Gateways (17 page)

Frank decided there had to be some chemical in the garage that was causing the damage to his car, and on Sunday he duct-taped all around the door between the house and the garage, left the outside garage door open, and parked the car at the curb. He told Liz to stay out of the garage and to keep the kids out, too, because if that chemical was bad for the car, it had to be bad for people as well, and come Monday morning she should call someone to check it out. She did that, making quite a few calls not just on Monday morning but through the rest of the week, and a parade of inspectors from the gas and electric companies, the city, the state, and even the EPA began trooping through the garage. They tested the air, the floor, the walls, the surrounding soil, the tools, and every half-empty can that Frank had carefully resealed on the assumption that he might need the contents again someday. None of them found anything suspicious, and most suggested Frank must be using something corrosive on the car, though they couldn’t find any trace of that, either. Liz pointed out that the mower, too, was pitted, but the inspectors thought that was just the result of age and use. Still, several of them took away samples of almost everything for laboratory analysis.

Weeks passed before the final verdict was in.

In the meantime, Frank continued to park at the curb and to leave the garage open, though he wasn’t very happy about that. He was on reasonable
terms with the neighbors, even the ones with the dog. and didn’t really expect them to “borrow” anything while the garage was open. But after a couple of days, just to be sure, he went to the nearest home improvement center and bought a metal cabinet, a length of chain, and a heavy-duty bicycle lock to secure it all. And every evening when he came home, there were pits in the cabinet walls, the chain, and even the bicycle lock.

Eventually, he lost his patience waiting for the authorities and bought himself a gas mask so that he could scrub down every inch of the garage and its contents. He also packed all those half-empty containers in a large cardboard box and set it in the farthest corner of the backyard, to be thrown away if the testing showed any of that material was responsible for the damage. Then he sanded and filled (it had a stubborn little rim around it) the hole in the floor, resealed the entire surface, and painted the walls, ceiling, and workbench with deck enamel. Last, since in spite of all his cleaning the flies were thicker than ever, he hung spiral flypaper from the rafters.

The lab tests all came back negative.

The flypaper caught two houseflies and a ladybug. The rest of the flies (the ones that seemed to glitter greenly when sunlight struck them at just the right, low angle in late afternoon) seemed very good at avoiding it.

Frank lost ten pounds between working on the garage and refinishing his car. And in spite of the car being parked in the open air, the pitting continued to appear; and not just on the outside, but under the hood, on the manifold, the battery, and the plastic windshield wiper fluid reservoir, which was soon leaking drops of pale blue liquid onto the asphalt. He patched the reservoir with duct tape and began parking at the other end of the block each evening, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. When the neighbors on either side pointed out that whatever was damaging his property was starting to work on theirs, too, and they were thinking of taking legal action against him, he didn’t know what to say. Although he said it very loudly.

Bert and the F1, F2, F3, and F4 generations were of course identical in all but their serial designations, except for one individual, whose tiny variation caused him to become trapped in a behavioral loop of tight right turns around a large metallic container. Observing both his internal and external activities, the other members of the group determined that he was unsalvageable, and as their collective senior, Bert took responsibility for sending the self-destruct signal. The defective machine collapsed into a fine greenish powder.

The irony of that fate did not escape the rest of them. Bert himself had been replicated imperfectly enough that his calculation errors had resulted in their current situation. But he—and by the nature of proper replication, they—had learned from that experience, as the Designers had intended. Now, with five generations of Bert in existence, it was time for a final test of the skills and ingenuity of those Designers. This planet had been explored sufficiently, and the tightbeam was crammed with information on its way to a distant data port of the receiver network. The good little machines that were identical to Bert did not care that they themselves would never go home. But they cared very much (ever so much!) about their mission.

After Frank’s lawyer assured him that, based on the investigations of the various governmental bodies, the neighbors had no grounds for suing him successfully, he calmed down enough to think. As he saw it, he had three options. He could do nothing, and take a chance on all of this just stopping. He could have the garage torn down and rebuilt completely, which would probably mean breaking up and repouring the slab, too. Or he and his family could sell the house and move someplace else.

The third option attracted him the most, but Liz and the kids, who liked the house, the neighborhood, the school, and the shopping, vetoed it.

The second option would be expensive, and there was no guarantee that it would work.

The first option was what they were already doing, and he didn’t see anything positive coming out of it.

