“So what?” Martin said. “I’ve stood this far from a collector. Look, you can stay here if you want to, but, Mom, grab your stuff and let’s get going.”
On the doorstep, Martin paused. The scene wasn’t as he remembered it. Yes, there was the park across the street, with its green-gravel expanses and its multihued play structures. Overhead hung the massive steel dome with its painted sky and clouds. The big skylights set into its curved surface glowed like giant lamps.
“But was it this dark before?” Martin said. “I feel like my eyes don’t work.”
None of the colors were right. The steel dome wasn’t powder blue. It was dull indigo, and the painted white clouds were gray. The redbrick houses around the street weren’t red, either. They were dark burgundy. Everything in the distance blended into gloom.
Mr. LaRue was on his sidewalk, glaring at them. His face seemed to be in shadow.
“Good morning,” Mom called to him as she juggled her painting tote and easel. “Just going for a picnic in the park.”
Mr. LaRue went into his house and slammed the door.
“What a nasty place,” Martin decided, looking at all the ruined colors. “Let’s get out of here.”
He herded his little group across the street and down a wide asphalt walkway. They stopped at a little building faced with gray stone.
“Chip, unlock the door. Hurry,” Martin said. He pulled open the door and waved them inside. Then he led them down into the handsome factory lobby and beyond it into the wide, echoing concrete basement of the suburb. Chip’s eyes lit up as he trotted ahead into the darkness.
“That Alldog!” Dad cried, standing still. “Will you look at what he’s doing?”
“Yeah, but I like to have my own flashlight just in case. You two need to get moving, really. We have somewhere to get to, you know.”
Their shuffling footsteps echoed in the vast space like the sounds of a mutant army. Dad murmured, “I knew there was an access space, but I never imagined it was so tall.”
“It’s eerie,” Mom said. “I keep thinking I’ll see ghosts.”
Martin remembered Bug. “Actually, Chip and I did see one once.”
They came to the door marked AUTHORIZED ENTRANCE ONLY and went through it to the narrow hallway. Martin stopped them on the disreputable red rug.
“Now, you guys stay here,” he whispered. “Chip and I are gonna go check out the loading bay. I’m gonna leave this door open. You can go hide in the factory if I get nabbed and collected. It’s got its own television, and there’s a cooker in there and everything.”
He crept to the corner, then turned to look back. Mom and Dad were right behind him.
“What are you doing?” he hissed. “You need to stay put!”
“Sweetie, I can’t let you walk into trouble,” Mom whispered.
“It’s my loading bay,” Dad said.
They made their way carefully through the corridors. When the last corner before the loading bay was in front of them, Martin stopped them again.
“Now I really have to go by myself,” he whispered. “Because if they’re walking around in there and we all try to creep up on them, then we might as well all go in playing kazoos.” He unroped the pairs of bottles from Chip’s back and shrugged off his knapsack. Then he crawled on his hands and knees to the corner and peeked into the bay.
A packet car he’d never seen before stood by the steel gates. Sided with dull maroon corrugated panels, it would have looked just like a regular packet that held boxes for the warehouse if not for the steel door set in its end. Warehouse goods didn’t need a door; their packets had removable sides. Only people used a door like that—or bots designed to look like people.
Two young men prowled and paced near the packet car. They wore identical gray suits with blue ties, identical black shoes, and identical expressions of disgust. “Twins,” Martin whispered to Chip. He didn’t know quite what the word meant, except that it meant two of the same thing. Dolls were sold in pairs as twins, and a famous superhero had split into twins. That made him twice as good at fighting crime.
The twins would have looked ordinary if they hadn’t been a matched set. They had unremarkable faces with stubby chins, short noses, and little fish mouths that clapped shut into a frown. Their short hair was blond, and their brows and sparse lashes were pale. Their eyes looked watery and shortsighted.
“Where is he?” snapped the first twin. “Why is he making us wait?”
