Tea with the Black Dragon - Страница 7

“Now what?”

The young man beamed with pride. He was blond. Good looking. Probably a Stanford student. “Now you tell the unit what you want the car to do.”

Martha knew she was the butt of a joke. She waited for the laughter to start. She glanced at Mayland Long, who watched her with noncommittal interest. No one would dare shove a walkie-talkie at him and tell him to say “forward,” “right,” “left,” “stop,” and reverse.” A shame, too. Probably do him good.

She cleared her throat. “Turn right,” she commanded. The car sat.

“Perhaps it has to be moving, before it can turn,” suggested Mr. Long.

She tried, “Go forward.” The tiny vehicle trundled across the carpeting and butted itself against the leg of a table.

“Far out!” she cried with instant enthusiasm. “Oh wonderful!” She commanded a right turn, a left, and then produced series of jolting jerks reminiscent other encounters with the Mercury’s clutch. In fascination, she withdrew to a chair placed before a multi-colored terminal display, where she continued her monologue of limited vocabulary.

Mayland Long turned to the shop man. “Modistics?” he inquired.

“Mostly. I took the i.d. plate off the box because I made some changes inside. How’d you guess?”

The older man shrugged his shoulders. “I have seen it advertised.”

“Oh? Byte or Kilobaud?” The young man’s eyes were calipers. He judged his customer closely, according to criteria known only to himself.

“Both,” answered Mr. Long. “But that was in the May issues. I remember reading that the speech recognition response was inadequate. That it was easily confused by labials, in fact.”

A fat man in a white shirt walked through the door. He ignored Martha and her car and they ignored him. He proceeded to the magazine rack, where he planted himself.

“S’true I made mods. Added a laser-cut filter, and a routine to cancel noise. Least mean squares.”

“You are Fred Frisch?”

He had a sizable blond moustache. He pulled on it now. “Yeah. Have I met you somewhere?”

“No. But I have met you.” Mayland Long’s well-tuned voice slid from polite impersonality to something a shade warmer. He lounged against the counter. “In the pages of Dr. Dobb’s. Your article on financial system for the home computer, with a sample 8080 implementation. Interesting! Almost wasted, really, such elegant algorithms for a 16 K machine…”

Mr. Frisch responded to this praise. He straightened. His silky moustache whuffed. His hands worried a black power cable into circles on the dusty counter. “Did you try it?”

Long’s eyes shifted only slightly. “Alas, I don’t have CPM,” he demurred. The fat man by the magazine rack dropped a well-thumbed copy of Byte back into its slot, sighing deeply.

“Oh. Well. There’s that,” Frisch admitted. “Interrupts would have made it run quicker, but so many people have CPM.”

“You went to Stanford, I imagine,” said Mayland Long, as he stared down at the floor, where the toy car was careening in circles around his legs. Martha Macnamara showed quite a skill.

“How’d you know? It wasn’t in the article, was it?” asked Frisch. Immediately he answered his own question. “No. They print only your name and address: no biography. I remember that because I got letters for months after, wanting me to send free tapes.”

“But you acknowledged the assistance of a Professor Carlo Peccolo for certain of your ideas. And Professor Peccolo has published in EDN, where a biography did accompany his article. How would you have received his help if you were not a student of his? Since he teaches at Stanford, it must be that…”

Fred Frisch cut in. “Oh sure. I see now. I thought for a moment you did auras, or like that.”

Mr. Long let his toe down upon the hood of the irritating race car, which protested like an angry bee.

“But I suppose Liz Macnamara might have told me who you were, without my chance reading.”

He shot a look upward and locked eyes with Frisch. “How’d you know I know Liz?”

“You were in the same department. You are of an age.”

“Who are you?” countered Frisch. “You work with Liz?”

“No.” He slipped his hand into his upper jacket pocket, as though to produce a card. Failing to find one, he patted the two side pocket, while furrowing his brow. Finally he spoke again. “Forgive me. My name is Long: Mayland Long. I know very little about Miss Macnamara. I am trying to learn more.”

“You’re a headhunter?” Fred Frisch spoke with the politeness of contempt. Mr. Long exposed his large straight teeth in a laugh.

“A job recruiter? No. Hardly. I represent a more personal interest.” His voice dropped almost to a whisper. “The lady with the talent for driving is Elizabeth Macnamara’s mother.”

