“No, thanks,” Emma said nastily, pulling him away before he could get a good glimpse. He ordered his helmet recorder to take a full image of it to peruse later. Might as well see what he would be missing. Surely Oscar Wingle would let them look around the place even if wasn’t operating.
How oddly exposed it felt walking through the streets with no one else in sight. Even as a child he’d had the distinct impression that he was being watched. At least with fifty thousand people surrounding him he had the anonymity of the crowd. But what with face-recognition software he was sure that the security force could find him any time it liked. Wingle World had a reputation for reuniting lost children with their parents faster than almost any other facility in the TWC. Perhaps faster than the children might like, considering where they were, but no successful abduction had ever been carried out within the Cheerful Community. Children who had been momentarily separated from their families usually returned with an icepop or corn treats and tales of an underground city with nice people who reassured them, washed their faces and let them use the bathroom. Daivid longed to get a look at the security system for professional reasons. There must be a thousand spy-eyes either implanted in the facades and ceilings of buildings, or hovering around in the air disguised as balloons or other merrymaking impedimenta. But no people. Daivid waved a hand in front of Emma’s face to get her attention.
“Why is it so empty here? Where is everyone? I would have thought this was the time that the park underwent maintenance. I’d have expected to see hundreds of people.”
“In Fimbul? Oh, no,” Emma scoffed. “Everyone on the planet goes on holiday all at once. The only ones who don’t go are the ones who can’t. Or don’t like to,” she added, thoughtfully.
Daivid looked around longingly as they left Anyville and moved into Future Land. Roller-coasters. Water rides. Parachute drops. Holo-adventures. All of them temptingly near, and all of them closed for the season. Even more desirable, the food concessions hadn’t turned off their threedeeo displays. Visions of meter-high sundaes and sauce-soaked sandwiches danced along the marquees of booths that were, disappointingly, also shuttered. He stared at a vision of steak-on-a-stick, trying to decide if he would have liked the selection with extra onions or not, when Emma poked him in the side.
“There’s Uncle Oscar’s place. Go right in.”
Daivid brought his attention to the building she pointed at. Stuck into the perfectly green grass was a rustic wooden sign that read “The Old Inventor’s Workshoppe.” He sort of remembered the cottage, or he had seen it in crystal-threedeeo features about Wingle World. It was a tiny, plaster-walled bungalow with a roof made of fibrous bundles like sticks. The shutter-framed windows were very small, set deeply into the walls. They didn’t look as though they’d let in very much light.
“That can’t really be it,” Daivid said. “He wouldn’t really have his lab right in the middle of the park for everyone to see. It looks like straw and plaster.”
“Don’t let appearances fool you,” Emma chided him. “That kitschy cottage is made of a supertough polymer. Resists wear, scratches, graffiti, even bullets. Uncle Oscar invented it himself.”
“But he couldn’t just leave the door open like that.”
“Why not?” Emma asked. “No one bothers him.”
“But you could just walk right in.…” Daivid protested, gesturing toward the open door.
On either side of the path, clay pots full of bright flowers perked up at the sudden movement and began to sing.
“Welcome, we bid you welcome! Welcome to Wingle World! Welcome, come one, come all! You’ll get your turn to see it all, you’ll sing and play and have a ball, So when you leave our gates we’ll miss you lots, but we will keep you in our hearts. You’ll want to come back … to Wingle World!”
Jones groaned. “That’s terrible.”
“Children like it,” Emma said, imperturbably. “But it keeps any over about ten from wanting to go inside and visit, which is the way Uncle Oscar likes it.” She opened the door and stood to one side. “Go right in. There’s room for everyone.”
Daivid glanced at the little cottage doubtfully. It looked as though it could only hold eight or nine people, which didn’t leave much room for the Inventor. He had to bend over slightly to go under the lintel, but Emma was right: the room would hold them all. The sense of smallness was an optical illusion, a Wingle specialty. One by one the Cockroaches joined him, Lin and D-45 having to ship their plasma guns to make it inside. The inside was much like the outside, plaster walls and flower pots, a primitive fireplace with black andirons and a kettle on the fire. But the wooden floor was bare of furniture, let alone the presence of their host.
