But he couldn’t stop himself from feeling miserable.
They passed through several abandoned cities huddled by the rails, as unnatural and decayed as corpses. Off in the distance, steel domes winked at them from distant hills. They shared a silent lunch of oatmeal bars, and Rudy made Martin drink the rest of their water.
Around one o’clock, they came to an empty rail yard with forty or fifty sets of rails laid out in parallel lines. Only a few packet cars remained in this mighty outdoor loading bay. Their paint had gone long ago, and they were so old, they looked like part of the landscape.
“I used to work this yard,” the AI announced gruffly. “God, what a place it was: men yelling, cars crashing and screeching . . . and the stink! We’d have a hundred cattle cars sitting in the sun; the damn racket just about drove you around the bend. And now look at it, all gone to hell.” They rolled past silent loading cranes. “Some lame, pathetic, boneheaded future this has turned out to be.”
Martin fell asleep to the rhythmic clicking of the rails and the gentle side-to-side motion of the car. When he woke up, the land had turned pink.
He peered out the bug-smeared front window. They were chugging through a small hollow among short hills of light pink rock that flowed in scoops and mounds, rose into odd pinnacles, and tumbled off into piles of boulders. Across the pink ground ranged desert scrub punctuated by pale, fuzzy cholla and twisted piñon pines. As they rolled along, the jumbled scenery swung around them, revealing new gullies and hiding entire hills behind a rock or two. The whole landscape felt as if it were in motion.
“Wow!” Martin breathed.
“We’re getting close,” Rudy whispered. “Wake up William.”
A cluster of emerald green towers rose out of the pink landscape in front of them, smooth and sparkling and altogether wonderful. The dark, sleek skyscrapers were such a fanciful addition to the scenery that they looked like something from a dream.
Ahead, Martin could see a Y in the packet line. A line snaked off to the left, toward the sparkling green buildings. “Leave us off here,” Rudy commanded. “Chip?” And Chip vibrated a repetition of the command.
“Good riddance!” shouted the AI.
They climbed out of the hopper car into the blistering heat of a desert afternoon, and their packet clattered away. Within seconds, it was hidden by a fold in the land. Soon, not even the sound remained.
Martin didn’t want to say so, but the emerald skyscrapers seemed very far away. The enervating heat and his drowsiness made him want to lie down right where he was and bake on a rock like a lizard. “Gonna take us a couple of hours to walk that,” he muttered to William.
William was busy trying to brush the bright orange dust of the bench from her clothing. She squinted at their destination. “Five minutes, tops.”
Rudy set down his attaché case and pulled out his lab coat. He put it on and smoothed the most obvious wrinkles. “Now, don’t use any names once we get inside,” he cautioned. “They’ll get picked up by the bugs and trigger alerts at Central. Don’t use the words ‘prototype’ or ‘Wonder Babies,’ either. If we can finish our business with Malcolm in less than an hour, we should be able to make it out before they catch us.”
Then he cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled toward the faraway skyscrapers.
“Malcolm! Hey, Malcolm! It’s me!”
Within seconds, a dot appeared on the thread of distant track in front of the green glass spires and gained size rapidly as it whizzed toward them. It turned out to be a small open-air packet car rolling backward. Two fantastical park benches spanned its narrow width. It shuddered to a stop right in front of them.
“Hold on tight,” Rudy advised as they climbed aboard. “Malcolm likes speed. And surprises.”
The little car accelerated dramatically. Soon, they were bouncing up and down with jaw-breaking intensity as the wind blew into their faces. William’s hair flew everywhere, and she couldn’t let go long enough to get it out of her eyes. Martin was terrified, but once the car slowed down, he wished it would speed up again.
The car rolled beneath an archway in the first huge green building. It came to a stop in a charming foyer floored with dark gray-green stonework and walled by impressively large panels of glass. The cool touch of climate-controlled air flowed past them, and yet they still seemed to be outside; the sun shone through in sparkling beams and cast the shadow of their packet car onto the floor. But the light that entered here wasn’t plain outdoor light. It was rarified and golden. It made everything seem shiny and beautiful, even the packet rails, which ended a few feet ahead of them in an ornate blockade of curving and curling brasswork.
