Fugitive From Asteron (21 page)

I glanced at my watch as I walked
across the parking lot to the executive office building. At five o’clock in the
morning, I figured it was still early enough to perform my task without
unwanted company. My security pass opened the entrance door. To remain unseen
by anyone who might be in the building, I avoided the elevator and took a
staircase up to Charles Merrett’s office.

The door was locked that led to the
outer reception area where his assistant, Margaret, worked. There was no keypad
there to try the code I knew for the inner office, and I had no way of getting
in. Then I remembered the conference room that was part of Dr. Merrett’s inner office
space. It also had a door to the hallway, the next one down the corridor. I
glanced at it and saw that it did indeed have an electronic keypad, similar to
the one on the other side of Dr. Merrett’s inner office. Would the code I knew
for the keypad entry through the reception area also work on this side of the
inner office, through the conference room? I tried it, and the door opened. I
walked in quietly and closed the door behind me.

In a moment I was sitting at Dr.
Merrett’s desk and starting his computer. Every sound reverberated in the
stillness—from my chair swiveling to the computer starting to my pin drive sliding
into a port on his terminal. I muted the computer so that it would communicate
with me through written words, not speech. That way I could remain as silent as
possible. I paused to listen but heard no sounds in the outer hallway. I glanced
outside the window but saw no one entering the parking lot or walking toward
the building at this early hour.

Soon the fancy graphic for Code
Cracker came up on the monitor, announcing that the program was installing on
Dr. Merrett’s computer. I followed the prompts, activated functions, and set
the program’s powerful algorithms into motion scanning the hundreds of millions
of possibilities to find the one combination of letters, numbers, and symbols
that would allow me to discover the terminal’s contents.

Like a safe cracker of old times,
patiently turning the dial to find the right combination and release the
tumbler, Code Cracker took time. While the program was engaged, I stared at the
empty box on the screen labeled Password. If the cracking was successful, a
password would appear in that box. I waited. Every noise seemed magnified in
the stillness. A car door slammed outside in the parking lot, and then two
people walked across the front of the building. I heard a clamoring that
startled me, but then I realized it was a robot moving through the hallway. I
glanced at my watch. At five-thirty in the morning, I did not have much time
left.

Finally, the small box on the
monitor filled with a password. I committed it to memory and attempted entry.
Success!

I did a search for Project Z, but
nothing came up. Could the data I sought be intentionally hidden from a search?
This meant I would have to probe the complex array of databases and files on
the computer. I saw various directories and was able to enter them. There I
found multiple layers of subdivisions. I dug deeper, opening some of the folders
that looked promising. I encountered a wide range of information on the
company’s business—a prototype of a new plane, designs for a space station,
financial reports, departmental reports, agreements to manufacture various
types of products to customers—but I found nothing that resembled the project I
sought.

With my hands perspiring onto the
keyboard, I raced against time. Finally, in a remote folder buried several
layers within a database innocuously labeled “Notes,” there it was. I found a
directory named, simply, Z.

My heart speeded in anticipation. I
selected the database named Z and waited for it to open. Soon I would see
before me the files of Project Z. At last I would be enlightened about the one
thing I must understand.

But unlike the other directories,
this one was not opening. Instead, a window appeared on my monitor, requiring
that I enter an additional code word to access the folder. I knew there was no function
in Code Cracker to find additional codes beyond the password into the computer.
On the remote chance it might work, I tried Dr. Merrett’s password, but it was,
predictably, rejected. Remembering how close Kristin was to her father, I tried
her birthday followed by her name as a code, then her name followed by her
birthday—but these wild guesses were immediately rejected. After these
rejections, as a security measure, I was prevented from making another try
during this session.

Stymied, I pondered the matter but
came up with no solution. I would
not
unlock the secret of Project Z
after all! The mystery that enveloped my life and involved Kristin, her father,
MAS, and—by his having one of the project’s special suits—Feran would remain
unsolved for me.

I had been at my task for two
hours. By now, people were arriving for work. I saw several vehicles park in the
lot. I heard doors opening and voices outside in the hallway. I nervously
glanced out the front window to see someone walking toward the entrance. It was
Margaret.

