by Isaac Asimov
Can we agree on that?”
“We can,” Limke said. Slyke’s face remained unreadable.
Derec waited until he was sure that neither of them wanted to act on their animosity toward each other. Then he said, “What do you know about the robot?”
“It came into cargo dock 27 at 2133 the day of the murder,” Slyke said. He looked up at the ceiling as he went through his recitation.
“You’re right about the repair berth; when we went looking for the technician on duty at the time, he’d disappeared. His name is Alvaro Kader, and we tracked him to a ship that left for Earth at 2300. He landed at Colombo-Lanka, and that’s the last we’ve seen. The tech in A61 remembers seeing the robot come and go, but apparently all Kader did was a routine post-shipping tuneup. The hotel concession has no record of a meal ordered by any member of Taprin’s staff, and we’ve interrogated all of them. It would be easy enough for a robot to walk through the kitchen and appropriate a service cart, though. According to the kitchen staff, domestics come through all the time to pick up meals, and that model is common enough not to draw attention to itself.” He looked down from the ceiling at Derec. “Then the robot went to Taprin’s room, knocked on the door, walked in and beat him to death. That’s where we are.”
“Wait. We’re not there yet.” There was a hole in Slyke’s chronology.
Derec worked it over in his mind until he’d pinpointed the omission.
“At some point, someone tampered with the station’s RI. What do you have on that?”
“Not a thing. We had all of our positronic techs go over the RI, and whoever scrambled it did a good job of covering his trail.”
“Yes, he did,” Derec said. “He did leave one thing behind, though.
Your techs wouldn’t have known to look for it.”
Slyke took this as an insult. “Kindly do me the favor,” he said.
“I ran a check through incoming message traffic,” Derec said. “I’ll admit, the primary purpose was to see what the two of you had said about me, to each other and anyone else. But while I was doing that, I ran across an anonymous message. It was directed to me, and what it said, more or less, was ‘Welcome back.’”
That created small fissures in Slyke’s professional stoneface. “You know who it is?”
Derec shook his head. “No. But there aren’t too many possibilities — it shouldn’t be that hard to narrow them down. There’s something else you need to know before we go on, though. I think perhaps the way this RI was attacked has meaning.”
“Meaning,” Limke repeated.
“Yes. My career was ruined and I lost several friends as a result of a series of events that began with the subversion of an RI. That was a much cleverer job than this; as far as I can tell, whoever attacked Tiko was relatively blunt, and then used minimal finesse to cover his or her tracks. I think the main point of the RI attack was to draw me in.”
“You don’t have many problems with confidence, do you?” Slyke asked dryly.
In spite of himself, Derec had to laugh. “It sounds a bit self-centered, I know. Still, I think it’s true. Ambassador Burgess and I stepped on powerful toes, and people of that nature have long memories. Also, I’m not convinced that the RI had to be manipulated in this way for the assassination to be successful.”
“Then why bother with it?”
“Hear me out. Say for the sake of argument that you were planning to assassinate Jonis Taprin. Say further that the timing of the act was important, that it was conceived as the ultimate rebuttal to his speech.
What’s the context of the crime, then? Robots on Earth. Exactly the conundrum I found myself in the middle of after the assault at Union Station. Then I get a call from Director Limke, and I arrive on Kopernik feeling in some ways like I’m sliding back into my old life. All the elements are there: a robot accused of a crime, a possibly compromised RI, a tense political backdrop made more tense by assassination —”
Derec broke off as the door to Limke’s office opened. “Director,”
said a stocky woman in the uniform of Kopernik Security. “There’s been an assault on a robot. I think you’d better come see.”
“I don’t have time to look into a robot-bashing, Wills,” Limke said.
“You know where the Managins are on this station.”
“All due respect, Director, I think you’re going to want to see this one. The robot says that another robot did it.”
