“Nakamura-san,” called the guard. “You have a guest. I need you to stamp the forms, please.” His voice echoed in the stillness.
No answer.
“This is strange,” muttered the guard. He strode down the line of machines in the middle, keeping carefully to the outside of the striped safety tape on the floor.
Eleanor followed, trying not to peer too obviously at the robots and equipment.
The guard stopped so suddenly she ran into his back.
“Sorry,” she said, flustered, “but you …”
Then she saw why he’d stopped.
A figure in a pink lab coat lay on the floor beside a medium-sized industrial robot. The robot’s arm was outstretched above the man, and blood pooled under his head.
“Oh, no.” The guard stepped forward, reaching for a pulse, and Eleanor woke from her shock in time to shout at him,
“Stop! Wait a second.”
The guard, surprised, did stop.
She knelt, found the robot’s power cable leading to a switch around the other side of the workbench, and shut it off. It should have been at total shutdown anyway, but she wasn’t going to take chances.
“Now.”
The guard felt the figure’s pulse and shook his head. It was Nakamura. She stared at the crepe-soled loafers he always used to wear in the lab. The squeak had annoyed everyone. She kept her eyes away from his head.
“Are you okay?” the guard asked, his thumb tapping a number on an old-fashioned hand phone. His own face was pale under its tan.
“Yes.” She’d thought the guard shifty-eyed and unpleasantly presumptuous in how close he got to her in the elevator. But in the face of the shocking thing on the floor, he was a haven of normalcy.
He was calling 110. Ambulance? He looked at Nakamura, then quickly away again. No, they didn’t need an ambulance. They needed the police.
Then he was talking to someone else, probably a senior manager from the way he bowed at nothing as he talked and the polite register of his language.
She must concentrate on something, or she’d be sick.
She backed into the bay and flicked the computer’s touch pad, intending to check what Nakamura had been doing with the welder. But instead of humming alive, the drive stayed silent, and the screen remained gray. She held her hand right in front of the heat sensor. Nothing. She tapped the restart pad. Still nothing. Checked the wall connection—livelined here, of course, and plugged in.
Why would he shut down the computer in the middle of an investigation?
She looked back at the robot. It was the same 316 series welder as Zecom had at Kawanishi Metalworks. Possibly the same one. But Nakamura said Zecom’s maintenance department found nothing wrong with the welder. Why did he bring it in here—had he found a disc like the one on the Tomita robot, after all?
The welder showed none of the stresses that should have been apparent from hitting an unprogrammed object in the middle of a movement. The end-effector was twisted under a dark and sticky coating, but the arm itself was right where it should be. None of the joints or leads showed impact fissures.
She walked around to the controller, which sat on a bench on the other side of the robot.
“Better not touch anything,” said the guard. He’d finished his call and was checking each of the bays.
She nodded. The controller lights were off, as she’d cut the power at the wall. She couldn’t remember if the lights had been on when they came in.
What’s wrong with this picture? She let her eyes lose focus so she could look at the whole scene—the white lights illuminated the tableau as if on a stage. Man Sprawled Lifeless under Avenging Mechanical Arm of Death.
That’s what bothered her—it was so obvious.
If Nakamura had been hit, then fallen where he now lay, the pressure-activated safety mat would have sounded an alarm. Nakamura might have disabled the mat, true. But Nakamura had never, in all the years Eleanor knew him, turned off a safety feature. If anything, he was obsessive about turning them all on.
Not only the safety mat. In fact … she walked around the robot to stare at it from the other side. In fact, Nakamura couldn’t have been hit by this robot and fallen where he had. This time it wasn’t a question of the robot arm moving outside its programmed arc, as when Mito was killed. This time it was physically impossible for the robot to make that arc.
The robot had been set up.
Her hands itched to examine it, but she didn’t dare. She crouched down and tried to see its network port, but the corner of the table hid it.
Voices boomed in the corridor, then the door at the far end banged open.
Two uniformed policemen followed another security guard into the lab. All the overhead lights came on.
Eleanor straightened hastily.
“What happened here, then?” said the first policeman loudly and jovially, as though to idiots. He had a broad, red expanse of face out of which small eyes peered.
The other security guard disappeared back up the corridor.
The policemen advanced into the lab, and the speaker’s tone changed when he saw Nakamura’s body.
“Trouble all right. You did right to call us.” He turned his back on them and spoke briefly into his phone.
“Was he like this when you found him?” asked the second policeman. He was small and colorless, like a bleached imp.
“Of course. We haven’t touched anything.” The security guard sounded cross, as though his professional reputation had been impugned.
“I always said these things were dangerous,” said the small policeman.
But they shouldn’t be dangerous, Eleanor thought, not if you take the proper precautions. And Nakamura always did.
The first policeman, the one with the piggy eyes, started toward Nakamura, then hesitated. He pointed at the robot.
“Is that thing turned off?”
“Yes,” said Eleanor.
The constable knelt beside Nakamura and checked vital signs, ignoring the security guard’s pointed comment that he’d done it already.
“Who are you?” said the small policeman to Eleanor.
