Drowned Hopes Part 8

"He doesn't have a native earth," Dortmunder said, and walked on to the kitchen, where his work area had overflowed the table and now also covered all but one of the chairs, plus part of the counter s.p.a.ce next to the sink. Maps were taped to the wall and the front of the refrigerator, and the crumpled papers under the table were knee deep.

Kelp had trailed Dortmunder into the kitchen. He stood watching as Dortmunder pointedly sat at the messy table and opened Marine Salvage to the facing pictures of the Empress of Canada lying on her side in Liverpool harbor in 1953 and the Normandie lying on her side in New York harbor in 1942. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building were both visible in the background of the Normandie picture. This East Nineteenth Street building where Dortmunder lived and had to put up with Andy Kelp wouldn't be in the picture because it was too far downtown, the Normandie having fallen over at Forty-eighth Street. Dortmunder made a show of becoming very absorbed in these pictures.

But Andy Kelp was not a man to be deterred by hints. "If you aren't busy..." he said, and gestured in a friendly fashion with the beer can.

Dortmunder looked at him. "If I'm not busy?"

"I thought we'd take a little run over to Wally's place," Kelp said, unruffled. "See how he's coming along."

"I'm coming along," Dortmunder told him. "Don't worry about it, I'm coming along fine."

Kelp nodded and pointed at the messy table with his beer can, saying, "I took a look at some of that stuff while I was waiting."

"I see that," Dortmunder said. "Things are moved around."

"You got some very tricky ideas in there," Kelp said.

"Both," Dortmunder told him. "Simple ideas and tricky ideas. Sometimes, you know, a simple idea's a little too simple, and sometimes a tricky idea's too tricky, so you got to concentrate on it and give it your attention and work it out."

"Then after that, what you have to do," Kelp suggested, "is take a break, walk away from it, come back refreshed."

"I just went to the library," Dortmunder pointed out. "I am refreshed."

"You don't look refreshed," Kelp said. "Come on, I'll give Wally a call, see if this is a good time to come over."

Dortmunder frowned at that. "Give him a call? What do you mean, give him a call? Did you give me a call?"

Kelp didn't get it. "I came over," he said. "That's what I do, isn't it?"

"You come over," Dortmunder said, gesturing at the table, "you go through the plans, you don't give me any advance warning."

"Oh, is that the problem?" Kelp shrugged. "Okay, fine, we won't call, we'll just go over." He took a step toward the doorway, then stopped to look back and say, "You coming?"

Dortmunder couldn't quite figure out how that had happened. He looked around at his table covered with half-thought-out plans. He had things to do here.

Kelp, in the doorway, said, "John? You coming? This was your idea, you know."

Dortmunder sighed. Shaking his head, he got slowly to his feet and followed Kelp through the apartment. "Me and my ideas," he said. "I just keep surprising myself."

FOURTEEN.

Kelp, leading the way up the battered stairs toward Wally Knurr's battered door, said, "Anyway, the advantage, just dropping in like this, Wally won't have a chance to bring out that cheese and crackers of his."

Dortmunder didn't answer. He was looking at the little red plastic crack-vial tops lying around on the steps, wondering what the letter T embossed on each one meant and how come crack producers felt it necessary to add a little styling detail like that fancy T to the packaging of their product. Also, as they climbed nearer and nearer to the wonder computer, Dortmunder was feeling increasingly surly, not so much because he'd been double-shuffled into coming here, but because he still couldn't quite figure out how it had been done.

Well, it didn't matter, did it? Because here they were. Kelp, to cut even further into Wally's cheese-and-cracker foraging time, had let them into the building through the downstairs door without bothering to ring Wally's apartment, so now, when they reached the top of the stairs, would be the first the computer dwarf would know of their visit. "I hope I don't scare the little guy," Kelp said, as he pushed the b.u.t.ton.

"HANDS IN THE AIR!" boomed a voice, deep, resonant, authoritative, dangerously enraged. Dortmunder jumped a foot, and when he came down his hands were high in the air, clawing for the ceiling. Kelp, face ashen, seemed about to make a run for the stairs when the voice roared out again, more menacing than ever: "GET EM UP, YOU!" Kelp got em up. "FACE THE WALL!" Kelp and Dortmunder faced the wall. "ONE MOVE AN-tick- Oh, hi, Andy! Be right there."

