The Empty Door Page 3

Scott Markman was not Cassiopia’s idea of a real investigator. He wore washed-out jeans, tennis shoes, and a brown corduroy sports jacket that did not conceal the bulge of the holstered handgun on his belt. He was well-conditioned enough, but his brownish-blond hair fell well past the collar of his jacket and seemed like an extension of the flippant personality that was apparent when he spoke. Cassiopia liked just about everyone she met, but the more she studied him, the more she believed he would not be suitable. He seemed completely disinterested in her, and his regard for her missing father was tenuous, at best. He wandered casually around the deserted house, plucking things up at random, looking at them, and setting them down out of place as though they had been idle curiosities.

  “You realize the lock on that front door isn’t worth much, Ms. Cassell,” he said.

  “I’ve told my father that a dozen times, but he’s never taken care of it. He’s always been more concerned about the basement.”

  “Basement? A house in central Florida with a basement?”

  “Yes, I know it’s a little unusual. This house was built back when Homestead Airbase was active. The basement is actually a bomb shelter the house was built over. For my father it was perfect. He wanted a basement lab for privacy and security.”

  “I’d like to see down there.”

  “It’s this way--.”

  She led him down the hall, opened the stairwell door, and waited impatiently for him to catch up. He stopped and gawked at the cipher lock on the wall by the door. “This is silly, isn’t it?” he said as she switched on the stairway light. “The doorknob lock on the front door is a piece of junk, but you’ve got a pricey, coded cipher lock on the entrance to your basement. Kind of weird, eh?”

  “Yes, I agree with you, Mr. Markman. My father is an eccentric of sorts. You could break into his house and steal all of his household belongings, and I doubt he’d barely notice, but getting into his laboratory is quite another thing. He is very particular about his work.” With an annoyed glance, she started down the steps.

  Markman shrugged and followed close behind. “You found nothing at all out of place?”

  “Nothing,” she said, as they reached the darkened lab. She carefully made her way across the room in the dim light and switched on the lab’s single, overhead bulb.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The light switch. There’s one right here by the stairs, but you had to cross the room to turn on the lights.”

  “The switch has always been on the wrong side of the room. The one by the stairs is new. My father must be in the process of changing it over, but really Mr. Markman, shouldn’t we be concerned at the moment with what has happened to him?”

  “Sorry, I just get hung up on details sometimes. It’s just me. I did check before I came over, and the last people to see him were his Tuesday morning physics class. When did you last talk to him?”

  “It was that same day. I spoke to him before I left for a robotics convention in Houston this past weekend. I was part of the planning committee.”

  Markman began to idly wander about the room. Cassiopia rolled her eyes in dismay when he stopped and began rummaging through the chemistry supplies. “Mr. Markman, unless you have a sound understanding of acids and bases, I would strongly suggest you not touch anything on that table. You may find it less than pleasurable.”

  “Was this placed turned on when you came in?” he asked, ignoring her warning, and with the same nonchalance he headed toward the supply area on the opposite side of the room.

  “Nothing, and please don’t even think of pushing any buttons, please...,”

  “This must be an antique or something, huh?” He said, standing next to a large trunk amid a tangle of electronic supplies. He had lifted the lid open and stood looking at Cassiopia blankly.

  “I don’t know. It’s just a trunk. I’ve never paid any attention to it.”

  “Well did your...sorry, does your father collect antiques?”

  “No he does not, and what has this got to do with anything?”

  “This trunk is empty.”

  “Yes. So?”

  “Well, there’s junk stacked up everywhere, but this big old trunk is empty. I mean, why would you stack a whole bunch of stuff around an empty storage trunk?”

  “Really Mr. Martman, does it matter?”

  “It’s Markman, ma’am. Call me Scott if you’d like. And sorry, but maybe this trunk was to bring something in or take something out. Is there anything like that you know of? Something valuable?”

  Before she could answer, an object on one of the storage shelves behind him captured her attention. It was a telephone, something quite strange in itself. Her father hated telephones. There was only one in the house, and it had always played second fiddle to the answering machine. For him to have a phone in his lab was unthinkable. It didn’t make sense. She stood staring, dumbfounded by the sight of a blasphemous telephone in her father’s lab. Perhaps the old phone had been there all along and she just hadn’t noticed it. She recalled her father’s favorite personal first law, “When confronted with a mystery, take everything that doesn’t make sense and fit it together. It will point you in the right direction.”

