To Obey

by Mickey Zucker Reichert

  Susan inched her way closer to the front of the line, dodging the writhing shoulders and flying elbows of people intent on becoming a part of infamous history. She finally worked her way close enough to ascertain it was, indeed, her apartment building at the center of the cordon and to catch occasional glimpses of the barricades and glowing neon crime-scene tape keeping the crowd at bay.

  Susan’s arm buzzed. For an instant, she thought one of the lookie-loos had zapped her with a prod. When it happened a second time, she finally recognized it as the all-too-familiar sensation of her Vox. She tapped the face, surprised to see Lawrence Robertson’s name come up. She could think of no reason why her father’s boss, the founder of U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men and creator of the positronic brain, would be calling her. Despite the simple routine of a Vox call, she felt her heart skip a beat and a lump form in her throat. The last time he had called her, they were chasing a mad bomber. And Remington had died.

  Knowing she would not hear anything Lawrence said over the sounds of the helicopter and the crowd, and he could not possibly hear her replies, she nudged the switch into text-translation mode: “Susan. Susan?” The device translated only his words, not his tone, but Susan sensed urgency.

  She hit the Kwik-set key for “Dr. Susan Calvin here.”

  There was a pause, followed by more text: “Are you at work?”

  Susan tapped out pidgin shorthand. “Lft early. Crowd o-side apt blding. U no y?”

  The subsequent pause left Susan light-headed. The translator should turn words into text instantaneously. If nothing came from the other end, it meant Lawrence Robertson had stopped speaking.

  “???,” she sent.

  Finally, words scrolled from the other end, “Is John OK?”

  Susan could feel her chest tying itself into knots. “He w/ u!” She indicated her father should be at USR with Lawrence at the present moment. She added fiercely, “??” Please be there, Dad. Why wouldn’t you be there? Her thoughts raced. At least don’t be here!

  “Susan, your father went home an hour ago. Damn…” The text line filled up with random marks as Lawrence Robertson either muffled the Vox to talk with someone else or muttered something unprintable.

  Susan slammed in a few more question marks of her own.

  Lawrence took infuriatingly long to reply. “Susan, go directly to the police.” She could almost hear the sudden, irritating calm in his lack of voice.

  “Y?” she demanded.

  “Tell them everything you know.”

  “No nothing!”

  Lawrence gave the last answer she expected: “Perfect. Stay with the police until you’re sure you’re both safe. Let me know what happens.”

  “But…” Susan started, but Lawrence’s words rolled over her own.

  “Please, Susan. Erase this conversation immediately, and don’t show it to anyone. Lives may depend on it.” He added maddeningly, knowing the intense bond between father and daughter, “Especially John’s.”

  Irritated as much as terrified, Susan texted back. “No erase til u tell me smthng uzful!”

  There was a faint click, all but lost beneath the noises of the crowd; then Lawrence Robertson was gone.

  Susan stared at her Vox a moment, uncertain what to do. Impotently, she shook her arm, as if this might bring back the signal. It seemed futile to call back Lawrence Robertson. Her father and Lawrence had been college roommates, had trusted one another since long before her birth. Her father trusted him, believed him the most brilliant human being who ever walked the earth, and her father’s judgment was always spot-on. Reluctantly, she erased all traces of her last conversation before shoving violently into the crowd.

  The people in front of Susan turned dirty looks on her, but something in her demeanor must have cued them, because they did not fight back as she cut through them without apology. Frantic for her father, Susan paid no heed to shouts, prods, and curses. She knew only she had to get to the front, had to talk to the police, had to ascertain nothing bad had happened to John Calvin. Home in the early afternoon the same day I’m home early, the same day the police show up at our building. It all seemed too much for coincidence, and Lawrence’s call only worsened her suspicions. Susan’s discomfort flared immediately to panic. It’s Dad! Oh, God, it has to be Dad! Susan flailed through the crowd, no longer worrying whom she might strike in blind panic.

