I had spent most of my money eating out with Sunday afternoon and evening spent at the local sports bar. That was going to have to end, too. I opened the fridge to see what I could make for dinner. The main shelf held a half empty six-pack of Mike’s Hard Limeade. I took one out, twisted the cap off and took a long swig. There was some ketchup, barbeque sauce and mustard in the door shelves along with two dozen packets of egg roll sauce. There were two eggs left, but I didn’t have the remotest idea as to how long they had been there. A white plastic take out box grabbed my attention from the bottom shelf. I opened it only to find green and gray mold growing on whatever used to be inside. I tossed that into the trash and moved on to the cupboards. There was a can of pork and beans next to a jar of crunchy peanut butter. I could make a peanut butter sandwich for dinner, but there was nothing to spread it on. A quick check of the freezer revealed a bag of broccoli that had probably been there for the last two years, maybe longer. The freezer needed defrosting, too. I was either going shopping or out to eat. I opted for both.
Over the next two weeks I settled into the routine of doing the inventory. I was learning some interesting things from what had been stored in the warehouse. There were the remains of secret projects that had either failed or been buried and not pursued. I found a model of a set of domes that would have been constructed on the moon had NASA continued the moon program. There were three different models for early versions of the Space Shuttle Program, one outfitted with what looked like an Ion Drive engine.
When I got my first paycheck it was larger than I had anticipated. The lack of overtime dropped me into a much lower tax bracket which substantially reduced the deductions for federal and state income taxes. I could at least order lunch instead of bringing my own sandwiches, and if I was careful, I could keep Mrs. Hernandez and Javier going. That was cause for celebration. I stopped on my way home and picked up another six-pack of Mike’s Hard Limeade. In the back of my mind was the Moon Room. What was really in there? What else were they hiding?
CHAPTER 2
After eighteen days, three hours and twenty eight minutes of inventory work, I came across ICN 42919 in the ledger with a location of MR. Had to be the Moon Room, but where was the key? I went through the drawers in the desk — nothing. I looked on all of the shelves and under the stacks of paperwork, still no key.
Come on, it has to be here.
I looked around the room. This was a secure facility, where would someone put the key? I looked at the metal security door and the reinforced metal jamb surrounding the door. No, I thought, no one would do that. I reached up and ran my fingers along the top ledge of the reinforced door frame. Almost completely covered in dust was the key. I unlocked the door, opened it and flipped the lights on.
The Moon Room was organized like a miniature of the warehouse with aisles of gray metal shelves. The room was about eighty feet long and fifty feet wide with fluorescent lighting fixtures that buzzed softly and flickered slightly above the aisle ways. The room had a slight musty odor to it. I followed the aisle designation and walked down to the proper shelf number. On level three was a wooden box with ICN 42919 stenciled on the end. I picked it up and headed back to my desk. I needed a screwdriver to open the box. The Inventory Control Ledger had the item listed as artifact, which didn’t tell me much. These were all artifacts of one kind or another. The thought occurred to me that artifact also meant something that was made by human effort or craftsmanship.
As I removed the last screw and lifted the lid I froze. Visions of Star Wars and C3PO ran through my mind.
What was something this sophisticated doing on the moon? And how did it end up here?
My heart was pounding and my mind was racing. I slowly reached out and gently touched the forehead. It felt cooler than I expected. It was smooth and strangely enchanting. In my daydreams I wanted to be part of the team to develop a robot that actually resembled a real human being, but that level of technology was still far into the future. Except here was a good portion of that technology, sitting in a wooden box in front of me. I pulled the sheet of paper that was nestled next to the head out of the box and unfolded it. The sheet was a metallurgical analysis that identified the skull material as a titanium alloy with a patina dating the skull to greater than 10,000 years old. According to the date on the sheet of paper, the head had been sitting in the moon room since early 1973. I set the sheet down and gently lifted the head out of the box. Titanium is strong, but very light in weight, yet the skull had a fairly hefty weight to it. If you were going to put a computer into a robot and properly protect it, a titanium alloy skull would be ideal. I examined the fine wires extending from the neck. They were dark in color and still flexible. Totally remarkable for something that was over 10,000 years old. I took out my pocket knife and shaved a small section near the end of one of the wires. As I moved it around in the light a slight flash of gold caught my attention.
I pulled open the desk drawer and grabbed a magnifying glass. The wire had some kind of coating on it, probably an insulator. That would make sense. The wire itself appeared to be some kind of gold alloy. Gold was a perfect conductor for electricity. As I sorted through the fine wires I noticed that two of the wires were thicker than the others.
Power supply wires?
I was going to need some test equipment, something I currently didn’t have. This was going to have to wait until tomorrow. I gently placed the robot’s head back into the box, put the screws back in place and returned it to the shelf in the Moon Room. I logged ICN 42919 into the computer and verified the name of artifact. I had trouble concentrating on anything else for the rest of the day with visions of advanced technology flitting through my mind.
Just before nine the next morning, I swiped my card and entered the lobby. Mike was at his desk, as usual. He questioned the cardboard box I carried in. I set it down on his desk so he could inspect the contents.
“Science project,” I said as he dug through the wires and components in the box. “Lunch time and maybe a little after hours.” My laptop was at the bottom of the box.
“I’ve got to log all this in as personal property, otherwise you’ll never get it back out of the building.”
I pulled the complete list out of my jacket pocket and handed it to him.
“Now we’re talkin’,” he said as he stapled the list into his logbook. “I don’t care what you do; just don’t let Woolser catch your inventory work slipping.”
“No sweat,” I answered as he waved me into the warehouse. My stomach tightened as I walked through the door. This was a huge risk for me. For an ordinary person, getting caught doing something like this would get them fired, and they would collect unemployment while they searched for another job. If I got fired, there wouldn’t be any unemployment. The people that placed me here would come and hunt me down. I was safe here only as long as I cooperated with them and performed the special assignments they gave to me. My secret hope was that when my next special project came up they would make Woolser put me back in the rover programming department and I would get out of doing inventory work. As risky as this was, I had to know if the robot’s head might actually work, and if it did, what I might learn from it. That could be my ace in the hole with the people I actually worked for. I was feeling anxious trying to get through until lunch. I couldn’t wait to get back to the robot’s head.
At noon, Mike dropped off the sandwich I had ordered for lunch and headed back to the lobby. I wouldn’t see him again until five. I opened the Moon Room and retrieved the robot’s head. Using my pocket knife I removed a small section of the insulation at the end of each wire and began resistance testing. The days in professor Tuttle’s Electronic Circuitry class at MIT came flooding back into my mind. It took only twenty seconds to identify the ground wire and determine that it wasn’t connected to the robot’s metallic skull. Good design practice. I identified and tagged the rest of the wires as either inputs or outputs based on their resistance to the ground and power supply wires: a hundred and twelve inputs and eighty seven outputs. Further testing would have to wait until after five.