Mike McQuay - Suspicion

With that, Derec and Katherine continued down the hallway, turning once to see the attentive robots before opening the door and stepping inside.

What they found was a spiral staircase leading up to a door set ten feet above their heads.

“You want to go first?” Derec asked.

“Go ahead,” Katherine returned. “I left my courage back in that sealed room.”

Derec moved slowly up the stairs, a feeling of expectation rising slowly in his stomach. He connected the word, butterflies, to the feeling, but had no idea of what it meant. He reached the door, and pushed the stud, expecting it to be locked up tight.

It wasn’t.

The door slid easily and opened, he thought at first, to the outside. It was as if he were walking onto an open platform set with furniture and a desk, a beautiful, panoramic view of Robot City all around. But there was no feel of the air, no wind, no heat from the mid-morning sun.

“How did we get outside?” Katherine asked, following him in.

“We’re not,” Derec said, pointing behind her.

The outside view was marred by the still-open doorway, a black maw in the center of downtown. When he pushed the stud to close the door, the full view was restored.

“Viewscreens?” she asked.

“I think so,” he replied. “There must be a series of small cameras set around the peak of the pyramid to give the view, which is then put on the screens. Look,” he pointed, “even above us.”

She looked up to see pinkish-blue sky above. “That would be the view from the platform we materialized on,” she said.

“Fascinating,” he said softly, knowing they’d finally stumble upon something. “If you were sitting in here, you could watch someone materialize on the platform and they’d never know it.”

“Do you think someone watched us materialize?” she asked, eyes wide.

He shrugged. “I’d have to think it probable at this point,” he said. “We were brought here. We were meant to be here. It seems logical that our progress would be measured.”

“Have you ever considered the fact, Derec, that you were brought here and I’m excess baggage?” she asked.

He walked slowly through the room. It was designed for someone to live in. There were easy chairs and a couch that converted to abed. Not city-robot material, but real furniture. There was even a plant of some kind under its own growth light. That told Derec that whoever kept this office returned at least often enough to keep the plant watered.

“I’ve considered a great many things,” Derec told her, “including the scenario you’ve just outlined. But there are several things to consider. I believe our meeting on Aranimas’s ship was accidental. The situation was too dangerous and uncontrollable to be otherwise, our injuries too real. But consider the facts that you admit to having known me previously by another name and that that name just happens to belong to someone who looked enough like me to be my twin. It’s a large universe, Katherine. That’s an awful lot of coincidence. Let me ask you something. Have you ever considered the possibility that the David you knew could be the one lying dead in that sealed room, and that I’m somebody else?”

Her face became confused, lips sputtering. “I-I… ”

Then she started to say something and stopped. Derec would have given a fortune, ten fortunes, to know the thoughts that had been running through her mind that second before she shut herself up.

“What are you hiding from me?” he asked loudly, in frustration.

Her face was a mixture of pain and longing. She responded by solidifying, as she had done so many times since they’d met on Aranimas’s ship. “There’s nothing up here for me,” she said. “I’m going back down with the robots. Join us quickly. We have other work to do.”

Then she turned and departed without a backward glance, leaving Derec angry again. He could feel so close to her, and so far away. There was never any mid-point with Katherine; it was all one way or the other.

He decided to inspect the office methodically, rather than simply tearing furiously into things, which had been his strongest desire. Starting on the outer edges of the room, he traversed it slowly, saving the plum of the desk for last.

He found a small, air-tight shelf full of tapes, all marked “Philosophy,” then broken down according to planet. Nearly all of the fifty-five Spacer worlds were represented. They weren’t of interest to him at the moment, but a perusal in future wasn’t out of the question.

He continued his walk of the outer perimeter, his hand finding the ladder where his eyes couldn’t. It was a metal ladder, set against the screen and lost in shadows. Even knowing it was there, he still found it difficult to see. It went up from the floor and stopped at the flat ceiling.

He climbed it until he reached the ceiling screen. There was no reason at all for this ladder to exist unless it went somewhere. Gingerly, he reached out and touched the ceiling screen above the ladder. It gave easily on well-oiled hinges, flapping open to reveal real sky.

He moved up through the trap door to find himself standing on the platform where he had materialized. Amazing. He began to put together a theory. Whoever started this civilization, whoever’s arm it was that turned on 1-1, with proper use of a Key to Perihelion, could materialize on Robot City at will, move down into the off-limits office and observe his city’s progress without ever being seen. When he was through, he could leave by the same means.

So, the city had an overseer, a guardian, who had apparently brought Derec here to sweeten the mix with the human ingredient. Why Derec? That question, he couldn’t answer.

He wondered if the overseer had been present during his and Katherine’s stay, if he had been watching them, perhaps all the way up to the moment they opened the office door. It would be simple enough for him to get away. All he’d need was the Key and a few seconds’ time.

Derec climbed back into the office and closed the trap door behind him, once again sealing in the illusion completely.

He continued his tour of the office by emptying the small trash can that sat by the desk. The trash can held several empty containers that he recognized as standard Spacer survival rations of good-tasting roughage plus supplementary vitamin and protein pills. He torn open one of the roughage containers to find, in the corner, a small glob of the stuff, which hadn’t hardened completely. This food had been eaten within the last twenty-four hours. The rest of the trash was comprised of wadded-up pieces of paper containing mathematical equations relating to the geometric progression of the city-building, which seemed to relate to the time it would take to fill the entire planet with city. Others seemed to be directed to the amounts of rainfall and the reservoir size, quick calculations regarding how long it would take an overflow to occur. Derec had the feeling that if he simply sat in the office and waited an indefinite amount of time, he could probably catch the overseer coming back. Unfortunately, he didn’t have an indefinite amount of time.

He put the trash back in the can and directed his attention to the desk itself. The top of the iron-alloy desk contained a blotter with paper and two zero-g ink pens. The only personal item on the desk was a holo-cube containing a scene of a very nice looking woman holding a baby. The sight of the cube sent a cold chill down his back.

He turned his attention to the drawers. On his left were several small drawers, which were, for the most part, empty. Only the top drawer contained anything at all, and that was simply more paper and some technical data on the workings of the logic circuits of the positronic brain. On his right, however, he struck gold. As he opened the big well drawer there, a slight motor hum brought a computer terminal up to desktop level, the screen already active, the cursor flashing: READY.