House of the Galactic Elevator

by Gerhard Gehrke

  Lord Akimbo finally looked at Jeff. His marbled skin caught enough of the natural light from the windows that he appeared to shine. He tapped at his lips with a finger.

  “And why would Lord Akimbo want to save those who would abandon their city when it needed them? Lord Akimbo has no use for such ones.”

  “They’d view you as a hero.”

  “What?” Lord Akimbo said with a roar. “Lord Akimbo is already a hero.”

  “That’s not what I meant to say –”

  Lord Akimbo cut him off with a chopping gesture and said, “Many may have forgotten me. The ones that left most certainly have. I leave them to their fate. Be assured that others such as they will be treated with gracious mercy as Lord Akimbo reminds them of the debt they owe. These will be forgiven. But the refugees? Fah.”

  The Grey just chuckled.

  “But the elevator’s fixed,” Oliop said. “I don’t know what else to do to make it work better.”

  “Yes, technician, you served well, and Lord Akimbo thanks you. Lord Akimbo also forgives you for your earlier impertinence.”

  With that, Lord Akimbo trundled on. Irving the Grey tried to stop by the doorway that led to the elevators, but Lord Akimbo shepherded the little fellow forward.

  “But we can’t just leave them!” the Grey said.

  “Oh, Irving,” Lord Akimbo said, “you do amuse. You do amuse.”

  The Grey’s scent packets lingered after they left. Jeff snorted. The awful aroma the Grey pumped from its glands pierced his nostrils. The two bots continued to stand watch and remained vigilant. All of the worms had gone with Lord Akimbo.

  “Hey, bots,” Jeff said. “I’m with Galactic Commons security. Stand down.”

  The bots ignored him.

  “Don’t you have the app?” Oliop asked.

  Jeff glared at him.

  “Just asking,” Oliop said.

  It was then that Jeff saw a blur of silver heading their way. Two small metallic machines the size of mice scurried towards them, their tiny feet skittering on the hard floor. The security bots didn’t react. The little machines leaped on the security bots and administered electric shocks with tiny proboscises. The security bots finally moved, swatting at their attackers, but they couldn’t touch the faster machines. After a dozen zaps from the little machines, each of the security bots went limp.

  Jordan appeared, running from the same maintenance door that Lord Akimbo had emerged from.

  “Hey, guys,” she said.

  She went straight to the downed security bots and examined them. The small silver machines dropped to the floor and began walking in circles.

  “Good cockroach,” Jordan said.

  Oliop shot up and gave her a hug.

  “Jordan!” he said brightly. “We missed you.”

  “I missed you too,” Jordan said. “Things have been crazy here while you guys were gone doing whatever.”

  “I told you what was going on,” Jeff said.

  “Relax, I’m just kidding. So who’s the guy with the silly walk?”

  “Lord Akimbo,” Oliop said. “He won’t let us rescue the other refugees.”

  “He’s the one who is going to use the elevators for something bad,” Jeff said. “We’ve got to find out what.”

  “Well if he’s in charge, then he’s the one that’s been taking down entire buildings in the city,” Jordan said. “I think Captain Flemming is dead.”

  In a low tone Oliop said, “Oooh.”

  After a moment, Jeff said, “Let’s not waste any more time giving him the chance to hurt anyone else. What can your little bugs do?”

  “I borrowed them from Ceph,” Jordan said. “They can deliver an electric shock that knocks the worms out. Shooting the worms works too, but we don’t seem to have any guns.”

  “I could take the ones from the bots,” Oliop said.

  He examined the deactivated security bots. Their weapons were fixed to their arms rather than held like any one of numerous other attachments. These weren’t the multipurpose bots of the pre-invasion, able to mop, wax, degauss, direct traffic, and chide infracting lawbreakers all in the course of an afternoon.

  “It will take a few minutes,” Oliop said.

  “We don’t have time,” Jeff said. “Let’s go.”