Hands up, facing the wall, Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other. Slowly, sheepishly, they lowered their arms. "Cute," said Dortmunder, adjusting the shoulders and cuffs of his jacket. Kelp had the grace to look away and say nothing.

Chiks and clonks sounded on the other side of the battered door, and then it swung open and the eighth dwarf stood smiling and bobbing in there, gesturing them in, saying, "Hi, Andy! I didn't know you were coming. You didn't ring the bell."

"I guess I should have," Kelp said, walking into the apartment, Dortmunder trailing after.

Wally looked around Dortmunder's elbow at the hallway, saying, "The warlord didn't come?"

Dortmunder frowned at Kelp, who frowned at Wally and said, "Huh?"

But Wally was busy closing and relocking the door, and when he turned to them, his broad moist face wreathed in smiles, he said, "I hope I didn't scare you."

"Oh, heck, no," Kelp a.s.sured him, brushing it away with an easy hand gesture.

"This is a bad neighborhood, you know," Wally said confidentially, as though there might be some people around who didn't know that.

"I'm sure it is, Wally," Kelp said.

"There are people out there," Wally said, pointing at the closed door, and he shook his head in disbelief, saying, "I think they live in the hall, kind of. And sometimes they want to, you know, move in here."

Dortmunder, who wasn't feeling any less out of sorts for having been made a fool of, said, "So what do you do when you've got them lined up against the wall out there? Give them cheese and crackers?"

"Oh, they don't line up," Wally said. "It's animal psychology. They run away."

Kelp said, "Animal psychology? I thought you said it was people living out there."

"Well, kind of," Wally agreed. "But animal psychology's what works. See, it's kind of like a scarecrow, or blowing whistles at blue jays, or like when you shake a rolled-up newspaper so your dog can see it. They don't stick around to see what you mean, they just run away."

Dortmunder said, "But don't they catch on after a while?"

"Oh, I've got all different tapes," Wally explained. "On random feed. I've got one that sounds like a woman with a knife having a psychotic attack, one that sounds like Israeli commandos, Puerto-"

"I'm glad we didn't get the woman with the knife," Kelp said. "Then I might have been a little scared. Just for a minute."

Dortmunder said, "Still and all. Sooner or later, they got to figure it out, every time they push that bell b.u.t.ton, somebody starts yelling at them."

"But they don't," Wally said, "that's why it's animal psychology. All they know is, every time they come up here and push the bell b.u.t.ton to see if anybody's home, something happens that makes them all nervous and upset. So it's conditioning. These people live kind of on the edge of their nerves anyway, so they don't like things that make them more nervous, so after a while they stop coming up here. It's what you call a.s.sociation."

Unwillingly, Dortmunder got the point. "You mean," he said, "they a.s.sociate coming up here with feeling nervous and upset."

"That's right," Wally said, nodding and grinning and patting his pudgy little fingers in the air.

Kelp, rubbing his hands together in antic.i.p.ation, his own recent nervousness and upset completely forgotten, said, "Well, when I come up here, what I feel is great! You been working on the old reservoir problem the last two days, Wally?"

An odd evasiveness, almost shiftiness, appeared in Wally's eyes and demeanor. "Kind of," he said.

Dortmunder became very alert. Was there a flaw here in the computer wizard? "Andy was telling me," he said, "you probably had all kinds of ideas to show us by now."

"Well, we're working on it," Wally a.s.sured him, but still with that same indefinable sense of holding something back. "We're working on it okay," he said, "but it's kind of different for us, not our... not the regular kind of stuff we do."

Dortmunder frowned at him; somebody else was in on this now? It was becoming a G.o.dd.a.m.n cast of thousands. "We?" he echoed. "Who's we?"

"Oh, the computer," Wally said, beaming, pleased at the confusion. "We do everything together."

"Oh, you do?" Dortmunder smiled amiably. "What's the computer's name?" he asked. "Compy? Tinkerbell? Fred?"

"Oh, I wouldn't name it," Wally said. "That would be childish."

"Well," Kelp said, "let's see what you've got, Wally."

"Oh, sure." Wally continued to exhibit that strange reluctance; but then he beamed around at them and said, "How about cheese and crackers? I can run-"

"We just ate, Wally," Kelp said. Moving toward one of the PC setups scattered around the room, he said, "This is the one, isn't it?"

"Well, kind of," Wally admitted, moving reluctantly after him.

"So let's fire it up."

"Yeah," Dortmunder said. "Let's see what the computer thinks." He was beginning to enjoy himself.

