Asimov’s Future History Volume 12

by Isaac Asimov

  But far worse than that was the tiny bit of Gubber’s own heart. The part who knew how tough, how hard, Tonya could be. How she never flinched from doing what was necessary. She and Grieg never had seen eye to eye. Besides, Tonya and he had both been suspects in the Caliban case.

  And Tonya Welton was a good actress. She could always convince Gubber of anything.

  Never mind that Kresh would have to suspect Tonya of complicity in the Governor’s murder. The worst of it was that Kresh’s suspicion might even be justified.

  Captain Cinta Melloy of the Settler Security Service was angry, and when Cinta Melloy was angry, no one else nearby was likely to find much peace and quiet–not that Kresh would have been likely to get much in any event.

  She was leaning over Kresh’s makeshift desk in the ops center. I am shoving myself into your territory, her posture told him. You have slighted me, and I have to bully you to make sure you know to respect me in future. “Why the double-damned hell did I have to find out the Governor was dead off the morning news?” she demanded.

  Because we suspected you in the plot–and we still do, Kresh thought. He couldn’t tell Melloy that, of course. Sooner or later that explanation was going to occur to Melloy, if it hadn’t already. If she chose to do something about it, then there would be major trouble, to put it mildly.

  For the time being, however, Kresh was resisting the temptation to give Cinta her own back. One rarely got anywhere trying to bully a bully. “This is a Spacer matter, Cinta, pure and simple,” Kresh said in his most diplomatic tones. “A Spacer citizen was shot on Spacer territory. I agree that perhaps we should have contacted you as a courtesy, but there is nothing that required us to do so, and, to be honest, we had other things on our minds besides protocol.”

  “Didn’t it occur to you that my SSS has jurisdiction over nearly this whole damned island besides the Residence?” Melloy demanded. “Didn’t it cross your minds that you might need my help? Didn’t it occur to you that I might decide to see to it you got booted out of your job?”

  Yes, and I took the risk eyes-open. “Cinta, we will take all the help we can get. I promise you there was no intent to insult you.” Just to keep you isolated, and to make sure you weren’t running the investigation. “It was an oversight in the midst of a crisis situation, not a deliberate slight,” Kresh lied, his voice sincere and his expression solemn. “Our head of state was murdered eight hours ago. Most of my people are still in a state of shock. I’m still in a state of shock. With all due respect, under the circumstances, contacting you was not the first thing on anyone’s mind. I’m sorry.”

  Melloy took her hands off the desk, and stood up straight, slightly mollified, but nowhere near satisfied. “I’m not quite sure I believe you,” she said. “It all sounds a bit too damned reasonable to be coming out of your mouth, Kresh.”

  “Be that as it may, Cinta, we could use your help,” Kresh said, attempting to move the conversation on into other topics. That is, we could use your help now that we’re fairly sure you can’t hurt us by suborning the investigation. “There are a hell of a lot of people being detained at Purgatory’s transport center. The people from the long-range aircars we diverted back from Hades and other spots on the mainland could cause us some trouble. We still have all airspace shut down for the time being, and things are likely to get a bit unruly.”

  It was unusual for a place the size of Limbo to have a major transport center, but Purgatory was far enough from the mainland to be out of safe range for the average private aircar. The average citizen either had to use public air transport or a special-purpose long-range aircar to make the journey.

  “How much longer can we keep the transport center shut down?” Melloy asked.

  “Not long,” Kresh admitted, not failing to notice that Melloy had said “we.” That was at least somewhat promising. “In fact, come to think of it, I didn’t have the authority to shut it down in the first place. Closing the ports was almost a reflex action, I suppose. First thing I thought of.” That much at least was true. The odd supporting fact always made a lie seem much more plausible. “Limbo City and the island’s airspace are in your jurisdiction. You’ll have to decide when to lift restrictions.” In other words, I’ve made a mess and I’m leaving it for you to clean up.

