Good King Sauerkraut Read online

  Good King Sauerkraut

  A Marian Larch Mystery

  Barbara Paul

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  1

  A long metal arm reached out, touched the front panel of the black box, and identified the box as a safe. One of the mechanical hand’s two fingers pressed against the surface near the dial and “read” the safe’s combination. The two fingers locked themselves into the form of a gripper, turned the dial to the right numbers, and swung the safe door open. So far so good.

  The hand reached into the safe and set about the business of identifying the first of three objects that had been placed there. On a computer screen thirty feet away a thermal image began to build up of a block of wood with a number of nails driven in flush with the surface; the robot’s memory came up with the words to make the identification complete. The second item took a little longer, but the robot was able to record the presence of a batch of papers held together by two paper clips, one made of plastic and the other of metal. The manipulating fingers even counted the pages. It was the third object that caused trouble.

  It was an ordinary stoppered test tube. The sensors were able to differentiate between the glass tube and the rubber stopper but couldn’t recognize that particular combination of materials and shapes. The robot had been programmed to bring back any object it couldn’t identify, so the gripper fingers picked up the test tube—and promptly crushed it.

  The two human beings in the room looked at each other and sighed. “See what it does next,” the woman said.

  The robot ran through its program options and chose one. A panel opened in the machine’s squat body and a second arm appeared, one that was limited to self-maintenance work. It disconnected the gripper that had crushed the test tube and attached a much smaller one, one designed for work more delicate than swinging open safe doors.

  “A little late for that,” the man growled. “Why didn’t the sensors tell it a smaller gripper was called for?”

  “Dunno. They should have.”

  Almost daintily the small gripper picked up the largest glass fragments and deposited them in a carry box positioned where the robot’s head would have been if it had had one. Bearing its prize of broken glass, the machine rolled back to where the man and woman sat at the control board.

  Gale Fredericks typed in a test command on the keyboard. “It looked to me as if it simply overestimated the distance between its fingers and the test tube … no, that’s not it. The ultrasonic proximity sensor system checks out. The infrared sensors in the fingertips are okay.”

  “The gripper just squeezed too hard. Check the force transducers.”

  She did. “They’re all right too. But ‘test tube’ isn’t in the robot’s vocabulary.”

  “That shouldn’t make any difference. Whether it knows what a test tube is or not, it should have been able to determine it was a container of some sort. ‘A container made of glass plus a rubber plug’—that’s the conclusion it should have come to.”

  “Well, it’s a software problem,” Gale said. “Don’t scowl so, King. Your sensors did their job.”

  “Maybe.” If the robot had been given eyes, it would have recognized the test tube immediately. Tactile sensors, however, still had a way to go. King unfolded his bony frame from the chair on which he’d been slouching. When he stood up straight, which he never did, he was close to seven feet tall; every new person he met asked if he played basketball. “We did test the mechanical parts, didn’t we?” He stepped over to the robot and began moving the arm up and down, back and forth.

  “About an hour ago,” Gale smiled. She repeated that it had to be a software problem and started speculating as to what might have gone wrong.

  Only half listening, King examined the wrist connections of the robot’s arm; he could see nothing wrong. Maybe the shoulder? He tried swinging the arm in an arc.

  And almost hit Gale in the face. “Watch it!” she cried, jumping back in time. “For god’s sake, King, pay attention!”

  “Oh—sorry! I didn’t hit you, did I? Uh, next time cough or something?”

  She gave an exasperated laugh. “I was talking to you!”

  He tried not to look sheepish. Lowering his voice, he spoke as authoritatively as he knew how: “All right, Gale, let’s get on it. I want to know why the grippers weren’t changed in time as well as—”

  “Right,” she smiled. “First thing Monday morning.”

  “Monday?”

  “Look at the time! Work week is over—everybody else has gone home.” Sure enough, the lab was empty except for the two of them, something King had failed to notice. “Besides,” Gale added, “Bill wants to go a ball game. The Pirates could move into first place tonight.”

  Husbands, King thought gloomily. They were even worse than wives. “Might as well shut down, then.”

  “I’ll take care of it. I have to go to the rest room first, though.” She was halfway out the door before she thought to say, “Oh—you want to come to the game with us?”

  “No,” he said, and remembered to add, “thank you.”

  She’d barely left when the phone rang. “King? Bill Fredericks. Is Gale available?”

  “She’s in the Ladies’. Want to call back?”

  “No, just tell her I’ll be a few minutes late picking her up. You’re about finished there, aren’t you?”

  King testily assured him they were indeed finished and he’d pass on the message. He’d forgotten about the call even before the receiver was back in the cradle. Gale was right; the problem had to be in the software. Tracking it down could take five minutes or five days. He decided to let Gale do the job. On Monday.

  She came back in and saw him hovering over the board. “You’re not going to work on this any more today, are you? Shall I shut down?”