"You see," Wally said, squirming a little, "the computer's used to kind of different inputs. So, you know, some of the solutions it comes up with are pretty wild."

"You should see some of the stuff John's come up with," Kelp said, laughing. "Don't worry about it, Wally, let's just see what you've got."

Kelp was so absorbed in Wally and the computer that he didn't even notice Dortmunder glare at him, so Dortmunder had to vocalize it: "Tricky, yes. Wild, no."

"Whatever," Kelp said, dismissing all that, his attention focused totally on Wally as the genius b.u.t.terball reluctantly settled himself at the PC. His stubby fingers stroked the keyboard, and all at once green lettering began to pour out onto the black screen of the TV from left to right. "He's selecting the menu now," Kelp explained to Dortmunder.

"Sure," Dortmunder said.

More greenery on the screen. Kelp nodded and said, "He's asking it to bring up the catalogue of solutions."

"Uh-huh," Dortmunder said.

On the screen, a new set of green words appeared: 1) LASER EVAPORATION.

"Well, I don't think," Wally stuttered, in obvious confusion, "we don't have to worry about that one, we can-"

"Wait a minute, Wally," Kelp said. "Is that the first of the solutions? Laser evaporation?"

"Well, yes," Wally said, "but it's not a good one, we should go on."

Kelp was apparently feeling some confusion, and potential embarra.s.sment as well, since this was, after all, his champ at bat here. "Wally," he said, "tell me what that means. Laser evaporation."

Wally looked mournfully at the words on the screen. "Well, it just means what it says," he answered. "Evaporation, Andy, you know? Evaporating water."

Dortmunder said, "Wait a minute, I think I get it. This computer wants to get at the box by getting rid of the water. Same as Tom. Only the computer wants to evaporate it."

"Well," Wally said, hunched protectively over his keyboard, "this was just the first thought it had."

"Take a laser," Dortmunder went on, enjoying himself more and more, "take a very big laser and burn off all the water in the reservoir."

"Wally," Kelp said. "Let's take a look at solution number two, okay?"

"Well, there were still problems," Wally said. Turning to Dortmunder, he explained, "You see, John, the computer doesn't actually live in the same world we do."

Dortmunder looked at him. "It doesn't?"

"No. It lives in the world we tell it about. It only knows what we tell it."

"Oh, I know about that," Dortmunder said, nodding, looking over at Kelp, saying, "That's that word you were using the other day, right? What was that?"

"Guy-go," Kelp said, looking wary.

"That was it," Dortmunder agreed. "Garbage in, garbage out."

"Well, sure," Wally said, his defensiveness more plain than ever. "But actually, you know, sometimes garbage in isn't garbage, depending on what you want the computer for. You tell the computer something, and sometimes it isn't garbage, and then other times maybe it is."

Over Wally's head, Dortmunder gave Kelp a superior look. Kelp caught it, shook his head, and said, "Come on, Wally, let's see solution number two."

So Wally's sausage fingers did their dance over the keyboard, and a new set of green words ribboned across the middle of the black screen: 2) s.p.a.cESHIP FROM ZOG.

There was an uncomfortable silence. Dortmunder tried his absolute best to catch Kelp's eye, but Kelp would have none of it. "Zog," Dortmunder said.

Wally cleared his throat with a sound like a chipmunk gargling. Blinking at the words on the screen, he said, "You see, there's this story-"

"Don't explain," Kelp said. He put a hand on Wally's shoulder, part protectively, part warningly. "Wally, okay? Don't explain."

But Wally couldn't help himself: "The computer thinks it's real."

"You know," Dortmunder said, feeling that unfamiliar ache in his cheeks that probably meant he was grinning, "I'm kind of looking forward to solution number three."

Wally did the gargling chipmunk again. "Well," he said, "there's kind of a solution two-A first."

Kelp, sounding fatalistic, said, "Wally? You mean, something that goes along with the s.p.a.ceship?"

"Well, yeah," Wally agreed, nodding that round brilliant silly head. "But," he added, with a forced hopefulness, "it could have an application maybe, kind of, with some of the other solutions."

"Fling it at us, Wally," Kelp said. Even his cheekbones were refusing to look at Dortmunder.

So Wally did his keyboard dance again, and s.p.a.cESHIP FROM ZOG was swept away into oblivion, replaced by: 2A) MAGNET.

"Magnet," Kelp said.