Frisch peered covertly at the top of Martha’s head and at her obliviously hunched shoulders. The control box dangled unnoticed from her wrist, for she had discovered the more adult fascination of computer checkers.

“Why doesn’t she ask her daughter herself?” he muttered uneasily. “I hardly know Liz.”

“Elizabeth has disappeared, Mr. Frisch.”

Frisch blinked at the word. “Disappeared? Jeez.”

“Mrs. Macnamara lives in New York, and so she’s slipped out of touch with Liz, who seems to have quit her job and moved from her last known address. We do not know who her friends are.”

“I’m not the one to ask,” said Frisch, for Long’s ears only. “Liz’s a bit of a pushin’ baby, if you know what I mean.”

Dryly, Mayland Long admitted he did not. “I’ve gathered the impression that Miss Macnamara is a rather ambitious young woman and she keeps to herself. Is that what it is to be ‘a bit pushin’ baby?’ ”

Frisch sighed and shrugged, with a half-smile that was one-quarter apology. “Not quite. She can be friendly when she wants to. When she thinks a guy might be… good for her career. She got along with Peccolo.”

Mr. Long’s eyes widened. Frisch hurried to explain “She was his T.A.—teaching assistant, you know? They were very chummy, for a while. But it didn’t last.”

“Why not?”

The blond fished with one hand ’til he snagged the back of a high stool and pulled it under him. Once seated, he remained in thought for a count of five. “I think it was this way. Liz wants to be a manipulator—the kind who controls. Peccolo is that kind. Much better at it. He used her when it was supposed to be the other way around. She put in a lot of hours on the machine for him—designing his lessons, cleaning up his math… Peccolo is a good teacher, fine organizer—all that jazz…” Frisch, who had been talking to the glass counter top, suddenly sought out the other’s eye. “But Liz has the technical brain. She’s real good.” The gaze slid away again. “Too bad technique ain’t everything.”

The dark man smiled slowly. His fingers drummed on the glass. “You’ve knocked heads with her? Don’t worry about offending me; I’ve never met the young lady.”

Frisch shuffled in place, embarrassed. “Well—no. Not me. I avoided Liz, you see, so I wouldn’t.”

“Do you think Peccolo would know where she is now?”

Fred Frisch shrugged once again. “Better than I,” he said. “What’s your part in this. Detective?”

Mayland Long laughed. Martha looked up. “Worse and worse! I’d rather be a headhunter!”

Frisch looked unconvinced.

“Mrs. Macnamara doesn’t speak the jargon, you see, and my field is languages.” Long found Martha standing beside him. Gently he took the controls of the racer from her hand and returned the box to Frisch.

“That fellow went to Stanford, didn’t he?” asked Martha, as she was propelled across the busy street.

Mayland Long, in a graceful inversion of traditional politeness, waited for her to let herself in the driver’s side, then swung around the front of the car and waited for her to reach over and unlock his door.

“So you were listening?” he replied, once in the quiet of the closed car.

“Oh no. I heard you say ‘modistics’ and immediately tuned out the conversation, since I would not be able to understand a word. I knew the fellow was from Stanford because he was blond, and there was a bicycle locked to the post outside.” Her voice trailed off. She was thinking of something.

“Well, however you came upon it, the supposition is correct. He is a Stanford alumnus, and knows your daughter slightly.”

Martha nodded. “Only slightly?”

“He has given us another name. Perhaps a more important one. Back to campus,” he commanded, and the car lurched obediently forward.

“Mayland—,” she began, as she found a space in the flow of traffic, entered and took it with unexpected competence. “I enjoyed myself back there. I think I missed my calling in life.”

The dark man smiled and his arm, braced against the dash, relaxed to the seat. “You should have been a computer engineer?”

“Sweet Jesus, no! I should have sold toys.”

Chapter 4

“I’m sorry. I haven’t the least idea,” said the professor. He leaned back in his leather chair until the springs creaked; his pale fingers drummed against the mahogany desktop. It appeared that the conversation was over early.

Martha frowned. Her blue china eyes shone like beads. Mr. Long and she had spent the last half hour being wonderfully lost among the Spanish red sandstone buildings and the dusty live oaks of Stanford campus. They had stopped to nose into the chapel, with its gold murals and gaudy, loud, Victorian glass, and had known the satisfaction of excoriating the place together. Now it was getting hot and she was tired. Peccolo’s attitude was no help.