  They moved cautiously into the elevator chamber. A multitude of ramps led up or down to dark platforms where scores of inert elevators waited. Only one was lit. Their elevator was still there, its door already closed. A blinking light winked on the external console.

  Jeff ran up the ramp towards the elevator.

  “Wait, there might be worms,” Jordan said.

  He ignored her, making to the console. The controls indicated that the elevator had been activated from within. Jeff slammed the controls with his hands. A readout said that the transit had already been engaged. Please try another elevator. A hum filled the air and the elevator vanished. The console before him went dark. Jeff was about to smash the controls when Oliop grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t do that, Jeff Abel,” Oliop said.

  Jeff took a step back and said, “We just lost our one elevator. Can we recall it?”

  Oliop examined the console. It powered back up before he could do anything. He squinted and tapped the screen.

  He said, “No. But this is interesting.”

  “What?” Jeff asked. He tried not to let his frustration show through.

  “They’ve somehow reset the home destination.”

  “You mean they went somewhere besides Earth?”

  “Kind of. Earth is the programmed destination, which we can’t change. This terminal is home. The elevators move from home, one, to destination, two, and back to one. Like the spokes on a wheel. When they worked before, to travel someplace different than where you came from you’d have to come back to one, here, to be able to go, say, to my homeworld. Three.”

  Oliop’s fingers drew imaginary lines in the air as he spoke.

  “Oliop, I get it,” Jeff said. “You’ve explained this a dozen times to me.”

  “But what’s new here is that they changed the value of one to zero.” Oliop nodded solemnly and added, “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  Jordan joined them. She walked carefully and checked every inch of the floor as if she were tip-toeing over a minefield.

  “So they didn’t go back to Earth,” she said.

  Oliop shook his head. “Nope. They did what I didn’t even think possible and reset the value of home. This means there’s someplace fundamental to the operation of the entire system that we’ve never seen before. Perhaps the source of functionality to the transportation system.”

  “Where is that?” Jeff said.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even know there was such a place. It’s someplace off the grid.”

  “We need to go there,” Jeff said. “Whatever they’re doing can’t be good.”

  “But we don’t know where that is, do we?” Jordan asked. “And is it even a place we can survive? I mean, if it’s powering the transportation system, what if it’s some kind of radioactive power plant, or the inside of a star, or a black hole?”

  Jeff walked over to another elevator. This one was completely dark, and the external console ignored him when he tried to power it up.

  “If we can’t get another elevator going, it really doesn’t matter,” he said. He gave the base of the console a kick. Then he smiled.

  “Hey Jordan, can you call Detective Ceph?” Jeff asked.

  “Why can’t you call him? Oh that’s right. You can’t bother with keeping a working com on you.”

  “Just call him. And ask him to bring us a worm.”

  Oliop nodded at this and got out his tools.

  “And what are you going to do?” Jordan asked Jeff.

  “Me? I’m going to see if I can get a loan.”

  ***

  Zachary didn’t bat a virtual eye when Jeff presented a line of credit that was enough to pay for a second AI.


  “You’re now officially our best customer to date,” Zachary said.

  The transaction cleared, and the credit amount in his loan account winked back to zero. Jeff tried not to think about the credit service that was willing to extend a loan to the Galactic Commons’ newest member race and what he had to offer as collateral.

  He had to bring Jordan in as a cosigner, and she almost didn’t agree to the loan, wanting to pore over the exact terms and conditions of repayment and what it meant for Jeff, her, and the human family.

  “We don’t know what we’re agreeing to,” she said.

  “We don’t have time to hire a lawyer to sort through this.”

  “That’s an extraordinarily large number. You and I both won’t be able to repay this. And if we default, that means that they can seize what exactly?”

  “I’ll agree it’s a bit vague. But this is an emergency. We’ll get paid back, I’m sure.”

  “You better be right. My student loans are already going to take ten years to pay off. With this tacked on, I’m doomed.”

