by Clay Moore
He received the notecards from the field agents praising some gizmo or other he made was all the payment he needed. Still, he had been regularly publishing in the scholarly journals of the Machine Age. He was starting to get a reputation among the gadgeteer community.
William thought he heard something. He shushed them all; The noise got louder. That noise increased in level because it was the volume of a number of the Automata. He looked over the barricade and saw quite a few of the automata striding to the blockade. He saw one of the Guardsman pointing his rifle at him. He ducked, and the spike embedded itself in the ceiling.
“Is that how they kill,” the Director asked?
“Yes, sir,” said William.
“They are using a version of these guns I made. Air pressure powers their projectile like it pressures some of our guns.”
“Well, fire back at them.”
William drew his weapon. Thomas got on the other side. William popped up and fired a shot; He saw the automaton burst apart. Thomas added an automaton to the kill number.
The automata seemed capable of learning. William peeked above the barricade. He saw all of the automata getting ready to do volley fire. He yelled for everyone to get down. The Director was a little slow. William grabbed him by the nightshirt and pulled him down. For his trouble, William was grazed in the right arm.
Thomas realized that the automata would have to reload their rifles. He popped up and fired at an automaton. Gladys took William’s position while he tended to his wound. She got off two shots. Then Gladys saw them completing their reload routine. She ducked and ordered everyone to duck.
William went back to the barricade. He pulled out his coil gun; William fired three times, hitting three automata. William looked out and saw all of the bodies of the toys. He counted the big body pieces and found that they had assaulted the house with fifteen of the Guardsman type toy.
He heard the voices of the other Agents who were sleeping in the house tonight. They performed a search and found no other automata. Only what was here on the second floor in front of the Director’s office.
William relaxed. He hailed the Agents searching the house. The Director went into his bedroom. The only place that he could trust to hold the plans was in the White House vaults. The Director put on his regular clothes. He sent a message to the actual Secret Service Headquarters. The Director had them call up what agents they have available and send them to the Mansion.
William had other concerns than the protections of the plans. If you questioned him, he would have told you that he was worried about his woman and her young son. William walked down the hallway and entered his apartment. He went to the door leading to Johnny’s bedroom.
He knocked at the door and said, “Rowena.”
The door flew opened, and he had an armful of woman. Johnny came out and also hugged what he could reach of William.
“Oh, William. I was so afraid for you.”
William noticed that she had her derringer in her hand. It was cocked, and she was waving it around. He caught the hand and gently took the weapon from her. He released the hammer carefully. Then he placed a deep kiss on her.
Johnny did not know just what all this kissing was about between the two of them. He was just glad to see it. His Mom was much more manageable when William gave her plenty of kisses.
“Mom was real afraid for you, but I knew that you would wallop those whatchamacallits.”
“Your uncle would have you use the correct term for them. He would want you to call them automata.”
“Oh, Dad, are you going to get all sciency on me like Uncle Thomas?”
“No, I just want you to respect him. He thought so much of me that he made this gizmo for me.”
William extended his right arm, and he showed Johnny the device that put a derringer in his hand.
“Oh, that is cool, Dad.”
William smiled. He put the derringer back into his sleeve. Then he hugged Johnny as if he were his own son.
Rowena saw the interaction between William and her son. She was glad to see the rapport develop between her son and William. There was one more Fulbright ready to become a Hazard.
Rowena smiled at the jokes she could tell about being a Hazard. She had taken a subscription to the three newspapers printing in Washington. Those newspapers were popular among library users. Sometimes her readers just wanted to come to a quiet place and read some bit of fluff. So, she subscribed to the National Police Gazette, and several boys monthlies.
The Boy’s monthlies were the most thumbed periodical. She also took a couple of the women’s magazines for the women in the house. The women’s monthlies, strangely enough, were not as thumbed through.
She questioned William about it. He told her that most of the women in the house were agents. They are more tomboys. They were women, and they had more feminine emotions, but they were just as comfortable in jodhpurs and a shirt than in a dress. He further told her that to keep the subscription going. Some of the men had been nosing around it to see what women read.
Still, her most read periodicals were the technical journals. In fact, she had to take out a couple subscriptions per journal. She had nipped the gentlemen taking books out of the library. She chastised the offender as if he were Johnny.
William let them go. Rowena was glad to see Johnny call him Dad or Daddy. When Johnny was told that if he wanted, William would adopt him, and he would be Johnny Hazard. He whooped and hopped about.
She watched William agonize over a letter he was writing to the Fulbrights. In that letter, he informed them that he was marrying Rowena. The next day William was filing for the adoption of Johnny. Then he explained to them that he was writing this letter to keep them informed of the situation.
The return letter was full of invective and outright slurs. Rowena looked at the letter when he was gone to take care of something. William left it on his desk. She read it because he left if on the desk.