I quickly deleted all trace of the Code
Cracker files and turned off Dr. Merrett’s computer. Just as I heard the door
to the reception area opening, I made a dash for the conference room door, and
then slipped out into the hallway and down the stairwell.

Chapter 16

Later that morning I sat in a classroom, staring at a board
filled with equations on the atmospheric science of planets. As I waited for
class to begin, I tried to figure out how to rid my own mental atmosphere of
the two pollutants poisoning it—Feran’s spies. A reprieve came when the air suddenly
filled with the scent of Kristin’s perfume. She sat next to me, the whole of
our special moments reflected on her expressive face. I had to strain to return
a similar glance because my encounter with Feran’s spies had drained me of all
feeling that could be called romantic.

Kristin whispered excitedly that
she had arranged for me to meet her father at five o’clock that afternoon. “I
told my dad that I wanted him to meet my
boyfriend
. I figured that
would get his attention,” she explained.

At the scheduled time, I arrived at
the executive office building to find Kristin holding a small bundle of blooms
to take to her father. “You’ll forgive him if he’s preoccupied, won’t you,
Alex? He’s been so upset since he canceled Project Z.”

We arrived on the third floor and
entered Dr. Merrett’s reception area, where Margaret was working at her desk.
“You just missed him, Kristin,” she said regretfully, raising her head toward
the open door of Dr. Merrett’s inner office. “He just left.”

“I’m sure he’ll be right back,
Alex,” Kristin said hopefully. “He never misses an appointment with me.”

The three of us turned toward the
hallway door where the sound of a low, humming motor was approaching us.
Gliding into the room on bristled feet that vacuumed the floor as they moved
was a tall, slim, cylindrical robot with eight arms, large pockets containing
cleaning supplies in the midsection, a head with a humanlike face of pliable
material whose mouth curved up in a smile, and a name painted onto his chest:
Dustin.

“Good afternoon, folks,” Dustin
said through moving lips, as he swiveled his head and shuffled into Dr.
Merrett’s inner office. The cheerful electronic janitor wore a baseball cap on
his head that read: “Clean Team.”

“Who called Dustin in?” asked
Kristin.

“I did,” Margaret replied.

“But I have an appointment with my
dad.”

“He said he was leaving for the day
just five minutes ago,” said Margaret.

“But he made an
appointment
with me. He never forgets that!”

Margaret pressed an icon on her monitor,
and a calendar appeared on the screen. “I have no record of it, dear. If he
made an appointment to see you, it didn’t get on his calendar. I’m sorry, Kris,
but I’m sure he’s not coming back.”

Kristin’s face fell. “Alex, I
apologize.” Her voice was heavy with disappointment. “Maybe we can catch him at
home. Over the weekend might be a good time.”

“Okay,” I said.
If I am still
living by then,
I thought.

“While I’m here, I’d like to leave
these flowers, Margaret.”

“Sure, Kris.”

“Alex, I’ll just be a minute, if
you’d like to wait.”

I nodded that I would, as Kristin
skirted around the industrious Dustin to remove the vase of flowers she had
brought her father earlier that week. “I’ll throw these out in the kitchen and
get some fresh water,” she explained.

With Margaret resuming her work and
Kristin down the hall in the kitchen, I leaned against a windowsill in the reception
area, watching Dustin plunge into his cleaning routine. One arm wiped the desk,
another emptied the wastebasket into a shredder inside his chest, a third sprayed
a cleaner on the window, and a fourth wiped it with a towel.

When Kristin returned, she sat in
the reception area, arranging the flowers. She and Margaret conversed without
engaging me, so I turned my attention back to Dr. Merrett’s office. Dustin was
gently wiping the computer screen with a cloth. Through a spigot on one of his
arms, he watered a plant on a bookcase that faced the monitor. I noted that the
plant, resting on a high shelf of the bookcase, seemed to have as good a view
of the screen as the window beside it.

“Did something happen to distract
my dad, Margaret?”

“I’m afraid so, dear. Right before
you arrived, two men were here from Earth Security.”

