Unwillingly, Dortmunder got the point. “You mean,” he said, “they associate coming up here with feeling nervous and upset.”
“That’s right,” Wally said, nodding and grinning and patting his pudgy little fingers in the air.
Kelp, rubbing his hands together in anticipation, his own recent nervousness and upset completely forgotten, said, “Well, when I come up here, what I feel is great! You been working on the old reservoir problem the last two days, Wally?”
An odd evasiveness, almost shiftiness, appeared in Wally’s eyes and demeanor. “Kind of,” he said.
Dortmunder became very alert. Was there a flaw here in the computer wizard? “Andy was telling me,” he said, “you probably had all kinds of ideas to show us by now.”
“Well, we’re working on it,” Wally assured him, but still with that same indefinable sense of holding something back. “We’re working on it okay,” he said, “but it’s kind of different for us, not our… not the regular kind of stuff we do.”
Dortmunder frowned at him; somebody else was in on this now? It was becoming a goddamn cast of thousands. “We?” he echoed. “Who’s we?”
“Oh, the computer,” Wally said, beaming, pleased at the confusion. “We do everything together.”
“Oh, you do?” Dortmunder smiled amiably. “What’s the computer’s name?” he asked. “Compy? Tinkerbell? Fred?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t name it,” Wally said. “That would be childish.”
“Well,” Kelp said, “let’s see what you’ve got, Wally.”
“Oh, sure.” Wally continued to exhibit that strange reluctance; but then he beamed around at them and said, “How about cheese and crackers? I can run—”
“We just ate, Wally,” Kelp said. Moving toward one of the PC setups scattered around the room, he said, “This is the one, isn’t it?”
“Well, kind of,” Wally admitted, moving reluctantly after him.
“So let’s fire it up.”
“Yeah,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s see what the computer thinks.” He was beginning to enjoy himself.
“You see,” Wally said, squirming a little, “the computer’s used to kind of different inputs. So, you know, some of the solutions it comes up with are pretty wild.”
“You should see some of the stuff John’s come up with,” Kelp said, laughing. “Don’t worry about it, Wally, let’s just see what you’ve got.”
Kelp was so absorbed in Wally and the computer that he didn’t even notice Dortmunder glare at him, so Dortmunder had to vocalize it: “Tricky, yes. Wild, no.”
“Whatever,” Kelp said, dismissing all that, his attention focused totally on Wally as the genius butterball reluctantly settled himself at the PC. His stubby fingers stroked the keyboard, and all at once green lettering began to pour out onto the black screen of the TV from left to right. “He’s selecting the menu now,” Kelp explained to Dortmunder.
“Sure,” Dortmunder said.
More greenery on the screen. Kelp nodded and said, “He’s asking it to bring up the catalogue of solutions.”
“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.
On the screen, a new set of green words appeared:
1) LASER EVAPORATION
“Well, I don’t think,” Wally stuttered, in obvious confusion, “we don’t have to worry about that one, we can—”
“Wait a minute, Wally,” Kelp said. “Is that the first of the solutions? Laser evaporation?”
“Well, yes,” Wally said, “but it’s not a good one, we should go on.”
Kelp was apparently feeling some confusion, and potential embarrassment as well, since this was, after all, his champ at bat here. “Wally,” he said, “tell me what that means. Laser evaporation.”
Wally looked mournfully at the words on the screen. “Well, it just means what it says,” he answered. “Evaporation, Andy, you know? Evaporating water.”
Dortmunder said, “Wait a minute, I think I get it. This computer wants to get at the box by getting rid of the water. Same as Tom. Only the computer wants to evaporate it.”
“Well,” Wally said, hunched protectively over his keyboard, “this was just the first thought it had.”
“Take a laser,” Dortmunder went on, enjoying himself more and more, “take a very big laser and burn off all the water in the reservoir.”
“Wally,” Kelp said. “Let’s take a look at solution number two, okay?”
“Well, there were still problems,” Wally said. Turning to Dortmunder, he explained, “You see, John, the computer doesn’t actually live in the same world we do.”
Dortmunder looked at him. “It doesn’t?”
“No. It lives in the world we tell it about. It only knows what we tell it.”
“Oh, I know about that,” Dortmunder said, nodding, looking over at Kelp, saying, “That’s that word you were using the other day, right? What was that?”
“Guy-go,” Kelp said, looking wary.
“That was it,” Dortmunder agreed. “Garbage in, garbage out.”
“Well, sure,” Wally said, his defensiveness more plain than ever. “But actually, you know, sometimes garbage in isn’t garbage, depending on what you want the computer for. You tell the computer something, and sometimes it isn’t garbage, and then other times maybe it is.”
Over Wally’s head, Dortmunder gave Kelp a superior look. Kelp caught it, shook his head, and said, “Come on, Wally, let’s see solution number two.”
So Wally’s sausage fingers did their dance over the keyboard, and a new set of green words ribboned across the middle of the black screen:
2) SPACESHIP FROM ZOG
There was an uncomfortable silence. Dortmunder tried his absolute best to catch Kelp’s eye, but Kelp would have none of it. “Zog,” Dortmunder said.
Wally cleared his throat with a sound like a chipmunk gargling. Blinking at the words on the screen, he said, “You see, there’s this story—”
“Don’t explain,” Kelp said. He put a hand on Wally’s shoulder, part protectively, part warningly. “Wally, okay? Don’t explain.”
But Wally couldn’t help himself: “The computer thinks it’s real.”
“You know,” Dortmunder said, feeling that unfamiliar ache in his cheeks that probably meant he was grinning, “I’m kind of looking forward to solution number three.”
Wally did the gargling chipmunk again. “Well,” he said, “there’s kind of a solution two-A first.”
Kelp, sounding fatalistic, said, “Wally? You mean, something that goes along with the spaceship?”
“Well, yeah,” Wally agreed, nodding that round brilliant silly head. “But,” he added, with a forced hopefulness, “it could have an application maybe, kind of, with some of the other solutions.”
“Fling it at us, Wally,” Kelp said. Even his cheekbones were refusing to look at Dortmunder.
So Wally did his keyboard dance again, and SPACESHIP FROM ZOG was swept away into oblivion, replaced by:
2A) MAGNET
“Magnet,” Kelp said.
Wally swung around in his swivel chair, facing away from the computer for the first time, looking up eagerly at Kelp, saying, “But it isn’t wrong, Andy! Okay, the first idea was, the spaceship finds the treasure. Or whatever finds the treasure. But then the magnet attaches to it, and you pull it up out of the water.”
“Wally,” Kelp said gently, “what we figure, roughly figuring, the treasure weighs somewhere between four hundred and six hundred pounds. That’s gotta be a pretty big magnet you’re talking about.”
“Well, sure,” Wally said. “That’s what we thought.”