Good King Sauerkraut (2 page)

He ended up spreading the mail out to dry and in the process found a set of demonstration disks for a new CAD program. The disks, fortunately, were in a sealed plastic container and had been untouched by the deluge. King was just slipping the first disk into the computer to try it out when the phone rang again.

It was his partner, Dennis Cox. “Big doin's, King. How close are you to a stopping point?”

“I'm stopped now.”

“Good. Come on over.” The phone went dead.

King scowled at the receiver. “Lawsy, I have been
summoned
,” he said aloud to the empty laboratory. Dennis claimed he couldn't think in the midst of the clutter of King's lab, so all their meetings had to take place in his office. King resented that. He even resented the resentment; it was a schoolboy reaction to what was nothing more than petty bullying. Game-playing.

But that was what Dennis did best, play games. He'd started in the day they first opened the doors of Keystone Robotics, back when there were three partners instead of just two. The exigencies of the first year of operation had proved too much for partner number three, who quickly began to yearn for the comforting security of a steady paycheck. So when Westinghouse eventually crooked its corporate finger at all three of them, the third partner had gone a-runnin'. If he'd stayed, he'd have been a moderately wealthy man by now, or at least conspicuously upscale. But it was just as well he'd gone, King thought; he hadn't much liked the guy anyway.

So now there were just King Sarcowicz and Dennis Cox, both of them designers of things robotic but with King thinking up most of their new technology while Dennis eased more and more into management. And management had just summoned technology to its office.

King opened the office door without knocking and walked in. “What couldn't wait until Monday?”

Dennis Cox was a good-looking man when he wasn't angry—blue-eyed, blond, and ostentatiously tanned the year round. And he was anything but angry now; he gave King his best cat-swallowed-the-canary smile. “Wait 'til you hear. I've had a call from Warren Osterman at MechoTech in New York. He just got back from Washington … with a pocketful of new DARPA contracts.”

King inhaled sharply. “Well? Do we get the subcontract?”

“Didn't you feel the earth shake? We got it! And from the clues Osterman dropped, I'd say the budget is
ee
-normous.” King let out a whoop. Dennis went on, “He wants us to come to New York next week. All that time I spent sucking up to the old fart finally paid off.”

DARPA contracts weren't exactly the lifeblood of the robotics industry, but they did mean serious money. A great deal of what was new in technology was the direct result of experiments funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, headquartered in the Defense Sciences Office in Arlington; DARPA was always on the lookout for new military applications. “Which project do we get?”

“He wouldn't say over the phone. But what does it matter? Any one of 'em will put us over the top.”

King knew that; it was what they'd been waiting for. The new contracts were for the much-desired, long-awaited automated battlefield. He and Dennis had been consulted time and again by both MechoTech and Washington; the talk was always of various possible robot-controlled superweapons that the Defense Department was itching to get its hands on. MechoTech had been talking not just to Keystone Robotics but to other outfits as well, preparing whatever presentation had eventually convinced DARPA that MechoTech was just the company to raise the mechanizing of warfare to a high art. “The government's been working on the automated battlefield for years,” King mused. “Why are we just now getting in on it?”

“High failure rate. Ruh-ho-botics is the latest to take a header, I'm happy to say.” Dennis was making fun of a rival firm called Rhobotics International, which had underbid Keystone on a couple of past occasions. “Warren Osterman says if we can manage the project he's going to give us, there'll be more work than we can handle until the year 3000.”

The two partners grinned at each other. This was the project that could make them the standard-setters, the ones who determined what “state of the art” meant. The good news made each of them feel more friendly toward the other than either had felt in years. On impulse King stuck out his hand; Dennis laughed and shook it.

“And we don't have to bid on it?” King asked.

“Nope. It's all settled—MechoTech says it's ours. But now the bad news.” He paused, making King wait for it. “Osterman wants those two yups from Silicon Valley on the project with us.”

“Which two yups?”

