Asimov’s Future History Volume 12

by Isaac Asimov

  Even stranger were the half people that flickered into existence here and there–half-seen arms or legs or torsos that the integrator was unable to link to any specific person. It did not exclude them until told to do so.

  Half of the images Fredda was seeing were at least in part imaginary. The integrator didn’t care. Given the appropriate data, it was quite happy to present hypothetical–or quite spurious–imagery. It could be instructed to run various versions of events, running through all the possibilities of who went where during the moments they were not actually in view of a camera. Even the hypothetical images were useful in sorting out the possibilities.

  By now, with more than half the guests accounted for–and thus eliminated–the images were getting more and more surreal. People were talking to other people who weren’t there anymore. What had been tight clumps of people were now isolated twos and threes.

  Computers and robots should have been able to do this job, but no robot or computer had ever been good enough at pattern recognition, at being able to see the whole when looking at only a part. Even their thousands of years of development were no match for the billions of years of human evolution. That was why Fredda had drawn this duty along with Donald. She could see the bit of chin, or the fleeting, partially obscured profile, and say it was the same face she had seen twenty minutes before, allowing the integrator to connect two image sequences as one person. Better still, Fredda knew lots of people’ and was able to identify any number of blurry faces the integrator was not able to match up with its still image identity file.

  It was strange to see it all this way, from this godlike angle, but it was a remarkably useful way to sort out the movements of this person and that. Stranger still to see her own image and eliminate it, to see Alvar Kresh and make him vanish. It made her doubt his reality–and her own.

  But should she make Alvar vanish? After all, he was the one who found the body. That in and of itself was a trifle suspicious. Donald had been a few steps behind him at the time. Kresh had not been alone in Grieg’s room for long, but suppose it had been for long enough–and even though it was a point open to interpretation, you could read the fact that Grieg had offered no struggle as a hint that he had been killed by someone he knew...

  It seemed absurd–and yet someone had killed Grieg, and as of right now the rest of the universe only had Kresh’s word for it that he had found Grieg dead.

  No. It couldn’t be. Not Kresh. The man might be stubborn and infuriating as hell, but there was no more honorable man on the planet. It was absurd to think that a man of his character could have done it. She knew him too well to believe such things. She was reluctant to admit such a thing, even to herself, but she liked him too well to believe such a thing.

  Fredda glanced at Donald, seated impassively at the integrator’s control panel. Did fretful, disturbing thoughts like that flit through his mind? Was he troubled by such delusional nonsense? She, Fredda, ought to know. She had, after all, designed his brain, his mind, herself. But that meant nothing at a time like this. The short, sky-blue robot seemed unflappable–but what lurked under the surface? Was he intelligent enough to have doubts, to see that the universe was not the well-ordered, every-peg-in-its-proper-hole place that the Three Laws would make it seem? He was a police robot, after all, and knew as well as any robot in existence what sort of madness humans were capable of.

  “Who do you think did it, Donald?” she asked, more or less on impulse. “Who killed Chanto Grieg?”

  Donald had been watching the image playback, but now he turned toward Fredda and regarded her with an unreadable stare for a full ten seconds before he replied. “It is impossible for me to say,” he replied. “There is so much information already in our hands, and yet so little of it appears to be useful data. We are forced to eliminate meaningless information as a first step toward the truth.”

  “But you are more familiar with the case data than anyone. I know you suspect Caliban and Prospero, but leave them to one side for a moment. Who is your prime human suspect?”

  Donald swiveled his head back and forth in an imitation of the human gesture of shaking his head to report uncertainty., ‘I am afraid I do not, and cannot, have an opinion on that. Before I could get to who, I would have to deal with why, to the question of motive. And I am simply incapable of imagining anyone wishing the–the death of a human being. I have seen death, I have witnessed the evidence of murder. I know there must, therefore, be motives for murder. But even though I know such things are real, I still cannot imagine them.”

  “Hmmph. Strange,” Fredda said. “Very strange. Humans are certainly capable of all sorts of remarkable delusions–but not that particular one. Sometimes I forget just how different robots are from humans.”

  “I don’t think I have ever forgotten that fact, even for a moment,” Donald said. “Shall we return to the task at hand?”

  “Hmmm? Yes, of course.” Fredda turned back to the integrator and watched the silent dance of the simulacra. They could have put sound in, of course, but that would do little more than add to the confusion at this point.

  Wait a second. Confusion. Confusion. They were missing the point of all the confusion. “Donald. Go to the time reference five minutes before the attack on Tonya Welton–and delete Tonya Weltlon, the attackers, the SSS intervention, along with all the people we’ve identified so far. Let’s get rid of the diversion and see if we can spot what they were trying to divert us from.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Donald said, manipulating the controls. He reset the system once again, running back to the proper moment in time. The image reappeared, affording the strange sight of all the bystanders reacting to the fight that was not happening. It was like watching an audience without being able to see the play. The little clumps of people turned and pointed at nothing at all in the center of the room, scuttled backwards to avoid the brawlers who were not there.

