"Hey, pull up, pull up! Watch that power line."
"I see it, Taki. What's the matter, don't you trust me all of a sudden? Seeall perfectly under control."
"Oh God, he's going under!"
"Sometimes I think you pick up a bit of that neurosis from your sister."
"There's a duck taking off. The noise has scared it. You'll never"
"Wheeeee! . . . Never what, Taki?"
"Jeez! I don't care what you saybalance sensors or not, I still feel sick."
"Look at this tree coming up. Wow, it's like a mountain. This is way better than Disney."
Since they were too young to fly real airplanes, they had settled for the next best thing and fitted one of Kevin's models with onboard controls to override the radio-actuated system so that they could fly it as mecs. After some initial setbacks and a bit of trial and error, the experiment seemed to be working out just fine. And they didn't need cubic miles of space to contend with all the restrictions and legalities that that would have entailed. The inlet of water at the back of the house provided as much of a world as they could have wanted.
"Take it up higher so we can switch places. It's about time I had a turn," Taki called via the intercom.
"Okay. Let's follow the road and see what's going on around the neighborhood. Boy, wait till Ohira sees this!"
Inside the house, Vanessa came into the front hall carrying a box containing a loaded slide carousel for her presentation at the neurophysiology seminar being held that weekend in Seattle, and in her other hand, a brown leather briefcase. She put the briefcase down beside the overnight suitcase, plastic bag containing books and files, and hanging bag already piled by the door, and the carousel box by the folders and several large envelopes stacked on the hall table. "Let's see," she said, checking over the items, "change of clothes for tonight, cosmetic bag, background files, journals . . . notes! I need my notes for the talk." She took the briefcase and went back to the den just as Harriet came down the back stairs with Vanessa's coat and purse.
"You did say the blue coat?" Harriet checked as she paused on the bottom step to let Vanessa pass.
"Yes, that's the one." Vanessa slipped it on, took the purse, and went into the den and over to the desk. Outside the doorway, Harriet's footsteps receded to the front of the house.
"Is this all? Shall I take these things out to the car?" her voice called distantly.
"Yes, please," Vanessa called back as she sorted through papers. "The stuff other than the bags can go on the back seat. It isn't locked. Be careful with the yellow box." Notes, references, prints of slides. Better take the papers by Christie and Rolands, too. . . .
In the front hallway, Harriet picked up the suitcase and plastic carrier, tried taking the loose folders as well, but they didn't feel very safe. So she put everything down again and stuffed the folders into the carrier; and since there was still room to spare, she slipped the envelopes in as well. Along with them and not really noticing, she put into the carrier a folded black plastic bag, secured with a rubber band, that had also been on the hall table, and which Vanessa hadn't noticed either. That felt better. She picked up the items again, found that she could now manage the hanging bag as well, and hauled all of them out through the front door.
A harsh roaring sound, rising in pitch to a whine and then falling again, made her look up as she began crossing to where Vanessa's Jaguar was parked. One of Kevin's model planes, red with yellow wings, fin, and tail surfaces, was circling above the open area at the end of the driveway. Taki was visiting and had been busy with Kevin in the workshop all day. The plane dived to pass low overhead, making Harriet flinch as she dropped the bags by the trunk, wondering for a moment if it was out of control and about to crash, but it climbed again and banked away over the garage. She looked around as she opened the rear door of the car to put the plastic carrier and the yellow box inside as Vanessa had said, but she was unable to spot where the boys were operating the plane from. Probably they were up at one of the windows, or hidden, chuckling, in the greenery somewhere. "Young monkeys," she muttered. "Always up to some kind of mischief."
Vanessa came out of the house with the rest of her things and opened the trunk. Inside were a couple of boxes of assorted paraphernalia belonging to Kevin and Eric, but enough room for her bags. Harriet handed them to her, and she hoisted them in. If the stuff in the boxes was important they wouldn't have left them there, she decided, and closed the lid. For once, Eric didn't seem to have a particularly pressing schedule this weekend. In fact, he'd said he might show up at a barbecue that Hiroyuki was throwing for his countless relatives to show their assimilation into American culture. Vanessa was happy that she would be away. It meant she wouldn't have to make excuses.
A noise like a motor boat that had been rising and falling grew louder, and Kevin's red-and-yellow KJ-3 swooped over a tree and disappeared around the side of the house.
"It's the two rogues," Harriet said needlessly. "Don't ask me where they are, though. That thing has been buzzing around since I came out, but I still haven't been able to spot where they are. It looks as if they're having fun, though."
"Yes," Vanessa agreed distantly. She paused as she was about to climb into the car and checked mentally for any last-minute things she might have forgotten. "If Eric does go over to Hiroyuki's tomorrow he'll probably take Kevin with him, so you might as well use the day for yourself," she told Harriet.
