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When Wendy first stepped off the ferry at Sol Island, the first thing she thought was, It’s so beautiful. The little port they’d landed at had a gray cluster of utilitarian buildings in front of it, square little concrete structures that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a nuclear test site, but back of the buildings stretched an expanse of green as far as the eye could see. Rolling hills, graceful trees, a clear blue sky. “It’s beautiful,” she told the dark-haired dock master who was checking off her luggage on his clipboard before seeing it loaded onto a waiting truck to be taken to the train. “The sky looks so clear…”
He smiled. “No pollution,” he told her. An embroidered tag on his coverall said his name was Don. “Makes more of a difference than you’d think, doesn’t it?” He checked off the last box and handed the clipboard over to Wendy to sign. “Welcome to paradise, Miss Avery,” he told her. “You’re going to love Sunflower Valley. And I think you’ll enjoy the train ride out there too, there are some great views along the way.”
“Thank you,” Wendy told him, returning the smile and the clipboard at the same time. She looked over her shoulder to where several dockworkers were coaxing a blue-painted crane toward the waiting train. “They are going to put Lofty inside, aren’t they? He’s afraid of heights, if the train goes over a bridge…”
“We were forewarned,” Don reassured her. “Lofty will be in a nice enclosed car, and you’ll be able to get to him if he needs you.” He flipped through pages on his clipboard and checked a pink copy. “He seems to have done all right on the ferry crossing, I know they were worried about that. And the train ride might be pretty, but it doesn’t take very long at all. He should be fine.” He cocked his head at her. “How about you? Nervous?”
Wendy blushed. “A little,” she lied. A lot, actually. “Have you ever…”
“I’ve been to the valley a few times,” Don told her. He waved a hand at the gray concrete buildings behind them. “No bunkers like we have, they don’t have to worry about coastal weather ripping their houses up. It’s a pretty little village. Everyone’s very friendly. And you’ll like Bob, don’t worry.” Her startled look made him laugh. “It may be a big Project, Miss Avery, but it’s a small island; we all know why you’re here. And Bob is a nice guy, he couldn’t carry a grudge if his dumptruck offered to do it for him. You’re not going to have any problems once he gets used to the idea of you being there.”
“I hope you’re right,” Wendy replied, feeling just a little bit better about the situation she was heading into. Not much, but a little bit. “You know…Bob?”
“Not very well, but I’ve met him – and like I said, it’s a small island.” Don shrugged. “Bob’s more of a workhorse than a socializer, but he’s friendly enough if you can get him to stand still long enough to talk to you. And he’s a little quirky, but since he spends all his time with his machines a little quirk here and there is understandable.” A long whistle sounded, and he checked his watch. “Well, you’d better get over there and settle in – train leaves in five minutes. Have a nice ride, Miss Avery.”
“Thank you,” Wendy said, waving to him as he walked back to the dock before making her way to the small train and finding her place in the single passenger car. She wished they’d had more time; any information she could have gotten about the man she’d been sent to work with would have been helpful in setting her mind at ease.
Don made himself busy until the train pulled out, then went back to the office and met the questioning looks of the other dockworkers with a grin. “She wanted to know about Bob,” he told them, getting a cup of coffee for himself. “Poor kid, she’s scared to death. I told her he was a nice guy.”
One of the other men laughed. “He is that – too nice. How long do you think it’ll take him to notice she’s a girl?”
“Longer than it would take me,” another man chimed in, not looking up from the terminal he was typing details of the day’s ferry run into. “That one was cute. Maybe I should stop doing my paperwork, I want a perky little blonde partner too.”
“You stop doing your paperwork, you’ll be looking for a partner to help you scrape barnacles off the dock,” Don told him, but he was grinning. He sat down and opened up his e-mail program, sending off a message to Sunflower Valley so they’d know the train was running on schedule. That taken care of, he settled back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. “She was cute, though – and she’s supposed to be almost as handy as he is. Maybe someone up at Project headquarters is doing a little matchmaking, do you think?”
“With the girl or the crane?” the ferry captain wanted to know. He was smirking into his own cup of coffee. “To hear the other women about these parts talk, young Bob is the most clueless man on earth unless he’s talking to a machine. That Mavis Keller, the one who comes to sign for the mail? She’s been working on him for months and still hasn’t gotten anywhere. Her last trip to the mainland, she complained to her friends about it the whole way across.”
“Mavis is cute too,” the typing man put in. “The guy’s got to be blind.”
Don chuckled. “Not everyone’s a ‘ladies man’ like you are, Steve.”
“Something I’m sure all the women on this island are grateful for,” Captain Jess added, his gray-blue eyes twinkling. “Clueless is better than clumsy any day, you know.”
Steve snorted and kept typing while the other men laughed, but he was grinning. What with the arrival of the perky blonde partner and all, maybe Mavis would need some consolation the next time she came to get the mail…
The trip from Sol Island’s southern dock to Sunflower Valley took just over an hour by train, and Wendy had to admit she enjoyed it. The scenery rolling by only got lovelier the farther inland they went, the few other passengers in the main car were pleasant enough, and she only had to go check on Lofty twice. The little crane’s car was fully enclosed and well-lit, but it had a window and the sight of the land and sky flowing past had Lofty quaking on his wheels; on her second trip back to the machine car, Wendy had ended up improvising a blindfold for him to keep him from panicking and then sitting with him until the train pulled into the station at Sunflower Valley.
She’d only left him long enough to get her things from the main car, but when she got back the doors were open and a brown-haired man in a blue work coverall was crouched in front of the now un-blindfolded crane while a yellow backhoe peered in cautiously from the platform outside. “I bet that was scary, since you’d never been on a train before,” the man was saying in a cheerful yet understanding tenor. “But it looks like you did just fine. Are you ready to come out now? Scoop would really like to meet you, and then we’ll all go home together.”