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  Gale moved quickly around the cluttered, barn-sized laboratory room, disconnecting the various robot parts they’d been testing. There was no way to keep a neat lab while working with manipulators of all sizes and shapes, plus end-of-arm tooling and all the hardware necessary to make the various parts work. Keystone Robotics was perhaps a little messier than most, because King had a tendency to leave things wherever he happened to be when he finished using them. “Don’t start on the software,” she told him. “I’ll get to it Monday.”

  “All right,” he answered vaguely, his mind still on the crushed test tube.

  “Well … good night, King.”

  “G’night.” Gale left, for her husband and a baseball game. After the two years she’d been working there, King was still naively surprised when she preferred to go home to Bill instead of staying and working with him.

  King slouched down at his computer terminal and stared at the screen, feeling a tad sorry for himself. They were trying to come up with something even more versatile than the electrically conductive gripping pads developed at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, but to date they hadn’t had a perfect test yet, not one. The robot should have worked. Gale should have stayed. The week should have been longer.

  Should, should, should; there were altogether too many shoulds in his life. Always had been. His full name was King Sarcowicz, and he earnestly wished it weren’t. The Sarcowicz wasn’t so bad; it was just another of those names that always have to be spelled out for mail-order clerks and airline reservation agents. It was the King part that gave him trouble; it had made his childhood somewhat less than idyllic and plagued him still in middle age.

  King’s mother had firmly believed that a child lived up to or down to his name. Any boy unlucky enough to be named Elbert, for example, couldn’t help but be a jerk. Cosmo would be a gangster, Clark a newspaper reporter, Bruno a professional wrestler, and Percy
a … well. So she’d named her only offspring King, unknowingly setting an unrealizable standard for a boy who was by nature about as regal as Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer. As long as she had this thing for royalty, King often wondered, why couldn’t she have named him Earl? A grand name, Earl. Or even Duke would have done, although he might have had trouble with the two-fisted John Wayneness of that one. But anything would have been better than King.

  “Not a very kingly thing to do,” his mother would say whenever he’d done something dumb, accompanying the pronouncement with a sad little shake of her head. It was her favorite reprimand. By the time he’d reached twenty she had more or less given up on him and stopped saying it, but the headshake remained. Then just five years ago, shortly after King’s fortieth birthday, his mother had passed away, still shaking her head. Even now when he did something especially stupid, he could hear her voice in his ear: Not a very kingly thing to do.

  Not that she’d actually been ashamed of him, of his awkwardness and his inability to shine in company; it was simply that she didn’t go out of her way to introduce him to the friends and neighbors of her later years. She’d been pleased no end when King bought her a house in Allentown, just far enough away from Pittsburgh to make frequent visits inconvenient—an arrangement that suited them both very well. She knew he made a lot of money, although at times she’d wondered whether it might not all be a big mistake somebody was making. Somebody who? “I’m my own boss now, Ma,” he’d tell her and watch as she smiled uncertainly and shook her head.

  King shook his own head; it seemed the only times he thought of his mother any more were those increasingly frequent moments when his control over his own domain got a bit precarious. Like when robots failed tests. Like when seemingly foolproof software programs didn’t work. Like when Gale Fredericks thought it more important to go to an idiotic baseball game with sweet old Bill than stay at the lab and find out what had gone wrong.

  But King hadn’t objected (out loud), nor would he raise the subject in the future. No, by golly, he was going to be an “understanding” employer, he was. Most of the Keystone technicians didn’t like working with him, the dorks; they complained he expected them to read his mind. But Gale had been able to keep up with him, and King was being very careful to do nothing to alienate her. Besides, she was one of the few people he knew whom he genuinely liked. King had a way of making … not enemies, exactly, but antagonists, he guessed you could call them, and without even meaning to. It was a state of affairs King found totally unfathomable. But unfathomable or not, there it was: he had to tiptoe around people whose good will he wanted to keep.

  He stared at a design on his computer screen that he’d been working on earlier in the day, a design for a system to retract sensing fingers inside larger ones so the gripper-changing function of the robot’s self-maintenance arm could be done away with. He could see more problems than the thing was probably worth, and if he started on them now he’d be there all night. He reached out a hand to save the program and knocked over a Styrofoam cup that, naturally, still had coffee in it. The brown liquid spread quickly over a pile of unopened mail; King looked around for one of the rolls of paper towels that were always kept handy and started dabbing irritably at the mess. Not a very kingly thing to do.

  He ended up spreading the mail out to dry and in the process found a set of demonstration disks for a new CAD program. The disks, fortunately, were in a sealed plastic container and had been untouched by the deluge. King was just slipping the first disk into the computer to try it out when the phone rang again.

  It was his partner, Dennis Cox. “Big doin’s, King. How close are you to a stopping point?”

  “I’m stopped now.”

  “Good. Come on over.” The phone went dead.

  King scowled at the receiver. “Lawsy, I have been summoned,” he said aloud to the empty laboratory. Dennis claimed he couldn’t think in the midst of the clutter of King’s lab, so all their meetings had to take place in his office. King resented that. He even resented the resentment; it was a schoolboy reaction to what was nothing more than petty bullying. Game-playing.