  Fredda pointed at two or three of the largest groups of bystanders. They were clearly the ones being diverted, no sense in watching them. “Get rid of those people there,” she said.,, And those, and those. “People vanished wholesale. Fredda let the sequence keep going. The fight had drawn people into the room from other parts of the Residence–but she was looking for the people who weren’t drawn by the noise. Fredda watched until the crowds gathered, had watched the now nonexistent action, and had begun to drift away.

  “Freeze it there, Donald. Mark on those people–those, and those. And that clump over by the door. All right now. Now–backtrack to five minutes before the fight, and delete all of the people just marked from the image trail. I only want to see the ones who weren’t drawn to the fight.”

  The 3-D image blanked for a moment, then came back up on the same scene minutes before the attack. There was no one left in the Grand Hall except Caliban and Prospero. Donald was showing his prejudices again. Both Caliban and Prospero had been in sight of one video camera or another throughout the entire evening, and beyond breaking up the fight, neither of them had done anything more suspicious than chat politely with the other guests. That, clearly, was not enough to satisfy Donald. But she let it go.

  After all, there was the bare possibility that he was even right to suspect them. They had Verick’s statement that the two robots were the last ones to see Grieg alive.

  But never mind that now. Fredda knew all about Prospero and Caliban. She was looking for unknowns, people she could not account for. “Give me an overhead view of the ground floor,” Fredda said. The image of the Grand Hall vanished, to be replaced by a cutaway view of the entire lower level, presented so Fredda was looking straight down on it from overhead. “Good,” she said. “Have you got all our personnel deletions saved for recall?”

  “Yes, Dr. Leving. Shall I run the deleted-persons sequence forward from the same time mark before the fight?”

  “In a minute, Donald. First, I want you to run it from that time with everyone still in place. Let’s see the whole picture first.”

  �
�Yes, ma’am.”

  The images cleared.

  The 3-D image blanked for a moment, then suddenly Fredda was looking down on an eddying throng of people, talking, walking, sitting, arriving, departing, arguing, laughing. It seemed as if the entire Residence were filled with people who desired nothing more than to be somewhere they were not. Everyone was on the move. It would be almost impossible to track anyone person in all of that. Which was, no doubt, what the conspirators were counting on.

  The fight started, and Fredda found that her eye was pulled toward it. People hurried in from all directions to see what was going on, and it was almost impossible to see what anyone person was doing from moment to moment.

  The two men attacked Tonya Welton; she knocked one of them down, and was about to rush the second when the two robots stepped in and pulled them apart. Kresh and Donald appeared, and Kresh waded in to sort things out. The crowd started to disperse just a little as the excitement came to an end.

  “All right, Donald,” Fredda said. “Stop. Reset to the previous time index and run it again, with all the personnel deletions.”

  Donald stopped the playback and reset the system. The vision tank dissolved in a swirl of colors and then reassembled itself to show a ghostly, empty house, with but a few faceless creatures wandering the building. They were constructs, place holders to indicate unidentified people, their faces too blurry for computer or robot or human to know who they were. No doubt most or even all of them could be identified with a bit more work, but that could wait. For now they were ghosts, ghosts in the machine, faceless beings walking through a simulated landscape. Some of them vanished or reappeared now and again as they were spotted and then lost by this or that video source. Sometimes, but not always, the integrator would connect two video sequences of the same person up with animated links.

  They ambled about the house, with the casual air of people with no clear goal in mind. Of course, half their motions were computerized guesses, but Fredda had the feeling the integrator was guessing right.

  But then. Then she saw it. Another figure, a small, slight shadow, a pale-skinned, youthful-looking man. Thinning hair cut a bit short, wearing rather plain clothes compared to the peacock finery that had been on display everywhere else at the Residence. There he was, hanging back, arriving two or three minutes before the fight–just a few minutes after the SSS guards had obeyed the false orders to stand down. The main entrance was unguarded, wide open. There was something nervous, tense, about him. But what the devil was he doing? It was hard to read his actions with no one around him.

  “Give me the fully-populated view for a second, Donald.”

  Suddenly the pale man was surrounded by people, and his actions became clear. He was contriving to enter the building just as a crowd of late arrivals came in, hoping, it would seem, to mix in with the crowd. The gambit worked: He got in with the rest of the group, gaining entry just thirty seconds before the fight began.

  And there. There! “Donald, freeze that. Freeze it!” She leaned in close to the image tank. “Do you see it?”

  “I see the subject you appear to be interested in glancing at his watch.”

  “Yes, but what does that say to you?”

  “That he wondered what time it was.”

  No imagination. That was why the universe needed people and not just robots. “But who would care what time it was when they were arriving at a party? Besides which, he’s a Spacer. At least he’s dressed in Spacer clothes with a Spacer haircut.”

  “What of that?”

  “Spacers hardly ever wear watches. If a Spacer needs to know what time it is, he asks his robot.”

