the clown again.
“Let’s try looking behind the fire now,” said Ida. “Usually the most important things are there.”
“All right,” I said.
The clown and I walked toward the fire, but the fire was like a wall.
“Um, squeeze around,” said Ida’s low voice.
We sidled over to the side of the hearth and squeezed around behind the fire. There was a sooty trapdoor in the back wall of the chimney. Ida pulled it open, and I followed her through.
Instead of the dungeon passage I’d expected, the room behind the panel was a completely modern-looking office room with bookcases and standard-looking cyberspace portals. One of the doors had an ant on the wall over it-peering in there, I could see that this portal was a hyperjump connection to the same dungeon room that Tom and I had just visited by way of the passages.
“Ahem,” said Ida.
“You’re doing good,” I said. “You were right.”
Right next to the ant lab portal was a door to a room with four booths that looked like arcade cyberspace games, each with swivel-mounted goggles and glove controls. The booths were labeled Walt, Perky Pat, Dexter, and Baby Scooter.
“This is it!” I exulted. “Yay Ida!” Peering into the booths, I saw that the Walt and Perky Pat goggles were dark and dead. But the Dexter and Baby Scooter headsets were flickering with colored images.
“Okay,” I told Ida. “These are for telerobotically controlling two robots that are in a factory next to the building where I am. Those robots have been building plastic ants. We have to go in there and take over the robots and try and get them to kill the plastic ants.”
“Okay,” said Ida a little uncertainly.
“Let me do it,” yelped Tom.
“Maybe Tom should do it, Ida,” I said. “I mean my life kind of depends on this. If we don’t kill all the plastic ants they might crawl over here and kill me. One of them tried to slash my wrist this morning. And Tom is better at games than anyone.”
“Oh all right,” snapped Ida.
Tom quickly took control of the clown. I settled into the Dexter booth and Tom took Baby Scooter. Pulling the Dexter headset over my virtual face shifted my viewpoint to that of the robot’s and, most importantly, this action overrode the robot’s control circuits and put me in charge. Dexter was now slaved to my hands’ motions.
This didn’t happen quite smoothly or automatically. Dexter and Baby Scooter had no desire at all to become our telerobotic slaves. My viewpoint bucked around wildly for a moment after I entered Dexter, and I could see that Baby Scooter was thrashing around as well. But Roger had made sure to hardwire the telerobotic override into the ROBOT. LIB microcode, and there was really nothing Dexter and Baby Scooter could do. As soon as we’d settled in, all their higher logic circuits were turned off.
Even so, the robots’ control circuits were still functional, and you could drive them around with the standard cyberspace control gestures. You didn’t have to worry about the best way to move their legs and so on; you had only to point and nod, and use your hands to control their manipulators. Since the robots had four manipulators each, the control booths actually had four swiveling glove controls.
Once Dexter quieted down, I found myself standing in front of the plastics-casting machine he’d been tending. There was a basket of tiny electronic circuits to my left and a bowl of shining translucent beads to my right. Farther to my right was Baby Scooter. I raised my hand and waved.
“Are you okay, Tom?”
“Yeah,” said Tom, waving back. “I’m fine. Are these the plastic ants?” He pointed at the components spread out before him. “Where are the live ones?”
“Down there.” I pointed at the trail of newly fashioned plastic ants that was marching from Tom’s bench to the crack by the elevator door. “Those are the guys we have to get rid of.” Just as I’d feared, the plastic ants were as lively as ever.
Tom picked up a live ant in one of his pincers. He squeezed hard, trying to crush it, but rather than crumbling, the ant skidded out from his grip and shot across the room like a pinched watermelon seed. “They’re really solid,” said Tom.
I scooped up another ant with my humanoid hand, and then used my two pincers to pull its gaster and its head sections apart from its alitrunk. When I dropped the pieces to the floor, they writhed about spastically. “Tearing them apart works,” I said. “But by now there’s hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands.”
“See how their trail goes into that crack by the elevator door?” said Tom. “Maybe we can pour something down in there that will melt them.”
“It would be even better if we could take the elevator down to where the ants have their nest,” I said.
“What’s wrong with the elevator?”
“It’s jammed.”
“Maybe I can fix it,” said Tom. “You look for something we can pour on them.”
I trucked back and forth on my bent-legged bicycle wheels, looking at the vats and barrels of chemicals. The plastic ants still in the lab seemed to sense we were no longer their friends-they were streaming en masse toward the crack at the bottom of the elevator door.
“Here’s a big can of acetone,” I said presently. “That might be good.” The big square can was of shiny metal marked Acetone — Highly Flammable. It looked like it held about five gallons.
Tom was examining a box on the wall near the elevator. “Somebody took out one of the fuses is all,” he said, rising high up on his legs to look on top of the box. “And, yes, here it is!” Dexter or Baby Scooter had probably removed the fuse, timing it to trap Roger where the plastic ants could finish him off.
Tom replaced the fuse, pressed the elevator button, and *clankclank* the cabin slid up to our level and the doors opened. A dozen plastic ants were running about on the cabin floor.
“Let’s see if they melt,” I said, lumbering over with the heavy can of acetone. I unscrewed the top and slopped some of the stuff onto the plastic ants. But it didn’t slow them down a bit.
“If we could light the acetone…” said Tom.
“That would probably work,” I agreed. “But how can we light it?”
“Make a spark with an electrical wire,” came Ida’s voice.
“That sounds good,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
We got in the elevator. Tom was about to push the button for the basement, but I stopped him and pushed the button for the main floor. “We can’t take the elevator to the basement,” I said. “There’s a dead body at the bottom of the shaft. I was starting to tell you before. The plastic ants killed Roger.”
The main-floor elevator door was still frozen into the half-open position I’d cranked it to. Tom and I squeezed out with some difficulty, and then went down the concrete stairs to the basement.
I looked around the basement. Where were the ants? No trail led out from under the elevator door here, which suggested they had taken up residence inside the shaft. Hopefully right at the bottom.
“Wait,” I told Tom, and hurried back up to the main floor to get the emergency key-crank out of the elevator door. Back in the basement, I put it into the hole in the basement elevator doors.
“Get a wire,” I told Tom.
Tom tore a heavy section of electrical conduit down from the ceiling. Being in robot bodies made us feel pretty reckless. Tom kept pulling on the wire and ripping stuff loose until the wire had about ten feet of slack. And then he yanked the wire in two with his pincer-claws. The two bare wire ends made big sputtering sparks if you held them near each other.
“All right,” I said. “It’s robot kamikaze time.”
“Kick some butt!” yelled Ida.
I clamped the acetone can against my chest with my tentacle, and used my humanoid hand to crank open the door at a furious rate. There behind the door was Roger’s corpse, and all around his corpse were the glistening plastic ants.
The ants were busy-they’d mounted the two Y9707-EX chips on the grungy shaft wall, with wires running around the chips. Several of the ants had fashioned themselves small silicon rectangles that were attached to their bodies like wings. One of the ants was just starting its wings with an abrupt beating stutter. It rose an inch or two into the air.
