Dash avoided the door completely: it was the obvious point of entry and he’d already found its hidden sensors. The windows, on the other hand, were high up, shuttered with steel, and appeared to be locked tight.

The fact is that by preference he’d rather have gone through the wall itself. That wasn’t likely to be hooked up to an alarm. But this was the middle of the city, empty alley or not, and he knew better than to draw that kind of attention to himself.

So he attached the suction pads to his boots and left glove, and he spidered his way up to one of the windows.

Another armored conduit was attached to the window frame. Dash squeezed some paste out of a tube, careful to form a very small bead that ran all around the conduit, and he waited while the acid burned its way through the shell. He did the same for the conduit on the window’s other side and had a look at the cables that were now exposed. Matching their gauge, he uncoiled a few feet of new cable from its spool and attached that to the left-side alarm wire. So far, so good, he thought.

Here’s where the timing was tricky. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he didn’t need to keep one hand on the building. After a moment’s thought Dash braced himself on the window frame, removed the suction pad from his left glove, and reattached it to his knee. Much better.

He leaned into the side of the building with the snips in his left hand. He practiced the motion a couple of times and, once he was sure he had it, he gritted his teeth, hooked his new cable to the alarm cable, and snipped it below the join, all in what he earnestly hoped was the same instant. His fingers finished with a twist that wound his new cable snugly against the original one, and he waited.

Nothing happened.

Dash smiled back over his shoulder at Miss Gardner and gave her a thumbs up. Then he turned back to the window.

Another bead of acid paste formed a small circle on the steel shutters. Dash waited for the acid to do its work and then he carefully lifted the little steel circle from its smoking hole. He fished his tiny televideo camera through the hole and attached its trailing wires to his goggles. Now he could see what was inside the window.

Dash whistled. There was a whole new security system inside, much like the one he’d just bypassed. He shook his head, pulled out an extensible claw, and set to work all over again. Some people, he thought, but he admired it all the same.

Ÿ

It took him thirteen minutes to bypass the second alarm. He wasn’t proud of that but this one had been a lot more difficult, with him working the claw and the camera on their extensible cables. He took another look around the interior with the little camera and decided he was in the clear.

Dash leaned back, hanging off his suction pads, and turned his ray gun’s beam to a midline setting that ought to burn through the shutter without leaving a lot of slag behind. That would be a big help when he welded it closed again on his way out. He fixed four more suction pads on the shutter itself and burned it free of its frame.

He caught the shutter and eased it out between the alarm wires and the wall. The suction pads gripped the face of the wall and that left the shutter hanging right next to its frame. Dash smiled: that had been a nice, workmanlike job, even though he’d like to practice those moves later on to improve his time.

He gave Miss Gardner another thumbs up. The look on her face made him pause: he wasn’t sure what she meant by it. But then she smiled and waved, and it seemed like that was all right.

Dash took a deep breath and heaved himself over the window frame. He turned, grasping its edge, and lowered himself until his feet found the edge of a crate. He wormed in that direction just far enough to get both boots on the thing, and then he let himself down.

Pitt’s storage building was filled, mostly, with great big rolls of design drawings that were stacked on racks. Flat storage files were arranged in columns down the middle. Dash figured there’d be more drawings inside those, too.

Even in the dim light he could tell that there wasn’t anything like a switchboard in here; but he’d known that as soon as he threaded his little camera through the window. No, all he could hope to find was some record of what it was, or where it was, anyway. He looked up and down the racks of drawings. He looked back at the looming flat files. Of course, there was an awful lot of stuff in here, wasn’t there?

A breeze came through the open window.

It whispered past the wires he’d rigged on the inside. Dash really had done a good job there, but his view through the camera and his grip with the claw hadn’t been as reliable as his own eyes and fingers. One of the improvised wires shifted just a little bit in the breeze. It lost contact with the alarm wire, and that’s when the trouble started.

Ÿ

In her post at the switchboard the operator saw the blinking red light of the storage facility’s silent alarm. She punched three buttons in succession and slid a lever into the on position. That made an awful lot of things happen, but the operator wasn’t aware of any of them; she’d never missed a beat in her ongoing dance with the switchboard. She disconnected, reconnected, and rerouted one input after another, and the six Info-Slates she was managing never registered a delay.

Ÿ

Dash was unrolling a large blueprint when the room’s front wall folded in on itself with a ringing crash, revealing a roughly man-shaped void in what had looked like a permanent wall. There was a robot wedged in the void. Its dark eyes flared into life and inside its chest something began to hum. It looked from side to side and fixed its gaze on Dash where he stood about forty feet away.

Its left leg creaked into ponderous motion, and then its right leg followed, as it stepped out of its niche and began to advance. A battery of cannon barrels spun out of the port in the center of its chest.

“INTRUDER,” the robot boomed, “YOU WILL SURRENDER OR YOU WILL BE DISINTEGRATED.”