The Free Lunch Read online

  He remembered a chart he had seen in one of the master manuals. If he had it right, a big ventilation tunnel went right past that area on its way to the outside world. He changed the computer display, checked the relevant chart, and found that not only did the tunnel pass within twenty meters of those ATMs, there was an inspection and maintenance access hatch at just that point.

  “Find a good spot?” Annie asked.

  “I think so. If you can get to it.” He showed her what he had in mind.

  She understood at once. “Good. We can make that work. But you’re going to do it, not me.”

  “I am?” His pulse went up even further.

  “Pay attention: here’s the plan. First, we costume you and make you up to look like an adult little person, like me. You’re a midget who works as a tunnel rat, got it?” He nodded. “Then we send you down that tunnel, wearing your new Command Band—” He began to object, but she overrode him. “I know, you don’t know how to use it yet—but I do. We’ll insert you at a point where all you’ll have to do is go straight ahead until you get my signal.” He nodded again. “When you reach that hatch, your band will blink white three times. Then you wait.”

  “How long?”

  “That’ll depend on what’s waiting for you outside that hatch,” she said. “I’ll be monitoring the area from here. If we get you down there fast enough, and there’s still only the one guard to worry about, it won’t be any time at all. But if other people start wandering through leaving work early, or other guards show up, I might have to wait for just the right moment. Whenever it comes, your band will blink red three times—and on the third blink, an electrical panel behind that guard is going to fail, in a gaudy and spectacular way. Hit that hatch release the instant you see the third blink, and you should be able to make it to the booth while his back is turned. Understand?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you do it?”

  He reviewed it in his mind. “Sure.”

  “Good man. Let’s get you made-up.”

  Annie worked fast. It took her less than five minutes to alter a maintenance uniform until it appeared to fit him, and another two to alter his features until he appeared to fit the uniform. She would not let him talk during the process. Soon Mike blinked at himself in the bathroom mirror, and by God, he was a grown-up midget. “They have little people working in those tunnels?”

  “Sure. And other tight spots in and under Dreamworld. Most of them are friends or relatives of Cast who can’t act worth a damn, or just aren’t pleasant-natured enough. That’s why I’m guiding you with blinking lights instead of audible directions. You may run into one or two real tunnel rats on your way.”

  “Shit—what then?”

  “You either bluff or hide. I recommend hide.”

  “Hide where?”

  “A branch tunnel, if there’s one near. If not, wherever you can. There’s machinery all along the length of that tunnel: impellers, precipitators, scrubbers, ionization units, fire-fighting gear, lots of things to condition all that air. Be creative. And if you have to bluff, remember to deepen your voice and say as little as possible.”

  “Okay.”

  “All right. Are you ready?”

  “Well…two more things,” he said reluctantly.

  “If they’re quick: we’re running out of minutes.”

  “What am I supposed to do once I get into the ATM?”

  For a moment she froze, expressionless…and then she burst out laughing. “Oh, that.”

  He grinned himself, in relief. He had not known many grown-ups who could laugh at themselves.

  “I beg your pardon, Mike. First signs of senility setting in. What you do is count how many people clock out this afternoon.” She took a pair of clickers from a drawer and gave them to him. “I need two counts: total employees, and total Trolls—can you handle that?” He nodded and tucked a clicker in each shirt pocket. “I need both as accurate as possible, so you can’t take your eyes off those turnstiles for a second, okay? They should all be through in twenty minutes or so; you’ll know it’s over when they go back to just one guard again.”

  “What do I do then? Wait for another panel failure and run for the tunnel?”

  “No. You just leave the ATM and walk away, bold as brass. You make like you just came on shift a few minutes ago, and head back inside to The China That Never Was. You know how to get back here from there, we did it yesterday.”

  “Sure. But Annie? If all you want to do is count little people going off shift…why not do it from here, over that camera, both of us? We could play it back to check our count—I mean, why?”

  She nodded. “Fair and intelligent question: is this trip necessary? I think so. Mike, cameras can be fooled, easily and cheaply. So can eyeballs, you know that now…but it’s difficult and expensive, so people generally only bother to fool the eyeballs they expect to be looking. I need that count as accurate as possible.”

  “Who’s trying to fool us? What’s going on?”

  She glanced at her wrist and grimaced with exasperation. “Mike, we’re out of minutes. I’ll tell you as much as I know myself when you get back, I promise. Do you trust me?”

  “Of course,” he said at once.

  She blinked. “All right, then. Something wrong is going on in Dreamworld. I don’t know what. I need you to help me find out. Will that do for now?”

  “Let’s go.”

  She grinned. “Good man. Come on, I’ll take you to the best spot to enter that tunnel.”

  Outside the access hatch she had him repeat back his directions and instructions. “Don’t jump the gun. Those last three red blinks may never come. If there are too many eyes around by the time you’re in position, we’ll have to abort and try again when the night shift leaves. In that case you just retrace your steps back to here again.”