“She’s a visitor.” The guard looked up from where he hovered over Nakamura and Piggy. “I brought her down here to see him.” He jerked his chin at Nakamura.
Eleanor chuckled mentally. As a visitor, she’d been an outsider to the guard when she arrived. But now, in the face of police questioning, as a visitor to the company she was token “family,” and therefore needed protection.
“At this time of night?” said the small policeman.
“He called me in Osaka,” she said. “He wanted me to come and discuss some research.”
“Research?” The policeman frowned in disbelief. Or perhaps it was his natural sour expression. “You’d better tell all this to the detectives when they arrive.”
“He’s definitely gone.” Piggy stood up. “You two had better go upstairs and wait for the ’tecs.”
He shepherded them toward the door. The guard muttered something about know-it-alls. Eleanor was glad to get out of there. Nakamura dead was horrible, but worse was the obvious falsity of it all. Someone had killed him, and it wasn’t the robot.
Oy, Ishihara!” One of the other detectives held his hand over the pickup of the vidphone as he yelled across the room. “Line three.”
Ishihara waved his hand wearily in reply and punched 3 on his desk monitor. It was after ten on Monday night and he didn’t want to talk to anyone.
Only the audio came on. The voice at the other end of the phone said, “Hello, Ishihara. This is Mikuni, at Okayama Prefectural. It’s been a while.”
Ishihara shook himself awake mentally. “Mikuni, you old devil. It’s been five years. How are things out in the sticks?” Mikuni was probably the only detective at Okayama whom Ishihara hadn’t offended during his term there, or maybe he was just thick-skinned.
“We have our little problems,” Mikuni’s voice was still calm and mellow. “Like now
. I thought you might be interested, seeing as how you had a similar case recently.”
Not more Silver Angels, surely. Ishihara reached for a pen. “I’m listening.”
“Bloke got hit by a robot. One of those industrial things, not a proper robot.”
Ishihara opened his mouth and shut it again while his brain caught up.
Mikuni went on. “Fortunately, it’s in a robot factory …” Someone spoke in the background. “I mean, a research institute. Zecom. Big machine tool company, high profile, international connections.”
Okayama Head Office had probably put together a response team immediately.
“There’s no shortage of experts,” Mikuni said. “In fact, we’ve got one of yours as well.”
“What do you mean, one of ours?”
“I mean that foreigner you quoted in your report on your factory case. I noticed it in the bulletin this morning.”
“McGuire?”
Mikuni said something off to one side, then came back on again. “That’s the one. She discovered the body. Don’t quite know what to make of her evidence.”
Ishihara opened his mouth to say that McGuire wasn’t “his” foreigner, then shut it again.
“What do you mean?”
“She says it wasn’t an accident.”
“Give me an hour,” said Ishihara.
“Good.” Mikuni sounded relieved. “Go to the Zecom Industrial Engineering complex. If you’re driving, come off the highway at Kusakabe interchange. Or change from the fast train at Zecom Hayakawa and go to the last stop on the Zecom monorail.”
“No worries.” Leave it to Mikuni, a dry, observing part of him said. It’s not likely the two incidents are connected. McGuire can take care of herself. But his instinct screamed, “go,” and he knew better than to ignore it.
“Forensics are still crawling around here,” said Mikuni. “By the time you come we should have some results.”
“Right.” Ishihara signed off quickly and left.
* * *
Mikuni met him in the lobby at Zecom. A good thing, too, as he’d never have found his way in the huge complex. Mikuni hadn’t changed much—the horn-rimmed glasses still gave him the deceptive look of a mild-mannered academic. His solid frame was a bit thicker around the waist, and his short hair was still dark, but had receded to a fringe around his ears. Ishihara stopped himself from touching his own gray thatch of hair just in time.
“You were quick.” Mikuni pointed to a door at the back of the lobby. “We’ve got a temporary incident room set up in there.”
“What happened?” said Ishihara as they walked.
“One of the researchers, Shigeo Nakamura, got hit with a robot arm. Looks like an accident, but we’re not sure yet.”
“What aren’t you sure about?”
“Local constables found a window in a ground-floor toilet open. But the main building security system showed no intruders. Nobody on camera.” He ushered Ishihara into a small room, set up as an interview room with comfortable chairs and a small desk. It was also now crammed full of laptops and handcoms, uniform jackets on the back of chairs, briefcases and incident cases on the floor, and disposable coffee cups everywhere, many of them used as ashtrays.
“This is Assistant Inspector Ishihara from Osaka, West Station,” Mikuni announced to the two men and a woman who were arguing over something on a computer screen. They all said hello cheerfully and turned back to the screen.
Ishihara didn’t catch their names and didn’t worry about it.
“And?” he said to Mikuni.
“And your specialist says the robot was set up.” Mikuni picked up a coffee cup and swirled the dregs in the bottom. “How reliable is she?”
Ishihara raised a hand in protest. “I only talked to her briefly about that Osaka case. It seemed like she was pretty clued in about the industry.”
“I guess we should listen, then. We confirmed Nakamura did call her at seven-thirty. I’ve got one of our engineers standing by to examine the scene, but I wanted to let her explain first. We can always get our man to confirm what she says.” Mikuni took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. “You want to see the lab first, or the gaijin?”
