a human being. I have seen death, I have witnessed the evidence of murder. I know there must, therefore, be motives for murder. But even though I know such things are real, I still cannot imagine them.”
“Hmmph. Strange,” Fredda said. “Very strange. Humans are certainly capable of all sorts of remarkable delusions—but not that particular one. Sometimes I forget just how different robots are from humans.”
“I don’t think I have ever forgotten that fact, even for a moment,” Donald said. “Shall we return to the task at hand?”
“Hmmm? Yes, of course.” Fredda turned back to the integrator and watched the silent dance of the simulacra. They could have put sound in, of course, but that would do little more than add to the confusion at this point.
Wait a second. Confusion. Confusion. They were missing the point of all the confusion. “Donald. Go to the time reference five minutes before the attack on Tonya Welton—and delete Tonya Weltlon, the attackers, the SSS intervention, along with all the people we’ve identified so far. Let’s get rid of the diversion and see if we can spot what they were trying to divert us from.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Donald said, manipulating the controls. He reset the system once again, running back to the proper moment in time. The image reappeared, affording the strange sight of all the bystanders reacting to the fight that was not happening. It was like watching an audience without being able to see the play. The little clumps of people turned and pointed at nothing at all in the center of the room, scuttled backwards to avoid the brawlers who were not there.
Fredda pointed at two or three of the largest groups of bystanders. They were clearly the ones being diverted, no sense in watching them. “Get rid of those people there,” she said. “And those, and those.” People vanished wholesale. Fredda let the sequence keep going. The fight had drawn people into the room from other parts of the Residence—but she was looking for the people who weren’t drawn by the noise. Fredda watched until the crowds gathered, had watched the now nonexistent action, and had begun to drift away.
“Freeze it there, Donald. Mark on those people—those, and those. And that clump over by the door. All right now. Now—backtrack to five minutes before the fight, and delete all of the people just marked from the image trail. I only want to see the ones who weren’t drawn to the fight.”
The 3-D image blanked for a moment, then came back up on the same scene minutes before the attack. There was no one left in the Grand Hall except Caliban and Prospero. Donald was showing his prejudices again. Both Caliban and Prospero had been in sight of one video camera or another throughout the entire evening, and beyond breaking up the fight, neither of them had done anything more suspicious than chat politely with the other guests. That, clearly, was not enough to satisfy Donald. But she let it go.
After all, there was the bare possibility that he was even right to suspect them. They had Verick’s statement that the two robots were the last ones to see Grieg alive.
But never mind that now. Fredda knew all about Prospero and Caliban. She was looking for unknowns, people she could not account for. “Give me an overhead view of the ground floor,” Fredda said. The image of the Grand Hall vanished, to be replaced by a cutaway view of the entire lower level, presented so Fredda was looking straight down on it from overhead. “Good,” she said. “Have you got all our personnel deletions saved for recall?”
“Yes, Dr. Leving. Shall I run the deleted-persons sequence forward from the same time mark before the fight?”
“In a minute, Donald. First, I want you to run it from that time with everyone still in place. Let’s see the whole picture first.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The images cleared.
The 3-D image blanked for a moment, then suddenly Fredda was looking down on an eddying throng of people, talking, walking, sitting, arriving, departing, arguing, laughing. It seemed as if the entire Residence were filled with people who desired nothing more than to be somewhere they were not. Everyone was on the move. It would be almost impossible to track anyone person in all of that. Which was, no doubt, what the conspirators were counting on.
The fight started, and Fredda found that her eye was pulled toward it. People hurried in from all directions to see what was going on, and it was almost impossible to see what anyone person was doing from moment to moment.
The two men attacked Tonya Welton; she knocked one of them down, and was about to rush the second when the two robots stepped in and pulled them apart. Kresh and Donald appeared, and Kresh waded in to sort things out. The crowd started to disperse just a little as the excitement came to an end.
“All right, Donald,” Fredda said. “Stop. Reset to the previous time index and run it again, with all the personnel deletions.”
Donald stopped the playback and reset the system. The vision tank dissolved in a swirl of colors and then reassembled itself to show a ghostly, empty house, with but a few faceless creatures wandering the building. They were constructs, place holders to indicate unidentified people, their faces too blurry for computer or robot or human to know who they were. No doubt most or even all of them could be identified with a bit more work, but that could wait. For now they were ghosts, ghosts in the machine, faceless beings walking through a simulated landscape. Some of them vanished or reappeared now and again as they were spotted and then lost by this or that video source. Sometimes, but not always, the integrator would connect two video sequences of the same person up with animated links.
They ambled about the house, with the casual air of people with no clear goal in mind. Of course, half their motions were computerized guesses, but Fredda had the feeling the integrator was guessing right.
But then. Then she saw it. Another figure, a small, slight shadow, a pale-skinned, youthful-looking man. Thinning hair cut a bit short, wearing rather plain clothes compared to the peacock finery that had been on display everywhere else at the Residence. There he was, hanging back, arriving two or three minutes before the fight—just a few minutes after the SSS guards had obeyed the false orders to stand down. The main entrance was unguarded, wide open. There was something nervous, tense, about him. But what the devil was he doing? It was hard to read his actions with no one around him.
“Give me the fully-populated view for a second, Donald.”
Suddenly the pale man was surrounded by people, and his actions became clear. He was contriving to enter the building just as a crowd of late arrivals came in, hoping, it would seem, to mix in with the crowd. The gambit worked: He got in with the rest of the group, gaining entry just thirty seconds before the fight began.
And there. There! “Donald, freeze that. Freeze it!” She leaned in close to the image tank. “Do you see it?”
“I see the subject you appear to be interested in glancing at his watch.”
“Yes, but what does that say to you?”
“That he wondered what time it was.”
No imagination. That was why the universe needed people and not just robots. “But who would care what time it was when they were arriving at a party? Besides which, he’s a Spacer. At least he’s dressed in Spacer clothes with a Spacer haircut.”
“What of that?”
“Spacers hardly ever wear watches. If a Spacer needs to know what time it is, he asks his robot.”
“Are you suggesting that he is checking the time in order to synchronize his actions? That he was timing his actions so he would arrive just prior to the staged fight?”
“Yes, I am suggesting that.”
Donald turned to look again at the image, then turned back toward Fredda. “It seems a great deal to read into a man glancing at his wrist,” he said, a bit doubtfully.
“In general, I grant you. But not too much at all to read into this man glancing at his wrist as he sneaks into this party two minutes before a fight breaks out. That is our man. I’ll bet on it. Clear everyone—everyone from the image system but him and run it forward, tracking a close-up view on him.”
The crowds of people vanished, and the pale-faced man in the dowdy clothes was alone in the integrator’s display, with no throngs of gaily dressed party-goers to hide behind, no diversionary fights to hide behind, all his camouflage stripped away.
Fredda watched as the slightly grainy, somewhat blurred blown-up image of the man moved inside. He made his way through the entrance, into the Grand Hall—and then directly out of it again, without so much as a glance at