Martin stood up, then promptly sat back down. His blanket had stretched itself through the holes in the park bench and wrapped him up like a ham sandwich in a baggie. “Okay, okay, we’re stopped,” he said, tugging at it. “I get it, you don’t like speed. You didn’t have to come with me, you know.”
The blanket uncurled itself from the bench, fluttering with agitation.
Chip hopped down and stood next to the packet car, tall ears pricked. His black-and-tan coat seemed to glow. “You know, Chip,” Martin said, “you always look great whenever we go anywhere fancy.”
William climbed off the cart, trying to comb her tangled hair with her fingers. Rudy jumped down and surveyed the foyer with the eagerness of a boy. “He changes this place every time I see it.”
“Over here, please!”
Beside them, between the packet lines and the wall, stood a long counter of dark marbled wood with a black granite countertop. Behind the counter, a slender woman beckoned them with long, fine hands. Her pale hair was twined into an elaborate mass of ringlets around her cat-shaped face, and her slanted eyes were impossibly large and green. All in all, she looked a little too much like a praying mantis in a wig.
“Please,” she called again, rapping on the countertop with a pink nail, and Rudy strolled over to her.
“Welcome to the Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory,” the woman fluted, bending her long neck and smiling coquettishly through her ringlets. She was wearing a pink blouse that looked like spun cotton candy, and every fragile bone in her upper body appeared to be half as thick as normal, and almost twice as long.
I hope she doesn’t try to shake hands, Martin thought. No way can I go through with it. She’s the scariest thing I’ve seen.
“Sir, your visit is a delightful surprise,” cooed the mantis lady to Rudy, looking down and tapping with her long fingernails on something out of sight. Martin glanced over the high granite counter and discovered a further countertop below, along with what looked like the casing of a computer console tilted so that only the mantis lady could read it. “Although, I’m told that for this visit, you’re Dr. Donner Chapel.” She gave a tinkling laugh. “I’m sure I don’t know why.”
Rudy smiled. “One of Malcolm’s little jokes.”
She laughed again and shook a long finger at Rudy as if he’d been rude. Martin’s blanket patted sweat from his forehead. She wasn’t a real woman, was she? Could a real woman have fingers eight inches long?
“Dr. Granville is at work in a sterilized room at the moment,” she trilled, “so your path will take you to the patio garden for light refreshments. After you’ve had a few minutes to recover from your journey, your path heads up to the top floor of the executive tower, where you will meet with Dr. Granville in his office. I hope that will be satisfactory.”
“That sounds fine.”
“Then . . .” She spread her elongated hands wide. Very wide. “In that case, your path awaits.”
Her icing pink fingernail pointed to an Oriental rug by their feet. A shiny brass banister closed off its far end. Martin had assumed that the rail marked where people should line up to talk to her. On closer inspection, the rail appeared to be attached to the carpet itself.
“A path, eh?” Rudy said. “That’s new.”
Once they were on it, the carpet shook itself a
nd rose infinitesimally into the air. Then it lurched forward. Martin’s blanket reached around him and hitched itself to the brass rail to prevent him from tumbling off.
“You fabric things!” Martin groaned. “Someone should have warned me about you.”
As they swept by the end of the counter, Martin glanced back at the mantis lady. She wasn’t standing behind the desk in sensible shoes, and she wasn’t sitting on a chair. Her torso ended at the surface of the lower countertop, and the “computer screen” she tapped at with those long fingers was a plain block of wood.
“She’s not real!” he hissed to William.
“She’s real,” William whispered back. “She just isn’t alive.”