  Zachary in his role as virtual loan agent never showed anything but polite encouragement of their enterprise, offering no clue as to his level of satisfaction with the transaction. Both a professional poker player and a funeral director would have been envious.

  Zachary said, “The AI packets will be delivered momentarily.”

  Jeff was surprised when an actual courier arrived on a grav bike and handed over a box with red envelopes inside.

  “All of this is for one elevator?” Jordan asked.

  “It appears so,” Jeff said. “The navigation computer is still in pieces, and there still might be a chance that it corrupts whatever we connect to it. There’s enough computer space within each elevator to accommodate the instant AI. It worked before, and it has to work now.”

  Detective Ceph appeared. He walked up the ramp, his stunner drawn. He, too, checked every shadow and nook carefully. From a pocket, he produced a limp worm.

  “We encouraged as many of them as we could to sleep their everlasting sleep,” Ceph said. “This one is merely stunned. Can you wake it?”

  “Let’s give it to Oliop and find out,” Jeff said.

  ***

  “I live, I think, I am,” the worm said.

  Oliop nodded, put away his blue-handled microfuser, and installed the worm into the place where worms went when they functioned as the lynchpin of an interplanetary elevator.

  “Go to work,” Oliop said to the worm.

  The elevator powered up. That was the less expensive part of the operation. Jeff read the instructions on the red envelopes and sprinkled the contents onto the controls inside the elevator. The metallic dust that poured out over the console didn’t look like much. Jeff was afraid that if he sneezed, a year’s GDP of his homeworld would be scattered to the winds. The product settled on the illuminated console surface. Before Jeff could wonder how long it would take, the activation button turned red.

  “Oliop, you know what to do next?” Jeff asked.

  Oliop made an adjustment to the console outside and got in. Jordan joined them, her two silver bug bots following her inside.

  “This is very dangerous,” Oliop said. “Could be a one-way trip. This might be safer if I went first.”

  “We don’t know if you’d be able to come back,” Jeff said. “We need to stick together.”

  “This isn’t the time to play it safe, you know,” Jordan said. “Let ’er rip.”

  Oliop nodded and gave Detective Ceph a good-bye wave before hitting the button that closed the door.

  Jeff looked at his hands. He saw a trace of the dust on his index finger. He wiped it off on his jumpsuit. That was when a second Zachary appeared in his head. He was dressed identically to the first. They looked at each other and offered a slight nod.

  “Jeffy boy,” the second Zachary said, “You made a good purchase.”

  “Thanks,” Jeff said. “Now both of you go away.”

  “Anything wrong?” Jordan asked.

  “Nah. Just getting my head around what we need to do.”

  Oliop’s finger danced above the red button. His mustache twitched. He closed his eyes and pushed.

  CHAPTER 26

  The crowd of refugees studied the space where the elevator once stood, as if it were a puzzle of sorts that just needed enough processor power to understand. Toggs, Doctor Cochran, and Kwed stood in the center of the bunch as various Galactic Commons citizens tried their hand at analyzing what had happened.

  “It’s coming back, right?”

  “They’ve abandoned us!”

  “The human took our money and left us!”

  “That’s not what happened,” Toggs said with little enthusiasm.

  He was never good at lying. What if they were correct? He considered the human female doctor who stood at his elbow. She kept a wary eye on the alien faces around her. If this camp was humanity’s best foot forward, then maybe this planet and this race of beings needed to stay isolated. At least the doctor was all right. She had stood up to the other humans on their behalf. Besides, she had a nice speaking voice.

  Doctor Cochran tugged at his arm.

  “I need to go back to camp,” she said.

  “No, you stay here,” he said. “It’s dangerous there.”

  “It’s dangerous here doing nothing. We can’t wait on Jeff, and you need to face the fact that maybe your spaceship isn’t coming back. I need to find the Director and a radio.”

  “Thaco will just infect you.”

  “I’ll take that chance.”

