Lady Slings the Booze Read online

  I’m the kind of guy, when I catch myself being dumb, I get mad at myself and my voice gets very very soft. Tesla was the kind of guy, he chuckled. I envied him that gift; it was healthier. (Then suddenly remembered that I didn’t have to worry about staying healthy any more. I was free to be as stupid as I wanted to be.) “I have done it again, Ken. Please pardon me. This will one day be marketed under the name ‘Macintosh Five’…but I am told that its designers will privately call it ‘Son of Jobs.’ It is about minus twenty-five years old. It has a giggle bite of rum, three and a half tear a bites of ram, bubble mammary, super-seedy worm drive, and can perform some preposterously high number of trips.”

  I’m pretty sure that’s what he said.

  “Thank you,” I said very very softly. “But what is that thing there that’s showing me the atom bomb?”

  This time he laughed out loud. Since I knew perfectly well it was himself he was laughing at, I let him live. After a very few ha’s, he saw the veins in my forehead and tapered off. “Again I beg your pardon, my friend. It is a computer, which will be produced in the year 2010. Her Ladyship provided it for me. Its earliest ancestor has only been on sale for a few months at this time.” He waited to see if that was simple enough.

  It didn’t look like a computer. It didn’t even look like one of those toy Apple computers they gave schoolkids in those days. And I thought computers were supposed to be the fathers of jobs. But what did I know? “Ah. I see. Like, some kind of super-IBM.”

  He said, “That’s correct: a kind of super-IBM,” with such an absolutely straight face that I knew I’d said something funny again. (I later learned that in 2007, IBM would save itself from receivership by subcontracting to supply the on-off switches for this model’s predecessor—but that this one, which didn’t need such a switch, would eventually finish them off. Why that’s funny, maybe a computer person could tell you.)

  To hell with it. Keep on asking questions and don’t stop, and sooner or later you’ll be asking intelligent ones. If you live long enough. “And it can pinpoint the other thirty-three toadstools that accurately?”

  “In combination with certain equipment of my own, with which it is interfaced—excuse me, ‘connected’—it has already done so. It contains the information in incorruptible form, in a series of Ultracard stacks that…in a conveniently manipulable format. The computer subsumes every existing human computer network or database, in much the same way that a Ferrari Testarossa usually includes a good FM radio. By that I mean that you can obtain literally any specific relevant datum that is presently known to mankind, and some which are not, in under a second, with a simple touch of the mouse.”

  I sighed, and straightened a kink out of my neck. “I was hanging on pretty good, right up until that last word,” I said sadly.

  “Oh!” he said. He pointed to the widget. “That input device is called a mouse.”

  “Why?”

  He said, “Because…” and stopped. Then he said, “It’s because…” and stopped. Then he said, “I think it’s…” and stopped again. Finally he frowned and said, “There is no reason.”

  “Got it. Go on.” I felt like Rocky Balboa. I was not going down…

  “I connected the computer with the equipment of mine I told you about yesterday, which detects functional radio receivers. First I made a list of every receiver on the planet. That took under five minutes…although to display the data, at the fastest rate a human could even theoretically comprehend, would have taken hours. Fortunately this was not necessary. I pruned the basic list to those receivers whose characteristic signature indicated that they were underwater, and stationary. That took less than two minutes. Then I summoned up a list of all licensed, legitimate underwater receivers from the FCC and its planetary analogs, and assorted military databases, and subtracted that from my own list. Another five seconds. The remainder I investigated in some detail by diverse means. Altogether it was another hour before I had the last of the mines pinpointed as closely as that one on the screen.”

  “You’re sure you’ve got them all.”

  “I am prepared to state authoritatively that there are no others with radio triggers, underwater or otherwise. Once I knew the characteristics of the enemy’s radio triggers, I searched my original list for any of that type that were not underwater, and found none. But bear in mind that they may have one or more, either underwater or otherwise, that are not radio-triggered. If so, I can presently think of no way to find them.”

  “I can,” I said grimly.