  Miraculously, a pathway cleared in front of Susan. Without any memory of how she managed it, she found herself at the crime-scene tape and, a moment later, addressing an officer who was engaged in conversation through a standard-issue Ear-mite clipped to his left lobe.

  “Please,” Susan said, seizing his arm. “My father’s in there.”

  Susan half expected him to shrug her off and send her reeling back into the crowd, so it surprised her when he turned his full attention to her. He had a weathered face, relatively young but prematurely creased, with a well-healed scar running from the outside corner of his right eye to the middle of his cheek. He stood only a few inches taller than Susan, with eyes the same dark blue as his uniform, a broad mouth, and a sturdy figure. “What floor?” he asked with a casual air that conveyed only mild interest. He had surely asked the same question multiple times.

  “Tenth,” Susan said. “Apartment 10B.”

  The officer stiffened, though whether at Susan’s reply or at something coming over the Ear-mite, she did not know. He raised his hand to Susan and spoke into the air. “Travis, hang on a mo. I found 10B.” He paused a moment. “The daughter, I think.”

  Susan did not like the sound of that. The officer did not seem particularly excited; he might simply have been relaying the apartment number of a random person who lived in the building. Still, to Susan’s worried mind, they had been searching frantically for her.

  The officer turned his full attention on Susan, and the crowd hemmed in, clearly eager to hear the conversation. He glanced at his Vox. “Is your name Calvin?”

  Susan felt as if icy fingers had invaded her chest. She supposed the police had easily acquired a list of every person who lived in the building, but it still bothered her that he brought up her name so quickly and easily. “Yes. Susan Calvin.”

  “Daughter of John Calvin, same address.”

  “Yes, yes.” Susan could stand the suspense no longer. “Is my dad okay?”

  “Come with me, please, Ms. Calvin.”

  “That’s Dr. Calvin,” Susan corrected, hoping the title might make him less condescending and more talkative. She added, a bit more forcefully, “Is my dad okay?”

  “We’ll explain everything. This way, please.” With a hooked plastic rod, the officer scooped a piece of the crime-scene tape high enough for Susan to slide under without ducking. When she did so, he dropped it back into place and ushered her along the familiar sidewalk. In the playground directly below their balcony, she saw a smaller crowd and recognized several of them as neighbors. The benches were full of nannies and stay-at-home mothers with children on their laps, while others milled around or chatted quietly among themselves or into Vox.

  Susan expected the officer to mix her into the herd. Instead he took her to the front door of the apartment building. There he stopped and gestured for her to wait.

  Again Susan obeyed silently, her heart pounding in her chest and her patience waning. It bothered her that he had taken her somewhere different than where the other inhabitants of the building were. She felt as if a thousand eyes followed her and, when the policeman left her side to talk to others at the entrance, she glanced back at the crowd. The prickles at her back proved true; everyone seemed eager to see what happened to her. Even the newscopter buzzed lower, and she heard the muffled click of Vox-cams.

  Not a fan of mystery, Susan allowed the police a few moments of private conversation before approaching them. As she came within earshot, they grew eerily quiet, all attention focused on her. “If you don’t tell me something about my father, I’m going to go hysterical on you.”

  The
officer to whom Susan had already spoken headed back to his post. A new one took her arm and coaxed her to the door. This time, she had the wherewithal to glance at his badge, which read “Freeman.” “Ma’am,” he said carefully, “I’m not privy to all the information. The detective in the lobby will tell you all you need to know.”

  Susan suspected the officer knew exactly what she needed to know but preferred not to be the one to tell her. Seized by an irrational urge to grab him and shake loose everything in his head, she found herself incapable of any action but following dumbly along behind him. Her throat closed, making even speech impossible. John Calvin had sat vigil at her bedside through the aftermath of two bombs. He had survived the accident that killed her mother, though it had required months of hospitalization and rehabilitation. Susan would do whatever it took to make him better. After all the storms they had weathered together, no one could steal him from her now.