He moved out of the way to give the crane a good view of the watching backhoe, and that was when he spotted Wendy standing in the doorway. He smiled at her, although she thought he looked a little wary. “Hi, you must be Wendy. Lofty was just telling us about you.”
“Wendy!” She immediately had the crane’s full attention. “I was sc-scared! Someone opened the b-big door, and I didn’t know what was going on, and you w-weren’t here. But then Bob came and took my blindfold off.” The crane arm swung, gesturing dangerously. “This is Bob.”
“Bob the Builder,” the backhoe outside corrected. He was looking at her with interest. “Hi Wendy, Lofty was just telling us about you.”
“This is Scoop,” Bob said, an amused twinkle showing in his brown eyes. He hadn’t ducked when the crane arm swung in his direction, Wendy noticed – but of course, he was also wearing a hardhat. “We came to pick you and Lofty up.”
Wendy came the rest of the way into the car, but kept Lofty between herself and the man whose business she was supposed to help run. “You’re Mr…”
“Just Bob,” he cut her off quickly, blushing a little. “Or Bob the Builder, of Bob’s Building Yard. Anything else just…confuses people.” He gestured toward the large open door. “Well, shall we go see your new house? Scoop, would you please go get Wendy’s things?”
The backhoe’s bucket bobbed a nod. “No prob, Bob,” he said, grinning, and then reversed himself and rolled away.
Lofty had obviously had enough of the train car; his engine was revving up and down impatiently. Wendy moved to lift out the ramp for him, but Bob beat her to it. “No, no,” he told her good-naturedly. “You’re all dressed up, you don’t want to get dirty. Let me do it.”
He kicked out the latches securing the ramp and then hopped out of the car and pulled it out. Then he expertly directed Lofty down the extended ramp and out onto the platform, patting the trembling blue frame before circling around to push the ramp back in. “You did just fine, Lofty,” he called over his shoulder. “It’s always a little scary to try something new.”
“O-okay, Bob.” Wendy had already jumped down out of the car, and he rolled over to her. “I don’t like the train, Wendy.”
“I know you don’t, Lofty,” she told him, patting his frame and suppressing a surge of irritation that ‘Bob the Builder’ had just done the same thing as though it were the most natural thing in the world; it had taken her two weeks of working with Lofty to gain the nervous crane’s trust, and he thought he could do it in five minutes? “Don’t worry, you won’t have to get on the train again. This is home now.”
“I’m glad we’re home,” Lofty said. He was looking around, still trembling. “But this is sc-scary too.”
“It won’t be for long.” Bob was done with the ramp, and wiping his hands on his coverall. “Because once you get used to it, it won’t be new anymore. Right?”
Lofty thought about that, then blinked. “I…I think so.”
Bob nodded. “Thinking is good,” he said. “Well, let’s take Wendy to her new house. You just follow Scoop and I, okay?”
More blinking. “I…think I can do that.”
“Good.” Scoop had come rolling up, his bucket full of Wendy’s luggage. Bob checked the load to make sure it was secure, then swung up onto the riding platform on the side of the backhoe’s cab. “Okay, let’s go!”
Wendy stepped up onto Lofty’s platform, and was irritated all over again when the crane took off after Bob and Scoop with barely a shudder. Ruthlessly, she pushed the feeling down and did her best to stamp it out. She’d known before she’d come here that Bob was really good with the machines; everyone at the mainland training center seemed to have mentioned it at least once. And since Lofty was going to be living in the yard, which was also where Bob lived, him trusting Bob already was not a bad thing.
She was still a little jealous, though. Bob seemed to be the kind of guy, nice or not, who was used to just jumping in and doing things however and whenever he wanted. Wendy had to wonder if the paperwork was something he hadn’t wanted to do, and had therefore only done when he’d absolutely had to. Which was a situation she was going to change as soon as possible. She was here to help run the business, not to be his secretary.
It didn’t take them long to reach the house, which Wendy had pretty much bought sight unseen from the Project – about the same way she’d bought her half of Bob’s Building Yard. It would have been more convenient to live at the yard, but she couldn’t because one, there wasn’t room, and two, the decency clause in their contracts wouldn’t allow it. The machines weren’t children but they were child-like and therefore impressionable, so Project personnel who worked closely with the machines had certain restrictions placed on their behavior above and beyond those of the other residents – not that most people objected, because there were some things you just didn’t want to have to explain to a piece of heavy equipment. Hence Wendy’s new home being a few blocks from the yard instead of inside it.
The little house was, to her relief, nice. The back yard was a mess, but the inside was clean and well kept and plenty big enough for one person. Bob carried in her luggage without being asked, let her know that the stationmaster would see to it that her boxes were delivered, and then proceeded to tell her all about the house in what sounded like a single breath before promising to come back the next morning so he could show her how to get to the building yard. And then in the next breath he was excusing himself and disappearing with the two machines, supposedly off to do a job that couldn’t wait.
Her boxes arrived shortly thereafter, and soon after that a neighbor showed up to welcome her to Sunflower Valley. Mrs. Lykins lived two doors down and brought with her cookies, a pot of tea, and all the gossip Wendy could absorb and then some. None of it was about Bob, unfortunately, although Mrs. Lykins did cluck over him once and mention that she thought they were ‘working that poor boy to death’ and everyone was so glad Wendy had been sent to help him. Wendy had to bite her tongue to keep from telling Mrs. Lykins that he hadn’t looked overworked to her at all.
And the next morning, she was very glad she hadn’t. Bob showed up at the crack of dawn – and he had cake and coffee with him, which he called a late breakfast in spite of the fact that half the sky outside still had stars showing in it. It was good cake too, and he’d blushed when she told him so; apparently he’d made it himself before coming over to get her. Then they’d walked the two and a half blocks to the yard, which was in the center of town.
