Bug Park

by James P. Hogan

  "Michelle Lang?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh, hi again. This is Phil Garsten."

  "Mr. Garsten, hello."

  "I hope I'm not gatecrashing on your holiday."

  "No, it's okay."

  "You see, I'm meeting a friend on his boat in the morning, and I'll be gone for the rest of the weekend."

  "It sounds wonderful. What can I do for you?"

  "You wanted to get together and talk about the Hebers and this theme-park idea. Well, I've just had a cancellation for Tuesday and wondered if we might fit it in then. The rest of next week's wiped out for me."

  "Oh . . . what time on Tuesday?"

  "First thing after lunch, say one-thirty or two. My office would be better, probably."

  "I think that would be okay, but I'm not absolutely sure. Can I call you first thing Tuesday if there's a problem?"

  "Of course. That would be fine."

  "Well . . . then have a good weekend on the boat, Mr. Garsten. I hope the weather doesn't close in."

  "Thanks. You too, Ms. Lang." Garsten replaced the phone and nodded, satisfied.

  "The little details," he murmured aloud to himself. "Always remember to take care of the details."

  "Hello, Doug? This is Michelle."

  "Well, hey."

  "Guess who I've just been talking to: Phil Garsten."

  "Garsten?" Michelle could sense Corfe go tense suddenly, even over the phone. His voice took on a hollow note. "What's happened?"

  "Nothing. He just wanted to talk about an appointment next week. Everything's still okay. In fact, I just wanted to pass on something that will set your mind at ease a little. He's going off with somebody on a boat in the morning—I wouldn't be surprised it it's Payne. So the office will be clear. I just thought you'd like to know."

  There was a silence while Corfe digested what she had said. "Why would he tell you something like that?" he asked finally.

  "Oh, Doug, don't sound so suspicious about everything. It was the reason why he needed to call me tonight, that's all. Is everything else okay?"

  "Yes. We've got the codes and passwords." Corfe's tone wavered. "Why are we doing this? . . ."

  Michelle shook her head. How roles could reverse. Now that she felt confident and optimistic, finally, he was suddenly the one having doubts. "You know why we're doing it," she said. "Why ask a question like that?"

  "I've just got this premonition that nothing's going to come of it. We're wasting our time."

  "There's only one way we'll ever know," Michelle said. "Go and unwind, and then get a good night's sleep. I'll see you tomorrow."

  Corfe paced around for a long time after he hung up. Now he could see dozens of ways for something to go wrong. The more he thought about them, the more impossible the odds of avoiding all of them seemed. Talking had been good for venting his frustration. But all his experiences of actual doing had prepared him for circumstances that were very different from those he faced now.

  In his Navy years, there had always been the Book to spell out exactly what was to be done and how, and provided you stuck by it, you were protected. Other people had already made the decisions. Having to write his own Book and then stand by the consequences hadn't been part of the training.

  Restless for some distraction, he sat down at the computer in a corner of his living room and dialed in for his e-mail. There was a message from Kevin, a response to one that Corfe had sent earlier. It read:

  Will be ready in the morning at 10:30.

  Tried out the remote hookup with Taki. It works just great. And we can get at hardcopy as well as what's on a screen. Another week would have been really useful. I've made a list of extras we might need. We can pick most of them up at the lab.

  Bests,

  K.

  Corfe felt chagrined. Even the kid was sounding positive and set to go. He worked hard to pull himself together. It had been a mistake to come back home and spend this evening on his own with no plans for anything to do. He'd have been better off staying in town—perhaps could have gone somewhere with Michelle and let a little of her buoyancy carry over. It was different for people like her, who ran businesses, he decided. They wrote a new page of their own Book every day of the week.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Shortly before noon on Saturday morning, Corfe halted the van in one of the slots in the same parking lot that he had used the previous afternoon. The weather had brightened up, with the sun peeking through broken cloud, but the reports were of new squalls moving up from the south. The city was quiet, having a lazy holiday, the parking lot more empty than full.

