AbductiCon (19 page)

“Damn it. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn it,” Xander muttered, scowling, surveying the scene with his chin tucked into his chest. He allowed himself a trickle of comfort in the idea that any potential audience for that morning’s panel might not be in any better shape than the missing panelist, but it really was no more than a trickle – it was the panelist that he was responsible for, not that audience. His job was to make the panel
happen
.

And that…was looking… iffy.

Deciding he did not have the time to start a wild goose chase around the hotel for Rory Grissom, Xander abandoned the coffee cup he was still clutching in his right hand on a side table next to the tumbled sofa, whirled, and ran out of the suite, leaving the door open behind him. At least Vince Silverman had arrived at the con safely shackled by the demanding and needy presence of that young wife of his. Maybe, Xander thought, that had been enough to keep him anchored in the place where he could be expected to be found – and even just
one
panelist…

He turned a corner in the hotel corridor just in time to see Vince Silverman stepping quietly, almost stealthily, out of a hotel room, closing the door behind him with an almost inaudible snick. He looked up just as Xander came to a winded, skidding stop a few paces away from him, and put up a hushing finger to his lips.

“Shh,” he whispered, “Angel’s asleep, and I’d rather not wake her right now. She was in full freak–out mode most of last night, and I finally managed to zonk her out with one of your good doctor’s industrial–strength sleeping pills. He basically told me that it would knock out a buffalo, but even that took a while to work. I’d rather not go through all that again.”

“Is she okay?” Xander asked as he fell into step beside Vince, walking away from the hotel room towards the central atrium and the elevators.

“Let me put it this way. One of Angel’s better attributes is that she lacks any imagination whatsoever. She is utterly literal about things. This is usually a feature, not a bug, because – well – my first wife, who was also a writer, and a good one, had plenty of imagination – and for a while that was wonderful because we fed each other’s muses – but it soon became apparent that marriage, or at least our marriage, was simply too small for two people with measurable quantities of weird imagination to co–habit in together without both of them going insane. It was exhausting, at best – and then there were times that I had to…”

Xander turned to look at him as he stopped talking, unsure if it would be more polite to inquire further or let the conversation lapse.

But Vince, noticing the look, simply shrugged.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “There was room for only one
me
in a domestic partnership. When it became a competition, Laura and I simply imploded. It was inevitable, I suppose. That’s why I find Angel so perfect, under ordinary circumstances. She doesn’t try to change or improve or reinvent my worlds. She just tells me she thinks they’re wonderful, even when she doesn’t have the first clue what I’m talking about. But that’s okay. She gives me the space to think, and work, and rest.”

“Um, this morning, the panel…” Xander began, feeling vaguely guilty that he was basically dismissing his GoH’s wife and any further concerns about her but pursuing the thing that he himself was concerned about in that precise moment.

Vince nodded. “I know. Are you expecting anyone to show?”

“No idea,” Xander said. “Beginning with your co–panelist. Rory Grissom isn’t in his room and I have no clue where to even start looking. Can you do a solo if you have to?”

“My dear sir,” Vince said, “I can talk about myself for hours. That won’t be a problem.”

Xander allowed himself a shadow of a smile and chose not comment further.

They did not have long to wait before the elevator doors opened in response to their summons, but they were nevertheless not the first customers. The young man slouching in the far corner looked up as the doors whooshed open, and nodded at Xander in greeting. Xander, recognizing him at once as Sam Dutton’s protégé, the one who had valiantly tried to save the train wreck that had been the panel with Bob the Android, nodded back as he stepped into the elevator, but said nothing .

The doors closed, and Xander, despite the fact that the button for the lobby had already been pushed, poked at it again impatiently before the elevator finally started to move.

“Is it my imagination or is this thing – ” he began, a little irascibly, and then, even as he was speaking, the elevator convulsed violently and stopped dead.

Somewhere, they heard the faint sound of an alarm.

Xander rolled his eyes. “Stuck? We’re
stuck
? Give me a
break
…”

“The place seems a little moribund this morning,” Vince said conversationally, sticking his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Do you think anyone will notice?”

