, has enough inertrium on hand to fill your order. Believe me, I’ve been calling, and not just for you, Abner. Everybody’s in the same boat.”
“Could I have a look at that order book?”
Herbert handed it over. Abner scanned the orders for the past two months. There was a normal amount of traffic until just a few weeks back; then these three projects had suddenly started to make very large purchases until the supply was exhausted. He looked more closely at the relevant orders. He looked again.
“It seems like all these purchase orders were signed by Howard Pitt,” he said.
Herbert took back his book and ran his eye over the columns. “Criminy, Abner, I do think you’re right.”
Abner looked one more time around the empty warehouse. “Of course, Herbert, since your warehouse is practically empty this would be the perfect time to build out that extension you used to talk about.”
They considered what it would take to make the addition to the warehouse. Abner recommended a young engineer he knew who might do the work at a reasonable rate, and Herbert seemed determined to give it a try.
But Abner’s mind was on other things as he left the inertrium warehouse.
I do wonder what he’s up to, he thought, that Howard Pitt. I sure do wonder.
THURSDAY, 2:43 PM
Howard Pitt’s new office was way up at the top of the same tower that housed the Morological Museum, which Dash had always meant to visit but somehow hadn’t got to yet; and between the ground floor and Pitt’s eyrie, Dash learned, was a whole network of doormen, security desks, and surveillance devices that might have rivaled the security at the Temple of the Spider God. Purely out of professional curiosity Dash tried to compare the two. He devised three plans that might have defeated the tower’s defenses if he wasn’t trying to be civil on this job.
He eventually got about two-thirds of the way up the tower using nothing but charm, friendliness, and a certain kind of helpless goodwill that he knew would get you almost anyplace. But on the sixtieth floor he came to a sudden stop.
The guards up there showed a whole new level of immovability. Dash very nearly got escorted all the way back to the sidewalk; but he managed to limit his losses to one floor. On the fifty-ninth floor he reviewed what he’d learned and examined his options.
If he was a flow of hot water trying to make it from the basement’s boiler to the top floor, the guards on sixty would be a plug in a rusty old pipe. It would take all kinds of pressure to get them out of his way, and in the end that pipe would probably burst before he got past them. Dash took off his back pack and hefted it.
He’d brought his gun, of course, even though this wasn’t that kind of job. But it was impossible to use it here unless he had a swift getaway in mind. The guards would call in the ASAA officers and the job—like Dash’s career—wasn’t likely to survive that encounter.
He turned his attention to the windows.
The whole building was a modern, sealed environment. He hefted his pack again. No problem there. Just briefly Dash wished that he’d been able to afford one of those rocket packs the window washers used. He’d sure wanted one. But they came pretty dear, those packs, and he’d had other priorities—the Actaeon, mostly—to worry about. Maybe if things picked up some, and he managed to save a bit …
He realized his mind was wandering and put a stop to that with the kind of discipline that he was still working on. So: the windows were no problem, and that meant he’d need to scale the building.
Dash dug his glass cutter out of the pack and set to work.
THURSDAY, 2:58 PM
“His father was a magazine publisher?”
Nola nodded. The herd of operators (and Mrs. Broadvine, who was now a sort of honorary member of the herd) had gathered at the Astro for lunch. If a few had been late—possibly due to explorations at the televideo switchboard’s employment office—no one mentioned it.
Mrs. Broadvine was unconvinced. “He sounds so young,” she said, but this sentence, as dubious as it seemed to her, had a completely different effect on most of the operators. They nodded with a lot of enthusiasm.
“His father owned about sixteen different, you know, popular magazines, like Astonishing Future Stories, and Six-Gun Frontier Stories, and, ah, Tales of Breathless Romance.”
There was a respectful pause, followed by a reflective silence. Mrs. Broadvine seemed quite moved.
Freda’s brow developed a wrinkle. “And they’d, what, they’d act out the stories…?”
Nola could see she was still stuck at Breathless Romance.
“Well, some of the writers were sort of, fanciful, I guess is the word, and so their heroes did things that weren’t really possible. Things in the adventure line.”
Freda seemed relieved; oddly, though, Rhonda looked a little disappointed. It takes all kinds of flowers to make a garden, Nola reminded herself.
“Mr. Kent hated things in his stories that couldn’t really happen. So if he was suspicious about something in a story he’d take Kelvin, which is Dash, of course, up to the roof or down to the basement, and they’d test the story. At the shooting range, or the bomb … thing … or in the lab downstairs, and if they couldn’t reproduce what the writer had written, then there’d be … you know, there’d be heck to pay. Rewrites. Rejections. Ghost writers.