  After learning from Kevin that morning about Kevin and Taki's experiments the evening before, Corfe had agreed that they needed to send more tools and accessories into Garsten's office to tackle desk drawers and file cabinets. The van had its own collection of mecs that could carry the additional items in. But first, the ones that were already inside would need to check out the several possible entry points that Corfe had noted the previous afternoon, and find the most suitable.

  Michelle shook her head wonderingly in the passenger seat next to him while he checked through the things they had brought. "I don't believe this. I started out trying to instill some respect in you for proper procedures. You end up turning me into a criminal. I'm a contract lawyer. This isn't what I do."

  "Don't blame me, blame Eric," Corfe answered. "Everyone who comes near him ends up having their life turned inside out."

  Michelle nodded. "You're right. And outwardly I've never met anyone more charming. How does he have this effect on people? Why do we end up doing things like this?"

  "I guess because of what he stands for. And we all love him for it." Corfe picked up the van's phone and called the Test Lab at Neurodyne. Kevin answered a few seconds later.

  "Right, we've arrived and we're in position," Corfe said. "I circled the block on the way, and it looks quiet. We're going to connect through now."

  "Everything's quiet here in the lab too. I guess everyone's holidaying as we hoped. I'm coupled in, ready to go."

  "Fine. We'll see you inside. Signing out." Corfe looked across at Michelle. "Okay, let's go."

  They climbed back between the seats to the rear section of the van. Corfe drew a curtain across the front and turned on the interior light to reveal banks of equipment and screens, two operator positions on one side, and one on the other, and a regular seat facing rearward behind the partition. He motioned Michelle into the station nearest the rear doors and moved himself into the one next to her. "There won't be any need for you to couple in to begin with," he said as he flipped switches and tapped keys to activate the equipment. "You can work in conjunction with Kevin from here. I'm patching the video from one of the mecs already in the office to that monitor up there." He indicated one of the screens, then handed Michelle a regular telephone headset. "This carries Kev's audio channel, so you can talk to him. This other screen will let you follow what I'm doing from the mec I'll be controlling. I'll be on the same audio circuit as you and Kev. Want to check it out?"

  Michelle put the set on her head while Corfe was attaching his own coupler collar and headset. "Hello, Kevin? This is Michelle testing. Can you hear me? . . ." Moments later she nodded. "Yes, he's there. We're through."

  The inside of the van disappeared, and Corfe was in a colorful, cartoon-like visual world, facing a signboard showing a hierarchy of system menus and labeled boxes. He pointed at a diagnostic branch and ran a quick test of vision and motor functions, then entered audiosys to make the connections.

  "Can you hear me, Michelle?" he checked.

  "I'd hope so. You're sitting right next to me."

  "I meant through the phones."

  "Yes. You're okay."

  "Do you read, Kev?"

  "Roger."

  "Okay. . . ."

  And Corfe was in darkness, entombed in a clinging plastic shroud. He freed his arms, worked them up over his head, and with some wriggling and tugging opened the top of
the bag. He pulled the folds low around him and stepped over them to emerge into a shadowy vault of looming shapes and rectangles that he recognized as the storage space below the worktop at the back of the secretaries' area in Garsten's office. There was more movement in the bag, and the second telebot-size mec appeared—similar to the one that Corfe was occupying, but with different accessories. Corfe held the folds of plastic aside while it emerged fully. "Everything okay, Kev?" he asked.

  "Check," Kevin's voice said on the audio.

  "Still with us, Michelle?"

  "I'm here. The pictures on the two screens are coming through pretty clear too."

  "Good. Let's start by getting everything laid out where we can see it, and do an inventory."

  Corfe walked to the edge of the cupboard's wooden base and jumped down to the floor. Kevin followed, dragging the plastic bag, now relieved of its major load. The carpet was like a field of closely packed tussocks of coarse gray grass, making the going bumpy. They stepped up onto the skating rink of plastic mat behind the nearer of the two desks, and passed beneath an office chair, looming above them like a gigantic tree of tubes and girders. Here would be as good a place as any to establish base camp, Corfe decided.