Bob’s house, Wendy saw immediately, was nowhere near as nice as hers, although it did look a lot sturdier. It sat near the back of the square walled yard, with a workshop nearby and the machine shed on the other side of that. Part of the shed arrangement looked new, the part closest to the workshop, and Lofty was inside it. “I thought he’d be more comfortable if he was on the inside, not the outside,” Bob explained as the machines came out to greet them. A small orange cement mixer whizzed past, and he called out, “Whoa, Dizzy, be careful! Wendy isn’t wearing steel-toed boots.”
“She isn’t?” The mixer flipped back over to them and peered at Wendy’s feet, then looked up at Bob. “I thought she belonged here. Is she a guest?”
“She does belong here, and she’s not a guest,” he corrected. “But people who work indoors don’t wear steel-toed boots, so you’re going to have to be just as careful now all the time as you are when we have visitors. Understand?”
“Got it, Bob.” The mixer looked Wendy over and smiled. “I’m Dizzy!”
Wendy smiled back; Dizzy, she knew from the information she’d been given before her arrival, was the youngest of the machines here. “It’s nice to meet you, Dizzy. I’m Wendy Av…”
“She’s Wendy,” Bob jumped in immediately, much as he had the day before when Wendy had tried to use his last name. “Wendy, Dizzy.”
“Wendy,” Dizzy repeated dutifully, before spinning away to dance around the other, larger machines. “Wendy is here! Wendy is here!”
Bob didn’t quite sigh. “I’ll explain it to you later,” he said in a low voice. “Let’s just say you don’t want them to get started on your last name.” He waved a hand at the other approaching machines. “You’ve already met Scoop, and this is Muck, the dumptruck, and Roley, the steamroller. Say hello to Wendy, everyone! She’s our new partner.”
He didn’t sound resentful, and Wendy forced herself to relax as she greeted the two new machines and then Lofty, who had come up behind them. “How did it go last night, Lofty?” she asked. “I thought about you.”
“I…think I like it here,” the crane stammered out. “Everyone is really nice. Why can’t you stay here too, Wendy?”
“Because there isn’t enough room in the yard for another house, Lofty,” Bob answered for her. “And my house is too small. But Wendy will be here every day, remember?” The crane arm bobbed a nod, and Bob smiled. “Maybe today Roley can show you around some other places, would you like that? I shouldn’t need either of you today, so you can take your time and explore.”
Lofty shivered a little. “Exploring s-sounds sc-scary.”
“I’ll be with you, Lofty,” Roley reassured him. “We’ll have fun! And if it gets too scary for you, we’ll come back to the yard and play with Bird, okay?”
“I – I think so.” Lofty sounded uncertain, but then that was pretty much the way he always sounded. He looked up at Bob with one large eye. “Th-thinking is g-good, right Bob?”
“Right, Lofty,” Bob told him. “Okay, Scoop and Muck, I’m just going to show Wendy the office and then we’ll get off to our first job. Dizzy,” he addressed the mixer, “I’d like you to stay here with Wendy, please. We don’t want to leave her alone in the yard on her first day. Is that all right with you?”
“I think it’s brilliant!” the little mixer squeaked, rearing up on her back wheels and clapping her front ones together in delight. “I can show her evvvrything!”
“Just be careful of where your wheels are,” Bob warned, and then returned his attention to Wendy. “Can I show you the office now? Sorry I can’t stick around longer, but we’re already late for our first job.”
“You are?” But he was already ushering her toward the house, beating her there to hold open a door on the smaller end of it; Wendy mentally reduced living space inside the house by a third, realizing the house and the office were the same building. No wonder he’d said his house was small! The walls were thick too; thick enough, she supposed, to keep an accidental run-in with one of the machines from doing more than exterior cosmetic damage.
The inside of the office surprised her even more. It wasn’t a mess – or at least, it wasn’t as much of a mess as she’d expected, and what mess was there wasn’t a dirty one. There were boxes stacked in the corners and piles of papers and work orders and receipts on every available flat surface, but except for one pile that was obviously a recent casualty none of them were on the floor. The cause of the floor-pile raised its striped gray head and gave her an inscrutable look, and Bob immediately started scolding. “Pilchard! Look at the mess you made!”
The cat yawned at him and curled back up, unimpressed. Bob circled around Wendy and scooped up the cat, placing it carefully on the floor before quickly gathering up the papers and stacking them back on the corner of the desk. Pilchard watched him stack, obviously gathering herself to leap back up as soon as he was done, but Bob intercepted the leap and held her against his chest. “Sorry about that, Wendy,” he said. “Pilchard likes to sleep right there, but she doesn’t like to lay on top of papers.” He rubbed the cat’s head and set it down again, and it made a show of turning its back on him as it stalked out of the office through a different door, tail in the air. Bob was looking a worried question at her. “You don’t mind cats, do you?”
“I like cats,” Wendy told him, wondering if collecting cats was one of the quirks Don at the dockyard had mentioned. “How many do you have?”
“Only Pilchard,” Bob assured her quickly. “She just wandered into the yard one day, I sort of adopted her. She also likes to sleep next to the phone, but if it rings she’ll knock it off the desk.” He looked embarrassed again. “She’s a pretty well-behaved cat everywhere else, she’s just hard on the office. I can close the door…”
“No, that’s okay.” Wendy thought she could probably handle one cat, and she also thought it would probably yowl and cry all day if the door were closed. Which would be more disturbing than having the cat underfoot, since it would eventually get tired of being pushed off the desk and find another place to sleep. Other than piles of papers, the desk also held the aforementioned phone, an old-fashioned answering machine with a cassette tape in it, and a computer that was on but in standby mode. On a small table nearby sat a fax machine with about two feet of paper dangling from it toward the floor. Wendy went over to it and carefully tore the paper off, noticing as she did that the red message light on the answering machine was blinking. “It looks like you’ve got some calls. Did you forget to check your messages last night?”