The second twin hoisted himself up to sit in the doorway of their packet car. The packet didn’t have steps or a railing, so his legs dangled a few inches above the ground, pulling up his trouser legs and revealing his white socks. “Well, Abel,” he said, “I would suggest that he’s avoiding us. He’s probably getting drunk or making his will.”
Abel took five or six deliberate steps, paused, and then turned abruptly. “Fine, he’s had enough time to drink. Let’s go get him.”
“What, right now?” the other twin asked. “Just waltz right into the middle of the suburb while people are out washing their scooters and drag the packet chief out of there in cuffs? I’ve got to hand it to you, Abel. You really know how to handle these delicate jobs.”
“Oh, shut up, Zebulon.” Abel hiked up his pants and squatted down to pick up a fragment of metal. Then he sent it skating across the loading bay, where it struck a sheet of tin with a bang.
“Settle down,” Zebulon said. “We have to stay below the radar on this. If our visit comes up on the list of reports, all we did was a follow-up interview about the packet chief’s missing son. We don’t want to use unnecessary force. It would be all over the suburb in minutes and show up on the buzz tapes that dump to Central.”
“What about the new bugs in his house? Can’t we find out what he’s doing through them?”
“No. Half of them aren’t placed yet, and they need to be tuned. It’ll be tomorrow before they transmit data.”
“What about the old bugs?”
“Just the auditory ones came up. I can pick up the television, but that’s it.”
“Well, damn it! What do we do, then? I don’t want to sit around here all afternoon.” Abel executed an impatient pirouette and shoved a freight bot out of his way. The massive bot hummed out an apology and rolled off.
“I’ll tell you what we do,” Zebulon said. “We leave, and we interview the security bot. Maybe we talk to the BNBRX packet chief again. Then we come back tonight. Around one o’clock in the morning, we quietly unlock Walter Earle Glass’s front door, and the suburb doesn’t see him or his lovely wife Patricia Grace Johnson Glass ever again.”
Abel mulled over the plan. “I thought you said we had to stay below the radar. Don’t you think a missing packet chief is going to be trouble?”
“We’ll put a standard detention order into the system,” Zebulon said, “because he skipped this meeting. Then we’ll upgrade it to a conviction tomorrow morning and link that to a hiring request. When we detain him tonight, I think he’s going to confess that he and his wife helped their son escape.”
“How do you know?” Abel asked. “Oh! I get it.”
“Exactly. Central still suspects him even though he had a clean lie detector test. They’ll probably give us a nice pat on the back. Anyway, packet chiefs aren’t important anymore. The new freight bots can run a loading bay by themselves.”
“All right,” Abel agreed. “But when we get back to Director Montgomery, it’s your job to explain why we went to the trouble of planting those bugs today and then didn’t wait till we could use them. I don’t want the price of forty-five top-of-the-line visual bugs to wind up coming out of my paycheck.”
“Fine,” said Zebulon, and the two men climbed back into their packet car. A moment later, alarm bells sounded, and the car chugged out of the bay.
Martin stood up to watch it leave.
“Nasty guys, Chip,” he said.
“They certainly are.”
Dad was right behind him. “This is it, Tr
is,” he said. “They intend to convict us.”
Mom emerged from behind a pallet of air conditioner ducts. “Who’ll move into my house? I worked so hard on it!”
Martin’s head started to pound. “I thought you two were going to stay back!”
“We have to keep an eye on you,” Mom said. “You’re just a boy.”
Martin decided to ignore this. “Okay, look, they left to go to BNBRX,” he said. “We need to leave right now. By the time they get back here tonight, we can be miles away, cross-country, and neither of those losers is gonna risk following us and tearing up his nice white socks.”
Dad frowned. “Is something going to happen to our socks?”
“Come on,” Martin said to Chip. At least one member of his party had the good sense to do what he said. He went back to fetch his knapsack, slung the pairs of bottles over Chip, and hurried across the loading bay.
The freight bots spotted their packet chief and all began vibrating at once. They clustered around Dad in a tight ring and rolled across the loading bay with him. “Calm down, calm down,” Dad told them. “Hush up now. I’m fine. Boys, it looks like you’ll be getting a new boss. We did good work here, didn’t we?”
