Arcade

by Robert Maxxe

  She was walking to the kitchen for a vase when the phone rang.

  Lon.

  "I'll get it," she shouted, so the children wouldn't pick up in the den where they were watching television.

  "How's my timing?" he asked as soon as she answered.

  "Beautiful," she said, laughing, flowers still in her arm. "They just came. Oh Lon, they're lovely. You're lovely."

  "I meant it, Carrie. I missed you all night. Didn't sleep a wink, kept thinking we should've been together."

  "I didn't sleep either," she said, leaving out that her reasons weren't altogether the same.

  "Carrie . . . "he began, and then stopped.

  She waited, breathless, guessing what he might be about to say, and oddly unsure whether she wanted to hear it.

  Then he went on. "You know, don't you, that I've fallen in love with you?"

  Her throat was tight suddenly, and it was hard to answer. But he was waiting.

  She gazed at the blurring image of the roses and forced out a whisper. "I know."

  "It's not the way it's done anymore, I suppose. People don't say those things so quickly. We've got to have a relationship first, know each other awhile—'a reasonable period of time,' some advice columnist would say. But, well, the feeling's here, it fills me up, and keeping it from you would just be . . . playing a game." He paused as if to let her contribute, but continued quickly. "I understand, though . . . I know that your timetable may have to be different from mine. I'm not coming from loving anyone else; you are. So if you have to take more time, a lot more time, I'll be patient. I can wait years for you, Carrie; I've waited years already. I only ask that you allow me to be honest about how I feel, and try not to be scared off by that."

  This time his silence lasted.

  She turned from the phone a second, sniffled once and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. "Christ," she replied then, "you sure do know how to talk to a lady. I'll bet I could stand hearing a lot more of that without being scared off."

  She paused, and still he kept silent.

  "But as for how I feel . . ." She sighed. "Lon, I really don't know yet. I don't know if being sure is a year off . . . or ten seconds. But I'll say this: I can't wait to be as sure as you are . . . I can't wait to be in love with you."

  "All things considered," he said after a moment, "I'll settle for that."

  And then he repeated how hard it had been not being with her last night, and asked if she would be free to come to his house that afternoon. His son was going to be away all day, he told her, had left for the city earlier with a friend whose parents had season tickets to the Giants games; and his daughter would be going off to town soon to hang out for a few hours with her friends.

  It was perfectly clear why he was assuring her they would be alone. She hesitated only because she'd promised to bring Emily to the arcade, and she didn't like breaking any commitment to the children.

  "But look," Lon added hastily, "we don't have to stay here. It's a gorgeous day. If you'd rather, we could drive out to Montauk and—"

  "No," she broke in, "I liked the first idea better. In fact, if we hadn't put it off last night, I might've gotten some sleep."

  She said she couldn't be at his house until sometime after two. First, she reminded him, she had to pick up her purse at the arcade.

  The demands of Carrie's business had accustomed the children by now to sudden changes of plan. So Emily took it stoically when Carrie explained that "something had come up," and that she had already phoned Cindy Revering's mother and arranged for the two children to spend the afternoon together. Any vestige of disappointment vanished when Carrie added that Alice Revering would be taking both girls to see the re-release of Disney's Snow White, currently playing at the shopping mall. It helped, too, that Carrie promised to make up the arcade treat another time—though she wished later that she had left out that part. In fact, Carrie became aware, she felt relieved that Emily was not going today.

  After Alice Revering picked up Emily at one o'clock, Nick was still in his room, listening to his stereo. Carrie stopped by the door and mentioned that she'd be driving to the arcade soon; they could go together . . . that is, if Nick was going.

  Nick replied, a bit gruffly, that he was going to the arcade but he would be meeting his friends first. A few minutes later he went out.

  In the wake of his leaving, Carrie pondered the likelihood that his surliness toward her was connected with Lon's entrance into her life. In a way, Mike would always be alive for both children; he, no one else, was their "daddy." It might be quite a while before they could see her attachment to another man as anything but an infidelity.

  She left the house herself at ten minutes of two, locking the door behind her with the extra keys she kept on a ring along with an emergency set for the car and the store.

  She was still a block from the arcade when she could see that two or three dozen kids were milling around the sidewalk in front. Driving nearer, Carrie was able to distinguish several separate groups of spacies. Nick was in one bunch of half a dozen, Dana standing beside him.

  Rather than interrupt Nick while he was mingling independently with his peers, Carrie pulled to the curb a few yards short of the spacies, and when Nick spotted her, she gestured him over to the car. Nick murmured something to Dana and crossed the sidewalk.

  "Would you do me a favor?" Carrie asked Nick when he came around to the window.

  "What?"

  "I thought there might be a stampede to get in when the doors open, and I'd rather stay clear. If I wait in the car, could you bring my purse out to me?"

  "You bet," he said enthusiastically. He seemed to understand that she meant to do him a favor as well, not intrude on his turf.

  "It's on the floor behind one of the machines," Carrie explained. "On the left as you enter, second one down the row, I think."

  He stared at her a second. "Behind it?" he asked quietly. "How'd it get there?"

