“We could be here a while,” Vince said. “Depending on what actually happened. And if they can figure out how to get us unstuck, or out of here. I could do the panel, in the meantime, just to keep us occupied. There’s you, and there’s at least one member of the audience…”
Xander groaned, leaning his back against the wall and then sliding down until he sat in a cross — legged crumpled heap on the floor.
The alarm had been raised at the front desk, and Luke Barnes was in full — flight managerial crisis mode — and this, given the bigger picture and the fact that he knew very well that no outside help was coming, included a healthy dose of panic.
The first thing he made a mental note to check or replace — if he ever got back home and got the chance to do it, or to tell someone else to get on with it — was the intercom system with which the elevator was equipped. He had no problem with hearing the responses from the elevator when he tried to communicate with the people in the elevator car — but those responses made it perfectly clear that those in the elevator could not hear or understand him, and once a less than satisfactory contact was made with those who were trapped, the conversation he attempted to have with them quickly degenerated into a confused mess of one — sided shouted repetitions which seemed to be getting neither side anywhere at all.
Luke thought that they said that there were three people in there — or they may have told him to hurry up and get them free — but it became very clear that the best thing to do was to try and get something done with the resources at hand rather than having a discussion about it. He finally screamed into the intercom that they should just hold on, and summoned a trio of maintenance staff who had happened to be on the premises when the hotel took flight and were therefore on mandatory duty.
The first one just shrugged helplessly.
“I’m IT,” he said. “I’m mostly here for when guests kvetch about the Internet going down. I’ve had a bit of a holiday, actually, since there was nothing I could do about the Internet going down this time — there is no Internet at the moment, and it ain’t my doing or anyone’s, and there ain’t gonna be any until we get back in some sort of sane signal range. Yes, I know — I’ve already been informed by multiple individuals in the know who appear to be running around this convention that NASA has apparently successfully trialed something they called a laser communications system and it’s supposed to be working just fine all the way out here, but unfortunately they neglected to equip us with the necessary hardware to take advantage of it. So that’s my line of expertise exhausted. There isn’t much I can do about the elevator situation, myself. I know zero about unsticking elevators.”
“You can come with me to the control room and see what we can find out about all of this,” said the second guy. “I don’t think I’ve ever dealt with elevators as such but I know my way around wires. We can start there.”
“Fine, you guys, you go do that,” Luke said. “Keep me posted.”
The third guy, an older man in blue overalls with the hotel’s logo on his left shoulder and a name tag that said ‘Andy’, met Luke’s pleading gaze with commendable equanimity.
“Can’t promise nothing,” he said, “but I’ve been known to get a stuck cog moving with a tap of the hammer in my time. If it’s mechanical, I might be able to figure it out. What floor is it stuck on?”
“I think halfway between two and three,” Luke said.
“Well, at least it isn’t a very long way down,” Andy said laconically.
“Unless you count the fact that it’s a really long way down… if they go through the floor,” Luke muttered..
“There’s that,” Andy agreed. “Have you got the elevator keys?”
“The what?” Luke said, his voice edged with panic.
“The hoistway doors — the doors at every floor — they have a key you can open them with,” the handyman explained patiently. “They’re like these little metal… I’ll know them if I see them, but without them we need a crowbar to open up the doors, and it’ll probably bollix them up proper so you may not be able to shut them properly later, and you really don’t want an open hoistway door gaping into a shaft. It’s better to try and do it the easy way first. And there will be an emergency procedure write — up somewhere, too. Did they leave you an emergency handbook for the office? There may be something in the elevator electrical room, too. We’d better follow those guys, that would be the first stop. And maybe it would be best if you sent someone up with ‘out of order’ signs right now, for every floor, and just to be safe make it for both elevators. They don’t have to be fancy, at least not the emergency ones, but you might really want to discourage people from going anywhere near that stuck elevator, for now. At least until we can figure out what exactly happened.”
“Have you done this before?” Luke asked, beginning to feel a little better — not happy, not even comfortable, but more in control as a procedure began to shake down into place.
“My son’s a fireman,” Andy said. “He’s done it before.”
“I wish he was here,” Luke said.
“We’ll manage. Hey, guys, anything?”
This last was addressed to the other two on the maintenance crew, whose own patches identified them as Mike and Luis, as Luke and Andy entered the electrical room. Luis, the guy who had said he knew his way around wires, had a bunch of them hanging out from a wall, as though he had eviscerated a mammoth, and was peering at the tangle in a manner which didn’t fill Luke with a great deal of confidence.
“So far as I can tell, the electrics are sound enough,” Luis said.
“Then it’s something mechanical, and it’ll have to be done the hard way,” Andy said. “Don’t see the hoistway keys anywhere — this could be bad — my son said that more often than not when people try and ‘help’ they generally pry the hoistway doors open or cut them open with a saw, and all they do is break the interlock system. You know, the thing that holds the doors together when the elevator isn’t actually right there, and the hoistway doors are essentially what stands between you and the shaft. We don’t want rubberneckers trying to get a better look down there. But it may have to do. Have you seen an emergency procedure anything around here?”
Mike pointed to where a laminated sheet hung on a wall. “There’s that.”
Andy stepped over and peered at the sheet. “Just like I said, they want the keys. It would be helpful if they had them here. Or said where to look for them. In the absence… the first thing we have to do is figure out exactly where the thing is. Look, it says clearly that if the car is more than three feet above a landing level then it’s dicey to try removing people directly through the doors. We may have to go in through the top. Okay, here’s what we do. I’ll get some tools, and I’ll meet you on the third floor — that’s above where it’s supposed to be stuck, isn’t it? — and we’ll pry open the doors there and see what we can find out. In the meantime, I suggest you cordon off that area. We’re going to have our hands full without trying to deal with an audience. And get those signs up. I saw the con people had their own security — can you get them to help? And someone had better stay right here — preferably you, Luis — it is possible that we may need to cut the power to the elevator car in order to get at it safely but that means leaving those poor folks inside in pitch darkness and we don’t want to do that until we have to…”