  “Are you suggesting that he is checking the time in order to synchronize his actions? That he was timing his actions so he would arrive just prior to the staged fight?”

  “Yes, I am suggesting that.”

  Donald turned to look again at the image, then turned back toward Fredda. “It seems a great deal to read into a man glancing at his wrist,” he said, a bit doubtfully.

  “In general, I grant you. But not too much at all to read into this man glancing at his wrist as he sneaks into this party two minutes before a fight breaks out. That is our man. I’ll bet on it. Clear everyone–everyone from the image system but him and run it forward, tracking a close-up view on him.”

  The crowds of people vanished, and the pale-faced man in the dowdy clothes was alone in the integrator’s display, with no throngs of gaily dressed party-goers to hide behind, no diversionary fights to hide behind, all his camouflage stripped away.

  Fredda watched as the slightly grainy, somewhat blurred blown-up image of the man moved inside. He made his way through the entrance, into the Grand Hall–and then directly out of it again, without so much as a glance at the invisible brawl that was going on. Now and again the image of him broke up a bit, with the intervening sequences linked by animation. The effect was much more startling in close-up, as the crude overenlarged images suddenly shifted into the oversimplified images of a generic man and then back again. Every time it happened, Fredda’s stomach tightened a bit, fearful that they had come to the last real video image of him, and they were about to lose him altogether.

  The image of the man went down a side passage, walking purposefully, a man who knew exactly where he was going and why. No pausing at intersections or hesitating over which turning to take. Either he had been in the building at some point in the past, or he had been briefed in detail.

  “Still not sure he makes sense as our man?” Fredda asked Donald.

  “His actions are remarkably purposeful for a casual visitor,” Donald conceded. “He appears to be making for the service areas at the rear of the building.”

  The pale man came to an unmarked door, glanced behind himself, opened it, stepped through, and closed it behind him. Fredda found herself staring at a blank door that had been closed in her face.

  “Damn it, Donald, follow him,” Fredda demanded. She was so caught up in the chase that it was a real effort of will to remember that her quarry was long gone, that she was tracking nothing more than an integrator image.

  “One moment, ma’am.” Donald worked the control panel, and then looked back up at Fredda. “I’m sorry, ma’am. That is the last of the data recorded from that location, and there were no video sources on the other side of the door. I can show you what is on the other side of the door, but there is no point in placing the man’s simulacrum there. There is no information at all about any other activity in that sector until the activation of the security robots. Once they were activated and deployed, they recorded that vicinity in great detail, but those records were of course destroyed with the robots. There is no further sign of the man we have been tracking in the extant records.”

  “Why should that one spot get detailed recording from the security robots?”

  Donald ran the integrator image forward straight through the door, revealing a downward ramp beyond it. He ran the video image down the ramp and turned the corner at the bottom.

  And there were the SPRs, the Sapper security robots, turned off, inert, lined up neatly.

  “Burning stars,” Fredda said. “Our pale-faced friend came here. Hid out in the same room as the security robots.”

  “So it would appear,” Donald said. “Note the line of storage closets along the rear wall. I would expect that he secreted himself in one of them.”

  “Probably,” Fredda said. She stared at the image, determined to think it all through. If Pale-man had come down here, then he clearly knew that the security robots were to be turned off. The image before her showed the integrator’s best information as to the state of the robots as of that moment. Upstairs, at the same time, Sheriff Kresh was still sorting through the chaos after the staged attack. When Pale-man came down here he would have to know that the security robots would be deployed soon afterwards.

  But he would also know that the robots had been tampered with. That they would suddenly stop working, and that the building
would be wide open to him. If Pale-man kept his cool, there was nothing at all to fear from being down here. All he had to do was hide, wait until the Sappers were deactivated, then come out with his blaster and–

  Hold it. His blaster. There were weapon-sniffers on all the entrances to the Residence, and around the perimeter of the property. Fredda had no trouble believing that the security net could have missed an intruder slipping into the place. That sort of mistake would be easy to make. But how could the system have missed a blaster corning in? She checked the images of Pale-man. No baggy clothes or carry bag that might conceal a gun. Besides, the weapons detectors would have picked up a gun. Nothing as small as any weapon he could have been carrying would be big enough to be shielded. No. Pale-man could not possibly have been wearing one on his way in.

  And therefore–therefore his blaster had been planted for him before he got in the house. And all of a sudden Fredda had a pretty damned good idea where and how.

  The underground storage room that had held the SPRs looked strangely different, strangely the same, in real life. The integrator had shown an idealized version of it, pulled up from the computerized architectural plans and a few still photos, but that was only part of the strangeness. Somehow, the room looked much smaller, rather than larger, than it had through the integrator. The real-life lights were a little dimmer, and the real walls were scuffed and marked here and there in ways the sim’s walls were not. The air was cool and a bit dank. Amazing the way reality could show up all the flaws of a simulation, flaws you had not even noticed in the sim.