Analog SFF, December 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Well, if that's the way you feel about it,” said the clerk, “then you can simply—"

  “No, please,” said Roger. “Stay on the line. Look. I'm a security consultant. I was simply testing your procedures."

  “Are you saying you were hired to do that?"

  “Well, no,” said Roger. “I was only trying to—"

  “Then I'm afraid you'll just have to wait for our security officer. He gets on duty at eight am. Good bye, sir.” Roger heard the phone disconnect.

  Roger blew out a breath. He needed some outside help, and decided that, early as it was, he'd call the president of his company. He stabbed at the “Outside Line” button, but he didn't hear a dial tone. After a few more attempts, he realized that they weren't going to let him make any outside calls.

  “Damn them!” he said, slamming the receiver to its cradle.

  He reached for his cell phone and flipped it open. The display indicated, “No Service.” And damn these metal frame buildings. Then came the understanding that they were probably jamming the cell phone frequencies. They really mean it. He slipped the phone back into his pocket. And that explains why there's no wireless—and why the bear didn't wake me up.

  Roger stood there, trembling. With a twinge of claustrophobia, he remembered being confined to his room as a kid—his parents’ punishment of choice.

  Annoyance turned to resentment and then to anger. He wasn't about to just wait like a brain-dead bovine to be freed. Property damage or not, he'd try like hell to break out. He had his pride—his professional pride.

  He took off his jacket, then rushed to the window and looked out. It was a non-opening window, but that didn't matter. There was no outside ledge. And from a sheer twenty-two story height, he was hardly going to shimmy to the ground on tied-together bed sheets.

  Glancing over at the locked door, he got an idea. He went to the door and put his ear against the lock. He heard a faint electrical hum, presumably of a solenoid, and that confirmed his theory; for safety reasons, the inside handle locking function was powered. If there were a fire, there might also be a power interruption. And for people to get out, the door would have to function normally if the power were cut. Roger stood up. All he had to do was somehow cause a power failure.

  But how?

  Roger darted to his overnight bag and rummaged for his Swiss Army knife. Carrying a knife. One of the advantages of driving rather than flying. He then unplugged the floor lamp and cut its power cord at the base. He stripped off a couple of inches of insulation from the two power wires, then twisted the bare wires together. Finding the closest power outlet to the door, he plugged in the cord. He heard a satisfying electrical zapping sound, and the hall light flickered and went dark. He sprang to the door and pulled down the handle. But it didn't engage. He was still held captive. He listened at the door and heard the solenoid. With a sigh, he unplugged his shorting cable. All he'd done was trip an unimportant breaker. To make sure, he flipped the switch on the bed table lamp. The light indeed came on.

  Straining for inspiration, he rubbed his temples and craned his neck, forcing his gaze to the ceiling. He smiled, for there, above, he saw a fire detector. All he had to do was light a fire and hold it under the detector. The hotel's system would have to release the solenoids so no one burned to death.

  Again, but how? If only I had matches.

  He scanned the room and caught sight of the coffeemaker.

  Using the screwdriver blade on his knife, he removed the coffeemaker's plastic housing, exposing the nichrome heating coil. Since the coffeemaker's cord wasn't long enough to let him hold the unit under the fire detector, he cut off the plug and appended his shorting cord. Then, after forcing a crumpled up business card into the heating coil and plugging in the coffeemaker, he stood on a chair and positioned the heating element directly under the detector. The device smelled like burning coffee. After a few seconds, the business card began to smolder.

  “Smoking is prohibited in this room,” came a loud and officious voice from the dressing table.

  “Yes!” Roger held the coffeemaker yet closer to the fire detector.

  Suddenly, he heard the clang of a fire alarm out in the hall. He smiled in satisfaction. But then, from little holes that he'd thought were simply patterns in the ceiling tiles, a heavy blanket of spray rained down. Roger, out of surprise and fear of electrocution, dropped the coffeemaker. It fell to the floor and sizzled as the water droplets hit it.

  Roger sprung from the chair, unplugged the coffeemaker, and rushed for the door. Just as he got to it, the alarm went silent and the rain stopped. And the door was still locked.

