Good King Sauerkraut

by Barbara Paul

  Dennis looked at his watch. “I have a date tonight and I need to soak in the tub a while first—my back’s killing me. Osterman wants us in New York on Wednesday. Will two days be enough to get Gale set up to handle things while you’re away?”

  “Should be.”

  “Good. We’ll take the eight o’clock flight Wednesday morning, then.”

  Business concluded, the two partners went their separate ways—Dennis to a night on the town with the latest of the chorus of great-looking women he’d accumulated since his divorce (where did he find them?), and King to …? He climbed into the aging Buick Dennis had told him repeatedly to get rid of. His oniomaniac partner drove a Mercedes 560 SL with a license plate that made King shudder: ROBOT-1. But buying a new car was a lot of effort, and King kept putting it off. The Buick still got him to where he needed to go.

  His route home took him through Squirrel Hill, where he stopped at Rhoda’s Deli to pick up three dozen eggs and a six-pack of Heineken. King lived in the Shadyside section of Pittsburgh, in a house designed for a large family but which suited King and his clutter very well. Unfortunately, the big house was a lot smaller now than when he’d first moved in; it seemed to shrink a little more each year. As he pulled into the driveway he saw Mrs. Rowe next door peeking out through the curtains. When he looked at her, she pulled back from the window.

  King turned off the engine and sat thinking. Now what had he forgotten to do? Mrs. Rowe didn’t like to complain when he’d neglected something. She just peeked at him through the curtains; that had come to be his signal. He took his eggs and beer and got out of the car to look around.

  Ah. The garbage cans.

  Mrs. Rowe was eighty and arthritic; King helped her out with things she couldn’t manage on her own whenever he could. He was pretty good about remembering to carry her garbage cans to the curb for collection, but he didn’t always remember to bring them back in. Yesterday had been collection day; that meant he’d driven past the empty cans at least three times without seeing them. He hurried to haul them in along with his own. Old Mrs. Rowe had probably been worrying about those cans all day.

  A yellow Post-it note was stuck to his front door, written in a round schoolgirlish hand:

  Dear Mr. Sarkowiz,

  You forgot to leave the check again. Please remember to mail it tomorrow.

  Sincerely yours,

  Ready-Maid Cleaning Service

  King was annoyed—not because they’d misspelled his name (everybody did that), but because they’d left the note out where anyone could see it. But his annoyance evaporated once he’d gone inside. King liked coming home to an empty house. He had enough of people yammering at him all day and demanding immediate decisions and instant solutions and delivery by last Tuesday; the welcoming silence of his home was a great soother-of-jitters. For a time he’d had a cat that met him at the door every night; but King had forgotten to feed him just once too often and the animal deserted him for Mrs. Rowe next door. This embarrassed the old lady. But the cat was still there; King caught a glimpse of him every once in a while.

  He opened a beer and scrambled six of the eggs for supper. While he ate he thought about automated mobile weapons and intelligence-gathering devices. Remote piloted vehicles that could go into the field and send back information to a central computer. Mine-planters. Detectors that read seismic disturbances in the ground to deduce number and direction of troop movements. Small, inconspicuous bombs that could drive themselves to a specified target area and then set themselves off. “Smart” bullets. Self-repairing fully automatic tanks, boldly going where no tank has gone before. Battles fought by machines, remote-controlled war.

  The idea of a totally automated battlefield had been lovingly nourished by various government agencies for the past thirty years, but of late most of the attention (and money) had gone to missile development. Killing from a safe distance, like David and his slingshot. But when the Strategic Defense Initiative boys had announced their sheltering umbrella would have a few holes in it, that the Star Wars defense could protect only military installations and not cities—then the automated battlefield was suddenly everybody’s favorite baby again. The budget, as Dennis Cox had said, must be ee-normous. And MechoTech had been handed a major hunk of it.