  “Through the tunnel? Couldn’t we just wait until it’s back down to one guard again, and then…no, I get it. Then you wouldn’t be able to use the same gimmick again when we try tonight, to get me out of the tunnel again. It’d look funny.”

  She was looking at him oddly. “Mike?”

  “Yes, Annie?”

  “If anything goes wrong, I will get you out of it. If I have to bust you out of a Security holding cell. Do you understand?”

  “Sure.”

  She frowned ferociously. “Well, go on, then. Don’t take dumb chances.” She opened the access hatch, and air escaped with a chuff.

  “I won’t,” he said, and entered the tunnel. He heard her say, “Good luck, boy,” and the hatch closed.

  THE TUNNEL CEILING was just high enough for him to stand upright; an adult of normal height would have had to walk stooped over.

  He walked into a constant stiff breeze. It had no odor, no temperature, and kept whispering nonsense, gently but insistently. Lights every ten meters or so gave adequate illumination. The walking was tricky at first. There was no flat flooring to the tunnel; it curved up on either side, and he found he had to keep exactly on the centerline as he walked, or he ended up veering all over the place. There was indeed gadgets and gizmos and widgets of all kinds and sizes installed every hundred meters or so along the length of the tunnel, and he could see that some of them did offer shadowy places of potential concealment; he started keeping track of how often those came along. At irregular intervals he came to places where branching tunnels departed; most often they were half the size of this one, less than a meter in diameter.

  It came to him all of a sudden that he was enjoying himself.

  Then he heard the approaching voices ahead.

  He took hasty inventory. The nearest full-sized intersecting tunnel was about fifty meters farther ahead, toward the voices—indeed it must be where they were coming from, since nobody was visible straight ahead for a long way. The nearest full-sized tunnel behind him was way behind—long before he could reach it, the maintenance crew would have entered this tunnel and seen him. That left two possible places of concealment: a small
tunnel, just beside him on his left, and a large piece of hardware about halfway between him and the cross-tunnel the voices were coming from.

  He squatted and stared down the small side tunnel. More of a tube than a tunnel. It ran straight as a die for several hundred meters until it reached another large tunnel parallel to this one, and was absolutely devoid of machinery or cover of any sort. He could fit into it easily, crawl on all fours without difficulty…but if anyone happened to glance into it as they walked past, they could hardly miss him.

  The voices were getting closer. A man and a woman. He straightened and sprinted toward them, hampered by the need to avoid scuffling his feet.

  The big gadget, whatever it was, was about the size of a desk. Mike noticed a mark chalked on the wall above it, one he almost recognized—a capital letter Q with an arrow through it—but most of his attention went to a lovely recess on this side of the gadget, a splendid recess, a shamelessly shadowy recess that was, in Mike’s hasty estimation, just large enough for him to fold himself into.

  But as he began to try, his nose warned him. The harsh bright stink of burnt wiring. The maintenance crew were coming here…

  Oh shit oh shit oh shit…

  Mike’s life had prepared him to accept what could not be helped. Without hesitation, he spun on his heel and made for the small tunnel. It was not possible to be both fast and quiet, and neither was optional. He did his best, flung himself halfway into the hole without looking back to see if he was in time, and humped himself the rest of the way inside in a single convulsive wormlike movement. Then he froze, like a Mobile Infantryman in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, controlling his breathing with an effort that made his head swim.

  Behind him, in the main tunnel, a male voice said, “Hell was that?” He had the high voice of a dwarf.

  “Come on, cut it out,” said a female voice. “I’m not buying it. Do I really look that gullible?”

  “She’s real, okay?” The man sounded offended.

  “I didn’t hear a thing, and neither did you.”

  “Well…maybe not. I don’t hear it now. But Goddamn it, the Mother Elf is real.”

  “You know, Max, you don’t look like a druggie.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t look like a jerk. It’s this one here.”

  “How the hell do you know? Oh, what, because of that? Anybody could have done that.”

  “It’s this one.” There were sounds of metal being tapped. Somehow the sound was easier to localize than voices, and it helped Mike confirm that the two mechanics were in fact at the housing he’d almost chosen to hide within. If he hadn’t been in freeze, he’d have sighed with relief.

  “This is the one, all right,” the woman conceded reluctantly. “Arced all to hell.”

  “Hold the light.”

  “Let me get it,” the woman said. “I got the spare thing right here, all ready to go.”

  There was a clattering sound.

  “Hey!”

  “Listen to me,” the man said heatedly. Then he was silent for some time, choosing his words. “While you’re workin’ with me, as long as you don’t believe in her, you get to hold the Got-damn light. If you don’t like it, file a beef with the shift supervisor and see what she says. Is that understood?”

  The woman paused for nearly as long as the man had. “Max, come on. A phantom fixer? An invisible magic midget that watches over Dreamworld and fixes our mistakes? Everybody has to believe that to work here? Give me a break.”

  “To work with me,” he corrected. “Other people…” He grunted. “That’s between you and them. You’ll find out. Now hold the Got-damn light higher.”

