Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes

Well, it didn’t matter, did it? Because here they were. Kelp, to cut even further into Wally’s cheese-and-cracker foraging time, had let them into the building through the downstairs door without bothering to ring Wally’s apartment, so now, when they reached the top of the stairs, would be the first the computer dwarf would know of their visit. “I hope I don’t scare the little guy,” Kelp said, as he pushed the button.

“HANDS IN THE AIR!” boomed a voice, deep, resonant, authoritative, dangerously enraged. Dortmunder jumped a foot, and when he came down his hands were high in the air, clawing for the ceiling. Kelp, face ashen, seemed about to make a run for the stairs when the voice roared out again, more menacing than ever: “GET EM UP, YOU!” Kelp got em up. “FACE THE WALL!” Kelp and Dortmunder faced the wall. “ONE MOVE AN— tick — Oh, hi, Andy! Be right there.”

Hands up, facing the wall, Dortmunder and Kelp looked at each other. Slowly, sheepishly, they lowered their arms. “Cute,” said Dortmunder, adjusting the shoulders and cuffs of his jacket. Kelp had the grace to look away and say nothing.

Chiks and clonks sounded on the other side of the battered door, and then it swung open and the eighth dwarf stood smiling and bobbing in there, gesturing them in, saying, “Hi, Andy! I didn’t know you were coming. You didn’t ring the bell.”

“I guess I should have,” Kelp said, walking into the apartment, Dortmunder trailing after.

Wally looked around Dortmunder’s elbow at the hallway, saying, “The warlord didn’t come?”

Dortmunder frowned at Kelp, who frowned at Wally and said, “Huh?”

But Wally was busy closing and relocking the door, and when he turned to them, his broad moist face wreathed in smiles, he said, “I hope I didn’t scare you.”

“Oh, heck, no,” Kelp assured him, brushing it away with an easy hand gesture.

“This is a bad neighborhood, you know,” Wally said confidentially, as though there might be some people around who didn’t know that.

“I’m sure it is, Wally,” Kelp said.

“There are people out there,” Wally said, pointing at the closed door, and he shook his head in disbelief, saying, “I think they live in the hall, kind of. And sometimes they want to, you know, move in here.”

Dortmunder, who wasn’t feeling any less out of sorts for having been made a fool of, said, “So what do you do when you’ve got them lined up against the wall out there? Give them cheese and crackers?”

“Oh, they don’t line up,” Wally said. “It’s animal psychology. They run away.”

Kelp said, “ Animal psychology? I thought you said it was people living out there.”

“Well, kind of,” Wally agreed. “But animal psychology’s what works. See, it’s kind of like a scarecrow, or blowing whistles at blue jays, or like when you shake a rolled-up newspaper so your dog can see it. They don’t stick around to see what you mean , they just run away.”

Dortmunder said, “But don’t they catch on after a while?”

“Oh, I’ve got all different tapes,” Wally explained. “On random feed. I’ve got one that sounds like a woman with a knife having a psychotic attack, one that sounds like Israeli commandos, Puerto—”

“I’m glad we didn’t get the woman with the knife,” Kelp said. “Then I might have been a little scared. Just for a minute.”

Dortmunder said, “Still and all. Sooner or later, they got to figure it out, every time they push that bell button, somebody starts yelling at them.”

“But they don’t,” Wally said, “that’s why it’s animal psychology. All they know is, every time they come up here and push the bell button to see if anybody’s home, something happens that makes them all nervous and upset. So it’s conditioning. These people live kind of on the edge of their nerves anyway, so they don’t like things that make them more nervous, so after a while they stop coming up here. It’s what you call association.”

Unwillingly, Dortmunder got the point. “You mean,” he said, “they associate coming up here with feeling nervous and upset.”

“That’s right,” Wally said, nodding and grinning and patting his pudgy little fingers in the air.

Kelp, rubbing his hands together in anticipation, his own recent nervousness and upset completely forgotten, said, “Well, when I come up here, what I feel is great! You been working on the old reservoir problem the last two days, Wally?”

An odd evasiveness, almost shiftiness, appeared in Wally’s eyes and demeanor. “Kind of,” he said.

Dortmunder became very alert. Was there a flaw here in the computer wizard? “Andy was telling me,” he said, “you probably had all kinds of ideas to show us by now.”

“Well, we’re working on it,” Wally assured him, but still with that same indefinable sense of holding something back. “We’re working on it okay,” he said, “but it’s kind of different for us, not our… not the regular kind of stuff we do.”

Dortmunder frowned at him; somebody else was in on this now? It was becoming a goddamn cast of thousands. “We?” he echoed. “Who’s we?”

“Oh, the computer ,” Wally said, beaming, pleased at the confusion. “We do everything together.”

“Oh, you do?” Dortmunder smiled amiably. “What’s the computer’s name?” he asked. “Compy? Tinkerbell? Fred?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t name it,” Wally said. “That would be childish.”

“Well,” Kelp said, “let’s see what you’ve got, Wally.”

“Oh, sure.” Wally continued to exhibit that strange reluctance; but then he beamed around at them and said, “How about cheese and crackers? I can run—”

“We just ate, Wally,” Kelp said. Moving toward one of the PC setups scattered around the room, he said, “This is the one, isn’t it?”

“Well, kind of,” Wally admitted, moving reluctantly after him.

“So let’s fire it up.”

“Yeah,” Dortmunder said. “Let’s see what the computer thinks.” He was beginning to enjoy himself.

“You see,” Wally said, squirming a little, “the computer’s used to kind of different inputs. So, you know, some of the solutions it comes up with are pretty wild.”

“You should see some of the stuff John’s come up with,” Kelp said, laughing. “Don’t worry about it, Wally, let’s just see what you’ve got.”

Kelp was so absorbed in Wally and the computer that he didn’t even notice Dortmunder glare at him, so Dortmunder had to vocalize it: “Tricky, yes. Wild, no.”

“Whatever,” Kelp said, dismissing all that, his attention focused totally on Wally as the genius butterball reluctantly settled himself at the PC. His stubby fingers stroked the keyboard, and all at once green lettering began to pour out onto the black screen of the TV from left to right. “He’s selecting the menu now,” Kelp explained to Dortmunder.

“Sure,” Dortmunder said.

More greenery on the screen. Kelp nodded and said, “He’s asking it to bring up the catalogue of solutions.”

“Uh-huh,” Dortmunder said.

On the screen, a new set of green words appeared:

1) LASER EVAPORATION

“Well, I don’t think,” Wally stuttered, in obvious confusion, “we don’t have to worry about that one, we can—”

“Wait a minute, Wally,” Kelp said. “Is that the first of the solutions? Laser evaporation?”

“Well, yes,” Wally said, “but it’s not a good one, we should go on.”

Kelp was apparently feeling some confusion, and potential embarrassment as well, since this was, after all, his champ at bat here. “Wally,” he said, “tell me what that means. Laser evaporation.”