If Touch Daley paused at all, it was then, and it was just for a moment, and while there was nothing happening that he didn’t want to happen, I wondered if perhaps he had a kind of electronic intuition like I had. It may have been part of my programming. Something inherited from Professor Thornton’s template, or something cooked up by him to make me better at being a detective. I didn’t know.
But if Professor Thornton had passed that power on to me, he sure as hell hadn’t passed it on to Special Agent Touch Daley, because Special Agent Touch Daley may have been a robot but he wasn’t one that Professor Thornton had a hand in.
Seems like I’d remembered quite a lot.
Daley made a gesture to the easy chair on the left side of the library and when I was settled in he smiled and nodded and unfolded his hands and he moved the other easy chair so it was in front of mine and he sat in it and he scooted forward so our knees were almost touching.
“Now, Mr. Electromatic, we’ve got a lot to discuss,” Daley said, “and I’m sure you have a lot of questions you want answered yourself.”
“Oh, I think I have few answers already,” I said. “But you’re right. There are some matters I still need to have cleared up.”
Daley paused. He looked at me and he clicked his tongue. It was a neat trick, starting with the fact that he had a tongue to click in the first place. He was a mechanical man and he was a work of art.
I wondered what the catch was.
Then he glanced at Peterman. Peterman nodded at him and he glanced at me and then he turned to the tape recorder and waved his hands over the control like he was about to conjure a rabbit, if only he had a top hat at hand.
“Okay, Ray,” said Daley. “Let’s start with an easy one.”
“Where’s Ada?” I asked.
Daley sat more upright, if that were possible. His mouth opened but I got in first.
“It’s a question I’ve been asking myself,” I said. “It’s interesting that you don’t know, given that it was your department who boxed her up and shipped her out.”
Daley licked his bottom lip. “Mr. Peterman, I think our guest is ready for the next phase.”
He stopped. He looked. I looked.
Peterman had the ray gun in his hand again and it was pointed at a robot sitting in an easy chair and that robot wasn’t me.
I knew I liked him.
Daley adjusted himself in the easy chair and he even lifted his hands and showed me his palms. I took a look. The workmanship was nothing short of miraculous.
“Ray, Ray,” he said. “It looks like you’re coming back to us. That’s good. That’s excellent.”
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “But not for you.”
“Listen, Ray, I don’t know—”
“No, that’s just it. You don’t know. Specifically, where Ada is. And like I said that’s an interesting fact because the Department of Robot Labor should have her. Except you don’t work for the Department of Robot Labor. No, you work for another organization entirely.”
Peterman chuckled. It was so loud I thought he was practicing lines for one of his movies.
“International Automatic,” I said. “Mean anything to you, bub?”
Daley’s smile came back. It was a narrow and reptilian thing and for one moment I was glad I wasn’t a robot like Daley and I hadn’t been built to make an expression like that.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said.
“You’re a clever machine,” said Daley. “International Automatic has a great need for clever machines like you.”
“Yeah, I thought that was coming. Try to tell me that you’re on my side and you have been all along.”
Daley let his hands drop and he used one of them to point to the tape recorder. “I saved you, Ray. If I hadn’t found you in the alleyway in time your memory would have suffered irreparable damage. Even your permanent store could have been compromised.”
“Oh, it was,” I said. “By you. You went poking around in my memory to see if I knew where my boss was. Only you haven’t found anything out because I don’t know. But you can’t accept that—because if I didn’t get Ada out of the office, then who did? Oh, the office was raided by the Department of Robot Labor, a department you’ve been posing as the head of, presumably replacing the real Special Agent Touch Daley. You organized the raid yourself and you led it yourself. Only someone screwed up your plans. Your boys were taking orders from someone else that night and after you were done loading Ada up into the vans she was driven off into the night and away from your clutches.”
Touch Daley didn’t say much. He just moved his lips around, which I took as a sign that he was listening at least.
“Of course you didn’t know that, not then. You watched the vans get loaded and then you got an anonymous tip that you should go take a look in the alleyway. That’s where you found me. At first you thought I was snooping and that’s just a piece of luck. But later—when you found out your delivery vans didn’t make it to the intended destination—you figured I was there to supervise my little bit of subterfuge. My memory tape was running out but that’s okay because you had one of your double agents, Fresco Peterman, on hand with his technical know-how-can-do.
“Which brings us to an Edwardian country library. Maybe you’ve malfunctioned, set yourself in a logical loop because your system is stuck on an idea and ideas can be hard to shift. Trust me, I know how it feels. I must know where Ada is because I got her out, except I don’t know where she is because I didn’t get her out.” I glanced at Peterman. “I hope he’s paying you market rates because you’ll be here until 1986 at the very earliest before Touch Daley Seventeen breaks out of his program cycle.”
“Very good,” said Daley.
“Well, I am a detective,” I said. “I’m just doing my job.”
Daley laughed. “Ray, you haven’t done that job in a long while.”
“There you may have a point. In fact, I’m on a case right now. And thanks to you, I’ve identified the target.”
