Isaac Asimov's I, Robot: To Preserve

by Mickey Zucker Reichert

  Jake swore viciously. Lunging across the console, he grabbed Susan’s left wrist, all that he could reach, and jerked her back toward the passenger seat. His effort allowed him to wrap his other arm around her head and force her back into the car. The moment he had most of Susan inside, the car leapt forward. Poised between dropping into her seat and tumbling onto the parking lot through the still-open door, Susan made the decision more geared to her survival. Instinctively, she threw her weight toward the center of the car, and the momentum of its takeoff made the door swing closed.

  Susan grabbed the handle with her injured arm, anticipating a fierce stab of agony that never came. It hurt, but not nearly as badly as she anticipated, and the pain seemed confined to her shoulder. As the car bumped over the concrete parking stop and into the grass lane, Susan yelled, “Stop! We can’t leave Kendall!”

  Jake clutched the steering wheel with one hand and reached toward several buttons on the dash. “He’s dead,” he said, eerily calm.

  The words did not register. “Jake! We need to save Kendall!” Susan looked over her shoulder, the movement stinging. “Kendall’s not in the car!”

  “He’s dead, Susan. Kendall is dead.”

  This time, Susan understood, but his words invoked only rage. An image popped into her mind of Kendall cradling Jake after the Cadmium agent had shot him in the head. Though they had all been warned they would be killed if they moved, Kendall had run to Jake’s aid, had staunched the bleeding even as he assessed the injuries and realized the policeman was still, impossibly, alive. Kendall had wept over Jake’s body, pronounced the man he loved dead, a convincing enough act to fool everyone in the room, including Susan.

  Now, it was Jake’s turn, and he had abandoned Kendall like a discarded rag. The comparison made Susan’s blood boil, but she could do nothing about it other than protest. “Jake, Kendall loves you! He would do anything for you! Anything! You have to save him. Go back! Go back!”

  Jake’s voice was stern. “Susan, get your door shut and locked. Tend to your injury. There’s nothing we can do for Kendall. He’s dead.”

  Susan continued to rage at Jake, but none of it mattered. He had, apparently, stopped listening to her, focused on the road, on his dash. “Central, Chief of Detectives Portable! Shots fired First Avenue Seven Two to Seven Three Street! Have Hasbro standby. Bringing one civilian in. Gunshot wound to chest, K!”

  Susan shouted over Jake, “What if he’s not dead? What if your unwillingness to let me assist killed him? What if . . . ?”

  A reply came over the dash. “Copy, Portable! On the line with EMS!” There followed a series of loud beeps, then, “In the confines of the Nineteenth Precinct, a signal 10-13! Shots fired! Over the air, units to respond to?” Jake waited until the other speaker finished before muting his connection. “Susan, Kendall never knew what hit him.”

  “You’re not a doctor!” Susan was screaming.

  “I saw what happened, Susan. He collapsed straight down, no movement of any kind. Material flew from his right ear. I’m sorry, Susan, but Kendall is dead. Any hesitation on our part, and we would have joined him.”

  To allow the information to sink in meant accepting the blame for Kendall’s death. Susan knew the shooter had no reason to kill anyone but her. She was a mortal danger to everyone around her. Not Kendall. No, no, not Kendall. Susan finally looked at the object still gripped in her hand. It was a quarter Kendall had dropped, a measly twenty-five cents. Had she not crouched to retrieve it, she felt certain, the bullet would have passed through her head instead of his. I killed him as surely as if I pulled the trigger.

  Tears sprang to Susan’s eyes, and the coin became a silver-colored blur. Finally, she pulled the door closed far enough that it clicked, then locked itself. The seat belt scrolled across her torso and snapped into place.

  The same voice came over the dash speaker. “Chief of Detectives Portable, any description on perps, K?”

  Jake replied, shouting into the dash. “Negative, Central. We didn’t see them. Possibly two perps. Possibly from 1354 First Avenue.”

  This time, Susan waited until Jake finished. “Are you sure . . .”