  “Damn it to hell!” Roger glowered at the door and wished for a good, old-fashioned crowbar. He stalked off to the easy chair and, despite the soggy upholstery, flopped down in it.

  “Wait a minute!” he said, aloud, his nose wrinkled in puzzlement. He flipped the chair's switch to on.

  “Good morning, sir,” said the chair. “Would you care for a back massage?"

  “Maybe later,” said Roger, rushing to get to his question. “Tell me—are you able to communicate with the bed?"

  “Yes."

  “How?"

  “I use the hotel's LAN."

  “Excellent. Exactly what I'd hoped.” Roger jumped from the chair and dropped to his knees. He found the LAN cable coming from the back of the chair and followed it to where it was plugged in to the wall. “I'm sorry to do this to you, chair,” he said as he unplugged the thick, Uniwire, LAN cable. If I'm lucky, the hotel's entire control system runs over this.

  He took his speech from the side pocket of his laptop case. It was soggy, but Roger didn't care. He needed the paper clip holding the pages. He straightened the clip and inserted an end into the center of the wall's LAN socket. He retrieved his power cord from the coffeemaker and wrapped the exposed “hot” wire around the protruding end of the paper clip. He plugged the cord into a power socket and then, very gingerly, held the other bare wire against the socket's ground. 120 Volts into the hotel's LAN might just do it.

  Nothing.

  Roger leaned his head against the wall. He was almost out of ideas. Maybe there's a surge protector, or a high-impedance series resistor. He thunked his head lightly against the wall a few times. That must be it—an isolation interface. He unplugged the a.c., then, using his knife, removed the LAN cover plate screws. Pulling the LAN socket away from the wall, he saw the interface assembly. It was the work of only a minute to bypass the isolation circuit. Again, he plugged in his power cable.

  There came a soft buzz and then silence.

  Roger, as if savoring a fine wine, inhaled an acrid smell of burning insulation, and he saw whiffs of smoke wafting up from his handiwork. Then, against the silence, he heard a distinct click from the door. He raced to it, pulled down the handle, felt the mechanism engage, and yanked the door open. “Yes!"

  He flipped the night latch and slowly closed the door onto it, making sure the door couldn't completely close. Then, choosing speed over organization, he rushed through room and bathroom, gathering up his belongings and shoving them into his travel bag. Soggy though it was, he put on his suit jacket and, with bag in one hand and laptop in its shoulder bag, he headed for the door. There, he paused.

  Looking back, he surveyed the carnage. The room, save for the droplets of water still trickling down the walls, looked less a hotel room and more like his workshop at home. And for some reason, he felt almost reluctant to leave it. Softly, he pounded a fist against the wall. Compensation!

  He was certainly not going to accept the hotel's free week's stay—even in the unlikely event it was still on offer. But he did feel he deserved some recompense for his ordeal. A towel. Maybe I should make off with a hotel towel. Then he chuckled. He darted to his spoil of battle, his trophy. He grabbed it, stuffed it into his overnight bag, then flew out the door, wincing as he heard the door snap closed behind him.

  Padding toward the elevators in shoes squeaking from wet soc
ks, he speculated that he'd probably just blown a local node and the elevators were probably fine. Even though he didn't much like the idea of enclosed spaces at the moment, he pushed the down button. The light didn't come on. Apparently he'd done more damage than he'd thought. He shook his head and bit his lower lip. It was very poor security not having a redundant data system. And security was his job. He chuckled. Was his job, at any rate.

  An Emergency Exit sign pointed him to the stairwell and he started down the twenty-one flights to the lobby. As he descended, his spirits rose, his anger slowly changing to amusement. He'd had fun—a release of years of pent-up geekiness.

  At about the fifteenth floor, he grew serious. He had a speech to give, but his written words didn't seem appropriate anymore. He gave a mental shrug; perhaps, after a battle with a hotel room and an encounter with a teddy bear, he'd rediscovered his values—including the notion that maybe security shouldn't automatically trump liberty or privacy. As he neared the lobby level he nodded, his lips stretched in a tight smile. He'd come to a decision; this morning, he'd deliver a very different kind of speech—and then start looking for a new job.

