by Duncan Long
At this point I was hoping Frank couldn’t smell fear. I tried to swallow again and discovered I couldn’t. ” I already turned them in,” I explained. “At the front desk when I picked up my pay chip.” How ironic. Here cowboy Frank was worrying about next to nothing while I was trying to sneak out with the crown jewels. I looked at my scared face reflected in his mirrored glasses and wondered what it would be like to be in jail with a three hundred pound synthapunk who called me Honeybunch.
I don’t know why, but instead of playing it cozy, I said, “Go ahead and check, you’ll just be wasting your time.” I said it half-heartedly because I was afraid that Frank was about to search the van.
Instead he thought I was lying about turning in the compukeys and my badge.
So he thought it was his big chance to catch a petty thief. “Yeah, we’ll see,” he said, a broad grin crossing his face with his icy eyes putting the lie to his smile. He turned to the vidphone and told it what extension to contact for the head desk. He murmured to it for a few moments while I wished I had a machine gun to fire at his fat rump.
After what seemed an eternity in neck high slime, he turned back with a look of sheer disappointment. “OK. You can go.”
I started to ease forward again when…
“Wait a minute. What’s in the van?”
Well, my last smart answer had paid off, why not try up the ante and try again?
With a big fake smile, I told the truth, “A stolen labbot, two computers, several boxes of lab tools, and anti-gravitation rods worth more than anyone can probably imagine. Want to look?”
He didn’t even glance toward the back of the van. Lucky for me he couldn’t see into its dark interior with his sunglasses. “Yeah, right,” he snarled and waved me through.
We probably both thought goodbye and good riddance. But I had the valuables and he only had the bad taste in his mouth.
* * *
The noon Kansas City traffic leading to my home was the usual hassle. All the crazies were out with the usual unipeds, bikes, modif-horses—and my blue van. All the while I was trying to accelerate/brake without causing the massive rods to come loose and either drop out the back doors of the van or come sliding forward to crush me. If I had to choose between driving those things through rush hour traffic or juggling primed RAW grenades, I’d go for the grenades every time.
I was doing well until I almost smacked into the robed figure of a Dweller on a bicycle when he suddenly cut into the van’s path. As I bore down on him, it was the first time I’ve ever seen one of those guys show any emotion; also the first time I’ve ripped anyone’s robes off their back when passing.
No police unipeds or traffic eyes were about so I just speeded up a little and left the guy before he could get his privates covered and get my van’s tag number.
Needless to say, I was very, very glad to get to my little green bubble dome and open the garage door with my scramble coder. If I’d been more alert I would have noticed the bars had been pried off the side window with all the finesse of a cosmetic surgeon using a machete. But I was too preoccupied for the sight to register as I glanced at the bent bars.
When the plastic garage door closed behind the van, I opened my van door and heard the intruder alarm inside the house. Great. I quickly closed the van door.
The house system gives off a false alarm about once a month (which is why I removed it from the vidphone cable; if the police come, they charge per trip for false alarms, plus you’re apt to get on their black list.) I was cautious but had that old “It can’t happen to me” attitude. Nevertheless, I reached down under the driver’s seat of the van and pulled out the plastic bag that contained my old Beretta 92-F nine millimeter semiautomatic pistol.
Now before you go moral on me, I know that having a firearm is illegal. But if you’re fair, you’ll also admit that just about everyone has an unregistered gun squirreled away somewhere.
I’m no different than the next guy.
So I pulled out the weapon and clicked off the safety (I always carry it with a round in the chamber, ready to fire once the safety is released).
While I was fumbling around with the pistol, the door from the dome to the garage opened and two “gentlemen,” who were unmistakably pukers, stepped through the opening: Mohawks, flowered shirts, chains…you know the look. They acted like they owned the place.
Maybe they did.
There I sat in the van, trying to look invisible.
Since the alarm was blaring in the house, they had apparently not heard me come into the garage. Lucky for me since they were armed; one had an old Colt M4 assault carbine—old but deadly—and the other had a three-shot rail gun. In my book, an assault rifle and a rail gun beat out one pistol. Especially a pistol manned by someone who hadn’t ever fired the thing in anger.
And pukers aren’t noted for leaving behind breathing victims. These guys definitely didn’t look like they’d be leaving without checking out the van. I knew I couldn’t race out of the garage without the rods crunching around—which would be even worse than anything the pukers could do—so I was going to have to take care of the guys or get shot trying.
I sat tight, slumped down in the van, sweat pouring out of my arm pits. While they were looking away, I slowly opened up the side vent on the van, waited, and prayed my “please God, just this once” prayer asking that they would walk over where I could get a clear shot at them.
They took their time and didn’t cooperate at all with my brilliant tactic.
After an eternity, they finally headed toward the front of the van, walked past ( whew…without looking in), and started pawing through the tools on my work bench.
That also lined them up with my open window vent. Ever so quietly and carefully, I brought my Beretta up to the window and tried to aim at the one carrying the rail gun. (I am here to tell you that aiming is not easy when your hand is doing a little jig out on the end of your arm.) I jerked the trigger and down went one while I screamed from the painfully loud report of the pistol—magnified inside the van.