  “Oh, the hell with jurisdiction,” Melloy said, though she didn’t sound entirely sincere; How could she, given the battles she had fought over the most trivial threat to her turf? “What are you looking for? What sort of person?”

  “I’m not looking for anyone, yet,” Kresh said. At least no one I’m going to tell you about. Tierlaw Verick had identified Caliban and Prospero as the last ones to see the Governor alive, and they were still at large, but Kresh had no wish for a trigger-happy SSS agent to blast one or both of them down to slag. Kresh knew too many stories about SSS suspects conveniently silenced by “accident.”

  Kresh was suspicious of Cinta’s cooperative attitude. Her behavior from anyone else would be gross belligerence. Coming from Cinta Melloy, it was all a bit too friendly.

  “If you aren’t looking for anyone, why are you holding people?” Cinta asked.

  “Mostly what I’m after is names and addresses, identifications. Something we can run against a list of all the people who were here last night or in the vicinity. I’d like to get as many of them as possible to account for their movements last night–and I’d like to have a list of those who can’t.”

  “It’s a tall order,” Melloy said.

  “It’s a big case,” Kresh replied. “Can you imagine the consequences if we don’t solve it?” Kresh hoped Cinta noticed his use of the word “we.” He did not know if she was sincerely offering her cooperation, but he was determined that he was going to rope her in as thoroughly as possible–while doing what he could to keep her away from more sensitive areas of the investigation.

  Getting her people involved in dull, slogging, but essential spadework might be no bad thing at all. But there was no need to be utterly transparent about it. “Can your agents do some of that ID and interview work? I’ve got teams of my deputies flying in right now. I was planning to turn some of them loose on photographing and interviewing the airport detainees–but the more bodies we have on the job, the faster it will go. And, after all, it is your jurisdiction. It might be smart to make sure your people are on the scene.”

  Cinta sat down, moving slowly into the seat without taking her eyes off Kresh. “We’d be delighted to help out,” she said, speaking in a measured, cautious voice.

  “Good,” Kresh said. Kresh was rather proud that he had thought of using the SSS for all the grunt work on the case. Not that processing the people at the transit center was makework, far from it. He really did need to know who was trying to leave the island. “There’s every chance that someone at the transport center was at the reception and saw or heard something–perhaps without even being aware of it. For that matter, I wouldn’t be surprised if the perpetrator is out there with the rest of the stranded passengers.”

  “That would be pretty sloppy work,” Cinta said. “Sure, the killer would want to get off the island, but wouldn’t he or she have found a way to get off without being caught? Hell, all you have to do to escape this island is disguise yourself as a rustback.”

  The cheap shot about rustbacks annoyed Kresh, but he didn’t allow himself to show it. “You’re right, except that the killer–or killers–weren’t expecting Grieg to be found so soon. They went to some trouble to insure that he wouldn’t be. If his body had been discovered in the morning, I’d agree with you that the killer would be long gone by now. As it is, maybe–maybe–we were able to shut down the transit system in time.”

  “But what good does the killer being there do if you don’t know who the killer is?” Cinta asked.

  “Maybe a lot. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the killer will make a slip or panic. But even if the killer doesn’t reveal himself, or herself, and manages to slip through our fingers for now, having a photo an
d name and address–even a false one–could be damned useful later on.”

  “Hmmph. Yeah. Your killer might be the only one with a phony name. Maybe. Do you expect any sort of trouble from the people out at the transport center?” Cinta asked.

  “Well, Infernals aren’t used to being told where they can and can’t go,” Kresh said. “They might get a bit unruly. We’re going to need all the help we can get in crowd control and air patrol operations to keep things under control.”

  “You planning on my people being anything but traffic cops and crowd control in all this?” Melloy asked, a little of her old assertiveness showing through.