  “Joe,” Arethusa said softly, “isn’t there something in the Geneva Conventions about torturing prisoners?”

  “What if there is? I never signed it,” I said. “And if I had, it seems to me jokers who plant nuclear mines are in a poor position to invoke it.”

  “Perhaps not,” she agreed. “But one day you and I must sit down and work out the moral equation in detail. To save how many lives is it moral to torture one person? Do we double that for two people, and so on? Does it matter if the lives we’re saving are those of people we dislike? Or if the person we’re torturing did not consciously intend harm? This is not a simple question.”

  “In this special case it is. More than six billion lives are at stake.”

  “Far more than that, Ken,” Tesla put in. “The terrorists intend to place six billions at risk. But if they succeed—if they merely succeed in letting the world know that those mines ever existed—they will destroy all those now living, and all those who ever would have lived. I cannot give an upper limit, but from things Lady Sally has let slip in conversation, I believe that exceeds a quadrillion lives…virtually all of them centuries in length.”

  Ever wake up in the morning wondering if there was any purpose to going on? Since that day, I never have again. “If there are any more mines, I’ll find them. Whatever it takes.”

  “Yes, Ken,” Arethusa said. “Uh…now, by the way.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  She glanced at Tesla and colored slightly. “You asked me earlier to let you know whenever…”

  “Oh. Oh! Right. Thanks.” I felt a silly grin on my face.

  There was one on hers too. “It is nice. Sharing it with a third party.”

  “Yes, it is.” Somewhere else in the building, Arethusa had just had an orgasm. I put out telepathic feelers—or tried to—but detected nothing. Well, the circumstances weren’t ideal. And it was still nice sharing the knowledge…

  Tesla cleared his throat gently.

  “Sorry, Nikola. Private matter.” Back to business. “Well, say, this is all good cheese. You’ve done as splendidly as I knew you would: a full quarter of our job is done. I always say, if you’re going to tackle a tough one, try to get the smartest man that ever lived to help.”

  “Thank you, Ken,” Tesla said gravely. Maybe I was among the first ten thousand people to call him that, and maybe I wasn’t. “But why do you say only ‘a quarter’?”

  “Well, the job breaks down into four parts. Find the mines, disarm the mines, find the miners, inform the proper people.”

  “In that case,” he said, “we are half done.”

  I could actually recall a time—less than a week ago!—when surprises were surprising. “Go on.”

  “Once I had located the receivers, it was a simple matter to determine what frequency they were all set to receive—”

  “Hold on a half. There have to be thirty different transmitters, one within radio range of each receiver, right?”

  Tesla shook his head. “They have the capacity to piggy-back on satellite transmission and conventional land lines. One transmitter covers the globe. It is located in Switzerland.”

  “Naturally. Okay, go on.”

  “I identified the pertinent frequency. A good choice, an obscure one.”

  “But you can’t know what the trigger code is.”

  “Unfortunately, no. If their triggering software were a little more sophisticated, I could ask it questions on the order of, ‘What wo
uld you do if I were to do thus-and-so?’ As things are, I dare not. But I do not really need to know the trigger code.”

  “Why not?”

  He looked slightly sheepish. “Here I may have overstepped my authority.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Lady Sally has told me that you are in overall charge—”

  Surprises could still be surprising. “Me? Hell, no! It’s her show; I’m just a consultant. Per diem and expense account. A merc.”

  “She was quite explicit,” he said. “You are in command.”

  Jesus Christ on a bicycle! When I let Lady Sally recruit me, I assumed it was at the rank of buck private. In my wildest dreams, corporal. Commanding officer was one helluva field promotion…

  Well, no time to admire my eagles: the battle was in progress. “I see,” I said, and took three long deep breaths. “Tell me how you overstepped your authority, Nikola.”

  “I could not wake you while you were being rejuvenated. But it did not seem wise to allow things to remain as they were. So I took action. I apologize if I was imprudent. It was a very agonizing decision for me. I hope you will not be angry with me.”

