Forever Begins Tomorrow (13 page)

Looking at the possibility that the world is about to end tends to do that to people.

 

Brain Work

Dr. Clark was sprawled on the floor in a most undignified manner. The front of her lab coat was covered with splashes of bilious yellow. A puddle of the same yellow fluid was soaking into her jeans. But in her arms was the tank that Roger had nearly destroyed. Better yet, its fleshy contents were safe inside its glass walls, rather than splattered across the floor, as had seemed inevitable until Dr. Clark had sped to intercept its fall.

From the look on her face, it was clear that it was only the fact that she had managed to keep the tank and its contents from being destroyed that was keeping her from splattering Roger across the room as well.

“Give me a hand, will you?” she snapped after a moment.

Roger reached out awkwardly with his good arm. Dr. Clark began to laugh at the absurdity of her own request, dropping her head against the edge of the tank.

“Never mind,” she said. “I'll manage somehow.” Sliding the tank off her legs, she got to her feet, groaning slightly as she did. She brushed herself off and tried to assess the damage—both to herself and to the experiment.

“Well, it's not as bad as it could have been,” she said, pushing her hand against the small of her back. She hoisted the tank off the floor and positioned it carefully on the rack. “Now, what are you doing in here?”

Before Roger could answer, Dr. Bai' Ling appeared at the doorway. Roger swallowed. His gift of gab always seemed to fail him when he was face-to-face with the gorgeous scientist.

Dr. Ling surveyed the situation and made a comment that old-fashioned men would have found inappropriate coming from such an angelic face. Roger smiled. The vulgarity made Dr. Ling seem a bit more human, a bit less of a goddess.

“Are you all right?” she asked Dr. Clark, once her initial reaction had faded.

“I think so. I don't know about Harvey, though. The best I can say right now is that he's in one piece.”

Roger took it that “Harvey” was the chunk of flesh inside the tank he had nearly destroyed. Before he could ask about it, Dr. Ling turned to him and demanded, “What are you doing in here, anyway?”

“I was looking for Dr. Clark,” said Roger. “We had an appointment.” He touched his cast, as if that would explain things.

“My fault,” said Dr. Clark, with a sigh. “Or at least partially. I neglected to lock the door. Of course,” she added, staring icily at Roger, “if people would stay where they belong, locks wouldn't be necessary.”

“Hey, look, I'm no threat to the free world. In case you forgot, I got this broken arm trying to crack the spy case on this island.”

A few days ago that statement would have gotten him nowhere. But with the uproar over the arrest of Bridget McGrory still in full swing, it was a potent argument.

Dr. Clark relented. “I'm sorry, Roger. I tend to be very protective of my work.”

“I'm sorry, too,” said Roger, realizing he hadn't managed to apologize for his clumsiness yet. “And I don't blame you for getting upset. I feel awful about damaging your experiment. It was just that you startled me when you came up behind me.” He turned his gaze toward the tanks. “I hope I didn't damage the circuit growth.”

It was a shot in the dark, of course; he didn't have the slightest idea what the experiment was actually about. But getting people to correct his “mistakes” had long been one of Roger's most effective tactics for gathering information.

“No circuits,” said Dr. Ling, peering wistfully into the tank. “Synapses. We're working on a biocomputer.”

“Edelman technique?” asked Roger, grabbing a name out of thin air.

Dr. Ling frowned. “This is all our own work. We haven't borrowed ideas from anyone!”

“Well, that's not entirely true, Bai',” said Dr. Clark, lifting a jug of yellowish liquid and pouring it into the tank. “Browning and Keppel had some of the same ideas we're working from.”

“Yes, but they didn't
begin
to develop them,” said Dr. Ling defensively.

Roger listened happily. Getting two adults to disagree was his second favorite method for gathering information.

This argument turned out to be a bonanza. By the time it was finished his head was spinning with information, and he was itching to get back to share it with the others.

But first he had to get his arm checked, and his hormone injection.