  “Oh, of course,” Kresh lied. If and when he had cleared her of complicity in the plot, then maybe he would give her people something a bit more challenging. But not just yet. “I want–I need–your agents involved in every phase of this thing.” So I can have them tied down and where my people can keep an eye on them. “But right now we have several hundred people to deal with at the transport centers, maybe a couple of thousand. We’re going to need all the help we can get to sort through them all. I can’t tell you what else we’re going to do because I haven’t figured it out yet.”

  Cinta grunted and folded her arms in front of her chest., ‘You just see that you keep me posted. No more surprises, all right?”

  “Absolutely,” Kresh said, having not the slightest intention of holding himself to that. Devray had finally given him the Huthwitz lead from Ranger Resato. That he planned to sit on for a while. The one Ranger who happened to be killed guarding the Governor, the Ranger wherein Cinta Melloy had known his name without being told, just happened to be a Ranger involved in the rustbacking trade that the Governor wanted to shut down. That was just too much of a coincidence. There had to be a connection.

  But damnation, when would he get a chance to deal with Huthwitz? Suddenly Kresh realized just how exhausted he was. He no longer had the slightest idea what time it was, or how long he had been awake. He wanted to keep going, to press on, but he knew that would be a mistake. This case needed a chief investigator who could think clearly, not a muzzy-headed fool playing the hero. “Look, Cinta,” he said, “I’m just about to drop dead at my desk. I need to find a bed somewhere and get some rest. Can we meet a little later, when I’m awake?”

  Cinta nodded. “Of course. You’ve been up all night. But there is one other thing. Something that seems incredibly suspicious to me, but no one else seems to be bothered by it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The empty house. Grieg was all alone in this–this palace. No one else at all. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

  “This Tierlaw Verick fellow was here,” Kresh said. “But there’s nothing unusual about there only being one person in a house. If anything, Verick spending the night is the unusual thing.”

  “Let me understand this,” Melloy said. “Apart from Verick and the Governor–and the assassin–there was no one in the house? In a house this large? There were no other humans at all? Just robots?”

  “That’s right,” Kresh said, a trifle bewildered. “What is it you’re getting at?”

  “What I’m getting at is that there wasn’t a room to be had in Limbo last night. The city was packed to the rafters–and yet Grieg’s enormous residence stands empty on the night he wanted to play the host. If that happened back on Baleyworld, and the host woke up dead, I’d be damned suspicious. I’d think someone had arranged to keep the place empty so the killers would have a clear field.”

  Kresh frowned. “That honestly never occurred to me. Sharing your home–giving up some of your own turf–is a very difficult and unusual thing for a Spacer to do. We value our privacy very highly. Probably too highly. I suppose from the Settler point of view, it does seem very implausible. Not to a Spacer, though. We’ll feed you dinner, care for you if you’re hurt or sick, rescue you from danger, defend your civil rights to the hilt. We’ll even put you up for the night–someplace besides our own home.”

  “Hmmph. Some things about you Spacers I never will get used to. I’m sure you’re right, but it still seems more than a little odd to me.”

  “Well, it couldn’t do any harm at all to look into the point,” Kresh said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Grieg was used to a house full of people and last night was the aberration.”

  “Mind if I take enough people off traffic duty to check it out?” Cinta asked.

  Kresh hesitated a moment. Sandbagged. She had set him up and knocked him right over. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was let her choose what part of the investigation to head up. Suppose this was the very point she needed to muddy up in order to protect herself? How Grieg’s choice of slumber-party guests could possibly matter, Kresh could not imagine, but never mind that. The problem was he could not see any way of saying no to Cinta without flatly stating that he didn’t trust her. And he was far too tired to deal with the twelve kinds of hell that would be sure to kick up. “No, Cinta,” he said. “You go right ahead.”

  But even as he spoke, he found himself wondering if he had just made the first big mistake of the investigation.

  Chapter 10

  FREDDA LEVING POINTED her finger at another party guest and watched him disappear. It was a strange sort of game, but one that needed playing. She rubbed her eyes and sighed.

  “That’s as many as I can get in this pass. Run it back again, Donald,” she said. “Let’s try that sequence again.”

