Code 61 - Donald Harstad [69]
There was a huge black and white photo, framed and lit with two special ceiling lights, on the wall above the bed. Being a WWII buff, I thought at first it was a photo of an anti-aircraft emplacement in Normandy. A closer look showed it was a series of sunken concrete entrances, very much like church doors. They were arranged in a circular shape, with a large hub in the center that also had doors, with names chiseled on the lintels. What had made me think of WWII was the abundance of undergrowth. There was a small label in the lower right corner. “Circle of Lebanon.” Interesting.
The kitchen was all built-in stuff, including a dishwasher and a really nice combination microwave and gas stove setup. Nice hood. My dream kitchen.
I looked at Hester. “This is the kind of place I'd kind of hoped to get to when I died.”
“Yeah.”
I noticed the computer, of course. I do that. Nice Dell outfit, with one of the new two-inch-thick monitors … flat panel displays like that ran about $2,500. Nice. An ergonomic keyboard. The whole unit had its own IKEA desk, with matching executive chair. The thing that struck me most about it, though, was that the thing was so uncluttered.
There were some extra boxes attached to the computer. I looked more closely at them, and saw a note entitled “Suggested Replacement for SOHO Server.” I knew just enough to know that SOHO stood for “Small Office/Home Office.” I knew what a server was; it connected several computers, and also connected them to the Internet. The list included things like Emulator, 300 W power supply, motherboard, 2 PIII CPU, 256 MB SDRAM DIMM minimum, floppy drive, DVD-ROM drive, PCI adapter, Ethernet adapter, networking card, keyboard and mouse, two 60 GB HD, and the like. Hmmm.
“Hey, Hester, when you get a minute … ”
She took one look at the note and said, “Apparently they're thinking of upgrading the SOHO server.”
“Yep,” I said. I kept my eyes moving about the place, just in case our Mr. Peel had had a guest.
“And,” she added, “they may not have decided yet, because there are no brand names attached to the descriptors.”
Ah.
“And I hope they're running ME.” She said that mostly to herself, her eyes, too, constantly moving about the vast room.
“Mmm.” Noncommittally, I hoped. I didn't have the faintest idea why she hoped that, and didn't want to seem uninformed enough to have to ask.
“Every bedroom we searched,” she said as she passed me, moving toward the center of the third-floor apartment, “had a computer. None of them even close to this beast. I think the residents bring their own, and then link to the net through this stuff. Nice system.” As she spoke, she darted her hand inside the doorway of the bathroom, and flicked on the light. She stepped in as I covered her. “Nothing,” she said, reappearing a moment later. We continued to move about.
There was a very strange structure dividing the third floor neatly in half. It looked like a small, peaked-roof house, about eight feet high, with sash windows on all four sides. The windows on the long sides were offset, on the near side to accommodate a glazed door, and on the far side to accommodate the corner of the huge main chimney. Inside the structure was a large, flat-topped skylight leading via wooden ducting to the six bedrooms below. Above the structure was the peak of the main roof, with glazed skylights that corresponded to glazed areas in the peaked roof of the little house. There was little, if any, room inside the little place for anything but a narrow foot purchase for somebody who might clean the glass.
“What the hell do you call this?” I asked Hester.
She looked at it for a few seconds. “Thingy, I think,” she said.
“Nobody inside,” I said, looking through the window on my side of the structure. I could see Hester through the glass, on the other side.
“Right.”
On the opposite side