  Jake gave a definitive, sorrowful nod. “Trust me. It’s very apparent to people who do this for a living. The shot took out his central nervous system so fast and fully, he never even knew he’d been hit.” He changed the subject abruptly. “Where were you hit?”

  “Behind the right shoulder,” Susan said dully. It seemed inappropriate to worry about her small wound when Kendall lay dead in a parking lot, but her medical training arose without intention. She had seen so many movies and shows, read so many books, where the main character was “only” shot in the shoulder. There was blood and pain, but it never prevented Hero from winning the day; and he always regained full use of his injured arm, often in moments.

  Susan knew better. The shoulder contained a unique arrangement of bones and tendons, the rotator cuff, and, more important, the subclavian artery and brachial plexus. A gunshot wound anywhere could kill a man. One that opened the subclavian artery would cause a fast and fatal bleed, internally or externally. Damage to the brachial plexus might permanently affect the use of the arm or cause debilitating pain that required surgical correction.

  Even the current relative lack of pain did not soothe Susan. Adrenaline and excitement or, worse, shock, could easily account for it. Pain did not always correlate with damage. Brains and eyes had no pain receptors, yet a bullet through either was far more frequently fatal. Statistics rose to her mind: two-thirds of people sustaining gunshot wounds to the head died before reaching a hospital. Overall, the fatality rate was greater than ninety-two percent, and nearly half of those survivors suffered moderate or severe permanent disabilities. If the bullet had passed from one side of Kendall’s head to the other, it had to have perforated both hemispheres of his brain, which diminished survival to essentially zero. Jake was right; Kendall was dead.

  Susan finally checked her shoulder. A hole cut through her shirt, the material around it and her skin sticky with blood. Cautiously, she eased the short sleeve toward her body to reveal the shoulder joint. The injury appeared to be posterior, close to the scapula, which made it almost impossible for her to examine. The bleeding did not seem significant, at least externally. When she palpated the area, she found abraded tissue and sharp pain. The axillary and anterior areas appeared unaffected. She moved the arm tentatively. It hurt, but she could move it through the full range the car and her automatic seat belt allowed.

  Jake addressed Susan softly, apparently worried she would verbally assault him again. “How bad is it, Doc?”

  All the fight had left Susan. She felt suddenly cold, and trembling overtook her extremities. “It’s tough to examine oneself under the best of circumstances, but I don’t think it’s serious. There’s no exit wound, so the bullet is either still inside or never actually penetrated.”

  “Assuming it was the same weapon as—” Jake broke off, clearly not wanting to bring the conversation back to Kendall. “I’d expect it to either pass clean through or cause a lot of damage and pain. My bet’s on a ricochet, either from a projectile or a chip off the driveway. Or we could be dealing with two different shooters or calibers.”

  At the moment, those details did not matter to Susan. “Did I hear you say you were taking me to Hasbro?”

  “It’s the closest hospital. Do you know of a better place?”

  Susan did not want to waste time in the hospital nor weather the stares of her previous fellow residents. More important, she did not want to answer any questions about Kendall. “If it’s just a ricochet, can’t I deal with it at home? Some cleaning supplies, a bandage . . .”

  “I’m not a doctor.” Jake threw Susan’s own words back at her. “And I don’t have X-ray vision. You might still have a bullet lodged inside you, and I’m not going to have you dropping dead on me because it move
d into some vital area.”

  Jake reached for the buttons. “I’m going to contact Central. The faster I feed them info, the less likely I get jammed up again.”

  Feces magnet, Susan reminded herself as Jake addressed the dash.

  “Central, one civilian down front of Alphonse’s! GSW to the head! Have a bus respond there forthwith.”

  He received an immediate reply. “Ten-four, Portable.”

  “Two minutes, Central.” Jake had just told them their estimated arrival time at Hasbro, Susan guessed.

  A different voice spoke: “Nineteen Charlie emergency message! Get me a bus here forthwith! One down GSW to the head, K!”