"Thanks. There are a few things I need to catch up on."
"If the washing machine man stops by before you go, there's a check for him tacked to the board in the kitchen."
"Okay."
"And I've marked a few things in the Dillards catalog that I'd like ordered."
"Will do."
Vanessa got into the car and closed the door, then lowered the window. "Oh, and if that woman calls again about wanting me at her sorority dinner or whatever it was, could you tell her it clashes with a prior commitment? I just don't have time or very much inclination for these sewing-evening get-togethers."
"I'll take care of it. In fact, I've still got her number. I'll call her. It'll sound better that way."
"Good." Vanessa agreed with a quick nod. "I'll probably be back sometime late on Sunday, then. If anything changes I'll let you know."
"Fine. Have a good time." Harriet stood back while the Jaguar pulled away, then turned to walk back to the house.
She had never been able to make up her mind about Vanessanever quite knew if she admired her for taking on the burdens of filling the gap in Eric's and Kevin's lives, or resented her for not bringing more warmth and involvement. But then, she thought, who was she to criticize a professional contending with expectations and responsibilities that somebody like Harriet had no personal experience of and could know next to nothing about? Maybe a person like Eric needed intellectual companionship in the home as much as some husbands needed someone to criticize TV shows with and tell politics to over breakfastalthough for what her opinion was worth, Harriet didn't see much evidence of intellectual companionship to a degree that she'd call stirring, in any case. Eric was always wrapped up in the lab, and Vanessa was always wrapped up in . . . well, Vanessa.
But that was their business. Harriet's concern was more about Kevin. After her own two grew up and left home, she had missed the unique ingredient that having young people around, even with the mess, emotional penduluming, and perpetual impecuniousness kids bring to a home. So when she and Frank separated, she had answered an ad and moved in to manage the domestic scene when Kevin's mother died, before Eric moved to Olympia. Although she had never known Patricia, she pictured her, from the things Patricia had left behind and the way Eric and Kevin sometimes talked, as someone who would have gotten involved and messy when Kevin and Taki painted their boat, and been more curious about where they were flying the plane from.
In fact, something like the lady lawyer in many ways, now that Harriet came to think of it. And she was a busy professional with responsibilities too, wasn't she? It would brighten up the place a lot, Harriet reflected as she went back inside through the front door, if just a little bit of Michelle would somehow rub off on Vanessa.
Michelle was getting more used to the idea of a factory workshop small enough to sit on a tabletop. She stood with Eric in one of the production areas at the rear of the Neurodyne building, looking down through a magnifier into one of the glass-topped shoe boxes, where two fly-size mecs were working at a bench surrounded by tool racks and trays of parts. The technicians operating the mecs, helmeted and collared, were in coupler chairs nearby, talking intermittently to each other in the way that Michelle still found disconcerting. The object they were assembling was a scaled-down mec a tenth the size of themselves. Even through the magnifier, Michelle was unable to make out any detail. She found it almost unbearable to try and imagine the scale at which it was happeningthe mental equivalent of eyestrain.
"A misconception that many people have is that making things small automatically means being very precise," Eric commented. "In fact, it works the opposite way round. Suppose that your technology sets a limit on the tolerances that you can work toa micrometer, say, which is forty millionths of an inch. Suppose that gives a snug fit between parts for a mechanism when it's built, let's say the size of a salt grain." Michelle nodded that she followed. He went on, "Now, if you make your mechanism ten times smaller, the same tolerances would result in a relative precision that's ten times sloppier. So it's not just a question of making everything smaller. You have to achieve correspondingly higher precision as well."
"You mean, all your reference standards have to be reestablished," Michelle said.
"Exactly. You have to recreate the whole system of dimensional gauges, flatness gauges, machine lead-screws, and so on to produce a new regime of precision tooling. Your entire engineering practice has to be exported down to the reduced scale."
Michelle watched him looking down into the compartment like some cosmic lord contemplating the strange realm that he had brought into being. She could understand why Corfe had abandoned his normal taciturnity to come and talk to her. The chances of seriously awakening Eric to the possibility of a criminal conspiracy directed against him would be about as remote as the far side of the moon.
"I'm still amazed that you can have that kind of complexity on such a tiny scale at all," Michelle said. "It makes you wonder why we're as big as we are in the first place."
Eric smiled without looking up. "Erwin Schrödinger asked the same thing."
"Who's he?"
"Was. One of the pioneer quantum physicists. He concluded that it has to be that way for a world that makes sense to be possible. The illusion of causality only takes over above a scale large enough to swamp out quantum weirdness. . . . But you're right. It still doesn't explain why we're as big as we are."