  “Ms. Cassell?”

  Cassiopia snapped her attention back to the annoying man. “Yes...what?”

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “No, no, nothing, I was just trying to think of someplace he could be.”

  “Are you sure? You seem distracted.”

  “Yes, I’m fine. I’m just worried, that’s all.”

  “Well, tell you what, I think I’ve seen just about enough for now. I need to check with some of his other associates. Here’s my card. By the way, I don’t actually work for the college, at least officially. I help them out from time to time when privacy is called for. If they need to avoid publicity, or if something needs to be kept low key, I can sometimes arrange that. I'm pretty good at it. They’ve given me your cell phone number. I hope that’s okay. I’ll do some more checking around, and let you know what I find. If we don’t come up with something, say within twenty-four hours, we may need to consider going to the police. In the meantime, if you think of anything or hear anything, please call me, okay?”

  “Yes, of course,” she replied politely, happy to be rid of him. She watched as he turned and disappeared up the cellar stairs.

  Cassiopia reappraised the room. Finding a telephone in her father’s lab made her wonder if some of the detective’s seemingly irrelevant questions had been very appropriate. The new light switch on the wall was no less a curiosity. Her father would never delegate any of his precious personal time to install such a trivial appliance unless it was somehow project-related. So, all of these things that would usually appear so ordinary seemed completely out of place.

  She studied the old empty trunk. It had always been there but had never been of any interest. It was covered with perfectly-spaced wooden slats and was heavy and very well preserved. The heavy coat of light brown stain looked freshly applied. There was nothing inside other than the plain brown cloth liner. She allowed the cover to close and went back to the telephone on the storage shelf. There was no dial tone, but a wire ran out from the back and disappeared into the baseboard. She pressed the pushbuttons and found they produced tones in the earpiece. On a whim, she entered her key code, but nothing happened. She glanced back at the new wall switch and went to it. A wire also protruded from the side of it and disappeared into the wall. She threw the switch several times and looked around, but nothing happened. She flipped the switch to the up position and went back to the phone. There was still no sound in the receiver and neither her key code nor any other random combinations produced any results. She was probably making something out of nothing. Perhaps the trunk was a keepsake, and the wall switch was intended to become just that—a wall switch. Beginning to feel somewhat silly, she returned to the unexplained switch and flipped it down. She went back to the t
elephone and, promising herself this would be the end of it, one last time dashed in her key code.

  Suddenly a soft swishing sound came from the trunk, startling Cassiopia. She walked over to it and cautiously raised the cover. Where the trunk bottom had once been, there was now a dimly lit shaft. An aluminum ladder led down to a bare cement floor. The soft light in the passageway below came from around a corner at the ladder’s base. Cassiopia stood dumbstruck by the discovery of a place in her father’s home of which she was completely unaware. Wide-eyed, she peered down into the hole as surprise quickly gave way to overpowering curiosity. With a hasty glance around the basement lab, she stepped into the trunk and onto the welded ladder. Carefully, she lowered herself down into the unknown of the shadowy passageway.

  The air was cooler at the bottom—the walls covered by slightly damp crudely finished cement. There was a narrow aisle that led around a corner from which fluorescent light beckoned. A faint hum from electronics equipment accompanied it. With one hand resting lightly against the cold, hard tunnel wall, she leaned around the sharp corner and stared intently into the intrigue of the adjacent chamber. The portion of the unexplored room that suddenly became visible caused her to gasp. She gazed in disbelief at captivating sights. Casting caution aside, she traversed the short, narrow corridor, and entered the secret lab, astonished by what she had found.

  Standing majestically in the room’s center, was a white, door-sized monolith. It was mounted on an inclined, blue, antistatic base that rose a few inches above the floor. It was larger than a standard door would be, and its black-framed outline was packed with the same familiar array of sensors and emitters that had encompassed the small Plexiglass cube in the upper lab. Captured within the thick, electronic frame was a porous, white material that reminded her of acoustic ceiling tile. The structure stood seven feet tall, supported only by its base. A fat, black cable the size of a fire hose was attached at its base. Her eyes followed it to something that made her gasp once more.