She hugged him all the harder after he and the other agents saved their life. She doubted that Fulbright would have risked his life for them. His country? Yes, he would risk his life for that, but not his family.
Fulbright stopped wooing her once she accepted her ring. William has not stopped wooing her even though he had won her. It felt great. Sometimes in the morning, she would find a single flower in a crystal vase he bought her on her desk in the library. He continued to take her to the theatre. She loved him for that.
“Okay, I got to check the house.”
“Halt right there,” said Rowena when she saw the hole in his coat sleeve.
She had his coat off before he could object. She spread the sleeve where it had been cut by the automata’s spike. The wound was still seeping a little of the blood. She grabbed his doctor’s bag and bandaged the wound. She made sure that the bandage would stay on the injury. She pointed at William’s chest and jabbed him with her finger to emphasize a point.
“You will not do this again. You will not hide a wound from me again, mister. Do not hide from me all the scrapes, bumps and bullet wounds that you get. Do not protect me. I am proud of you and what you do. I am proud of the wounds that you get in the line of duty.”
Rowena could not stay mad at William. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. William thought that getting wounded would not be such a bad thing if she would hug him and kiss him like this.
She let go of him and looked him in the eye. She seemed satisfied with something. She nodded and shooed him out the door by spanking him on the rump. William left his room in good spirits.
“How was Rowena and Johnny,” Thomas asked the dutiful Brother and Uncle.
“Scared out of their wits. They had no idea of what is going on. We’re going to have to have a session with the agents about the toymaker. Show the toys and let them all know what we can expect.”
“My thoughts exactly. I can do the lecture, but I could use you to bring it to the agent level. Then I can get into the specifics. I’ll need
to produce a lecture about the toys for the gadgeteer community in the Secret Service.”
“Do a post mortem on three of the carcasses. I’m going up before a judge for a search warrant in the morning. I want him to see the toys and their weapons. The Director is writing up an official document for the Judge to peruse.”
“Going back to the toymaker.” Thomas said that more to make sure that was the plan.
Seven agents dressed in black with black bowlers on their heads entered the office. The Director came out wholly dressed. He had the plans. The Director put them in a metal box with a Cuff attached; He put the cuff on one of the agents. The Director gave William the affidavit for the Judge. Then he walked out with the agents who formed a protective cordon around the Director and the agent carrying the plans.
“Well,” said Thomas, “he sure gave us a mandate.”
“Yes, he has. He wants us to put this toymaker behind bars.”
*****
The Toymaker made it home. When the Toymaker heard gunshots coming from inside the House, he knew that he had been set up by the Confederacy. They wanted the plans, but they did not want someone that could be made to express himself in front of reporters.
He felt cheated. He wanted to be paid in Gold, but instead, they paid him in Confederate money. They told them that they would exchange the money for Gold at any time he pleased. He asked for the Gold, and got nothing.
This time the mission was to be paid in Gold in advance, which they did. He suspected that he was paid in counterfeit Gold looking coins. Specific gravity was a tough thing to cheat.
He looked at the House that was his workshop; He climbed up the stair to his bedroom. He felt a tightness in his chest. The attacks were coming more often and were getting worse.
He worried about Evangeline. How would she get along with him in the world? Who would interpret the world for her? What would she do to make her way in the world? What would happen if she killed another man for taking liberties with her?
He opened the door to his room and climbed into bed.
Evangeline took the nights off. She did not sleep. She simply turned herself off, and a timer in her system turned her on in the morning. In between, her mind did nothing. A mechanical brain, when turned off, did not do anything.
When humans laid down to sleep, their mind was still active for a human being but allowed to roam. The human brain never turned off until the human died.
On this day, she decided that she needed to get to work early. There was no telling how the humans would act after the attack. She got up and walked to her father’s room to see if he was up. She opened the door.
Her father was lying on the bed in his work clothes from the previous day. He was not under the covers and in his nightclothes. She also did not see his chest rising and falling. She took a mirror given to her by her mother. She set it under his nose; There was no condensation formed in the mirror. Her father was dead.
Her mother had given her the ability to learn new skills by reading books or having someone show her how to do something. She had also read the writings of fiction. In those books, the death of the father resulted in hard times for the family. She knew that humans would come and take away Papa’s things. That was why he had her set up a second workshop in the sewers under the city. He wanted her to continue her work.
She went down into the sewers. She turned on the automata in the workshop. The speaking engine was a difficult way to communicate between machines. She used the coding that her father used to tell his toys what to do. She articulated the dots in sequence and position by pitch and rhythm.
She turned on one of the massive Great ape machines. She told the Ape to go and retrieve her father’s body. Then she ordered the automata that worked with wood to create a casket to lay her father in.
She turned on three human-sized automata. When she built them, she made them anatomically correct. She also gave them high strength and an understanding of human fighting techniques and how to render a human unconscious.