After a long, sleepless night he found himself wondering if maybe the house had been built on some old graveyard, and the spirits of the dead were causing this; although when he suggested that to Liz, she looked at him as if he had lost his mind. It sounded crazy to him, too, but what other explanation was there? He wasn’t Catholic, but he was strongly tempted to go to the local parish and beg a priest to come out and exorcise the property. It couldn’t hurt anything. Still, it seemed a bit extreme. Then the car’s catalytic converter blew due to a myriad of perforations, and Frank was at the end of his rope. The following Sunday, he went to St. Catherine’s with his concerns. The priest listened to the whole story before gently suggesting that he seek psychiatric help.

On Monday morning, he told Liz to call a contractor about demolishing the garage.

The signal went out across the planet, an ultra-high frequency reveille summoning all the generations of Bert back to their progenitor, and they came
at speeds that no natural denizen of the land, the water, or the atmosphere could match. They were powerful little machines. They could drill out or chip away particles of any substance this planet had to offer, whether stony, metallic, or carbonaceous. They could not be harmed by being swatted, stepped on, or eaten. But they had their limits. Like Bert himself, not one of them had the strength and speed to achieve escape velocity—not to mention that in this planet’s thick atmosphere, they could barely attain the hypersonic. Like Bert himself, they were all trapped at the bottom of this planet’s steep gravity well.

Of course, in spite of their individual artificial intelligences, they were only individuals in a technical sense. Now, knowing the new plan and agreeing to it unanimously—and why would they not?—they assembled themselves like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, each fresh arrival fitting into his place, snug against his fellows. The final construct was sleek and slim and iridescent as the back of a housefly.

The noise woke him: a clicking like a child’s blocks tapping together, or a key turning a deadbolt over and over. At first he thought it was the contractor, arriving a few days early and at an ungodly hour. But it wasn’t really a knock, so then he thought it must be a branch bumping against the side of the house, or even a loose siding board flapping in the wind. It was much too early to get up; dawn twilight was showing at the bedroom windows, Liz was still asleep beside him, and he didn’t hear the usual morning racket from the kids. He almost turned over and went back to sleep, but the sound was just loud enough and puzzling enough to pull him all the way to wakefulness.

It seemed to be coming from the garage.

He threw on jeans and sneakers, and almost tried to open the door to the garage before he remembered the duct tape. He went out the front door instead, out to the sidewalk, expecting to see some animal nosing about in the garage—a stray dog, a raccoon, an opossum; even a deer. Antlers might be making that clicking noise, knocking against a wall, or little hooves on the garage floor. Or claws. A cornered animal, he thought, and wondered if he should have taken a broom from the kitchen. He stayed well back from the garage entrance, to give it plenty of room to escape.

From the sidewalk, he peered into the open garage. At first, in the uncertain light, he couldn’t make sense of what stood inside. Was it a big roll of wrapping paper? A floor lamp? A scale model of the Washington Monument? Then he thought, No, it was one of those model rockets he had
seen in a movie once. Had the kids found yet another hobby? He swore under his breath, because he had warned them, ordered them, to stay out of the garage.

He took a few steps toward it, not enough to actually go into the garage, but enough to get a better look at the thing. It was a little taller than he was, slim enough for him to circle with one arm, though he didn’t feel any need to try that, and its surface seemed to flicker as if it were made of thousands of tiny parts that vibrated constantly, like the wings of insects. And as he watched, a dozen smallish flies landed on that surface with the tiny clicks he had already heard and seemed to merge with it. The vibration stilled abruptly, and then the thing rose a few inches from the garage floor, moved sideways until it was clear of the building, and shot upward into the pale morning sky. While Frank stood outside the garage with his mouth hanging open, it vanished into the distance.

After a long moment of staring, Frank rubbed at his eyes. Either he was still asleep or the kids were somewhere snickering at him. He was pretty sure he wasn’t asleep. With a last, long look upward, he went back into the house. He checked on the kids. They were in bed, but that didn’t prove anything. They could be faking, or there might have been a timer on the thing. He heated a cup of last night’s coffee in the microwave. It was lousy, but it was something to occupy him until the sun rose above the houses across the street, at which point he woke the kids and yelled at them, assuming they would deny everything, which they did. A minute later, Liz was standing beside him, yelling at him not to yell at the kids. It was probably somebody else’s kids, she said, using the open garage.