“Um, no, those would be from people trying to catch me this morning before I left the yard – that fax would be too.” Bob made a face and held out his hand for the paper. “I suppose I can add it to today’s list, but I try not to do that. What I normally do is get all the messages together when I get home in the evening and then put them on the next day’s list, then I print the list out on the computer to take with me so I don’t forget anything.” He pulled a flattened roll of perforated printer paper out of his back pocket and wrapped the sheet Wendy handed him around it, only briefly glancing at the contents. “Now I really have to go. There’s coffee in the kitchen, or tea if you want it, just make yourself at home. I don’t think there’s any food in there except eggs and milk, though, sorry about that. Dizzy can show you how to get to the café and back. I’ll try to be home before dark, if I can, and then we can talk about the business. Okay?”
Wendy didn’t know what else to do; she nodded. Bob looked relieved and bolted out the door, and seconds later he was perched on Scoop’s riding platform, a battered red toolbox resting in the machine’s front bucket as they rolled out of the yard and away. She checked her watch, saw the time and winced. He was already late? Wendy shook her head. Maybe it was a special job, something that had to be done early; she’d check the list on the computer later. What she was going to do right now, though, was have a look around and maybe fix a pot of water for tea.
Bob’s kitchen was accessible either from the front door next to the main office door or around the inside through a little living room that was clean and cozy and filled with comfortably worn furniture. Pilchard was curled up in a large overstuffed armchair with a footstool in front of it, and from the position of the small television and the remote on the table next to it, Wendy was reasonably certain that the chair was Bob’s. Other than that, though, she couldn’t deduce much of anything about the man from the room. There were no pictures anywhere, few books, and the only magazines were all about architecture, renovation and home improvement.
In contrast to the coziness of the living room, Bob’s kitchen was all white and as cleanly bare as a bleached bone. A mixing bowl and a few utensils were air-drying in a rack beside the sink, and a pot beside the stove had obviously been the source of the morning’s coffee. A teakettle was hanging from a hook nearby, and Wendy filled it with water from the tap and put it on the stove to boil. Bob’s icebox was as empty as he’d said it was, holding just five eggs in a wire basket next to a half-empty glass bottle of milk on the top shelf. Wendy made up her mind that she was having lunch out at the same time she wondered what Bob was planning to eat when he came home. Maybe he picked up his dinner from someplace on his way back to the yard, and that was why he didn’t have much food on hand; he was a bachelor, it would make sense. Or maybe, being a bachelor, he hadn’t planned at all and would end up eating the other half of the cake he’d made that morning and which was currently sitting in the breadbox.
Wendy found tea and sugar and a clean mug and set them out, then went back to the office. Another fax had come in while she’d been in the kitchen, and remembering what Bob had said about his usual procedure she took the sheets and used them to start a new pile. She couldn’t find anything to mark the pile with, however, and while she was still shaking her head over the complete lack of standard supplies in the office the kettle whistled and she went back to the kitchen to get her tea.
When she came back, another fax had appeared. Wendy put that one in the new pile and sat down at the desk. First she was going to look at the list of jobs for the day, and then she’d start going through the piles of things all over the office. The blinking red light on the answering machine got her attention, and she decided to take care of those messages first.
Three more jobs landed on the pile, scrawled on printer paper because Bob had obviously never heard of any other kind. Out of curiosity, Wendy rolled back the tape to listen to his message: “Hi, you’ve reached Bob’s Building Yard. I’m not here, but if you’ll leave me a message I’ll get back to you tomorrow – or if you happen to see me around, just stop me and tell me what you need and I’ll get to it as quickly as I can. Thanks!”
Wendy sat and stared at the machine for a full minute, then went back to the computer. The starfield screen saver obligingly turned off when she moved the mouse, and she found herself looking at a mostly bare default-blue desktop with a document titled list.doc in the center of it. Double-clicking brought up a page of numbered names, no addresses, each with an accompanying shorthand description of the job to be done and sometimes a note about what supplies and equipment would be needed. The jobs varied from simple (cleaning out a rain gutter for Mrs. Potts) to labor intensive (building a new small corral for Farmer Pickles) to just plain weird (what was a ‘Spud hole’, and why were two of them in the middle of Carver Road?).
There were eight of them on the list, three of which were starred for no reason she could figure out. Eight jobs – nine, if you counted the fax he’d taken with him – and they were all for today. And she already had five in the pile for tomorrow, and it was only…she looked at the clock and made a face. It was early.
By lunchtime, Wendy had answered six phone calls, gotten two more faxes, and plowed her way through a heap of invoices whose dates told her that this really was an average day. She’d also checked the yard’s books and found them in fairly good order, although it looked like Bob had been using the invoices to keep track of his materials usage. He’d even been filing them, by date, in a big filing cabinet which was almost full even though he’d only been in the Valley for six months. As far as office supplies went, Bob had a heavy-duty stapler, some strapping tape, a few pens, and a carpenter’s flat pencil that he’d obviously been sharpening with the box cutter in the top desk drawer. The fax machine/printer was feeding out of a box of perforated paper that sat underneath it and was about half empty, and there was another unopened box of the same standing beside it with two boxes of green hanging file folders on top of that. The other desk drawers held a weird assortment of mail, catalogs, and building material samples, along with two half-used rolls of duct tape and an open plastic package of recycled manila envelopes. The corner next to the filing cabinet was full of neatly stacked parts boxes, which she was guessing he reused when he could.
At noon, Wendy walked out of the office into the sunshine, amazed that her day was only half over. Dizzy rolled up to her like an overexcited puppy, bucket spinning excitedly. “Wendy! Are you ready to go get lunch? Roley and Lofty are out exploring, and I was bored. Are you ready, can I show you now?”
