Deride drove his rented Buick through the Roseville area of San Diego, on the western side of the bay. The streets were all named for people he didn’t care about Emile Zola, Louisa May Alcott, Lord Byron. They were all poets and writers who hadn’t contributed much to the world’s gross production.
He found the headquarters of Marine Visions Unlimited by its small sign on the side of an ancient, red brick warehouse off Dickens Street. The offices were apparently on the second floor, accessed from a street level glass door facing a stairway. The ground floor was devoted to their experimental endeavors, he supposed.
Parking the Buick at the curb, Deride got out and straightened the skirts of his suit coat. He had expended a thousand dollars U.S. for the suit, but like almost anything else of a personal nature, he didn’t pay much attention to it. If someone asked him what color he was wearing, he would have to look down before saying, “gray.”
On one end of the building was a small loading dock, backed by an overhead door which was closed. He crossed the street, pulled open the glass door and stepped inside. Another sign told him he was welcome, just climb the stairs. A door on the right was labeled for “Authorized Personnel Only,” and he twisted the handle and pushed it open. Deride quite often went where he wasn’t invited.
Stepping inside the large, open space, Deride took a slow look around. Shoved into one corner were the remains of an old American convertible. It had been badly damaged in a turnover, and he couldn’t understand why it was there. He would have sent it off to the landfill.
The rest of the room was something of a lunatic asylum. Tools and welding equipment littered the concrete floor; work tables and steel lockers were shoved against the walls. Schematic diagrams and blueprints were taped to walls and lockers. Out in the center of the floor were half a dozen big work tables, and the odd shapes, electronic boards, and electric motors scattered on them suggested that six or seven differing projects were underway at the same time.
There were fourteen people in the lab, and not one of them took notice of him. They were bent intently over their work, six of them gathered together at one table.
He didn’t take notice of them, either. His attention was drawn to another corner, opposite the damaged automobile.
Sitting on a four wheeled trailer was an oblong monstrosity that Deride knew from experience was the result of practical design. It was about staying American twelve feet long and eight feet wide, perhaps two and a half feet tall. The corners and edges were all rounded. Deride had understood that there were legs, but they were apparently retracted, and the body rested on the bed of the trailer on four one foot diameter steel pads.
He walked slowly toward the trailer, studying the creature.
The forward end was slightly bulged and featured large round floodlights on stalks; giving the monster a bug eyed appearance. Below the lights were projections that Deride assumed to be the lenses for video and seventy millimeter cameras. Between the floodlights was an upright, circular housing that contained a fan. A similar housing and fan on the stern, combined with the forward unit, controlled the side to side movement and the horizontal plane rotation. A single propeller in a protective housing on the aft end provided forward propulsion.
Three rounded wells, two of them forward and one aft, passed completely through the body and contained three more turbine blades. Powered by electric motors, those blades would provide up and down movement, and judging by their size, Deride expected a massive lift capability.
In addition to the apparent lift capacity, Deride was also intrigued by the manipulator arms. There were three of them, mounted just below the floodlights, and though they were folded back in repose, he estimated a reach of around eight feet. Each had elbow and wrist joints and were probably capable of the seven axes of movement he had heard about.
Two of the arms were fitted with two fingered, one thumbed hands which appeared extremely strong. The third arm was outfitted with a cutting torch at the moment.
The whole apparatus was painted a virginal white, and diagonal yellow stripes the corporate identification of Marine Visions Unlimited ran up the sides from bow to stern. At the stern terminus of the yellow stripe was the legend, in black letters, Celebes.
Deride also knew, from the newspaper accounts of the Soviet rocket retrieval, that the unofficial name of the robot was Gargantua.
“Mr. Deride?”
He turned away from the robot to find a stunning young woman looking at him. She was tall, with platinum blonde hair and pale blue eyes that didn’t waver from his own. Definitely a bird of another feather, he decided. Most women demonstrated a large degree of timidity when they faced him. His reputation, his physique, or his money accounted for that, but he did not know, nor care, which of those attributes were responsible for the subservience of women. Or of most men.
Pulling his glasses off, he folded the temples and dropped them in his breast pocket.
“You know me?” he asked.
“I’ve seen your picture. You aren’t authorized to be in this area, Mr. Deride. I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“I’m here to see Dr. Brande.”
“Dr. Brande is out of the country. Perhaps I can help you?”
“And you are?”
“Kaylene Thomas.”
“I need to meet someone in authority,” he said.
“I’m president of the company.”
He had known that. Deride always knew everything about any mission he took for his own. He even had a copy of her picture in his dossier on MVU. Still, it never hurt to put people down a little, keep them off balance.
“I see. Well, I want to buy that thing.” He pointed back at Celebes.
“He’s not for sale.”
“Oh, I think it is.” Deride produced his wallet from his inside jacket pocket and extracted a cashier’s check. Handing it to her, he said, “That’s made out for two and a half million dollars. I believe it covers your development, as well as a tidy profit.”
She looked at the check.
Deride also knew that Thomas was a pragmatist when it came to dollars and cents. He preferred dealing with her over negotiating with Brande.
Unexpectedly, she shoved the check back at him. “Not for sale.”
Deride held up both of his hands, palms toward her, rejecting the check.
“Why don’t you discuss it with Dr. Brande? Keep the check for the time being.”
He turned and walked out of the laboratory, carefully taking time to don his sunglasses and set them squarely and precisely on his nose.
CHAPTER TWO
Rae Thomas called it “Hoboville,” for the transient nature of the employees as well as for the junkyard accumulation of furnishings, but Brande kind of liked the homey and relaxed decor of the Marine Visions headquarters on the second floor of the warehouse off Dickens.
Except for the prerequisite spaces for restrooms, storage, and a kitchenette, the entire floor was open, providing an expansive feeling, Brande thought. Thomas objected to the furnishings, but she couldn’t fault the cost. The desks, file cabinets, and chairs were mostly Navy surplus. The computer terminals were generally purchased from the newspaper want ads and refurbished and upgraded by Dokey and Otsuka. Their cables dangled from the false ceiling, and above the ceiling was a snake’s nest of gray and color-coded cabling that would defy the logic of most mortals. Fortunately, MVU had a plethora of electrical engineers and computer-literates who found the maze intriguing.
Brande admitted to himself though not to anyone else that the color schemes prevalent in the office might be a trifle jangled. The metal pieces were black, gray, or beige, depending on what was on sale at the time. The woods and fabrics ranged from walnut to oak and yellow or blue to orange and red. Then again, he reminded himself, it wasn’t a perfect world. One didn’t order the angel fish to stand in that corner of the ocean, and the silver grunnion to move over there.