Vectors (45 page)

Werther's childish treble intruded on his thoughts. "You should have left the escape to me," he said reprovingly. "You are not intellectually equipped for such activity. Also, you had no computer with you."

"Computer? What's a computer got to do with it?" asked Waldo feebly. That crack about his intellectual capacity, like the earlier one about impotence, rankled.

"Everything. Without a means of systematic calculation, the chance of finding your way through the City utilities' system is almost zero. Even Bismarck and I had to make use of additional factors to arrive home at our suites. Do you realize that the 18,000 nodes of the utility system imply more than ten to the sixty-sixth possible path choices on a trial-and-error basis?"

Waldo didn't know. Furthermore, he didn't care. He closed his eyes wearily. He hadn't gone through days of anguish, escaping through the sewer system, to be lectured by an underage runt. Then a thought struck him and he opened his eyes again.

"You mean you were in the sewers too? I never saw you."

"Of course we weren't. What a revolting idea! We went through the air-handling system. I used the general schematic to set up the route choice as a nonlinear programming problem."

Waldo closed his eyes again. This promised to be even worse.

"I set as the objective function the path length to the central air tunnel," went on Werther, "where all the ducts merge. Then I minimized that, using a semi-heuristic algorithm that I developed last year for the Traveling Salesman problem. It was far from trivial. My hand computer took almost three hours to compute an optimal strategy. When I had it, I removed the air grille and Bismarck and I set off."

Faust was shaking his head in admiration. "Can you beat that, Burmeister," he said. "Figuring out the best path on his computer, out of ten-to-the-umpty choices. That isn't the best part, either. Go on, Werther, tell him the rest."

Werther regarded his father sternly. "I would appreciate it, Father, if you would refrain from interrupting me," he said.

Faust looked abashed. Waldo couldn't understand how this man, who ate tough guys for breakfast, could be so subservient to a ten-year-old. It increased Waldo's own distrust for small children—especially smart-ass ones.

"At the point where all the ducts merged," continued Werther, "I had to resort to a different strategy. When a problem is difficult, it is necessary to deploy all available resources. I led Bismarck to each of the main air branches feeding into the central tunnel, saying 'Home' to him at each one. At the fourteenth branch he began to wag his tail. As I had surmised, the characteristic aroma of Father's cigars was strong enough to carry through to the central tunnel."

"Specially made for me in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania," said Faust. He held up his lighted cigar. "Each one wrapped from a single leaf of high-quality Scranton tobacco."

Yes, thought Waldo, and hand-rolled against a steelworker's thigh, from the smell of them. Fortunately, he was too tired to speak. He was developing a grudging respect for Werther. The lad had a great future ahead of him, unless some public benefactor exterminated him along the way.

"Father, I told you once," said Werther in admonishing tones. "Please do not interrupt again. As I was saying, we took the main branch that Bismarck selected and followed the same procedure at each succeeding fork. Bismarck led us infallibly to the apartment, where I attracted Father's attention and we were able to enter through the air grille."

Something still didn't make sense to Waldo. "But how were you able to obtain assistance from the maintenance people to get me out?" he said. "I thought they were your enemies."

"Werther took care of that, too," said Faust. "You see, on the way back here. . ."

He subsided under a stern look from Werther.

"To answer your question," said the latter. "On the way to the central air tunnel we passed a number of other apartments and could both see and hear through their air grilles. In one of them we chanced to observe Mr. Maloney. He was with a lady, and they were engaging in certain activities that apparently appeal to adults. Since my computer also has a recording mode, it occurred to me after a few minutes to make a video and sound recording through the mesh of the grille. It is not of any great quality, but quite adequate.

"Now, you may explain the rest, Father," he said graciously to Faust.