“Have a nice day,” the woman called, waving her hand, as their carpet whisked them around the corner.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Their path flowed up a curving incline and down broad steps into the heart of the bottle green empire. At no point was their view of the towering glass walls entirely obscured. Conventional offices might run along one side of their path, but the other was open to the sky. Walkways from office suite to office suite crossed over one another on narrow bridges high in the air.
“Is this what your lab was like?” Martin muttered to William.
“Not the part I lived in,” William said.
The center of the office complex was an elaborate flower garden complete with fully grown trees, and the multistory office blocks of brown and black stone rose around it like vertical mountains. Birds flew and sang beneath the glass roof, and yellow sunbeams dripped through the thick foliage like honey.
The Oriental rug stopped in the middle of the lush greenery by a teakwood table. A small monkey in a red cap and pants swooped down and balanced on their rail.
“Please sit and share some refreshments,” said the monkey in the low, measured tones of a newscaster. “I can offer you an excellent strawberry-lemonade ice, freshly squeezed and flash-frozen.”
“That sounds perfect,” Rudy said, and William nodded.
“How about you, sir?” the monkey asked, turning to Martin. “Will a strawberry-lemonade ice be adequate, or would you prefer that I bring you something else?”
Martin gazed into the monkey’s big brown eyes. “Um . . . the ice, please,” he said.
“I’ll be right back,” the monkey promised, and sprang away through the trees.
Soon, Martin was sipping an incomparable slushy and admiring the flowers that grew nearby. Chip lay at his feet, eyes closed in deep relaxation. The monkey had pulled a power cable from the bushes and offered it to the dog: “To rejuvenate you, sir, our finest pulse charging system. Note the gold plating on the prongs.”
Martin picked through a tray of unusual fruit and selected a star-shaped apple. The apple had no seeds at its core, only sweet white flesh with just the right amount of crisp snap. “I could get used to this,” he said.
“This is the world of the high-tech labs,” Rudy said. “The scientists live in luxury. Their experiments live underground and seldom see the sun. I used to eat these starpples for breakfast.”
“And these walls have ears too,” Martin said in a low voice.
“Yes and no. We have a lot of freedom, but when a lab is under suspicion, everything gets checked, from how our pupils dilate when we’re talking about certain topics to what chemicals get thrown off in our urine.”
“Ugh,” Martin said, but he finished his starpple anyway. A bluebird flitted down and offered him a cluster of matching blue grapes, and he discovered that they didn’t have any seeds either.
William ate a skinless orange, shiny as a gold lollipop. “No names, remember,” she warned Martin.
“That’s right,” Rudy said. “We don’t have to worry about the end-of-day analysis. We’ll be gone by then. It’s the big things that we have to watch out for. Names. The special nouns I told you about. Just try to keep quiet as much as possible.”
Three jewel-toned dragonflies hovered over the table and began to hum in a delicate harmony. Martin’s blanket took aim at the nearest one and swatted it away. The monkey dropped down onto the table again and collected their empty glasses. “I hope you’ve enjoyed your refreshments,” it murmured. “If you would be so kind as to resume your path now.”
This time, the Oriental rug took them inside a glass elevator, and they rose to the top of the tallest tower. The rug flowed down a long balcony with a dizzying view and through the door of a grand mahogany-paneled office. There, it paused long enough to let them disembark. Then it left the room with a gentle rustle.
Wide windows wrapped around three sides of the office. Martin walked along them and feasted his eyes on the view of the pink desert outside. He didn’t like heights, but being here wasn’t like being on Hertz’s hill, maybe because he had walls and a roof to protect him. Besides, the ground was so far away that it didn’t seem like ground anymore.
The packet line zigzagged and curved across the arid terrain until it crept over the uneven horizon, but that was the only sign of human life in the entire exotic landscape. All Martin could see were rocks, canyons, mounds, and arroyos sprinkled with desert plants.
Chip hopped along with his front paws on the narrow windowsill, looking out too. He left heart-shaped nose prints on the glass. Martin didn’t think at first that the glass had any color to it, but then he realized that it did. The sky looked too blue, and the desert plants looked too green. The ground was the orangey pink color of Mom’s tortilla warmer.