She turned them on and told them that she wanted them to be in charge of the security down here. Then she turned to the servitor’s automata. These were the automata that kept the others wound up. She had them wind up the others to begin making more automata. She even designed robots that could glean from the human world the metals that they would need to continue the mission her father had yet to do.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Going back to the Toymaker
*****
WILLIAM AND THOMAS stood before Judge Beckelsham. Apparently, he had the morning duty for Search Warrants. The Judge looked at the warrant application, and then at the brief that William wrote. Then he looked at the three toys. There was no doubt about the nature of the alleged crime. They actually had evidence of the dolls and not some neatly dissected wannabe murderous toys. They were shot, but the dolls was clearly designed to inflict harm if not death. He signed and sealed the search warrant.
“Sorry about the last time, but I could see no evidence of a crime. The reloads they carried spoke to me. Good luck, I hope you find what you need.”
Outside the Judge’s chambers, William had a question for Thomas. “Did you find that suspicious? I mean it is practically the same evidence.”
They went out of the courthouse; William and Thomas passed by a paperboy. Thomas gave him a nickel. And took the paper with the lurid headline “Gunfight in the Hazard Mansion.”
“Got your answer here. Can you imagine the outrage that would happen if the next day it said ‘Judge refuses Search warrant in Hazard Mansion gunfight case?’”
“Damn we did not stop for breakfast this morning. I would have seen it in the paper at breakfast. We both felt the need to move quickly. On this I agreed.”
“Let’s go execute this warrant.”
William and Thomas rode their clockwork bikes to the Toymaker’s workshop. They kept on their dusters and walked up the steps onto the wide porch. The windows along the long porch showed his toys. He was an excellent toymaker. Something had changed him. He used his skill and knowledge to turn his toys into something lethal.
The attack on the Secret Service Mansion to retrieve the breach loading naval gun plans showed him to want money. In the end, it appeared that was what he seemed to be all about.
They knocked on his door. William looked through the glass in a crack of the window shade. It seemed that they had left the building. William stepped back to try and kick the door open.
“Wait, William. I got something a little more effective.”
He reached into a pocket and took out a small matchbox. He reached into the box and removed a match that was slightly thicker than most matches. He inserted the matchstick into the lock. Then he broke off the match in the lock. He stepped back from the door. William followed him in stepping back. I was an axiom of William’s that when the gadgeteer steps back from one of his devices, you follow his lead.
From the lock was an intense light. And a bit of smoke. When it stopped, Thomas indicated that William could open the door. William simply pushed the door open. Some of the bits of the lock fell out of the door as he opened it.
“What was that?”
“These matches are not what they seem. There is a glass ampule in the the matchstick. Insert the match into the lock and break the stick off in it. A chemical reaction happens burning at the temperature of the melting brass. The match melts the lock. Push the door open and lock disintegrates.”
“You’ll have to get me some of those.”
“Take this box. I got more coming in. A few agents who saw it wanted them for the same reason as you.”
William took the box. Then he pulled his gun and walked into what looked like a hurried departure. All of the display automata were gone from the shelves and the boxes with them. He lifted a swing board up to allow him to walk behind the sales area.
He looked below, and the moneybox was gone. There were several boxes to hold the dolls, along with twine and brown paper rolls.
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Thomas followed by William; He went into the room behind the sales counter. He saw a large roll-top desk with the roll-top open; A large ledger book was open. Thomas ran his finger down for the sales for the day. He had Twenty sales for the day, almost six hundred dollars in total sales.
That did not make sense. The Toymaker was making good money. Why would he work for the confederates? Thomas knew how gadgeteer’s worked. Somewhere here would be his notebooks, the place where he kept his designs and his plans for improvement. He found a drawer full of the Record books he used to write down his ideas.
Thomas sat down at the desk and went through the notebooks. He wasn’t trying to read the totality of the man’s thought. Thomas followed the development of the idea of a superior toy. As far as he could see, the concept of machine intelligence suddenly appeared when he constructed Evangeline. The knowledge that his daughter was just one of his toys opened Thomas’ eyes.
What would happen to Evangeline now that her father was no longer here to give her direction? Then he heard a scream of pain from William.
William went into the workshop behind the sales counter. He knew the office would attract Thomas. What William wanted to know was how they manufactured so many of the automata that William had seen. The workshop was as he expected. There was a small forge to melt the metal and pour it into molds. He saw some of the positives for the parts. He seemed to have repeated using some of the parts. Then he noticed the more substantial parts. He recognized some of the cogs as being more extensive versions of the smaller ones. Obviously, the Toymaker was making bigger Automata.
The forge was something that they really could not move effectively. The automata would have to make one where they were now located.
He walked to the middle of the floor; A sudden springiness in the floorboards revealed a trapdoor. He tapped the floor to find the boundaries. He found the hinges partly disguised. He could find nothing to lift up the trapdoor.
