A Werewolf Among Us

'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