Delos 2 - Futureworld

by John Ryder Hall

  The reporter touched her arm and leaned toward her confidentially. “Socks, I don’t know whether there’s a real story here or not, but I know damn well I’m not going to find out by following Duffy around.”

  Tracy straightened up. “If you’re going, I’m going,” she asserted and started to rise.

  Chuck grabbed her. “No. You’re not!”

  Pulling her arm free, she looked at him determinedly. “Oh yes, I am. Just because I get mad at you doesn’t mean I want to see you get hurt.”

  Chuck rose, pressed down on her shoulder. “You stay here.”

  He had started for the door, but Tracy jumped up and followed.

  “As soon as you go out that door I’m going to call Duffy!” she warned loudly—which stopped Chuck in his tracks.

  He looked at her with a tilted head and hurt expression. “You wouldn’t do that . . .”

  Her face was set in a fixed frown. “Try me.”

  Chuck eyeballed the woman standing beside him. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Damnation, but you are the—the most stubborn broad I ever met!” He waved his hand at her. “All right! But hurry up!”

  Chuck ambled out of the bedroom as Tracy stepped quickly toward her closet, stripping off her rumpled pajamas. In the hall of the suite she heard him talking.

  “And don’t take all night to figure out what to put on. We’re going to be trampling around in some dark, wet tunnels, and the rats won’t care what you wear!”

  Tracy stopped as she heard the word “rats.” She blinked and shouted out to Chuck, “Did you say rats?”

  “Gray ones . . . about a meter or so long.”

  She quivered but struggled into her clothes. “I know you’re lying,” she called out to him. To herself she said: “I hope . . .”

  • • •

  The reception area of the Delos resort was empty, except for two robot guards. Most of the lights were out or dimmed, but they glittered off the clear plastic domes covering the Delos model like shimmering moons.

  Tracy and Chuck stepped forward, out of a hallway, then froze as they saw the two sentries. After waiting, breathless, a moment they crept out, bending low to put the big Delos model between them and the guards. They froze again when one of the robots stirred and turned his head toward them.

  But nothing happened.

  When the guard’s head turned back, Tracy looked at Chuck. He shrugged and they tiptoed across to the escalator that led to the higher levels. It was not running; but bent low, they had no trouble scampering quickly up it to a higher level. Out of sight of the guards below now, Chuck thumbed an elevator button.

  “Where are we going?” Tracy whispered nervously, peering around.

  “The power plant,” Chuck whispered back.

  “Why?”

  “I think the tunnel I followed starts there.”

  The door to the elevator hissed open quietly and they entered. Chuck pressed the bottom button and they began to descend smoothly. Thinking swiftly, he pressed Tracy back against the wall so that no one might see them through the clear plastic port of the elevator door, for there were silent, unmoving guards on every level.

  The elevator door finally hissed open and Chuck stuck his head out, holding the door open with his shoulder. They were in a short concrete corridor with another elevator across the space before them. To their left, at the end of the corridor, was the room housing the huge Delos power station. Chuck crooked his finger at Tracy and crept out without looking back. Hugging the shadows, they reached the entrance to the station and surveyed the big room carefully.

  Robot workers were at work everywhere, oiling, repairing, wandering about with clipboards recording readings from dials and performing other, more esoteric duties. The place was a vast, colorful maze of varicolored pipes and huge black furnaces.

  Chuck pulled at Tracy’s hand and they slipped carefully over to a black iron staircase and wound down it speedily. Ducking behind an array of pipes and conduits, they studied this new room for a few moments. Chuck pointed at a sign ahead and Tracy read it.

  WARNING TO ALL MODELS 400 TO 700.

  THIS AREA IS ABOVE

  HUMIDITY TOLERANCE LEVELS.

  CONTROL PERMISSION REQUIRED

  BEFORE ENTERING.

  Tracy put her mouth to Chuck’s ear and breathed, “I thought they shut down for six hours a night.”

  “Not the powerhouse,” he answered softly, his eyes studying the entrances to the lower tunnels.

  “What do we do?” she questioned, looking back over her shoulder nervously. The whole thing didn’t seem such a great idea now.

