by Mike Mcquay
“Like every other human culture that ever lived,” he replied. “Yes. Think about them… ” He pointed at her, then snapped his fingers. “Maybe we don’t need a body for this. Maybe we can simply recreate the circumstances.”
“You mean try and set it all up just like it happened to the dead man?”
“Sure. The computer in the office told me that there is danger from alien contamination. Let’s see if we can bring it out a little.”
Katherine stood again, her face uncertain. “Need I remind you that the last man who had to face up to this predicament is dead?”
He walked past her, out onto the now inward-curled disc that held the room, watching the robots on the streets hurrying to their deadlines through time and space. She joined him within a minute.
“What choice do we have?” he asked.
“None,” she answered. “Both of our problems are tied up in the murder. We’ll do whatever we have to, to solve it.”
“Let’s go over everything the witness told you,” Derec said. “Look for a loophole.”
“It’s sparse,” Katherine replied. “He was already sealed up, and angry about it, when they arrived to cut him out. He had no idea why he’d been sealed in. When they cut him out, his behavior seemed a bit erratic, he had a headache and a cut on his foot.”
“Didn’t you have a headache last night?” he asked.
She cocked her head. “I just assumed it had something to do with my passing out,” she said.
“Just a thought,” Derec replied. “I’m trying everything on for size right now.”
“Anyway,” she continued, “he went off, against supervisory request, and turned up dead a short time later. When the utility robot tried to turn the body over to take a pulse, another room sealed itself off, and the robot just barely survived the sealing because of his quick reflexes. That’s it. The whole story.”
He leaned against the curled lip of the disc on stiff arms, trying to reason the way a computer would. “You know,” he said after a minute, “the phrase ‘alien contamination’ could cover a lot of territory. On surface, human beings and their composition are obvious. But, under the surface, on the body’s interior, we’re all quite a strange collection of ‘alien’ germs and viruses.”
“The bleeding foot,” Katherine said. “That thought occurred to me, but I was never able to connect it with the actual murder, so I assumed it to be inconsequential.”
“Me too,” Derec replied. “But I’m beginning to think that, perhaps, this puzzle works on more than the obvious level.” He knelt on the ground, studying the cut-out piece of city-robot that lay on the disc surface.
“What are you doing?” Katherine asked.
“This piece has been taken off stream,” he said. “It’s not connected to the city anymore, or to its programming source.”
“So?”
“So it’s dead, it’s the only thing around here that isn’t going to protect me from its jagged edges.”
“You’re going to hurt yourself!” she said loudly.
“There’s only one way to test our theory,” he said, rolling up the sleeve of his one-piece.
Rec poked his head out of the room. “Please, Friend Derec, don’t do anything that could cause harm to your body.”
Derec ignored both Katherine and Rec, drawing his forearm across a sharp edge of the dead city part, making a five-centimeter gash along his inner arm.
He stood, grimacing with the pain, then watched the dark blood well up from the place.
“Nothing yet,” Katherine said.
“Let’s try an experiment,” Derec said, turning his arm over so the blood could drip on the disc. “The second sealed room didn’t develop until the utility robot rolled the body over. Maybe gravity… ”
“Derec!” Katherine yelled.
No sooner had the blood hit the floor than the curled lip of the disc began growing, pushing in and up, trying to close them in.
“Let’s get out of here!” Derec called, moving toward the stairs, the disc curling up over his head like a cresting wave as he moved.
With Katherine right behind, he reached the stairs leading down, only to have them disappear before he could plant a foot on them. Overhead, the roof of the already existing room was stretching itself out, joining the edge of the disc in a perfect, seamless weld. Where the stairs had been was now a solid wall.
“Keep moving around the disc!” Derec called, breaking into a trot. “Maybe we can beat the enclosure.”
He had turned his arm back over now, trying to catch dripping blood on his free hand to keep it off the ground. But it didn’t help. The city-robot had isolated him as the alien carrier and was reacting to him now, and not his blood.
They went around the perimeter of the room, the roof hurrying to meet the curling disc. It had closed them in completely.
Then, as they watched, the already existing room seemed to melt and combine with the floor, the outer walls straightening and angling to ninety degrees, then pushing in all around.
Within a minute, they found themselves standing in a sealed room, exactly like the one David had been cut out of.
Chapter 11. Deadly Air
Derec and Katherine sat on the floor of the room, while Rec, who’d been trapped with them, leaned close to Derec, witnessing the boy wrapping his cut arm in a piece of cloth ripped from his one-piece.
“Do you think Eve’s called for help?” he asked Rec as he worked.
“No,” the witness said. “Eve will not perceive a danger to you. Are you in danger?”
“What about the utility robot?” Katherine asked, ignoring the robot’s question. “Will the utility robot summon help?”
“That is within the scope of the utility robot’s field prerogatives,” Rec replied, straightening as Derec finished. He then wheeled slowly around the room, taking everything in for later recounting. Rec took his job very seriously.