  At the door to the lobby, he stopped, hand on the door handle. Perhaps for the sake of his own personal security, it might be better not to give any speech at all.

  He turned and walked the additional flights down to the parking garage. As he drew close to his car, Roger cast a sideways glance to the overnight bag he carried. “Come on, Theodore,” he said in a soft, conspiratorial voice. “Let's quit this joint and go home."

  Copyright (c) 2005 Carl Frederick

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  * * *

  The Slow Ones

  by Larry Niven

  Some things take lots of patience!

  We landed a small plane at the Mt. Forel spaceport, with a lot more runway than he needed. He'd phoned ahead. I watched him for a while, making his way on foot along the three-kilometer path that leads down to the Draco Tavern. He took his sweet time, stopping to pan across the alien foliage with the video-camera bump on his forehead.

  When he stopped to rest, I went out to meet him. What the heck—the tavern was clean and in good repair and life was turning dull.

  This strip of land between the airlocks and the foothills is covered with strange plants, purple ground cover too dry to be moss, and big odd shapes that you might take for wind-shaped rocks. He was looking about him, delighted and a little awed, as he perched on one of the slow ones. This one looks like a rock wind-smoothed into the shape of an inverted boat. I was amused.

  “Thank you for letting me come, Mr. Schumann,” he said. He was a black-haired white American, medium height, with a smile that might have been ingratiating. The vid camera was a glittering dot on his forehead. “Matthew Taper. I'm with CDC Network. I hope I won't keep you long."

  “No problem. There aren't any ships in and I've got lots of free time."

  “Ah. Good.” He slid over to make room for me on the Type Two Slowlife. I sat. He hadn't noticed a second inverted-boat-shaped rock, this one's mate, fifty meters further back.

  He pointed at a cube of clear yellow plastic set in the Draco Tavern's wall. There was a shadow inside it: a dark aerodynamic shape like a large turtle with big clawed feet and a head partly retracted. Taper asked, “Is that an alien or a sculpture? Or a hologram?"

  “Alien,” I said. “Speedy, I've been calling it. It's almost through the jelly lock."

  “That's an airlock? Made of jelly?"

  “They're all airlocks, that whole line along the front of the tavern. For Speedy, we've got this block of plastic ... not jelly, just memory plastic soft enough to deform. He'll walk through it, but slowly, and it won't lose air in either direction."

  “How many aliens have you got in right now?"

  “Ten. Six are in Argentina, hunting."

  “But you have to feed the rest?"

  “I meant on Earth. There's nobody actually in the tavern."

  Taper's eyes defocused: he was consulting notes. “You got a lot more with the first liner, with Thrill Seeker. Five species, twenty individuals. That first landing must have been a thrill a minute."

  I waved it off. “Oh, you can find anything you want about the first one. Let me tell you about the second landing."

  “Weren't there records of that too?"

  “But nobody looks at them..."

  * * * *

  That long ago, we didn't have much telescope coverage of the Moon. What we had was Spaceguard. Spaceguard was an effort by NASA and other political entities to track Near Earth Objects: that is, asteroid threats above one kilometer across. Map those and you might stand a chance of protecting the planet from a giant meteoroid impact. They'd already found 90% of the candidates, they said.

  An object was found approaching the Moon's dark limb. It blinked out as it entered the shadow.

  Another sky watcher caught the flare of what might have been its drive, but turned out to be riding lights. The skywatching community began talking to each other. Hundreds had it in view when the chirpsithra liner settled into orbit around the Moon, and they didn't tell a single disaster control office or newsman for nearly ten hours.

  They'd done this once before, with an incoming asteroid that turned out to be a false alarm. Skywatchers talked to each other, and the public remained in blissful ignorance. Lines of communication just hadn't been established.

  But now the world was watching, and everything happened too slowly. The mile-wide soap bubble drifted in orbit around the Moon. A smaller boat budded loose and drifted toward Earth. It eased down through the atmosphere, taking more hours, following force field lines down to Earth's magnetic pole. It settled at Mount Forel in Siberia, where the first ship's boat had touched down the previous year.

