by Robert Maxxe
At the far end of the corridor, they entered the waiting room of an office suite. Through an open door Carrie saw Lon in his shirtsleeves, feet upon his desk, holding a phone to his ear. He spotted Carrie, gave her a smile, and motioned her to join him.
His large office was positioned so that it had both the external windows and, on the opposite wall, the "fishbowl" view of the factory floor. At one end of the room was the desk, and at the other were a comfortable sofa and chairs placed around a marble coffee table. Under the outside window stood a long table displaying half a dozen different models of small computers—the Intellitronics product-line, Carrie guessed.
While Lon finished his phone call, she was able to take a more leisurely look at the manufacturing process through the fishbowl window. The gigantic brightly lit space where the work was done looked as much like a laboratory as a factory. The walls and surfaces were all immaculate white, the employees were all wearing long white coats and skintight rubber gloves, and at some of the worktables minuscule components were being handled with tweezers and examined under microscopes.
As Lon conversed on the phone, Carrie could hear him using his special professional jargon, words so odd that at moments it occurred to her he could be pulling her leg with double-talk:
". . . turns out that snivitz we were getting came out of faulty mosfet, but we cleared it by putting a new bus into the backplane.
Soon he traded closing gibes, and said good-bye.
"What's a snivitz?" Carrie couldn't resist asking as Lon cradled the phone.
"A small glitch," he answered teasingly, and came around his desk. Then he explained. "A glitch is an unwanted electric pulse, or burst of noise, from the machine—the computer equivalent of static in a radio." Reaching her, he planted a sedate kiss on her cheek, and apologized for it with a nod toward the factory window. "Good for keeping an eye on the shop," he said, "but it does make it hard to give you the kind of greeting I'd like."
Carrie was relieved. "Then you're not annoyed at me for busting in on you . . .?"
"Annoyed, no. Curious, yes."
"I didn't even think of coming until half an hour ago," she rushed on. "And then all I wanted to do was see you. . . ."
Holding her at arm's length for a moment, he saw at once that she was fraying around the edges. He gestured to the sofa. "C'mon, sit down and tell me about it."
She started to pour it out even before she had settled. "One of the children, a spacie . . . he was found dead this morning on the beach. . . ."
Lon let out a low moan of sympathy and wearily lowered himself down next to her on the couch. He didn't have to be told what kind of chain reaction the event had set off in Carrie.
"Who was it?" he asked.
She told him the name, explained it was the son of the woman who ran her exercise group, and filled in the background against which the death had particularly upset her—the exchange she'd had with the boy yesterday evening, the revelation that Nick held some kind of peculiar authority among the spacies.
Lastly, she told Lon what it was that had shaken her most: the knowledge that Nick had also been on the beach last night. Catching her implication, Lon lifted his eyes and stared incredulously at Carrie.
"Your daughter was there, too," Carrie added. "Did you know about that?"
Lon shook his head, and Carrie repeated the story Nick had told last night to account for coming home late, his pursuing Dana while she was distraught. Finally Carrie mentioned her feeling that the two youngsters had been in bed together yesterday afternoon at her house.
He was quiet for a long time after she finished. He stopped looking at her, and turned instead to gaze across the office through the glass partition onto the factory floor. Carrie waited. If only he took long enough to digest what she'd said, maybe he would finally agree with her.
"So," Lon said at last, "where does that leave us?"
"I know where it leaves me," Carrie replied. "I can't back away from this anymore. I can't just write off that game as a harmless pastime, or some great leap forward in teaching the kids a new technology. Lon, I don't know exactly what's going on in the arcade, or why. But at least there's one thing I can say now beyond any shadow of a doubt: there's a young boy whose life has been cut short—and wouldn't have been if that place had never come to Millport."
Slowly, Lon shook his head. "Carrie dear, there are hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn't have been killed prematurely if the automobile had never been invented. Does that make it bad? A situation came up that threw this kid for a loop. It's a tragedy, I feel that as keenly as you do. But don't you think the real problem is that, to start with, this kid was a little off the wall and—"
"Oh Jesus," she cried out desperately, bolting up from the couch. "I knew that would be your answer!" She went to the outside window and stared up at the clear blue sky, trying to calm herself.
"And because you anticipated my reaction, does that make it wrong? Look at this objectively, for Pete's sake! There's no earthly reason for a plot to control these kids, take them over. Who'd have any reason? What would be gained? Are the sweet young things being programmed by computers to turn suddenly on the kindly folk of Millport and suck out their blood—or invade Osgood's one night and eat all the ice cream without paying?"
She turned on him. "It's not funny!"
"You're goddamn right it isn't!" he shot back. "Not the side of it that's ripping us apart."
"And you think that's just because I can't be objective?" She fought to hold in tears of frustration. "I raced over here because I need you, need your help. Why can't you try—just try—to see it my way? You can't imagine a reason, so you say there isn't one. With your neat, logical engineer's mind I suppose that's a terrific approach for problem-solving. Well, I'm different. I can't see a reason either, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop looking for one. Because what I can see isn't right or normal."
