A huge steel hand, seemingly the size of a piano, appeared from below, clutching a metal rod as long as Kevin’s leg. Kevin took it and wedged it into place like a pit prop below the pin that he’d been holding up. The other mec climbed higher, its head coming into view like a boilermaker’s rendering of King Kong filling a window halfway up the Empire State Building. “Will that do it?” Taki’s voice asked on the audio circuit.
“There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there,” Kevin answered.
Sir Real produced another piece of metal from the accessories attached around its waist—an improvised key-blank, formed from a rectangular-section bar, with a cross-piece to turn it. Kevin guided the bar into the lock, steering it carefully past the struts that were propping up the pins. The struts and the blank, in effect, together formed a composite key. Kevin moved out of the way to one side, giving Taki room to apply force to the crosspiece. The lock’s circular faceplate, looking to Kevin like the door of a bank vault, started to turn.
“I don’t believe this!” Kevin exclaimed. “Taki, I think this is actually going to work!”
“See. Didn’t I tell you to trust me?”
“How come you know so much about this kind of stuff?” Kevin asked.
“You would too if you had to live with a paranoid sister who locks up everything movable in closets and boxes. You have to learn about things like this, to get things you need.”
“Why does she lock everything up?”
“I told you, she’s paranoid. She thinks I’d take it.”
There was a solid clack as the lock disengaged. “Jackpot!” Kevin said. “Now let’s see if we can open it.”
“Huh, what’s this ‘we’?” Taki said, scooping him off the ladder and transferring him to one of Sir Real’s belt hitches. “What’s a pipsqueak like you going to do? This is the real man’s department.”
“Was that meant to be a pun?” Kevin groaned, clinging on while the larger mec backed down the ladder to the floor.
“No—but it’s not bad, is it?”
“No, not bad. Just terrible.”
“I knew you’d like it.”
They reached the floor. Sir Real set Kevin down and then shifted the ladder aside. Above them, the front of the file cabinet towered like a windowless gray skyscraper. From the handle of the lower drawer, a length of cord dipped across the floor like the cable of a suspension bridge and ran through a clothesline pulley secured to the leg of the bench standing a few feet away.
“Okay, then, let’s see this great Samson act,” Kevin said.
Sir Real picked up the free end of the line and took in the slack through the pulley. Then it turned to face the pulley, the line running through one hand and around its back to the other. It drew the line taut and leaned against it experimentally. “I need something to push back against,” Taki said.
“There’s the edge of the carpet just a short way back.”
Sir Real looked back over a shoulder; then, paying out line as it went, moved backward until it could brace a foot. The mec crouched, took the strain, and then slowly straightened, using its legs and back. Above Kevin, the immense face of painted metal crept outward.
“You’ve cracked it! It’s moving!” Kevin exclaimed. Taki paused to take in slack and then repeated the maneuver, pulling the drawer out another half inch.
Kevin wondered how much more they might have been able to achieve if they’d had more than a day to prepare. People were always making a fuss over there never being enough time to do things. Kevin had his own theory about that. Being God, knowing everything and existing forever, had to be a pretty boring way to exist, it seemed to him. It would be like reading a book that you already knew every word of. What made books fun was the uncertainty—wanting to know what happens in the part that you haven’t got to yet. God must have gotten pretty tired of being God, Kevin thought. And so He had invented time to make the Universe more interesting.