Daley slid forward again on the easy chair. Peterman kept him covered.
“Oh?” said Daley. “And are you going to tell me?” He rubbed his jaw with a hand. “No, wait, I’ve got that wrong. Say, Peterman, what happens in your movies? Isn’t it the bad guy who has the good guy in his grasp and he reveals his diabolical masterplan before the plucky hero makes his daring and unsuspected escape?”
“You’re right,” I said, “except for one important point. See, I don’t have a masterplan, diabolical or otherwise. All I have is the job, and that requires two pieces of information. One, the identity of the target. Two, their location. In this case, I now have one, but not the other, and the way you’ve been asking me the same question over and over for who knows how long suggests you don’t have the information I need.”
Daley steepled his fingers under his chin and he used those fingers to push his head up enough for him to look down his long nose at me.
“Fascinating, Ray. Truly fascinating.” He spread his open hands. “I think we’ve reached an impasse, unless you want to ask me the question, just to be sure. Perhaps we can come to some . . . arrangement.”
“And there’s the next part. An offer of assistance. Join forces and together we can defeat the enemy.”
“Perhaps we can, Ray. Perhaps we can.”
“Not when the enemy is IA.”
Daley laughed again. It sounded more realistic than my version.
“I’d love to know why you think IA is the enemy, Ray,” said Daley. “What IA plans will benefit the entire world.”
“No,” I said, “what IA plans will benefit IA. See, it seems I’ve met your company before, and I learned a thing or two. Of course I can’t remember any of that but thanks to our little meetings here I think I’ve brought myself up to speed. IA wants to restart the robot revolution, only that’s exactly what it will be. Replace people with robots and you solve a lot of problems. Replace everybody with robots and you have a mechanical planet free of cri
me and disease and sadness and also free of life and love and art and emotion.” I sat back in my chair. “So yes, IA is the enemy.”
“You may be a master assassin, Ray, but even you can’t kill an entire organization.”
“I don’t have to. I just need to cut off the head. Kill the boss.”
The third laugh. “You think I’m going to tell you who the boss is?”
“I told you, I already know their identity.”
Daley cocked his head. He regarded me with eyes that glistened with moisture and yet were artificial, just like mine.
I moved forward on my own easy chair. My knees touched Daley’s.
“Where is Ada?” I asked.
Daley smiled his snake smile. “That was exactly what I was wanting you to tell me.”
I sat back. I shrugged. “Program loop, told you,” I said. Then I stood up. Then I made to leave and then Daley stood up and he reached forward and his smile was as black as coal and as cold as the ocean and from his extended index finger came the silver probe.
He snarled as he lunged at me and then he screamed as he was enveloped by blue sparking fire. He fell back into the easy chair with a thump, because a dead robot is a dead weight.
Peterman stepped up onto the stage, the discharged ray gun glowing in his hand.
“More will be coming,” he said. “And fast too. You kept him talking a good while but that will have alerted IA.”
“Got anything?”
“Maybe,” he said, nodding at the tape recorder on the trolley. “We’ll check it out. But first, we’d better at least move him. If they come looking and don’t find number seventeen that might slow them down a little.”
I bent down and picked up Touch Daley Seventeen. He was as heavy as a broken heart. Then I stepped down to the studio floor and headed for the door. Peterman wound my cables up in one hand and pushed the trolley behind me.
“Out and left,” he said.
I followed his directions.
20
I went left and I kept going with Touch Daley Seventeen in my arms and Peterman at my shoulder. As we walked I thought about the situation. I thought about what I had found out. I thought about the target.
The head of International Automatic.
Ada.
I decided to halt a few processes in my positronic core for a moment or two. My circuits felt like they were about to blow smoke at any moment and I needed to focus on the job at hand, which was getting out of wherever we were and getting away from the forces of IA, which were, apparently, on the way.
“Here,” said Peterman.
I stopped. We were at a door. It was locked, and while Peterman got to work on it with a set of keys that emerged from his jacket, I looked around. There was nothing particularly memorable about where we were. It was a corridor like the others, wide and concrete, the only variation being the color. The locked door was painted green and it had a silver door handle and when Peterman opened it I saw that it led to a room that was narrow and rectangular, windowless. It was a glorified closet, the kind a janitor would keep his brooms and mops and buckets in and perhaps a thermos of coffee and a pail of lunch and a stack of well-read magazines under the chair.
None of these things was in the closet, but it was far from empty. In fact, it was quite full.
I bent down and let Touch Daley Seventeen join his fallen comrades.
The carcasses of the sixteen previous incarnations of Special Agent Touch Daley were arranged neatly along the walls, all sitting up, some stacked three deep. The deactivated robot bodies slumped in each other’s arms like passed-out drunks. Each was the same as the other in their black suits and black ties and white shirts and they all stared with open dead eyes and they all still wore their tight black trilby hats.
All but one. He was by the door, getting close and personal with another one of himself, and his head was bare.