Dennis took a deep breath. “Gregory Dillard and Mimi Hargrove.”

“Oh,
shit
!” King dragged up a chair and sat down, not noticing Dennis wince when he banged the chair against the desk. “Why those two, for god's sake?”

“Osterman says they write better programs than we do. Look, King, I know you and Mimi don't get along. But on a project this big, you can make the effort not to strangle her, can't you? She and Gregory always work as a team, you know—we've got to take them both.”

King didn't mention that Gregory Dillard had even more reason to stick knives in him than Mimi Hargrove did. “Sure, I can make the effort. But will she?”

“Of course she will. She'd put up with the devil himself to get in on this deal.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Ah, you know what I mean. Besides, we've been having more software problems than usual lately, haven't we?”

King glared at him suspiciously. “You've been pumping Gale Fredericks for information.”

Dennis looked astonished. “I've been reading your goddam
reports
, King! You were the one who insisted we keep each other informed, for crying out loud.”

King didn't remember it that way but let it pass. “We can solve the software problems,” he insisted stubbornly. “We've got good programmers.”

“You're not listening. Warren Osterman has already decided. Mimi and Gregory are part of the package.”

King's skin started itching, a sure sign of people trouble. Hardware trouble he could handle, and even software trouble, given time. But certain people, an embarrassingly large number of certain people, always left him with his nerve ends exposed. Mimi Hargrove and he had locked horns the first time they'd met, at an international robotics congress … and things had stayed downside ever since.

King and Dennis talked a while longer, speculating as to which part of the Defense Department's grand vision of a totally automated battlefield MechoTech was subcontracting to them. Dennis indulged in a little bragging about his contacts in the bigger firm, but King was convinced it was his own work with tactile sensors that had brought Keystone in on the project. By tacit agreement they avoided the subject of the pair from Silicon Valley; they'd had to work with incompatible people before and they could do it again.

Dennis looked at his watch. “I have a date tonight and I need to soak in the tub a while first—my back's killing me. Osterman wants us in New York on Wednesday. Will two days be enough to get Gale set up to handle things while you're away?”

“Should be.”

“Good. We'll take the eight o'clock flight Wednesday morning, then.”

Business concluded, the two partners went their separate ways—Dennis to a night on the town with the latest of the chorus of great-looking women he'd accumulated since his divorce (where did he find them?), and King to …? He climbed into the aging Buick Dennis had told him repeatedly to get rid of. His oniomaniac partner drove a Mercedes 560 SL with a license plate that made King shudder: ROBOT-1. But buying a new car was a lot of effort, and King kept putting it off. The Buick still got him to where he needed to go.

His route home took him through Squirrel Hill, where he stopped at Rhoda's Deli to pick up three dozen eggs and a six-pack of Heineken. King lived in the Shadyside section of Pittsburgh, in a house designed for a large family but which suited King and his clutter very well. Unfortunately, the big house was a lot smaller now than when he'd first moved in; it seemed to shrink a little more each year. As he pulled into the driveway he saw Mrs. Rowe next door peeking out through the curtains. When he looked at her, she pulled back from the window.

King turned off the engine and sat thinking. Now what had he forgotten to do? Mrs. Rowe didn't like to complain when he'd neglected something. She just peeked at him through the curtains; that had come to be his signal. He took his eggs and beer and got out of the car to look around.

Ah. The garbage cans.

Mrs. Rowe was eighty and arthritic; King helped her out with things she couldn't manage on her own whenever he could. He was pretty good about remembering to carry her garbage cans to the curb for collection, but he didn't always remember to bring them back in. Yesterday had been collection day; that meant he'd driven past the empty cans at least three times without seeing them. He hurried to haul them in along with his own. Old Mrs. Rowe had probably been worrying about those cans all day.

A yellow Post-it note was stuck to his front door, written in a round schoolgirlish hand:

Dear Mr. Sarkowiz
,

You forgot to leave the check again. Please remember to mail it tomorrow
.

