Verbanic sighed. "What am I going to do with a girl in a neck brace?"

Gonzalez grinned. "Anything you want, gringo."

By the time Verbanic and Gonzalez reached the software lab, the truck was practically overflowing. With an effort they crushed the last of the dumpster contents into the grinding, sticking maw of the truck.

Lew Verbanic leaned against the truck and mopped the dirt and perspiration from his face with a grimy handkerchief. "I'm beat," he said.

"That's the end of it, pal." Gonzalez turned off the crusher and leaped out of the truck. "Oh, shit, we forgot something."

"What?" Verbanic peered out over his handkerchief.

"That," Gonzalez said, gesturing with his head toward a metal cube half covered by a tarpaulin beside the dumpster.

Verbanic walked up to it and removed the tarp. "This thing?" He explored it with his toe. "You sure we're supposed to pick this up? It looks like some kind of equipment," Lew said as the two men strained to lift the cube into the truck.

"People throw out all kinds of stuff," Gonzalez reassured him. "Remember that time a couple of years ago we picked up that 200 pounds of junk at Colossal Studios? It was some kind of a thing like this, too, a computer or something. Wires and tubes all over the place. This ain't nothing new."

"That stuff at Colossal was all smashed and burned. This looks brand new."

"Maybe it don't work," Gonzalez offered. "Like in the space shuttle. They had four computers in

8

that thing. Supposed to talk to each other, you know, tell each other how to run the spaceship."

"How do computers talk?"

"How am I supposed to know? Maybe they got metal lips. Anyhow, the space shuttle computers didn't do no talking. They clammed up at the last second, after the astronauts were all strapped in and everything, and they had to scrub the mission for two days.