Derec had left two loose ends on the tight bandage, and held his arm out to Katherine to tie them. “Can I trust you to tie a good knot?” he asked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
She frowned deeply as she tied. “What happened in that office?” she asked. “You’ve treated me like your worst enemy ever since you came out of there.” She pulled the knot tight, a smile touching her lips when he groaned loudly.
“Look,” he said. “You’ve got secrets, I’ve got secrets. Why don’t we just leave it at that?”
“Fine with me,” she said. “All I want is for us to get the rest of this together; then I’ll make an emergency hyperwave call and be out of your hair in less than a day. You can rot here for all I care.”
“We’ll both rot here,” he said, wanting to hurt her.
She drew back. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Damn you!” she yelled. “Tell me what you mean? Why did you say I’d rot here?”
“No reason.”
“It’s the hyperwave, isn’t it?” she asked. “They won’t give us access to the hyperwave.”
“It’s not that, it’s… ”
“It’s what? What?”
He leaned his head back and shut his eyes. “There is no hyperwave transmitter,” he said softly.
She pulled herself a distance from him and curled into a small ball. “You’re lying,” she said, but he could tell that she really believed him.
“The robots have no contact with the outside,” he said. “They have no spaceport for landing ships. They have no hyperwave, or even the equipment for making one. They’ve been evasive about the point because of the security alert.”
“Why have you waited until now to tell me this?” she asked.
“I told you-you’ve got secrets, I’ve got secrets.”
“I get it now,” she said, her eyes distant. “We’re both free agents, looking out for ourselves.”
“Something like that,” he said, but why did it hurt so bad t
o say it?
She stood and moved all the way across the room to sit on the wall opposite. “Well, I suppose, at this point, we must work together to solve the murder,” she said.
“I suppose,” he replied, sorry to have started the whole line of conversation.
Her face was hard. “After that, I will thank you to stay away from me. We’ll each take care of our own problems.”
“Fair enough.”
“So tell me, if it’s not a great secret, why the room sealed around us because you cut yourself?”
“I’ve got a theory, nothing more,” he said. “The city-robot is programmed to protect human and robot inhabitants and to defend itself against anything alien… foreign to it. Apparently blood inside the body is fine, but once it gets outside the body, its natural microbes register as alien and set off the works. The city program has to be fairly complicated. The omission is obvious, and could either have been a mistake or a deliberate glitch to test the ability of the robots and humans living here to control their own system.”
“What do we do now?”
“Well, once we get out, if I can get access to the central core with one of the supervisors, I can reprogram the core to accept human blood as a natural microbe on the body of the city. In this sterile atmosphere, it’s perfectly understandable how such a glitch could happen. It could even be a means for the city to protect itself from infection.”
“But how did David die?” Katherine asked.
“Could it have been blood loss?” Derec asked.
She shook her head. “No chance,” she replied. “There was very little blood. The cut was smaller than yours.”
“What’s left?” he said. “I have to think that his death is a completely separate incident, unconnected to the blood loss.”
She looked skeptical. “Back-to-back coincidences, Derec? Deadly coincidence at that.”
He stood. “You’re right, of course. It must all tie together… but how?” He paced the room. “What other leads do we have? The only other connection is the fact that both of you came away from a sealed room with a headache.”
“We have another problem,” she replied, watching him moving back and forth in the confined space. “When I came in this room the first time to find the body, it had been sealed up… air tight.”
He stopped walking and stared at her. “The city would never keep us locked up without air. It would be a violation of the First Law, should we die.”
“It happened to David.”
“But David was already dead when it happened to him,” Derec said. “In fact, this just strengthens my theory. When the utility robot rolled him over to check for signs of life, gravity pulled a little more blood out of an already open wound. The room didn’t relate to David as a human, since he was dead. All it fixed its sights on was the ‘infection.’ We’re still alive and the city-robot knows it. Whatever else this crazy place may be, it’s run robotically. Ipso facto, we’re safe on that account.”
“Just the same,” she said, “I’ll be happier to be out of here.”
“Me too.”
“You realize, Derec,” she said, her voice low and heavy with meaning, “that we are recreating history right now. We are going through exactly the same progression that David went through before he died.”
“I know,” Derec replied. “But what else can we do?”
They stared at one another across the space of the room, the witness recording it all, and they may as well have been a million kilometers apart. They sat that way for a long time, far longer than it should have taken for a supervisor to show up.
Derec spent the time alternately trying to think his way out of their dilemma, figure out what was going on with Katherine, and looking at his watch. And the late morning turned to early afternoon, and Derec, who wasn’t worried about the air supply in the room, suddenly became very thirsty and began to dwell on the possibility that the robots had either forgotten them or couldn’t find them.
“Friend Derec!” came a loud voice from outside the room. “Friend Katherine! It is I, Wohler, the philosopher!”
Derec glanced at his watch. It was nearly five p.m., which meant rain was undoubtedly on the way. “We’re in here!” Derec called. “Can you get us free?”