Sincerely yours
,

Ready-Maid Cleaning Service

King was annoyed—not because they'd misspelled his name (everybody did that), but because they'd left the note out where anyone could see it. But his annoyance evaporated once he'd gone inside. King liked coming home to an empty house. He had enough of people yammering at him all day and demanding immediate decisions and instant solutions and delivery by last Tuesday; the welcoming silence of his home was a great soother-of-jitters. For a time he'd had a cat that met him at the door every night; but King had forgotten to feed him just once too often and the animal deserted him for Mrs. Rowe next door. This embarrassed the old lady. But the cat was still there; King caught a glimpse of him every once in a while.

He opened a beer and scrambled six of the eggs for supper. While he ate he thought about automated mobile weapons and intelligence-gathering devices. Remote piloted vehicles that could go into the field and send back information to a central computer. Mine-planters. Detectors that read seismic disturbances in the ground to deduce number and direction of troop movements. Small, inconspicuous bombs that could drive themselves to a specified target area and then set themselves off. “Smart” bullets. Self-repairing fully automatic tanks, boldly going where no tank has gone before. Battles fought by machines, remote-controlled war.

The idea of a totally automated battlefield had been lovingly nourished by various government agencies for the past thirty years, but of late most of the attention (and money) had gone to missile development. Killing from a safe distance, like David and his slingshot. But when the Strategic Defense Initiative boys had announced their sheltering umbrella would have a few holes in it, that the Star Wars defense could protect only military installations and not cities—then the automated battlefield was suddenly everybody's favorite baby again. The budget, as Dennis Cox had said, must be
ee
-normous. And MechoTech had been handed a major hunk of it.

MechoTech did some design work of its own, but primarily it was a manufacturer that drew upon whatever innovations it could acquire the patents for. Keystone Robotics had dealt with MechoTech before; its president, Warren Osterman, knew their work and was pleased with it. King didn't know Osterman well, but the MechoTech president seemed to be one of those people who always knew things that other people only read about in the papers weeks later. King tended to respect his judgment, and the fact that Osterman had hand-picked Mimi Hargrove and Gregory Dillard to design the software on this new project, whatever it was, made him pause. It was only a few years ago that Mimi and Gregory and three others had broken away from Ashton-Tate Corporation to found SmartSoft in Santa Clara, where they'd quickly established themselves as leaders in the field of robot programming. There was no question that they were good, but King was more than content to have the width of the continent between them and Keystone; why look for trouble?

The first time King ever saw Mimi Hargrove had been in Berlin, a little over six years earlier; that was before she'd teamed up with Gregory Dillard. The occasion was a biannual congress for the exchange of ideas among people who worked in robotics, and Mimi had been delivering a paper about software problems connected with surgical robots. King had spotted what he was sure was a logic flaw in one of her algorithms and had stood up in that packed auditorium to say so. He'd gone on to question a few other things, to which she'd had no immediate answers. Then he'd innocently suggested she test her theories before presenting them and sat down, not realizing he'd offered her the ultimate insult before her fellow professionals. The session eventually ended and the audience started drifting out.

It wasn't until someone stopped by King's seat and asked why he'd “attacked” Mimi that it occurred to him he might have been out of line. To him it was purely an intellectual problem and personalities shouldn't be allowed to enter into it; getting the machines to work right was the important thing, wasn't it?

Dennis Cox, groaning softly in the next seat, had explained it to him. “You remember that scene in
Amadeus
when Mozart takes a simple little tune that Salieri wrote and turns it into something grand? He goes merrily improvising along, totally oblivious to the feelings of the man he's showing up as inferior. Well, you just did something like that to Mimi Hargrove.”

“Good god—I didn't mean that!”

“‘Mean',” Dennis had said wryly, “doesn't count. You're careless with people, King. You humiliated her. You asked her to prove things she couldn't prove without putting in hours at a computer with all of us watching over her shoulder. And then you implied she wasn't even professional enough to test out her solutions before offering them.”