by Stan Ruecker
“You’re kidding,” Kevin said, wondering if they’d open his mail, too. He decided not to mention it, just in case. It wouldn’t hurt to try. He could just stick a hard drive in between a couple of sheets of paper and mail it to himself.
“Anyway,” Karen said. “It’s probably just as well. If we don’t know what it is, it’s probably dangerous.”
“You don’t know that.”
“But that’s the assumption everybody’s making.”
“Don’t they know I already cleaned it out? I did a good job on this thing.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“But I did,” Kevin was indignant. “And besides, they can’t even prove there ever was an alien virus.”
“They don’t have to prove anything. That’s what being in charge means.”
“Did anybody tell them I already cleaned it out?”
“The way they got it figured, if you can’t prove it, you didn’t do it right. Sorry.”
“That really burns my butt,” Kevin said, forgetting for a minute he was always going to be as formal as possible with Karen, to try to teach her the right way to talk. “These guys need to hear about this.”
“Who, exactly, would you like to talk to? They did ask if there were any questions at the meeting this morning. You could’ve stuck your hand up then.”
“I wasn’t at the meeting.”
“Then you’ll have to take my word for it. Nobody wants to hurt your feelings, Kev, but they don’t want to risk their space station because you’re pretty sure you cleaned out the system.”
“The whole thing’s crazy.”
“Maybe. But it isn’t my decision, and it isn’t your decision either. And now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got some schedules to arrange. We’re putting everything else on hold until we finish the wipe and restore.”
Prison break
The running peacocks herded Ray into a detention room with air that accommodated him. If he wanted to sit down, the air where he was going to sit got thick enough to support him. If he stretched out, it flowed to keep him above the ground.
Sitting cross-legged in mid-air, Ray decided it must be time for lunch. He opened the knapsack and looked inside. There was a can of oysters and a can opener, an avocado and cream cheese sandwich, neatly wrapped in wax paper, and a thermos. On the thermos was a label saying: “Magnetic containment. Do not discard. Do not expose to open flame. This means you, Ray.”
He decided not to open the thermos. He ate the sandwich, put the oysters away for later, neatly folded the wax paper and stuck it in his pocket.
Then he thought of running around the room to keep himself busy, but because of the viscosity of the air, it was like trying to run through water. So he walked instead, doing laps, but that could only go on for so long, especially in such a small room. So he started wading diagonally from corner to corner. Finally he collapsed on his back and started to sing.
“Hey!” he sang. “Hey! They put me in here but there ain’t no way. Hey.” He clapped, and something hit him in the chest. He looked around, but there was nothing to see.
He tried clapping again. Same thing.
He stood up and went over to the wall. Clapped gently. A gentle push came back from the wall.
“Well I’ll be jiggered,” he said.
He went over to the door, took his boots and socks off and stood on the cold floor. A few minutes later he sneezed, right into the seam where the door met the wall. The material comprising the door buckled as if shot by a bullet. Ray stuck his hand through, grabbed the edge of the door, and pulled. The door slid open.
Ray stuck his head out and looked both directions. There were no peacocks in sight, so he grabbed the chance to run. The thermos bottle stayed in the room, beside the knapsack with the oysters.
Ray ran through a short corridor and turned right. A sealed hatch faced him, decorated with a rough surface of knobs and protrusions, as though the door had grown in place through some lithomorphic process.
“Rats,” Ray said, and the hatch folded itself open. Or had he taken a step closer? He took a step back.
The door stayed open. Wait a minute, Ray thought. What do I care how it works, as long as it works?
He dived through to another short passage. This one ended in a room full of hanging thread. He turned around to see the hatch closing. Then the threads behind him began to hum. They made a very melodic hum, in fact, like someone working quietly and humming to make the work go right. Ray took out a pen and brushed one of the threads with it. Nothing. He ventured to touch one with a finger. It felt like a thread. Ray walked out into the room, brushing aside the humming threads.
Within a few steps he was completely surrounded, but he kept going. A few steps more and he was lost.
Great, he thought sardonically. Maybe no one else will know where I am either.
Suddenly there was a new sound off to the left. Not the humming of the threads, but a high, sharp, electronic sound. Ray turned left toward it. The humming of the threads changed. He stopped. The melody continued, only subtly different. He turned right and took two steps. It changed again. He turned back. The sound went back. To the left the threads were humming in a distinctly minor key, while to the right the music was in a major chord.
Ray headed left, and almost ran straight into Lucy’s drone.
“Ray!” it shouted. “What are you doing here?”
“I—” he started. “Now wait a minute here,” he said. “What am I doing here? What are you doing here?”
“You don’t even know where here is. Do you?” the drone demanded.
“Okay,” Ray said, “so, not exactly. But don’t avoid the issue. The point is, what are you doing here?”
I’ve gotten ridiculous now, Ray said to himself.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the drone said. “Just follow me.”
It turned on a bright green light and headed diagonally across the threads. Ray noticed that the threads had started trembling slightly. The drone sped up.