  “Not if you tell me what you did within the next five seconds,” I said carefully.

  “I initiated a broadcast. Perhaps you slept through the brownout last night? Yes. I call your attention to the particular mine there on the screen, the one beneath Pennsylvania Station. Where once there was a radio receiver, now is melted plastic, melted copper, new glass, iron filings, and minor contaminants. The mine is disabled. I can disable the other twenty-nine anytime you wish. So you see, the job is nearly half done.”

  14. Gathering Shadows

  What shall it profit a man if he gaineth the whole world, yet he hath no deductions?

  —EDISON RIPSBORN

  “NEARLY?” I said weakly, trying to get a deep breath.

  Tesla looked troubled. “That mine is disabled…not disarmed. Only the radio trigger is destroyed. Its owners could yet hand-trigger it, by physically going to the site. It would be a suicide mission, of course, but I don’t think that rules it out.”

  “But they have no reason to do so,” I pointed out. “As far as they know, all their mines are safe and ready to go. We’re safe for at least as long as it takes them to push that button and notice how quiet everything is in New York.”

  It was a good thing Tesla didn’t wear glasses; when he frowned like that, those eyebrows would have brushed them right off his face. “Ken, I am forced to assume that the master terrorist—we may as well call him The Miner—is as intelligent as myself. I do not consider this likely, but I must assume it.”

  “I’ll buy that.”

  “I put myself in his place. I propose to blackmail the world into disarmament. One fine day, I announce my threat to the world, as publicly as possible. Of course the world’s governments do not capitulate…so I set off one of my mines, telling them in advance when and in what city I will do so, to prove my control. Then I set off one every forty-eight hours until I get what I want.”

  “I’ll buy that too.”

  “In that case, I wish to be utterly certain that each mine is functioning correctly, will detonate when I tell it to. Malfunction would be embarrassing, and embarrassment is fatal to a bluff.”

  “What bluff? The Miner’s got thirty nukes!”

  “Ken, imagine you are the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I tell you that to retain your job, you must sacrifice four American cities. And a few dozen foreign ones, four of them Soviet. How will you decide? Remember that one of the cities is Los Angeles.”

  The answer was obscene, but undeniable. “I get you. The Miner’s bluff depends on making everyone think he has an unlimited number of nukes, that he can keep on taking out cities until he gets his way. And he’s gambling that neither of the major players will go higher than four cities before folding. Okay, how does that affect our problem?”

  “If I were The Miner, I would have a means of testing my radio receivers at frequent intervals. Some test that would not trigger the bomb, but would give assurance that the trigger was still operational.”

  Trade name for norepinephrine. Common side effects: elevated pulse and temp, buzzing in ears, dry mouth…

  “Nikola,” I said gently, “I’m aware of your feelings on strong language. But if we’re going to keep having conversations like this, sooner or later I’m going to have to say, ‘JESUS CHRIST!’” I shouted the last two words. “Suppose the guy has some kind of continuous failsafe light on every bomb: he may already know something’s wrong!”

  “Since his trigger is radio, his failure warning would be so as well. A hardwired monitor would be a trail to him. None of the thirty mines has broadcast anything since I began observing them.”

  “But they could be set to do so at regular intervals.”

  “I’m sorry, Ken. I said it was a difficult decision. I feared that our enemy might trigger his bombs at any moment. We have no way of being sure he has not already begun blackmailing governments as we speak. Or he could begin with an explosion, to get their attention—and he might well select New York. I reasoned that at a minimum I must preserve the only living humans who know where the mines are.”

  “No, no! I’m not second-guessing the decision: you did what you had to do. But now there’s a clock ticking: we’ve got to move fast.”

  “That is correct,” he agreed.

  “What I don’t understand,” Arethusa said, “is why we have any time at all. You say there’s a bomb planted in every country that’s nuclear-capable. Why hasn’t he acted already?”

  “Damn good question,” I said.