  The integrator’s three-dimensional images scrolled back to the beginning again and started over. Fredda sat and watched as the party guests started to filter into the Residence. By now well over half of the people at the party were missing. Every time Fredda or Donald or the computer managed to identify a person, they would eliminate his or her image trail from the integrator’s event sequence for the evening.

  The imagery integrator was a Settler machine that was a close cousin to the simglobe, designed to take in all manner of visual images and combine then into a single three-dimensional whole. Four dimensions, if you counted time.

  And the more people that were missing from its images, the better. They needed to know if there had been anyone who did not belong at the reception, and what better way to do that than by eliminating those who did?

  It was a shame that the Settlers’ access recorder system wasn’t useful in these circumstances. It could automatically record comings and goings of each person, and identify each against its access authority list–but such systems were designed to work in more orderly settings than a massive reception. Even the sophisticated access recorder in use at the Residence had been overwhelmed by the crush of bodies at the reception. Too many people, too many strangers, too many people coming in too quickly.

  They had fed the integrator everything–the architectural plans of the Residence, all the news video and 3-D imagery taken the night of the assassination, detailed 2-D and 3-D still images of the Residence’s interior and exterior, still pictures of all the guests, and whatever other information Donald had been able to get together.

  The integrating simulator had swallowed it all up, and used the masses of data to produce the computer model that Fredda and Donald had been watching for entirely too long. The integrator could present any view of the interior or exterior of the Residence, at any scale, as seen from any point in time in thirty-two hours, the time period under investigation. It could run its imagery forward or backwards at any speed, or freeze it at any point.

  It could fill in the blanks from one image by lifting them from another. If, for example, it saw a given man was wearing blue pants and red shoes in a full view from the front, but noted he had a bald spot in a view from the rear where his legs were obscured, it would add both data points to the full image bank of the individual. Given enough information, the integrator could present the man at any time, from any angle–or subtract him from the scene and let you see the woman behind him who had been hidden from the cameras in real life, producing a view of her built up from h
er image bank. The integrator could not, of course, show what she had been doing while hidden from view, but it could at least show where she had been.

  Indeed, much of what the integrator showed was conjectural. Not every part of the reception had been recorded. There had been any number of times and places where there were no camera images, where a certain amount of guesswork was required of the operator. That led to guessing, of course. And guessing made you wonder. What was everyone up to when they were out of view?

  And that was the question that made it all turn paranoid. Subject X was seen leaving room A and then appeared forty seconds later appearing in room B, with no video imagery of what went on in the hallway between. Had X moved in the straight-line direction, as seemed reasonable, or had X done something nefarious the moment he or she was out of camera view? Was forty seconds an unwarranted delay, or was it about as long as the trip should have taken? Was the delay caused by some fiendish part of the plot, or by a call of nature, or just a moment’s pause away from the crush of the crowd?

  And was it paranoid to ask such questions? After all, someone in that swirl of visitors had killed Chanto Grieg. Several someones had been involved. Somewhere in the evening, someone had to have done something that he or she would not wish to be observed, and presumably had had the sense to do it out of sight of the cameras. Somewhere in all the delays explained by innocent stops in the refresher, and chance meetings in the hallways, the acts leading up to murder were being hidden.

  But where? Where in all the background clutter of people at a party were the guilty acts? The best way to find out seemed to be eliminating all the innocent acts and examining what was left.

  So here they were, erasing the innocent from the image trail, in hopes of leaving none but the guilty behind.

  It was a tricky job, for the integrator images were not infallible, or even completely realistic. If there were imagery, say, from a camera in a hallway that showed a man entering a room that had no camera, the integrator had no way of knowing what the man did once he was out of camera range. Absent instruction from the operator, the simulacrum of the man in the room would just stand there, in the center of the room, a motionless wooden doll, until such time as the hall cameras picked him up reentering the hall. Then the simulacrum would move, stiff-leggedly, toward the door, melding into real-life imagery as the man came back into camera view.