"That was your field originally, wasn't it?" Michelle said. "Before you turned commercial and got into microengineering. You were more of a physicist to start with."
Eric looked up and eyed her with mock severity through his gold-rimmed spectacles. "What's this? Have you been checking up on me?"
"No. Just talking to Doug. He said you were excommunicated from the church for being a heretic, and that was why you got out of the academic scene."
"Hmm."
"What did he mean?"
Eric didn't answer immediately, but moved away from the bench to glance briefly over the status display for the two operating couplers. "Every generation of scientists eventually becomes impervious to any ideas that challenge the ones they were raised on," he replied finally. "They stop being the impartial seekers after truth that they're supposed toif they ever were in the first placeand turn into high priests defending the entrenched dogma."
"So why didn't it happen to you?"
"I don't know. Maybe I was born between generationstoo late to be a bishop in the established church; too early to start my own. So I changed to a different religion and ended up at Microbotics." Eric grinned as the irony struck him, and swept an arm to take in the surroundings. "And now here I am, doing the same thing again. Maybe it's just in my nature." Michelle would have been curious to learn more, but Eric changed the subject. "Anyhow, I don't think that was what you wanted to talk about." He turned to her and waited. Michelle shifted her eyes to indicate the two technicians in the couplers and returned a questioning look. Eric nodded and led the way around a partition to an equipment bay where the sounds of motors and extractor fans soaked up their voices.
"Back when you quit to set up on your own, there was this business about DNC having side effects," Michelle said. "I'm concerned about it."
"My word, you are being thorough with your homework," Eric commented.
"It's what I'm paid for. So what's the real story?"
Eric made a dismissive gesture. "You just said itthat was years ago now."
"Yes, but it never really went away, did it? And it could be coming back. Isn't there something in Science this month about a call for putting direct neural work on hold?"
"You know about that too, eh?" Eric nodded and looked impressed.
"I have to know the truth. If there are any grounds at all for suspicion about this technology, we can't risk using it in a project that would involve the general public."
Eric drew a long breath and exhaled it sharply, as if determined to put this to rest finally. "The truth is that there was never a scrap of truth in it. There were some overactive imaginations at work, coupled with sensationalized journalism. That's always a bad combination. When you peel away the hype, it all boiled down to two cases of mental disturbance that turned out to have nothing to do with DNC."
"Yes, Doug told me about those."
"Then what else do you want me to add?"
Michelle raised a conciliatory hand. "Well, no disrespect or anything, Eric, but one person's assurance isn't really enough in this kind of situation. I'd need to go through the records you have of exactly what was said at the time, and any references that pertain. Also, it would help if you could point me to other specialists in the field who could give an opinion."
"Yes, yes," Eric said, nodding several times. "Of course you can have all that. . . ." He read the expression on her face that said there was more and let his eyebrows ask the question.
"Do you really think that was all there was to it?" she said. "Or could those imaginations and those pieces of journalism have had a motive?"
"Oh, I see. You have been talking to Doug, haven't you."
"Just doing my job," Michelle reminded him.
"Jealousy at Microbotics. Fear of being left behind. A scheme concocted to discredit the technology. . . ."
"It wouldn't be the first time that something like that has happened," Michelle pointed out.
"Practically anything you can name has happened, but that doesn't mean every piece of tabloid gossip is right," Eric countered.
Michelle hesitated, wondering if it would be diplomatic to bring up the subject of Vanessa's previous husband just then. But Corfe had been particularly anxious to make known his suspicions regarding Jack Anastole's involvement. She could hardly get this close and shy away now. "Wasn't Jack supposed to have had documented proof?" she said finally.
"Oh, you know about him too?"
"He said he had evidence that something like that was going onthe names, everything."
Eric flashed a humorless grin. "That's what he said. And for a while I took him seriously. But when the time came for him to produce it, it all suddenly evaporated. And so did hebut I suppose you know all that too."
"Isn't it possible that he could have been bought off?" Michelle ventured.
Eric showed both palms and made a face. "Anything's possible. But any scientist would be suspicious of a proposition contrived for no other reason than to explain away a lack of evidence. So should any lawyer." He looked at her challengingly, as if to say that as far as he was concerned that wrapped it all up. Michelle bit her lip.
"Why would he make something like that up?" she persisted.
"Who knows? Perhaps he didn't actually make it upnot consciously, anyway. More likely he had his suspicions, just like Doug, got all fired up to build a case around themand wishful thinking did the rest, for a while. But by the time Jack came to see things more soberly, he'd implicated some influential people at Microbotics and elsewhere. When he realized there was nothing in it, he accepted a peace offer and made himself scarce until the dust settled."
