Red Tide by G. M. Ford Read Free Book Online Page B

shared a whispered conversation with a moderately attractive blonde woman in a pale green lab coat. Harborview Medical Center was stitched on the coat in red. Gardener had seen her before someplace, but couldn’t remember where or when. He thought she might have been a speaker at one of the many conferences he’d attended in the past few months, nearly all of which had been aimed at preparing for a moment just such as this, but which, at this point, all ran together in Gardener’s head as little more than an endless series of presentations, punctuated here and there by bleak rubber chicken lunches.
    Gardener watched Morningway think it over before responding to whatever the woman was saying. He wondered how Morningway felt about administering a program everybody hoped never to need. Wondered how one kept his troops battle ready when all they were ever called upon to do was clean up moderately toxic spills from the highways and help with household recycling.
    The mayor looked Gardener’s way and cocked an eyebrow in an exaggerated manner which made it plain he’d spent hours practicing the move in the mirror.
    “I believe we’re good to go,” Gardener said.
    Just as he uttered the phrase, at the moment when people began to cross the room, the TV picture started to roll. Gardener kept his face intact as his innards collapsed like a dying star. This was the first time the SFD had patched directly into the robot for a remote video feed. The department had put a lot of money into the technology, money most of city government would have preferred to spend elsewhere. Any kind of failure here would surely not bode well for next year’s appropriations. He crossed his fingers and smiled.
    When the screen went blank, Gardener pretended not to notice, busying himself, instead, in the top drawer of the desk. Before anyone could speak, however, the screen reappeared, rolled once and then again, before suddenly coming to rest. Mercifully, the picture was considerably better than Gardener could have hoped. Far from the grainy images of the past, the picture on the screen was crisp and clear. The sound was so good they could hear the crinkle of the plastic when the gloved hand pulled the film aside to allow the robot to enter. Gardener adjusted his expression to suggest he’d known all along the system was going to function properly and refocused on the screen.
    They were now looking at the world through the robot’s eyes. The Pioneer Square Station lay deserted. Everything seemed huge and ominous from the robot’s three-foot-high point of view. The safety railings looked like a forest of blue metal trees receding to the horizon, the stone floors like a wide, polished runway, leading off in all directions.
    “Give us a little background, will you, Ben?” It was Harlan Sykes, doing what he got paid to do…making people feel informed whether it was true or not.
    Gardener stifled a sigh and began to speak. “First call came into the downtown station at three thirty-six P . M . Said we had a dead guy on the escalator in the bus tunnel. We dispatched an aid car to the scene.”
    “Only one?” the mayor interrupted.
    Gardener kept his voice neutral. His dislike of the mayor was well known within governmental circles. The way he saw it, Dean was a habitual self-promoter, a sycophant, whose only real interest in public service was in his own reelection. Worse yet, he was a man who always seemed more interested in fixing the blame than fixing the problem. This close to making his thirty, however, Gardener could see no sense in baiting the bear, so he kept his face clear and his voice flat.
    “At that point, the call was nothing more than a standard request for assistance,” he said.
    A low-frequency electrical hum announced that the robot was moving. All eyes fell on the screen. Gardener spoke as he watched. “The aid car arrived six minutes later. By that time a pair of SPD officers were on the scene. They confirmed the guy on the