  MechoTech did some design work of its own, but primarily it was a manufacturer that drew upon whatever innovations it could acquire the patents for. Keystone Robotics had dealt with MechoTech before; its president, Warren Osterman, knew their work and was pleased with it. King didn’t know Osterman well, but the MechoTech president seemed to be one of those people who always knew things that other people only read about in the papers weeks later. King tended to respect his judgment, and the fact that Osterman had hand-picked Mimi Hargrove and Gregory Dillard to design the software on this new project, whatever it was, made him pause. It was only a few years ago that Mimi and Gregory and three others had broken away from Ashton-Tate Corporation to found SmartSoft in Santa Clara, where they’d quickly established themselves as leaders in the field of robot programming. There was no question that they were good, but King was more than content to have the width of the continent between them and Keystone; why look for trouble?

  The first time King ever saw Mimi Hargrove had been in Berlin, a little over six years earlier; that was before she’d teamed up with Gregory Dillard. The occasion was a biannual congress for the exchange of ideas among people who worked in robotics, and Mimi had been delivering a paper about software problems connected with surgical robots. King had spotted what he was sure was a logic flaw in one of her algorithms and had stood up in that packed auditorium to say so. He’d gone on to question a few other things, to which she’d had no immediate answers. Then he’d innocently suggested she test her theories before presenting them and sat down, not realizing he’d offered her the ultimate insult before her fellow professionals. The session eventually ended and the audience started drifting out.

  It wasn’t until someone stopped by King’s seat and asked why he’d “attacked” Mimi that it occurred to him he might have been out of line. To him it was purely an intellectual problem and personalities shouldn’t be allowed to enter into it; getting the machines to work right was the important thing, wasn’t it?

  Dennis Cox, groaning softly in the next seat, had explained it to him. “You remember that scene in Amadeus when Mozart takes a simple little tune that Salieri wrote and turns it into something grand? He goes merrily improvising along, totally oblivious to the feelings of the man he’s showing up as inferior. Well, you just did something like that to Mimi Hargrove.”

  “Good god—I didn’t mean that!”

  “‘Mean’,” Dennis had said wryly, “doesn’t count. You’re careless with people, King. You humiliated her. You asked her to prove things she couldn’t prove without putting in hours at a computer with all of us watching over her shoulder. And then you implied she wasn’t even professional enough to test out her solutions before offering them.”

  King’s skin had started itching, nervously. “Do you think I should apologize?”

  “I think you should try.”

  King had stood up immediately and apologized, but by then most of the audience had dispersed. Mimi was eventually able to publish papers supporting the points King had questioned and thus restore her reputation, which wasn’t all that badly damaged to begin with. But she never forgave him for insinuating publicly that she didn’t know what she was doing, and every meeting of the two since then had been tense and uncomfortable. King had heard via the grapevine that Mimi had let it be known she would never ever under any circumstances whatsoever at any time or in any place work with Keystone Robotics.

  Yet there she was out in California getting ready to do just that. Did that mean she’d forgiven him? King wasn’t naive enough to think that; it was more likely she had something up her sleeve. Something like humiliating him the way he’d humiliated her.

  King cleared off the table and put his dishes in the dishwa
sher, absentmindedly including the empty beer bottle along with them. Mimi must want this project pretty badly to consent to work with him. And that must mean she knew more about it than he and Dennis Cox did. Or more than Dennis had told him. Dennis held things back sometimes; he liked knowing more than his partner.

  People not telling people what they know—it was only then that King remembered he hadn’t told Gale Fredericks her husband would be late picking her up. Oh well, they’d get together eventually and go on to their ball game. Bill Fredericks would drive up Hi-Honey-what’s-wrong and Gale would yell at him for being late. He would protest he’d left a message with her boss, and she’d say he should know better than to count on King to remember. Bill would snarl something and Gale would snap back at him, and they’d end up arguing through the entire ball game before they finally made up and decided it was all King Sarcowicz’s fault.

  Whew. That little fantasy didn’t turn out too well.