The mechanical victim lay in several pieces in an access tunnel running parallel to the main passenger hall between the Spacer docks and the Spacer hotel. Kopernik was designed with many such passages, so its robots could carry out their duties without having to slow down to human pace. Even in the parts of the station primarily used by Terrans, station authorities maintained the parallel structure, on the theory that if the Terrans couldn’t see all the robots working around them, everyone would be more comfortable. In this and many other ways, Kopernik was caught between Spacer and Terran preconceptions.
Lieutenant Wills let them to the spot and then stood back while Derec, Slyke, and Limke looked over the scene. Derec was the only Spacer there, and he recognized the damaged property as a Gruden, a brand specialized to higher-echelon domestic service. Somewhere on Kopernik, a Spacer politician was wondering where his valet had gotten to.
Judging from the state of the wreckage, that politician was going to need a new robot. Derec winced as he looked over the damage: the robot’s cranium was wrenched off and severely dented by impact with either the floor or a bulkhead; the bearings at its elbows were broken; a number of its fingers dangled from wires. And if Derec wasn’t mistaken, much of the Gruden’s torso had been battered with its own head. They were looking at scrap.
“You said it told you another robot attacked it?” Limke asked the lieutenant.
“Yes, Director. Officer Ladze there —” she pointed out a young man directing robots away from the scene “— found it first. It spoke briefly to him before losing all function.”
“Ladze,” Limke called.
“Director?”
“Trade places with Lieutenant Wills for a moment.”
Ladze approached the three of them as Wills took up his traffic duty. Robots moved speedily by, but most of them saw the group of humans and coordinated their approach to the scene so as to give the humans a wide berth, while not colliding with their mechanical counterparts coming the other way. Every once in a while Wills had to hold up a hand, slightly away from her body; when she did, the robot traffic in both directions instantly adjusted itself to give her, and the crime scene, that much more space.
“Tell us what the robot said when you found it,” Limke said.
Ladze was taller than Derec, and not a Spacer, which made him very tall indeed. As if conscious of it, he ducked his neck slightly, and although he couldn’t have been thirty years old, already his shoulders were rounding. He spoke with some diffidence, but precisely.
“One of the robots came out into the main passage and said it needed to report a property offense. I was passing through on my way to the duty room, so I figured I might as well look since I went on shift in six minutes, anyway. The robot led me back into the tinhead alley here, and I found this one. It was trying to talk, but its vocal apparatus was seizing up on it. Over and over it said, ‘I have been assaulted by a robot. Request assistance. I have been assaulted by a robot. Request assistance.’ I tried to ask it questions, but it didn’t respond to any of them, and then it just kind of petered out.” Ladze shrugged. “I called the duty officer and let her know that I was on five minutes early.”
“How long ago was this?” Slyke asked. He was looking at the flow of robotic traffic with unease and what looked like disgust.
Ladze checked the time chop on his datum. “About an hour.”
Derec brought out his own datum. “Tiko,” he said.
YES, DEREC.
“Is routine monitoring carried out in this corridor?”
YES.
OF COURSE.
Derec filed that. Given recent events, his question had been anything but obvious, yet Tiko had responded as if a large number of its memory matrices hadn’t been scrambled a few days before. Keep looking at that RI, he told himself.
“Good,” he said. “Show us this section of passage, beginning ninety minutes ago and proceeding at sixty-to-one. When you see the assault, slow to normal time.”
WORKING.
Slyke, Limke, and Wills stood close to Derec as his datum’s small holocaster replayed the previous ninety minutes at that location.
Robot traffic blazed by in a series of frozen poses; and then in one of the frames, there was a robot on the floor, dismembered much as they saw it now.
“There,” Derec said. “Go back one minute and play at normal speed.”
Tiko complied, and Derec felt a slow horror building in him as a Cole-Yahner domestic appeared in the camera view, then stopped and looked in the direction from which the Gruden would be coming.