  “Yes it is,” Tesla said. “I can offer two hypotheses. Either there are one or two more marginally nuclear-capable nations left on his list, and he is now busy mining them…or he is waiting for some specific, psychologically appropriate date.”

  That hammer of light hit me between the eyes. I tried not to squint. “August sixth,” I heard myself say.

  Tesla said something in Croatian. Somehow I knew it was the equivalent of “JESUS CHRIST!” “Of course,” he added in English. “How stupid of me.”

  “What’s August sixth?” Arethusa asked.

  “Hiroshima Day. But that’s not important now.” For an instant I had the wild feeling I was Leslie Nielsen in Airplane. “And don’t call me Shirley. The important thing is, how often does The Miner test his receivers?”

  “He has to strike a balance,” Tesla said. “Too frequent broadcasts from a water pipe, even brief ones, might be noticed somewhere, and commented upon. And each test lowers the mean time until failure; if one tests a system too often one risks wearing it out. Assuming a target date no more than months away, I should guess something on the order of once a week would strike him as prudent.”

  I relaxed a trifle; I’d been thinking in terms of daily, or even hourly.

  Come to think of it, I had no assurance at all that he ever tested his receivers. I hadn’t thought of it, and maybe the Miner wasn’t as intelligent as Nikola Tesla.

  I had to assume he was, with stakes like these. But at least I didn’t have to mount a military assault within the next hour.

  Oh, hell—maybe I did have to. His next weekly check could be as much as six days away…but it could be in the next ten minutes.

  Time to start acting like a commanding officer.

  “Does Mary have ears in this room?” I asked.

  Tesla looked puzzled. Arethusa said, “No, Ken. Nowhere on this floor.”

  “Nikola, is there a telephone in here?”

  “What number do you wish?” he asked.

  “Lady Sally! As quickly as possible.”

  He touched his computer. The keyboard stuck out its tongue, to the right. A smaller keypad. A calculator. He pushed numeral one and one other key.

  “Coming, Nikky!” Lady Sally said, sounding as though she were sitting in front of me. A second later, she was.

  I’D half expected it.
And still I was startled. Whatever device she’d used to get here, she was not carrying it on her. We had caught her in the shower; she wore only fragrant suds.

  I wasted seconds staring.

  No, I take that back. I wasted nothing. I spent seconds staring. Clothed, Lady Sally McGee was a very striking woman. Dressed in foam, she was the second most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  “What is it, Ken?” she said.

  “Red alert!” I blurted, forcing my attention back to the war. “I want Pris and…who’s the next best fighter in the House?”

  “Me.”

  “Then I want you,” I said, suppressing my pun generator.

  “And after me, Father Newman. He was Special Forces.”

  “Him too, then. And the Professor and Ralph Von Wau Wau and Cynthia and Tim…and Mike, if he’s available.”

  She closed her eyes briefly. “He is.”

  “Can I have Mary too?”

  “Sorry: she’s out of town on personal business. What equipment do you want?”

  Shoot for the Moon. I gave her my Christmas list. “Walkie-talkies, bulletproof vests, handguns and knives for everybody—laser pistols for anyone checked out on them. I’ve got my own handgun and knife. Ammo. Tear gas grenades would be nice. Binoculars. Enough field rations to last three people at least a week. We’ll be working in teams of three on eight-hour shifts around the clock. And for God’s sake make sure Ralph has a license tag good for Manhattan.”

  “No problem so far,” she said. “But for the pistols, lasers, and tear gas, may I substitute one of these?” There was a weapon in her hand. Don’t ask me where it came from; I don’t want to think about it. And don’t ask me how I knew it was a weapon: it looked like a midget trumpet, with less than normal flaring to the bell and with the three keys placed inside the loop part instead of on the shaft. She didn’t hold it like a firearm or a trumpet: she held it down at her side by the loop part, seemingly upside down, the bell facing in my general direction but not pointed at any one of us. Maybe that was why I was sure that if her fingers were to press upward on those keys in the right way, nastiness would come out the bell.