Olympus: It's Not Just a Game

Chapter 37

Wheeler was seething as they reached the entrance to Mythologen Enterprises, and he peeled out across the sunlit atrium, and pulled up in front of the old familiar elevator door. They whooshed to the top floor.

The boy was amazed at all the changes. Last time he had been to his father's office, it was one big room full of yard-sale tables littered with stacks of floppy disks, miles of printouts, and twisted, tangled cables running everywhere. Where were the bearded grad students in their sandals and cutoffs? Now, row after row of cubicles filled the whole top floor of the building, and a huge paneled door at the far corner led into the President's office.

Mrs. Morrison stepped into the long row of cubicles. A programmer peeked curiously around the wall of this little office, and gasped. "Hello, Hank," Mrs. Morrison said. He never replied, but his fingers skittered over his keyboard. One quick beep indicated an electronic message sent. In a fraction of a second, soft beeps echoed from terminals everywhere. All over Mythologen, furtive heads popped up to see the notorious ex-wife.

One face was friendly enough. A gangly man in cutoffs and a political T-shirt peered out of one of the nearer cubicles. "Hi, kid!" he exclaimed. Tom Chapman had been a skinny MIT grad when he had first come to work in Mythologen. Wheeler had gone to his wedding, years ago, back when he could still walk. He had been the ring bearer, and he still remembered the Swiss Army knife Tom had given him that day.

"Hey, Tom," he said shyly.

"Good to see you, man," Tom exclaimed. "Where you been, man?"

"Oh, around," Wheeler answered. "You know."

Tom glanced down at the wheelchair. "Bummer about the legs, man." Wheeler nodded, not knowing what to say. "But you're as smart as ever, I'll bet. Debugged anything lately?"

"Not really," Wheeler said shyly.

"Well, I could use you! I got some cool stuff running here. Want to see?"

"Not right now," Wheeler apologized. "Maybe later?"

"Sure. Cool. Later!" Tom replied. "See ya!"

The intruders approached the massive mahogany desk that guarded the approaches to the president's suite. Sheila sized up the defenses. Last time she had seen her husband's executive secretary, Frieda Simmons had been a political radical just out of one of Boston's lesser colleges. The intervening years had been kind to her. She wore a dark and expensive suit and power hair.

"Hello, Frieda," Sheila began, carefully. "I need to talk to Ray for a few minutes."

Frieda pushed her chair back from the desk. "I'm sorry," she answered quickly." He hasn't come in yet."

"Now Frieda," Sheila answered. "This is me. I'll just go into his office and wait for him."

"No!" she leapt out of her chair to block the door.

The older woman smiled knowingly. "Now that we've established he's in there," she continued, "I need to see him for a minute."

"He's got a very busy schedule."

"Frieda," Mrs. Morrison warned her, "your whole day is going to go a lot more smoothly if we just get this over with."

The secretary bit her lip. Intellectually and socially, of course, she had nothing but contempt for this night school dropout. This blue-collar woman with her community college degree in something-or-other was no match for someone on Frieda Simmons' social plane. But Sheila Morrison had established her place in the office pecking order years ago, and Frieda had never been able to stop her from doing whatever she wanted in her husband's office. The fact that he was now her ex-husband made a difference, of course, but Frieda hesitated, and was lost.

"Five minutes," Sheila said, as she pushed past the secretary. "You'll never regret this." She shoved her way into the president's suite.

The bustling streets of Cambridge spread out below a wall of glass. The brilliantly colored towers of Harvard University thrust up over the crowded roofs of the city to their left, and the massive buildings of MIT rose to the right. But Wheeler only had eyes for his father.

Ray Morrison had two ways in treating guests. He flattered and stroked those who could be useful to him. He would come out from behind his desk for them, and give them the grand tour of the office. He would point out the skyline of Cambridge, offer them refreshments in the bar, and sit down with them in the comfortable chairs looking west over the city.

But those who wanted something from him got the opposite treatment. He stared rudely at Mr. Huber and Mrs. Morrison from behind his desk. At last he waved them grudgingly toward the hard chairs before it. He waited silently until they sat, ignoring Wheeler altogether as he rolled up beside them. Frieda Simmons hovered behind them. Finally, he snapped, "What do you want?"

Wheeler couldn't keep silent. "Dad, we're looking for a kid named Karl Huber." Mr. Morrison looked surprised to see him speak.

"Oh!" Mr. Morrison pretended surprise. "It's you, Simon. Looking for your little friend, are you?" He got up, and made a great show of walking around the office. He looked behind the potted plants, and behind the curtains, and then shrugged his shoulders. "Sorry, we don't seem to have any boys here just now." He sat down again.

"Real funny, Ray," Mrs. Morrison replied. She wasn't laughing. "You know where Karl is. We have a tape of you telling Simon that Karl is locked up in storage."

"A tape?"

"A disk, actually," Wheeler explained. "We've got a total data dump of that scene in Olympus where you said it."

"Frieda," Mr. Morrison explained, looking at her hard and significantly, "do you hear this? We have tapes of every moment I've been in Olympus, don't we?"

"Yes, sir," she answered primly. "We keep them all on file."

"These people claim I said something about somebody named Karl in Olympus. I'd like to show them that I never said, 'Karl is locked up'." His eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch as he spoke.

"I can get the tapes," she answered efficiently. "I'm sure they'll show you never said any such thing." And she gave him a long and significant look.