But there was also a reference to Rainbows End Rest Home… This woman was Mom's roomie! And all this time he'd worried about how dull life must be for Mom nowadays. What a team: the mad scientist and his mother the shrink and — Whafs this ? Weeks of do-it-yourself snooping that Miri and Mom and this Xiang had run on Dad. A dozen surmises rose to mind, and — Mission, mission, keep your eyes on the mission . He resolutely pushed all the personal issues aside. The main thing this proved was the stupidity of running watches with local personnel.
Bob grabbed another coffee and settled back to watch the views of UCSD and the night's other hot spots. In the modern military, losing concentration was much the same sin as falling asleep on duty. It was time to get in the groove.
And still, a tiny internal voice did its best to distract: What in heaven's name have Miri and Mom been up to ?
Monday, 5:00 p.m. Finally .
Twilight was still colorful in the sky over La Jolla Shores when Robert drove into the traffic loop north of Warschawski Hall. He headed east on foot, toward the Geisel Library.
"Ready for the big night, my man?" That was the Stranger-Sharif, walking beside him. Passersby didn't seem to see his green-faced companion.
Robert gave the Stranger a sour look. "I'm ready to see you deliver."
"Don't worry. If we succeed tonight, you'll have your peculiar genius fully back, my word on it."
Robert grunted. Not for the first time he speculated on the lunacy of the terminally desperate.
"And don't look so discouraged, Professor. You've already done your hardest part. Tonight it's mainly Tommie Parker who has to get things straight."
"Tommie? I wonder."
"You wonder?" The Stranger's smile broadened. "So you've identified Tommie's 'miracle design bureau'? Poor Tommie. He's the only one of you who thinks he's running free. In fact, he thinks I'm just one of his best collaborators. See, I can be nice when that's absolutely necessary."
There were as many people here as Robert had ever seen on a campus evening in his grad-school days. Up ahead, in the direction of the library, light hung in the sky, brighter than the twilight behind them. Looking down from the tops of the eucalyptus trees, Robert could see crowds along the esplanades south and east of the library. There seemed to be several groups, not mixing. "What's going on?" That must be the distraction Tommie had promised; it was far larger than Winnie's Librareome demonstration.
"Heh. I've planned extraordinary festivities around the library tonight; almost everybody's invited, especially staff from General Genomics labs. But not you. I suggest we detour around the library."
"But that was the rendezvous point — "
"It's already too busy. We'll head for Pilchner Hall direct. This way, please." The Stranger pointed to the right, into dark eucalyptus trees.
Meantime, in the GenGen labs…
Sheila Hanson popped up half an hour into the night shift. "You ready, Tim?"
Tim Huynh sat back from his desk, and gestured up his little helpers. "We're ready, boss." He stepped into the corridor and followed Hanson's come-hither arrows up the stairs. She and the rest of her lab techs were already gathered round the surface entrance. Four or five were recent graduates. The rest — like Timothy Huynh himself — were work-study students. "You're sure this isn't going to lose us our jobs?" Belief-circle gaming was all very well outside of work, but Huynh would never have considered this adventure if his own supervisor hadn't suggested it.
Hanson laughed. "I told you. GenGen regards this battle as a form of public service. Besides, it will embarrass Huertas International." Her glance took in all of them, GenGen's entire night crew except for regulomics. Sheila's explanation was enough for Tim. Once upon a time, he had really looked forward to working at GenGen. How many people got to see — in person — the lab equipment that their college majors were built upon? But more often than not, his job came down to unwedging overenthusiastic cleaning robots, and hauling non-prepped cargo. Yes, sometimes there were real problems, problems where you got to consult with users and help customize their experiment setup. But then you spent days devising automation so that wouldn't happen again. Not one of the crew members, even the ones who weren't Scooch-a-moutis, looked unhappy about tonight's little diversion.
"Okay, everybody," said Sheila, "let's see you look properly formed." They slipped into their Scoochi characters. There were pofu-longs and dwelbs, and a great big shima-ping. The shima-ping was Sheila. She glanced at Huynh. "You can't be the Scooch-a-mout, Tim. That's reserved."
"But I'm commanding the critters." He waved at the helper bots that had followed him up the stairs.
"You're guiding them, Tim. You can be a Lesser Scooch-a-mout."
"Okay." He shifted form. These were all world-class designs, not seen before tonight. He doubted very much that any of them would remain reserved for long, but if Sheila wanted to play the beliefs strictly, he wasn't going to be the one to break the circle.
They trooped out the doors, into the evening twilight. There was still color in the tops of the eucalyptus. South, across the ravines, their goal was a vast double pyramid, glassy-faceted on top, dark and be-vined below. And that was the real, naked-eye view! The Geisel Library. As they moved along, Sheila and others were fitting their vision over the world. This hadn't been rehearsed. It was designed as a surprise for the Hacekeans, but even more as a surprise for the world that would soon be coming down to watch. One by one, the eucs made little popping noises and suddenly were transformed into moonflower trees, their leaves fluorescent in the twilight.
"We have been noticed," someone said.
"Of course. We're all over. There are s'nice and got-a-runs coming from the Lit Building."
"There's fweks and liba-loos flying from our basement at the library!"
And every appearance sent a tiny fraction of a penny winging back up the Scoochi tree of creation. For once, Tim didn't mind the rip-off. The Scooch-a-mout affiliance was as broad as any. Even hardware illegals at the edge of the world would benefit from the royalties.
Hanson — > Night Crew; <sm>Keep our gear out of sight, long as you can.</sm> The real view from local cams would show that some of the Scoochi images wrapped real critters. So for the moment, Sheila wanted all the privacy she could get on that. What the Hacekeans learned would have to come from public viewpoints and their own naked eyes. Huynh let Rick Smale and the others handle that. He concentrated on running the critters: all the lab bots with enough range and flexibility to walk to the library. These gadgets did routine cleaning and module swapouts. They weren't designed for running around in the wild out-of-doors.
But GenGen had cleared them to go, and Timothy Huynh was having a ball. First, he laid down a consensus for the robots' appearance. There were queeps and chirps, spitting and shooting in all directions. In reality, these were his four hundred mobile manipulators — known as "tweezer bots" in the business. They were barely fast enough to keep up with the humans. But he also had mapped megamunches and xoroshows and salsipueds — these onto his cleaner bots and sample carriers. Behind them lurked the two largest mechs in Huynh's lab, combination forklifts and heavy-equipment installers; for now, they were tricked out as gray-masted blue ionipods. He had supplied the physical specs two weeks ago, when the prospect of this adventure had first floated around the labs. The resulting visual designs were spectacular, and meshed with the reality of the underlying robots and the touchy-feely gear that Huynh had attached to the bots' hulls. If you patted the xoroshow on its haunches, you'd feel muscle sliding lithely under silky fur, just what your eyes were telling you. As long as they were confronted by only a few pairs of human hands, the haptics were fast enough to maintain the illusion. They were better than anything he'd ever touched on Pyramid Hill. Of course, the remote audience would benefit very little from that, but it would boost the morale of the Scoochis here in person, and undermine their opposite numbers among the Hacekeans.