  They laid out the remaining contents of the bag and took stock. There were: a half-dozen specialized mecs, ranging in size from a quarter-inch, to one of the new Keyboard Emulator models that Corfe had described at Taki's; a standard keyboard plug, with two feet of lightweight cable coiled like a hose; a miniaturized recharging unit with power cord; a selection of lines, pulleys, and attachment slings; assorted tools; a six-foot steel measuring tape.

  The first thing, they had agreed, would be to get Kevin and Michelle working on the computer files while Corfe went off to look at entry points for the reinforcements. To operate the computer they would first have to plug in the KE mec, which required getting it up onto the desk. They stood looking up at it, towering over them like a hangar for zeppelins. There was no quick way up. They already knew that, of course.

  "Okay, let's roll out the tape," Corfe said. "Now we'll see if this crazy idea of yours and Taki's works."

  "We already tried it. It works," Kevin answered.

  Taking a side of the case each, they carried the measuring tape to the base of the chair and stood it on its side so that it butted against the castor and support bracket. While Kevin wedged the case to prevent it from moving, Corfe took hold of the protruding metal tag at the end of the tape and backed away until the markings showed that he had drawn out thirty-six inches. "That should do it," Kevin said, and locked the clamp to stop the tape retracting.

  Corfe came back, and between them they moved the case out from under the chair and closer to the desk. Working together like firefighters maneuvering an extension ladder, they raised the tape carefully from the floor, moving it slowly so that it wouldn't kink and bend, and turned it until the top end leaned against the edge of the desk. "What we need now is something solid up on top of the desk to act as an anchor and keep the tape taut," Kevin said.

  "Can you see anything on the screen, Michelle?" Corfe asked.

  "There's a kind of metal desk organizer with lots of dividers and trays," she replied after a few seconds. She was looking at the screen that Corfe had pointed out before he coupled in, showing the view being picked up by one of the two small mecs planted high up in the office since yesterday.

  "Let me see." Still retaining motor control of the larger mec, Corfe switched his vision to the channel that Michelle was watching. Hence, he was able to see down onto the desk and at the same time work with Kevin by touch to move the tape from below. The organizer was a chromed composition of stationery slots and trays for pens and other oddments, with numerous edges. Just the thing. "Okay, it's a bit farther to the left," he told Kevin.

  With Corfe directing, they steered the tape above the organizer, and then extended it farther until it suddenly buckled over the edge of desk to fall across the metal dividers and edges. "Now we reel it in," Kevin said.

  After a few tries they succeeded in snagging the end-tag. Pulling the tape tight, they now had a rigid ladder running up from the floor to the edge of the desk, and over.

  Now it was Kevin's turn to switch mecs. Transferring to one of the small models that they had below, he wrapped a length of line around its body like a mountaineer's rope and inched his way up the swaying metal strip, using the mec's hands as clamps on the edges. Corfe switched his vision back to floor-view and steadied the tape from below. At the top, Kevin unwound the line, secured it to the desk lamp, and threw the other end down to Corfe, who was then able to walk himself up the drawer fronts, carrying the KE mec, and its keyboard adapter plug and cable with him.

  "You know, if this fails, you guys could always get in a circus with that act," Michelle told them.

  There were now three mecs up on the desktop: the small general-purpose type that Kevin had used to scale the tape; the larger, more powerful, telebot type that Corfe had taken up; and the Keyboard Emulator. Corfe unplugged the regular keyboard from the computer and replaced it with cord that he had brought up from the floor; the other end connected into the head socket of the KE mec, which Kevin now activated and brought around in front of the screen. Corfe tipped the power switch on the front of the computer box to "On," and the whir of the cooling fan starting came from inside. He crossed the desk and turned on the monitor, and a moment later the screen came to life to show the familiar operating system trademark and logo.