  The way he asked was strangely intimidating. Carrie was suddenly reluctant to reveal that the man with her last night, partly at her urging, had been exploring the technical details of the machine.

  "I put it on top while I was playing," she said. "It slipped off and fell down in back. That's why I forgot it."

  So now she had lied to him. The game had made them both liars.

  But the answer satisfied Nick, and he went back to his friends.

  It was still a couple of minutes before two. Carrie passed the time watching the crowd of youngsters as she might study a flock of migratory birds, looking for clues to their habits and instincts in the way they stood, moved, talked, touched each other. There weren't nearly as many girls as boys. That was interesting; only one in each group. Dana waited with Nick and four other boys, one of whom was Alan Pomfrey, a son of the woman who ran Carrie's weekly exercise group. And there was Judy Arbuckle again, the lone girl in a group of six that included Andy Green. Carrie recognized, too, the girl she had once seen identify herself before playing the game—Terry McDowell, wasn't that her name?—standing with five boys. There were also two more groups, each including just one girl, though Carrie recognized none of the faces.

  Then suddenly it dawned on her there was nothing random about the shape of the crowd. The waiting spacies broke down neatly into groups of six, each comprised of five boys and one girl. And, thinking back, Carrie realized that the groups she'd seen around the games whenever she'd visited the arcade had been constituted exactly the same.

  Each one, she guessed, must be what they called a zal.

  ". . . assigned to my zal," Nick had said, accounting for his relationship with Dana.

  Were they all assigned?

  Then an old question sprang again to mind: assigned by whom? And others, falling through her brain like dominoes: Who decided the size of a zal, invented the word for it, decided the ratio of males to females? Why should there be only one girl in each group?

  They were beginning to funnel through the entrance now; the arcade had o
pened. Nick was one of the first inside.

  She expected him to reappear momentarily, the bag to be located immediately. But a couple of minutes passed, then a couple more, before Nick came trotting back out. He circled around to the window beside the driver's seat.

  "It's not there, Mom," he said anxiously.

  "But it's got to be. I might've told you the wrong machine—"

  "I looked behind every one, in every corner. Honest."

  He was flushed and slightly breathless, brows furrowed in desperation. There was every sign he had really made an effort.

  Carrie sat motionless for a moment, weighing her next step. Of course she could go inside and double-check. But she knew the layout of the arcade; no hidden nooks and crannies where anything could lie unnoticed. She doubted that one of the other children had taken the purse and concealed it. Nick had been third or fourth through the door. There wouldn't have been time, especially when only Nick knew where to look.

  "Sorry, Mom," Nick said, obviously impatient now to return to the arcade. "You'll get it back, though, I'm sure. One of the people who run the place must've come in and put it away somewhere to keep it safe."

  Could he be keeping the bag from her himself? Carrie searched his face for any hint of guile. Seeing none, she felt ashamed for even doubting him.

  "That must be what happened," she said.

  She let Nick go and drove on to Lon's, almost missing the turn onto Bowridge Road because she was so preoccupied by the missing purse. In one way, its disappearance was somewhat encouraging—at last a happening that couldn't be explained away as an automatic function of a computer, a sign of some ordinary human presence returning to the arcade. Between last night's closing and today, someone had been there.

  Mr. Peale again?

  Or someone else? Whoever he "represented."

  "One of the people who run the arcade," Nick had said. Was there an intimation of foreknowledge in his suggestion—had he seen one of these people? Or was the phrase merely born out of a normal automatic assumption? There had to be someone.

  She made a mental note to ask him later, a first step to recovering the purse.

  Or would it be brought back to her? Driver's license, credit cards, checkbook, her name and address were given on a dozen different items in the bag. They could find her easily.

  But who were they? Why were they never seen? What secret about the arcade were they keeping?

  Interfaced . . .

  And now once more she felt the tingle of fright, like the sharp little teeth of some small nasty animal gnawing away deep inside her. Could they, who had secrets to keep, deduce from where the bag had been lying that the machines were being examined, their secrets probed?

  She drove faster, her eyes constantly darting to the rear-view mirror. She couldn't help feeling vulnerable, hunted. Perhaps it was absurd, insane. Yet the fact was that the people she needed to find had kept themselves hidden, remained unknown to her.

  While they knew all that was necessary to find her first.

  They even had the keys.

  18

  He opened the door looking very Sunday-casual in gray slacks and a beige cashmere sweater with no shirt underneath. Carrie hoped she seemed relaxed, too. She mustn't let him know she was upset—yet again by the arcade. A point could come where he decided she was a skittish person, easily thrown off balance. Not his type.

  She pushed the arcade out of her mind and smiled broadly.

  "God, you look good," he said.

  When they were inside, the door closed, he kissed her, a warm comfortable kiss. It was, she felt, like being welcomed home after a long journey by someone she had known forever. Suddenly the missing purse hardly seemed a crisis.

  "Thank you," she said.

  The reaction seemed to amuse him. "My pleasure."

  Then he made a little speech of apology. He was just finishing up some work, it would take another few minutes. "Make yourself at home," he said, gesturing to the living room. "Or come and watch me. It should interest you: I'm running my PC."

