Chapter 3
He led them up two flights of stairs to a bubbledome between and slightly above the wings, a private observatory or energy greenhouse that had been converted into a child’s bedroom.
From the string of prismatic danglers on the lamp, to the dinosaur hologram on the desk, to the dirty clothes on the floor, everything marked it a kid’s room. Probably all the clutter archeologists dug up, from prehistoric caves to that Croatan place they’d found in the east coast sand a few years ago, all came from kids’ bedrooms. Somehow that increased Rosemary Lestrade’s chronic on-the-job depression.
Not only was she old enough to be his mother—in cultures where girls married at twelve or thirteen, she could have been his grandmother. A son to carry on her family name ... or a daughter to carry on at least her genes. Too bad you never knew how they might turn out.
“All right, M. Cunningham,” she said, moving a toy woolly mammoth out of the way as she sat on the bed, “do you want to tell us about this evening in your own words, or would you rather we started off with a few questions? Sit down and turn on your tapebox, M. Click,” she added to her partner, who had paused to fiddle with something.
“That’s a working model of the Halley’s Comet Space Probe of 2062,” the kid informed him. “But they really started it up in 2058. I can make the comet’s tail stuff with my chemistry set and the probe model sorts it out.”
“All right,” said Lestrade, “the old question and answer method. Tape running, M. Click?”
“Oh.” Subdued, the boy looked down and sat on the end of his bed. Then he looked back up at her. “Anyway, Sergeant Lestrade, thank you for calling me ‘M. Cunningham.’”
She raised one eyebrow.
“Most grownups don’t em us kids. Mostly they call me ‘Cunny.’ I hate ‘Cunny.’ Old Stickysap—I mean M. Sapperfield—calls—called me Master Roberts. He’s—He was—good at that. He finds out everybody’s family names and always uses—used—’em, whether they like ’em or not.”
Lestrade glanced at Click. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside a desk chair heaped with what looked like part of a chemical experiment, maybe to make comet’s tail stuff. He nodded at his tapebox to let her know he had tabbed it on.
She looked back at Cunningham.
“I don’t mind Roberts,” he said. “I like Roberts a lot better than Cunny. But Big D—Wally Dutois—he hates ‘Epstein.’ And Sheryl Hawthorne just about had trollies when M. Sapperfield started calling her Miss Scarborough. Some of the other kids turned it into ‘Scary Sherry,’ and now she’s talking about getting her first name reregistered.”
“Did M. Dutois or M. Hawthorne have anything to do with your being in the Owlsfane Garber Middle College plant tonight after hours?” said Lestrade.
Cunningham seemed to catch his tongue behind his teeth. He stared at the floor again, pressing his fingers into the hem of his tunic. He wore a green tunic covered with a design that, looked at closely, resolved into mathematical equations. “No,” he said. “They didn’t have anything to do with it. It was all my own idea.”
He’s lying, said the police part of her mind. At least he’s no stoolie, said the mother part.
“Come clean, kid,” the junior sergeant put in. “My bobber just jumped a klick. Which one—”
“M. Click,” said Lestrade, “let the witness answer my questions in his own words.” (Okay, her police side challenged her mother side, you know that for once the lie detection bobber happens to be right, how do you justify sliding over it? Her mother side snapped back, The kid let it slip out in the first place without thinking. If it’s important, we can pick it up later, but meanwhile it’s best to make him comfortable.) “So why were you still in the school plant, M. Cunningham?” she went on. “As I told your parents, school rules and family rules are outside our authority, but we need all relevant data before we can run a program.”
“I was just camping out.”
“Camping out,” said Click.