Fortunately, the remaining puker wasn’t too bright. Or maybe he just hadn’t watched the right 3V ads. At any rate, the one left turned and brought up his rifle and proceeded to spray the van’s windshield with automatic fire.
Like most other folks who can afford it, I had gotten a van with carbopolythene glass. It’s just as tough as the ads say and—as proved by my independent, highly personal, puker tests—bullet proof. If the puker had fired through the door or side windows, I would have been dead meat. But instead he only fired directly at me, sending a spray of bullets careening off the windshield.
After a few noisy moments of full auto fire, he was standing there with an empty rifle, his mouth hanging open and I sat in the van with my jaw clenched shut. Suddenly we were in a race.
He went for his partner’s weapon and I fumbled with the vent window, finally got it open, and fired three times.
The puker crumpled.
The spectacle over, I carefully got out of the van and enjoyed the dry heaves while my ear rang.
Of course most people would tell you I’d made the world a better place since two pukers were dead. But I would not be truthful if I didn’t tell you that I was more than a little upset; this was the first time I’d actually had to defend myself and I didn’t relish it.
Sure, legally you can kill anyone that’s in your house uninvited. At least you can in our region. Also, using an unregistered weapon to do it is not too big of a deal as far as the police are concerned when the end result is two dead pukers and a little bribe on the side.
But I also had a load of stolen rods and equipment. And I really couldn’t afford to take the next few days filling out forms, telling compupolice my life story, and maybe even feeling the wrath of other pukers should they find out what I’d done.
So I calmly got two body bags out of the locker in the garage and filled them up.
Maybe you’re wondering why I happened to have two body bags.
I traded for them on the black market after I’d talked to a friend who had reported a killing to the police. I didn’t care to go through the ordeal myself after hearing of the hassle. Life is just too short and the government already does its part to make it as tense as possible.
At the same time, don’t think I was callous about this. I still had a bad case of the shakes and these were the first dead bodies I’d ever had the pleasure of working with and at the time hoped they would be the last as well, thank you very much.
I finally got the guys zipped up and—with a lot of straining on my part—pulled the two bags into the corner of the garage for the time being. That done, I turned off the alarm and enjoyed another bought of the dry heaves.
That ordeal once again over, I opened the van and could have kicked myself for straining with the bags—the labbot was sitting right there waiting to move at my beck and call. Some days I could give absent-minded scientists a bad name.
“Labbot 3 on,” I told the bot. It perked right up and swiveled its camera to look at me. With the tedious instructions needed to control a bot, I got it to do what I wanted, and we managed to move the rods out of the van and fastened them to the side of the garage. Provided we didn’t have an earthquake, I figured they’d be pretty safe there for a while.
We—I seem to think of labbots as living entities so I say “we"—unloaded the equipment, and the labbot stuffed the two corpses into the van. I closed and locked it and then had the bot stand in the corner where I covered it with a drop cloth.
I went inside for a quick, hour-long nap but slept for the next eight hours instead.
Chapter 4
My head felt three times its normal fat size. Guess I must have slept on my face or something.
Anyway, when I woke up, I felt awful. It was still gloomy out so I checked my thumbnail watch through blurry eyes; it was very early in the morning. But I couldn’t get back to sleep… too much to do.
And the smell was awful. My clothes seemed to have taken on a life of their own—an existence that, judging from their odor, would have fit right into an organic barn yard somewhere.
So the first order of business was a hot shower followed by two aspers, and some clean clothes.
One hot mug of caffinex later, I felt like—if not a new person—a reasonable facsimile thereof.
I decided to skip shaving and headed for the garage.
As I stepped into the garage, I tried to figure out what I had done to myself the day before. I now:
1) Had two ripening bodies in the back of my van,
2) Was responsible for the theft of a small fortune in equipment, 3) Owned a total of three illegal weapons (including the two pukers’), and
4) Was the owner of the one hundred three stolen anti-gravity rods.
I felt like going back to bed. But it was early morning. That was something I needed to take advantage of since that’s when the roads are least traveled.
Shortly, I was moving down the street in front of my dome. Driving carefully so that I wouldn’t get stopped by a random spot check (no drugs, officers, just two bodies…), I headed out of the city with its traffic eyes and got onto the interstate.
Two hours later, the body bags were dumped at an all but abandoned rest stop whose spy cameras had long ago been dismantled by the electro-renegades in the area. I hightailed it back to my house, feeling like a great weight had been taken off my shoulders. I was once again a free man. It is amazing how much pressure was removed when I kicked those two thugs out of the back of my van and returned home without getting stopped.
The alarm was silent when I got back: A welcome change.
After another cup of caffinex and a good-sized meal from the instawarm, it was—finally—time to get down to some worth-while work.
The first project would be creating my own power company. Don’t laugh. I told you these rods had potential. The work I had in mind later was going to take a lot of electrical power and I was already paying an arm, leg, and some other major body parts just to keep the light, 3V, instawarm and van recharger going. An electrical generator made a lot of sense.
