He pulled a silver whistle from his pocket and blew fiercely on it. It made no sound at all. Bill slid over a bit, looking at him suspiciously, and Basurero scowled in return.
“Don’t look so damned frightened-I haven’t stripped my gears. This is a Supersonic Robot Whistle, too high-pitched for the human ear, though the robots can hear it well enoughsee?” With a humming of wheels a rubbish robot-a rubbot-rolled up and with quick motions of its pick-up arms began loading the plastic rubbish into its container.
“That’s a great idea, the whistle I mean,” Bill said. “Call a robot just like that whenever you want one. Do you think I could get one, now that I’m a G-man like you and all the rest?”
“They’re kind of special,” Basurero told him, pushing through the correct door into the canteen. “Hard to get, if you know what I mean.”
“No I don’t know what you mean. Do I get one or don’t I?”
Basurero ignored him, peering closely at the menu, then dialing a number. The quick-frozen redi-meal slid out, and he pushed it into the radar heater.
“Well?” Bill said.
“If you must know,” Basurero said, a little embarrassed, “we get them out of breakfast-cereal boxes. They’re really doggie whistles for the kiddies. I’ll show you where the box dump is, and you can look for one for yourself.”
“I’ll do that, I want to call robots too.”
They took their heated meals to one of the tables, and between forkfuls Basurero scowled at the plastic tray he was eating out of, then stabbed it spitefully. “See that,” he said. “We contribute to our own downfall. Wait until you see how these mount up now with the matter transmitter turned off.”
“Have you tried dumping them in the ocean?”
“Project Big Splash is working on that. I can’t tell you much, since the whole thing is classified. You gotta realize that the oceans on this damned planet are covered over like everything else, and they’re pretty grim by now, I tell you. We dumped into them as long as we could, until we raised the water level so high that waves came out of the inspection hatches at high tide. We’re still dumping, but at a much reduced rate.”
“How could you possibly?” Bill gaped.
Basurero looked around carefully, then leaned across the table, laid his index finger beside his nose, winked, smiled, and said shhhh in a hushed whisper.
“Is it a secret?” Bill asked.
“You guessed it. Meteorology would be on us in a second if they found out. What we do is evaporate and collect the sea water and dump the salt back into the ocean. Then we have secretly converted certain waste pipes to run the other way! As soon as we hear it is raining topside we pump our water up and let it spill out with the rain. We got Meteorology going half nuts. Every year since we started Project Big Splash the annual rainfall in the temperate zones has increased by three inches, and snowfall is so heavy at the poles that some of the top levels are collapsing under the weight. But Roll on the Refusel we keep dumping all the time! You won’t say anything about this, classified you know.”
“Not a word. It sure is a great idea.”
Smiling pridefully, Basurero cleaned his tray and reached over and pushed it into a disposal slot in the wall; but when he did this fourteen other trays came cascading out over the table. “See!” He grated his teeth, depressed in an instant. “This is where the buck ends. We’re the bottom level and everything dumped on every level up above ends up here, and we’re being swamped with no place to store it and no way to get rid of it. I gotta run now. We’ll have to put Emergency
Plan Big Flea into action at once.” He rose, and Bill followed him out the door.
“Is Big Flea classified too?”
“It won’t be once it hits the fan. We’ve got a Health Department inspector bribed to find evidence of insect infestation in one of the dormitory blocks-one of the big ones, a mile high, a mile wide, a mile thick. Just think of that, 147,725,952,000 cubic feet of rubbish dump going to waste. They clean everyone out to fumigate the place and before they can get back in we fill it up with plastic trays.”