must have an unlimited budget and access to everywhere. Right?”
“Access to everywhere?”
“Everywhere Mulligan’s.”
Do I, wondered Pete. “Do I?”
“Yeah, I image you do,” said Danny. “Kind of neat, if you ask me. You should check out the tubes.”
“Sort of,” Pete agreed, thinking of neat and of the faces of the trainers when they had to let him pass. Pass into a course and then pass the course. They didn’t literally let him pass any course, but they couldn’t stop him from moving on to the next course that only the trainees who passed the preliminary course could legally pass to. Get what I’m sayin’?
“So here’s the deal,” said Danny, in a slightly hushed voice, leaning forward. He looked both ways and pulled a plastic bag from his pocket that protected Triton’s finger prints on the glass from which he had drank. “I need the finger prints on this glass ID’ed.”
“And I need you to come up to the third floor with me,” said Pete. Fourth floor, actually.
“We’ll never get me past the guard at the front desk,” said Danny. “No badge. Just call it in and use the rest of the day to get the ball rolling on these prints.”
“So how’d you get in here?”
Danny smiled. “Not by asking the guard for a badge, that’s for sure. Would you want to sneak me to the third floor?” Fourth floor. “That’s patently absurd. Call it in. See if they even bother to send someone down.”
“You can be sure I’ll call it in,” said Pete. Looking at Danny he wondered all the more why they wanted him to find him. “Why do they want you found?”
“It’s not about me, it’s about timing. What are you learning in those classes anyway?”
Not enough to hold an intelligent discussion on time, that was one thing. “And the finger prints. What in the Whirled is that about?”
“I think something out of this Whirled,” said Danny, looking at the glass. “Take them to Strumm Laboratories. Tell them Triton sent you.”
|m|*
For anyone knowing much about Mulligan’s, which wasn’t much anyone, they probably wouldn’t know much about Mulligan’s philosophy over directives. If someone broke into the Mulligan private library they wouldn’t learn anything there either because all the info on directives was declassified and kept with all the coffee supplies, and unless a thief needed a caffeine rush, well, I think you know where this is going. Maybe not.
Casually speaking, Mulligan’s focused on three human drives, for a start, drivers of being they would say, the bases of the model of what they were out to construct, based on the drive to reproduce, the drive to self-defend, and the drive to fuel and refuel. Casually speaking, for starters.
Grace Pobbible was particularly self-defend smart, but that isn’t informative, really. What’s more informative is she wasn’t reproduce smart, not boy girl smart. She was sort of not especially interested. Of course she really hadn’t applied herself. If she really wanted to conceive, no doubt she could work it out. But do the whole family thing? It was iffy if she could work out how to want to wrap herself full time, or even part time, in a family. Mom, dad, baby family. Just mom baby? That’s more a relationship.
Guys like Danny and Pete weren’t boy girl smart either, interested and curious maybe, but not smart. Still, both got themselves married and thus were on a forced death march to boy girl smart, not that they’d survive ‘til the end. Doomed idiots, but smart enough, even - sometimes, and thus possibly - sometimes smarter than enough against a Grace.
Grace, being who she was, did not envy the boy girl smart a Danny could relatively easily, if painfully, blue-fully, acquire, because he had or would acquire it by being a man, which Grace saw as a disadvantage, and gave her an edge, a sharp edge. She wasn’t biologically compelled to waste quant?m intelligence trying to figure out some ditsy woman, which was all the worse for a man when it wasn’t even his personal biology doing the compelling. She didn’t see women as necessarily ditsy, nor men as not a challenge, nor without their own edge, if a dull one, until they all stooped down to try to figure one another out and tried not to be figured out and began building mazes and traps and cages. Add in bouncing baby girls and boys and you got a full out primordial stew of quixotic, quant?m stupidity going.
Still, there was that game experience acquired from the whole reproductive circus, and valuable play room available that could be seen as a blind spot, or not even seen, technically, for an outsider. Thinking she was smart, because she was and did, which could be damning when under or misinformed, Grace was pretty sure she had some solid boy girl information, if only a trace. As much as the odds seemed against it, Hjalmar Poelzig had a little crush on her. Danny knew that too. Hjalmar was blind to it, despite what Danny told him. Grace didn’t understand it, but she played it out and sure enough it got her a surprised smile and an invite to step into Richards Hall. Or so she thought, although it probably would have if things were different, random, unproven.
