Jubal frowned and pulled on his nose as if he were not artistically satisfied with its proportions. ''What on earth does hypno-keying have to do with all of this?"
"I won't go into that now," St. Cyr said. "Besides, Tina can give you a much better lecture on the topic than I can."
Jubal looked at his daughter, perplexed, but she did not raise her eyes to meet his.
Possibility: Hypno-keying has unsettled Dane Alderban's mind. His reliance on superstitions would seem to indicate this and might also evidence an underlying taint of more serious psychosis.
At most: neurosis.
Psychosis.
St. Cyr ignored the other half of his symbiote and said, "For a long while, I suspected Jubal." The old man looked away from Tina, his face coloring. "From the beginning, Jubal insisted that I should look outside of the family for the killer, and he would not entertain for a moment any other likelihood. Each time that he attempted to redirect my attention away from a member of the family, I had to wonder about his intent. Now it seems clear that this was only naivet�. Secondly, I was unfavorably impressed with Jubal's lack of emotional response to the deaths of his children. He seemed to view it all with a detached, almost academic sterility. Again, it was Tina who made me see how hypno-keying could be responsible for this unemotional reaction. And since Jubal has been a hypno-keyed artist a good deal longer than anyone else in the family, he has had more time to grow even cooler and more impersonal than his children are rapidly becoming."
"What the hell is this?" the old man asked. This time, St. Cyr noticed that Jubal's rage even appeared to be acquired rather than genuine, as if he were imitating an actor he admired. St. Cyr could not be angry with him now. He could only pity him.
"Finally," St. Cyr said, not answering the question, "Jubal seemed suspect because of his reluctance to allow the family to be armed with deadly weapons. It appears now that this was only due to some genuine dislike for weaponry."
"Of course it was," Jubal said. "And what motive would I have had for killing my own family?"
"The same motive Dane had — no motive at all. You could have been mentally unbalanced." He turned immediately to Alicia and said, "Then I suspected you. For one thing, you were the only one in the family who wept at Betty's death. That made you suspect simply because it was a different sort of reaction. When Tina explained that you had undergone hypno-keying much later in life than the others in the family, when you married Jubal, I felt that you were even more of a candidate for prison. What must it have been like, all these years, being at least somewhat emotional and caring in a house of people growing constantly more machinelike, colder, more selfish."
"It hasn't been easy," she said.
Jubal looked stunned. St. Cyr thought he really was, for once, what he appeared to be.
"But," the woman said, I've had the guitar, my music, for comfort."
"You've left me," Tina said, after a long moment of silence.
St. Cyr sensed the ripple of surprise that passed through the others, heard Hirschel's quickly drawn breath of disbelief, waited for all of that to subside. He said, "You came on the list of possibilities when I learned that you were the only one in the family who fully understood what hypno-keying had done to you and the only one in the family who seemed to be angry that your life had been perverted, against your will, before you were old enough to understand what was happening. It seemed distinctly possible that you might have become unbalanced by having to live with this realization for years, and that you might have felt that murdering your brothers and sisters, one-by-one, was the most fitting revenge on your father. Then again, you're a bright girl, too intelligent not to realize that Jubal's life has been tainted by hypno-keying, too, and that when he had each of you treated, he could not be said to be a rational man making a rational choice."
"But you still suspected me." She was still looking at her hands.
"Yes. You lived separate from the others. At a glance, that seemed to be because of the space limitations on other floors. However, it was soon clear to me that, with your family's resources, you could have adapted any part of the house to make a fine studio. You wanted to be separate from them. Perhaps because you hated them."
"Felt sorry for them," she corrected. "I didn't want to have to see them."
"Finally," the cyberdetective said, "I was wary of the relationship that seemed to be growing between us — at the same time that I encouraged it. Had I become sexually involved with you, or had I allowed my fondness for you to become something deeper than mere liking, my judgment in your sphere would have been severely affected."
"Very logical," she said. Her voice was bitter, not at all pleasant. St. Cyr thought that there might even be tears in it.
"I have to be."
"It's your job."
"Yes."
She looked at him for the first time now, and she did have tears in the corners of her eyes. She said, "Anything else I did that was suspicious?"
Yes, he thought, you always seemed, somehow, to be an extension of my nightmare, an analogue of the stalker…
Illogical.
He knew it was illogical even without the bio-computer's judgment. "No other reasons," he said.
Jubal roused himself. "But why do you hate your hypno-keyed talents, Tina? I don't understand. How can you hate me enough to murder your own brothers and sisters?"
"She didn't," St. Cyr said.
Jubal said, "What?"
"She didn't murder them."
They all looked at him again, surprised more than before. He saw that Tina was shocked too, and he realized that she had expected him to prove logically that she was the killer even though she was not. That made him feel tired and ill.
"Then what has been the purpose of all of this?" Hirschel asked.
"As I said when I started, I wanted you to see that I have been very careful to consider every angle before making an outright accusation. I want you to understand that I haven't been rash."
You are being rash now, and you know it.