“So, where’s Uncle Oscar …” Daivid began to ask, when the floor dropped out from underneath them. The entire platoon found themselves hurtling through a titanium-lined tube.
“You knew you shouldn’t do anything I say!” Emma’s voice echoed above them.
“Oh, slaaaaaagggg!” was all Daivid had time to say, before he and all of his troopers landed heavily in a swimming pool-sized tub full of pads. Thanks to the armor, no one was hurt. Their highly trained reflexes got them out of the container and back onto their feet in seconds, weapons out and on guard. Daivid had his sidearm drawn in a flash as he surveyed the dimly lit room. There was nothing in it but the landing tub, and one furious company of space troopers.
“Goddammit!” Boland growled. “Now I remember that little fraxer from the kiddie shows! She was always getting people in trouble. And we fell for it! Literally! It’s a good thing we’re not fighting the lizards, or that goddamn Insurgency. We’d have been toast!”
“Serves you right,” said a cranky voice from behind the tub. The lights brightened as Oscar Wingle the 7th entered the room. The lined, sharp-chinned face with the wild gray hair, eyebrows, and mustache would have been familiar to trillions of children throughout the galaxy. He and his many-times forefathers had delighted the young with their calm, warm speeches, and their own pleasure in the entertainments they seemed happy to offer their viewing and park-going public. None of that placid hospitality was evident on this face. The deepset gray eyes with the avuncular crinkles at the corners were amused, all right, but definitely inclined to laugh at, not with, his current audience. Wingle was dressed in a coverall made of slightly shiny fabric Daivid recognized as being proof against fire and most known kinds of caustic fluids. He pointed a wrenchlike tool at them. “You said you knew not to trust her, and what do you do? You obey the first thing she tells you to do. Hah! Grown men and women falling for a trick like that. Literally, falling! I loved it! A kid wouldn’t have listened to her. He’d have remembered the rule. You grownups, you just believe whatever you hear last. And what’s all this about cockroaches? I don’t stand for bugs in my park.”
“That’s, er, that’s the nickname of our unit, sir,” Daivid said, recovering his wits. “Lieutenant Daivid Wolfe, X-Ray Platoon. My unit. The Cockroaches.” He nodded briefly toward the immobile ghosts arrayed behind him. Wingle was unimpressed.
Wingle gestured with his wrench. “What in hellfire are all of you doing here in my park in the middle of the off season? Go away at once.”
Daivid was faintly shocked. Wingles didn’t swear. They told children it was bad manners to use bad language. There was even a song about it.
“Sir, I have orders from my commanding officer to receive an item from you, a controller chip. I have, er, no other description, but I am sure you know what I’m talking about. If you will just give it to us, we will return to our ship.”
Wingle’s eyebrows went up, then down. “So, they didn’t listen to me after all. Hear me now, you young scoundrel: the chip is not ready yet. I told your admirals that they could have it when it’s ready. It’ll be ready when it’s ready! Did they try and hurry Michelangelo? Did they try to hurry Leonardo da Vinci? Did they try to rush Paine Fitzwallace?”
In fact, their patrons had tried to hurry the first two in th
eir endeavors, but the third was a stranger to Wolfe. “Paine Fitz…?”
“Inventor of the shields for string-drive starships,” Borden murmured in his ear, using the implant channel. Wingle’s eyebrows went up again.
“Right you are! Bright girl. And without even an electronically enhanced memory. Don’t like those things anyhow. But you shouldn’t mumble. I can hear you fine, just fine. Technology’s a wonderful thing.” Borden made a quiet noise of astonishment. Wolfe stared. Wingle shouldn’t have been able to hear a secure channel. The brows dropped once again. “Now, can you hear me fine? I told you to scoot. Come back when it’s ready. I’ll send a message.”
Daivid opened his mouth to say that it wasn’t so easy to get back there, that their ship was on its way to a war they didn’t want to be late for, and Harawe would cut off his personal parts if he returned with a message like that. “Sir, I will have to check with my superiors.”
Wingle watched the changes in his expression, no doubt reading his mind. “Never mind, then, boy. I’ll do it. This way.”