  The lobby looked exactly as it always did, except the security doors were propped open. She recognized the six civilians seated on the padded benches lining the walls near the elevators as other occupants of the tenth floor. Mike and Linda Cready from 10G, a retired couple in their eighties, sat together, talking softly. Gray-haired Gary Stolty, the widower from 10D, sat nearby, head bowed, face in his hands. He was a friendly man, semiretired, performing odd jobs for the building manager as well as for his neighbors. He never asked for money but always took what they gave him graciously.

  Ashley Terrance from 10E was sobbing. She worked in retail but was currently home, nursing a viral infection. Aldius Maynard, a chronically unemployed slacker who lived with his parents, stared into space, wide-eyed; his girlfriend, Rochette Holley, was rocking and crying hysterically beside him. She wore a blanket over her heaving shoulders, and a detective stood in front of the pair, talking softly. Notably missing was Sammy Cottrell, a thirty-two-year-old mother of three who lived in 10C. She was nearly always home, tending two highly active sons and a daughter with special needs.

  Officer Freeman took Susan to a man wearing a suit and tie and standing near a stairwell, speaking into the air. “This is Detective Hollinger. He’s the one you need to talk to.”

  Susan tried to thank the officer but could not squeak out a single word. A cold wave of discomfort washed over her, and she suddenly lost all urgency for information. Her medical training made her calm in a crisis, which allowed her to think clearly. At the moment, she wanted to avoid her thoughts; panic might have seemed welcome.

  The detective stood nearly as tall as her father, about six and half feet, and so slender he looked as if he might break in a solid wind. He wore his blond hair in a buzz cut that might have made him seem military if not for the baby-faced features accentuated by the need to remain professionally clean-shaven. He looked more like a high school basketball player or high jumper than a detective, even with the obvious gun holstered at his left hip.

  Freeman waited for the detective to stop speaking before finishing the introduction. “This is Ms. Susan Calvin.”

  The detective nodded solemnly, and Susan stuck out her right hand. “That’s Dr. Susan Calvin,” she corrected.

  Detective Hollinger clearly had paid more attention than Officer Freeman had. “Doctor,” he said with a nod, and clasped her right hand in a strong grip, then released it nearly as quickly. “What kind of doctor are you, Dr. Calvin?”

  “Medical,” Susan said.

  The captain gestured at Freeman, who promptly left, then to an empty corner that held the only open seats, a small and weathered bench. If they kept their voices reasonably low, no one else would be able to hear them. As they headed toward it together, he said, “Your father is a doctor also?” It was more question than comment.

  Susan dutifully stepped to the indicated corner and sat on the far end of the bench, hands clasped in her lap. She focused on the detective’s use of the present tense in reference to her father. That buoyed her spirits remarkably, despite the fact it had never consciously occurred to her that her father might not be alive. “My father is the PhD kind of doctor. Robotics.”

  Hollinger remained standing in front of her. “He worked at U.S. Robots, didn’t he?”

  “All my life,” Susan replied. “USR was incorporated the year I was born, and he was there from the start.” Still attuned to verb tenses, she furrowed her brow. “He still works there, at least he did as of this morning.”

  The detective cocked his head, apparently listening to something on his Ear-mite. The technology was still in its expensive stage, but she doubted it would take long for everyone to have the ability to listen to conversations without the need for text or the possibility of others overhearing. “Excuse me a moment,” he said to Susan, then into the air. “I’m talking to her now.”

  A moment of silence followed, then the detective continued, “Susan Calvin, yes. The daughter.” He paused. “Yes, she’s also a doctor.” He rolled his eyes and glanced at Susan as if they shared a joke, though he never smiled. “No, a real doctor. MD.”

  Susan wondered how often her father heard the “real doctor” crack and if it ever bothered him. She supposed most people with PhDs grew accustomed to the misconception or deliberate ribbing, but she knew some stodgy doctorates became positively apoplectic.

  “Not yet. Give me a chance.” He turned his attention directly on Susan. “Sorry about that.”

  Susan wiped her palms on her khakis, surprised to find they left an obvious smear of moisture.

