Smart House (7 page)

Beth made a strangled noise and shook her head. “You’re insane!”

“Then you shoved him in the pool and pushed the button to cover it. He never had a chance! And you had the control computer in your hand. You could go anywhere without any record. He wouldn’t have let anyone else touch it, just you!”

“What do you mean, a control computer? How big was it?” Charlie asked.

“Little. Like a pack of cigarettes.”

“How do you know?” Alexander asked in wonder. “He said he wasn’t going to show anyone until our meeting on Monday.”

Bruce looked at him in contempt. “Everyone knew, you asshole. You think he could resist showing off?”

“I didn’t know,” Milton said slowly, shaking his head. “I don’t think anyone did. It would have come out before now.”

“Neither did I,” Beth said.

Bruce looked from one to another in disbelief. Mad-die was near tears, raising her glass again, her hand trembling visibly. “You all knew,” Bruce said harshly. “Nothing else made any sense. I figured it out and so did all of you. What are you trying to pull off? A frame? It won’t take! She did it! No one else had a reason except her!”

“Did you people tell the police about this little gadget?” Charlie asked blandly.

Alexander shook his head. “I thought I was the only one who knew, and I couldn’t find it later. I didn’t even think of it at the time because Gary was playing the game, same as everyone else. He wouldn’t have used it during the game. He was going to demonstrate it on Monday. The whole house was on a trial run that weekend, a demonstration. Everyone here was a Beta tester for the weekend, even if they didn’t know it. Anyway, that was just a safety device, a backup in case something went wrong, a door stuck or something like that, and nothing did. Go wrong, I mean. I never gave it a thought until later.”

Charlie said easily, “I wonder if you would mind giving Constance and me a guided tour, explain things about the house as we go, since you’re the one with the most complete knowledge of what it can and can’t do.”

Alexander moistened his lips, glanced at Bruce, at Milton, back to Charlie, and nodded.

Bruce glared at the others in the room, then stamped out, yelling over his shoulder, “Any hacker in the world would have figured out that he had such a device. You all knew!”

They started in the lowest level—computer laboratories, offices, the playroom with billiards, pool, and arcade games, and finally the showroom with the glass case that had held the toy weapons used in the game. Charlie gazed at it with brooding eyes. The case was empty now.

“How did it work?” he asked finally. “Beth said it wouldn’t open unless you were due a weapon, and then it thanked you by name. How?”

Alexander shifted uncomfortably and mumbled, “By visual identification and the original visual scan at the entrance, and the weight of the object itself. It was pretty good, but not perfect, not yet. We were still working on it.”

“So I approach the case and I’m recognized by the computer.” At Alexander’s nod, Charlie moved to the case and stopped. “I could open the top now?”

Alexander went to his side and pointed toward the ceiling. “There’s a scanner up there, and one on this side,” he said. Neither showed even though he was directing Charlie’s attention to them. “It’s up there,” he said. “And outside the bedroom doors, and the front door, and at the gate. By the time you get inside the house there are two pictures of you, and at the front door and the bedroom door your weight is registered. The carpet runners in the halls are wired, of course, but not the interiors of any rooms, except the elevator. After that it’s a matter of matching data, that’s all.”

“The toy weapons were on a scale of some sort?”

Alexander nodded. “They were registered by number, and as soon as one was lifted, it was recorded. Then the case wouldn’t open again until someone else tried, or you registered a kill and could take another weapon. That part was simple.”

Charlie and Constance exchanged glances. Hers said,
Simple as any magic.

As Alexander led them through the corridor, Constance asked almost meekly, “What’s a Beta tester?”

Alexander looked at her suspiciously, as if he thought she was teasing him. “End user tests,” he mumbled. “Someone who’s not supposed to know how the program works, just if it does.”

She nodded gravely. The next room they entered was Gary’s former office and laboratory. A maze of wiring, computers without cases, some wholly encased, test boards, extra keyboards, disk drives, and monitors appeared arranged haphazardly, but obviously there had to be a method, Charlie assumed, without being able to discern it. On the back wall were shelves, a filing cabinet, a workbench with what looked like more testing equipment…

“What’s behind that wall?” he asked after surveying the room a few moments.