“Where are we?” Martin said. “Out here . . . this all looks really different from back near my suburb.”
William was examining the contents of the shelves that occupied the remaining wall. All sorts of odds and ends cluttered them: pieces of robotic junk, odd sculptures, interesting toys. William picked up a small rag doll, and it uttered a piercing scream. She put it down again.
“We’re near the coast,” she said. “All the labs are out here. Close to Central, over that way.” She pointed vaguely to the west.
“What’s a coast?” Martin wanted to know.
The door burst open, and a young man in a lab coat strode into the room. He had a broad-shouldered, stocky build, and his black hair was cut so close to his head that it was little more than a shadow on his scalp. His skin was the color of cappuccino, and his eyes were dark olive green.
“Big brother!” he cried, coming forward to clasp Rudy’s arms.
Chip shied away from the newcomer and came to sit on Martin’s feet. “Hey, boy, it’s okay,” Martin whispered to him. But it isn’t okay, he thought.
“Is he really his brother?” he muttered to William. “He’s way too old to be one of the you-know-whats.”
Dr. Granville overheard him.
“Yes, we’re brothers,” he said. “When your friend here was two years old, his designer brought him to visit the RISLab, and my father decided he had to have one like him right away. Except for a few tweaks, of course; Daddy Granville was very proud of his heritage.”
“And except for a little difference in allowance,” Rudy added. “Malcolm here was quite the favorite son. There I was, stuck with the other experimental subjects in the underground dormitory, with nothing to call my own but my locker and my cot. Meanwhile, Malcolm had everything money could buy and a genius in robotics could dream up. Remember that pony you got for your fifth birthday? And when I came out for the summer and we played Robin Hood, your dad made you your own merry men.”
Dr. Granville laughed. “That pony had six legs. More sure-footed, and a smoother ride. How’s my sweetheart?” he asked, turning to William. “You’re growing older by the day and lovelier by the minute.”
William didn’t look older at all; in fact, she’d never looked younger. Her cheeks had brightened to the color of bubble gum. Great, thought Martin, I’m not the only one in this room who’s stuck in a stupid schoolyard crush.
“Did you study those schematics I gave you?” Dr. Granville asked.
William nodded
vigorously. “Every day. Until I had to leave them behind.”
Dr. Granville grew serious. He clapped Rudy on the shoulder.
“I’m glad you came to me. There’s news. They’re reopening your lab.”
Rudy’s face became unreadable. “Are they?”
“Of course,” Dr. Granville said. “We all knew they would once they’d punished the old scientists. It’s too important a lab to lose. You can come back, and come back at the top. They’re hunting you down, you know. You don’t want to go back to being an experiment in your own lab.”
William took a nervous step back at this idea, but Rudy put on one of his charming smiles.
“Malcolm,” he said, taking Dr. Granville’s arm and giving it a little shake, “you know I wouldn’t put you in the middle of this. Don’t forget, you have your own lab to lose! I’m only here because we have a bot problem to work out, and we’ll leave as soon as we’re done. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine—and his unusual pet.”
“Well met,” Dr. Granville said, advancing to shake Martin’s hand. “I’ll admit, I’ve heard something about you. And is this the legendary bot himself? Well, well.”
He tilted his head and stared at Chip. Under his scrutiny, Chip started to pant. He circled Martin’s legs nervously and sat down on his feet again. Then he looked up and gave a quick whine.
“He has a very intelligent look, doesn’t he?” Dr. Granville said. “My guess is that your bot is just playing at being a dog. But the devotion is real.” He glanced up at Martin again. “Good Lord, is that one of my fourth-generation medical blankets? It’s turned itself into outerwear!”
Martin blushed and touched his cape, which, due to the warm conditions, had assumed a light cotton texture. “I tried to get it to go away, but it won’t.”
The Walls Have Eyes Page 14