"Look, what happened to that boy is sad. And what's going on between Nick and Dana is obviously going to require our attention. But don't blow it out of proportion, Carrie. It's not as if things like this don't happen everywhere all the time."
"What about the game itself," she demanded, "the whole way it's set up? If it's so damn simple and innocent, why is the design so complicated? Why isn't each player going up against a single machine, instead of playing against a whole group of machines linked together?"
She had begun pacing furiously, but Lon remained sitting as if to preserve a harbor of calm to which she could return.
"You're talking about the interfacing," he said. "I told you I'd come up with a perfectly simple—"
"You never told me what it was," she interrupted, challenging him.
"Couldn't be more elementary. I would've thought of it the night we were in the arcade if you hadn't got me so stirred up about spooks that I couldn't think straight. The machines are simply ganged to run off one computer."
"One? But there are nine—"
"Except," Lon cut in, "eight of those boxes are basically shells, consisting of not much more than a screen and a control board. The computer that drives all the games is located in just one of them, and the others are interfaced with it. Which also clears up the question of high equipment costs. It's much more economical this way."
"Still expensive, though," Carrie observed. "A hell of a lot more than the average video game."
Lon ceded the point grudgingly. "Nowhere near as much as if each game were self-contained."
Carrie persisted. "How about the game's capabilities? Far beyond the average. The way it interacts—"
He knew where she was headed. "Speaking the players' names, seeming to recognize them? I checked that out, too. I wanted to be certain the answers I gave you off the top of my head were reasonable."
"And of course you were satisfied," she said with an edge.
He wouldn't be baited. "Carrie, the game is utilizing existing technology, that's all there is to it. It isn't magic for a person to walk up to a comput
er, say his name out loud, and then have the game appear to repeat it back in conversation—say, affix it to some pre-programmed question asked by a synthesizer. In fact, that's child's play compared to what's in development. IBM has got a typewriter on the way that will take verbal dictation—you talk, it writes—and even talks back, asks for clarifications just like any secretary, to check punctuation, or ask you to spell a name. . . ."
"But that's advanced, you said; in development."
"Not too far from production, though—a few years, maybe. And the game obviously uses only the simplest application of the same principles."
Carrie kept up her assault on his passive reasoning. "Even so, why use it? You don't think it's extraordinary to put all that stuff into a kids' game?"
"It's not run-of-the-mill," Lon agreed amiably. "But to survive in any high-tech business, you've got to stay ahead, innovate. We have to do it in my area, the pressure's even greater to do it with games. Do you have any idea how many quarters were pumped into video arcade games last year? Twenty-five billion, Carrie—more than six billion dollars! In this country alone. With money like that at stake, I don't think it's the least bit odd for a company to go after it aggressively, with something new and attention-grabbing."
"Aggressively," Carrie scoffed. "Nine machines . . . and they're being played by fewer kids every day, not more."
Lon shrugged. "Businesses fail. Ideas are bad, or ahead of their time. And you can bet there are a lot more Spacescape games around than the nine in Millport."
There was a restless silence. More games? Was that less reason to worry? Carrie wondered. She stalked over to the glass partition and stared out at the factory, the nursery for thousands more computers, machines that she couldn't bring herself to regard with anything but misgiving. If Spacescape was being played in other places besides Millport, were similar things happening there? Were other children being torped—and dying because of it?
Lon's answers could never satisfy her. She needed something else from him.
Gazing out at the assembly lines, she asked, as if idly, "How many people have you got working out there?"
"Four hundred and eighty," he said.
She faced him again. "Look, I know I haven't said a damn thing to budge you an inch. But it can't end for me. I've got to keep going all the way—until I know for sure there's nothing to find . . . or I find myself confronted with the unimaginable. I'll do it alone if I have to, Lon, but I wish to God you'd help. I'd get where I'm going faster, and whatever's waiting there, we'd see it together."
He looked at her intently for almost a full minute. Then he turned his hands up in amiable surrender. "Okay, what next?"
"Help me track down the people behind the arcade."
"I gave you a lead on that already—"
"I checked the lease," Carrie said quickly. "It was a dead end." She filled in the details of her visit to Edna Swann, and also described her fruitless attempt to find a telephone listing for "Pace's" —the client named on the arcade blueprints.
"Are you sure you got the name right?" Lon asked.
"It's an anagram of 'space,'" Carrie replied. "That's enough to tell me it's connected to a game called Spacescape."
Lon regarded her with an expression that suddenly seemed a bit less tolerantly bemused, and more respectful.
She came across the room and sat down again. "If you'll follow up on that name, Lon, we ought to get somewhere. I could go around in circles for weeks, but you're in a related business and somewhere there ought to be a link. Maybe there are suppliers to your company who also supply the game people. A lot of your four hundred eighty employees came with experience, didn't they? One or two may have worked for the game maker, or may know someone who did. If you'll just take the time to phone around to all your business contacts, or canvass your employees—"
"It won't take any time at all," Lon said. Jumping up, he went to one of the computer terminals on the table by the window, switched it on, and began tapping instructions into the keyboard. For the first time he appeared excited, caught up in the spirit of the chase.