  "We're in business!" Kevin announced.

  "Bravo," Michelle complimented from the van.

  "Teamwork," Kevin said from the lab at Neurodyne.

  The cursor on the screen moved—presumably following a finger that Kevin was moving in virtual space. A selection of menus appeared. "Where would be a good place to start?" Kevin's voice asked on the circuit. "files, looks promising, yes?"

  "Let's have a look at what we've got there," Michelle said.

  The cursor moved over the screen, stopped, and then a box appeared with the legend: enter password

  "Okay, I think I've got this," Kevin muttered. "Give me a second to look up what we taped. . . ."

  "Okay, can you do without me now for a while?" Corfe said.

  "Sure. We'll be okay now," Kevin answered.

  Decoupling from the can-size telebot on the desk, Corfe reactivated the other mec to find himself back down on the floor. He selected some tools and devices that he thought he might need from the collection they had laid out there, and departed for other parts of the house.

  Michelle was not the only one who had been watching. Although Corfe had looked hard enough during his visit, he had seen no sign of internal surveillance, and had concluded that the building's protection was limited to standard measures for detecting external break in and entry. But some of Garsten's business was such that he didn't always want his clients to know that they were being observed and recorded. Also, he did highly confidential work for Martin Payne, and Payne owned a company that dealt in some pretty advanced technology.

  Each of the principal rooms had a normal-looking mirror, wall plaque, or framed design concealing a miniature camera that could be remote-directed. And the bases of the ceiling-lamp fixtures contained sensitive motion detectors that responded to reflective metallic surfaces. Garsten had good reasons for not wanting either the police or any of the regular private security companies in any kind of proximity to his affairs. Accordingly, he relied on Microbotics for his security arrangements, and the alarm lines from his office went directly to the company's premises at Redmond.

  Garsten was with Vanessa and Andy Finnion in the room at the top of the lab block where the equipment was set up, when a call came through from the supervisor currently on duty in Security, across in the main building. They were killing time, waiting for Eric to reach the hazardous stretch of road that they had picked for the "accident." All modern vehicles carried a satellite-linked positioning system, and it was simple for Vanessa to check the ca
r's location by dialing a number that returned its current map coordinates. Payne himself had joined the yacht, now at Fox Landing, where he was finalizing preparations for the holiday weekend.

  "Andy, it's Kyle here. We've got trouble. Can you get over here right away?"

  "What is it? What's up?"

  "Is Phil Garsten still with you?"

  "Yes, he is. Why?"

  "Bring him too. We've got an alarm condition from his office. You need to come and see this for yourself."

  Finnion hung up, looking mystified.

  "Perhaps I'd better come too," Vanessa said. There was time yet. Their last fix had shown Eric in the same place for almost thirty minutes, probably stopped somewhere for breakfast. Finnion nodded. They took an elevator down, left the lab block, and arrived in Security several minutes later.

  Garsten's eyes bulged as Kyle showed them the current view from one of the live cameras and a replay of some of what had been happening. "What are they?" he protested in a strangled voice, pointing an outraged finger at the screen. "What's going on? . . . Goddamn robot things all over my office. . . ."

  Finnion blanched. "Something's screwed up big. I need to call Martin. We may have to scratch the operation."

  "No!" Vanessa's voice was tight but firm. "Think about it. Whatever's happening has nothing to do with the plan. Phil's office doesn't come into it. It's something else going on there, a coincidence." Garsten and Finnion glanced at each other. Maybe she had a point. They waited to see what she would make of it.

  Vanessa stared at the screens, thinking rapidly. "The van has to be there somewhere. Whoever it is has to be doing this from the van. . . . It's no use us just going crashing into the building. All it'll do is alert them that we're onto them and scare them off." She shot a look at Finnion. "Andy, can you mobilize some of your guys quickly—you know, ones who can be trusted?"