  Everything we saw came via orbital cameras; it was hours before camera crews could get on site. We saw aliens eleven feet tall and very slender, plated with dull red armor: the same chirpsithra species who had crewed the first ship. They emerged from the lander and began landscaping.

  * * * *

  Taper asked, “Was the Draco Tavern in place yet?"

  “No, I had backers and a site, but there was nothing on it but posts and string."

  “Pity. So what do you mean, landscaping?"

  “That's what it looked like, even up close. They sprayed water and dirt and alien fertilizer. I was one of the first on site, and I could smell that chemical reek.

  “Cameras showed up, and newspersons, and UN officials. The chirpsithra went about their business. They planted some weird alien trees in the soil they'd made, and then some structures that they brought out on big float plates. Like Japanese landscaping, we thought."

  “I'll run those records after I get home.” Taper waved around us. “Is this what you're talking about? This whole three or four square miles looks like alien gardening."

  “Yeah. Those bigger trees were planted as saplings. Most of this layered mosslike stuff grew up over the next few years. The slow ones were already in place. There was plenty for the herbivores by the time they got hungry.

  “The chirps talked to me about the interspecies tavern I wanted to build. We settled on where to put it—right at the edge of the cultivated stretch. They left me the jelly lock and a lock for themselves, and those were the first pieces of the Draco Tavern. They played diplomat and gave some interviews, and then they left."

  Taper was having trouble catching up. “Slow ones?"

  “Originally there were a dozen,” I said. “Six little half-eggs must have been food animals. They didn't move fast enough, and the Type One, Speedy, rolled over them and ate them during the first six or seven years. Two of the others went home on the next ship after snuffling around Siberia on tractors. They were the fastest.

  “After they left, Speedy was making visible progress toward the airlocks. It's taken him twenty-six years to get into the jelly lock. He'll be inside before Christmas. These others—do you see that tree stump with
an indented top? There's water in the top, a little pond of his own, but you can't see that. He's the slowest. These boat-shaped—"

  “Yeek!” He rolled off.

  I stayed where I was. “Ahab doesn't mind. I know them all pretty well. You can talk to them with electronic mail—"

  “They can use computers?"

  “Sure, all of these slow ones are intelligent tool users. The computers they build work as fast as ours. To the slow ones, they're instantaneous. To talk to them, you just trade letters. It doesn't matter how slow they write."

  I watched him working out how useless that would be to a newsman. I said, “Of course they need terrific protection against spam. Otherwise—"

  “Yeah. What do they talk like?"

  “Here.” I fished out my translator and whispered a few instructions. It projected a screen, watery looking in the horizontal sunlight.

  * * * *

  HELLO! I SEEK A COMPANION.

  I AM RICK SCHUMANN, HUMAN, HOPING TO BECOME A BARTENDER.

  CALL ME QUIZZICAL.

  HI, QUIZZICAL.

  IS THAT YOUR STRUCTURE BEING ERECTED ON THE TUNDRA?

  YES, THAT'S THE DRACO TAVERN.

  MOST IMPRESSIVE. I WONDERED IF WINDS WOULD DAMAGE IT, BUT IT HAS STOOD FOR SOME TIME.

  THERE WAS SOME DAMAGE TWO YEARS BACK. WE FIXED IT.

  I HOPE TO SEE THE INSIDE SOON. IT MUTATES LIKE DREAMS.

  BE WELCOME. THE JELLY LOCK IS FOR SLOW ONES.

  I SEE IT. SPEEDY IS ALMOST THERE. I SEE A FLUTTERING THAT MUST BE YOUR KIND'S TRAFFIC.

  DO YOU KNOW THE CHIRPSITHRA?

  THEY LIVE TOO FAST TO BE TRULY KNOWN, BUT THEY DON'T DIE TOO SOON. AT LEAST WE MAY CONVERSE. ONE, KTATH

  * * * *

  Taper scowled. “Is that all?"

  “Yeah. Quizzical is the Type Three, the one like a tree stump."

  "Twenty-six years?"

  “Understand, Mr. Taper, most of my visitors use oxidizing chemistry. Some are even faster than chirps and humans. One type burns like a fire. She was born in the tavern, and I only got to know her for a few hours. But that's not the only way to live.