  Chuck pointed to the robots moving through the machinery on seveal levels, on catwalks and in aisles. “They’re only four hundreds. I don’t think they’re programmed to stop us.”

  “Are you sure?” Tracy asked in a whisper.

  “No . . .”

  The lanky reporter started out boldly from behind their temporary shelter and Tracy gave a start, hastening to follow. Aping his model, she simply walked across the open area toward the tunnel entrance Chuck had selected. Robots crossed in front of them and passed close by, but none of them “saw” the two humans.

  “It’s kind of eerie—” Tracy remarked.

  “Shush!” Chuck admonished her.

  Several robots were just leaving an aisle; they were carrying a tube replacement tube and the two reporters had to dodge around them—the robots didn’t even appear to see them. And no one shouted an alarm.

  The two made it to the tunnel entrance and halted to look back. “That’s why we have to send men—uh, people—to the planets,” Chuck said, correcting his male-chauvinist statement.

  “Huh?”

  “Machines see only what they are programmed to see,” he explained. “They can’t register anything they weren’t made to register.”

  Tracy shrugged her shoulders, trembling. “Okay, fine. But now what?”

  “Follow me.”

  Chuck started forward into a utility tunnel. Tracy shivered and quickly caught up with him, grasping his elbow.

  The tunnel was narrow, the floor wet in spots and gritty under their feet. Their footsteps echoed hollowly. Sweaty pipes ran along one side, thick and dusty, Chuck clicked on the flashlight as soon as they were well back from the tunnel mouth.

  They walked.

  And walked . . .

  “Do you know where you’re going?” Tracy eventually asked, then yipped as a rat ran across the narrow passageway, disappearing into an access hole.

  “Not entirely,” Chuck said absently, staring ahead.

  “Terrific!” But Tracy tagged doggedly along.

  Once they stumbled over a discarded shard of asbestos sheathing from a pipe repair. And they passed several cross-tunnels, but kept straight ahead. Neither of them noticed the dark figure that stepped silently from the gloom of a cross-tunnel to follow them.

  • • •

  “Hey, I’m tired!” Tracy complained, tugging at Chuck’s arm. “How about a break, Daddy Long-Legs?”

  “Um,” Chuck said, “just a little farther.” He was flashing his light in several directions; now he grunted with satisfaction. “Over here!”

  Tracy followed the tall reporter to a wide area in the tunnel, where she saw a set of iron rungs embedded in the concrete wall, leading up out of sight. Sinking down on a big round pipe, she blew out her breath as Chuck flashed the light up the vertical wall.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “If I figured right, we’re underneath their research and development area.”

  “Is that good?” Tracy wiped her brow and stared critically at her wet hand.

  “If they’re keeping any secrets, this is where they ought to be,” he said, putting his foot on the bottom rung. He looked back at Tracy. “Coming?”

  She heaved herself to her feet and started up the ladder after him. “Are you kidding? And leave this garden of paradise down here?”

  • • •


  Tracy was still muttering as they emerged into a large room filled with benches of scientific equipment and standing banks of electronic gear.

  “What did you say?” Chuck whispered, crossly as they closed the metal floor plate behind them.

  “I said that was a concrete gopher hole,” she complained, jerking her thumb over her shoulder. “Now what?”

  They stood in a darkened room. Chuck pointed at a dimly lit sign above a door: RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, and, in smaller letters, “Alpha Only,” He sidled over to the door and listened with an ear pressed against the panel. Carefully he tried the knob and the door opened. As he peeked within, Tracy crowded him to see in as well.

