Bugs Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘All the non-porcelain bathroom products come through here. We could build our own robot body components here, too.’
    Fred followed him, ducking through a low doorway, down a twisting corridor and into a room filled with deafening radio music. Several dozen women and a few men sat on high stools, bending low over electronic circuit-boards. All wore white coats and shower-caps. None of them seemed to notice the din, though one or two soldering-guns were tapping out the rhythm.
    ‘God wants you-ou!
    God wants a-you-ou!
    Booga, booga, booga, booga!
    God wants a-you-ou!
     
    ‘We can make our own circuit-boards here,’ Pratt said in pantomime, his words mouthed against the gale-force sound.
    Then it was out another door, up and down stairs, through more tunnels, to a small machine-shop.
    ‘Here’s where our mechanical prototype gets made. Jerry, this is Fred, going to join my team. Got anything to show us today?’
    ‘Looky this,’ said Jerry. He was a short man, balding, with a fringe of fuzzy orange hair that stood straight up at theback, like Joey the clown. He opened a cupboard and brought out a shining silver hand and forearm, which he laid on a workbench. Then he pushed and pulled a lever at the base of the forearm. The hand opened and closed dramatically. Jerry looked proud, as they thanked him and moved on.
    Next came a servo system test lab, where stood two pairs of disembodied metal legs. The two pairs faced each other. One had been painted pink, one turquoise. At the top of each was a small platform supporting machinery, from which a cable rose and looped across the room like a liana, ending at a tall grey console.
    ‘Can you turn ’em on for us, Stan?’
    Stan, a silent, hairless, chinless man in a white coat, pressed switches on the console. The two pairs of legs began to dance together, whirling about the room in waltz time. They seemed to restrict themselves to a tiny invisible dance-floor in the centre of the room, changing direction whenever they reached the invisible edge. Likewise, when the lianas became entangled the legs would reverse their motion and whirl the other way.
    ‘Almost like a complicated cake-mixer,’ Fred said, laughing. He stopped laughing when he saw Pratt’s face.
    ‘This is no toy,’ Pratt warned. Spontaneous remarks were not on.
    Finally, the tour returned by a commodious vicissitude of recirculation to the sea of cubicles. At one point, their path led past a group of cubicles that were being dismantled and rearranged, so Fred could see their components: each comprised eye-level partitions, a name-plate, a desk, a table, and a phone that hung from these walls, a chair and a terminal. Options included bookshelves, files, extra chairs, and framed photos of children.
    Pratt pointed to an empty one. ‘This cube is yours. Come on.’
    Two other software engineers were waiting in Pratt’s office. He introduced them as Carl Honks and Corky Corcoran.
    Carl was a skinny middle-aged man with deep-set eyes that seemed unfocused. Though he was not Chinese, he wore a Chinese jacket buttoned up to the throat with cloth-covered buttons, the kind of jacket perhaps no longer in fashion in the People’s Republic. Harking back to an even older tradition, Carl also wore a long mandarin beard and had long nails. He looked very much like the illustration for a Conan Doyle story of opium fiends in Limehouse.
    ‘Carl’s an old China hand,’ Pratt said, as though explaining something.
    Corky Corcoran was a quiet thoughtful-looking man whose precise middle age could be deduced from his beard and wire-rimmed spectacles. Now greying, he looked like the patriarch of a commune. He wore woodsman clothes: a coarse wool shirt, corduroy trousers, and huge boots with a mile of rawhide lacing that would impress any bovver boy. If he smoked, it would be a corncob pipe.
    Fred immediately imagined a history for him: Corcoran drops out of university (Berkeley), visits Woodstock, marches on the Pentagon with