I have proof.
You seem to. But what you are about to suggest is impossible.
"Who is it, then?" Hirschel asked
St. Cyr got a grip on the table and said, evenly, though the bio-computer still tried to reason him out of vocalizing the absurdity, 'Teddy, the master unit, killed all four of them."
THIRTEEN: Proof
"But that's impossible!" Dane was the first to realize that they were no longer restricted to the open floor and that the cyberdetective would no longer be suspicious of any movement in his direction. He got to his feet and approached the detective, shaking his finger like a schoolmaster from the old days making a point with a misbehaving child. "You're grasping at straws to keep from admitting the truth, what we all know is the truth, that the du-aga-klava—"
"I have proof," St. Cyr said.
Hirschel was on his feet now, obviously intrigued by the prospect of a murderous robot but reluctant to believe it. "What about the Three Laws of Robotics? They've never been proven wrong before. Robots didn't turn against man as everyone once feared they might. Those three directives keep it from happening."
"There is a simple flaw in all those laws," St. Cyr said. "They leave out the human equation."
"Look," Hirschel said, approaching the detective and pointing at his own palm as if all of this were written there. "The First Law of Robotics: 'A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.' "
"Unless," St. Cyr amended, "he has been programmed especially to circumvent that directive."
"Programmed to kill?" Tina asked. She was standing next to him, her long black hair tucked behind her ears, out of mourning now.
"To kill," St. Cyr affirmed.
But Hirschel was not finished. He proceeded, almost as if he were reading a litany: 'The Second Law of Robotics—'A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.'"
/> "But," St, Cyr pointed out, "if the First Law was already circumvented to a large degree, the robot would unfailingly obey an order to kill."
Convinced yet not convinced, Hirschel recited the Third Law: "A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.'"
"Teddy will protect himself, despite the fact that it might mean killing to do it, because the First and Second Laws have no application in his case."
"But this is unheard of!" Hirschel said. Despite his insistence, it was evident that he had been convinced and that he looked upon the affair as one of those moments of excitement he traveled from world to world in search of. His dark eyes were bright.
"Perhaps it isn't as unheard of as we think. Perhaps the robot industries have encountered such misprogramming before but have always managed to catch it before much damage was done, and to quiet the news media about it." He lifted the paper sack, then decided not to use that just yet. "For instance, I have a feeling that Salardi was on the run from private police hired by one of the major robot design and construction companies in the Inner Galaxy. I know he was a roboticist on the archaeological expedition, for he told me that much himself." He turned to Dane and said, "Did Salardi know about the killings down here?"
"You told him," Dane said. "Just the other day when you asked him those questions."
"That was the first he had heard of it?"
"It looked that way to me," Dane said. "He was a hermit of sorts. I hadn't talked to him in six months, since the last time I interviewed him to gather background for my book."
"Norya knew about the killings," St. Cyr said.
"But in confidence, as we planned how to make the authorities follow up on the du-aga-klava lead. Norya is exceedingly — professional. She would never gossip about such things to anyone."
"Then Salardi learned of the clueless murders when I told him about them the other day. He had a few days to think about them and — perhaps because he had once illegally mis-programmed a robot himself — realized that Teddy could be to blame. When he came to tell us, he made the mistake of addressing part or all of his business to the house computer that welcomed him. Teddy has a tie-in to the house computer and got to him before anyone knew he was here. Not having time to perform the sort of misleading slaughter he had on the other victims, he quickly broke Salardi's neck."
"You think Salardi once programmed a robot to kill?" Tina asked.
"Not necessarily. Perhaps to steal, or lie. I can imagine a hundred different situations where a thieving robot could be valuable. All I'm saying is that this sort of thing may be rare — but not unheard of."
"But why would Teddy be programmed to kill? Who would have been able to do it? And who would have reason?" Jubal asked.
St. Cyr said, "I'll get to that in a moment. First, though, I feel as if I ought to explain why I took so long reaching the conclusions that I have. I had all the facts for some time, but I just could not make them mesh."
"No need to explain, surely," Hirschel interjected. "No one would suspect a master unit robot of murder — not any more than anyone would suspect a man of giving himself a severe beating and then reporting it to the local authorities."
St. Cyr licked his lips and waited for the other half of his symbiote to respond subvocally. When it did not, he said, "It was worse than that for me, though. You know that my reasoning powers are augmented by the data banks and logic circuitry in the bio-computer shell that taps my nervous system. In those data banks are the iron-worded Laws of Robotics. Even when I began to wonder about Teddy, the bio-computer half of the symbiosis had such a strong effect on me that I almost willingly disregarded the prospect without following up on it as I should have. The bio-computer very nearly convinced me that it was a silly supposition — impossible, an emotional reaction. But what the bio-computer could never come to terms with — since it is not human and has no conception of human fallibility— was the limited knowledge of those who had fed its data into it in the first place. Programmed knowledge, to any computer, is the word of God. All judgments are based on it. In this case, no one had informed the other half of my symbiote that there was a way around the Laws of Robotics."