“I’m ready, let’s go.” The trip to the ‘downtown’ area of Sunflower Valley turned out to be more enlightening than Wendy had expected, and it took a lot longer too. There weren’t too many people out, even though it was a beautiful day, but everyone she did meet seemed to know who she was and why she was there – just like Don, the dockmaster, had told her. And they all seemed very happy about it, too. Apparently Bob was well-liked in town, and it wasn’t only Mrs. Lykins who thought he was overworked.
Wendy thought about that all the way back to the office.
There were two new messages blinking on the message machine when she got back, but no new faxes; Wendy took that as a good sign. So far, only seven jobs for the next day. She wrote them down, then started a new list on the computer and went back through the files to see what kind of supplies Bob might be needing for each of them…which was how she figured out that not all of the jobs were actually jobs. He was apparently setting up the larger job requests as on-site consults so he could make a time and materials estimate, and then he scheduled the actual work for another day. Bob was a lot more organized than she’d thought he was.
He was also a lot better off than his house and his hours might have led someone to believe, which Wendy had known after she’d tracked through the yard’s books. Sunflower Valley didn’t use money; all of the inhabitants were on the Project payroll, yes, but that money was virtual, not actual, and it was never used locally. The barter system in place on the island was a service-for-service model kept track of through a sophisticated computer network. The service provider logged in, input time and materials used, and then the ‘transaction’ was approved by the recipient and the computer figured out the exchange rate and calculated the amount of credits involved. These records were up to date – Wendy thought that was probably because they were logged into the nearest terminal at the site of the actual job, and the ones done for the township of Sunflower Valley were logged by the building inspector after he’d checked Bob’s work.
She made another trip back to the filing cabinet, but the inspection reports weren’t in the files. That mystified her, until she took another look around the office and realized that what few supplies Bob had were all recycled, even down to the ubiquitous perforated printer paper. Wendy went back to the computer and logged into the network, and there were the reports. The inspector’s name was A. Bentley, and his reports were absolutely exhaustive. Which explained why Bob hadn’t printed them, of course; they were available on the network, they were even searchable, so printing them would have been a waste of paper. Her eyes were again drawn to the stack of empty parts boxes in the corner. It didn’t look like Bob was the type to waste anything.
Wendy amended that thought; he wasn’t wasting anything in the office, but construction supplies might be a different matter. All contractors had a certain percentage of waste, you never used everything. Was Bob keeping track of that? There was nothing in the computer or in the files to show that he was. Maybe it was time to have a look around the yard.
The sun was still fairly high in the sky, and Dizzy was nowhere to be seen when Wendy went back out. Neither were Roley or Lofty, although the dirty red dumptruck, Muck, was back. Muck rolled up to Wendy with an eager smile. “Are we going out on a job, Wendy?”
“Not right now, I’m afraid.” Wendy looked down at her straight skirt and ‘office’ shoes and shook her head. “I’m not really dressed for it. If we needed to go out, I’d have to come to work dressed more like Bob was today.”
Muck gave a little rock on her heavy tracks that seemed to be a shrug. “Bob is always dressed that way, or at least most of the time he is. You aren’t always ready for work?”
The question took Wendy aback for a moment, but she understood almost immediately what the dumptruck was asking. “There are different kinds of work, Muck,” she said. “When I’m out fixing something, I dress a lot like Bob does. But if I’m going to be working indoors all day, I wear office clothes like the ones I have on now.”
“You look pretty. You wouldn’t want to get those clothes all dirty,” Muck agreed, her shovel bobbing slightly in a nod. “And those shoes aren’t safe for working outside. When we have to work around ladies who have those kind of shoes on, Bob makes them stay away from where we’re working or go back inside their houses.”
“That’s very smart,” Wendy agreed, nodding herself. “You’re right, these kind of shoes are just for looking pretty, they’re not safe to work in and I wouldn’t want to get them dirty.” She cocked her head at the dumptruck and smiled. “Could you show me around the yard, Muck? I don’t know where everything is.”
“Oh sure!” Muck immediately reversed herself, paying obvious and careful attention to Wendy’s location at all times. “You were just in the house, so I don’t need to show you that. Over here is our shed, that’s where we all sleep. Bob made it, it’s really nice.”
Wendy dutifully admired the shed, which was very well built although more than a bit battered. She could see a soccer ball in one corner. “Did someone kick that over the wall? I can toss it back…”
“Oh don’t do that, that’s our new ball!” the dumptruck informed her. “We like to play soccer.”
That was interesting; Wendy never would have thought of the machines playing soccer, much less having their own ball. “Did Bob teach you that?”
“Yeah. Bob likes to play too, but he doesn’t get to play with us very much.” Muck sounded unhappy about that, but then she brightened. “Do you like to play soccer?”
“Sometimes. In different shoes,” she added quickly, seeing how hopeful the machine looked at her answer, and conveniently not mentioning the fact that she hadn’t played soccer since grade school. “Do you play anything else?”
Muck rocked on her tracks again. “We tried volleyball, but Bob said it was dangerous because the ball went too high.”
Wendy mentally pictured the ball being whacked through the air by a hydraulically powered steel bucket and winced. “I think he was right about that,” she agreed.
“Bob is mostly always right,” Muck told her. “Do you want to see the rest of the yard?”
“Yes, I do.” The ‘mostly always right’ comment had startled her, but Wendy wasn’t going to discuss that with Muck. She probably wasn’t going to discuss it with Bob either, but she did file it away to think about later. “Where does Bob keep his building supplies?”
“Oh, we don’t keep those here.” The dumptruck wiggled its shovel in a clear negative. “When we need something for a job, we get it from J.J.”
“J.J.?”
“At the lumber yard. That’s where Trix lives. She’s a forklift,” Muck said. “Trix, not J.J. When Bob needs something to do a job, he calls J.J. and then we go get it once it’s ready.”
Getting closer. “What about the supplies you have left once a job is done?” Wendy asked. “Where do those go? Does Bob keep them here?”