My eyes darted to Margaret.

“Oh? Why?” asked Kristin.

“They’re looking for a suspicious
person they think is somewhere in Rising Tide.”

“Gee, if ES is involved, it must be
serious,” said Kristin. “It must be a . . . spy.”

“I suppose.”

“A spy from where?”

“They’re looking for someone from
Asteron.”

“What!” gasped Kristin. “A spy from
there
 . . . here?”

I moved away from the windowsill so
abruptly that I bumped into Margaret’s desk, shaking the items on it, because I
had seen out the window two men leaving the building, two men dressed in
business clothes who yesterday wore police uniforms when they broke into my
apartment—Feran’s spies! I steadied the desk, apologized, then placed my hands
in my pockets, trying to act casual, until the two women who had suddenly
turned to me looked away.

“I don’t know much about it, just
that ES is searching for a man they want to talk to, and your father gave them
permission to look around and question the people here. He told me to alert all
the divisions.”

I heard a voice of such bitterness
that I could not believe it was Kristin’s: “I hope they get this guy fast. He
should be punished for snooping on us and for working for those horrible
people!”

In a flash of guilt, I looked away
from Kristin. My eyes fell on Dustin—and what I saw next astonished me. One of
his arms reached up to the small plant on the bookcase. Then his prong-like
fingers closed, as if they were clutching something on the soil, but nothing
was there. The arm moved to a small compartment that slid open in Dustin’s
shoulder, and the fingers dropped the imaginary object in the little bin, which
closed again. The fingers then reached over to a similar compartment that slid
open on the other shoulder, clutched at something that, again, was not there, and
placed the imaginary object in the identical spot on the plant’s soil.

“Hey, Alex, are you leaving us
too?” asked Kristin.

Heading to the door, I paused to
remember my manners. “I have to take care of something. Would you excuse me,
please?” Then I raced out of the office, down the stairs, and out a side door
of the building.

I whisked past the steely block
letters that spelled SPACE TRAVEL on the lobby wall and the rocket replicas
displayed under them. Avoiding the elevators, I took the stairs to the fourth
floor. The building that had given me a life and that I favored above all other
places was now fraught with dangers. Every voice, every footstep, every glimpse
of a human being sent me hiding in doorways while I walked down what seemed
like an interminable hallway to Frank Brennan’s office. I felt my heart race in
my chest, then calm momentarily, only to surge again at the next alarming item,
such as a door opening or a person sneezing. I wondered how I had managed to
spend my entire life in the state of a cornered rat. But that was before I had
sipped wine from a crystal glass, when I had been forced to drink from Feran’s
stream.

Upon seeing me, Frank’s eyes
widened in a smile.

“May I shut this?” I asked, my hand
on the door.

“Sure. Have a seat, Alex. Say, are
you okay? You’re whispering.”

“I need to talk to you.” I sat down,
facing Frank at his desk.

“I’m glad you’re here, Alex. I want
to tell you something too. Mykroni called me to say he heard about my
accomplishments in Housekeeping. He wants me to come to his office to talk
about robotics. It sounds as if he might have a job in mind.”

“Good.”

“It was
you
who told him
about me, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You know, Chuck’s name never came
up, and I hope it never will! I felt as if I could tell Mykroni what I really
accomplished here, even if it does make a liar out of his son.”

“I think you can tell him the truth
and he will listen.”

“Thanks, Alex. I owe you one.”

“If you mean you would like to help
me, I do have some questions for you.”

“Shoot.”

When I told Frank about the
peculiar movement in Dustin’s cleaning procedure, he pressed a control on his
computer to summon the robot to his office. He gestured for me to follow him to
an inner office, which contained a wall of instrumentation to rival my flight deck.

“This console controls the Clean
Team,” Frank explained, as we sat before the grid of buttons, lights, computer
screens, and electronic panels.

Soon we heard the low humming sound
of Dustin arriving, his vacuuming feet removing the dirt particles on the floor
as he approached us. Frank sprang open a door on Dustin’s back to access his
control panel, then pressed a few keys. Projecting from Dustin’s eyes into the
space before us, a three-dimensional holographic image appeared of Dr.
Merrett’s office, with Dustin starting his janitorial routine.

