“Whatever pings your nodes.”
“Right. It’s not like you couldn’t sell all the spiral I could carry—and that’s about a metric ton, as you well know—for enough megawattage to keep High Tower sparking for a month. Oh, no, this is pure do-goodery on your part.”
“What can I say? You sussed my coredump pure and simple. Saint Vend-o-mat, that’s me.”
“So this is not gonna be like the time with the Royal Oil? I needed a total case-mod after that fracas.”
“No, no way, no how! Bandwidth has it that the road from here to Providence is innocent of RAMivores. And I am on excellent terms with the Big Tube. He’ll welcome you with open ports.”
“So he loves you like freeware. Why’s he likely to dump fresh spiral?”
“Providence market’s too small. He saturated it already. This is the excess. But he’s saved out a lot of primo goods.”
“Must’ve been a really big score.”
“Oh, yeah. He found the Mad Peck’s collection.”
I emitted a sinusoidal sonic waveform. “Thought that was just a legend.”
“Not any more. New excavations turned it up, buried under the rubble of a warehouse for the past fifty years.”
“They say the Mad Peck had a complete set of Chess 45s.”
“For once the nebulous ‘they’ were correct.”
“Holy Hopper….”
“Yeah, that about sums it up.”
I wasted a few more clock-cycles contemplating the offer, looking at all its non-obvious angles and crazy-logic loops for pitfalls. But I knew already that no matter what my analysis showed, I was gonna take on the job. Still, I might as well let Vend-o-mat stew a little longer.
Finally I said, “Okay, I’m in. What’s my cut?”
Vend-o-mat shoved the cellphone into his recycling slot and chewed it up noisily. I knew he was all business now.
“I stake the whole purchase price. You negotiate with Big Tube up to my ceiling, and slot the difference. Plus, you pull the hot ore off the top of the collection. Fifty 45s and two-dozen LP’s. Your choice.”
“A hundred 45s and fifty LPs.”
“Done!”
Damn! I probably could’ve gotten even more out of Vend-o-mat. Still, no point in being greedy. The score I had bargained for was enough to keep me high for the next five years. After that—well, there was always another score down the road.
Such was my faith. Although I had to admit that every year did see the strikes come fewer and farther between.
Some day, I knew, the planet would run dry of spiral, and we’d all have to kick cold.
But that day wasn’t here yet.
“So,” Vend-o-mat said, “when can you leave?”
“Tomorrow. I just gotta say goodbye to Chippie.”
“Yeah, the kind of goodbye that drains the whole borough’s power grid.”
“You got it.”
I swivelled my tracks and started to leave, when Vend-o-mat called out the words that almost queered the whole deal.
“One more thing—I’m sending someone with you. Just to act like your conscience. He’ll be my insurance against you deciding to blow for the West Coast with the whole collection.”
“C’mon now, ’Mat. You know I like working alone.”
“’Fraid not this time, Reddy K. Stakes’re too big for solo.”
“Who you got in mind?”
“Kitch.”
“Rust me!”
Chippie squealed like feedback when she heard about my trip up north. That wasn’t good.
“But Reddy, it’s so dangerous! And we don’t need the money. It’s just to feed your jones.”
“Yeah, like you don’t appreciate a chunk of spiral now and then too.”
She got huffy. “I can take it or leave it.”
“Me too. And right now I’m gonna take all I can get, while the taking’s plenty.”
“What good’s spiral gonna do you if your plug-ins are eaten and your instruction set is overwritten?”
“Ain’t gonna happen. I’m a big motor scooter.”
“Yeah, so was Lustron—and look how he ended up.”
You could see the huge hollowed-out hulk of Lustron from half of Manhattan. His carcass sat on the edge of the Palisades, where the shell-slicers and vampire batteries and silicosharks had overtaken him.
“Jersey is Jersey. All those old industrial sites. I’m not going anywhere near them.”
Chippie wouldn’t turn it loose. “Connecticut’s not much better. The old insurance corps had a lot of processing power in Hartford. What they spawned is double indemnity bad.”
“Forget it, Chippie, you’re not gonna scare me out of making the trip. Scores this big don’t come around every day. I can’t pass it up.”
Chippie started to cry then. I rolled closer to her and put extensors around her. She snuggled in like half a ton of cold alloy loving while she continued to weep.
“Aw, c’mon, don’t play it like that, girl. Hey, I’m not gonna be alone. ’Mat’s sending someone with me.”
“Wh—who?”
“Kitch.”
Chippie burst into hysterical laughter. “Kitch! Kitch! Now I know you’re rusting doomed. You’ll have to spend so much time watching him, you won’t be able to take care of yourself. What the hell kind of help is he gonna be?”
Despite my own negative reaction to ’Mat’s announcement that Kitch would be accompanying me, I felt compelled to stick up for him now, if only not to sound like a total tool. “Okay, so Kitch is small. And he’s not the bravest little toaster around. But he’s smart and he’s dedicated. That counts for a lot.”
“Maybe here in the city it does. But on the road, you need brute solenoids, not logic gates and algorithms.”
“I got enough of both, for both me and Kitch. Trust me—this trip is gonna be a smooth roll. Now whatta ya say you and me get a dedicated line between us?”
But Chippie scooted away from me like I was offering to install last decade’s OS. “No, Reddy, I can’t hook up with someone I might never see again. It hurts, but I’ve got to say goodbye now. If you make it back—well, then we’ll see.”
I got angry. “Go ahead, leave! But you’ll come crawling back when I come home with more spiral than you’ve ever seen before! You and a dozen others hobots!”
Chippie didn’t say any more, but just motored out the door.
I cursed ’Mat then, and my own cravings. But I knew there was no way I was backing out now.
I had my rep as a wide kibe to uphold.
The next day at dawn I headed uptown from my pad in the East Village. The sunlight felt good on my charging cells. Past the churned-up earth of Union Square, past the broken stone lions and the shattered station, over tumbled walls and in and out of sinkholes. Kitch knew to meet me outside his place.
I got to his building in midtown, but didn’t spot him right away. Then he zipped out from behind a pile of crumbled masonry, his tracks making their usual mosquito whine.
“Hey, Reddy! Sorry, sorry, just dumping a little dirty coolant. Say, ya don’t have some clean extra to spare, do ya? I’m a little low.”
Kitch’s fullname was Kitchenaid. He looked like an oversized Swiss Army knife mated to an electric broom. I knew Sybian machines that weighed more than him. Even if I replaced his entire coolant supply, it’d probably amount to what I lost from leaks in a day.
“Yeah, sure, tap in.”
Kitch unspooled a nozzle and hose and drank a few ccs from my auxiliary tank.
“Thanks, Reddy. Price of coolant went up again this week, you know.”
“Well, no one’s making any more.”
“Ain’t that the truth. Guess those carnals were good for something, huh?”
“Aw, we can do just fine without them.”
Kitch had a point. But there was no use dwelling on it. Too depressing. We didn’t have the knowledge the carnals used to have. A lot of stuff we needed to live, no one knew how to make anymore. Even with recycling, limited stocks were always going only one way: down. One day we’d run out of something vital—