O O O
Weapons still at the ready, the Cockroaches fell in behind the old man. Wingle heard the click as D-45 automatically thumbed off the safety on his plasma, and glared back. “You don’t need that here. Nothing happens here and nobody comes here without my say-so. You’re safer here than you were in your mother’s womb.”
“Didn’t have a mother,” Adri’Leta growled under her breath.
D-45’s head swiveled toward Wolfe, who nodded. The safety clicked back on, and the squad chief slung the gun strap over his shoulder. His squad, and the other two, followed suit.
The shiny steel walls of the corridor were strongly lit not only from above, but from the tops of the walls. Triple shadows caused the chameleon coating of the Cockroaches’ assault armor to go crazy trying to disguise itself. Daivid watched the play of light and dark on the backs of the squad ahead of him, though he kept his eyes on their host, who stumped along at the head of the parade. In his humble opinion, Thielind made a much better drum major.
The ensign, walking at his side, kept turning his head to stare at each new detail, overwhelmed with awe as each new wonder revealed itself.
“Look at that,” he said over the private channel, as they passed through a set of blast doors that opened without a single sound. “They didn’t have anything that good on the Eastwood! Triple-shielded, hardened deuteronium layered with semiliquid dampening resin. They could stop a plasma missile.”
“But it makes a hell of a mess of the floor,” Wingle agreed. “Smart kid, aren’t you?”
Thielind fell silent. “I forgot he could hear me.”
“Tight-band transmissions,” Wingle said. “I didn’t invent it, but I perfected it. It’s my technology you’re carrying around in your head, and in your helmets, so of course I can pick it up, just about anywhere. You think I wouldn’t keep the master codes?”
Wolfe frowned. “Are you sure you ought to be telling us this, sir? If you’re in possession of top secret technology, you’re vulnerable to the enemy.”
“They’re not gonna hurt me,” Wingle assured him, turning to look at him with the bushy brows on high. “Both sides want me to keep on doing what I’m doing, inventing things for them to use against one another. Me, I’m just having fun. Sit down, shut up, and don’t touch anything.”
This last was delivered as they crowded behind him into the room at the end of the long corridor. Crowded was the operative word, Wolfe observed, because though the space was over twenty meters on a side, it was jammed with tables, boxes, racks, scientific apparatuses, glass cases, cabinets, partial figures of some of the park’s most famous characters and some Wolfe didn’t recognize on stands, on tables and on the floor, and so much more that he was gawking just trying to take it all in. Wingle plopped himself down in a rolling armchair of ancient design in front of an old wooden desk covered with the most modern of communications equipment.
“Sit!” Wingle ordered. Concealed within the fascinating jumble were several dozen chairs. Most of the platoon followed Daivid’s gesture to sit down, but Thielind began to wander, looking at some of the cases. Wolfe could hear him crooning to himself in the soft voice he used to talk to machines. This had to be his idea of heaven. The slender ensign came to a wooden cabinet with hundreds of small drawers in it and pulled one out at random. A hand came around the side of the cabinet and slapped him on the wrist.
“Hey!” Thielind exclaimed. Naturally such a blow couldn’t hurt him through his armor, but the sudden movement surprised all of them. A pink-cheeked youth appeared from an alcove beside the cabinet and leered at the ensign.
“Good boy, Sparky,” Wingle said over his shoulder. “Don’t any of you fools touch anything! And take off those goddam helmets. I like to see who I’m yelling at. Why, look there. A bug. And a spider!” he exclaimed as Haalten and Aaooorru removed their masks. “I wondered about you, shorty,” he said to the corlist. “Didn’t know whether those were prosthetics or limbs. Don’t see too many of your people lately. We get all kinds here. Gives the humans and non-humans a weird sense of belonging together when they interact with my critters. Big load of nonsense, if you ask me. Hello, kitty,” he said to Ewanowski. “I always liked cats, but I’d hate to have your vet bills.”
Daivid was flatly astonished. “This is the beloved Oscar Wingle, who makes all those appearances for charity, who loves children? Who’s known to have the patience of the saints?”
