Harry Harrison - The Turing Option

But he was going to join the human race for dinner just as often as he could. Or at least that portion of it represented by the 82d Airborne. Come to think of it the human race really was well represented there. White and black, Asian and Latin. They were all good guys.

He went to sleep smiling. The dreams did not bother him this night.

Brian was sitting on the edge of the decorative planter when Shelly came out of the Megalobe visitors’ quarters the next morning.

“How is it in there?” he asked as they started toward the lab, the attendant bodyguards walking before and behind.

“Spartan but comfortable. The place was obviously designed for visiting salesmen and executives who manage to miss the last plane of the day. Fine for overnight — but a little grim by the second evening. Still, not too different from the first air force barracks I ever stayed in. I can stick it out for a few days at least.”

“Have they found you a better place to stay?”

“Megalobe Housing Advisors is on the job. They are taking me to see an apartment right down the road. Three this afternoon.”

“Good luck. How is Dick Tracy doing?”

“Keeping me busy. I had no idea before I started running this program that there were so many data bases in the country. I suppose it is Murphy’s Law of computers. The more memory you have the more you fill it up.”

“You’ll have quite a job filling up this mini-mainframe here.”

“I’m sure of that!”

He unlocked the lab door and held it so she could go by. “Will you have some time to work with me today?” he asked.

“Yes — if an hour from now is okay. I have to get permission to access some classified data bases that Dick Tracy wants to look at. Which will probably lead me to even more classified information.”

“Right.” He turned away and hadn’t gone a dozen steps before she called after him.

“Brian! Come see this.” She was studying the screen closely, touched a key and a copy emerged from the printer. She handed it to him. “Dick Tracy has been working all night. I found this displayed when I came in just now.”

“What is it?”

“A construction site in Guatay. Someone was building prefabricated luxury apartments there. Dick T. has pointed out the interesting fact that this construction is taking place almost directly under the flight path for the planes landing at the San Diego Airport in Miramar.”

“Am I being dumb? I don’t see the connection…”

“You will in a second. First off, with that much air traffic, people in the area tend to treat aircraft sounds as if they were some kind of constant background noise — like surf breaking on the beach. After a while you just don’t hear it. Secondly, because of the difficulty of getting to the building site — it’s very scenic but is halfway up a cliff — the prefab sections were brought in by freight copter. One of those monster TS-69s. They can lift twenty tons.”

“Or a loaded truck! Where’s your contour map?”

“The program has access to a complete set of satellite and geodetic survey topographic data bases.” She turned back to the terminal. “Dick Tracy — show me composite contour map and suspected route.”

The color graphics were clear and crisp and so realistic they might have been filmed from the air. The program displayed an animation of a vehicle traversing the route, as seen from above, complete with compass headings and altitude. The dotted trace stretched across the screen and ended with a flickering Maltese cross in a flat field next to Highway S3.

“Let’s have the radar view from Borrego Springs Airport.” Another beautiful graphic, as good as a photograph, but this time seen from the ground. “Now superimpose the landing site.”

The Maltese cross reappeared — apparently, deep inside the mountain.

“That is the suggested landing site. Anything further east would be detected by the Borrego Springs radar. This site is on the other side of the hills — in radar shadow. Now superimpose the flight path.” The dotted line stretched out across the screen.

“And all of the suggested flight path is behind the mountains and hills!” Shelly said triumphantly. “The chopper could have left the building site and flown to that field, could have been waiting there when the truck arrived — picked it up and flown back along the same track with it.”

“What about the radar at the airport here at Megalobe?”

The view of the mountains was slightly different on this display — but the computed track was the same; completely out of sight.

“The next and important question — how long would it take to drive from here to that pickup spot?”

“The program should be able to tell us — it has a data base of all the delivery vehicles in the area.”

She touched the graphic image of the vehicle with her finger and a display window appeared beneath it. “Sixteen to twenty minutes driving time from here, the variable being the speed of the truck. Let’s call it sixteen, then, because they would move as fast as they could without drawing attention.”

“This could be it! I must call Benicoff.”

“Done already. I had the computer get a call out with instructions to tell him that he is wanted here at once. Now let us find out how far the copter could have gone with the truck in those vital twenty minutes.”

“You are going to have to check all the radar units on the other side of the mountains that might cover that area.”

Shelly shook her head. “No need — Dick T. did that already. It is on the fringe of San Diego Miramar. There is a chance that their peripheral radar records would not be kept this long — but as you said about computer memory. Until it fills up no one seems to notice. The programs now never erase memory drastically. Instead, when a memory or data bank is nearly full the lowest-priority data is overwritten. So there is always a chance that some of the old stuff is retained.”

Ben arrived forty minutes later; Brian let him in. “I think we may have found it, Ben. A way for the truck to get out of the valley inside that vital hour. Come look.”

They ran the graphics again for him, all of them wrapped in silence while the possibilities were explored on the screen. Ben slammed his fist into his palm when they were done, jumped up and paced the room. “Yes, of course. This could certainly be the way that was done. The truck left here and went to that spot to meet the copter — which probably didn’t even land. Shackles would have been mounted on the truck to fit the lifting gear. Drive up, click on — and lift off. Then a flight through these passes and out of the valley to a remote landing site on the other side of the mountains. Someplace where they wouldn’t be seen — but close enough to a road of some kind that would lead them to a highway. Which means that instead of moving at road speed the truck would be doing a hundred forty miles an hour and they would be long gone from the search well before the roadblocks went down. Trundling along the freeway with thousands of other trucks. The ice-cold trail has suddenly warmed up.”

“What do you do next?” Brian asked.

“There can’t be too many places to set down so we should be able to find the one they used. Then we do two things — and both at the same time. The police will search along the entire area under the flight path, finger-search any possible landing sites. They will look for marks, tracks, witnesses who may have seen or heard something that night. They will search for any kind of evidence at all that this is what really happened. I’ll supervise that myself.”

“But this is a careful bunch of crooks. Surely, they would hide all the evidence, cover all the tracks.”