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He had tilass knob and turned it carefully, but as quickly as he dared He checked the dial again Its needle careened farther to the right, fully in the red, but fairly stable The lever on the left would activate the printing apparatus upstairs He pulled it

He needed an answer, and he needed it now

The ears and chains struggling against the request At the rear a fuse fizzled and popped, but did not blow; a circuit objected with a fit of sparks, but held steady; a row of lights flickered, but did not go out

Now Gideon looked up at the basement door He stared at it Hard And he willed the system to work the way he told it to--please, just this once, if never again

Three seconds passed He knew because he counted

Click

Whir

A blue-green glow sparked to life on the h the crack where the bottom of the door met the top stair

"Yes," Gideon breathed, but he did not s on the apparatus was not the hard part It was the first hard part

The printer was far too large to share the basement with its companion device, which occupied two-thirds of the downstairs floor space Ordinarily this was a source of great irritation for Gideon, ould’ve beenin one room, or at least on one level, preferably at a quarter of the present size But just this once, it was a good thing

So long as everything worked And sometimes, it didn’t

The lines, wires, tubes, and lumpily soldered joints that connected the twoand floor, carrying reater speed than any such wires were ever expected to bear They twitched, sparked, and jerked as electricity surged fro Gideon’s answer into the printer’s circuits, where the infor apparatus began to translate the electric and netic impulses from the mechanical brain in the basement onto paper

The nimble, spindly lead keys clacked slowly at first as rows upon rows of theainst ribbons of ink, and banged down on the paper receipt with sticky gravitas Then the rhyth loud and ruine

A treton Star-News, unspooled within the printer’s belly The apparatus dutifully pressed its h a slot that emptied into a basket it spit out paper covered hatever the brain downstairs corandfather’s coat off the back of a chair he never had time to sit in, and donned it with a fast hitch of his shoulders He also seized a cast bronze plaque created as a gift by former president Abraham Lincoln--not for sentimental reasons or because the plaque was as valuable as the coat, but because it praised and identified Gideon’s greatest creation

A series of heavy blows battered the door to the laboratory upstairs, but Gideon was finally s He already had a plan--plans were never the problem Time to execute them was more often the difficulty

He dashed up the stairs in a hurried tiptoe thatthe base

Whoever was trying to get inside through the reinforced main door had discovered his folly, or so the scientist assumed That particular portal was lined with lead, and fastened to the ith hinges made to hold a firehouse door

Gideon checked the paper basket and said, "Excellent!" Before his eyes, the basket filled and then overfloith a billowing flutter as the paper kept co volu the ansould not be brief And knowing it would not be good

Apart from the printer’s clatter, he heard only silence

The intruders had given up on the door, but it wouldn’t take the to come around the side and realize there was another way into the office

Crash

Not long at all

The breaking glass of his office as followed by the scrape of an ar the shards to the floor After this carinding sound of heels turning the glass to dust

Gideon picked up an armful of paper and scanned it His eyes widened