Isaac Asimov's I, Robot: To Preserve

by Mickey Zucker Reichert

  Jake loosed a laugh of his own. “Not likely. By the blood splatter, the book was closed at the time of the murder. Also, the perp clearly struck from behind, which means the victim never saw him.”

  Susan added, “A blow to the head as hard as the one Dr. Goldman sustained would have rendered him instantly unconscious. Unless, of course, there were multiple blows, in which case he would surely have spun around and fought back, not paused to write something in his notebook.”

  Jake apparently had the benefit of a report. “The coroner believes two hits, both with massive force. A remarkably strong man. Or, of course, a robot.”

  “Not a robot,” Susan said quickly. “Not possible.”

  Jake merely shrugged. Susan knew he was not judging, only letting them know what the police and coroner believed and why. He reached for the book. “So what were the last words of Dr. Ari Goldman?”

  Instinctively, Susan grabbed Jake’s arm to stop him. Peters and Pal also leapt toward him, and they all nearly collided.

  Jake stopped in midmovement. “What?”

  Still clutching his arm, Susan explained, “Aren’t we supposed to leave everything exactly as it was?”

  Jake turned his head toward Susan slowly, as if to give her time to come to her senses. “Forever?” He raised his brows. “Like as a shrine to the murder?”

  Peters retreated. “The police investigation is over. They cleared the scene for regular use.”

  Susan understood the point but still had one of her own. “What if the location of something at the time of the murder is the clue? What if we start moving things around and miss it?”

  Instead of disengaging Susan’s fingers, Jake picked up the book with his left hand. “I guarantee you some things have already been moved.”

  Peters bobbed his head. “Like that book, for one. The only reason the police didn’t take it as evidence was because I told them I needed the information written inside it for a lifesaving study. They argued about it but finally left it provided I guarantee them access to it.”

  Jake continued. “Moving things is the only way to find clues buried under other clues. Besides, we have several hundred pictures at the station if the exact location of anything becomes important.”

  Susan finally let go of Jake, feeling a bit foolish. “So, what were the last words of Dr. Goldman?”

  Jake leafed through the laboratory book, the others staring over his shoulders. What appeared to be lines and lines of typewritten text and numbers interspaced with precise graphs and mathematical formulae met Susan’s gaze. Each page also contained an outlined box. Most of those were filled with scrawled, handwritten paragraphs, punctuated by far too many exclamation points and seemingly random capitalizations.

  Cody Peters added the important details. “The legible stuff was written by Nate, all of which would have been dictated by or delineated by Ari. Nate could write a lot faster and neater, and he could do the complicated math and graphics in his head. Ari would just say, ‘Graph that information,’ and Nate could do it remarkably quickly.”

  Susan found herself enjoying a touch of pride at the description, though she had no real right to it. She had had no hand in Nate’s creation.

  Pal stepped back to give Jake a bit of room. “What was the reason for the primordial book and ballpoint? Couldn’t he have done it all a lot faster with a palm-pross?”

  Peters shrugged. “That was Ari. He worried he’d damage or destroy anything electronic, and he had reason. He went through more Vox than anyone I ever heard of.”

  Jake returned to the significant. “So all the stuff in the boxes was written by the victim?”

  “He had those journals specially made. Our agreement was that anything written inside a boxed area was ‘off the record.’ None of it would appear in any papers, articles, or descriptions.” Peters added with a shrug, “Not that anyone could read it, anyway.”

  “I can read some of it,” Jake announced. “It appears to say, ‘Ran me out of GD tubes again.’” He hesitated, then squinted. “Then it’s a name, I think. Maybe starts with S. Then a bunch of exclamation points.”

  Peters kept his mouth clamped, but a grin spread across it. “I believe he was addressing me.”

  Pal leaned in again. “How can you tell?”

  “Because I’m the only one who reads the Ari boxes, for one thing. When he gets miffed at me, he uses some . . . um . . . interesting nicknames. Schnook, shmegegge, klutz, which I’m told means a block of wood in Yiddish. I know he’s actually angry when he reverts to six or seven years old and calls me jerkface or poopdog.” Cody Peters laughed, clearly to show Goldman never meant, nor did Peters take, anything offensive from the exchanges.

  “So what’s the S word here?” Jake held out the book to Peters, who had already examined it with the police.

  Dutifully, Peters accepted the book, turned it around, and looked at the open page. “I believe that’s the classic S-head.” A flush flashed across his cheeks. “Honest, though. He only resorted to profanity when I did something unbelievably stupid.”

  “Like run him out of GD tubes?” Pal pointed out the fallacy in the argument. “That’s hardly a capital offense.”

  “First of all, I believe the GD part is shorthand for a different profanity. I really ran him out of Schmidt capillary tubes.” Peters leafed through the book, though he had obviously done so many times in the past. “More precisely, he ran himself out of them. You need some history to understand why it’s a swearing offense.”

  Peters handed the book back to Jake with a caveat. “I’ve looked through here a few times since the murder. There’s nothing different from before, aside from his notes from the night of September first, which mesh perfectly with the project.”

  Pal filled in the gaps. “So the first blow must have happened quickly and without warning.”