Xander reached for the com link earpiece that should have been in his ear and realized with a sinking feeling that he had neglected to wear it that morning. His phone, of course, would still be useless.

“Swell,” he said. “Does that intercom thingy in the panel work?”

Vince toggled the intercom switch. “Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. Transportation system failure in Tower 1.”

Marius, in his corner, could not help a grin at that.

But there was no immediate response, and Xander stepped up to the elevator doors and banged on them with both hands. “Hey! Heeeeey! Hellllooo! Can anybody hear me? We’re stuck in here! Helllooooo?”

Vince slouched back against the mirrored side of the elevator car. “It’ll only take a few minutes of someone else waiting for the elevator that never comes and the alarm will be raised somewhere,” he said. “Chill. They’ll unstick us.”

“Do they have personnel on tap at the hotel?” Xander asked. “Someone who knows what to do about this?”

“Far as I know,” Vince said, “that emergency phone goes to the front desk and then they call in the cavalry…”

“What, like some Schindler operative? Or the fire department, to come rescue us like so many stuck cats? I hate to mention it, but those guys might take a little while to get here…” He paused, and suddenly lifted his head to sniff at the air. “Can you smell smoke?”

“Not even a little bit,” Vince said. And then, as Xander muttered something under his breath, tilted his head a little in a quizzical manner. “What was that?”

“I said, 羔羊中的孤羊
Gao yang jong duh goo yang
,” Xander snapped. “Sometimes there just isn’t anything to say that the Firefly crew haven’t already said better. I still say I smell smoke.”

“There hasn’t exactly been time for anything to really start burning yet,” Marius said.

“Look, it isn’t that I am generally twisted on the subject of elevators, but stuck ones make me
claustrophobic
, okay?” Xander said, and banged on the door a couple more times. “Anybody there?”

“We could be here a while,” Vince said. “Depending on what actually happened. And if they can figure out how to get us unstuck, or out of here. I
could
do the panel, in the meantime, just to keep us occupied. There’s you, and there’s at least one member of the audience…”

Xander groaned, leaning his back against the wall and then sliding down until he sat in a cross–legged crumpled heap on the floor.

Ξ

The alarm had been raised at the front desk, and Luke Barnes was in full–flight managerial crisis mode – and this, given the bigger picture and the fact that he knew very well that no outside help was coming, included a healthy dose of panic.

The first thing he made a mental note to check or replace – if he ever got back home and got the chance to do it, or to tell someone else to get on with it – was the intercom system with which the elevator was equipped. He had no problem with hearing the responses from the elevator when he tried to communicate with the people in the elevator car – but those responses made it perfectly clear that those in the elevator could not hear or understand
him
, and once a less than satisfactory contact was made with those who were trapped, the conversation he attempted to have with them quickly degenerated into a confused mess of one–sided shouted repetitions which seemed to be getting neither side anywhere at all.

Luke thought that they said that there were three people in there – or they may have told him to hurry up and get them free – but it became very clear that the best thing to do was to try and get something done with the resources at hand rather than having a discussion about it. He finally screamed into the intercom that they should just hold on, and summoned a trio of maintenance staff who had happened to be on the premises when the hotel took flight and were therefore on mandatory duty.

The first one just shrugged helplessly.

“I’m IT,” he said. “I’m mostly here for when guests kvetch about the Internet going down. I’ve had a bit of a holiday, actually, since there was nothing I could do about the Internet going down this time – there
is
no Internet at the moment, and it ain’t my doing or anyone’s, and there ain’t gonna be any until we get back in some sort of sane signal range. Yes, I know – I’ve already been informed by multiple individuals in the know who appear to be running around this convention that NASA has apparently successfully trialed something they called a laser communications system and it’s supposed to be working just fine all the way out here, but unfortunately they neglected to equip us with the necessary hardware to take advantage of it. So that’s
my
line of expertise exhausted. There isn’t much I can do about the elevator situation, myself. I know zero about unsticking elevators.”