Wohler called back loudly, “An Auroran philosopher once said, ‘Freedom is a condition of mind, and the best way to secure it is to breed it.’ Ho, Derec. We were held up digging in the mines, but I now have a laser torch to cut you out. I am here on the west wall of this room. I will ask kindly that you move to the east wall to avoid the torch as well as possible!”
Derec was sitting against the west wall. He stood immediately and moved over near Katherine, who looked at him with unreadable eyes.
“Go ahead!” Derec yelled through cupped hands, Rec moving up closer to the west wall to witness the torching from the inside.
Even through the thickness of the wall, they could hear the hiss of the torch on the other side. Derec slid down the wall to sit next to Katherine. Their arms accidentally touched. Both of them pulled away.
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “Something feels wrong.”
“I know,” he replied, “but what?”
The inside of the wall began to glow red hot in a small, circular section. Then the red turned to white, and a rivet-sized section burned through to reveal the outside through a quivering haze of heat.
Derec watched the hole expand, his mind racing as the torch began to etch the beginnings of a human-sized circle in the side of the room. He thought about headaches, and about erratic behavior and about blood and its composition-and then he thought about the nature of the city-robot.
“Stop!” he yelled, jumping to his feet and running as close to the metal cutting as he dared. “Stop the torch!”
“Derec?” Katherine asked, beginning to stand.
Derec covered his mouth with his hand. “Get on the floor!” he yelled. “All the way down and cover your mouth!”
“What’s wrong?” came Wohler’s voice from outside, the sound of the laser winding down to nothing. “What is it?”
“We can’t use the torch on the wall!” Derec called.
“I don’t understand,” Wohler said, bending down so that his eye covered the hole in the wall and he could look inside.
Derec backed away, getting down close to Katherine on the floor. “Is there some way to flush oxygen in here?” he asked loudly.
“We’ve come in a newly manufactured emergency truck,” Wohler replied. “I believe the emergency equipment includes oxygen cylinders.”
“Get one quickly!”
“The rains are approaching,” Wohler said. “We must hurry and get you out.”
“Listen,” Derec said. “The city material is a kind of metallic skin, an iron/plastic alloy. In the manufacturing process, a great deal of carbon monoxide is used as the reducing agent. I think your torch is liberating the monoxide as a gas into the closed room. By cutting us out, you’re gassing us!”
“The utility robot has gone for the oxygen!” Wohler said. “You have my apologies.”
“You didn’t know,” Derec said. He looked at Katherine. “Are you all right?”
“So far,” she replied. “Are you sure of what you’re saying? David didn’t die until later, outside of the room.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “Carbon monoxide in large doses will simply work its way gradually through the bloodstream, bonding firmly with hemoglobin and starving the tissues of oxygen. His headache and erratic behavior were the first signs of an oxygen narcosis reaction and, unless he was treated to massive doses of oxygen, it would spread throughout his entire body, eventually killing him.”
“And my headache?”
“You walked into the room with his body just after they had cut through the walls,” he said. “You undoubtedly saved your own life by passing out when you did, for they took you out of the room immediately, thus limiting your exposure to the gas. Carbon monoxide is colorless
, odorless, and tasteless. You would never have known what hit you.”
“The oxygen is here, Derec!” Wohler called, fitting a hissing nozzle up against the hole.
Derec crawled across the floor toward the hole. “Come on,” he said, waving her on.
They reached the hole and sat breathing the life-giving oxygen. Derec felt the beginnings of a small headache, but he was sure it would get no worse.
They emptied the canister of oxygen and began another. When that was finished, Wohler returned to the opening. “Rain is imminent,” the robot said. “How do we get you out? We have nothing small to cut through this, and our heavy equipment can’t be brought up this high, at least not with the rain coming. Do we leave you for the night?”
“There’s no time for that,” Derec said. “I must get underground and report this information to the central core.”
“The rain is also dangerous for me, Friend Derec,” Wohler said. “I must take shelter soon.”
“Okay,” Derec said. “Stay with me as long as you can. Just let me think for a minute.”
“Derec… ” Katherine began.
“Shhh,” Derec said. “Not now.”
“Think about your arm,” she said. “Think about where you cut it, and how.”
“My arm, I… ” He held his arm up, looking at the blood-soaked bandage and feeling the throb. “I cut it on the dead piece of city-robot,” he said.
“Because… ”
“Because it was the only piece of the city that would allow me to cut myself on it!” He put his hands to his head. “That’s it! Wohler! Stand back. We’re coming through.”
With that, he raised his right hand, pushing his pointer finger through the small, burned-out hole. As soon as his finger grazed the jagged edge of the hole, it expanded to allow free passage. Next came his balled-up fist; the hole expanded wide to keep from cutting him. Then his arm went through, followed by head and shoulders. Seconds later, he was standing on the disc, its edges curling up to protect him. Katherine followed him through, and both of them stared into the teeth of a bitter cold wind and a savage vision of blue-purple clouds crackling with lightning.