“A fruit cellar. You can get to it from the pantry upstairs.”

“Onward,” Charlie muttered. “I want to see how the vacuum system works in the elevator.”

Alexander explained that it was simplicity itself, one of the best features of the house, as far as marketing was concerned. The units fitted into the walls of every room. Each room had a control, or they could be put on a timer, individually or as a complete system. He touched the control button, a small bar under the musical staff that had looked merely decorative. At his touch the back panel detached itself and slid to the floor on casters that were hidden by the body of the machine. The whole unit was only a few inches high, about twelve inches by sixteen; the top was the same material as the elevator walls, a pastel blue plastic with a soft sheen. It began to move along the floor of the elevator; when it reached the end of the wall, it made a right-angled turn, continued, and repeated this at the next corner, humming softly.

On the wall that had housed it were two strips of metal to guide it back into place, and a round hole. Charlie nodded toward the housing. “It’s emptied there?”

Alexander reached down and picked up the humming vacuum cleaner and turned it over. It stopped its operation. There was a brush visible, and the four ball-bearing type wheels, and a round hole for the dirt to enter. Part of the mechanism was hidden by a metal plate. “See,” Alexander said, pointing. “When it’s cleaning, this hole is opened; the cover slides over it to expose the other one when it’s in place to be emptied into the system. Here are the air vents to assist the suction phase.”

The vents were almost invisible along the metal strips that edged the machine on both sides. Charlie studied the whole machine dubiously. “They actually think enough air could have been pulled through there to cause anoxia?”

Alexander put it down and touched the bar button again. The vacuum moved silently to the wall and slid back into place. The humming increased for a few seconds and then died out.

“That’s how it should work,” he said. “They had people measure the elevator and calculate the cubic feet of airspace and how much air can be pumped out in a minute, all that, and they said it could have happened, if the machine malfunctioned.”

“And the man simply waited and died.”

“They said that’s what happened.”

“You don’t agree, I take it.”

Alexander Randall bit his thumbnail and shifted on his feet, glanced at Constance, at Charlie, at the vacuum cleaner, and back at his thumb. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

“Okay. Can we get to the back of the elevator, the pipes, whatever?”

He looked relieved. “Sure. Best way is through the heating plant.” They went back through the game room to the other side of the basement, into another large area.

They passed an oil-burning furnace, an equally large air conditioner, other oversized machines. There were rows of tanks on one side of the wall, with pipes from them vanishing behind panels. Chlorine, algaecide, other pool chemicals, carbon dioxide.

Charlie looked from the last tank to Alexander. “What’s that for?”

“The root cellar, cold storage for apples, grapes, things like that. Carbon dioxide helps keep them longer. And some goes to the greenhouse. One part per thousand increase raises the yield by some incredible number. I don’t know much about that. Rich knew, and there’s a horticulturist working on the greenhouse.”

Charlie’s expression was murderous. “A man dies of anoxia, you have tanks of carbon dioxide handy, and no one thinks to mention it! Why not?”

“The police tried to make a connection and couldn’t,” Alexander said, his nervousness making his voice almost shrill. “No one could see how it got from here to the elevator, or anywhere else. There’s no way.”

“I bet. Where do the pipes go?”

Alexander led them from the room into a narrow passage between the back of the house and the concrete wall of the swimming pool. The wall was a maze of pipes and ducts. The carbon dioxide pipe was thin stainless steel tubing near the top. In the center of the passage a steep flight of stairs went up; the pipes continued straight ahead. The largest duct stopped at the back of the elevator wall; other pipes went on through the end of the passageway.

“And that?” Charlie said, pointing to the end. “What’s behind there?”

“The cold-storage room. You can’t get to it from down here, only from the pantry off the kitchen.”

Charlie examined the tubing again and could find no way the gas could have got from it to the elevator. It was unbroken, without a valve, without a seam. He turned and led the way now, up the narrow, steep stairs that took them to the back of the house near an entrance to the rear garden. Opposite the stairs was the door to the Jacuzzi room.