Chip stopped on the steel rails and morphed into a small rolling packet car to get them safely past the alarms. His head stayed a dog’s head, but his body resembled a playground toy on wheels, with stiff legs and a plank for a back. This time, the plank had notches in it to hold ten large plastic water bottles that dangled from their ropes and sloshed around. The rolling toy was so short, it barely had room enough for Martin.
“What in blazes is that thing?” demanded his father.
“He’s not long enough,” Martin said in dismay. “It’s the water bottles. He’s never had so much to carry before.” The dog on wheels turned his head toward Martin and rolled his dark eyes apologetically. The caricature of a tail, barely a wisp this time, hung down in shame.
“Are you telling me— Oh, my head! Is that your Alldog?”
Mom stopped beside Martin. She extended a tentative hand to touch Chip’s fuzzy ears. Then she ran her hand across his board of a back.
“So that’s how you got out,” she marveled. “Our birthday present!”
“A defective toy? But what about the freight bots?” Dad turned to his faithful crew. “Aren’t the freight bots going to do something? Sound the alarm?” He touched his watch. “Call me?”
“No, they like him. Look, we have a problem. I thought Chip could carry us all out at once, but he can’t because he’s holding the bottles. I’ll go first and unload the bottles at the other end, and then I’ll send him back for you.”
“No, I’ll go first,” Dad said bravely, “and make sure it’s safe.” He hesitated. “Is he safe?”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Dad, he’s just a dog. I have to go first, I’m used to it. He won’t have the bottles when he comes back, so you should be okay to ride out together.” Before they could argue, he straddled Chip’s short board. “See you soon,” he called.
Chip rolled through the dim washing room, and water dripped down the back of Martin’s shirt. Then came the dark tunnel that seemed to get longer every time they came through it. At last, daylight filtered in through the open end, and Martin prepared to whoop with glee at the sight of the sun. But Chip slammed on the brakes just before the tunnel mouth and refused to budge.
“What’s wrong?” Martin asked, scrambling off the load of sloshing bottles.
In answer, Chip softened back into a dog and cowered down on the rails. Martin tiptoed to the edge of the tunnel, crouched down, and peered outside.
The maroon packet car stood on the rails about forty feet away. Its door was ajar, banging in the wind.
“Oh, crap!” Martin jerked out of sight and sat down with his back against the tunnel wall. “They didn’t leave the suburb. They lied! They must have lied because they knew we were listening. What are we gonna do now, Chip? We can’t get out!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Chip crept up to Martin, and he smoothed the dog’s ears. His hands felt as if he’d held them in ice water, and his fingers weren’t working right.
“What are we gonna do?” he whispered. “Okay, calm down, let’s think. For starters, I do not wanna go back in there and tell Dad and Mom, because Dad’s gonna get that look on his face and say, ‘I knew this was crazy.’ And I don’t wanna sit here and wait for them to start rolling that car around, because if they roll it in here, there’s not a whole lot of room.” And he hastily pulled his legs back from the shiny steel rails. “So that means going out there. Maybe I can figure out what they’re up to.”
As if in approval, a warm breath of wind curled into the tunnel and brought with it the smell of dirt and growing things. “Yep,” Martin said, “that’s the right thing to do.”
As quickly and quietly as possible, Martin unroped the bottles from Chip and slipped out of his knapsack. Then he slithered forward until the car was in sight again. Nothing about it had changed. Anyone who pushed aside the flapping door would spot him at once.
“That little building over there,” Martin whispered, pointing to a metal storage shed twenty feet away. “On my signal. But quiet!” And they scooted out of the tunnel toward the shed. Chip seemed to float like a ghost, without a sound. Martin tiptoed as fast as he could.
Once behind the shed, Martin threw himself down into the stiff weeds and froze, listening for pursuit. Then he listened for any sound at all. Then he lifted his head and looked for movement.