“Yeah—Yes, M. It was going to be a big adventure. I had my miniflash, and a Gemini Space Rations Kit in my locker, and chips for the dispensers, but you wouldn’t actually need all that. I had it all programmed out. There must be so much food in the kitchen, they’d never miss what one kid could eat overnight. There’s showers in the dressing room, and comfort stations all over the building, and cots in some of the groves, and first-aid stuff in the nurse’s room, and gol knows what in the teachers’ lounges. I figured they don’t lock up inside, all they have to lock is the outside doors. And old Piney—M. Pinesweep’s—done and out by eighteen hundred or eighteen thirty hours on nights when nothing’s going on, like this week. So I told Mom I was staying overnight with Badger—Ron Badderley, my best pal. And then all I had to do was hide out till M. Pinesweep locked up and went home. I hid up in the skyview bubble. M. Pinesweep finishes up in there during the day. I ate some of my Space Rations, and watched the sunset, and by then I figured M. Pinesweep would be gone, so I came down ...”
“You were going to camp out in the building all weekend?” Lestrade prompted as his voice trailed off.
“No ... Well, I figured if it charged me enough, I could phone Mom Saturday and tell her I was staying over with Badge till Sunday. Or else I was going to come home Saturday morning, just go out a back door and be gone before the fireflies got there—because it’d set off the alarm, that wouldn’t have been very civic-minded, I’m sorry. But I was coming home Sunday anyway, no matter what.”
“Did your buddy Badger know about all this?” said Click.
“Of course! I wouldn’t tell Mom and not clear it with Badger first. He didn’t mind covering. We do things for each other all the time. And if anything came up, he knew where I was.”
“How were you going to get home Saturday morning?” said Lestrade.
“Bus. I’ve got the money. I was going to get off at the Novoposhni gate and walk from there.”
“Sounds like fun,” Lestrade commented, looking at it from the child’s point of view rather than the parent’s.
“Sergeant,” said the boy, “I told Mom and Woodstock all about it when the fireflies brought me home.”
“Mmm,” she approved. “I’d have made sure I had a change or two of clean socks and underwear along.”
Cunningham grinned. The policewoman decided it was as good a chance as any for backtracking to where he had choked up.
“So you came down from the skyview after sunset,” she recapped. “That’d be about nineteen hundred hours, maybe a little after.”
He nodded. “It was pretty dark, but I had my flash. I was going to see if the teachers’ lounges were locked up after all, but then I thought maybe I’d go take a swim and shower first. That’s why I went to the pool.”
Leave safety lectures to his parents. All Lestrade said was, “You were going to swim in the dark?” That much fit into the category of case data.
“At first I was going to swim with just the pool lights, the ones right under the surface, all around the edge. But the water looked too smooth. I know it gets like that in plain pools when nobody’s gone in for a long time, but not in aquanatoriums unless the cover’s on. They’re never supposed to go away and leave it covered, but I got down and felt anyway. I didn’t want to go diving in when it looked that smooth. And the glass was over it, sure enough. So I started looking for the button. And then I saw something dark in the water. It didn’t look like it belonged there.”
He paused and swallowed a couple of times.
Lestrade brought the teddy mammoth into her lap, stroked it once or twice, squeezed its stuffed neck a little, and plopped it casually across the bed.
Cunningham went on, “I didn’t think it could be a monster or anything like that. I’m going to be a realizer when I grow up, Sergeant Lestrade. Some fancier kids would’ve seen anything, but I’ve got reality perception. I’ve always h
ad reality perception, I was born with it. So I knew it wasn’t any kind of a monster, and I didn’t think it could hurt me. It wasn’t moving, anyway. I was pretty sure it didn’t belong there, so I found the light button and tabbed all the lights on. So I could take a closer look at it before I programmed out what to do.” The boy picked up the mammoth and started squeezing. “And it was M. Sapperfield. Well, I didn’t know who it was at first, but I saw it was somebody, so I found the button and got the glass out of the way, and tried to drag him out, but it was…he got all clumped up, he was too heavy for me…but I got a look at his face, anyway ...” He swallowed and went on. “... And ... Well, I got him down to the shallow end, and got in the water and tried the Heimlich, and the Riksdatter Method, and whatever I could, but nothing did any good. So I opened the front door to set off the alarm, and waited for the fireflies. But they couldn’t…bring him around either?”