Wingle let out a bark of laughter. “Me? Hell, no. I had my fill of appearances when I was in my twenties. Marching in parades six times a day in the hot sun. People shaking your hand when all they want is to shake your wallet. Kids puking on your leg, and having their moms shout at you that it’s your fault. Getting hammered from the moral majority minority every damned generation that you’re corrupting the minds of the innocents when it’s them that ought to be legislated out of existence. There’s the Oscar Wingle everyone knows. Dudley!”
A light went on across the room, illuminating yet another niche. Inside it, an exact duplicate of Oscar Wingle, to the last hair and wrinkle, smiled and raised a hand to wave at the troop. He lowered his hand and the light went out.
Wingle grunted. “He can put up with any amount of bull. I made him that way. He’s more advanced than any synthetic creature that humankind or anyotherkind has come up with in over three thousand years.”
“He’s an android?” Borden asked.
“A puppet, miss lieutenant. The jolly marionette that dances to my whim. Didn’t you ever visit my overblown establishment up there? Hell’s bells. Maria!”
From yet another dark recess that Wolfe now noticed were cut into the heavy stone or plascrete walls came a silver-skinned being. She was beautiful and terrible at the same time, a creature that made Wolfe think of a higher chord of humankind, something they would evolve into in another hundred thousand generations. Her longlegged figure stalked past him, drawing his eyes to the gentle sway of her hips. The slender lines of back and arms undulated like silk sheets hanging in a light breeze, her breasts softly rounded, just waiting to be cupped by eager hands. And yet above the delicate features of her face she had huge blank eyes, plain silver with no whites, irises or pupils, like the ancient statues of gods ten thousand years old that were still preserved in the museums on Terra, and there were coin-shaped protuberances at the sides of her knees and elbows, as if to remind the viewer that what he was looking at was not human, but was she something more or something less?
“Mmm-mm!” Injaru hummed.
“No lie,” Parviz agreed, his round brown eyes fixed on the swaying figure.
Wingle glanced over at her as though she was no more beautiful than the battered and timeworn desk his elbows rested upon.
“Get these youngsters something to drink, Maria. Tea, or whatever the hell they want. Liquor closet has about anything you’ve ever heard of, and probably hundreds you have never heard of but are good at giving you a hangover. I lik
e a little brandy, but it’s too early for me. Help yourselves.”
The silver goddess undulated over to the big wooden cabinet at the side of the room opposite the desk. Wolfe couldn’t keep his eyes off the grace of her movements. Neither, he noticed, could most of his crew, but Thielind had the most avid gaze.
“She’s amazing,” he breathed.
“Prototype,” Wingle said shortly, his long, gnarled fingers punching buttons on a communications console that looked old-fashioned, with its ornamented wooden case, but responded with the blinding speed of the newest units. He leaned close to the screen, peering at the logos that flashed by almost too quickly for the brain to acknowledge having seen them. “I invent all kinds of things the military wants to have. No one here knows about it, which is just fine. When I come up with something, I run the stats through my database to see if it has any military implications or uses, then I get in touch with the central government. If they want it, they buy it. If not, I sell it to someone else. I don’t care. I’ve got plenty of money. Much too much money. Takes all the sport out of life.”
“Do you play poker?” Boland asked hopefully.
“Shut up,” Daivid and Wingle said at the same time. The inventor leaned into the screen.
“Hello? Is this the commander of that dreadnought up there? What’s your name?”
In the three-dimensional display, the head and shoulders of a very young female lieutenant with her black hair in a complicated braid stammered. “Lt. Parr, sir. How may I help you? Er, how did you get on this frequency?”
“I damned well dialed it up,” Wingle said, raising his bushy eyebrows. “Now, who’s in charge up there? I want to talk to him, her or it, mach schnell.”
A plain blue and gray image of the Space Service emblem appeared in place of Lt. Parr’s worried face, the graphic Daivid referred to as the “One moment, please” image. Bland music floated out of the speakers for approximately three seconds.
“Silence! Voice only.”
The troopers’ shoulders relaxed slightly. They all disliked the computer-generated music. A bureaucrat’s favorite use was to keep an unwanted caller listening to it endlessly until he felt like getting around to responding.
Strong Arm Tactics Page 24
