Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, page 5
He looked to the ornithopter for a little reassurance, but it wasn’t built for that sort of thing. Then he realized that there might be another way to get in there.
Dash took a sheet of paper and a pencil out of his pack. He wrote carefully, using the statue’s head for his desk.
Am on side of building on floor below. Would Like to Talk. Sincerely, D. Kent.
He took a wad of putty out of its waterproof pocket on the back pack and pressed it in a tacky glob to the front of the note. “Could you stick this to the window upstairs?” he asked the ornithopter.
It chirped and flapped away over the ledge and returned a moment later. When Dash pulled out his magazine the ornithopter settled onto his shoulder and hid its head under one wing. Its little solar collectors extended with a sigh. Nap time.
* * *
About twenty minutes later Dash heard a window slide open down below. I guess they’re not all sealed after all, he thought.
A voice came up from somewhere below the statue’s feet.
“Are you up there, Mr. Kent? He wants to see you.”
Dash woke the ornithopter and sent it back to its cote. He clambered down with a smile for the security guard. The guard seemed a little less pleased to see him.
They took the stairs.
Howard Pitt’s office was about the biggest office Dash had ever seen, and even though his experience wasn’t all that wide it was still a very big office. It was nearly as big as the whole top floor of the building. The big severe rectangular windows let in a great deal of natural light: so much that you didn’t need a lot in the way of artificial lighting to help it along, not in daytime, anyhow. There were drafting tables all around the edges of the room, some of them bigger than doors, and one of them nearly as large as those big, bright windows were. Half-height bookshelves marked off the working areas. These shelves were packed not only with books, but with models, rolls of drawings, and photographs of completed projects.
More photographs—big ones, big like everything else—hung on the walls. These showed Howard Pitt himself at the openings of his most famous projects: bridges, buildings, aqueducts, the entire Red, Green, and Purple lines of the Retropolis Transit monorail system; and plenty more. The pictures stretched on down those long walls as though this was a gallery. One large spot on a nearby wall was empty: Dash saw a little brass plaque set below it. The plaque read: RETROPOLIS TRANSIT AUTHORITY: TUBE TRANSPORT SYSTEM.
Dash guessed that picture must still be off at the framer’s.
He took a look at Howard Pitt, as the pictures showed him.
Pitt was a tall man, an imposing man, with his bald head and the hat, of course, and he was usually wearing jodhpurs or some other adventurous kind of clothing. Dash noticed that although none of the pictures seemed staged, Pitt always looked somehow larger than life, as though he, but none of the officials and dignitaries who stood near him, was built on the same scale as the massive monuments he’d created. He just oozed competence and achievement, even in the pictures. This was a man who had “impressive” written all over him.
When Dash turned to see the actual Pitt walking (no, it was more like striding) toward him, he saw that the pictures had fallen short of the mark. Dash didn’t realize it, but he stepped back when he got a good look at Pitt: as though Pitt were a towering monument, and you wouldn’t want to be too close to its edge.
“You have done two praiseworthy things,” Pitt told him. “Imprimis, you managed to reach the seventy-ninth floor—which nobody has done before, whether inside or out; and secundus, you understood that you could go no farther without being apprehended, and so you contacted me instead. That shows ability, in the first case; it shows good sense and perspective, in the second.”
He looked down at Dash with something that could almost have been approval.
“Let me see what you’re carrying in that pack.”
Dash shook his pack’s contents out on one of the work tables, and even emptied the pockets. When he was done there was a sizable pile of equipment there. Pitt looked a bit grim as he picked up one item or another. He put the pistol aside with an expression of distaste.
“Yes,” he said, “I see the climbing gear, very good quality; I like those explosive pitons. You’re not carrying an excessive amount of rope, that’s good.…”
Dash was starting to feel like he was in the middle of some kind of test.
“This…” Pitt had picked up the ornithopter call. “I assume it’s a control of some kind for that surveillance device?”
Dash nodded. It was, sort of.