  “Where does she sleep, Max? A flea couldn’t hide in this place overnight. Hell, we got over a hundred ghosts in the joint, and they’re all accounted for, every night. No wait, I get it: she just beams back up to the mother ship—”

  “Amparo.”

  He said it very softly, so softly that even from a few meters distance Mike almost missed it amid the sound of her talking…but she shut up in midsentence.

  “One more word and you can give me the light. And get your ass back to the shop. You aren’t screwin’ up my luck—we clear on that?”

  Silence.

  After that, there were tool sounds, and barked-knuckle noises, but not another word was spoken by either mechanic until, an endless time later, there came the blessed gentle hum of the whatever-it-was powering back up. Then there was a pause, and she said “Well,” and another pause, and he said, “I don’t think you’re gonna make it around here,” and a third pause, and then finally Mike heard them both walking. Away. Away from him, back in the direction they’d come from.

  He waited until he couldn’t hear their footsteps anymore. At last he relaxed his rigid muscles, allowed himself a long noisy sigh, and squirmed backward out of the coffinlike tube. Max and Amparo were gone.

  He wanted to stay where he was. He wanted to go back the way he’d come. But he knew time was short: shift change was coming. And Annie was watching him from back at her place.

  He moved forward as quickly as he dared.

  As he went past the machine he’d almost hidden behind, he noticed that one of the mechanics had left a candy bar on top of it. He was tempted to swipe it, but decided it would be stupid: when they came back and found it missing they would know someone else had been here, and there couldn’t be very many people who were supposed to be.

  He also noticed that the chalk mark on the wall was now erased.

  From that point onward, everything went exactly as planned. As far as he could tell, nobody spotted him leaving the tunnel; nobody challenged him while he was in the ATM; he had no trouble getting what he was sure were accurate counts of both total employees and Trolls; he left the ATM booth unremarked and made it back to Annie’s without incident.

  GOOD WORK, MIKE, were her first words.

  Now that it was over, he was fiercely proud of himself. Not to miss counting a single departing employee had been a challenge for him. “Thanks, Annie.”

  “What are your counts?”

  He told her, and she frowned. “You’re sure you didn’t count anybody twice?”

  “Positive,” he said happily. Then, “Why? What’s wrong?”

  She was silent for so long he was about to ask again. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “But now I’m sure something is wrong.”

  “Why?”

  “Because six more Trolls just went off shift than came on shift eight hours ago. And I think it’s been going on for days. Maybe longer.”

  “Huh? I mean, how can that be?”

  She sighed deeply. “Mike, I haven’t the faintest idea. Yesterday I happened to see a Troll I didn’t recognize leaving the place. I found him on the orbital scan—you saw me—and confirmed that he’s not on the personnel roster. Then I searched the entire departing crew…and found five more ringers. I pulled up yesterday’s scans—as far back as I can go without leaving a spoor—and got the same result: six shills. And I haven’t been able to ID any of them through public records. They seem to be nonpersons.”

  “How can that be?” Mike asked again.

  Four or five questions later he realized she was not going to say anything more to him that night. Eventually he went back to the book he’d been reading.

  C H A P T E R 7

  DEBUGGING DREAMWORLD

  The next morning after breakfast, Annie cleared away the table and said, “We are now going to hold a conference of war.”

  “War on who?”

  She nodded. “Exactly.”

  Mike must have looked as confused as he felt.

  Annie sighed. “This is my home, Mike. Somebody is messing around with it. I won’t tolerate that. I have to find out who’s doing it, what they’re doing, and why, and then stop them.”

  “Just because too many Trolls left yesterday?”

  She gave him a withering look. “They keep close track of numbers around here. First, to make sure there are no los
t or hurt or, God forbid, snatched children. And second, to catch people like you, trying to sneak Under, or even just to sneak in for the day without paying admission. Posing as an employee is a standard tactic, so they monitor staff just as closely. Alarm bells should be going off…and they’re not.”

  Mike was scandalized at the notion that anyone would try to sneak in for free, for a single day. To want to live in Dreamworld he could understand—but to cheat it? The thought was intolerable; he turned his mind away from it. “Maybe they’re slipping in inspectors, like, to check up on the rest of the staff?”

  “I’ve checked Security’s and Management’s files. No, there’s something funny going on.”

  “But what? Why?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m worried. But ‘when you have eliminated the impossible…’”

  “‘…whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth,’” he finished the quote. “Sherlock Holmes.”

  She smiled for some reason. “You’ve got it,” she agreed. “Weird as it seems, more people are leaving the grounds than are entering.”

  “How?” Mike asked again.

  Again, she nodded as if he had said something intelligent. “Exactly. That’s our only angle of attack. If we figure out how they’re doing it, perhaps that will give us a line on who it is.”

  “Have you got anybody in mind?” Mike asked. “Any suspects?”

  “One,” she said, “but I don’t understand what he’d expect to gain—and he never does anything unless he expects to gain.”