When the Gruden appeared, the Cole-Yahner simply reached over, hooked an arm under its jaw, and tore its head off. The catastrophic injury, together with the sudden imperative to reorganize sensory input, rendered the Gruden practically static, although it did struggle to preserve itself. The passing robots observed, possibly made a comment to each other, but all of them were working on orders from a human which superseded whatever imperative they might have felt to end the assault.
“Tiko,” he said. “Was this incident brought to your attention by any of the passing robots?”
NO, DEREC.
It snapped into place then, and Derec rounded on Slyke. “Where’s the robot that was found in Taprin’s room?”
“I told you, it was destroyed.”
“No, I don’t think it was. I’ll bet you everything I own that the robot you found in Taprin’s room was the robot that alerted Officer Ladze to what happened here. And I’ll make you another bet. Tiko, run the assault sequence again. Find the best view of the perpetrator’s serial number and magnify.”
The holo stopped, ran back, paused. Tiko magnified a portion of the frozen image. The Cole-Yahner’s serial number was clearly visible: CY984653JM-I7.
“You can explain this later, Slyke,” Derec said. “In the meantime, I think we’ve got a more immediate problem. Tiko. Run the serial number of the destroyed robot. To whom is it assigned?”
The briefest of pauses. AURORAN CHIEF OF PLANETARY SECURITY PON BYRIS.
They burst into Pon Byris’ suite, Ladze and Wills first, followed by Slyke, Limke, and Derec. The three law officers had weapons out, and they fanned through the three rooms.
“In here!” Wills called from the bedroom. “Tiko, dispatch emergency medical team!”
All five of them clustered around the broken body on the bedroom floor, and Derec knew the medical team wouldn’t even have to open their cases. Pon Byris was well beyond the reach of human science.
“It’s not a bad diversion for a tinhead,” Slyke said an hour or so later, when they’d learned what they could from the scene and retired to Shara Limke’s office to await the inevitable reaction. Byris’ staff had flooded the room even before the medical personnel arrived, and when they broadcast the news of the Chief’s murder, it looked like Aurora finally had its excuse for war with Earth. Military vessels from Aurora and Keres were appearing outside the Terran picket, and from all appearances the Terran forces were more than ready to join the dance. Someone had leaked the rumor that a robot had killed Byris, with the predictable result that Terran political rhetoric had reached a fever pitch. The calls for total severance of relations with the Fifty Worlds were becoming a chorus, with frequent solos demanding war first. All of it was much like the situation five years before, but at the same time the stakes were even higher. After Union Station, fewer than thirty percent of Spacers had actually left Earth; now only a tiny fraction was willing to stay. Those few Spacers who hadn’t left after Taprin’s assassination were now en route to Kopernik, and as often as not their offices and businesses were being destroyed behind them.
And, in far too many cases, burned down around them. Apoplectic demands from Spacer governments that Earth restore order and protect the lives of Spacers working there met with waffling, as the Terran government calculated its chances of political survival and decided that avoiding all-out anarchy was worth a few dead Spacers. The Managins raved on every newsnet, and on Kopernik Station Derec waited for the first shots to be fired. When he took the time to think about it, he didn’t expect to live beyond the week. Kopernik would surely be one of the first casualties, intentionally or not. Maybe Shara Limke was right, that a new station would be constructed in its place, but that wouldn’t make much difference to Derec if there was war.
Derec caught himself wishing he was back on Nova Levis. It wasn’t a thought he’d ever imagined himself having. He did what he always did to distract himself from untenable emotions and desires: he worked.
The list of incoming traffic from the day of Taprin’s assassination was waiting for him. He went through it, eliminating those ships from Earth that carried no robots, and then eliminating the ships from the Fifty Worlds whose robots were all accounted for. Either one of those eliminations might turn out to be based on faulty or tainted records, but Derec’s instincts were pointing him in a particular direction, and all he could do was ride them until he discovered what that direction was.