  A new voice: “Nineteen Adam eighty-four.”

  Then, back to the previous speaker: “Nineteen Sergeant eighty-four, Central.”

  Jake pulled into the Emergency Room and cut the engine. “Eighty-four at Hasbro, Central. Can you have the squad meet us at this location?”

  “Eighty-four” apparently meant arrival. Susan reached for her own Vox. She needed to let Pal know what had happened and where to find them.

  • • •

  Susan and Pal got home from the hospital around two a.m. She flopped down in her favorite, padded chair, careful not to jar her bandaged shoulder. The pain had lessened to a dull ache, surely aided by the painkillers and anti-inflammatories the hospital had pumped into her. The X-rays had not shown any bullets or fragments, no cracked or broken bones. She had sustained a deep abrasion, surrounded by significant bruising and some soft tissue swelling, nothing worse. Apparently, the bullet had either grazed her or struck her only after its velocity had been lessened by passing through other material or bouncing from another object. She had been very lucky.

  Pal perched on the arm of the chair, placing his well-muscled arm across Susan’s uninjured shoulder. His warm presence comforted her, and she lazily snuggled against him. “I’m so sorry about Kendall. I know what it’s like to suddenly lose someone close to you.”

  Susan knew he did. She felt empty, dead inside, selfish for the fuss the Emergency Room staff had made over her relatively minuscule wound. “This has to end.”

  Pal stroked Susan’s left shoulder. “Everything ends, Susan. One way or another.”

  Pal was right, of course, in a practical sense. “I’m sick to death of watching friends and family threatened, injured, murdered because of me.” Tears sprang to eyes already puffy and swollen from crying.

  “Not because of you,” Pal pointed out, exactly what Susan needed to hear. “It’s in no way your fault that the SFH wants you dead.”

  Susan knew that was also correct, but she could not disabuse herself of the responsibility. Nothing she had done caused the SFH to want her dead, but she had dragged others into harm’s way. “Pal, maybe it would be better if I joined the witness protection program or something.” The idea of living under an assumed identity in some foreign city did not appeal to her. Far from all the things that mattered to her, all the things that made her Susan Calvin, she might just as well be dead.

  Pal looked pained, forced to speak words he clearly would rather not have spoken. “I don’t think you qualify. First of all, you’re not a witness to anything. You have to have significant value to the police or government for them to spend the time and money, unfortunately.”

  At one point, Susan knew, she might have had such value, when the Department of Defense also believed she had the same code that caused the Society for Humanity to want her dead. She now realized it would have been wiser to convince the SFH it did not exist and leave the DoD believing it did. Not that she had any control over who believed her and who did not. “If I’m dead, the SFH will no longer have reason to bother my friends.” She would have added “and family,” but she no longer had any living relatives, at least none she knew of.

  “That’s . . . not an option.” Pal spoke firmly.

  Susan remembered their conversation after the last shooting, when Pal had saved her life. “What about . . . what we talked about? Do you really think it’s possible the code does exist despite my father’s denial, despite the fact that Cadmium shredded our apartment twice and, apparently, found nothing?” It seemed ridiculous to even consider such a thing. Susan believed John Calvin with all her heart. Still, she knew her father would have done anything to protect her, even lie. He had used ignorance as a way to protect her in the past; she had not learned his significance to USR until two years ago. What made her so certain he would not do so again?

  “I don’t know,” Pal admitted. “But I think finding it is worth a try. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

  Susan nodded tiredly, wiping her stinging eyes. “I suppose that’s true, but I told you before. I have no idea where to look.”

  “But now you’ve had time to think about it, and it’s become a priority. Surely you’ve given it some thought since our last conversation.”

  Susan had not had much free time to devote to the project, certainly not enough to type or dictate anything into a palm-pross or Vox. She had managed to consider the matter at night when she lay in bed, when anxieties precluded sleep. “Literally nothing survived the DoD ransack, not even the walls themselves. They took everything portable and had plenty of time to examine it, yet they still continued to go after me.”