“And the portable chemical analyzer, a fine device, but not one you should have expected to need today, I think; the same goes for the Enigmascope, which is at best unreliable.…”
“You, you just have to keep it really clean…,” tried Dash.
Pitt actually said “Hogwash,” a word that Dash had never before encountered in the wild.
“The various magnifiers and sound devices could have been useful. But altogether,” Pitt said with an air of finality, “altogether, young man, you are carrying a great deal of equipment that you couldn’t have expected to need.”
Pitt indicated the ray gun. “That, of course, is an item that I hope you didn’t expect to use.”
Dash assured him that this was the case.
“And these?” Pitt pointed at the magazines. “I can’t imagine what use you thought they would be.”
Pitt seemed to have lost interest in the back pack, and maybe even in Dash.
“You will find, as I have, that it is best to use only those things that are necessary. Only what is necessary. To encumber oneself with … more … confuses the issue, not to say the mind, and only makes simple solutions needlessly complex.”
He gave Dash a look. “Nothing must be needlessly complex,” he said. “The simplest solution is always the correct one.”
He paused. Dash sensed that maybe—just maybe—he was being given a second chance. He felt like he really wanted one.
Pitt visibly forced himself to be patient. “Do you know what equipment I carry at all times? The equipment that is in almost all cases necessary … and sufficient?”
He pulled his slide rule from its hip holster. “This. Just this. As opposed to … that.”
Dash’s eyes followed Pitt’s down to all the gear that somehow looked … childish, unnecessary, in its sprawl across the table. Then he looked back at the slide rule and a small, besieged part of his brain tried to think of a way he could have fought his way into the Temple of the Spider God armed only with a slide rule.
The rest of his brain decided that he simply wasn’t smart enough to think of the way to do it.
Dash looked at his feet. He made a couple of tentative motions with his hands, and then he scooped all the gear into his back pack, even though it was far too late to hide it from Pitt, as he wished he could.
“You didn’t have a plan, did you?” Pitt demanded. “You came here with every scrap of equipment you had, and you … you improvised.”
Dash couldn’t meet Pitt’s eyes. “Yes, sir, I guess I did.”
Pitt seemed disturbed. “It’s a betrayal of the ability you do have,” he told Dash. “I wonder if that could be salvaged.” Then he seemed to lose interest.
“Your note,” Pitt remembered. “You said you wanted to speak with me.”
Dash stared blankly. Why had he come here? Then he remembered Miss Gardner and the switchboard.
“It’s the switchboard, Mr. Pitt. The switchboard for the Info-Slates. You’ve fired all the operators and closed their office down, and there’s nobody operating it, but it’s still working and you can’t get through to an operator, but the Info-Slates still work. And it’s, ah, it seems sort of strange, is all, and I wanted to find out why. Uh, what, that is, I wanted to find out what was going on, and so I tried to come up here and that wasn’t very easy, and then I wrote you that note.”
Pitt seemed surprised. “The switchboard,” he said. “Really?”
He walked over to one of the windows, Dash trailing behind him.
“The switchboard was inefficient. It was complicated, cumbersome, and prone to operator error. Its strengths all lay in individual talents that were inconsistent, where they existed, and difficult to replicate. The operators were a jumble of parts, each one a different size and shape, that were expected to work smoothly in a single, flawless machine.
“It could take months to train an operator up to standard. If a significant number of operators had left or been lost, well! The entire system would have collapsed.”
Pitt gestured out at the skies over Retropolis: alive with individual rockets and hovercars that were all watched over by a few ASAA officers, swooping and patrolling around them.
“The Air Safety and Astronautics Association depends on the timely response of their Info-Slates. So do a number of other organizations. It is too important a service to be entrusted to such an antiquated and unreliable system.”
Dash and Pitt looked out over the city.
“Well…” Dash said. “What did they do wrong?”
Pitt slapped the window. “Wrong? They did the same things that people always do wrong. Look at them!”