“There usually isn’t anything left,” Muck told her. “Bob is mostly always right. Or do you mean the things that are left over after we take something apart? Because most of that goes to the recycling center, unless it’s something Bob thinks we can use here and then he puts it up.” The big red shovel gestured toward the other side of the yard, and Wendy saw a small, neat tarp stretched over an equally small pile of something against the far wall. “That’s some old bricks. Bob wants to use them to make a flower bed that sits against the wall. He has a plan all drawn out for it, but we haven’t had time to build it yet.” A large eye angled in Wendy’s direction. “Maybe you can help us?”
Wendy allowed that she might be able to do that, and agreed to ask Bob about the flowerbed plan when he got back. She looked inside the workshop, which was neatly cluttered with stacked paint cans, power tools, a well-used table saw, a small portable generator, and racks of other specialized tools hanging on the walls. He also had spools of various gauges of wire, a thick coil of steel cable, utility lights, and a weatherproof bin attached to the outside of the shed wall that was full of smallish pieces of scrap wood. Muck told her that Bob used those ‘just all over the place’. “It doesn’t make sense to cut up new wood when you just need a little piece,” the dumptruck quoted.
All right, Wendy was convinced: Bob apparently didn’t waste anything on the job, either. She stayed out in the yard for a little while longer, talking to Muck, and then went back inside the office and got back on the network; she had paperwork to find and finish. Paperwork had been the reason, or so she’d been told, that the Project had decided to sell its half of the building yard and set Bob McKinney up with a partner he hadn’t asked for.
That was his name, whether he was able to use it in Sunflower Valley or not; Wendy had known some things about him. Robert J. McKinney, college-educated civil engineer with a background in contracting and a talent for relating to the AI machines. In his early thirties, unmarried, no family on the island. And now she also knew that he was well-liked in town and so far seemed to be pretty good at managing his business. Not to mention that he could bake good coffee cake, had pretty obviously spoiled his cat rotten, and had taught the AI machines to play soccer.
Add all of that to the day’s job list and the almost-full filing cabinet…and Wendy was starting to see why the Project’s ‘extra’ paperwork might have fallen by the wayside. Even though she still hadn’t completely ruled out the idea that Bob just hadn’t wanted to do it, she was willing to entertain the idea that he could have also just assigned paperwork a low priority in the face of all the other things he was doing. They could settle that later. For now, she pulled up the reports that headquarters wanted filled out and started completing what she could with information gleaned from the file cabinet. Weekly job summaries. Materials usage reports. Structural maintenance assessments.
Wendy finished and submitted as much as she could, if not as much as she’d hoped to, by the time five o’clock rolled around. She cleaned up what little mess there had been in the kitchen – one mug and a spoon – and then sat down in the office to wait for Bob. Surely he would be home soon. Five-thirty came and went. Wendy checked list.doc again, wondering if he was on the last one or if the list order even meant anything, or if maybe the addition of the ninth job that morning, almost ten hours ago, had possibly thrown his day’s schedule off by a few hours. He had said that he didn’t like to add new morning-arrived jobs to the day’s list, maybe that was why.
It was starting to get dark by the time Bob and Scoop showed back up at the yard. All of the other machines were already there, settled into their shed for the night, and the backhoe joined them once Bob had taken his toolbox out of its bucket. He was still putting the tools away when Wendy came out, and he greeted her with an apologetic smile that crinkled the corners of his tired brown eyes. “Sorry I didn’t make it back sooner,” he said. “But you know how it is – start late, finish later.” He hauled the red toolbox out of Scoop’s bucket and carried it over to his workshop, and Wendy thought she heard him groan under his breath when he straightened up from setting it under the table saw. “I have to clean everything up and get the machines settled for the night,” he told her when he emerged. “If you want, you can go have dinner and then come back. That should give me time to get everything taken care of here, and then we can talk about the business, okay?”
Wendy wondered again just what he was planning to eat for dinner, but she didn’t really feel like she knew him well enough to ask. “All right,” she said. “I’ll be back in…an hour?”
He smiled. “That’ll work. See you in an hour!”
Not knowing what else to do, Wendy left the yard and went back downtown to the restaurant she’d eaten at for lunch – actually, it was the only restaurant in Sunflower Valley, a tiny little business called Luigi’s Café. The owner, a tall, fair-haired man wearing a chef’s white coat, greeted her with a friendly smile. Wendy smiled back; he’d introduced himself at lunchtime as Lucas Lewis, which wasn’t what the machines called him, and he’d explained that ‘Mr. Luigi’ had been an old friend of the family. It was at that point that nearly everyone else in the restaurant had jumped in to make sure Wendy fully understood the quirk the machines had with names – the one you were introduced with was the one the machines identified with you from that point forward. Forever, because new knowledge was permanently engraved into the AI ‘brain’ and couldn’t be changed. Which also meant that using a different name for someone than the one the machines knew confused and frustrated them, which was something everyone wanted to avoid if at all possible.
‘Bob the Builder’ and his refusal to let her call him anything else had made a lot more sense to Wendy after that.
She stretched dinner out as long as she could, which didn’t quite come to an hour, then headed back to the yard. Bob was sitting on his front porch step nursing a cup of coffee when she got there, obviously fresh from the shower and wearing worn khaki pants and a faded red-checked flannel shirt open over a loose red t-shirt. He looked smaller without the bulky coverall, broad-shouldered but not nearly as stocky. He also looked desperately tired, but he still greeted her with a smile. “Long day, huh?”
Wendy shook her head. “Not as long as yours, I’d guess. It’s always this busy?”