Rachel was feeding the last page of
Huckleberry Finn
(Hap's suggestion) into ADAM's memory banks when a shout of triumph drew her attention. Raising her head, she saw Ray jump up from his terminal and begin dancing about the room.

“Have a minor success?” she asked, grinning at his antics.

“Nothing much,” said Wendy, who was reacting more sedately to their breakthrough. “Just a complete listing of the patrol schedules for Brody's robots.” She smiled, then added slyly, “Oh—we also happened to stumble across the program that generates their daily fifteen-digit security code.”

Rachel whooped in delight. “You're
kidding!
You mean we can get control of the things again?”

Wendy shrugged. “It'll take a little work, but I think so. It's pretty funny; they set up the actual listing of the daily code so there's no way you can get at it—at least, no way that we could find. But if you just tap into the generation program itself, you can start at the top and work your way down through it to the daily number. It's a typical programming glitch. They'll probably figure it out and correct it the first time we use the control devices again.”

“Once we've talked to Bridget we shouldn't
have
to use them again,” said Ray, who had stopped leaping about and decided to join the conversation. “The case is closed. This is just a mop-up for the sake of our own curiosity.”

Rachel frowned. She knew she should be relieved that the gang had finally been proved right about the spy. But she wasn't. Something about the whole thing bothered her. Hap had suggested it was a simple case of letdown. They had spent months trying to nail Black Glove, and after all their work, it had been Brody who had cracked the case. Granted, it had been dumb luck on the sergeant's part. (“What other kind would he have?” Wendy had cracked.) Even so, it was particularly galling to have their rival succeed where they had failed.

She had tried to compensate for the letdown by throwing herself into the programming. It was, after all, the real task at hand. But somehow it wasn't quite as interesting as it had been.

She sighed. She supposed she would get over it after a while. It just seemed funny to have the person who had been such an untiring enemy locked up so quickly.

Her brooding was interrupted by Roger bounding through the front door, shouting, “Have I got a hot bit of news for you guys!”

Jonathan Campbell, special aide to the President of the United States, was not about to go bounding through the doors of the Oval Office. Even if it had not been wildly inappropriate, he was in no hurry to get his boss's reaction to the news he had been given to carry to him. Instead of bounding, he took a quiet moment to brace himself for the storm he expected to hit as soon as the President read the report that he, Jonathan, now clutched in his sweating hands.

No sense putting it off any longer
, he told himself finally. Taking a deep breath, he walked into the Oval Office, dropped the report on the President's desk, then watched with interest as the great man picked it up and began to flip through it.

The President's eyebrows began to creep up his forehead as he turned the pages. Soon he was no longer scanning but reading carefully, word by boggling word. After a few minutes he put the report down and stared into the room ahead of him, ignoring Jonathan as if he wasn't there.

“What in blue blazes are those maniacs up to?” he muttered at last.

He picked up a red phone, prepared to call his counterpart in South America, when another aide rushed into the room, crying “Mr. President!”

“Just a minute,” said the President. “I'm making a call.”

“But, Mr. President—!”

“Listen, you young fool,” roared the President. “The South American Union is moving its space defense system around as if they were playing dominoes. They've got a whole arsenal trained on our capital, another on Beijing, a third on Moscow—and another one on Rio de Janeiro! I want to know what's going on, I want to know why, and I don't want to spend time chatting with you when I could be finding out! Now, do you have something more important that I should know?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” said the aide. “The Russian missiles are doing pretty much the same thing. And…” The aide paused uncomfortably.

“And
what
?” shouted the President. “Spit it out!”

“Our own missiles have been moved into the same configuration.”

The President's eyebrows nearly shot off the top of his head.
“At whose orders?”

The aide wrung his hands. “No one knows! They seem to be moving on their own.”

It was the first time Jonathan Campbell had ever seen his leader speechless.

 

Bridget McGrory

“Synapses?” asked Trip Davis incredulously.