Dash was nearly sure that he wasn’t supposed to be looking at the switchboard operators. Nearly sure. Pitt seemed to be pointing down at one of the skyways, where pedestrians milled through a suspended tube between two buildings. There was quite a crowd in there. The crowd was moving in uncertain knots and clumps.
“They start and stop; they pause, they collide; they try to go fast, and then they have to slow down again when they catch up to whoever’s right ahead of them. They behave erratically, inefficiently.
“If only they moved naturally, as particles do, they’d slide right along at an even pace; if they followed the laws of fluid dynamics they’d make their way effortlessly from one place to another. If they had the grace to act like waveforms they’d propagate their precise and predictable way through the universe. But do they? Do they?
“No. They do not.
“They spend their days doing only that which is not necessary. They prevent civil engineering systems from working the way they should do. The way they are supposed to do. I try to enhance their lives and their excursions and I try to make their lives more efficient, and they respond with this. This. It isn’t enough.”
Pitt’s eyes rose from the city and rested—comfortably, at ease now—on the sky above.
“It isn’t enough. Not yet.”
“So I guess that’s why you built the Transport Tubes, then?” Dash asked. “So folks would … move like particles?”
Pitt’s eyes remained on the sky.
“I built the Transport Tube system to solve the problem. Yes, that’s just what I did.”
Dash had made it all the way back to the street before he realized that he’d never been told who was minding the switchboard now. The whole interview was a kind of a painful lesson that hadn’t really taught him much except that he didn’t measure up, somehow. His back pack hung off its straps like so much dead weight.
He looked up at the city—beautiful, he was sure, if maybe not as orderly as it might be—and he noticed that the big full Moon had risen in the afternoon sky to hang over it all, like it was watching over them. He was so distracted by the sight of the Moon that he walked right into a small man in spectacles.
“Gosh, Mister, I’m really sorry. My fault, my fault completely. Are you okay?”
When they’d established that he was okay, Dash walked uncertainly back toward home.
* * *
Abner collected himself. The young man who’d collided with him had been very polite, but Abner knew that he himself been lost in thought while he stared up at Pitt’s office. That man is up to something, he thought, and I don’t believe it’s any good.
It seemed like he might have to find out what that was.
4
JOURNEY TO THE ALLEY OF ABOMINATION
SATURDAY, 5:12 PM
“Krajnik, Lillian, Doctor…,” mused the doorman, paging through his list. “No, ma’am, I do apologize. You’re not listed.”
Lillian nodded. There was something about Lillian’s nod that told you she wasn’t really agreeing with you; it’s just that humoring you was probably more practical than any of the alternatives. An astute person would start wondering, right about then, what the alternatives were; but the doorman just flipped the cover back onto his notebook and smiled, job done.
“Your shoes,” said Lillian.
The doorman, confused, looked at her and then—in that reflex that dates back to the dawn of the age of shoelaces—he looked down. “Yes?”
“You ought to take them off.”
He grinned. “Much as I might like to, ma’am, that’s against our dress code.” This, his friendly, expectant, but inflexible expression told her, was about as far as he was going to go. He looked right and left, eyes bright, obviously on the lookout for somebody who was still there.
Lillian shrugged; you could only do so much. Her eyes dropped to his feet and she turned a dial on the earpiece of her glasses. Nothing much happened at first except that the doorman’s eyes started to twitch. He pursed his lips with the slightest possible discomfort. He looked down at his shoes. “That’s odd, isn’t it?” he murmured.
By the time he reached for his shoelaces it was already too late. His feet had swollen to about one and one-quarter times their usual size, and although he didn’t know it yet, this was only the beginning.
The doorman found a shoehorn lying on the pavement, right where she’d been standing. Behind him the door was swinging closed.
THURSDAY, 7:42 PM
Harry Roy had decided that his employees just weren’t up to the job: not this job, anyway. He cruised his hovercar slowly above the streets as though he wasn’t sure where he was going, gradually wandering closer and closer to the top floor of Rusty’s apartment building. Whatever that little robot was up to in there, Harry felt certain he could puzzle it out.
