Organic Future - Sparrowhawk Part 13

Connie shrugged. "You know how it is. Busy." She studied first one of them carefully and then the other, and Emily wondered if she could sense the pain that had suffused the room such a short time before. The kettle whistled.

Emily poured, and when both women had their coffee, she shooed Andy off to play and pointed at his chair. Connie sat down, turned on her recorder, and began to ask questions. Emily answered them all as best she could, until Connie asked, "And what did you do afterward?"

"We went on to the restaurant."

"I'm surprised you had any appet.i.te left."

Emily hesitated. "I didn't." She glanced sidelong at her husband. He was watching Connie intently. "We just had a drink."

"And then?"

"I went back to the lab. There was work to do." When Connie stared at her, she felt herself blush. How much did Connie know? How much had Bernie told her? Were they close? Had she interviewed him yet? Did detectives interview each other?

She looked again at Nick. He was watching her now, not Connie, and on his face she thought she saw just a hint of a forlorn puppy that knows it is about to be given to a new owner. He hadn't missed a thing.

Connie was looking at him too. "I have some questions for you as well, Mr.

Gilman."

"Why? I wasn't there." His tone was glum.

"But you're close to your wife, and..."

"You mean I'm a suspect?"

She nodded. "That's the other reason why I'm here. Now, is there any reason why you should wish your wife harm?"

He looked shocked. "Of course not!" He clearly meant what he said, and Emily's heart warmed.

There were more questions, probing for his knowledge of PROMs and genimal controls, for any history of emotional instability or violence, for possessiveness and jealousy. At the end, she grew explicit: "How would youfeel if you learned your wife was sleeping with another man?"

As Nick's mouth fell open, Emily felt her face turn pale with shock. She watched as Nick stared at Connie, who in turn was watching Emily, a slight, knowing smile upon her lips. She waited for the explosion that had to come, now that someone had all but spilled the beans. But why? Why should she do that? Did she want Bernie for herself?

Finally, he said, "That is none of your business."

"He's right, you know," said Emily. "I think you'd better go."

Connie had the grace to look down as she said, "That was out of line.

Sorry." She clicked off the recorder, said, "Thanks for the coffee," and left.

Emily and Nick stared at each other across the table. They could hear Andy talking to himself in the other room, the thudding boom as the Hawk's wings grabbed air for its takeoff, almost each other's thoughts.

As the Hawk noise faded, Nick said, "You are spending too much time with that cop."

She shook her head. "Not as long as someone's out to kill me. He's protection."

"But what if they're trying to get him!"

"They're not." She felt awful about deceiving him, but she did not dare to tell him the truth. She could not face the possibility that he would leave her. Misdirection, the truth but not the whole truth, was her only option.

She reached across the table to cover his hand with her own. "I'm the target." She told him of the image Bernie had found in the Mack's chip.

He sighed. "I still get jealous," he said. "So does that other cop."

"You saw it too?" She smiled at him. "Yes, I like Bernie. But I'm not about to walk. And if I did..."

"She might plant a chip or two herself?" He grinned boyishly, and she felt a tide of relief wash through her, removing tension, at least for a while.

The Tortoise accelerated smoothly down the entrance ramp, its legs pumping vigorously in the periphery of Emily's vision, and merged into the flow of traffic on the expressway. Emily's hand was tense on the tiller as she steered, but not because she was now late for work. That was no problem.

Neoform was not that rigid an outfit, at least at her level in its hierarchy, and there was nothing urgent awaiting her.

No. The problem was what she had told Nick. Did she have no intention of walking out on him? Was she so sure? Was Bernie just a momentary pa.s.sion, born of a congruence of novelty and shock and fear and opportunity? Would he disappear as soon as the villain responsible for the chips in the Sparrow and the Mack, and for the a.s.sa.s.sin bird, had been caught? Or was there something more between them? More than between her and Nick? And Andy. How could she fail to think of him?

The traffic was especially heavy in the three lanes bound eastward toward the city center. That would change later on, when the commuters flowed the other way and choked the three lanes Emily now followed. Not for the first time, she felt fortunate that Neoform lay even farther west of the city thantheir neighborhood, so that her commuting kept her free of the worst of the inevitable traffic jams.

Still, "free" was a relative term. The traffic on her side of the narrow strip of gra.s.s that separated the eastbound and westbound sides of the highway was quite bad enough. Every lane was a steady stream of Buggies, gas-burners, and Macks, the fastest vehicles in the leftmost lane. She had maneuvered the Tortoise into the center lane, where the speed was comfortable and she could, if necessary, pa.s.s to either side. Now she glanced at the median strip. It was concave, a drainage ditch deep enough to stop wheeled vehicles from crossing freely, by accident or design. As she pa.s.sed one of the flat, paved turnarounds for official vehicles that periodically interrupted the gra.s.s, she reflected that legged animals would not need them. They could trot as easily across the ditch as across a sidewalk. She smiled at the thought that her Bioblimps would be able to ignore even the roadway.

