Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  “You what?”

  “Input the reservoir,” Kelp repeated, unhelpfully, but then he added, “Our first model in the program is the valley from when the towns were there. So we can pinpoint the box. Then we tell the PC about the reservoir, and put in the dam, and fill the water in, and probably tell it how much water weighs and all that, so it can tell us what might be different down there at the bottom now.” A shadow of doubt crossed Kelp’s eager face. “There’s a lot of data we’re gonna have to get,” he said, “if we’re gonna do this right. Guy-go, you know.”

  “No,” Dortmunder told him. “Guy-go I don’t know.”

  “You never heard that expression?” Kelp was astonished.

  “May probably did.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” May said.

  “Guy-go,” Kelp repeated, then spelled it. “G, I, G, O. It means ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out.’ ”

  “That’s nice,” Dortmunder said.

  “It means,” Kelp amplified, “the computer’s only as smart as what you tell it. If you give it wrong information, it’ll give you wrong information back.”

  “I’m beginning to see,” Dortmunder said. “This is a machine that doesn’t know anything until I tell it something, and if I tell it wrong it believes me.”

  “That’s about it, yes,” Kelp agreed.

  “So this machine of yours,” Dortmunder said, “needs me a lot more than I need it.”

  “Now, there you go, being negative again,” Kelp complained.

  May said, “John, let Andy finish about this. Maybe it will help.”

  “I’m just sitting here,” Dortmunder said, and tried to drink from an empty beer can. “I’m sitting here listening, not making any trouble.”

  “I’ll get more beer,” May decided.

  As she got to her feet, Kelp said, “I’ll wait for you to come back.”

  “Thank you, Andy.”

  While May was out of the room, Kelp said, “Actually, if we could work this out, that’s a lot of money.”

  “It is,” Dortmunder agreed.

  “I’m not saying necessarily a tunnel,” Kelp said, “but whatever, probably wouldn’t take a lot of guys. Your old—This, uh, guy, he’s seventy years old, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How strong is he?”

  “Very.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” Kelp said. “So he can carry his weight. Then you and me. And a driver, probably.”

  “Absolutely,” Dortmunder said. “I drove up there once already. That’s enough. We’ll call Stan Murch, if it looks like we’ve got something.”

  “And maybe Tiny Bulcher, for the lifting and the moving around,” Kelp suggested as May came back with three more beers. “Thanks, May.”

  May said to Dortmunder, “I already opened yours, John.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You know,” Kelp said, popping open his beer can with casual skill, “your old— This guy, uh…”

  “Tom,” Dortmunder said. “His name is Tom.”

  “Well, I’ll try it,” Kelp said. “Tom. This Tom sounds a lot like Tiny. In fact, I’m looking forward to meeting him.”

  Dortmunder muttered, “Better you than me.”

  “Anyhoo,” Kelp said, “we were talking about the PC.”

  Dortmunder looked at him. “ ‘Anyhoo’?”

  “The PC,” Kelp insisted. “Come on, John.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “It’s true,” Kelp said, “we have to get a lot of information to put into the computer, but that’s nothing different. You always want the best information you can get anyway, in any job. That’s the way you work.”

  “That’s right,” Dortmunder said.

  “And when we put it all in the computer,” Kelp told him, “then we say to it, ‘Plot us out the best route for the tunnel.’ And then we follow that route, and it takes us right to the box.”

  “Sounds easy,” May said.

  “Whenever things sound easy,” Dortmunder said, “it turns out there’s one part you didn’t hear.”

  “Could be,” Kelp said, unruffled. “Could be, we’ll give the model to the computer and ask it about the tunnel, and it’ll say the tunnel doesn’t work, too much water around, too much mud, too far to go, whatever.”

  “Be sure to put all that last part in,” Dortmunder told him, “when you’re putting in the rest of the garbage.”

  “We’re not going to put garbage in,” Kelp corrected him. “We’re going to input quality data, John, believe me. In fact,” he said, suddenly even more peppy and enthusiastic, “I know just the guy to work with on this program.”