  Besides, he’d never once heard Gale raise her voice in anger; maybe he secretly wanted her to fight with her husband. I’m not a goddam message center, King thought testily and decided to put it to rest for a while. He needed some distraction before going to bed; otherwise he’d lie there for hours worrying about Gale Fredericks and Dennis Cox and Mimi Hargrove and the MechoTech project.

  After a moment’s thought he slipped Aliens into the VCR. He opened another beer and settled down to watch the marvelous mechanical monsters do their thing.

  2

  The next morning King poached four eggs for breakfast and hardboiled six others to take with him. He waved goodbye to Mrs. Rowe, who started every other day by sweeping off her front walk, and drove away. Keystone Robotics was closed on Saturdays; occasionally a technician or a manager would come in to finish a job, but usually King had the place to himself.

  After he’d checked in with security, the first thing King saw in the lab was his computer screen glowing away; he’d forgotten to shut down. Yesterday he’d been about to try a new computer-aided design program when Dennis Cox had imperiously summoned him to his office, forgetting which of them was named King—and the new CAD program had been forgotten. King cleared the screen, relieved to see the image had left no afterburn. But as long as the program was already loaded …

  Three-quarters of an hour later he unloaded the new CAD in annoyance; it was one of those programs that redrew the screen every time the user panned or changed views, making the whole design process a lot slower than King liked. Computer-aided delay. For a three-thousand-dollar price tag, they were going to have to do better than that. He put the package aside for Gale Fredericks to look at later.

  Saturday was King’s reward for putting up with Monday through Friday. Once a week he put Keystone’s contracted projects aside and played with whatever designs struck his fancy. Every now and then one of them panned out and Keystone was able to make money out of it; but the real purpose of Saturdays was to allow King to experiment without any specific end in view and without a deadline hanging over his head. And with the advent of desktop manufacturing, King could see the results of his experimenting sooner and a lot more cheaply than before. The computer used a laser and powdered plastic or metal to create prototypes of robot parts, and it did it in a matter of hours instead of the weeks and even months the traditional manufacturing methods took.

  King called up a design for a driverless vehicle he’d been doodling with for several Saturdays. The problem was finding a method of obstacle avoidance without having to plant sensors along the road to guide the vehicle. King had vaguely had public transportation in mind when he’d started the design; but with the new DARPA contract constantly hovering at the edge of his attention, he saw no reason the vehicle couldn’t be adapted to troop transport. He got to work.

  He worked steadily until about one o’clock when he looked up to see Dennis Cox picking his way with exaggerated caution through the laboratory’s obstacle course. Now what’s he up to? King thought with resignation. The only time Dennis came to the lab was when he wanted to talk King into something. King saved the program he was working on and waited, hands clasped loosely in his lap.

  Dennis pulled up a chair and eased himself down on it carefully. “Back’s still bothering me,” he complained. “Look, King, there’s something we’d better settle before we go to New York. Right now it looks like a four-person team, but MechoTech can still pull in somebody else. But even if it stays only you and me and Mimi Hargrove and Gregory Dillard, one of us is going to have to be in charge.”

  King’s eyebrows shot up. “Me,” he said, surprised that needed to be talked about.

  Dennis licked his lips and spoke carefully. “No, King. Not you.”

  “What do you mean, not me? I’m the one who’s going to be doing the primary design work. Everything will have to originate with me.”

  “Originate with you, yes. And you’ll do a helluva job. You’re one of the best designers I’ve ever seen, King.”

  First the stroke, King thought.

  “But, alas and alack, you are one lousy organizer.”

  Then the poke.

  “You forget deadlines,” Dennis said, “you ignore paperwork, you don’t remember to tell others what you’re doing. You go off on some tangent of your own and then get mad when we can’t read your mind and keep up with you. You alienate the people who work for you.”

  “Not everybody,” King said defensively, thinking of Gale Fredericks.

  “You really believe Mimi Hargrove will take orders from you?”