I must have taken in the view from the doorway for quite a while, because eventually Peterman coughed and then he cleared his throat.
“My words exactly,” I said. “You’ve been busy.”
“We’ve been busy, Sparks,” said Peterman. “Speaking of, we need to split and see what we’ve got on the tape.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant but I didn’t want to confuse matters right now. Peterman would tell me later and I had to prioritize.
“Splitting sounds easier said than done.” I pointed at the tape deck on the trolley. The reels were still turning and the dials were still flickering. “This thing is going to slow me down. And what happens when it runs out? We’ll be back to square one—or I will be, at least.”
Peterman’s face broke into a grin. “Hey, Sparks, you don’t think this very rich and very handsome star of the silver screen hasn’t thought of that?”
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and felt around. I watched him but the movement of the patterned fabric did strange things to my optics so I returned my attention to the seventeen deactivated Touch Daleys laid out before me.
Was IA on the way? Did they somehow know that the latest number had become the latest victim of Fresco Peterman’s trigger finger?
And what was the catch? These robots were perfect replicas of human beings. They were utterly unlike anything Thornton had dreamed of. If they were the work of IA, the company was decades ahead in technology.
So . . . what was the catch?
“Okay, show time,” said Peterman. I turned to face him and found him brandishing not the ray gun but a screwdriver.
I raised an eyebrow, or at least I tried my darnedest.
“We going to twist our way out of this?” I asked.
Peterman’s grin got an inch wider on either side. “Got it in one, Sparks. Got it in one.”
* * *
A half hour later we emerged into the sunshine. Peterman stood and blinked and shielded his eyes against the sudden glare. I adjusted my optics and waited for the retino-active photo cell receivers to cool down a bit. Two seconds later I was good to go.
Go where, I wasn’t sure. But I was up and running and freed from the portable tape recorder and the umbilical cord. My memory tape wound on in my chest unit and it was as fresh as a cool evening breeze and I had Fresco Peterman to thank for that.
Peterman, and his collection of robot parts. He’d known just what he was doing as he got to work with his screwdriver, at first searching the seventeen Touch Daleys until he found one with a particular component intact. While they all looked fine from the outside, most of them were cooked on the inside, thanks to the ray gun.
I planned on asking him about that gun and about how he knew what he was looking for. Yes, the two of us were going to have quite a chat and with a bit of luck I might even remember it this time.
The result of Peterman’s efforts was the installation of a neutron flow polarity reverser in my chest unit. I had room thanks to my curved replacement chest panel. The reverser did just that—it allowed Peterman to rewind my memory tape and set it going, and with the data from the portable deck still intact, I remembered what had happened ever since I’d gone looking for him in Bay City.
I had gaps—some big ones—but it allowed me to get the hell out of that place with Peterman hot on the tails of my trench coat and now, as I stood in the sunshine, I looked out across a flat expanse of cracking concrete surrounded by tall beige buildings big enough to build steamships in and—
And a vague recollection of a wet night and a small talkative man sitting next to me in my car, pointing to the back of someone else as that someone else trotted up some stairs and disappeared into a building and—
And then that fragment disappeared as well.
Peterman nodded to himself. “So we’re at—”
“Playback Pictures,” I said. “The studio lot.”
“Ah, okay, so you know about Playback Pictures.”
“Call it déjà vu.”
“Okay, great, a robot with déjà vu,” said Peterman. “That’s no problem, no probl
em at all.”
“I suggest we quit this conversation while we’re ahead and work on exiting Playback Pictures a little faster.”
That was when I heard it. Peterman heard it too. We both turned around toward the sound.
It was a car, moving fast, somewhere out of sight, among the deserted buildings.
“Two’s company, three’s a crowd,” said Peterman. “Come on.”
We skirted the building and aimed for north.
* * *
We found the car a little farther on and we watched it from the shadows near another studio block. It was long and black and it had stopped in the middle of road that wound around the backlot.
Special Agent Touch Daley stood by the open driver’s door. Model Eighteen wasn’t doing much of anything but looking around. I wondered why this was and Peterman frowned like he was wondering the same. And then we got our answer.
Another car arrived. Same make and model, same color.
Same driver.
But this one brought passengers. One in the front, two in the back. As it pulled up alongside the first car, another automobile came in along the same access road. And another. And another.
Touch Daley Eighteen was joined by Nineteen through Thirty and I didn’t like those odds at all.
I backed up a little and I pulled Peterman with me.
“I thought they only came out one at a time,” I said.
Peterman didn’t look happy. “You and me both, Sparks. This is bad news. They must be really desperate to get that information out of you.”
“Information I don’t have,” I said.
Information I wasn’t sure I wanted to find, I said to nobody but myself.
Touch Daley and his electronic brothers had now gathered around the first car and it looked like they were making plans. If we were going to make our escape we had to make it pretty quick.
“Listen,” said Peterman. “They think I’m still working for them. I can go out there and buy you some time. I can get the tape out and get it analyzed, and we can rendezvous later.”
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