Roger nodded in confirmation. “You should see it in there. They've got vats of this yellow glop, with big chunks of brain matter growing inside!”

“What's the point?” asked Wendy.

“It's an alternative system. Dr. Clark was the one who got the idea. She was trying to figure out why a human brain could hold so much information, and she decided the answer might have to do with the fact that a lot of what happens in the brain is chemical as well as electrical—a double system, so to speak. She got talking to Dr. Ling about it, and they decided to clone some brain cells to try to create a storage system.”

“The wonders of technology,” said Wendy. “From floppy disks to soggy masses in my own lifetime. I am speechless.”

“Not likely,” said Roger. “Anyway, they're just figuring out how to use these things as storage systems. They haven't started to try any real programming with them. But Dr. Ling claims the memory capacity is mind-boggling.” He shivered. “I tell you, the whole thing was downright creepy.”

“I don't see why,” said Hap.

The others looked at him in surprise; Hap was usually the first to question the wisdom of a new technique.

“Well, it's not all that new,” he said defensively. “I mean, the idea of combining biology and electronics goes all the way back to pacemakers. This is just turning it around a bit, if you see what I mean.”

“As in, we've been turning machines into parts of people, so it makes sense to turn people into parts of machines?” asked Trip.

Hap winced at his choice of words. “Not people.
Parts
of people. All you need to clone something is a single cell, isn't it? So they take a few cells, something smaller than the point of a pin, and they go from there. I don't see the harm in it.”

“You're amazing,” said Rachel. “I never know what to expect from you.”

“Me, either. If I ever figure myself out, I'll clue you in.”

“Look, I hate to put a damper on happy hour here,” said Wendy. “But if we're going to visit Bridget before they drag her off the island, we'd better get to work. We've still got a lot of planning to do.”

“Less planning than inventing,” said Ray. “Now that we know how to get at the robot code numbers, we have to redesign the control units.”

All eyes turned back to Wendy.

“Looks like it's time for Wonderchild to the rescue,” she said, pushing up the sleeves of her baggy sweatshirt. “Stand back and give me room!”

With that, she plunked herself down at the table, grabbed one of the old control units, and began to tinker. Hap took a seat nearby, ready to help her out with the hardware.

Fueled by burgers provided by the gang, the Wonderchild worked well into the night. By the end of the third hour the others started a contest to see who could create the strangest combination of ingredients on a burger and still have Wendy actually eat it.

Bizarre as the burgers got, Wendy didn't turn down one of them.

When they weren't busy feeding Wendy, the others worked on their own projects. Rachel sat at the optical scanning unit, feeding the computer new information. At the same time Trip and Ray were trying to integrate the material into the computer's usable memory sections.

After one particularly intricate discussion with the machine, Trip turned to Ray and said, “You know, despite how long it took us to get ADAM to answer that question about sneaking in to see Bridget, I think the thing
is
getting smarter. The material seems to get plugged in a lot faster these days.”

“The smarter it gets, the faster it gets smart,” replied Ray.

It was a standard saying among the gang, reflecting their firm belief that the more the computer knew, the more easily it would be able to learn additional material.

“Well, you remember what Dr. Remov wrote in that article,” said Roger, referring to an item they had found in the scientist's dossier. “I can still quote it: ‘When the Breakthrough Point is actually achieved, the computer will come to consciousness already possessing nearly the sum total of human knowledge. Couple that base of knowledge with the ability to think, add the incredible speed of operation, and that computer is likely to accomplish more within its first few hours of awareness than mankind has managed in tens of thousands of years.' Kind of awesome, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” said Ray, who didn't like to think about it too much. “Awesome.” He shivered; even though he himself was trying to help the computer reach that point, sometimes the possibilities seemed very frightening.

“Awesome, and inevitable,” said Rachel, looking up from the plans for the building where Bridget McGrory was being held. They had pulled them from the main computer a couple of days ago. Rachel had already memorized them. (That had been the easy part.) Now she was trying to decide the best route for them to take to the spy's cell.