  The room was another maze of cables, pipes, huge shrouded pieces of equipment, tables piled with neatly arranged test equipment, and large bulky objects whose function was a mystery. Chuck opened the door wider and noticed on the opposite side of the room a sign that said: BETA LABORATORY, SATELLITE THREE, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  The two reporters slipped into the room and stood listening. There was the hum and whisper of air conditioning, but no other sound. The only light came from several “clean rooms” across one end of the big laboratory. Chuck indicated the light and they moved toward it, wary, their eyes scanning their crowded surroundings. All around them were pieces of equipment under construction and test. Here was a huge ape arm, three times longer than Chuck’s height—a huge, hairy object with wiring and strong aluminum and chrome protruding from the shoulder end. On the next table was a tiny figure dressed in forest-green jerkin and tights, poised as if to fly, an impish smile on its tiny face. Across the aisle was the lower half of a muscular male figure wearing only a leopardskin loincloth. Two benches farther on lay the head of a great lizard or dragon, with bulging eyes and too many teeth.

  Tracy and Chuck came to the big windows of the “clean room” area. Within, under bright lights, lay an oriental warrior, in full sixteenth-century armor, his simulated Tadatsuna blade in an ornate scabbard and his chest protection folded aside, the wicker chestplate opened to show its interior electronics. Wires ran from the warrior to an elaborate control panel behind him.

  “Duffy mentioned they were building an Eastworld,” Tracy remembered. “He said—”

  “Duffy said a lot of things,” Chuck interrupted.

  They moved on to the next “clean room” windows, where a lovely Japanese lady, wearing a full ceremonial obi, stood in front of another control panel. She was poised in a graceful position, holding a fan, but wires now led out from her head to a panel and one arm was opened, its electronic circuits visible. Chuck and Tracy passed on without stopping.

  Two figures stood, unmoving, in the next “clean room”—two brutish, hirsute man-like figures with low brows and protruding jaws. They wore untanned skins and the female was nearly as hairy as the male. Their dull eyes stared sightlessly at the wall of glass before them.

  Chuck and Tracy walked by again without pausing and found an outré scene in the next “clean room.”

  A multi-tentacled figure, almost as tall as Chuck, reddish with brown and black markings, hunched over a piece of bizarre machinery. Wires fed from an open access panel in its spindly legs to another control panel.

  “The Martian updated replacement for Futureworld,” Chuck drawled and Tracy nodded agreement.

  The next “clean room” vista had movement and the two reporters edged close to peer in. A small brontosaurus was lifting its head, its mouthful of teeth filled with what appeared to be raw meat. The movement was repeated over and over, and wires ran from the baby dinosaur to another control panel.

  “ ‘Prehistoric World,’ I suppose,” Tracy remarked matter-of-factly.

  Chuck now stopped and glanced around the darkened lab. His flashlight flicked on and he played the light over a nearby control panel. “I gotta find some lights,” he whispered.

  Tracy squinted into the darkness and suggested a direction. “Over there . . . beyond that bulky— Oh!”

  Chuck’s moving light had settled on a reclining human figure whose eyes were looking directly at them, and Tracy started before realizing it was a robot on a bench, a Cro-Magnon improvement over the Neanderthals in the “clean room.”

  Grunting, Chuck moved to a large control panel that took up most of one wall of the lab room. “You’d think a simple light switch would be easy to find, wouldn’t you?” he asked as he studied the banks of indicators.

  Tracy meanwhile wandered along the wall. “Why don’t we get out of here?” she suddenly asked nervously.

  “We just got here! And, besides, there’s something I want to find out.”

  Abruptly the overhead lights went on and Chuck jerked his head around to see Tracy standing by an ordinary wall switch. She looked embarrassed.

  He laughed, then continued to scan the control panel. With the lights on, he could see that it was the largest in the room. He noticed a red-edged switch at one side and, taking a chance, threw the lever.

  Part of the big laboratory began to function. Lights came on, pumps throbbed, motors whirred into life, and an odd thumping sound began. Chuck reached out quickly and threw the switch to the OFF position. The sound died and Tracy looked at him skeptically.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked.

  Chuck waved his hand at her, studying the controls. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got an instinct for this kind of thing.” He paused, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “Let’s try this one.”

  Reaching out, he pulled a second switch. Nothing happened. Both reporters turned to look about. Nothing. No sound. No movement.

  “No soap,” Chuck chuckled.

  “An instinct, huh?” Tracy walked over and pointed at another switch. “Try that one.”

  Chuck shrugged and reached out to throw it. A low hum started at once.

