Part 28 (1/2)

”What do you want me to say?” the kid said, looking young and petulant. ”I apologized.”

”Come by tomorrow with the car and let's talk, all right?”

Lester didn't even notice that his car was missing until the kid drove up with it, and when he asked about it, Perry just raised his funny eyebrow at him. That funny eyebrow, it had the power to cloud men's minds.

”What's your name?” Perry asked the kid, giving him the spare stool by the ticket-window. It was after lunch time, when the punis.h.i.+ng heat slowed everyone to a sticky crawl, and the crowd was thin -- one or two customers every half hour.

”Glenn,” the kid said. In full daylight, he looked older. Perry had noticed that the shantytowners never stopped dressing like teenagers, wearing the fas.h.i.+ons of their youths forever, so that a walk through the market was like a tour through the teen fas.h.i.+ons of the last thirty years.

”Glenn, you did me a real solid last night.”

Glenn squirmed on his stool. ”I'm sorry about that --”

”Me too,” Perry said. ”But not as sorry as I might have been. You said it was your first night. Is that true?”

”Car-jacking, sure,” the kid said.

”But you get into other s.h.i.+t, don't you? Mugging? Selling a little dope? Something like that?”

”Everyone does that,” Glenn said. He looked sullen.

”Maybe,” Perry said. ”And then a lot of them end up doing a stretch in a work-camp. Sometimes they get bit by water-moccasins and don't come out. Sometimes, one of the other prisoners. .h.i.ts them over the head with a shovel. Sometimes you just lose three to five years of your life to digging ditches.”

Glenn said nothing.

”I'm not trying to tell you how to run your life,” Perry said. ”But you seem like a decent kid, so I figure there's more in store for you than getting killed or locked up. I know that's pretty normal around here, but you don't have to go that way. Your brother didn't.”

”What the f.u.c.k do you know about it, anyway?” The kid was up now, body language saying he wanted to get far away, fast.

”I could ask around the market,” Perry said, as though the kid hadn't spoken. ”Someone here has got to be looking for someone to help out. You could open your own stall.”

The kid said, ”It's all just selling junk to idiots. What kind of job is that for a man?”

”Selling people stuff they can't be bothered to make for themselves is a time-honored way of making a living. There used to be professional portrait photographers who'd take a pic of your family for money. They were even considered artists. Besides, you don't have to sell stuff you download. You can invent stuff and print that.”

”Get over it. Those days are over. No one cares about inventions anymore.”

It nailed Perry between the eyes, like a slaughterhouse bolt. ”Yeah, yeah,” he said. He didn't want to talk to this kid any more than this kid wanted to talk to him. ”Well, if I can't talk you out of it, it's your own business. . .” He started to rearrange his ticket-desk.

The kid saw his opportunity for freedom and bolted. He was probably headed for his brother's stall and then the long walk to wherever he planned on spending his day. Everything was a long walk from here, or you could wait for the busses that ran on the hour during business-hours.

Perry checked out the car, cleaned out the empties and the roaches and twists from the back seat, then parked it. A couple more people came by to ride his ride, and he took their money.

Lester had just finished his largest-ever flattened-soda-can mechanical computer, it snaked back and forth across the whole of the old Wal-Mart solarium, sheets of pressboard with precision-cut gears mounted on aviation bearings -- Francis had helped him with those. All day, he'd been listening to the racket of it grinding through its mighty 0.001KHz calculations, dumping carloads of M&Ms into its output hopper. You programmed it with regulation baseb.a.l.l.s, footb.a.l.l.s, soccer-b.a.l.l.s, and wiffleb.a.l.l.s: dump them in the input hopper and they would be sorted into the correct chutes to trigger the operations. With a whopping one kilobit of memory, the thing could best any of the early vacuum tube computers without a single electrical component, and Lester was ready to finally declare victory over the cursed Univac.

Perry let himself be coaxed into the work-room, deputizing Francis to man the ticket-desk, and watched admiringly as Lester put the machine through its paces.

”You've done it,” Perry said.

”Well, I gotta blog it,” Lester said. ”Run some benchmarks, really test it out against the old monsters. I'm thinking of using it to brute-force the old n.a.z.i Enigma code. That'll show those dirty n.a.z.i b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! We'll win the war yet!”