The whirlpool was ten feet long, six feet wide. There was a taut plastic cover over it, a roller at one end, grooves along the sides where the plastic cover was secured.

“Open it,” Charlie ordered, and watched the unhappy young man go to the wall with a control panel. He touched a button and the cover slid back, rolled itself up, and vanished.

“Close it again.” Charlie grunted, his eyes narrow as he watched the cover slide over the pool. Although it moved fast, it was not fast enough to keep anyone in who wanted out. But once in place, it would be almost impossible for anyone under it to move the cover out of the way. Less than an inch of space separated the cover and the surface of the water. He looked closely at the groove and tested the cover, and finally said with a scowl, “Let’s move on.”

“The cold-storage room?” Alexander asked. He had started to chew on the other thumbnail. The rest of his nails were bitten to the quick.

“Naturally.” Charlie took Constance’s hand and squeezed it a little, reassuringly, he hoped. She had not said a word since their tour started, but she had seen everything he had, he knew, and later they would talk about it, compare notes. Her hand was cool in his.

They passed a dressing room and a lavatory, then found themselves in the corridor by the elevator doors again. Another hall led to an outside door. Alexander went down that one. Near the end of this passage there were doors on both sides, one to the kitchen, one to the pantry, which he opened. Just inside the pantry was another very heavy, insulated door. A draft of cold air flowed from below when he opened this one.

“It’s really a refrigerator,” Alexander said, leading the way down. “Gary called it a root cellar, but it’s a refrigerator.”

It was like entering an ice cave. The room was so heavily insulated that no sound penetrated; the walls were stainless steel, the floor plastic. Bins lined one wall, shelves the other. Two fluorescent ceiling fixtures cast a bluish light. Constance shivered and hugged her arms about herself. At the far end of the room were two stainless steel carts on wheels and another door, this one only about five feet high. Charlie spotted the steel tubing; it dipped down in this room and went behind the bins.

“Explain all this,” he said brusquely, waving at the bins, the other door, the room in general.

“It’s Rich’s experiment,” Alexander said. “The room is a low-oxygen, high-C02 environment. Not dangerous,” he added hastily. “Fifteen percent oxygen, one percent carbon dioxide, it won’t hurt you, at least not very fast. The bins are meant to hold special produce—grapes, pears, whatever, each in its own environment most ideally suited for long keeping. The bins are airtight, and the carbon dioxide mixture is controlled by the computer.”

Charlie reached for one of the bins, and Alexander caught his arm.

“Don’t do that. Look.” There was a panel with symbols that meant nothing to Charlie. “That says this bin has a concentration of twelve percent carbon dioxide, and the temperature is forty-two. You don’t want to open it until you exhaust the gas, you see.”

Charlie examined other bins with other panels, all slightly different, all containing carbon dioxide. He pointed at the end door. “And that?”

“A dumbwaiter up to the pantry. The idea is that you can hang a side of beef down here, or bushels of fruits, stuff too heavy to lug down the stairs. So there’s a dumbwaiter.”

Charlie was looking at him with incredulity. “I hope we can open that,” he said.

“Oh, sure. I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Meiklejohn. I really do. But the police swarmed over this room and the bins and everything, and they couldn’t figure out a way to make it add up. Look, this bin is empty.” He pulled it open. It was about two feet deep and just as wide, narrowing at the bottom. He closed it again and went to the back of the room and opened the door to the dumbwaiter, a stainless steel box, two by three feet, about five feet high. The control here was simple: one black button for up, one for down. There was a bar handle on the outside of the door; the inside space was completely smooth without controls or handle.

Charlie was glaring at Alexander by now. “Let’s have a look at it from upstairs,” he growled. They left the cold-storage room gladly. Constance was shivering, and Charlie felt chilled through and through. The dumbwaiter in the pantry was behind another insulated door, and there were two control buttons on the wall. Alexander started to reach for one and Charlie shook his head. “In a second.” He pulled the door open and examined the space. There were vents in the ceiling of the enclosure. He looked at Alexander questioningly.