"This is on-line with the company's main memory," he said all the while he was punching the keys. "We've got all the employee records filed in there. I can find out if any of our people here ever worked for Pace's; and if that draws a blank, I'll check the California work force." Pausing for a second, he watched some words appear on the screen, then fingered the keyboard again.
"All right, I've accessed our employee file and started a search. It'll take the computer a few seconds. . . ."
Carrie went over and watched the screen. Lon's last instruction still glowed in white letters on a greenish background: CROSSREF PACE'S
A moment later new words began showing up on the screen, line by line:
MDWDL EMPFI
CROSSREF PACE'S
TOTAL 2
PATRICIA MILOTTl, ASSEMBLER
PREV EMPLR PACE, INC.
THOMAS WALLACH, INSPECTOR
PREV EMPLR THE PACE CO.
"They're different companies," Carrie said.
"Maybe," Lon said. "A lot of people filling out job applications are careless about what they call a former employer. I gave the computer discretion to search the files and feed back any name similar to the one we want. It may turn out that both these people worked at the same place."
Lon called through the door to his secretary, instructing her to have Milotti and Wallach sent immediately to his office.
While they waited for the two workers to appear, Lon came back to the subject of Nick and Dana, asking Carrie to detail her reasons for believing the youngsters had been to bed. When she described the brief stop she'd made at her house yesterday afternoon, he quizzed Carrie intensely.
"So you didn't actually see Dana there?"
"No, I didn't even go into Nick's room. But I heard noises—"
"Which could have been anything," Lon put in.
"And then later," Carrie rode over him, "Nick said that the reason Dana was upset was because things were getting too serious between them—'heavy' was the word he used."
"Which could still mean anything," Lon insisted.
She could understand that it was difficult for him to deal with her claims—harder, he must think, than it was for her. Since Dana was the older, Lon must feel implicit in Carrie's story was that his daughter was being charged as the aggressor. Nevertheless, his defensiveness rankled Carrie. He was blocking off discussion instead of exploring with her what could be done to help both children. She wanted to tell Lon how she felt, bring him around to a constructive approach. But before she could say anything more, the secretary appeared in the door and announced that Mr. Wallach was waiting outside.
Lon told her to send the man in, and also to pass the second employee straight through as soon as she arrived. Then he sat down behind his desk while Carrie remained on the sofa.
Wallach was a stocky man in his mid-thirties with unruly reddish-brown hair. The pristine appearance of his white calf-length lab coat was marred by a large coffee stain at knee-height.
"Foreman said you wanted to see me, Mr. Evans . . .?"
"Yes, Wallach, thanks for coming in." Lon motioned to a chair beside the desk and Wallach sat down. "I had some questions about the place you used to work, the Pace Company. Was that just before you came to us?"
"That's right, sir. They laid some people off, and I was lucky enough to come here right afterward."
"Where was the company located?"
"Bethpage."
"Right here on the Island. What did you do for them?"
"Micro-circuit board checker. Something like what I do for I.I."
Lon had picked up a pencil and was doodling as he spoke. Carrie wasn't sure if it was a habitual aid to his concentration, or if it indicated disinterest. Was he simply going through the motions of an investigation to pacify her?
"What kind of circuits were they?" Lon asked Wallach.
"Memory."
"What were th
ey used for? What did the company make?"
"I really don't know, Mr. Evans."
Lon looked up sharply. "Wait a second, Wallach. You worked at this company. You must know what they were turning out."
Wallach shook his head. "No, sir. Sorry, sir. You see, the factory wasn't like here, not open, everybody working together. It was an old place, lots of small rooms, the work all compartmentalized. The boards were put together in one room, brought to me for checking, then somebody picked them up and carried them to another room for the next step." Wallach threw a glance back to Carrie, as though anxious to assure her, too, that he was telling the truth.
"So you never saw the parts go into a completed assembly?" Lon said.
"No, sir. Never."
Lon thought. "How many different kinds of board did you inspect."
"Just the memories."
"ROM or RAM?"
"ROMs only."
"So RAMs and other circuits were being done in the same way, put together and checked in other rooms—"
"Guess so, Mr. Evans. The whole operation was split up. Kind of inefficient, if you ask me." Quickly he added, "I like working here much better."
The second employee arrived now, a tall, very pretty girl with olive skin and long, straight black hair. Her dark eyes darted apprehensively from Lon to Wallach to Carrie. She was obviously puzzled and quite worried about being summoned to the boss's office. Carrie appreciated Lon's executive skills in the way he instantly put the young woman at ease.
"Ah, Patricia, thanks very much for coming in. Nothing at all to worry about. I just thought you could do me a favor, maybe supply some information I need."
The girl took the chair that Wallach vacated for her. "Oh yeah?" she said. "About what?"
The thought of Eliza Doolittle popped into Carrie's head. Patricia Milotti's rather aristocratic beauty was unfortunately mitigated by a harsh voice and careless pronunciation.
"The place you worked previously," Lon explained. "Pace Incorporated. Could you tell me where that was located?"