  To the left of the majestic slab, stood a large, older model, mainframe Drack computer. Its five rectangular towers, each of them six feet tall, were grouped together in the familiar circle that was a trademark of Drack Industries. This was a computer well out of the financial reach of most private individuals. Its speed and capacity were nearly infinite. To find one here was unimaginable.

  Turning to study the right side of the room, something that had been out of sight suddenly gleamed into view, something whose presence dwarfed even the Drack system. Cassiopia stopped and stared in shock—her mouth agape in disbelief. There in front of her was a shiny, armor-covered robot, parked upright in its base station charging unit against the wall. It was no ordinary household machine. It was a TEL 100.

  Cassiopia tried to shake herself awake. Her mind raced to find an explanation for what she was seeing. No one owned a TEL 100. If you were incredibly rich enough to purchase one, the odds of your also having the technical knowledge to operate it were slim at best. And, even if you did try to obtain one legally, the government would require an in-depth background check that took months, and your petition would still likely be turned down. So profound were the breakthroughs made by the TEL Corporation in robotic mobility that the U.S. government had felt it necessary to intervene in the distribution of the company’s technology and products.

  Robotics was Cassiopia’s specialty. She knew the history of this model very well. Anyone even remotely involved with robotics did. TEL corporation executives had been profoundly successful at combining the most advanced robotic componentry into their own single package design. Products from dozens of other companies had been incorporated into their masterpiece, many of which the parent company did not fully understand itself. The TEL people had invested their technological resources on only three main elements. The first was computer integration of all the best available componentry into a single chassis design. The second, more difficult, had been the development of a highly reliable inertia measurement gyro subsystem that would enable a biped machine to move upright and anticipate and maintain its balance even in hostile environments. The third and probably most ingenious innovation had been the virtual type bio-silica buss interface that allowed a TEL to use any one of a hundred existing microprocessor-based computers as its central brain. A user could make his own choice of computer controllers or even design his own. The possibilities were limited only by human imagination.

  The results of this far-reaching design policy had become clear the day the TEL Corporation demonstrated its first prototype 100 at one of the many robotics conventions Cassiopia had helped organize. There had been quiet anticipation in the hall as members of the scientific community watched the TEL 100 drive smoothly around center stage on its tractor-driven aluminum alloy shoes, and a few ahs were heard when it locked the treads and stepped up the portable stairs, quite gracefully for a mechanical device. When the robot had coasted back to its demonstrator however and was abruptly and rudely pushed over, falling to the stage floor with a loud crunching bang, most thought the exhibition had gone embarrassingly awry. There had been a few awkward seconds of silence, punctuated by one or two inappropriate laughs—until the TEL rolled over onto its side and got back up under its own power. A near riot broke out in the convention hall as people scrambled and fought their way out of the auditorium in hopes of reaching one of the few phones already in use by reporters, competitors, and would-be stockholders.

  Cassiopia stood gazing with deep affection at the glistening robot, remembering those scenes well. The company had taken the genius developed by other companies and combined it with their own to create a technological paragon that was more than the sum of its individual parts. They had given every remaining, unassigned square inch of the robotic housing the capability of holding additional state of the art memory. Nothing was wasted, and everything worked. There was much talk of using TELs for space exploration and many rumors that testing was already underway.

  How such a device had come to be in the possession of an individual even as renowned as her father, was completely beyond Cassiopia. But her shock quickly gave way to delight and curiosity, as she found herself standing in front of the dormant, silvery machine, her hand on the reflective metal arm that rested in its dark tan, molded body panel.

  She touched the gold-tinted pulse-shield visor that was recessed into the robot’s contoured metal face and then moved her hand down across the dark grated opening where speech synthesis terminated. The silver chest plate was bordered in red where the triple redundant gyros were installed, and there was an automatic door below that to provide the TEL interface capability with other computers. Cassiopia looked closely at the model label on the robot’s collar. The latest model was a 100C, but certainly her father would not have had access to the newer models. This was probably a 100A or more likely just a 100.

  The polished metal label read, TEL 100D. Impossible! This was the next prototype in the series. How could he have obtained such a priceless piece of technological jewelry as this?

  Dazed, she turned to study the rest of the room and awkwardly bumped into someone standing close behind. She shrieked and raised her hands in fear.

  Scott Markman held up one hand and tried to reassure her. “Hey, take it easy. It’s just me.”

  Chapter 4