  The coroner’s report, as described by Jake, gibed with Pal’s suggestion, and it seemed likely, but Susan was not ready to place it in the category of indisputable fact. “It’s still possible he left the bench, closed the book, and went to investigate something.”

  Pal contradicted Susan’s thought. “Possible. But if he did, he must have dismissed it because the murder clearly happened right here, exactly where he would have been sitting while writing in the book.”

  Susan sighed. She doubted the book would hold any useful information or clues, at least to the killer or killers.

  Jake suggested, “At this stage, it’s often best to try to re-create the situation in chronological order.” He placed the book carefully on a clean section of desk. “Dr. Peters—”

  “Cody,” Peters insisted. “I feel weird being the only one in the room called by his title.”

  Jake amended, “Cody, tell us exactly what you did in the last moments you saw your partner alive.”

  Cody complied. “Ari was working here most of the day.” He pointed to the stool where the murder had obviously been committed. “I was dividing time between here”—he tapped the back of the stool sitting catty-corner to Ari Goldman’s—“and at my desk.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Then I got the call.”

  “Call?” Jake said.

  “Right.” Cody rubbed his brow. “From Eastside Hospital. I remember it was one o’clock exactly because we were just headed to the cafeteria for lunch. I was told my daughter was asking for me, but I couldn’t get any more information over Vox. Harper was twenty-three weeks pregnant with twins, just at the edge of viability, so I got worried.”

  Jake asked a strange question. “Male or female caller?”

  “Female,” Peters replied without hesitation. “Identified herself as a nurse practitioner. Isabella, I think. I asked about my wife and son-in-law, but she said she was just the one instructed to call. She didn’t know anything. I told Ari I’d start calling around for more information, but he told me to just go. Go! Said he�
��d already made arrangements for Nate to come help, and he was more useful than me anyway at the best of times.”

  “Nice partner,” Pal muttered.

  Cody must have heard him, because he came immediately to Ari Goldman’s defense. “It was his way of putting me at ease, of letting me know I didn’t have to worry about the project, to focus all my thoughts on Harper. Ari teased me a lot, but I gave as good as I got. It worked for us, and we did some pretty spectacular research together.”

  Susan nodded vigorously. “The best. So . . . you left immediately?”

  “Not quite.” Cody relived the moments in this head. “I headed back to the lab.”

  “Was it locked?” Jake asked.

  Peters grimaced and shook his head. “Not over lunch, no. We weren’t working with any particularly valuable materials, not on this project, anyway. Many of the other labs had people in them, and we look out for one another. I wouldn’t have thought a thief could slip in and ransack one; the noise would draw attention, unless maybe he knew exactly what he was looking for and where.”

  “A murderer managed,” Pal pointed out.

  Susan looked at Nate. He hovered with the others, but he had not spoken a word since his initial “yuck.” The conversation, thus far, pointed to someone invited into the lab, such as Nate.

  Cody could scarcely deny it. “That’s a bit different, though. A person would not necessarily attract suspicion unless he acted in a suspicious manner. It’s kind of expected that, if you’re working with something valuable, say gold or nanorobots, you keep the door locked.”

  Susan put the theory to the test. “Did anyone check on you when you came back to the lab?”

  Cody squinted. “How do you mean?”

  “Well,” she pointed out, “the two of you had already left for lunch, so your return should have caused others to peek out and make sure it wasn’t someone sneaking into your lab.”

  Peters’ mouth screwed into a knot, and he waited several moments before answering. “Not that I noticed, but it’s possible. My mind would have dismissed a glance from a neighbor as normal. Plus, I had other things on my mind.”

  Jake examined the desks thoroughly, though it seemed unlikely he would see anything the police had missed at ground zero. “So what did you do next?”

  Peters walked to the door as he relived those moments of his life. “I came inside. I had already taken off my lab coat for lunch and hung it on my chair, so I went over to my desk and put it back on.” He took a few long strides from the now-closed door to his desk, pretended to whip a lab coat from the back of his chair, and pantomimed putting his arms through the sleeves. “I then went to my workstation.” He walked to the four-table arrangement, around to the other side. “At that time, I had some test tubes in the rack, some beakers with fluid in them, and my palm-pross sitting there.” He indicated the surface of the desk opposite Goldman’s.

  “I opened this drawer.” Cody tugged a handle, and the drawer slid out easily. “Put my stuff carefully inside it.” He looked down, then back up to his audience. “It’s all there. I checked.” He shoved the drawer back in. “I then went to the storage closet.”

  “Why?” Jake asked.

  Peters shrugged. “We have hangers for our lab coats on the back of the door there, and that’s where we leave them when we’re done for the day. Habit more than anything.” He crossed the room and opened the storage closet. Again, it yielded soundlessly. “I took off my coat.” He pretended again. “And slung it onto my hook, where it is right now.”