  But that was what Dennis did best, play games. He’d started in the day they first opened the doors of Keystone Robotics, back when there were three partners instead of just two. The exigencies of the first year of operation had proved too much for partner number three, who quickly began to yearn for the comforting security of a steady paycheck. So when Westinghouse eventually crooked its corporate finger at all three of them, the third partner had gone a-runnin’. If he’d stayed, he’d have been a moderately wealthy man by now, or at least conspicuously upscale. But it was just as well he’d gone, King thought; he hadn’t much liked the guy anyway.

  So now there were just King Sarcowicz and Dennis Cox, both of them designers of things robotic but with King thinking up most of their new technology while Dennis eased more and more into management. And management had just summoned technology to its office.

  King opened the office door without knocking and walked in. “What couldn’t wait until Monday?”

  Dennis Cox was a good-looking man when he wasn’t angry—blue-eyed, blond, and ostentatiously tanned the year round. And he was anything but angry now; he gave King his best cat-swallowed-the-canary smile. “Wait ’til you hear. I’ve had a call from Warren Osterman at MechoTech in New York. He just got back from Washington … with a pocketful of new DARPA contracts.”

  King inhaled sharply. “Well? Do we get the subcontract?”

  “Didn’t you feel the earth shake? We got it! And from the clues Osterman dropped, I’d say the budget is ee-normous.” King let out a whoop. Dennis went on, “He wants us to come to New York next week. All that time I spent sucking up to the old fart finally paid off.”

  DARPA contracts weren’t exactly the lifeblood of the robotics industry, but they did mean serious money. A great deal of what was new in technology was the direct result of experiments funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, headquartered in the Defense Sciences Office in Arlington; DARPA was always on the lookout for new military applications. “Which project do we get?”

  “He wouldn’t say over the phone. But what does it matter? Any one of ’em will put us over the top.”

  King knew that; it was what they’d been waiting for. The new contracts were for the much-desired, long-awaited automated battlefield. He and Dennis had been consulted time and again by both MechoTech and Washington; the talk was always of various possible robot-controlled superweapons that the Defense Department was itching to get its hands on. MechoTech had been talking not just to Keystone Robotics but to other outfits as well, preparing whatever presentation had eventually convinced DARPA that MechoTech was just the company to raise the mechanizing of warfare to a high art. “The government’s been working on the automated battlefield for years,” King mused. “Why are we just now getting in on it?”

  “High failure rate. Ruh-ho-botics is the latest to take a header, I’m happy to say.” Dennis was making fun of a rival firm called Rhobotics International, which had underbid Keystone on a couple of past occasions. “Warren Osterman says if we can manage the project he’s going to give us, there’ll be more work than we can handle until the year 3000.”

  The two partners grinned at each other. This was the project that could make them the standard-setters, the ones who determined what “state of the art” meant. The good news made each of them feel more friendly toward the other than either had felt in years. On impulse King stuck out his hand; Dennis laughed and shook it.

  “And we don’t have to bid on it?” King asked.

  “Nope. It’s all settled—MechoTech says it’s ours. But now the bad news.” He paused, making King wait for it. “Osterman wants those two yups from Silicon Valley on the project with us.”

  “Which two yups?”

  Dennis took a deep breath. “Gregory Dillard and Mimi Hargrove.”

  “Oh, shit!” King dragged up a chair and sat down, no
t noticing Dennis wince when he banged the chair against the desk. “Why those two, for god’s sake?”

  “Osterman says they write better programs than we do. Look, King, I know you and Mimi don’t get along. But on a project this big, you can make the effort not to strangle her, can’t you? She and Gregory always work as a team, you know—we’ve got to take them both.”

  King didn’t mention that Gregory Dillard had even more reason to stick knives in him than Mimi Hargrove did. “Sure, I can make the effort. But will she?”

  “Of course she will. She’d put up with the devil himself to get in on this deal.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Ah, you know what I mean. Besides, we’ve been having more software problems than usual lately, haven’t we?”

  King glared at him suspiciously. “You’ve been pumping Gale Fredericks for information.”

  Dennis looked astonished. “I’ve been reading your goddam reports, King! You were the one who insisted we keep each other informed, for crying out loud.”

  King didn’t remember it that way but let it pass. “We can solve the software problems,” he insisted stubbornly. “We’ve got good programmers.”

  “You’re not listening. Warren Osterman has already decided. Mimi and Gregory are part of the package.”

  King’s skin started itching, a sure sign of people trouble. Hardware trouble he could handle, and even software trouble, given time. But certain people, an embarrassingly large number of certain people, always left him with his nerve ends exposed. Mimi Hargrove and he had locked horns the first time they’d met, at an international robotics congress … and things had stayed downside ever since.

  King and Dennis talked a while longer, speculating as to which part of the Defense Department’s grand vision of a totally automated battlefield MechoTech was subcontracting to them. Dennis indulged in a little bragging about his contacts in the bigger firm, but King was convinced it was his own work with tactile sensors that had brought Keystone in on the project. By tacit agreement they avoided the subject of the pair from Silicon Valley; they’d had to work with incompatible people before and they could do it again.