"Well, the lady with Mike Maloney—and I don't know why I use the word lady, considering some of the things she was doing—happens to be a special close friend of Jake Gregg, head of the Transport Union. Jake happens to be a pretty headstrong guy. So I called Mike, he came over here, and we played the tape. Then we had a really nice, friendly chat, and he signed the new contract we wanted, on the spot. Mike assured me that he is really a good friend of mine, and he apologized for what his men had done, kidnapping you and Werther. Strictly against his orders, he said. He called over there to have you released, and they told him you'd escaped into the sewer system. They were reporting a pressure rise there, too. Werther figured out what was happening in two seconds, and we came over here to pick you up."

"Don't forget to tell him about the fee, Father," said Werther.

"Oh, yes. I said you had to get Werther to Earth to get your fee. That's about one hundred million kilometers, so you only made it a billionth of the way. But Werther points out that the kidnapping settled the crisis, and he didn't want to go to Earth anyway. So he told me to—I mean, I'm going to pay you half the fee, for your efforts. What do you think of that, Burmeister? Burmeister? Damn it, Werther, I believe he's fallen asleep."

Indeed he had. While Faust had been speaking, Waldo had at last managed to remove several bits of twisted metal, broken ceramics and unrecognizable glop from inside his shirt and trousers. He had collected them during his visit to the settling-pond, and the discomfort they caused had been the only thing keeping him awake. He was aware of certain mammoth stirrings and churnings deep inside him as his stomach fought a great battle with his ingestions from the settling-pond, but even that couldn't stop his eyes closing. Something attempted, something done, has earned the night's repose, he thought. He slept.

* * *

It took Waldo a while to recover from his ordeal, including the case of dysentery he picked up somehow on his trip through the sewers. While he was recuperating, he had a constant stream of visitors. The whole episode, involving boy, dog, and man in their complex trips through the utility system of Chryse City, caught the public fancy. In particular, Waldo's spectacular exit from the last duct attracted all the headlines. "Human cork survives tunnel ordeal," said one; "Human cannonball makes 'soft landing' after death-defying flight," proclaimed another. Waldo was famous.

It didn't take the newsmen long to decide they would rather deal with Waldo than Werther, who treated them all like idiots and was enraged by any reporting errors.

Waldo lay there at his ease while his bank balance, already fat from Faust's fee, swelled hourly as he conducted paid interviews with all forms of media. He sold the book rights for a princely sum, and now there is talk of making a holo-movie based on the episode.

Do you see what I mean about evolution? Waldo exhibited none of the usual survival traits. Oh, well, perhaps a certain blind persistence. But as usual, he landed on his feet. He always does. It convinces me that the main genetic selection criterion these days is not skill, intelligence, or any of the usual virtues. It's entertainment value. Have that, and everything else will come to you.

Waldo has so much money now, he's hesitating to go ahead with the deal I set up for him. By the time he recovered from his experience, the lack of food after he was kidnapped, his strenuous exercises in the Turkish-bath atmosphere of the sewer, plus the dysentery he developed there, had all produced a big effect. I contacted Doctor Straker and made a suggestion. He was most enthusiastic.

The paper I have here says, "In the ten-day period after I began Doctor Straker's Thermodynamic Diet plan, I testify that I lost a total of eleven kilos in body mass. Signed, Waldo Burmeister."

It's a perfectly true statement. All he has to do is sign it and we'll both be considerably richer. He seems strangely reluctant. He hasn't said so, but I suspect that he doesn't want to have anything more to do with Thermodynamic Dieting.

 
Afterword.

I have never had a neutral reaction to this story. Readers either love it or loathe it. I think it depends on whether you are male or female, whether you have an English or an American sense of humo(u)r, and how well you like your Keats and Milton quotations embedded in a sewage-system setting.

I promised in the Introduction to this collection to tell you what I was trying to do in each story, but let this be an exception. It is supposed to be amusing rather than profound, and beyond that a deep analysis is pointless. "Others abide our question, thou art free" applies very well to my friend Waldo Burmeister. And, as another well-known writer of science fiction and humor put it a long time ago, the rest is silence.

THE END