“No.” Lestrade glanced at Cunningham’s wristphone, a regulation kids’ model with instrack channels to police, fire department, and emergency medical unit, additional buttons to be preset by parents. A lot of kids’ phones had only two or three private-channel buttons. Cunningham Roberts Cunningham’s deluxe model had seven. “Why didn’t you phone the fireflies instead of using the alarm?”
He looked at his wristphone and back at her with a sheepish grin. “Uh ... I left it in my locker. To sort of, you know, rough it more. Pretty silly, huh?”
“Fireflies let you stop at your locker before bringing you home, huh?” said Click.
The boy nodded.
Lestrade said, “What if your parents had tried to phone you?”
“They don’t care if I don’t answer sometimes. So long as they know where I am. And they thought they knew—at Badger’s. Mom says adults have the right to ignore phone chimes, why shouldn’t kids? She even got me a model with a ten-four privacy button. That’s what I tabbed before I left it in my locker. She’s going to get me a regular adult model for Christmas. ... Only I guess now she won’t.”
“That’s her decision,” said the policewoman.
“Besides, they say when you tab an emergency channel, there’s got to be a lot of noise and screaming in the background or they keep asking you questions to make sure it isn’t a joke, and maybe it gets backed to your number as a false alarm anyway, by mistake, even if it’s really legit.”
“Cute little rumor,” Click remarked.
The boy went on, “If you just push the door open, they’ve got to come check it out right away.”
“Pretty good reasoning,” Lestrade told him, “under the circumstances. But when you need these emergency channels, you use them and worry about your alarm record later.”
“I never had to tab an emergency button before.”
“Next time you’ll know. Well, M. Cunningham,” she went on, “did you notice any bubbles in the water beneath the steelglass? While it was still covering the pool?”
“You mean, around the body or anything?”
“No. Probably around the edge somewhere, maybe in the middle. Think carefully.”
He shut his eyes for a minute, then opened them and started up. “Oh! You mean, if there were bubbles, then the aerators would’ve gone on and that’d tell you when—when it happened?”
“Smart kid,” said Click. “Hey, how about being my junior partner someday, M. Cunningham?”
“It wouldn’t necessarily pinpoint anything,” Lestrade replied with a mental sigh—not because the kid could add things up but because now it might color his memory. “We’ll be determining the time from the postmortem anyway. Just for corroboration, maybe to help check if the automatic aerators are working all right.”
He shut his eyes again, frowned, and finally shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t remember. Not for sure. I think there were some bubbles, but not very many. They could’ve just been from the fish.”
“All right. Better an honest lapse than a definite answer that turns out to be a memory trick.”
“Sergeant Lestrade, they won’t have to stimulate my memory, will they? You know, hypnotize me or touch in a probe or anything?”
“They’ve got it down to a painless process, fella,” said Click. “Don’t even have to dope you out. Easy as clipping a fingernail.”
Lestrade gave her partner a stern look, then turned back to Cunningham, who sat twisting the toy mammoth. “Memory stims are last resort only,” she promised him. “I very much doubt we’ll want one to check whether or not the aerators are working.”
“That’s good. I’m not, I’m not scared or anything, not about probes and stuff. It’s just ...”
“It’s just that you don’t want to find M. Sapperfield like that all over again?” Lestrade finished for him. “That’s realistic. I wouldn’t want to relive it, either. Not many people would. Well, M. Cunningham, we’ll take your prints and I think that’ll be it for tonight.”
“My fingerprints’ll be all around the pool. I had a lot of trouble with the button. And then ... with M. ... with the body. They don’t show you how to work the safety catch on that button till you’re a senior. I had to figure it out by myself.”
“What were you going to do about the prints you left all over the school plant, fella?” Click teased. “They’d have tracked you down by those, y’know.”
“I would’ve had my gloves on anyway when I opened the door to get out. I didn’t think anything else would matter. They couldn’t dust the whole school for prints, could they? And they wouldn’t know for sure everywhere I’d been, and a lot of places they’d expect to find my prints anyway. Along with everybody else’s, all us other kids. Sergeant Lestrade ... I’m not under suspicion, am I?”