“Is seeing the lab going to tell me anything?”
“Didn’t tell me much.”
Mikuni said that McGuire had been waiting in another meeting room for two hours. Ishihara hoped she wasn’t too pissed off—he didn’t want to waste time calming her down.
He needn’t have worried. She was curled up asleep in one of the low chairs, shoes on the floor beside her. She was wearing a cream suit, and looked small and pale against the dark pink cushions.
He hesitated, then coughed loudly.
She jumped and half sat, smoothing down her rumpled jacket in an automatic movement. Her face relaxed a bit as she recognized him. “What are you doing here?”
Ishihara inclined his head. “That’s my line.”
She squished her feet into her shoes and stood up, smoothing her hair. “If you’ve come to get me out of here, you can have any line you like.”
“Why are you here? Does it have anything to do with the death at Kawanishi Metalworks?”
She sighed. “I don’t know if it’s anything to do with the death. It’s certainly something to do with the robot. The welder, you remember?”
Ishihara nodded.
“Which reminds me.” She smacked her hand on her thigh in a flamboyantly foreign gesture. “My report on the Kawanishi robot is available. I suggest you request a copy.”
“Okay, but when did Nakamura …”
“I called Kawanishi this morning …” She glanced up at the wall clock. “Yesterday morning, to ask if they’d had any problems with their other welder, the Zecom one. They said no, but it had been recalled. So I called Zecom, who said they basically only recalled it as a PR exercise.”
She paused as if she didn’t want to go on.
“And?”
She avoided his eyes this time and spoke to the pink carpet. “I spoke to Nakamura in the morning. He called me back last night and said he wanted to tell me something about the welder. Or something connected with it. When I got here, he was dead.” She said the last quite flatly.
“Do you know what he wanted to tell you?” said Ishihara.
She shook her head.
“Why call you and not the police?” he wondered out loud.
McGuire shifted from one foot to the other, then looked up to meet his eyes directly. “He used to work at Tomita, in my department. Maybe he felt he could confide in me. Or maybe it wasn’t a matter for the police.”
Ishihara, momentarily distracted by the gray of her eyes, took out a cigarette and lit it. “Why did he leave your company?”
“He didn’t like the way we did things,” she said shortly.
Ishihara decided to leave it at that for the moment. “What did you tell Inspector Mikuni?”
She stared at the floor for what seemed a long time before replying, as though trying to decide something.
“It’s not what it seems.”
“What isn’t?”
“Nakimura’s … death.”
“Were you good friends?”
She snorted and looked up. “I couldn’t stand him.”
“Then don’t feel guilty if you’re not upset.”
“I’m not … this isn’t a matter of how I feel. The evidence points to murder.” She threw her hands up helplessly. “It sounds like a TV melodrama.”
“Show me.”
“He clocked in at seven-thirty last night,” said Mikuni. They were in an elevator on the way to the lab. “We’ve got witnesses who saw him eating dinner in the canteen after six-thirty, but he didn’t talk to anybody.”
“These researchers work all bloody hours.” Ishihara glanced at McGuire, but she stared blankly at the elevator doors.
“He wasn’t supposed to.” Mikuni let both Eleanor and Ishihara leave the elevator, then followed them out into the corridor. �
�They’re fussy here. He had to get written permission from his supervisor.”
“Who’s that?”
“Director of research. Fellow called Yui.”
“Weird name. Was he here when the body was discovered?”
“No, we called him at his apartment. He’s been overseas, only got back this afternoon.”
They went past the constable at the door of the lab and down to an area in the middle, cordoned off with familiar orange tape. McGuire looked a bit pale, but not like she was going to puke or anything.
A robot as tall as a man stood on a stand in the middle of the room, surrounded by equipment on a table and benches. He called it a “robot” in his mind, but it still only looked like an arm on a base, like a crane. Beside the robot was a chalked outline on the floor. Uniform branch liked their traditional chalked outlines.
“So what’s the problem?” said Mikuni. “What’s she going to show us?”
He looked at Ishihara as he spoke, as if expecting him to translate. Ishihara passed McGuire a pair of platex gloves and pulled on some himself.
She fiddled with controls at the bottom of the robot stand.
“I’m turning off the alarms,” she said, without looking up. “Please stand where Nakamura would have been standing when he fell.”
Ishihara looked at the chalk lines and positioned himself facing the table. ‘This right?”
“Yes,” said Mikuni and McGuire together.
Ishihara shifted one foot onto the rubber mat next to the robot and an alarm squawked, making everyone jump.
McGuire flicked a switch hurriedly. “Sorry.”
Ishihara waited, keeping an eye on the long robot arm.
“I’ve disengaged the grasping part of the program. And I’ve got my finger on the stop button.” She pointed to a large, red button on the other side of the robot’s control box.
With a shudder, the robot started up. Ishihara stood quite still. For an insane second he wondered if McGuire was behind both deaths and he’d just given her the chance to dispose of himself.
The robot’s arm moved quickly, but not too fast to follow. Back, forward, turn, dip swivel. And repeat.
Less Than Human Page 10