  “Somebody else?” Dortmunder asked him. “One of us?”

  Kelp shook his head. “Wally’s a computer freak,” he explained. “I won’t tell him what we’re trying for, I’ll just give it to him like as a computer problem.”

  “Do I know this Wally?”

  “No, John,” Kelp said, “you don’t travel in the same circles. Wally’s kind of offbeat. He can only communicate by keyboard.”

  “And what if he communicates by keyboard with the law?”

  “No, I’m telling you that’s all right,” Kelp insisted. “Wally’s a very unworldly guy. And he’ll save us weeks on this thing.”

  “Weeks?” Dortmunder said, startled. “How long is this gonna take?”

  “Just a few days,” Kelp promised. “With Wally aboard, just a very few days.”

  “Because,” Dortmunder pointed out, “until we have this figured out, we have Tom Jimson living here.”

  “That’s right,” May said.

  “And if he decides to stop living here,” Dortmunder went on, “it’s because he’s gone back upstate to make a flood.”

  “The Jimson flood,” said a cold voice from the doorway. They all looked up, and there was Tom, as cold and gray as ever, standing in the doorway and looking from face to face. A wrinkle in his own face might have been intended as an ironic smile. “Sounds like an old folk song,” he said, his lips not moving. “ ‘The Famous Jimson Flood.’ ”

  “I think that was Jamestown,” Kelp said.

  Tom considered that, and considered Kelp, too. “You may be right,” he decided, and turned to Dortmunder. “You spreading my business around, Al?”

  Getting to his feet, Dortmunder said, “Tom Jimson, this is Andy Kelp. Andy and I work together.”

  Tom nodded, and looked Kelp up and down. “So you’re gonna help me realize my dream of retirement,” he said.

  Kelp grinned; he acted as though he liked Tom Jimson. Still comfortably sprawled on the sofa, “That’s what I’m here for,” he said. “John and May and me, we’ve been talking about different approaches, different ways to do things.”

  “Dynamite’s very sure,” Tom told him.

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Kelp said. “That water’s been in place there twenty years, more or less. What happens when you make a sudden tidal wave out of it? Think it might roil up the bottom, maybe mess things up down there, make it harder to find that box of yours?”

  Dortmunder, standing there in the middle of the room like somebody waiting for a bus, now turned and gazed on Andy Kelp with new respect. “I never thought of that,” he said.

  “I did,” Tom said. “The way I figure to blow that dam, you won’t have no tidal wave. At least, not up in the reservoir. Down below there, in East Dudson and Dudson Center and Dudson Falls, down there you might have yourself a tidal wave, but we don’t give a shit about that, now, do we?”

  No one saw any reason to answer that. May, also getting to her feet, standing beside Dortmunder like an early sketch for Grant Wood’s Urban Gothic (abandoned), said, “Would you like a beer, Tom?”

  “No,” Tom said. “I’m used to regular hours. Good night.”

  Kelp, still with his amiable smile, said, “You off to bed?”

  “Not till you get up from it,” Tom told him, and stood there looking at Kelp.

  Who finally caught on: “Oh, you sle
ep here,” he said, whapping his palm against the sofa cushion beside him.

  “Yeah, I do,” Tom agreed, and went on looking at Kelp.

  May said, “Let me get you sheets and a pillowcase.”

  “Don’t need them,” Tom said as Kelp slowly unwound himself and got to his feet, still smiling, casually holding his beer can.

  “Well, you need something,” May insisted.

  “A blanket,” he told her. “And a towel for the morning.”

  “Coming up,” May said, and left the room, with alacrity.

  “Well,” Dortmunder said, having trouble exiting, “see you in the morning.”

  “That’s right,” Tom said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Kelp said.

  Tom paid no attention to that. Crossing to the sofa, he moved the coffee table off to one side, then yawned and started taking wads of bank-banded bills out of his various pockets, dropping them on the coffee table. Dortmunder and Kelp exchanged a glance.