Bob shrugged. “My days go pretty fast, there’s always a lot to do around here and only one of me to do it – until now, anyway.” He pushed himself to his feet and held open the office door; once inside, he left the desk chair for her and leaned against the wall. “Thanks for catching up so much of the paperwork. I hope no one gave you the idea that you had to do it. You’re half-owner of the building yard, not my secretary.” Wendy was hard pressed to keep her mouth from falling open, but Bob didn’t appear to notice her surprise. “I’m afraid they didn’t tell me very much about you, except that you knew the business and you were good with the machines. There’s definitely enough work for both of us, but if you’d rather not go out…”
“I grew up in the construction business, my father was a carpenter,” Wendy told him. “I have every intention of working my share of the jobs that come in – and I’ll be expecting you to keep up your part of the paperwork from now on, too.”
The words came out a little more harshly than she’d intended, but Bob just nodded and glanced down at her feet. “I know, I need to do better. And you’re going to need steel-toed boots. The machines try to be careful, but it just isn’t safe to wear normal shoes in the yard, or even regular work boots. Seven and a half, right? I can order you some.”
Wendy was starting to think she wasn’t going to get any arguments out of him. Or maybe he was just too tired to argue? Then the rest of what he’d said hit her. “How did you know my shoe size?”
“Oh, I…sorry.” He chuckled self-consciously, blushing. “I taught myself to eyeball measurements when I was a kid, and it kind of spread out from lumber to everything else as I got older. I still double-check the measurements when it’s something that needs to be absolutely precise,” he assured her. “But for regular stuff, my first estimate is the one I go with.”
Bob is mostly always right, Wendy heard Muck saying, and understood; the dumptruck had been talking about measuring, not about everything in general. Maybe. Hopefully. “That’s useful,” was what she said. “I bet that saves a lot of time on the job.”
Bob shrugged. “I guess – it’s the way I’ve always done it, so I don’t really think too much about it.” He sighed, shifting his weight, and that was when Wendy realized there wasn’t another chair in the office for him to sit on. “I can only imagine what you must think – what the Project must think, what they’ve told you,” he said. “But I do try to keep up. I was hoping that this winter I’d have a little more time to devote to catching up on the non-urgent stuff.”
Wendy had to wonder if that actually would have happened –she was also wondering what the Project had told him, or not told him, as the case may be. And she was getting the idea that she and Bob had gotten off on the wrong foot, possibly before she’d even arrived in the Valley. Wendy had expected to be taking over half of the business from a slacker who only did what he wanted to do…what had Bob expected? Someone who’d been sent to take his business away from him? Someone who’d been told by the Project that he hadn’t been doing his job?
If Wendy had learned one thing during her first full day in Sunflower Valley, a large part of which she’d spent digging through the building yard’s files, it was that Bob most definitely was doing his job. In fact, he was doing more than his job. The invoices showed that he worked seven days a week. There hadn’t been any complaints from the residents of Sunflower Valley that she knew of, except for those people who thought Bob was working too hard. No, he hadn’t been doing the incidental reports – or at least, he hadn’t been getting them done on time – but the A.I. progress reports were up to date and always had been. Wendy hadn’t had time to read them, but she had a feeling those files (on the network and searchable, just like A. Bentley’s inspection reports) were thorough and complete.
Because that’s what she would expect from a man who worked from sun-up to sun-down every day…and still made time to teach his machines to play soccer. Wendy gave in to the urge to offer reassurance to her new partner. “No one at the Project had any complaints about the job you’re doing here,” she told him. “All they told me was that the paperwork wasn’t getting done. They thought you needed help, and they’d decided that having the Sol Foundation as half-owner of the yard wasn’t getting it for you.”
Bob smiled. “Well, that was true. No one at headquarters…well, let’s just say I kind of started working before I ever got on the ferry to come to the island.” He shifted his weight again. “They told me my new business partner was named Wendy Avery, from Peterborough, Ontario. And they said you’d done really well with Lofty.” He made a face. “His A.I. profile says his stutter and fear of heights manifested after being tipped over when his hook caught on a rail and the fall tore off his crane arm.”
“Yes, that was it.” Wendy hadn’t been there at the training center when it happened, but she’d seen the video footage. “He’s more than a little paranoid. Lifting anything with his crane arm makes him nervous – in fact, pretty much everything makes him nervous.”
“Yeah, I’d noticed that.” Bob ran a hand through his wavy dark hair, pushing it back off his forehead. “I think we can help him best just by not treating him any differently from the other machines. From what I saw yesterday and today, that should be enough about three-quarters of the time – if we’re confident he can do it, he’ll think he can too. And if he expresses doubt in himself, we can use positive verbal reinforcement and then walk him through whatever it is he needs to do. What do you think?”
Wendy nodded, understanding now why he’d jumped right in with the nervous crane the way he had the day before. “I think you’re right. Do you know how he did today with Roley?”
“I checked on them once or twice. Lofty was just fine. And I had Farmer Pickles keep Spud close to home today.” Bob saw her look of confusion and explained, “You probably heard of him at headquarters. Spud is the A.I. scarecrow.”
Wendy’s mouth dropped open. “But I thought that project…”
“Didn’t work? It didn’t – or rather, he didn’t.” Another sigh. “Spud lives up at the farm. Fred Pickles – that’s Farmer Pickles, to the machines – is in charge of him. Spud leveled off developmentally much faster and at a lower level than the regular machines. To all intents and purposes, he’s developmentally disabled.” Bob grimaced. “He can follow directions up to a point, but he can’t process cause and effect relationships. I could explain to him that he shouldn’t try to scare Lofty, but he wouldn’t remember it for more than a few hours at most. And he’d never be able to understand why he shouldn’t do it.”
“Then what are we going to do?”
“Just keep an eye out for Spud when Lofty is around, at least for the next month or so,” Bob told her. “Farmer Pickles already told Travis, his tractor, and I talked to Scoop and Muck today after we left the yard. They’ll run interference until Lofty gets his wheels under him around here, so to speak. But I don’t want to give you the wrong idea about Spud,” he added quickly. “He’s just like the machines as far as not being able to intentionally hurt people, and even though he’s mischievous and causes a lot of trouble, it isn’t malicious. He will do whatever you tell him, or at least he’ll try, so don’t worry about that.”