He reached a point opposite the attic window and paused the car. He pulled out a street directory and paged through it like the most perplexed tourist in history.
Over the top of the pages he could see that Rusty’s curtains were drawn. But they were lightweight curtains, and they let in a lot of light. Harry could make out the faintest flicker of movement through them.
Since the street directory was incomprehensible, Harry-the-Tourist pulled out a pair of magnifying goggles that were a big help to Harry-the-Spy’s view of the window. Rusty was watering some plants on the sill. It looked as though somebody else was sitting near the window. Rusty bent and did something there, and then came back to the windowsill without his water can.
Rusty looked up. He waved at Harry, then pointed at himself, and then upward. The robot disappeared from the window and emerged, a moment later, up on the roof.
Harry put the street directory away. He shrugged, and then let the car drift up so he could see what was going on up on the roof.
He was beginning to see why his men had run into some difficulty with this assignment.
THURSDAY, 7:53 PM
As she stepped out of the dimness of the stairway, fresh air came rushing past Nola as though it had an appointment downstairs and it didn’t want to be late. The Campbell twins had shadowed her all the way up, after they’d let her in and directed her to the roof; she could still hear their hushed voices arguing on the landing below until the door swung shut behind her.
After that stairwell the sky seemed unusually wide and clear. The sun was taking its time going down, and it had already been joined by a large full Moon that hung over the city. Nola took a deep, contented breath, and she looked around for Dash.
She found him over by the ornithopter cote. He was looking at nothing in particular and he didn’t seem to notice Nola when she approached him.
“Hello, Dash,” she said. “I told the other operators what you’re doing, and they’re all very grateful.”
Dash could have looked a little more pleased by the news. “I don’t think I did much, as it turned out.”
He gave her a very short version of his interview with Pitt.
“I didn’t learn a thing, not really.”
For some reason his eyes kept wandering over to his back pack.
Nola figured she could understand, at least a little. “He’s very … intimidating, isn’t he?”
“He’s amazing,” Dash told her, and once he’d started it seemed like he couldn’t stop. “I felt like a little kid, standing next to him. It’s like he can do anything, and if you can’t do anything too, then, well, you just don’t matter. And even what you did do,” he went on, “which seemed pretty swell at the time, you know, well, it turns out you did it…”
She waited.
Then she tried: “Inefficiently?”
Dash shot up and at last he really looked at her, his eyes wide. “Yes! Like whatever it was, you did it plain wrong, or, I don’t know, wasteful, like. Like…”
She waited again.
“I don’t know,” Dash finished. “Everything he said just sounded right.”
Nola was worried. Earlier, Dash had seemed so much more sure of himself: so much more capable. She hadn’t had any trouble convincing the other operators—except maybe for Mrs. Broadvine who was not, technically, an operator anyway—that they were in good hands with Dash. Tonight, though …
“Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened,” she suggested, and so he did.
Right about the time Dash was describing his stay on the statue a little robot came out of the ornithopter cote and sat down quietly with his back against the shed. He was holding one of the ornithopters; its wing didn’t seem to be working right. He nodded politely to Nola, and she nodded back. She noticed that he wore a nameplate labeled RUSTY but—though she was too well mannered to look closely—she couldn’t see a speck of rust on him.
They listened to Dash’s story together.
“Well,” she said when he’d finished, looking more dejected than before, “I don’t see what you’re so down about. I mean, look at what you did! You tried to get in to see his office, and when that didn’t work, well, whillikers, Dash, you climbed up twenty stories on the outside of the building, and then you sent for, for…” she waved toward the cote “… uh, something that could spy out the top floor for you, and then—now this really is something, ’cause it’s smart and, you know, sort of … self-effacing at the same time—you sent a note inside and you got a meeting with him and he had to talk to you.”