The smile didn't last. The Tortoise's head began to sway minutely back and forth. Normally, it held steady until she bent the tiller left or right. Then the neck and head followed her command, and the reflexes built into its nervous system by eons of natural evolution, no thanks at all to the gengineers, brought the limbs and body in train. She loved to watch the process: first the movement of the head, say to the left, then the left-side limbs bent a little more, taking shorter steps, while those on the right took longer, and the beast would pivot into a shallow curve or a sharp turn, just as she, its master, its driver, wished.

But now--something was wrong. She had, when young, driven a few old gas-powered automobiles. This was not the wobble in the steering, not transmitted to the wheels, that came from a loose coupling in the steering column. This was more like the constant overcorrections of a novice driver, for the Tortoise indeed seemed to be hunting for some proper path.

How bad could it get? Would she, she wondered, be unreasonably paranoid if she uncovered that switch Nick had used to protect them from the Sparrow? She eyed the median strip and the traffic beyond it, the trucks, fuel-driven and gengineered. If the steering went...

She glanced in the rearview mirror. A gap was coming up on her left. As it reached her, the Tortoise's head stopped swaying, and the beast swung smoothly into the other lane. She had not turned the tiller.

Now the median was right beside her, and the opposing traffic and its ma.s.sive trucks, heavy steel and toothy Macks, were mere yards away. Adrenaline surged through her. Her heart raced, and her mouth went dry.

She tried to steer back into the middle lane, back to the comfort of being surrounded by a horde of people going in the same direction and insulating against opposition.

The Tortoise did not respond.

She yanked at the tiller, but it made no difference. She stabbed her fingers at the "pull-in" switch's panel, expecting resistance such as Nick had met, but there was none. With a sigh of relief, she punched the switch. If it worked, she knew, she would suddenly become an obstacle in a steady stream of high-speed traffic. She would be hit, buffeted, rolled, bruised, perhaps more seriously injured. But she had her belt on, and she knew it would be much worse if the Tortoise crossed the median.

Nothing happened. The panic rose still more. She punched the switch again, and again, as fruitlessly as the first time. She crested a rise and faced a mile of road gently descending and then rising into a leftward curve. She stared at the oncoming traffic, and she saw that a gap in that traffic was on its way. On the far side of that gap, a juggernaut belching smoke and noise, was a truck, all steel and engine, not flesh, not teeth, but just as deadly.

The Tortoise's nose swung just enough to align with that truck.

Thereafter, it moved just enough to track it in its progress toward her.

The situation was eerily familiar. She had only seconds left, but they seemed to stretch interminably. She had all the time she needed to search the panels below the dashboard, find the one whose ventilation slits suggested the presence of electronics, open it, identify the motherboard, and yank it out.

The Tortoise promptly stumbled to a halt. She gasped with relief. She had hoped only to s.n.a.t.c.h any foreign chip that might be on the board and thereby return her vehicle to normal. But now a memory rose to tickle at the back of her mind: Somewhere, the source would come to her, she had read that Tortoises and some other Buggies were designed to function only as long as they received signals from their controlling computers. The computer didn't control all the genimal's functions--it ate and defecated and scratched without command--but without some signal, the beast could do nothing at all. Deprived of its computer, it was paralyzed.

Horns blared behind, and a swerving Roachster slammed the Tortoise's sh.e.l.l, b.u.mping Emily's now-inert vehicle onto the shoulder of the road.

Another buffet slammed her into the median, tilting helplessly. There were more horns, and in the vehicles that now swept past her she could see purple faces, mouths open, fists waving.

If they only knew how little she cared for their anger! She fell back in her seat behind the useless tiller. She grinned, feeling the stretching of her face as if it were some strange and independent thing, knowing that with her wide mouth she must look as foolish as...as foolish as she felt. She was safe.

Already her charge of adrenaline was draining from her system and her body was returning to normal.

In a few moments, she was able to lift her hand, and the Tortoise's motherboard, to her lap. She turned it over, and over again. She studied it, savoring the luxury of time. And there, a little less dusty, a little newer in appearance, was a chip that reminded her of the one Bernie had shown her. The one from the Mack.

Could she trust her memory? What if she pulled the chip and put the board back and replaced the panel and started up, and the Tortoise remained intent on killing her?

But she was a gengineer. She knew how genimals were controlled. She had been the one to teach Bernie all he now knew. And her memory was reliable. It had better be.

She yanked the chip from its socket. Then, hesitating only briefly, she put the motherboard back where it belonged.

The call had to be routed to his vehicle, somewhere in the city, but within moments of entering her office, Emily was telling Bernie what had happened. "I'm afraid I got my fingerprints all over it," she said. "But it worked. I plugged the board back in, and the Tortoise was fine."

She had ignored Alan Bryant when she had come in, too intent on reachingBernie. Now he leaned against the wall, listening as he waited for her attention, his eyes wide, his mouth pursed in an "O."

"What about you?" His voice was tinny in the phone's earpiece.

"Pretty shaky. I got all the way over in the right lane as soon as I could. I stayed there too."

"You did the right thing." He hesitated. "I should be done here before lunch. A burglary and rape. Then I'll come by and get the chip."