  May came back in, gave the money on the moved coffee table a look, and put an old moth-eaten tan blanket and a pretty good Holiday Inn towel on the sofa. “Here you are,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Tom said. He put a.32 Smith & Wesson Terrier on the coffee table with the money, then switched off the floor lamp at one end of the sofa and turned to look at the other three.

  “Good night, Tom,” Dortmunder said.

  But Tom was finished being polite for today. He stood there and looked at them, and they turned and went out to the hall, May closing the door behind them.

  Murmuring, not quite whispering, Dortmunder said to Kelp, “You wanna come out to the kitchen?”

  “No, thanks,” Kelp whispered. “I’ll call you in the morning after I talk to Wally.”

  “Good night, Andy,” May said. “Thanks for helping.”

  “I didn’t do anything yet,” Kelp pointed out as he opened the closet door and took out his bulky heavy pea coat. Grinning at Dortmunder, he said, “But the old PC and me, we’ll do what we can.”

  “Mm,” said Dortmunder.

  As Kelp turned toward the front door, the living room door opened and Tom stuck his gray head out. “Tunnel won’t work,” he said, and withdrew his head and shut the door.

  The three looked wide-eyed at one another. They moved away in a group to huddle together by the front door, as far as possible from the living room. May whispered, “How long was he listening?”

  Dortmunder whispered, “We’ll never know.”

  Kelp rolled his eyes at that and whispered, “Let’s hope we’ll never know. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  He left, and Dortmunder started attaching all the locks to the front door. Then he stopped and looked at his hands, and looked at the locks, and whispered, “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

  EIGHT

  You roll aside the two giant boulders and the tree trunk. You find the entrance to a cave, covered by a furry hide curtain. You thrust this aside and see before you the lair of the Thousand-Toothed Ogre.

  Wally Knurr wiped sweat from his brow. Careful, now; this could be a trap. Fat fingers tense over the keyboard, he spat out:

  Describe this lair.

  A forty-foot cube with a domed ceiling. The rock walls have been fused into black ice by the molten breath of the Nether Dragon. On fur-covered couches loll a half-dozen well-armed Lizard Men, members of the Sultan’s Personal Guard. Against the far wall, Princess Labia is tied to a giant wheel, slowly rotating.

  Are the Lizard Men my enemies?

  Not in this encounter.

  Are the Lizard Men my allies?

  Only if you show them the proper authorization.

  Hmmm, Wally thought. I’ll have to do a personal inventory soon, I’m not sure how much junk I’ve accumulated. But first, the question is, do I enter this damn cave? Well, I’ve got to, sooner or later. I can’t go back down through the Valley of Sereness, and there’s nothing farther up this mountain. But let’s not just leap in here. Eyes burning, shoulders rigid, he typed:

  Do I still have my Sword of Fire and Ice?

  Yes.

  I thrust it into the cave entrance, slicing up and down from top to bottom, and also from side to side.

  Iron arrows shoot from concealed tubes on both sides of the entrance. Hitting nothing but the opposite wall, they fall to the ground.

  Aha, Wally thought, just what I figured. Okay, Ogre, here I come.

  Enter

  Bzzzzzztt.

  Doorbell. Drat. Is it that late? Leaving Princess Labia to twist slowly slowly in the lair, Wally ran his fingers like a trained-dog act in fast forward over the keyboard, changing the menu, bringing up the current Eastern Daylight Time—

  15:30

  — and his appointment book for today, which was blank except for the notation: 15:30—Andy Kelp and his friend to view the reservoir. Oh, well, that could be fun, too.

  Lifting his hands from the keyboard, withdrawing his eyes from the video display, pushing his swivel chair back from the system desk, and getting to his feet, Wally felt the usual aches all through his shoulders and neck and lower back. The pains of battle, of intense concentration for hours at a time, of occasional victory and sudden crushing defeat, were familiar to him, and he bore them without complaint; in fact, with a kind of quiet pride. He could stand up to it.

