Margaret’s face was stony. “Kimberly Abrams, corporate headquarters, San Francisco. If a call comes in during the next few minutes, I’ll be near the switching equipment. Can you point me in the right direction?”
“Certainly. Third door on your right, with the big ‘No Admittance’ sign.” Miss Briggs had straightened in her chair.
Chinese Gordon followed Margaret down the hall, then waited as she pounded on the door. When it opened she said, “Kimberly Abrams, corporate headquarters, San Francisco” again, and Chinese Gordon could see a young man in a short-sleeved shirt with a tie and a row of pens and pencils in the breast pocket arranged according to length. “Bill McGee,” he said, and brushed an unruly tuft of hair off his forehead, not sure if he should offer to shake her hand.
She turned away from him and said to Chinese Gordon, “We’ll get out of your way and let you get to work.”
Chinese Gordon said, “It’ll only take a minute, ma’am.” He set his tool case on the floor and knelt to open it.
The young man smiled uncomfortably and asked, “Is it something I can give you a hand with?”
“Oh no,” said Margaret, and for the first time her features displayed a mild amusement. “He’s only changing the lock. Meanwhile, I’ve got to have you sign for the new key and be on my way.”
She brushed past him into the room and glanced quickly about her as she rummaged inside the leather case. She had imagined it would be a wall of exposed wires and boxes that made clicking noises, but it wasn’t. There were four or five computer terminals with sleek molded casings and a console along the wall. The room looked empty and surgically sterile. She wondered if Chinese Gordon would know what to do. She stared past the young man at Chinese Gordon, who was looking at the machines out of the corner of his eye as he worked. His face showed no surprise, no concern. He already had the old lock out of the door.
She handed the key to the young man and said, “Before you sign, do you understand your responsibility?”
He stared ahead with a noble, serious expression. “Yes, I do.”
“Fine.” She handed him a card that said only “7503, Number 4,” and he selected a pen from his pocket and signed it. Margaret looked at it closely and then dropped it in her leather case. Then she pointed to the console and asked, “Is that our pride and joy?”
The young man’s voice deepened with self-importance. “Part of it. The distributing frame is mostly behind those housings.” He waved his whole arm to indicate a bank of plain squares that looked to her like kitchen cabinet doors. “We use the terminals to debug the programming of the switching system, but if we need to, we can access just about any base we want.”
She hoped Chinese Gordon had been listening, but she couldn’t be sure. He looked absorbed in what he was doing. “Very good. Now can you please point me in the direction of the Santa Monica Freeway?”
“Certainly,” he said. “Just go straight up Grand past Washington and there you are.”
“I’m sorry, but my sense of direction is embarrassing. Could you just point?”
“Oh, sure,” he said, and pointed toward the console.
“I mean outside.”
“Oh. Sorry.” He blushed, then rushed forward through the doorway. Margaret followed slowly, and then he stopped himself and came back to walk beside her at a slower pace. “I’m not supposed to leave the room,” he whispered. “I’m monitoring.”
“You have permission this time,” she whispered back, and walked still more slowly.
As soon as they turned away, Chinese Gordon backed into the room. From his tool kit he lifted a caulking gun fitted with a narrow metal nozzle that came to a point. It took both hands to lift the caulking gun to the first of the housings covering the distributing frame and insert the nozzle. It was hard for the eyes to accept that the compact cylinder was this heavy—heavier than gold and almost as heavy as lead. He pumped the trigger and moved quickly to the next housing. One after the other he pried them open a crack and slipped the nozzle in, then pumped the trigger a few times. By the third one he could tell the caulking gun was lighter, and when he had finished the console, it was empty. He closed the tool kit over the caulking gun and walked to the hallway, locking the door behind him.
Chinese Gordon had been gone no more than two minutes before Mr. McGee stepped back through the front entrance of the building. As he passed Miss Briggs his eyes didn’t meet hers because he didn’t want to see the disapproval he expected. He knew it wouldn’t be jealousy because the woman from headquarters had been to see him, only impersonal contempt because he’d left the switching equipment. He knew that whatever it was, it would take him another week now before he’d be able to work up his confidence to ask her to go to dinner. He’d watch her and listen to the tone of her voice for at least that long before he was sure. His lowered eyes crossed her desk as he passed, and some part of his mind registered the fact that all three of the buttons on her telephone that happened to be lighted went out at the same time. When he reached the door of the switching room, he tried the knob. Then he inserted his key, and it wouldn’t turn. A big drop of sweat moved down his forehead in a slow arc and splashed on the inner surface of the lens of his glasses like a tear.
On the other side of the door behind the plain spotless surface of the airtight housing that protected the first row of modules in the distributing frame, several thousand tiny random electrical catastrophes were occurring in the microcircuits. The silvery spray of mercury had landed in shivering globules on all of the main boards and caused first one short circuit, then sixty, then hundreds as each one spattered sizzling droplets of mercury in every direction, each droplet causing another short circuit. In a few moments enough of these sparks would have occurred to melt the insulation that protected the wires of the major circuits. Less than a minute later a significant portion of the mercury would reach three hundred fifty-seven degrees Centigrade, and it would begin to boil. Then the space inside the airtight housing would begin to glow with an unearthly light that oscillated from yellowish-green to blue as the thousands of exposed wires discharged electricity in infinitesimal lightning bolts through the mercury vapor.
Kepler walked across the street to the city maintenance yard, opened the door of the orange dump truck, and hotwired the ignition. Trucks were so much easier than cars, with everything plain and in the open and easy to reach. He ground the gears getting it into second, but after that he got used to the stiff clutch and the sloppy transmission. The bright morning light made a glowing haze on the dusty, flecked windshield as he wound up the entrance ramp, but when he was on the Golden State Freeway he could see well enough, and soon he passed under the green sign that said “Jct Harbor Fwy South 1” and went by the Dodger Stadium sign. At that point he abruptly steered across to the left lane. Three cars shot past him on the right, and two others dropped far behind, seeming to be aware that something was wrong. He slowed down and moved onto the left shoulder and they too slipped past. In his right mirror he could see that he had a gap of at least a quarter mile before the next pack of cars reached the Dodger Stadium sign. He started the hydraulic lift of the dump truck and moved almost to the point where the two freeways separated. As soon as he saw the first pieces of gravel start to hit the pavement and bounce behind him, he swung the truck across all five lanes of the freeway, dumping the load as he went. As he drove on, he could see the gray pile of gravel stretching across the junction three feet high at the shoulders and at least six in the center lanes, like the body of a big gray fish. He lowered the bed of the truck and then he was up to speed again, heading south.