Michelle waited for a moment and then said neutrally, "Who's contriving explanations now?"
Eric's head jerked up sharply. He could have reacted with pique, anger, or a curt denial. Michelle tensed inwardly. But instead, his face creased into a grin of admission that she found warming. "Okay, you've got me," he conceded. "So, I take it that you buy into this conspiracy theory of Doug's. But, then, we've already agreed that lawyers have to be suspicious of everything, haven't we?"
As it applied just then, Eric's observation was even truer than he realized. As a result of the further research she had done and her subsequent reflections, suspicions had begun forming in Michelle's mind of possibilities a lot more serious than just a disinformation conspiracysuspicions that she had so far not confided even to Corfe. She studied Eric's face, looking for a clue to whether this was the time to broach them. For clearly, Eric hadn't made the connection, any more than Corfe had.
"Very much so," she agreed. "As you say, about everything."
Eric caught her tone. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"It does seem . . ." Michelle reconsidered her words and began again, articulating slowly. "If there was . . . something, to what Jack was claiming, there are people who might construe what happened to him, when it did, an extremely fortuitous coincidence. . . . Wouldn't you agree?"
Eric's mouth opened as he started to respond, then closed again. He frowned at her, as if replaying in his mind to be sure that he hadn't misheard, then screwed his face up incredulously. "You can't be saying that . . . No, this isn't you. It's Doug again, isn't it?"
"No," Michelle said. "These are my own thoughtsbased on what I've heard and read, what I know of how the world can be." Eric was still struggling to take in what she was saying. She went on, "Let's just assume for the moment that Doug is right about Jack being bought off when he went east, and look at things in that light. Three years later you've got DNC working. Everyone in the industry is saying that Neurodyne is on its way to the billion-dollar league. And what happens? All of a sudden Jack's back in town. Isn't it a pretty likely bet that he was here to renegotiate the price? But what it really said was he was going to be a security risk permanently." Eric was shaking his head; but Michelle was committed to seeing it through now and continued, "And then he's found dead in a hotel room, supposedly of a heart attackforty-two years old, normal weight, swam and played tennis, no history of coronary complications, nothing in the family. If you were in Ohira's position, wouldn't you fire me if I weren't suspicious?"
"Oh, I can't believe it. It's too preposterous." Eric snorted and waved the whole idea away. "This isn't Chicago a hundred years ago, for heaven's sake. Are you sure you don't watch too many movies? . . . If it didn't involve a recent tragedy, it would be a joke."
Michelle stared back at him without smiling. "I very much hope I'm wrong," she said. "But until we can be certain of that, I'd say it's something you ought to think about. Anyone capable of going to extremes like that isn't going to stop at just creating some bad publicity for a piece of technology."
The mec and the relay had been in a black plastic bag secured with a rubber band. Kevin searched behind the cushions of the couch in the living room that Taki had been sitting in earlier, then craned his neck over the top to peer down between the back and the wall. "Well, that's just great, Taki. I risk untold wrath and retribution to get it back for you. I guard it with my life for days. And now you've gone and lost it again in a couple of hours. What kind of appreciation is this for being the best friend you've ever had?"
"Well, it's your fault for distracting me with all that stuff about game strategies." Taki stepped back from the table and looked back across the room to the door. "I went there to put the book down, and later I went out through the hall and back to the kitchen. . . . It'll be in the last place we look, you wait and see. Things always are."
"Well, of course it'll be in the last place we look. Do you think we're gonna keep looking after we find it?"
Taki wandered through to the front hall. "You don't think it could have gotten mixed up with all that stuff that your mom and Harriet were loading into the car, do you?" he said, looking around. Vanessa had been gone a couple of hours by now.
"Harriet said she hadn't seen it," Kevin said, appearing in the doorway behind. It was her night off, and she had gone for the evening too. "Did you put it down out here?"
"I can't remember."
Batcat, the only other resident to be home just at the moment, uncurled on its favorite chair, stretched, sat back on its haunches, and blinked at Kevin several times. Not for the first time, Kevin got the uncanny feeling that the animal was telling him he was stupid. The cat straightened up, stretched again, and then jumped down off the chair. Kevin watched as it entered the piano room through the open doorway and crossed the floor toward the stairs leading down to the rear lab.
"Taki, we're being stupid," Kevin said.
"Oh, I see. It's I risk wrath and anger, but we are being stupid. How come?"
"What's the obvious way to find out where a lost mec is?"
Taki thought, shrugged. "Put an ad in the Lost Mecs section?"
Kevin nodded in the direction the cat had disappeared in. "Go downstairs and activate it from a coupler, then look around and see where you are." Taki spread his hands. What more was there to say? He followed Kevin to the stairs, and they went down to the lab.