“This is routine identification, M. Cunningham. Exactly like thumbprinting your checks for the bank, except that we still have to use inkpads. Antiquated guiderules. M. Click and I will be signing our report with our own full sets of prints.”
Chapter 4
After the pollies left, Cunningham sat on his bed thinking until Mom tabbed his wristphone to check if he was all right. When he got back down to the family room, she was studying their stilled game screen as if she could help her king win the trick just by looking at him. Woodstock sat in a heavier smoke cloud than ever.
“Mom,” said Cunningham. “Woodstock. I’d rather be punished right away.”
Mom stood. Woodstock puffed again.
“We can talk about it tomorrow,” Mom said.
“I want to take it now, Mom. Before bedtime.” It was past his bedtime already, though he often got to stay up late on Fridays and Saturdays anyway.
She sighed. “Well…two weeks’ house arrest, then. Passes out only for school and church.”
“I’d rather be spanked.”
“Spanking. Brutal practice,” Woodstock said from his couch. “Corporal punishment. Outmoded. Police brutality.”
“Other kids get spankings.”
“You’re too old for a spanking, Cunningham,” said Mom. In fact, he had never been spanked. As far back as he could remember, it had always been some drawn-out, grownup kind of punishment.
“Badger still gets spanked, and he’s two months older than me. Mom, I just want it over with. Lots of other kids get spankings right away and then they can forget about it.” Family ‘house arrest’ was too much like the real thing, but he wouldn’t tell them that and get them worried.
“Punished enough, Mary,” Woodstock went on groggily. “Don’ lift a hand to our son.”
She sighed again. “No, Woodstock, maybe he’s right. It might be a sort of…exorcism.”
“Establishment voodoo.”
His mom went to his dad and they argued quietly for a little while. Cunningham played a few tricks against himself on the screen and tried not to want to overhear phrases about Establishment brainwashing and the right time and place for respecting children’s wishes.
At last Mom came back and said, “Would you rather have a spanking now and go to bed, or stay up as late as you like tonight and talk about it tomorrow?”
“The spanking right now and go to bed.” He wanted to be alone, or maybe he’d start acting like a baby and tell her too much.
“All right.” She stood up, took his arm, and led him out of the family room and over to the airshaft. “Uh ... what shall I spank you with, son? Do you have any preferences?”
He tried to think what other kids got spanked with. The first picture he tuned in was Old Stickysap breaking rulers on kids’ arms. Stickysap used to break a ruler or two every week, so rulers were out. “Hairbrush?” he said, remembering some old twentieth-century comic strip they studied last year in M. Swanneck’s seminar.
He had an idea it was supposed to be bristle side on bare rump, but his mother drew the line higher. “If you want to be a reality perceiver,” she said, “you aren’t going to start undressing in front of the other gender, not even me, not now at your age. And I’m still going to need this brush afterwards for my hair.” So in the end she used the back of her hairbrush like a plain paddle, over his undershorts and pants and all. He wasn’t sure how accurate the whole thing was. The Big D liked to say, “I got about a hundred Big Ones last night,” but some of the other kids talked about thousands and even googols, and maybe the D’s hundred was an exaggeration, too. Thirty-nine was what it said in the Bible, but Cunningham’s Mom said, “That’s enough” at nine, and when he straightened up he saw her hand was shaking. Senior Sergeant Lestrade would have done it a lot more professionally.
But anyway, even if they bungled it, it hurt and it was over with. He didn’t have to worry any more about the way he tried to camp out without permission tonight, except to pay up on the bet. (Because no matter how good his reason was, he’d still given up before sunrise, and he guessed the Big D would say, “So you were scared to stay in there overnight with Old Sticky’s ghost.”)
Mom hugged him, praised him for not crying and upsetting his father downstairs, and told him if he couldn’t sleep or started having nightmares, he could stay up as long as he wanted.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 31