“When did you see the weird move,
Alex?”

“After Dustin watered the plant on
the bookcase.”

Frank sped the action up to that
point, then played in slow motion the maneuver I had described, in which Dustin
seemed to remove something from the plant and store it in one of his shoulders,
then replace the item on the plant with something that he took from his other
shoulder.

“Hmmm. I see what you mean,” said
Frank. “I never noticed that before. Let’s see if it’s on my master program.”

Frank activated a function on his
instrument panel, producing another hologram of Dustin at work in Dr. Merrett’s
office, exactly like the image we saw from the robot, but with one exception.
On this master program, after Dustin watered the plant, he completely skipped
the maneuver I had questioned, advancing to the one that followed it.

“It looks as if someone added a few
lines of code directly to Dustin, but never copied them onto my master program.
That’s against the rules!”

“Do other robots in the Clean Team
have the program for Dr. Merrett’s office?” I asked.

“No, only Dustin.” Frank checked
the compartments on Dustin’s shoulders. “These storage bins are empty now, but
I guess they once contained something to make sense out of the movements you
saw. But what?”

“Do you have any security checks
for the robots that clean the executive offices?”

“You know, because the bosses have
office safes for their documents and passwords for their computer files, we
haven’t thought much about the robots gaining access to restricted
information.”

“Who could have changed Dustin’s
code? Could Chuck have done it?”

“Chuck is capable of writing a few
lines of program. So are other people. The programming language I use for the
Clean Team is also used by other departments at MAS. It’s called QuikCode.”

“I see.”

“It’s not as if we keep the Clean
Team a secret. They roam the halls. They’re on the elevators. They’re in people’s
offices. They use a known programming language. Someone familiar with QuikCode
could figure out the program and make changes, I suppose, although I never
thought about that before.”

“When was the change made?”

Frank punched keys in Dustin’s
back, setting his hologram in motion again, until we came to the image of the
movement in question.

“Let me find out the date when this
programming was done,” said Frank, freezing Dustin’s action at that point and
pressing more keys in the robot’s control panel. “It was in May, two and a half
years ago. The maneuver you saw, with Dustin removing something from the
plant’s soil and placing something else on it, was programmed then.”

“And the other day you said Project
Z started in April of that same year, right?”

“That’s right. Project Z started in
April; Dustin’s code was changed a few weeks later.” Frank’s worried eyes
scanned mine. “What are you thinking, Alex?”

A camera.
That was what I
was thinking. A small, waterproof video camera—no doubt camouflaged to blend in
with its setting. This device could have been disguised as a small rock,
because the plant already had some shiny stones for decoration sitting on the
soil. This camera would have been focused on Dr. Merrett’s monitor, recording
images but apparently not transmitting them. Maybe the thieves did not want to
risk electronic transmission of the data, which could potentially be discovered
and traced to them, so they had Dustin physically place and replace the camera
regularly, thereby making the activity traceable only as far as the robot. Once
Dustin left Dr Merrett’s office with the used camera, someone could open the
compartments manually, remove that device, and insert a new one to be planted
on Dr. Merrett’s shelves during Dustin’s next scheduled cleaning time. This
someone could be hard to find, because Dustin roamed the halls and came into
contact with many people.

“Unless that plant eats some kind
of special plant food that has to be taken away too, I can’t explain what
Dustin was doing,” Frank added.

Dustin waited patiently for us to
complete our examination, a benign smile on his face.

“Could someone on your staff have
changed the code?” I asked.

“A few of them would be able to.
But wait, no one from my staff was here two and a half years ago, so none of
them could have programmed the sequence you saw in Dustin.”

“You mean your staff does not remain
employed for very long?”

“I mean
Chuck’s
staff.
Everybody had run-ins with Chuck at some point. When he got heavy-handed with
them, they’d quit or get fired. And the best workers left the soonest. That is,
until Chuck left Housekeeping two months ago for greener pastures. I don’t know
how his promotion is working out for Dr. Merrett, but it’s allowing me to build
a more stable department here.”