“Wait,” Ray shouted. “Slow down!”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” the drone said.
“But where are we?”
The temperature had started to rise, and there was a rumbling sound coming down somewhere behind them. The drone stopped in front of a closed door, flashed a light at it, and the door slid back.
“That,” it told Ray, as the door closed itself behind them, “was the dishwasher.”
Lucy gets the boot
Lucy was trying to keep her patience, but it wasn’t easy.
Why is the universe populated with incompetent lunatics? She wondered. It’d be so much easier if they were just lunatics plain and simple. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about their occasional lapses into reason.
“What have you done with my spokesperson?” she said again.
“I’m sorry, but that information is not available at this time.”
“And when will it become available?”
“That information is classified.”
“Listen, clown,” Lucy said. “I want to speak to someone in authority over there.”
The peacock drew itself up to its full, impressive meter and a half.
“I am the Bishop of Docking,” it said.
“Ah,” Lucy said. “Just as I thought.”
“What do you mean?” the offended Bishop said.
“I was listening to some of your entertainment broadcasts. You’re pretty full of it around here.”
“You are not clear. Even for an infidel pirate.”
“Sorry. What I meant to say is, if you can’t tell me where my envoy has gone, is there a Cardinal available?”
The peacock did a little running back and forth, then broke the connection.
She started up her engines. She could hear alarms going off on the ship that held her, could see dockworking peacocks hustling away from her in all directions. They wouldn’t blow her up in their own hold. The only thing she had to worry about was some statio
n trolley sneaking around the curve and crashing into her from the outside. A peacock face wearing a small amber fedora showed up on her display.
“Please stop that,” the peacock said.
“Where is my spokesperson?”
“Your spokesperson is temporarily unavailable for comment.”
“Listen, and listen good. I want contact with both my spokesperson and the electronic unit I sent with him. I want that contact within fifteen minutes, or you and a large portion of your ship are going to take an excursion somewhere you won’t like, and you’ll do it in little pieces all stuck to me.”
“You’re bluffing. A probe your size does not contain propulsion equipment of that capacity.”
“How good is your physics?” Lucy asked. She opened a little hole in space, rotated it around itself until it formed a torus, then folded the torus through a little hole in itself, completely inverting it. “Show that to one of your techs,” she said, “then come talk to me about capacity.”
Seven minutes later the hold doors opened, and Lucy was jettisoned. As she went out the bay door, they hit her with a spatial-temporal pulse. The last image she had was of autumn leaves, dropping quickly away from her in the depths of space.
Everyone else gives up
“Drat,” the little drone cursed. They were standing in front of the entrance to an escape shuttle.
“What? What?”
“I can’t get this thing to talk to me. It has a power-on lock that can only be disabled with a physical key.”
“What does the key look like?”
The drone sunk despondently to rest on a bundle of inverted glass lilies. “Never mind,” it said. “We’re through.”
“Listen,” Ray said. “You might be just the first electronic drone in an identical series of a thousand, but I happen to be all I’ve got. I can’t just stop because we don’t have some kind of security access. Can’t you just break…”
He stopped. The drone was about as big as a fat bumblebee.
“Okay,” Ray said. “So maybe you can’t just break it. But can you jimmy it somehow?”
“I could maybe figure out the fuzzy matrix it needs, since it has to have a molecular analog for comparison. Usually they aren’t too smart about it—they use a standard analog as the base. You reverse-engineer from genetic library material or from crystallography or whatever and match against the encrypted matrix. But I would still need to have a medium to write it to.”
“What medium?”
“It’s usually an imprinted plastic, but any thin—fairly thin—amorphous surface could be used, provided it isn’t too fibrous. I need something smooth.”
“So you couldn’t write it to a piece of paper, say?”
“No way. The surface would have to be coated.”
Ray stuck his hands in his pockets and paced. “Okay,” he said, “I give up. We might as well turn ourselves in.”
He took a little square of paper from his pocket and chewed absent-mindedly at the corner.
“Ray,” the drone said.
“I told you I give up. It’s okay.”
“What are you chewing on, Ray?”
“It’s just a piece of wax paper,” he said. The drone flashed over and picked it out of his hand, humming furiously.
“That does it,” the drone suddenly announced, and the hatch suddenly started to hum.
“Is it supposed to hum like that?” Ray asked.
“How do I know?” the drone asked. “I’ve never picked a lock on one of these before.”
Ray watched nervously while the humming got louder. Then the hatch beeped and popped open.
“Maybe it was filling up with air,” the drone suggested.
“At least they have an escape pod,” Ray said. “That’s more than Lucy can say.”
“I think there’s an escape pod,” the drone said. “At least, there used to be one.”
“Don’t you know?” Ray asked.
“It would depend on when my records were updated,” the drone explained. “I might have an old version.”
“Does your data include anything on operating this thing?” Ray asked, climbing in. There was a prodigious array of what had to be controls, but to Ray’s eye they were nothing but textured knobs.