  King was silent a moment and then said, “She’ll have to, if I’m in charge and she wants to stay on the project. Dennis, I’m the only one who can run the project. Unless you’re planning to do all the designing yourself?”

  Dennis’s face tightened; that barb struck home. “Warren Osterman doesn’t know anything about your work habits, and he’ll probably want to make you project leader … unless you tell him I’m a better manager than you are. Which I am. And you know it. What do you think Mimi Hargrove and Gregory Dillard are doing out in California right now? They’re tossing a coin to see which one of them is going to be in charge.”

  “A software person? That’s ridiculous,” King scoffed, unconvincingly.

  Dennis shook his head. “Not so ridiculous. Gregory Dillard was put in charge of a submersible project the Navy contracted to Rhobotics International two years ago. Gregory convinced the Navy that software people were needed to head it up to keep the ‘boy geniuses’ from going overboard. He meant the designers. Now if he got away with that once, you know damn well he’s going to try it again. He’ll either back Mimi or she’ll back him, you can count on it.”

  “Hell.”

  “So they’re going to go into MechoTech next Wednesday with it all worked out which one of them should run the project. And if we want to keep control ourselves, we’re going to have to do the same thing. Then it’ll just be a matter of persuading Warren Osterman.”

  King’s stomach rumbled. He got up and started wandering around the lab while Dennis continued his pitch. His partner was right on both counts; Dennis was the better organizer, and those two in California undoubtedly were conspiring to take over the project. It was the one thing King hated about his business—the politicking. Of necessity all their projects were big ones; robotics work did not come cheap. It seemed obvious to him that the one who thought up the robot and made it work had to be the one in charge, so obvious that any challenge to that Universal Truth left him frustrated and helpless.

  There was something else, too. Dennis didn’t know, but Gregory Dillard would be even more unhappy about taking orders from King than Mimi Hargrove would. The year before, King had run into Gregory quite by accident, in San Francisco, at one of the exhibitions of new high-tech products that were being held throughout the country with increasing frequency. Gregory and his wife Karen were looking at a housekeeping robot; after an exchange of amenities, all three of them watched a demonstration.

  One of the r
obot’s design team conducted the demonstration, a man named Johnson or Thompson or something forgettable like that. The robot was a prototype, the man said, with bugs still to be worked out. A group of eight or ten people watched, as the robot first scrubbed and then waxed a small tile floor, moving a chair and a table and then replacing them as needed. Also on the demonstration floor was a raised hutch, its doors open to reveal shelves filled with breakable glassware. The robot’s sensors told it this particular piece of furniture couldn’t be moved without damaging its contents, so it carefully and neatly scrubbed and waxed around the hutch’s four legs.

  “Square legs,” Gregory Dillard pointed out.

  Johnson or Thompson admitted that was one of the bugs still to be worked out. They hadn’t yet found a way to program the machine to accommodate irregularly shaped furniture legs. Gregory introduced himself as one of the owners of SmartSoft and started speculating on possible programming approaches that might solve the problem. He suggested using a second robot, a smaller one, perhaps only a couple of inches in diameter. The small robot could clean around the table legs and in corners; then it could use sound sensors to listen for the big housekeeping robot and dump whatever dirt it had collected in the big robot’s path. That was one possibility.

  Gregory talked on easily, reducing the programming problem to the level of a game he enjoyed playing. He was Mr. Smooth in person, managing to imply that SmartSoft was the nearest thing to programming heaven to be found on earth and that he himself fit perfectly the programming ideal of deity. The designer was obviously intrigued and asked if he thought SmartSoft would be interested in taking on the problem.

  King was thinking; the whole thing had a vaguely familiar ring to it. Something he had seen once before, at a demonstration very much like this one …

  “Got it!” he cried, interrupting Gregory in midsentence. “Haig-Marcus Robots, last year. They were working on a machine to do individual paint jobs on previously installed items, like the molding of a window frame. They were having trouble making the robot follow the contours of the wood.”