  At twenty-four, Wally Knurr was well on his way to becoming a character in one of his own interactive fictions. (He wrote them as well as consuming them, and so far had sold two of his creations: Mist Maidens of Morg to Astral Rainbow Productions, Mill Valley, California; and Centaur! to Futurogical Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts.) A round soft creature as milky white as vanilla yogurt, Wally was four feet six inches tall and weighed 285 pounds, very little of it muscle. His eagerly melting eyes, like blue-yolked soft-boiled eggs, blinked trustingly through thick spectacles, and the only other bit of color about him was the moist red of his far-too-generous mouth. While his brain was without doubt a wonderful contrivance, even more wonderful than the several computer systems filling this living room, its case was not top quality.

  From infancy, Wally Knurr had known his physical appearance was outside the usual spectrum of facades found acceptable by the majority of people. Most of us can find some corner of the planet where our visages fit more or less compatibly with the local array of humankind, but for Wally the only faint hope was space travel; perhaps elsewhere in the solar system he would find short, fat, moist creatures like himself. In the meantime, his was a life of solitude, as though he’d been marooned on Earth rather than born here. Most people looked at him, thought, “funny-looking,” and went on about their business.

  It was while doing a part-time stint as a salesman in the electronics department at Macy’s as a Christmas season extra four years ago that Wally had at last found his great love and personal salvation: the personal computer. You could play games on it. You could play math games on it. You could talk to it, and it would talk back. It was a friend you could plug in, and it would stay at home with you. You could do serious things with it and frivolous things with it. You could store and retrieve, you could compose music, commit architectural renderings, and balance your checkbook. You could desktop publish. Through the wonders of interactive fiction, you could take part in pulp stories. To Wally, the personal computer became the universe, and he was that universe’s life form. And in there, he didn’t look funny.

  At the New School, where Wally had once taken a basic course in computers, he now sometimes taught a more advanced course in the same thing, and it was in that course he first met an enthusiast as open to the possibilities of this new marvel of the age as himself. The fellow’s name was Andy Kelp, and Wally was delighted they’d met. In the first place, Andy was the only person he knew who was willing to talk computer talk as long and as steadily as Wally himself. In the second place, Andy was one of those rare people who didn’t seem to notice that Wally looked funny. And in the third place, Andy was incredibly generous; just mention a
new piece of software, a program, a game, a new printer, anything, and the first thing you knew here was Andy, carrying it, bringing it into Wally’s apartment, saying, “No, don’t worry about it. I get a special deal.” Wally had no idea what Andy did for a living, but it must be something really lucrative.

  Five days earlier, Andy had brought him this problem of the reservoir and the ring—just like an episode in interactive fiction! — and he’d leaped to the challenge. Andy gave him before and after topographical maps of the territory, and Wally’s software already included a number of useful informational programs—weights and measures, physical properties, encyclopedia entries, things like that—and all he had to do to get whatever other software he needed was to look it up in the manufacturer’s catalogue, give Andy the name and stock number, and the next day there Andy would be, grinning as he took the fresh package out of that amazing many-pocketed pea coat of his. (Wally had been trying recently to figure out how to make an interactive fiction out of a journey through that pea coat.)

  In any event, late last night Wally had finished the reservoir program and was really quite pleased with it. Andy had already told him, “Call me any time, day or night. If I’m asleep or not around, the machine’ll take it,” so Wally had phoned the instant the program was ready, expecting to leave a message on the machine. But Andy himself had answered the call, whispering because, as he said, “My cat’s asleep.”

  Andy had been very pleased to hear the reservoir program was ready and had wanted to come over and see it as soon as possible. Wally himself, of course, was available at any time, so it was Andy’s own complicated schedule that had kept him away until three-thirty this afternoon. “I’ll be bringing a couple of pals of mine,” he’d said. “They’re very interested in this project. From a theoretical point of view.” So this would be him. Them.

  Nice. Wally buzzed his guests in through the downstairs door, and went off to get the cheese and crackers.