Wendy cocked her head at him. “Do you worry about it?”
He shook his head. “Sometimes, not all the time. I worry about the effect Spud has on the machines’ development, because of the coping mechanisms I see them developing to deal with him. Spud complains a lot, tells tall tales, and makes excuses for everything,” he clarified. “He tries to get the machines to go along with whatever he’s doing, sometimes he tries to get them to blow off work…they’ve learned to distrust him. Not to mention that they’ve had to learn when to tell on him and when not to.” That surprised Wendy, and Bob chuckled tiredly, shaking his head again. “Well, we learned it, right? When you’re a kid, you learn which secrets are okay to keep and which ones aren’t. It’s a pretty normal thing, developmentally.”
“That’s subjective reasoning, though…” Then she got it. “Spud forced them to develop faster than they were expected to, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, pretty much.” Bob shifted, sighed. “No one was even sure they could develop that kind of subjective reasoning capability. But they did. And that threw off all of the developmental projections the Project had come up with for the A.I. matrices. Which means that from that point forward...well, we’re pretty sure they’ll still level off at the 10-year mark, but other than that all bets are off.”
Wendy nodded slowly, processing that. The A.I. ‘brain’ had limitations, one of which was in the area of emotional development; no A.I. machine would ever mature emotionally beyond the level of a 10-year-old human child. That didn’t limit their ability to learn, however, or retard the functioning of the complicated logic processors that made them capable of independent thought. “I’ll have to read through your A.I. progress reports tomorrow. I don’t want to contradict anything you’ve already been doing, the machines need consistency.”
She noticed that her words released a certain tension in her new partner, and his sudden bright smile erased many of the tired lines on his face and lit up his brown eyes. “We can start dividing up the job list when you’re done catching up on the reports, then,” he told her, straightening up out of his slouch against the wall. “I know today has been a long day for you, and then you had to wait for me to get back…we can talk some more later, if you’d like for me to take you home now.”
“You want to walk me home?” She raised an eyebrow. “You look like all you want to do is slide down that wall and go to sleep.”
To her surprise, he blushed. “I…um…well, yeah, I am pretty tired. It just felt rude to send you off into the night alone after your first day at work. But it’s not like there’s any crime or anything to worry about, Sunflower Valley is perfectly safe day or night.” He held back a yawn with one hand. “Remind me to introduce you to Constable Rickey, he can tell you all about just how much crime we don’t have and why you can’t ever let the RCMP know how easy his job here is.”
Wendy smiled. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I won’t tell on him.” She stood up, and Bob immediately moved to hold open the office door for her. “What time are you starting tomorrow?”
Bob shook his head. “You don’t have to keep the same hours I do. Come in at eight or nine, that way you can stop at the café for breakfast. I know you haven’t had a chance to go grocery shopping yet.”
“If you leave me a list, I’ll do that tomorrow and pick up whatever you need too,” she told him, following up quickly with, “After all, you’re going to be doing my share of the work so I can get caught up. The least I could do is run your errands while I’m running mine.”
Her new partner blushed again. “That would be really nice, thank you.” He tried to hide another yawn. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Wendy. Have a good night.”
“You have a good night too.” Wendy left the office and responded to the chorus of good nights from the machines as she left the yard, smiling to herself when she heard them questioning Bob about whether she was going out on jobs with them and what they would be doing the next day. She wondered as she walked the two short blocks to her house how much longer Bob would stay up talking to the machines, doing paperwork and getting his next day’s list of jobs ready.
Her little house was dark and not too welcoming –Wendy hadn’t expected to be coming home after dark, so she hadn’t left any lights on. She went into the kitchen, the one room that was completely unpacked, and made herself a cup of herbal tea generously sweetened with honey. The tea and a plate of Mrs. Lykins’ cookies from the day before lasted through two boxes of books being unpacked and sorted onto the built-in shelves in Wendy’s new living room, and then she turned off all the lights and went upstairs. She got ready for bed, got into bed and turned out the light…and stared at the ceiling. Which was still unfamiliar, since this was only her second night in her new house. A wave of homesickness flowed over Wendy, much to her surprise. Wasn’t twenty-nine a little old to be feeling homesick? She was, though. Everything and everyone around her was so new: new house that wasn’t a home yet, new people who weren’t friends yet, new job that wasn’t…well, she wasn’t exactly sure what Bob and his building yard were going to be for her yet. She had a good feeling about her new partnership, but it was really too soon to be completely sure.
A flash caught her eye, and Wendy pushed up onto her elbows to look out the window. A square of yellow light was shining through the darkness, reassuringly warm and welcoming like a vision of home in the distance after a long journey. Wendy smiled at her own silliness; she was peeping in someone else’s bedroom window in the middle of the night, that wasn’t something to get sentimental over. Maybe something to get arrested over…
A shadow crossed the square of light, vanished, and then reappeared. It turned, blurred shadow becoming a sharp dark profile, and Wendy’s mouth dropped open when she realized the bedroom she was peeping into was her new partner’s. Bob was getting ready for bed. She saw him stretch, all too obviously trying to pop his back, and then he moved out of sight again and a second later his light went off. The window two blocks away wasn’t completely dark, though; a blue-white glow now shone from it, so much fainter that if she hadn’t been looking there already it wouldn’t have drawn her eye. Bob had a nightlight on.
Wendy got out of bed, dug her own nightlight out of a box on her dresser and plugged it in, and when it obligingly lit up for her the rosy glow it emitted made her smile. The light reminded her of home…and reminded her that eventually this place would become her home too. Homesickness muted a little bit, she went back to bed, took one last look at the faint light two blocks away, then rolled over, pulled up her blankets and closed her eyes. The workday started early at Bob’s Building Yard, she needed her sleep.
And then tomorrow after work, she was definitely going to put up her bedroom curtains.