“Jeez, this could take a while,” Evelyn said.
But with the first diskette she got lucky. “I see something here says RECYC.DOC.”
“That sounds promising. Click on it twice.” She obeyed. The screen flickered and changed.
“Holy cow,” she said, “it’s a letter explaining what she’s sending.” Then her spirits plunged. “But it’s got no address!”
Big Lu — apparently her proper name — was a wacko, a complete space cadet. She was a candidate for a guest shot on the latest freakazoid talk show, one of those nuts who might hole herself up in a farmhouse with half the army reserve trying to chivvy her out. Dianne peeped at her through loops of galvanized chain link, trying to come to grips with the situation. After being manacled in the upstairs hallway, she had been flung over Big Lu’s shoulder, toted downstairs, and dumped like a sack of beans in a tiny room next to the furnace. The room had damp fieldstone walls and a concrete floor, probably a coal room in some previous era. A hunk of chain link fencing served as a door, her captor removing one of the cuffs from Dianne’s wrist, then snapping it to the links. She then had bade Dianne good night and had gone off to dispose of her captive’s car. Dianne had spent a sleepless night with one arm raised higher than her head, and now, with daylight filtering through the curtained windows, she knelt with her fingers hooked in the links, staring out at a wall of electronic equipment.
“World government’s coming,” Lu was telling her. “Your United Nations. And when that happens, we’ll really be in the soup.” Under a teetery wall of dead monitors and other stacked-up, dusty computer gear, she was laboriously positioning a heavy workbench under a hanging fluorescent light.
“Some of us are already in the soup,” Dianne responded weakly.
“You’re not mocking me, are you?”
“No, I’m mocking myself.”
“That’s good. It’s not wise to mock me.”
The table was massive, built of stout timbers and angle-irons, and even Big Lu, for all her bullish strength, grunted at her labors. She eyeballed the thing, then threw a couple of hip checks into it as a final adjustment.
Satisfied, she began rooting through an old wooden soft drink crate bursting with cables and other junk.
“Technology,” Lu said, “sets us free. That’s the point of it. Trouble is the government wants to use it to create bondage, the bondage of bureaucracy. New laws, new regulations. We’ll be more enslaved than ever.”
Got to humor her, Dianne thought. Buy some time. With enough time she could work out a plan, and with a plan and some luck, she might escape.
But the thought left a hollow in the pit of her stomach. How could she escape when she was penned up like this, watched by a jailer who could break her in half with one hand? She wished to heaven she hadn’t been so headstrong. She should have taken someone into her confidence.
Someone like Evelyn...
“Bureaucrats only do what they get paid to do,” she said, trying to be conversational. “They’re lawmakers. So they make laws.”
“Yeah. Whether we need them or not.”
“Well—”
“It’s like that Disney cartoon, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. All those buckets carting water and dumping it till the entire room is flooded, not having sense enough to know enough is enough.”
“Well—”
“That’s government for you. What they’re doing with the Internet. Typical arrogant pseudo-cyberheads. The only freedom we got left, and they want to control it.”
“Then maybe we can vote them out at the next election.”
“Pooh! Complete horse potatoes! There’s too many spineless voters for that. If the government passed a law tomorrow allowing netters to be shot on sight, most people would not only accept it, they’d provide the bullets.” Lu suddenly gave a bark of triumph, dragging a rusted chain from the crate with a grinding rattle. “I knew I’d find this sucker if I kept looking for it”
Dianne eyed Lu’s find with cold misgivings. Its oxidized links left orange stains on Big Lu’s fingers.
“What... what do you want a thing like that for?”
“What do I want it for?” Big Lu nudged a camera on a tripod into Dianne’s field of view. “Sweetie, you’re gonna be famous. An international cyber-celebrity. As they say in Tinsel Town, girl, I’m gonna make you a star.”
She dropped the chain on the bench with a hideous clatter.
Finding clues among the confusion of computer files was no easy matter. Not the least of Evelyn’s problems was deciphering Dianne’s spidery printing on the labels. She removed the last diskette from the drive slot and looked at the phone. What could she tell Timothy?
“You through with that calculator yet?” Mrs. Aird shouted in crusty tones from the other room.
“I’m more than through,” Evelyn admitted, “I’m completely beat.”
“I didn’t bleat! I only asked you a question!”
“Yes, I’m through! I am totally through!”
“When you do get through, come on in here and I’ll show you something that isn’t a waste of time.”
Evelyn groaned and went into the kitchen.
Mrs. Aird glanced up at her. “So you are through. I thought you’d get tired of all that nonsense.” She held up the fridge magnet. “Check this out. It’s won’t be as much fun, maybe, as playing with a calculator, but I think we should try and see where this chicken-scratching leads us.”
“Huh?” Evelyn didn’t comprehend what her friend was alluding to. “What chicken-scratching are you talking about?”
The magnet in Mrs. Aird’s hand was in the form of a metal clamp that had a slip of pink notepaper clipped in its jaws. Mrs. Aird gave the note a flourish and squinted at it over her glasses. “Let’s see now, if I’m deciphering correctly, it says here ‘Last Chance Computers — mark shipment fragile!’ And there’s an address scrawled here beside it...”
Evelyn’s spirits leapt as she grabbed the note. “You mean the whole time I been sweating like a computer scientist the information was stuck on the door of the fridge?”
“Seems like it.”
“I can’t believe it! It’s so... so old fashioned!”
“That’s your opinion. There’s no such thing as an old fashioned fridge note. They’ll always be around. Just like brooms.”
“Huh?”
“Has the vacuum cleaner replaced the broom? No. Ever try to swat a mouse with a vacuum cleaner? You can’t do it. All you’d do is knock a hole in your wall. And witches can’t ride vacuum cleaners, they’d run out of electrical cord, wouldn’t they?”
Evelyn rushed to phone to read the address to Timothy. “I know where the place is,” he replied. “I’ll head straight down there.”
“Not without us!”
“But it could be dangerous—”
“I don’t care. Me and Mrs. Aird want to see this thing through.”
“Mrs. Aird?”
“A friend of mine. You’re going to love her. We’ll meet you in front of that shop in less than an hour.”
Evelyn hung up the phone and gazed at her old friend affectionately. “Mrs. Aird, find us a photo of Dianne. I know two old witches that better saddle up this minute, zoom down to the city, and fast!”
As Dianne watched, Big Lu divided the rusty chain into four equal sections with a bolt cutter — her square wrists bulging with each cut — and then secured each length to one corner of the old workbench with long and shiny self-tapping screws. The lengths of chain lay flat on the tabletop, angling in from each corner, and to the free end of each one Big Lu attached a padlock.
“Can you figure it out yet, dear?”