  As one, the entire group moved to the closet to peek inside. Neat metal shelving filled most of the space to the right, piled with boxes. One was tipped on its side, partially filled with capillary tubes. Several loose tubes, clearly from the spilled box, lay across the railings of the shelving, and shards of several more covered the floor, some ground to dust. Across from the open door into the lab, a small window stood half-open, admitting a light, late-summer breeze and a view of the neighboring building, a windowless warehouse nearly as tall as Hassenfeld Research Tower. To the left, Susan saw a small sink with a soap dispenser and a mirror above the basin.

  Casually, Peters stepped into the storage room, righted the fallen box, partially closed the window, then frowned at the carnage on the floor. “Ari would never have let this mess sit.”

  Pal asked, “Are those the Schmidt capillary tubes?”

  “As a matter of fact.” Peters continued to study the floor, but Susan turned her attention to his laboratory coat. Something there had caught her eye. “What’s this clipped to the lapel?”

  “Where?” Cody turned to look at the indicated object, then rolled his eyes and gave Susan a disdainful look. “Surely you’ve seen those before, Susan. The radiologists and techs wear them around the hospital.”

  Susan nodded. She had noticed them before, but she had never been issued one herself. “They have something to do with radiation exposure.”

  Peters got down to the specifics. “It’s called a dosimeter. Anyone at risk of significant radiation exposure is issued one monthly. When the new one comes in, you send the old one back. The lab does its magic and decides how much and what type of radiation exposure you had, if any. If they find anything significant, they’re supposed to initiate a full examination of the cause. And, of course, treat you, if warranted. If not, they have to decide if it’s enough to place you on leave or reassign you permanently or temporarily.”

  Pal asked the question on every mind. “Do you use much radiation in your experiments?”

  “None so far.” Cody moved closer to Susan. “But other labs on the floor do, off and on, and it’s easier to just issue badges to everyone here than to constantly ask what they’re working on day to day.” He unclipped the badge from his lapel, examining it more closely. His brow furrowed. “This isn’t right.”

  “What do you mean?” Jake asked.

  “The color.” Peters pointed to the badge. “It’s usually a brilliant white. This one’s dull, almost brown. I’ve never seen that before.”

  Everything fell together in Susan’s mind. “I know what happened.” She cupped her hands around the badge in Peters’ grip, as if afraid he might drop it. “This all makes sense.”

  Silence followed Susan’s proclamation, and every eye fixated on her. Without explaining, she added, “We need to get this analyzed immediately. Where do they do that?”

  “The same place they do patient testing. Basement of Mayner Pavilion.”

  “I can take it,” Pal offered.

  “Thanks,” Cody said, “but that’s not necessary. I’ll use the tube.”

  “The tube?” Susan had never heard of it.

  Dr. Peters smiled. “When they first built Manhattan Hasbro, when it was still New York Presbyterian, they put in a pneumatic tube transport system. It was common practice at the time for sending medications, notes, samples, results, stuff like that, around the hospital. Now we have significant numbers of volunteers and couriers in the hospital itself, and results are sent electronically, but here we still use the PTT quite a bit. It’s been updated since the late nineteenth century, of course. It’s computer controlled now, so you can actually track the cylinders through the vacuum, and they don’t end their journey with the slam that sometimes used to break more fragile items, no matter how carefully they were packed. At one time, I understand, you could hear the tubes banging through the walls all over the hospital, day and night.”

  Cody liberated his hand from Susan’s, fished around the back of the shelves, and retrieved a cylindrical plastic container. He opened it to reveal a padded interior and a plastic self-sealing bag. He placed the badge into the bag, snuggled it into the padding, then closed the cylinder. With everyone following curiously, he carried it out of the lab to the end of the hallway, where a plastic box with a keyboard hung on the wall. He placed the oversized pellet into a hole, typed someth
ing on the keys; then the cylinder disappeared with a breathy whoosh.

  Turning, Cody found Susan, Pal, Jake, and Nate directly in his path. He stiffened a bit, then smiled. “And that’s how it’s done.” He tapped his Vox a couple of times. A voice came over the speaker. “Radiation Lab, this is Aiden.”

  “Hi, Aiden. This is Cody Peters from Hassenfeld Tower.”

  “I see that. Shouldn’t you be . . . anywhere except work? I’m so sorry about . . . what happened.”

  “Thank you.” Cody pursed his lips. “We’re doing a bit of sleuthing, and we happened to notice an irregularity of my dosimeter. I’m tubing it to you now. Can you do a stat check?”

  Aiden hesitated. “Sure, Doc. Anything. But you do realize you’ve only worn it a week, right?”

  Cody gave Susan a look.

  Susan explained. “We think it might have taken a hit of radiation. Does your test distinguish a pulse from background stuff?”

  Aiden sounded almost offended. “Even the old film badges could do that. Ours are a lot more sophisticated, with multiple chips and materials. In just a few minutes, I can tell the amount and type of radiation exposure, even the date and approximate times. Is that what you need?”

  Susan nodded excitedly.

  “Yes,” Cody said. “Exactly.”

  “Ah! It’s arrived, Doc. I’ll get on it right away and call you back.”

  “Great! Thanks.” Cody broke off contact, then headed back toward the laboratory. “You are going to clue us in on what you’re thinking, right Susan?”

  Jake guessed. “This has something to do with the analysis of Nate’s battery, doesn’t it?”