  Hollinger cleared his throat, and Susan’s breath caught. She had delivered enough bad news to recognize stalling. “Aren’t you off a bit early, Dr. Calvin? I thought young doctors like you worked crazy hours.”

  Susan could not think of a topic she would less like to discuss, especially when she still had no idea of her father’s fate. However, she knew lying to cops, or even withholding information, was rarely a good idea, especially for an innocent person. “My attending and I weren’t seeing eye to eye on a patient, and we both decided it was a better idea for me to go home than to deck him.”

  Hollinger loosed a strained chuckle. “You don’t look like the violent type.”

  “I’m not,” Susan assured him. “But this guy could incite Gandhi.” She thought she might get another chuckle, but Detective Hollinger gave her nothing. He clearly had a sense of humor, so Susan made the obvious leap. Apparently, something troubled him enough to make laughing inappropriate, and it likely concerned whatever news he needed to give her. “I’m not sure why my father came home early, but I know he did. He was in that building when…whatever happened…happened.” She tried to keep her tone firm, stifling worry, making it clear she deserved some information.

  The detective clearly got the hint. He glanced longingly over his shoulder, as if hoping someone would relieve him of his duty or an even more urgent call would come over the Ear-mite.

  Susan pressed, “I’m sure whatever you have to tell me can’t be any worse than what I can imagine.” It was a well-known phenomenon in medicine. No news was generally good news; laboratory personnel alerted doctors to abnormalities while leaving the normal results to arrive over time. Doctors, too, were far more likely to sit on routine matters and handle the critical ones first. Still, the longer patients waited, the more they imagined they, or their loved ones, had something disfiguring and fatal the doctor could not bear to pronounce. She wondered if police ever got to deliver good news.

  Hollinger dropped to a crouch to look Susan directly in the eye. “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, Dr. Calvin.” He took a breath that seemed to last a lifetime. “Your father is dead.”

  It felt as if all the blood drained from Susan’s body in an instant, replaced by a sudden flood of icy water. She found herself incapable of speech, thought, or movement. She knew nothing but the sting of a deep and entrenching cold seeping through her every part. Had she been standing, she probably would have collapsed. Far beyond meaningless, the pronouncement was impossible. She finally managed words,
“Are you…sure?”

  They were words, but not intelligent ones. Susan felt certain the police knew dead when they saw it, just as she did. They did not require a second opinion from her or any other physician. She tried again, “Murdered?”

  “It would appear he was shot.” Hollinger kept his attention on her face, apparently looking for clues to her mental state. “Several times.”

  Susan doubted the police considered her a suspect. More likely, the detective wanted to make sure she was not going to topple over, run screaming, or mindlessly attack him in her grief. She was accustomed to death, used to being the messenger, and she knew how difficult a job it was, regardless of how many times, how many ways. Susan remained calm; her training would not allow otherwise. “How?” She looked Hollinger straight in the eyes, surprised to find them moist. He was crying.

  “Perhaps you’d be more comfortable…,” he started, but Susan stopped him with a firm shake of her head.

  “Can I…see him?”

  “No.”

  The answer startled her. It was always the first thing doctors did, a quick cleanup, if necessary, then a walk to the bedside to cement the reality of death for the survivors. But this was not a long-suffering grandparent fading into routine darkness. This was a crime scene, ugly, brutal, probably bloody. It was silly to think they would allow her access before they examined every clue.

  The detective explained, “They’ve already taken the body away. When they’re finished upstairs, I’d like you to accompany me to your apartment. We’ll need help figuring out what’s out of place, putting all the pieces together, finding answers.”

  Still strangely cold, Susan felt as if someone had dropped a boulder on her chest. Yet still the tears did not come to her own eyes. “Tell me everything you know. What happened to my”—to her surprise, she had to force out the final word—“father.” And, once spoken, it released the floodgates in an abrupt and violent sob. Her eyes filled so quickly, she was blinded, and the tears ran down her face. Not Dad. Her thoughts flashed backward a year to the agony of losing Remington. Not Dad, too.