Once upon a time Hjalmar had worked for Grace. So had Danny. Once Mulligan’s separated her from TRITON, her boom business, and her internship ended, she set sail on her own and set up a company called Grace Pobbible Industrial Sleep. That should be self-explanatory. Should be. It’ll have to be.
Hjalmar was a little odd about boy girl smart, he seemingly equal parts smart and stupid. He was a little odd about self-defend and fuel, too, sometimes smarter than he should be considering how stupid he was at the same time.
“So you’re in charge of Richards Hall,” said Grace. “Isn’t that just the craziest thing?”
Hjalmar laughed because Grace said it so animatedly, recklessly flirtatious. “Why do you say that? How did you know? Or did you just knock on the door for the hell of it?”
“I heard you were here,” she said. “The girls talked about it over at I.S. Richards Hall open to the public. Open period. Big news around here. The mysterious Richards Hall. How in hell did a college get built surrounding it?” That wasn’t exactly what happened.
“Five years ago it was biggish news,” said Hjalmar.
“Five long years,” said Grace. “I have been so busy.”
“So what’s the occasion?” asked Hjalmar. “Why have I the pleasure? Did you want to see Triton?”
“Who, huh, what?” Grace stammered.
All expression left Hjalmar’s face. Grace seemed sincerely startled. Was she not there to see Triton? “You knew he was here. You made the reservation.”
“N, no,” said Grace. “Reservation?” Reservation?
“So what did you want?” He couldn’t hope she wanted to see him. He half cringed, fearing Danny might be standing behind him about to slap him in the head for being on the verge of hope.
“Okay, I do want to see Triton,” Grace admitted. “I deduced he was here, but I didn’t arrange for it. Word got to me some goof had some finger print work done and mentioned him. Or it. I wanted to see for myself.” Grace regularly threw people off guard using the tactic of telling the truth.
Hjalmar looked on, puzzled. Maybe it was best he keep his mouth shut. Was she calling him a goof? It wouldn’t have been the first time. “If you want to see him, go see him. FYI, I imagine he’s asleep and he didn’t like being awakened last time.”
Grace was surprised at the atmosphere within the Hall. She expected gloom, mainly because it had been shuttered up for so long and Hjalmar was now in charge. It was quite lively and arty. “Nice digs,” she said.
“Nice what?” asked Hjalmar, his mind going deep. Dinosaur deep. He knocked on and opened a door and motioned for Grace to proceed, and come face to face with Danny Bortbrin. This wasn’t good. On her perpetual daily calendar the first to-do item every day was to not run into Danny Borbtrin. He could bend her reality no end. She could do it back at him, but it was more lose lose than win win.
“So we meet again, Dr. Impossible,” said Danny.
; “Oh, this is too much,” she said. “Let me out of here.”
Hjalmar, standing close behind her and in the doorway, accidentally blocked her retreat and Danny commanded her to stay. She really hadn’t anticipated she would just walk out. It happened so fast she hadn’t anticipated anything, and no doubt would have turned back one way or another if just to get a look at Triton.
“It defies the laws of probability for you to be here,” she said to Danny, facing Hjalmar. It especially defied those laws, at least one of them, because she said so. Which was possible if not probable. That was Pobbible for you.
“What?” Danny asked with a puzzled laugh. “Don’t tell me you’re still using that second rate math you picked up at Branson’s.”
“As opposed to your insane geometry?” she asked, turning towards Danny and the room. “What next with you, an abacus?”
Danny could actually do quite a lot with just a straight edge, sharp or dull. He held up the lab report. “Did you see this?”
“See what?”
“Finger print analysis. One set of prints, five different people. Someone different for each digit.” Strumm Laboratories. Expect thorough. Expect the best.
“Well, that’s odd,” said Grace. “The lab probably screwed up.”
“Would you like me to suggest that to Hermann the next time I see him?”
Grace most certainly did not. “It’s against the laws of probability