  Pal shifted his weight, placing a bit more on Susan without putting any pressure on the injury. “I think we’ve already established that the DoD didn’t find the code. It’s your mind we still have to search.”

  Susan nodded. It felt as if months, not days, had passed since their conversation. “My father and I read every day. I can name several favorites when I was a child, but those were ones I picked, not him. As I learned to read, I did most of the choosing. He’d sit and listen to me for hours, helping me with the more difficult words. By the time I was ten or eleven, I picked my own reading material. He might have suggested a few things he had liked as a kid, but he never insisted. Some I read, some I didn’t.”

  Pal bobbed his head, mouth pursing thoughtfully. “Make me several lists. One could be books your father suggested, another books you read repeatedly together, another books he chose to read to you. I’ll work on those while you’re doing what you have to do to free Lawrence.” He paused, then added, “Did he do much singing?”

  “Lawrence?”

  “Your father.”

  Slightly drug-addled, Susan shook her head and let her mind wander back to her childhood. “No. When I was really little, he used to sing me to sleep after reading. I’ll make a list of those songs, too.”

  “Movies? Television shows?”

  Susan considered. “The DoD stole all of our media. They could bring up anything we accessed over the last several years, at least. Probably most of the reading material, too.”

  “But they could have missed something,” Pal pointed out. “So a list of what you watched, especially together, might help.”

  Fatigue bore down on Susan. Her head sank.

  Pal noticed immediately. He took all of his weight off her and sat up straight. “Time to sleep?”

  Susan wished she could. “I’m still too keyed up. If I lie down, I’m just going to start sobbing again. I don’t think I’m going to be able to fall asleep until my head can’t hold thoughts anymore.”

  Pal went back to questioning. “Did your father have any safe-deposit boxes, lockers, mail slots? Did he have a desk or cabinet at work we could examine?”

  “Dad didn’t have any outside hobbies. There was a bank box with a few important papers in it: birth certificates, diplomas. The few things people still put on paper to preserve. I’ll show them to you if you want to examine them.”

  “Please.”

  Susan rose, and dizziness washed down on her. She waited until the stars and squiggles passed and the room returned to its normal contours before walking into the bedroom and openi
ng the drawer in an end table. She pulled out the papers, carried them back to the chair, and dropped into it. She felt as if cotton wool filled her skull.

  Gently, Pal liberated the papers from her hands and set them on the coffee table. “Are you sure you can’t sleep, Susan? You look like death walking.”

  “I’m still walking?” Susan’s words sounded as if they came from a distance.

  Pal laughed.

  “Lawrence and I went through everything in my father’s shared office. The only thing remotely resembling a code we’ve managed to turn up was the message he sent me after his death.”

  Pal gripped Susan’s arm. “What?”

  Susan explained. “He didn’t write it after his death, of course. He scheduled it to show up in my Vox after his death.”

  “You saved it.” It was not a question.

  “Of course I saved it, but it won’t make sense to you. It directed me to a smart port key he had taped under a specific bench near our apartment.” Susan tapped at her Vox to bring the message back. She had read it several times in the lonely days following John Calvin’s murder but rarely in the past year and not at all in the last several months: “No1 evr loved any1 > I loved u. R spiritual plce. Dad.” She showed it to Pal.

  Pal grasped her wrist to hold the Vox steady. After a moment, he said, “Sweet. Where is your spiritual place?”

  “The bench. When we went to it, we took sniper fire from the SFH but did manage to find the port key.”

  “You mean one of those old-fashioned thingies they used to use to link devices before the Net went fully global?”

  “Yup. But a selective programmable one. We had to find the right two devices to connect in order to get his message.”

  “Did you?”

  “Eventually.”

  Susan twisted in her chair to face Pal. “It spit out a message that required first Nate, then me to decode it.”

  Pal stared. A light flashed through his pale eyes. “That has to be the uncoupling code, Susan. With what else would he have taken so much caution?”