“So even though Dash didn’t get a lot of formal education he knows just about everything there is to know about ballistics, and about, well, physics, and chemistry, and so on, as they relate to adventuring. It’s how he got his expertise.”
With the exceptions of Mrs. Broadvine (who remained skeptical) and Rhonda (who was still thinking about something else) everyone at the table seemed impressed.
Freda stared into her coffee. “And he fixes things around the house, too?”
This wasn’t really going the way Nola had planned.
“The important thing,” she said, “is that he’s agreed to help us. He’s trying to get the truth out of that Mr. Pitt right now.”
THURSDAY, 3:03 PM
Getting out of the building hadn’t been a problem. Even getting up the building had been pretty simple, thanks to the suction pads that Dash had mounted on his shoes and gloves. But getting back in, now, that might be another thing altogether.
The tower’s architect had been pretty helpful. There were deep pilasters and nice, wide ledges that Dash appreciated, especially at this height; and just now Dash had perched on the shoulders of a conveniently placed statue. This was his kind of architecture.
But the top floor of the building was something else again.
All around that ledge there were decorative railings that were surprisingly sharp and pointed, for example, and all those points seemed to be pointing down.
The ledge itself—unlike all seventy-nine ledges below—slanted outward in a shallow, acute angle that managed to make it nearly impossible to climb. Dash measured it with his practiced eye: there was about ten feet of outward slope, which was, without being boastful about it, exactly enough to prevent you from stretching out to grab the edge.
Any more surprises beyond the ledge were well hidden because Dash couldn’t see past the ledge at all.
The top floor inspired a whole different kind of appreciation for its architecture. It managed to be as well defended as an ancient castle in a sort of quiet and self-possessed way that you wouldn’t really notice unless you were clinging to a statue seventy-nine floors up, and looking at it with considerable interest, the way Dash was doing now.
Dash had a feeling that Howard Pitt’s floor had been a special order item.
He shrugged out of his back pack and hung it around the statue’s neck, then opened the pack to take an inventory of its contents, which he already knew pretty much by rote.
His climbing gear was all in order. A series of pitons … he looked up again. Yep, about eight pitons, forced into place with their explosive charges, and probably a second line, just to be on the safe side. That left the spiky railing; but he knew he could melt that with his ray gun. It was all pretty simple, really.
But he had no idea what he’d find when he got over the ledge, or whether anyone was watching up there.
So he pushed the button on his ornithopter call and relaxed in the statue’s shadow with Astonishing Future Stories number 117. That was the issue with The Cypher of the Robot of Atlantis.
THURSDAY, 3:14 PM
“That little robot’s just a mystery, through and through, Mr. Roy,” Harry’s technician told him. “He must have got in on Tuesday night—right after we lost him in the Transport Tubes; my apologies again, sir—’cause his lights have been going on and off at sunset and sunrise, and we can see movement through his window. But he hasn’t come out for anything.”
Harry Roy shuffled through the earlier reports. “But it says in here that on Wednesdays he always puts in a day’s work with the Civilian Conservation Corps, and on Thursdays he’s usually over at the League Hall.”
The League of Robotic Persons, over on Rue du Rur, was an organization that Harry Roy knew pretty well. Though not, of course, from the inside.
He sat back in his chair and had a look out over the assembly floor. The Ferriss Moto-Man Company employed its own, for the most part, which meant that about ninety Big Lugs were tromping their deliberate way down the assembly line with all of the parts, lubricants, and raw materials that kept the line pumping out more Big Lugs just like themselves. Everything down there was looking just fine.
“… ever since we started following him,” the technician was saying. “He might miss a day or a half day from time to time, but two days in a row? It’s just unheard-of.”
Harry nodded.
“Well, something’s up, then. But we’ve got no way of knowing whether we should be interested unless we get a look inside.”
“Well…”
Harry glared at him. “There has to be a way to get in there. There’s got to be some pretext you can use.”
The technician ticked off all of his previous pretexts. “There’s televideo maintenance, but the building super there, that Kelvin fellow, he handles all those repairs. Ditto plumbing, heating, and electricity, also sewer connections and so on. Packages get delivered to the lobby or the super’s office. Somebody has to buzz you in. The roof, well, you’d just have to see it, sir. I wouldn’t want to set down on that roof without a squad from the Space Patrol, sir.”
Harry looked it up in the reports and raised an eyebrow. “Lot of gunfire there,” he observed.