  "There you go again."

  "Mea culpa—personal computer. I've got one back here. . . ."

  He led her to a room at the rear of the house, overlooking a large flower-bordered lawn that had been set up as a home office. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covered the walls except for a space between the windows where a large desk was situated. There were no papers on the surface of the desk, only a telephone, and four pieces of equipment Carrie recognized as computer components.

  "Ever seen one of these up close?" Lon asked.

  "Just from the other side of airline reservation counters and my bank teller's window."

  He dragged a chair from a corner and set it beside one already at the desk. "By the way," he said, "all this stuff is made by my outfit, Intellitronics, Inc." He paused to survey the equipment. She could see that he had enormous pride in the product.

  She gave her attention to the instruments. The most familiar was the television monitor with its attached keyboard, similar to a typewriter's, though with many more keys. There was, too, a rectangular metal box, enclosed except for two vertical slots on the front, and something with a roll of paper coming out of the top that also resembled a typewriter but without a keyboard. The fourth item, Carrie thought on second look, was not part of the computer, merely a telephone-answering machine; atop this, instead of in its own cradle, lay the receiver of the telephone. All the instruments were encased in smooth white metal, embossed on one edge or another with a small gold medallion stamped with a mark—

  ***

  —the logo of Lon's company.

  "So you designed all this?" she said, impressed.

  "Not everything. The hardware, the basic computer circuitry—that was my contribution. Want the guided tour?"

  It took her a moment to answer, distracted by the monitor where lines of words and numbers marched vertically across the screen. None made any sense to her. At last Lon's question penetrated.

  "Yes, please," she replied.

  Lon sat and began explaining the components. The keyboard was used to give instructions to the computer, or call up data. Programs could be written, questions asked, either by writing them in plain English as on a typewriter, or in one of several computer languages, or sometimes merely by pressing certain special-function keys. Information was given back on the monitor screen. The device with the paper in it was a printer. Anytime the computer operator wanted to see data down on paper in black and white, a certain key was pushed, initiating an automatic printout. The enclosed metal box with the two slots, Carrie learned next, was a disc drive. Flat, round pieces of flexible plastic called floppy discs—or, in shoptalk, just "floppies"—went into the slots. A floppy might already have a program on it—a complex code of electronic pulses magnetically transcribed into the coated plastic—which the computer read as data. Or it could be blank, used to record and preserve new input. With a combination of two discs in the drive, a variety of functions could be performed.

  This far into his lecture, Lon realized that Carrie hadn't sat down, was still hanging back, away from the desk. He patted the chair next to him. "C'mon, it won't bite," he said, then chuckled. "Come to think of it, it will—but not in a way that hurts."

  Carrie sat as Lon explained his pun. In computer terminology "byte" denoted a single character—each number, punctuation mark, or letter of the alphabet held in the memory was a byte. "It's also the unit by which we measure size of the memory. For instance, a 64K computer has a memory that holds sixty-four thousand bytes."

  Finally he came to the piece of equipment Carrie had thought was an answering machine. In fact, Lon said, it was a "modem," short for modulator-demodulator; it translated computer data into sound frequencies, allowing it to be transmitted through the telephone lines. With the modem, Lon was able to have a constant exchange of information between his personal computer and the central memory bank at his company's headquarters in California.

  "Or even be
tter, I can sit right here on a lazy Sunday while I check production lines at the factory and, if necessary, send instructions to correct a hitch." He tapped a button on the keyboard and the lines of characters traveling vertically across the screen suddenly froze. Lon pointed to the top line:

  AS RT bd1271 Ln5 38p/h—1419

  Moving his finger slowly across the line, he interpreted the abbreviations for Carrie. The assembly rate of a particular component part identified as board 1271, being made on production line number 5, was running at thirty-eight per hour as of 14:19 o'clock, 2:19 P.M., the current time. A slightly lower rate than usual, Lon remarked, as he punched another key and the lines of data began moving again.

  "From reading all this, I can usually spot the reason for a production slowdown. Could be a defective bearing in the conveyor. Or maybe the robot assemblers have dipped into a bad parts shipment so they're discarding a lot—they do a much stricter quality control than plain old humans. I can even tell how much coffee is being taken out of dispensers where we provide it free—so the company knows when its live employees are overdoing the coffee breaks."

  "Big Brother," Carrie said tartly "That's just the kind of spying that makes sensible folks leery of computers."

  "Listen," Lon objected, "is it better in some old-fashioned sweatshop where a thug of a foreman grabs the guy who's goldbricking and bawls him out before shoving him back on the line? This is a deterrent, that's all. Our workers know we're keeping tabs, so they don't take advantage. What's more," he concluded, his voice softening, "without this I'd have to check in at the plant today. And then where would we be?" He put his hand on her lap, and she felt a slow warmth flow along her thighs.

  "You've got a point there," she said.

  But her criticism had dampened his eagerness to teach. "I'd better concentrate on this now," he said, nodding at the screen. "Be done soon." Immediately he was immersed in his task, eyes fixed on the passing lines of information, while every few seconds he tapped a message into the keyboard.