  They waited. Nothing else happened.

  Chuck made a face and grumbled, “The hell with it. We’ll try them all. Maybe there’s a combination.” He started flipping switches randomly and carelessly.

  Hums.

  Whirrs and clicks.

  Thumps, modulated hums, and flashing signal lights.

  Ticks, bubbling retorts, faint whiffs of ozone, and rippling bands of readout lights.

  Tracy and Chuck stared around in delight.

  • • •

  In another room, whose airlock door was labeled VACUUM CHAMBER—DANGER, something began happening. In the round, white, empty vacuum chamber, out of sight of the two reporters, something began to form in the air.

  There were, at first, flicks of dull color in the center, in the empty space.

  Soon the colors and flicks and shimmerings became areas—irregular blots of seemingly solid material suspended in the vacuum of the chamber. In seconds, the areas defined themselves into three flat but roughly humanoid shapes, flickering and pulsating shapes that looked as if they were composed of pointillist dots. But unfilled areas filled in rapidly and, while Chuck and Tracy were still throwing switches, the shapes refined themselves into three powerful-looking samurai warriors, brutally strong. Finally the images—unmoving, as if frozen—had built rapidly into three-dimensional figures.

  A click sounded as the figures reached full status. A red light on the chamber wall blinked to green. There came a faint hiss as air entered the chamber, equalizing to the outside pressure.

  The three samurai stirred, as if coming awake. Their hands automatically gripped the swords slanted through their belts, and they looked around with glittering dark eyes.

  • • •

  Chuck pointed to another area of the research lab and suggested they look there. He and Tracy passed the former vacuum chamber without looking in, but glued their faces momentarily to the windows of two empty ones farther on. At last, they approached a larger area of the vast laboratory, one with a second-story balcony running around it. The floor of this high-ceilinged area had massive equipment bolted to the floor that the firs
t, lower part of the lab could not have held. Iron staircases led up to the balcony from several points, and overhead was a huge crane on rails that ran the length of the huge room.

  Chuck and Tracy saw well-defined areas where control panels stood before work platforms. Some of the platforms were empty, but one contained a slender and exceedingly spiny dragon, green-scaled and twisting, moving its head in a repetitive pattern and flicking its long tail. On another platform stood an angry-faced Captain Henry Morgan, in colorful pirate clothes trimmed with white lace and gold buttons. On the next platform sat a alligator whose mouth opened and closed menacingly.

  “Watch out, Disney World!” Chuck muttered.

  • • •

  The rounded end of the vacuum chamber had a thick airlock.

  The wheel now turned from the inside and the metal dogs twisted free. The hatch swung abruptly open and the three Japanese warriors strode out, each pulling his curving sword free as he landed on the smooth concrete of the outer room. Their eyes glittered through the slits in their helmets as they scanned their new surroundings.

  • • •

  Chuck pointed at one of the staircases. “Let’s get a look from up there.”

  He and Tracy walked past a bulging metal cylinder labeled THETA-SIXTY-ONE: THROMBOGENIC SYNTHESIZER to mount the stairs. They paused partway up and overlooked the huge room: square cabinets, tubular tanks, spherical tanks, concatenated bulbs, writhing conduits, and conical containers were scattered in an orderly chaos over the floor, creating in effect walls around various experimental and work areas. Chuck could see a larger-than-life cyclops seated on a cube, staring dully at a blinking light. Nearby was a nude male figure, impressively muscled, with a red cape and limp pair of blue tights on a chair close by. A fat, jolly Santa Claus was surrounded by a covey of leprechauns on another research platform. Paul Bunyan loomed ominously, three times higher than a man—ax and all—over a bank of murmuring computers.

  Tracy gestured at the complex below them. “Why in hell don’t we come back in the morning? This is about as exciting as a visit to the waterworks.”

  “It shows what they are planning . . . I think.”

  Tracy grunted and climbed up toward the balcony, urged on by Chuck. “Uh-huh. Really dangerous stuff! Santa and the elves. Paul Bunyan—but no Blue Ox! Fairy-tale stuff.”