“I guess you run it with your mouth,” the drone said. “You got to remember, these birds don’t have hands.”
“You run it with your mouth,” Ray said, and arranged himself across two little couches, about the size and shape of uncomfortable footstools.
“I can do better than that,” the drone said. “If you can just get the hatch closed up, we’ll get out of here.”
Ray grabbed the manual, or rather mouthual, knob on the inside of the hatch and snugged it closed. There was a whine as the servos pulled the door into its final sealed position. In the meantime the drone had attached itself to a socket on the instrument panel.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Ray said.
“Would your rather continue with your re-education, pirate?” the drone asked.
“How did you know about that?” Ray asked.
“I was eavesdropping,” the drone said. “These birds don’t keep any secrets.”
The pod suddenly gave a lurch.
“We’re away,” the drone said. “I hope they don’t bother to worry about us. There’s a space station indicated not too far from here.”
“Will it be safe?” Ray asked.
“Well,” the drone said. “It isn’t run by any ridiculous peacocks.”
Kim, Usha, and Martin
“Tell me again.” Martin said.
“I want cameras set up in the government archives, and I don’t want to have to go through a bunch of red tape to get it done.” Kim tapped her front tooth with the eraser end of a pen.
“It has to be quiet,” Usha added. “We don’t know who we’re watching for.”
“Good,” Martin said. “But I’ll need another tech. Someone with a background in video.”
“How about Don?” Usha suggested. “She should be just about finished over in Rio, shouldn’t she?”
“At, what,” Kim said. “Something like 35% over time and budget? I’m not sure we want to take any risks like that here.”
“It’s not necessarily her fault,” Martin said. “There were some extenuating circumstances there.”
“You wouldn’t have lost a shipment through a package leak,” Kim said. “So don’t even try to tell me you would have.”
“Maybe she just got a bad seal on that container,” Martin said. “It could happen to anyone.”
“Whatever,” Kim said. Martin had trained Don, and Kim had sent her to Rio on his recommendation, so there was some ego at stake. But that didn’t mean they had to throw good money after bad.
“Tell me again why you need a second tech,” Kim said. “I see three, maybe four cameras in there, and with Usha to cover your exit, I think you’ll have plenty of time.”
“What’s our transmission radius?” Martin asked.
“A quarter mile. That’s all we’ll need. We’re set up over here in the back of this warehouse. We aren’t going to need a lot of power.”
Kim pointed on the map.
“Okay,” Martin said. “But you’re talking an hour and a half, if you really want to be sure. And that’s not counting time for any electricals I come across.”
“There’s nothing in there,” Usha said. “I’ve checked the records, and I sent Peter over to walk around. He told them he was checking the drains. They rely on their security gate to keep people out. The archives aren’t an area anyone goes into, so they just don’t worry that much. There’s just the gate, and the one camera.”
“Which you’re going to cover for,” Martin said.
“I’ll be up at the front filling out forms,” Usha said. “Don’t you worry. Nobody is thinking of anything but making my life a living hell. Not once I get in there with my need-to-know and my Freedom-of-Information-Act.”
�
�Good,” Kim said. “Then Martin comes down through the roof, positions his cameras, and back up again for a pickup over here.”
She pointed at a blind alley.
“Not good,” Usha said. “There’s only one way out.”
“We’ll get Kelly over there,” she said. “And he won’t actually enter the alley. He’ll stop just here, at this corner, and you’ll come down the fire escape and up the length of the alley and in the passenger door—just like on the dropoff, only in reverse.”
“Okay,” Martin said. “But make sure I have at least a twenty-minute window. I might be early.”
“I hope you are,” Kim said. “But I’d rather act as dispatcher out of the warehouse. When I start to get signal from that fourth camera, I’ll send Kelly for you.”
“Fair enough,” Martin said. “And even if you don’t—”
“We’ll assume the hour and twenty minutes, which gives you ten on either side.”
“Can you spend more than an hour and a half filling out forms?” Kim asked Usha.
“I can spend two hours just getting the right forms,” Usha said. “Let alone trying to figure out how to fill them out. And I’ll take a thermos full of tea.”
“Tea’s a good idea,” Kim said. “Remember, these people might be on our side, for all we know. We’re only going in there to find out who’s taking advantage of them, not the other way around.”
“Then maybe I’ll take a little bag of candy, too.”
A horse of a different colour
The stationmaster’s representative, who looked a little like an electric horse, was not delighted to see them. “Danger,” it piped, while Ray and the drone headed down the concourse toward a line of trading booths.
Ray dodged around something that might have been a decorative plant, except that it seemed to be wearing a gun.
“Do you have a radio?” he asked the horse.
The stationmaster’s assistant had a built-in com link. It was available for a fee that, alas, was outside the scope of the financial resources of most people arriving in escape pods.
Lucy’s drone flashed a light that hit one of the horse’s ears.
“I see,” the horse said. “Please come this way.”
It led them to a booth off the main thoroughfare. The lights in the booth were not so harsh as the lights outside, and the furniture was comfortable.