"Okay," Jubal said. "I understand that, and I can't blame you for anything, certainly. But what about the proof you mentioned?"
"First of all," St. Cyr said, "the fact that the killer left no footprints in the damp garden soil can be explained by the fact that Teddy has a gravplate mobility system and never touches the ground. The lack of fingerprints is easily accounted for; stainless steel fingers are not whorled."
"But this is not conclusive," Hirschel said.
"Also, consider that he has access to the house, everywhere in the house. He can override the voice locks on all the bedroom doors, enter silently and at will. And, in those cases where the victims were murdered on their balconies, it is possible that he could increase the power input on the gravplate generators and drift up the side of the house to attack them without ever entering their rooms. He could get very close to anyone, for he was uniformly trusted."
Everyone but Tina and Hirschel seemed too stunned to take it all in. One trusted one's mechanical servants, for they were incapable of doing anything to make that trust hollow. If one could not trust robots, then all of modern society came in for suspicion. If robots could turn against men, all the underpinnings of this life might be as shaky as rotted planks. Hirschel was less affected because he was more the primitive than any of them. If the entire fabric of human existence, across the hundreds of settled worlds in the galaxy, fell apart tomorrow from some unimaginable cosmic event, he would survive with just his hands and a knife. Tina also, though a child of civilization, was not so affected by the disclosure as the others were — perhaps because she had ceased to care about a lot of things.
"How did he get the corpses to look as if they'd been clawed by an animal?" Hirschel asked. "His fingers are blunt, not sharp."
St. Cyr lifted the paper sack onto his lap, opened the top and lifted out a long tool that looked very much like a back-scratcher, with a long shaft terminating in four hideously sharpened tines that were curved at the tips like well-honed claws. "As you know, the 'hands' at the ends of Teddy's arms are only attachments which are removable so that he can accommodate the insertion of various other tools. The ends of his arms are something like drill clamps that will take any number of bits. This set of claws is one of those 'bits.'"
"Where in hell did he get that?" Jubal asked.
"He made it," St. Cyr said. "He's perfectly capable of operating a machine shop — just as you ordered him — a function he usually performs in order to transfer your silver designs from paper to reality. Somewhere along the line he took the time to make himself this dandy little ripper."
"What I'd like to know is where you got that," Hirschel said.
"In Teddy's workshop."
"Just a while ago?"
"Yes."
"And he doesn't know what you went down there for?" Hirschel clearly felt St. Cyr had made a serious tactical error.
"He doesn't even know I went down there," St. Cyr said. "I told him I was going to the fourth floor. I sent the elevator up there, empty. Since there was no one else in the house to use it just then — you were all in the kitchen — I knew I had the elevator shaft to myself. I just used it to go down one floor to the garage, then into the workshop."
"With that arm?" Hirschel asked.
"The arm wasn't any problem going down," the cyberdetective said. "Coming up was a real bitch, though."
Hirschel smiled admiringly and said, "I believe that I have been underestimating you all along."
St. Cyr acknowledged the compliment with a nod, though it pleased him very much. On his left, Tina moved closer to him, until he felt their hips brush.
Hirschel said, "I expect that you can explain where he got that narcotic-dart gun that he used against you in the garden."
The detective reached into t
he paper sack, removed a pistol and handed it to the hunter. "Recognize the make?"
Hirschel gave it a careful scrutiny, pulled back the slide and peered at as much of the workings as he could see. "Very simplistic, but well-made. The mechanisms look too fragile to last long."
"Teddy machined it," St. Cyr said.
Jubal spoke up again: "But it was never stipulated that he know weaponry. I wouldn't want a master unit of mine to have that kind of knowledge."
"You never stipulated that he kill your sons and daughters, either," St. Cyr said.
Hirschel handed the gun back, and the detective put it with the artificial claws. To Hirschel, he said, "There is a wolfs head mounted in your suite. I saw it the first day I was here."
"I killed it a good many years ago," Hirschel said. "Before the species was eradicated by Climicon."
"Was that the only one you shot?"
"No. There were two others. But I didn't see any sense in having them mounted."
"What was done with them?" He already knew the general answer to that, but he wanted to get everything as exact as he could.
"I gutted, cured and tanned the hides, left the heads intact except for the eyes. I knew the species was slated for eradication, and I knew that the hides would be worth a great deal of money some day, for museums and such. I have a lot of animal skins stored here on the second level. It's another eccentricity that Jubal allows me." He smiled at Jubal, and St. Cyr thought there was genuine affection on the older man's part for the younger.
The cyberdetective pulled the last item from the paper bag. It was one of the wolf hides that Hirschel had prepared and stored. "Teddy used it to plant wolf hairs with the bodies — and as a partial disguise when he attacked me in the gardens. He was wise enough to realize that if I were hallucinating, this minimal diversion would confuse me enough to keep me from recognizing him. He was also clever enough to disguise himself at all, on the chance that he might fail to kill me then — as he did."
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