She wished he was there, or Nick. Either one would be a comfort, and she should call her husband soon, to tell him too, to hear his concern. For that matter, she should have called him first, but...To her surprise, she found herself thinking that Nick's comfort would be worth more to her than Bernie's.

It would be more comforting.

She had two men in her life, as she never had had before. Someone else was trying to kill her. There were just too d.a.m.ned many complications. But now she had a clue to how she should resolve at least one of those complications.

She looked up as her a.s.sistant pulled himself away from the wall. What did he want? More complications?

"Gelarean's called a meeting," he said. "At ten. And we have no problems with the Bioblimps. The new babies are growing fine." When she sighed in relief, he added, "Glad you're okay."

Then, pointedly, he looked at his watch. "It's very nearly ten now."

Chapter Sixteen.

BERNIE TURNED THE chip over and over in his hand, staring at it, studying it. Finally, he said, "We're getting quite a collection of these things, aren't we? The Sparrow, the Mack, now your Tortoise."

He had had to wait in Emily's lab for half an hour. Alan Bryant had explained that she was in a meeting, and yes, it was running late. Then he had turned back to his work, and all Bernie could do was watch the pretty pictures on the workstation screen. When she had eventually arrived, she had led him to what pa.s.sed for Neoform's company cafeteria, a row of vending machines in an alcove near the second-floor stockroom. One wall bore a collage of dusty photos displaying to all who cared the company's past triumphs. Beneath the display was a counter equipped with racks of paper napkins, wire bins of salt, pepper, and sugar in paper envelopes, and bowls of tiny packets containing catsup and mustard. A line of stools waited beneath the counter.

They had the room to themselves. Everyone in the building apparently preferred to eat out, at one of the local restaurants. They came here only for occasional snacks, or when they were working through the night and needed sustenance. And sustenance, Bernie thought, was surely all they would get. The machines' displays did not promise much culinary excitement.

There had been an uneasy silence when they first sat down, choosing the metal folding chairs at one of the two small tables instead of the stools.Eventually, she had said, "That meeting. Sean wanted progress reports on our work, but that wasn't all." As she spoke, she watched the hallway outside the alcove, not him. She seemed to be looking for some particular person. "He said you didn't seem to be getting anywhere and were just wasting people's time. He meant mine. He wanted to bar you from the premises."

"Does he have a guilty conscience?"

As she shook her head, releasing a flood of odors--perfume, shampoo, the smell of the back of her neck, which he had tasted twice now--he snorted. A warrant would get around such a ploy too easily. Or if he wanted to see Emily, a phone call, and she would come to him outside. They had both enjoyed their encounters on the sheets, and he hoped there would be more. She was wearing a light blouse that let him see the straps of her bra and a skirt of some thin, summer-weight fabric.

"I told them about the Tortoise, though. And he gave up," she said.

"You made it clear that the problem wasn't over."

She nodded vigorously, her wide mouth smiling at her victory over her boss, and produced the chip. She held it out to him. He took it, and he saw immediately that it was as identical as she had thought to the others. When he gestured for her to go on, she told him the rest of the details.

Now she said, "And I didn't have to shoot it."

He grimaced. "I wouldn't have thought of that. Pull the board and yank the chip. Instant repair." He looked up from the chip, ignoring the plastic-wrapped sandwich and cardboard cup of coffee in front of him. "Very quick. Very cool. Congratulations." He meant it all. She had done the perfect thing under the circ.u.mstances.

"What would..."

"Shot it." She seemed cooler toward him, as if she did not look forward, like him, to going to bed together again. Was she having second thoughts?

"Pulled out my gun and blown its head away. That would have stopped it."

She made a face and looked at her food. She had chosen salami, cheese, onions, and green peppers on a sesame-seed bun. "But I still have the Tortoise, alive."

"That's true." He eyed his sandwich at last. He had pushed the b.u.t.ton for tuna fish on rye, but it looked more like canned cat food on dirty foam rubber. "Do all genimals stop like that when you pull the plug?"

She held one hand palm upward, fingers spread. "I knew the Tortoise would.

I read the owner's manual after Nick and I got married, and I thought I remembered that. But others? Some Buggies, I think. But I really don't know for sure."

"I suppose it would make sense for private vehicles. But what about jets?"

He was, quite naturally, wondering about the Hawks he loved to fly. Would the same ploy, if it ever became necessary, work for him?

She shook her head. "Probably not. They would need some control in the air, wouldn't they? In case of accident." She paused while she unwrapped her sandwich and took a bite. He followed suit, first setting the chip on the table between them. Then she said, "Of course! The Chickadee! They can't possibly turn off the same way." He made a disappointed face. She laughed around a mouthful of sandwich, but then she choked the sound off abruptly. He looked at her curiously, and in a moment she said, "Your colleague came by the house this morning. She wanted the dope on the Mack attack."

"Connie?" he asked.

She nodded. "She also laid some heavy hints on my husband."

He winced.

She reached out one hand to touch his wrist. "I don't believe you'd brag about your women, Bernie. But..."

He sighed. "Yeah. We've been pretty close."

"So she wants you for herself. She's jealous."

"So's Nick," he said.