Nothing met his gaze but plants waving back and forth in their endless dance and a few beetles sedately trekking through the dust. The steel dome rose beside him from its cradle of concrete. It cast its shadow over Martin.
He crawled like a commando for another few yards to the shelter of a big metal hulk. It had many iron wheels running along its sides, a squat body, and a top like a jar lid. From the lid protruded a long thin barrel that looked like it might have been a gun. Martin slithered around the hulk inch by inch, watching for scorpions. Then he peeked out from its shade. A shiny wheel stood on the rails not four feet from him. He was by the back end of the maroon packet car.
“So you let him go,” a voice said nearby, and Martin froze like a rabbit. “How does that not violate your programming?”
“I was confident of his safety, sir.”
The voices appeared to be coming from inside the packet car. Martin realized he was holding his breath and let it out in a puff. Fur tickled his cheek. Chip had oozed up beside him, his muzzle next to Martin’s face.
“That’s the security bot’s voice,” Martin whispered to him. “The freight bot with the big doll’s head. That’s right! They said they were gonna interrogate him before they left.”
“You were confident?” queried the agent’s voice. “You said yourself you didn’t even see where he went.”
“I didn’t need to, sir,” the security bot answered. “My partner took care of him.”
“Your partner? You told us you work alone.”
“I do, sir.”
“So if you work alone, how could you have a partner?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Impatience was palpable in the agent’s voice. “Do you realize you’re not making a blind bit of sense?”
The bot sounded aggrieved. “You told me to tell you the truth.”
“Hold on,” interrupted the other twin, and from his confident tone, Martin thought he might be Zebulon. Zebulon seemed to be the one with the ideas. “I think what you’re telling us is that, at least for a while, another security bot showed up, one of your own class.”
“No, sir,” the security bot said. “He wasn’t another bot of my class. He was me. Another . . . no, not another . . . a me. My partner was me, because I work alone.”
A puzzled silence followed. Martin turned to Chip. “Did that make any sense to you?” he whispered.
“Pardon me, but if you’re satisfied now, I need to leave,” t
he bot said. “I have a security matter to attend to. A human is in the yard.”
“Yes,” Abel said sarcastically. “Two humans. Us!”
“No, sir. Someone else is in the yard.”
Uh-oh! thought Martin.
Zebulon spoke. “A human, out here? Really?”
Martin sat up and banged his head against the bottom of the hulk.
Chip pulled himself into a crouch. He didn’t vibrate, not exactly, but Martin’s hearing on Chip’s side went funny.
“Oh, never mind,” the security bot said. “My partner has it.”
Another silence followed. Then Zebulon’s voice said gently, “Your partner. Who is you. Although you work alone.”
“Yes, sir.” The bot sounded relieved. “I think you’ve got it now.”
“Abel, shove that pile of junk out the door, and let’s be on our way. If I was the packet chief around here, I’d write out an order to replace it!”
The security bot landed with a clatter on the gravel railbed. Then the door slammed shut. The maroon packet’s engine sputtered to life, and the steel wheels started to turn. Martin lay flat and listened to it chug away into the distance.
“So it’s you,” the monstrous bot said, gazing at them with reproach in its big blue eyes. “If I’d known it was you, I could have brought you in to talk to them, and maybe then they would have believed me.”
“They were just being mean,” Martin said as he stood up. “I thought you made all kinds of sense.”
The bot gave him a smile and rolled away.
Martin and Chip ran to the mouth of the tunnel. Chip galloped inside while Martin dragged the bottles and knapsack off the rails. A couple of minutes later, Mom and Dad came rolling down the line, looking pale and overwrought.
“Why did you leave us so long?” Mom cried. “I was worried!”
She slid off her makeshift ride and ran to him. Chip had to screech to a stop and stumble sideways to avoid colliding with her, and Dad fell flat on his back on the rails.
“Tris, for crying out loud!” he said.
“I was worried about you,” Mom said again as she enveloped Martin in a hug. Then she looked through the tunnel mouth. “Oh, goodness!”