Suspicion

Chapter 10. The Sealed Room

Derec had hoped that when he came out of the overseer’s office Katherine would have already been gone, but she wasn’t. She stood waiting for him with the two witness robots, a smile on her face as if seeing him somehow made her happy. What an actress. He had to wonder now, once again, what it was she wanted out of all this. He’d once again have to pull in and play it by ear where she was concerned. Perhaps she’d say something to give herself away. Meanwhile, she’d get no satisfaction.

“How did it go?” she asked cheerily, but then her face changed, tightened up when she noticed his mood swing. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing… Katherine,” he said, her phony name sticking in his throat. “I found an exit to the top platform, and a computer, but nothing in it helped any, except to tell me what we already knew-that we’d have to solve the murder.”

“Well then, I think we should stop wasting time and get on to that,” she said suspiciously, not quite believing his change of attitude. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Never better,” he lied, angry at himself for wanting to be close to her despite what he’d learned. If he had any sense, he’d turn and run as fast and as far as he could from her. Instead, he said, “Let’s go.”

They moved out of the Compass Tower quickly and quietly, Katherine watching Derec out of the corner of her eye most of the time. He tried to be more nonchalant to keep from arousing her suspicions, but it was difficult for him. He apparently wasn’t as schooled in subterfuge as she. As they made their way through the building, robots paid them no attention, already becoming familiar and comfortable with human presence.

When they stepped outside, they found a tram with a utility driver atop it, waving to them. “Friend Derec!” the robot called, and they moved over to the tram.

“What is it?” Derec asked the squat driver.

“Supervisor Euler asked me to be your driver today, honoring an earlier request you made in regard to transportation.”

“Well,” Derec said, looking at Katherine, “it appears that we’re finally being trusted a little bit. Our own tram, eh?”

“It’s radio-controlled,” the utility robot said.

Derec narrowed his brows. “What’s its range?”

“The range of the control is roughly equivalent to the limits of the already extruded city.”

“Oh,” Derec said quietly. “You mean that the tram won’t operate except in city limits?”

“A fair appraisal,” the robot said.

Katherine laughed loudly. “Now that’s what I call trust,” she said, and shook her head.

He glared at her and climbed into the tram. “Rec,” he told his witness, “why don’t you ride up here with me?”

The robot dutifully climbed in beside Derec, leaving Katherine to sit with her witness in the seat behind.

“Where to, sir?” the tram driver asked.

Derec turned to Katherine. “You know where we’re going?”

“Quadrant #4,” Katherine replied. “Eve will show you from there.”

They drove on quickly. Derec, for the first time, took a moment to think about the other things that had happened in the office, things that were pushed out of his mind by his anger toward Katherine. His name, for instance. He was called David #1 on the computer record. Then why did he come after David #2? Was it a simple experiment shorthand, or did the name have meaning? It sounded so… engineered. The thoughts generated by that line of reasoning were more than he could bear. He pushed them away and thought that if his name was, indeed, David, then Katherine had told him the truth; at least about that.

There were other concepts implied in those few paragraphs. Whoever the overseer was, he obviously knew David and Katherine, and knew something of their past histories. So whoever had brought him here was someone he’d known before his memory loss, and he couldn’t help but consider the possibility that the overseer had had something to do with his memory loss. But the chances were just as good, if not better, that Katherine herself had been connected with his amnesia for her own purposes, whatever they were.

Layers and layers. So much had been implied by the notes on the computer. The city was, indeed, considered an experiment in synnoetics, of that much he could now be certain. But then, when it came time to deal with a reason for the defense system going operational, the overseer seemed just as much in the dark as he, himself, was.

Derec also wasn’t sure if he had been deliberately brought here to help the city, or if he had shown up accidentally, the overseer deciding to the use him, as opposed to either stepping in himself or letting the operation shut itself down. The more answers he found, it seemed, the more in the dark he was.

They arrived at quadrant #4 without difficulty. Eve took her triangulation readings to help them find their way back to the house on the pedestal. Derec watched the city developing all around him as they drove, the sight of humans driving the inhabitants into a frenzy of human preparation-the robot equivalent of nesting.

“This is the place,” Eve said as the tram stopped in the middle of an ordinary-looking street. The witness looked all around. “It doesn’t appear to be here.”

“It’s moved some, that’s all,” Katherine said. “We’ll go on foot from this point.”

They climbed out of the tram and started walking, the tram following close behind them in case they had need of it.

“You sure this is the right direction?” Derec asked, after they had gone a block. “How far could it have moved?”

“Everything looks familiar here,” she replied.

“The whole city looks the same,” Derec said. “I don’t think you… ”

“There!” She pointed.

Derec needed no pointing finger to tell him they’d arrived. A tall tower stood in the middle of a street, nothing else anywhere near it. Atop the tower was a single room, sealed up except for a circular hole cut out of it.

“Let’s leave a witness here with the tram in the case of problems,” Derec said. “We’ll take Rec up with us.”

“Fine,” Katherine replied, walking to the pole.

He followed her, watching the spiral staircase reform when she touched the pole with her hand.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she told him, starting confidently up the stairs. “If this man’s not your twin, he went to an awful lot of trouble to look just like you.”

Derec smiled weakly in return, wondering, given the fact that he was #4, just who was whose twin.

She reached the top, waiting off to the side for him to join her. “I want you to go in first,” she said. “After what happened last time, I’m afraid of my reactions. I may have to work up to it.”

“All right,” he said, moving around to the cut-out. As he got close to the place, he felt his own insides jumping a bit at the thought of seeing himself dead. He got right up to the cut-out, then quickly ducked his head in before he changed his mind.

It was empty.

He climbed through; there was no sign of a body or anything that resembled a body or anything else for that matter.

“Katherine,” he called. “Come around here.”

She moved to the cut-out, shyly poking her head inside, her eyes widening when she saw the empty room. “Where is he?” she asked.

“That was my question,” Derec replied. “It appears that our corpse has gotten up and walked away.

“Or was taken away,” she returned. “Remember what happened when he died? A utility robot had to fight waste control robots for possession of the corpse. Maybe they got him this time.”

“Didn’t anyone stay behind when you passed out before to keep that from happening?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine said, and went back out the cut-out to call down to her witness. “Eve! Did anyone stay behind after I fell unconscious yesterday?”

“No,” the robot called back up. “You were our first priority. We all did our parts to get you home safely and to get you medical attention.”

Katherine came back into the room. “No one stayed behind,” she said.

“I heard,” Derec replied. “Pretty convenient.”

“Convenient for whom?” she said, eyes flashing. “What are you driving at?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “I’m just… disappointed.”

“ You’redisappointed,” she said, sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall. “This was my ticket out of here.”

“Just like you,” he said, “thinking about yourself while the whole world crumbles around you.”

Her eyes were dark fire. “And just who should I think about?” she asked. “The buckets of bolts who run this place, who don’t have enough sense to keep from destroying themselves?”

“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.