Mike McQuay - Suspicion

“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.

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 to 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.”