“Derec.”
He looked up and saw Shara Limke in the doorway of his lab. “Have you found the Cole-Yahner?”
“No. But we’ve found four of Byris’ other robots, all suffering the same kind of damage. We’ve got Tiko looking for the robot, but there are more than one hundred Cole-Yahners of the same model in service here. Most of them don’t wear humaniform to avoid spooking the Earthers, so they look more or less identical unless Tiko can read their serial numbers.”
“Sounds like what you need to do is get your security people out there and physically check every Cole-Yahner on Kopernik Station.
Mark the ones you’ve cleared and have Tiko look for the ones that aren’t marked. Sometimes the low-tech solutions are the best.”
“That’s a strange thing for a positronic theorist to say,” Limke said.
“Actually, Slyke’s doing something like that. He’s got every TBI agent on-station combing the halls with the robot’s serial number written on the backs of their hands.”
“Robot,” Derec said. He was looking at his display, and one of the ships on the list had caught his eye. “I’m not sure that’s it.”
“Not sure what’s it?” Limke asked.
Only one ship had come in bringing cargo from a non-Spacer world on the day of Jonis Taprin’s assassination. It was the Viltroy, carrying
“biotech samples, positronic circuits, rare metals,” with a five-day maintenance layover at Kopernik scheduled before its final delivery of its cargo to Earth.
Its planet of origin was Nova Levis.
“I’m not sure it’s a robot at all,” Derec said.
Chapter 18
NOVA BOULEVARD WAS gridlocked the next morning. A demonstration in front of the Triangle had attracted seemingly half the population of the city,
Ariel attended the hearing knowing more or less exactly what would happen, and as usual her political instincts were accurate. Eza Lamina held the gavel, seven of her fellow Spacer senators made up the rest of the committee, and Vilios Kalienin remained close at hand, offering whispered advice at every break in the proceedings.
“Ambassador Burgess,” Lamina said after an hour or so of preliminaries. “Your association with the question of cyborg citizenship is terribly discrediting to what this government is trying to accomplish.
It is difficult for me to understand how you can continue in your present liaison capacity, and it is even more difficult to see how your project can continue without you.”
Ariel had
lost all interest in political niceties. “That’s quite a tidy assessment of the situation, Senator. You get rid of me and the only compartment of the Triangle interested in government transparency, all at one stroke.”
One of the other senators spoke. Arvid Aanesen, from Acrisia.
Privately Ariel thought of him as Senator Vowel, and his speech fed into the caricature. He was the kind of politician who always spoke as if he was changing the course of human history; he thundered, he boomed, he devoted himself to the pursuit of the orotund and obfuscatory. “This is beneath you, Ms. Burgess,” he said. “The gravity of this situation demands a certain decorum from us all, but perhaps most especially from yourself.”
“You’ll excuse me if I see no reason to be decorous when I’m being scapegoated,” Ariel shot back. “A corporate citizen in good standing of this planet asked me to investigate a legal question. I am in the process of doing so. I have taken no position on the question and do not intend to. It is manifestly useless for this panel to attach to me motives imputed by subetheric parasites.”
“Who has asked you to investigate the question?” Lamina asked.
“Given the irrational response to the question,” Ariel said, “I believe it is in no one’s best interests for me to divulge that information.”
“I will remind you that you are under compulsion to answer direct inquiries here, Ms. Burgess.” This time the speaker was Brin Houser, cashiered from the Solarian diplomatic corps for profiteering on Settled worlds.
That I should be grilled by a group of corrupt exiles, Ariel thought.
At least the last time people tried to scapegoat me, they had power that meant something beyond a pathogenic backwater.
“I assert that the committee has no legitimate interest in knowing the answer,” she said. “The purpose of the question is solely to widen the smear that is as of now only being perpetrated on me and my project.”
“You will answer the question, or you will be held in contempt,”
Houser said, drawing the last few words out for effect.