“Yes, sir, and also the explosions. We think there’s these little surveillance machines flying around, too.”
“Any trouble with the authorities about the business on the roof?”
“Apparently not, Mr. Roy. Some kind of special license.”
Harry thought it all over. “I wonder if Rusty picked this building because it’s so hard to get at.”
“Well, he was already living there when you told us to follow him. So I guess I don’t know.”
Harry got up and walked over to the window where he could see the Big Lugs at work.
“We’ve got no reason to think he’s dangerous, or even suspicious, except that we can’t tell where he was built. I’ve got to say it seems like that’s the way he wants it.”
There was no argument there.
“But who did build him?” Harry turned. “It’s nice work; in fact, it’s excellent work. But you know what kind of regulation we deal with here. Every one of the Lugs that comes off that line comes with its indenture certificate and a schedule of payment. Just the way it should be.”
They watched the assembly line—a line that never stopped—delivering Lugs-in-progress to one station after another where they were progressively fitted, riveted, turned, adjusted and readjusted until, at the end of the line, they emerged as mechanical people.
Harry had always thought there was something beautiful about the line in spite of its clamor and grime.
He turned back to his employee. “If somebody’s making robots on the sly, making robots like this Rusty fellow, we’ve got no way of knowing whether they’re being made up to standard. We’ve got no way of knowing if they’re getting their indenture papers. We can’t know what happens to them.”
The technician smiled and nodded eagerly. “Yep, if they’re not giving out those indentures they could be selling something we can’t sell. Not legally. You could buy a robot forever. What a business!”
Harry looked at him for a very long time.
“Send Davies in,” he said, “and on the way out, tell Miss Baker that you’ve been fired.”
Some people just didn’t belong in robotics. That’s all there was to it. Harry watched the assembly line while he waited for Davies. It’s just like a big, long maternity ward, he thought, except for all the noise.
If he ever found himself in an actual maternity ward, Harry would be in for a surprise. But the sentiment was still worth having.
THURSDAY, 3:32 PM
As soon as he heard the sound of the ornithopter’s rapid wingbeats Dash stowed his magazine in the back pack and shrugged the pack over his shoulders. The ornithopter—about the size of a pigeon, though its wingspan was wider—settled comfortably on the head of the statue. It preened and then looked up at Dash with what looked like curiosity, and probably was. You just couldn’t be sure.
“Hey, buddy,” Dash said, “could you pop over that ledge and get me some pictures? I need to see what’s up there.”
The ornithopter cocked its head and swiveled it, taking in the ledge. It gathered its legs under itself and pushed off, wings beating with a bright, mechanical ping ping ping, and spiraled out, around, and over the ledge. Dash listened to the pings as they beat down the face of the wall; in a moment, they pinged back past him and down to the other end of the ledge. With an anxious expression, Dash listened while it hovered there for a bit; but to his relief nothing distracted it before it came back down to alight on the statue.
Dash bent over the tiny televideo screen on its back and pressed REPLAY.
The ornithopter’s cameras had as brief a memory as the little creatures had themselves. But since it hadn’t gotten sidetracked up there Dash was able to watch a nearly complete replay of its travels up and down the top floor of the tower. He whistled. You really had to admire this kind of preparation.
He recognized the motion sensors: they were top-of-the-line Kilroys, perched solidly along the wall, and they were spaced with great care so that their view fields overlapped; each one was flanked by a pair of rotating cameras with night vision filters ready to swing down, come nightfall.
Dash sped through the recording. Yep, there were the alarm lines—clearly visible but unreachable in their transparent tubes. He knew that the tubes themselves would be rigged with sensors. Then there was a set of devices that he didn’t recognize. These were long cylinders that you might have overlooked, since they blended so well with the coping along the ledge’s cornice. They were placed right about where you’d expect to find a handhold if you were climbing up.
Dash stroked the ornithopter’s head. It looked like climbing over that ledge would have been a really bad idea. “Good job, fella.”
The little mechanical bird bobbed its head and continued to watch him. “Yeah, hang on there. I need to work this one out,” Dash said.
Pitt’s top floor office was completely prepared for his ascent from below. Dash was pretty sure that coming down from the roof would be at least as much of a problem. “That’s some solid craftsmanship up there,” he told the ornithopter, which concurred—Dash guessed—with a tinny chirp. It hopped up onto his shoulder.
So if there was no way to get up there on the outside of the building, it seemed like he’d have to go back in. Dash couldn’t expect to find any less of a defense indoors, either. He just hated getting captured. It seemed like sloppy work. Even when you did it on purpose.