“You can come with me to the control room and see what we can find out about all of this,” said the second guy. “I don’t think I’ve ever dealt with elevators as such but I know my way around wires. We can start there.”

“Fine, you guys, you go do that,” Luke said. “Keep me posted.”

The third guy, an older man in blue overalls with the hotel’s logo on his left shoulder and a name tag that said ‘Andy’, met Luke’s pleading gaze with commendable equanimity.

“Can’t promise nothing,” he said, “but I’ve been known to get a stuck cog moving with a tap of the hammer in my time. If it’s mechanical, I might be able to figure it out. What floor is it stuck on?”

“I think halfway between two and three,” Luke said.

“Well, at least it isn’t a
very
long way down,” Andy said laconically.

“Unless you count the fact that it’s a
really
long way down… if they go through the floor,” Luke muttered..

“There’s that,” Andy agreed. “Have you got the elevator keys?”

“The what?” Luke said, his voice edged with panic.

“The hoistway doors – the doors at every floor – they have a key you can open them with,” the handyman explained patiently. “They’re like these little metal… I’ll know them if I see them, but without them we need a crowbar to open up the doors, and it’ll probably bollix them up proper so you may not be able to shut them properly later, and you really don’t want an open hoistway door gaping into a shaft. It’s better to try and do it the easy way first. And there will be an emergency procedure write–up somewhere, too. Did they leave you an emergency handbook for the office? There may be something in the elevator electrical room, too. We’d better follow those guys, that would be the first stop. And maybe it would be best if you sent someone up with ‘out of order’ signs right now, for every floor, and just to be safe make it for both elevators. They don’t have to be fancy, at least not the emergency ones, but you might really want to discourage people from going anywhere near that stuck elevator, for now. At least until we can figure out what exactly happened.”

“Have you done this before?” Luke asked, beginning to feel a little better – not happy, not even comfortable, but more in control as a procedure began to shake down into place.

“My son’s a fireman,” Andy said. “
He
’s done it before.”

“I wish he was here,” Luke said.

“We’ll manage. Hey, guys, anything?”

This last was addressed to the other two on the maintenance crew, whose own patches identified them as Mike and Luis, as Luke and Andy entered the electrical room. Luis, the guy who had said he knew his way around wires, had a bunch of them hanging out from a wall, as though he had eviscerated a mammoth, and was peering at the tangle in a manner which didn’t fill Luke with a great deal of confidence.

“So far as I can tell, the electrics are sound enough,” Luis said.

“Then it’s something mechanical, and it’ll have to be done the hard way,” Andy said. “Don’t see the hoistway keys anywhere – this could be bad – my son said that more often than not when people try and ‘help’ they generally pry the hoistway doors open or cut them open with a saw, and all they do is break the interlock system. You know, the thing that holds the doors together when the elevator isn’t actually right there, and the hoistway doors are essentially what stands between you and the shaft. We don’t want rubberneckers trying to get a better look down there. But it may have to do. Have you seen an emergency procedure anything around here?”

Mike pointed to where a laminated sheet hung on a wall. “There’s that.”

Andy stepped over and peered at the sheet. “Just like I said, they want the keys. It would be helpful if they had them here. Or said where to look for them. In the absence… the first thing we have to do is figure out exactly where the thing is. Look, it says clearly that if the car is more than three feet above a landing level then it’s dicey to try removing people directly through the doors. We may have to go in through the top. Okay, here’s what we do. I’ll get some tools, and I’ll meet you on the third floor – that’s above where it’s supposed to be stuck, isn’t it? – and we’ll pry open the doors there and see what we can find out. In the meantime, I suggest you cordon off that area. We’re going to have our hands full without trying to deal with an audience. And get those signs up. I saw the con people had their own security – can you get them to help? And someone had better stay right here – preferably you, Luis – it is possible that we may need to cut the power to the elevator car in order to get at it safely but that means leaving those poor folks inside in pitch darkness and we don’t want to do that until we have to…”