  Bright headlights appeared on the edges of the airfield, high-intensity beams that competed with the rising sun. An armored vehicle approached, looking identical to the one that Toggs had used to eavesdrop on the human radio chatter. Its engine roared as it ran through a thick growth of dry berry bushes and dipped down and across a series of ditches.

  “It’s the humans,” Kwed said, his voice trembling. “They’re going to close in and kill us. I knew this was a bad idea. I just knew it. I told you we should have stayed at camp.”

  The vehicle stopped at the edge of the crowd. The engine cut out. The single barrel of the main gun stared straight forward in Toggs’ direction.

  “This is the Director,” a voice said over a loudspeaker. “I need all of you to return to the camp. Our forces at the perimeter have been advised of the security breach and will respond in force if this order is not followed immediately.”

  Most of the refugees stood in silence. Some looked at Toggs for direction.

  “Oh thank you, Director!” Kwed said. “All of you! We need to return to camp. If we don’t, we’ll be killed!”

  Toggs tried to shush Kwed, but it was too late. Some in the crowd started to move.

  “Once back in camp,” the Director said, “we can negotiate more permanent accommodations since it appears you will be our guests for some time to come.”

  “Toggs,” Doctor Cochran said. He looked at her. “He doesn’t talk like Thaco. Thaco sounds like it has a hard time forming sentences. But the Director was definitely infected.”

  “Maybe he fought off Thaco like Jeff did.”

  “But we saw him in the thick of other infected earlier. Seems reasonable that they would have given him another dose of the virus if he had somehow shrugged it off. Either Thaco experienced a sudden die-off, or something fishy is going on.”

  “I don’t know about that. And besides, what choice do we have? And by we, I mean those of us who are your prisoners. He has the military machine with the big gun.”

  “Look, I’m doing what I can for you. I’m going to try to talk to him. Make sure he’s at least forestalled the bombing.”

  With that, she pushed her way forward towards the armored vehicle.

  “All of you must comply with the direction to return to the camp,” the Director said.

  Toggs was about to just keep standing there, bombs and guns be damned. Frustration at their failed escape made him
grind his teeth together. He then realized that the Director was speaking to them not in the halted tones that the guards had used to make simple requests understood, but with the help of a translator unit. He hadn’t heard the Director speak before.

  He grabbed Kwed. “Have you seen anyone talk to the Director?”

  “No,” Kwed said. “Never. He used the typing device so we couldn’t eavesdrop. I was hoping he would talk to me as I’d be willing to act as a representative…hey wait, where are you going?”

  Toggs let go of Kwed and made his way after Doctor Cochran. She was through the crowd and approaching the front of the armored vehicle, waving both hands over her head.

  “Director, it’s Doctor Cochran,” she called. “I need to talk to you. It’s urgent.”

  She walked around the side of the vehicle, looking at each mounted camera and trying to get someone’s attention inside. Toggs caught up with her as she made it to the rear ramp. She picked up a rock and knocked three times against the armored hull. The ramp whirred and lowered. Two soldiers waited. Neither carried rifles. One had a lump of drippy Thaco in his hands.

  “Director!” Doctor Cochran called. Then she recoiled at the sight of the soldier with the virus.

  Toggs pulled her back. He stepped forward and grabbed both men.

  One of them said, “Do not interfere.”

  Toggs slammed them into one another. The one holding Thaco dropped it. Toggs stomped on the glob. The two soldiers began to punch at Toggs’ arms and hands, but Toggs had encountered windblown grass that hit harder. There were no other soldiers inside, only the man with the dark suit and the silver hair who was now getting out of the commander’s chair and walking back in their direction.

  “The Director has a translator,” Toggs said.

  “I didn’t know that, but it makes sense,” Doctor Cochran said.

  “Let them go,” the Director said, indicating the soldiers in Toggs’ hands.

  Toggs pitched them one at a time past the Director and into the back of the vehicle.

  “You’ll have to forgive the soldiers, Doctor Cochran,” the Director said. “They can’t help themselves.”