The rest were so drecky it was hard to believe, going right down to one in a shapeless brown bag of a garment toting a big heavy sacking purse, hair cropped to a crewcut, nervous face shiny except where it was chapped or spotted—a Divine Daughter, probably. Nothing short of religion could persuade a normal girl to make herself look so awful.
“Whereinole the shiggies?” Stal said half under his breath. In company jobs, of course. Of all the megalopoli New York ate most and paid best. Same problem Ellayway, though there the hirer was government, drecking the draftees to the Pacific Conflict Zone, but who’s richer than a government?
So kill time. So put up with this sheeting notion of being dragged around a cold vault. So wait until tomorrow anti-matter when the plane will take Stal and sparewheels back to love on her and oh Bay.
“Where they keep Teresa, say?” muttered Zink Hodes, sparewheel nearest to Stal. He alluded to Shalmaneser’s legendary girl-friend, source of endless dirty jokes. Stal didn’t deign to reply. Zink had gone storehopping last night and was wearing a Nytype outfit. Stal was unpleased.
A couple up ahead with not one or two but count ’em three prodgies trailing along: embarrassed at the attention they attracted from envious neighbours in the crowd, explaining in loud voices that the three weren’t all theirs but they were taking a cousin’s appleofmyeye out for the day as well as their own two, mollifying the people around them but not so readily that they weren’t the last to shush when the guide finally called the visitors towards him.
“Good afternoon and welcome to the General Technics tower. I don’t have to tell anyone about GT—”
“So why you don’t get the mouth sewn shut?” whispered Zink.
“—because it’s environment-forming for everyone in this hemisphere and even beyond, from Moonbase Zero to the Mid-Atlantic Mining Project on the deep ocean floor. But there’s one element of our manifold operations which always fascinates you, Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, and that’s what you’re going to be shown.”
“He should fascinate good and tight, such as weld it,” Zink said.
Stal cracked fingers at the two other sparewheels a pace distant and gestured they should shut Zink in from both sides.
“Leave you behind,” Stal said. “Nylover. Or get on that plane we put you out at thirty thousand, no ass-padding for you land.”
“But I—”
“Fascinate,” Stal said, and Zink complied, eyes round with dismay.
“Notice the granite slab you’re passing under with the lettering engraved by GT’s high-precision explosive forming process. They said nobody could work natural stone explosively so we went ahead and did it, thus bearing out the company motto at the head of the list.”
A dropout near Stal moved lips in an audible whisper as he struggled to interpret the obliquely viewed writing.
“Underneath are listed prime examples of human shortsightedness, like you’ll see it’s impossible for men to breathe at over thirty miles an hour, and a bumblebee cannot possibly fly, and interplanetary spaces are God’s quarantine regulations. Try telling the folk at Moonbase Zero about that!”
A few sycophantic laughs. Several places ahead of Stal the Divine Daughter crossed herself at the Name.
“Why is it so sheeting cold in here?” yelled someone up the front near the guide.
“If you were wearing GT’s new Polyclime fabrics, like me, you wouldn’t feel it,” the guide responded promptly.
Drecky plantees, yet. How much of this crowd are GT staff members hired by government order and kept hanging about on makeweight jobs for want of anything better to do?
“But that cues me in to another prime instance of how wrong can you be? Seventy or eighty years back they were saying to build a computer to match a human brain would take a skyscraper to house it and Niagara Falls to cool it. Well, that’s not up on the slab there because they were only half wrong about the cooling bit—in fact Niagara Falls wouldn’t do, it’s not cold enough. We use liquid helium by the ton load. But they were sheeting wrong about the skyscraper. Spread around this balcony and I’ll show you why.”
Passive, the hundred and nine filed around a horseshoe gallery overlooking the chill sliced-egg volume of the vault. Below on the main floor identical-looking men and women came and went, occasionally glancing upwards with an air of incuriosity. Resentful, another score or so of the hundred and nine decided they weren’t going to be interested no matter what.
Stal remained in two minds. His eyes darted across the equipment laid out below. There was eighty or ninety feet of it, at least—cables, piping, keyboards, readins and readouts, state-of-action banks, shelving loaded with gleaming metal oddments.
“It’s pretty big even if it doesn’t use a whole skyscraper,” someone called. Another drecky plantee, doubtless. Stal refrained from objecting when Zink scuffed his feet noisily.
“Wrong,” the guide said, and swivelled a spotlight head-high beside him. The beam leapfrogged over machinery and people and came to rest on an unimpressive frustrum of dull white metal.
“That,” he said solemnly, “is Shalmaneser.”
“That thing?” the plantee exclaimed dutifully.
“That thing. Eighteen inches high, diameter at the base eleven inches, and it’s the world’s largest computer thanks to GT’s unique patented and registered system known as Micryogenics. In fact it’s the first computer estimated to fall in the megabrain range!”
“That’s a damned lie,” someone up the front said.
Thrown out of orbit, the guide hesitated.
“What about K’ung-fu-tse?” the someone went on.
“What? I’m afraid I don’t—” The guide gave a meaningless smile. This wasn’t an interruption by a plantee, Stal concluded, and raised on tiptoe to see what was happening.
“Confucius! You’d say Confucius! At the University of Peking they’ve had a megabrain computer in operation since—”
“Shut his hole! Traitor! Dirty lying bleeder! Throw him over the side!”
The yells were instant, reflex, automatic. Zink pushed forward and shouted with the others. Stal’s eyes narrowed as he drew a pack of Bay Golds from his pocket and set one at the corner of his mouth. Only four left in the pack, spin them out with some of this Nytype dreck, this son-of-Manhattan-green which was what you could get on this coast. He bit down hard on the automatic aerating tip.
What was so important about what the Chinese did, unless the draft got your balls? Nothing to shout about, for def.
Corporation police dragged the little red brother out before anyone had a chance to do more than punch his head, and the guide, relieved, went back into his standard flight pattern.
“See where I’m focusing the light now? That’s the SCANALYZER input. We feed all the news from every major beam agency through that readin unit. Shalmaneser is the means whereby Engrelay Satelserv can tell us where we are in the happening world.”
“Yes, but surely you don’t operate Shalmaneser just for that,” another plantee said loudly, making Stal squirm in his shirjack.
“Of course not. Shalmaneser’s main task is to achieve the impossible again, a routine undertaking here at GT.” The guide paused for effect. “It has been shown theoretically that with a logical system as complex as Shalmaneser consciousness, self-awareness, will eventually be generated if enough information is fed it. And we can proudly claim that there have already been signs—”
Commotion. Several people pressed forward to get a sight of what was going on, including Zink. Stal stood his ground with a sigh. Another planted distraction was the likeliest. Whyinole should these blocks believe people couldn’t tell a fake event from the real?