As I soon found out, it would have been easier to have left the electric engine in the van.
Instead, acting rashly, I had the labbot jerk the engine out of the van; only after it was out did I realize that it would be hard to get it back in. Too, I should have experimented with an old motor-
-if I’d failed at my task, I would have ruined a perfectly good van. But by now, caution had been thrown to the wind. I wanted to get to the nitty-gritty of practical use of the rods. I dived into the job knowing that failure was not an option, unless I wanted to get another job and save up for a new van. Which I did not.
After the bot had placed the van’s engine on the concrete floor, we went to the corner where the rods were, anchored them more securely in place, removed one, and clamped it on its side to the vise on the work bench.
The idea was to slice off several sections of rod so that they could be mounted on the electric motor of the van. This would enable me to power the van and—since the motor would also become an electrical generator if it moved on its own—would become a source of electricity. (I told you these rods had a lot of potential.)
You’ll notice I didn’t say “just” slice off several sections of the rod. That’s because the force exerted down the length of a rod is pretty great. Though the metal that the rods were made from was relatively soft, if a regular synthadiamond saw were used to cut into them it would soon become all but locked in the gravity field. Though it could be moved, the friction would melt either the rod or the saw blade before the job was done (unless you wanted to take sixteen years doing it or had a waterfall to cool the metal).
So I used an industrial laser that I’d “borrowed,” compliments of Weisenbender and company.
Even the laser was tricky to use since the rod tended to reflect the light and burn holes in the work bench and me, but the laser did its job fairly quickly.
The bot and I got most of the rod sectioned, though one small piece did get away. It was spinning with a slight wobble when it escaped so that it went twisting off on a zigzag tangent that finally ended when the projectile lodged in the rafters of the garage.
Even the bot followed the action with its unblinking camera eye.
By noon my able—if dimwitted—electronic assistant and I had gotten the lengths of rod welded to the armature of the van’s motor. Standing back from the plane they’d be operating in, I crossed my fingers and had the bot remove the restraining chains (I figured I’d rather lose one bot than some important part of my anatomy).
The rods started right up in their tight little orbit and very quickly the shaft was spinning at its maximum speed.
I sprayed it liberally with sililube and started taking measurements of how much electricity and mechanical power the thing was giving off. It put out quite a bit of power. Only then did the full impact of the last six years’ work set in. Generators like the one I’d created could be the solution to any number of mankind’s energy and travel problems. Those who had invested in public utilities would be fit to be tied; the rest of us were going to be enjoying almost free, unlimited power.
Now the cynical among us would probably figure I had wired myself into a corner: the motor was going lickity split without a load on it and the van’s motor pod was empty. But it wasn’t quite like that. The problem of stopping the motor had—more or less —been planned on ahead of time.
Remember that the greater the load that is placed on a generator’s circuit, the more slowly it tends to turn. Short the thing out and it practically stops. That was the theory. And I had also already connected a load to the motor’s shaft just to be on the safe side.
My problem was that the rod-driven generator I’d created from the van’s electric motor put out a lot more energy than I’d expected. Shorting the thing out was a little dangerous and tended to melt the heaviest of cables. Finally I got the bot ready to la
tch onto the motor when I gave the order and then I used a pry bar to short out all the cables I’d connected into the generator.
Somehow we managed to stop the metal whirlwind I had set into motion, and we did it without burning down the garage or ripping the bot apart. (Since the gear box of the van would slow down the motor/generator in the future once the motor was back in the van, I knew getting it stopped would be easier once the motor was in place.)
After a short break to collect my wits and replace one of the bot’s arms with a spare stored in its chest, we carefully chained the lengths of rod so they couldn’t start spinning, and the motor was placed back in the van.
Easier said than done.
At this point I realized that I would have saved a lot of time if I’d left the motor in the van and modified it there, but there was no way to undo what I’d done. Many curses and skinned knuckles later, it was back in place.
The motor mounted, the shaft was connected into the transmission and I was ready to say good-bye to the household vehicle transformer (I hoped). I left the rods locked in place while I removed the batteries from the van, leaving just one small bank for back-up power, though—if the rod-driven generator went down—the batteries would do little other than power emergency lights or the like since the motor would probably be shot in such an event and beyond the help of battery power. But I knew the batteries would be of use for the project I had planned several days later.
I cannibalized the van battery charger to create some outlets inside the van to create an inverter to supply regular household current for appliances or my shop tools. Finally, I placed a water-proof outlet inside the front bumper so that I could power appliances with electricity generated from the van’s motor. With a long extension cord, the van’s generator could even be used to run household appliances when the van was in the garage—and thereby lower my utility bills (I didn’t want to quit using the government’s power completely since that would attract too much attention).
The bot risked life and limb once more to remove the restraining chains and the motor again hummed to life. Though it sounded a bit more beefy than a normal van’s electric motor, it wasn’t strange enough to attract attention—I hoped. (It would be a little strange if I had to park since the motor would continue to hum along when I left it. That would attract notice, so I decided I’d have to figure something out on that count but decided not to worry about that until later.) I tested the outlets and found that they furnished all the electrical power I could ever need.