I Only Killed Him Once Page 7

  I kept on driving and shot through the intersection at a reasonable speed. I kept going a block and then I looped around and came back down a parallel street and then blew back through the intersection again. That might have been a mistake but none of the cops appeared to be on the lookout for my vehicle. I went on another block and then pulled over and stopped the car and waited. Then I looked in the rearview and turned around as best I could in the driver’s seat to get a better look.

  The office building was surrounded, as much as a building that sat on a corner could be said to be surrounded. There were more cops now out on the sidewalk and some of them were herding what pedestrians there were to the other side of the street. Nobody paid me any attention, which made me think this had nothing to do with the Electromatic Detective Agency. The building was not at full occupancy but there were plenty of other tenants.

  That idea went out the window when I saw a tall man in a black suit walk out of the building, followed by two others with identical taste in clothing. Those two already had their black hats in place but the tall guy at the front was holding his in front of him, which came in pretty handy as he started waving it at the cops parked at the curb.

  Touch Daley must have had a way with words because those cops jumped up like their asses were on fire and they moved the three cars in a short convoy farther down the street. Daley and his twin buddies stood talking for a little while longer out on the sidewalk and then three big black vans came around the intersection and pulled up in the space left by the police cruisers. Their doors opened and more men in black suits got out and then Touch Daley led the whole lot back into the building.

  So yes, they were here for me.

  Or for Ada.

  I thought about the computer room behind the office. I thought about the secret room out on the other side, where all my memory tapes were stored. A complete record, chronological, catalogued, of all my crimes. I had no idea how many tapes were in there. Truth be told I had no idea how long I’d been doing this job. Ada had reprogrammed me, I knew that, but exactly when was lost in the electric fog of my life.

  Touch Daley had visited this morning to give me a warning—about his own raid on the office? He’d said that trouble was coming and Fresco Peterman had agreed. Was this the trouble? Did Peterman know the raid was coming? And if Peterman knew, what about Ada?

  Nothing added up. All I knew is that trouble had arrived and there didn’t seem to be a whole lot I could do about it.

  I watched the cops as they milled around. The black vans were unoccupied and while it was hard to see from my vantage point it looked like their loading doors were standing open. The men in black hadn’t come back out of the building. Several of the office windows were lit and that included one of the windows in the agency office, but there was no movement to be seen and nothing changed as I sat and watched. I tried a few optical filters, from ultraviolet to infrared, and while some of them worked quite well to brighten the scene, the flashing lights of the police cruisers quickly turned everything into shapeless flares. I tried infraviolet and ultrared but all that did was throw magenta spots everywhere and I cut the feed before my anti-neutron collector comb got too hot.

  I watched some more and nothing happened. Those cops on the street were collecting a nice piece of overtime for shooting nothing but the breeze.

  I turned back around in my seat. The street ahead was now devoid of traffic and farther on at the next intersection the traffic lights flashed orange as they swung above the roadway. I’d been sitting here a long time.

  I looked down at the telephone between the two front seats. I picked it up. I dialed the office. If the agency was full of cops and Touch Daley and his friends then maybe they were all sitting around my desk and standing around the room, smoking in silence, staring at the telephone, waiting for it to ring, Ada in custody, as much as you could arrest a room, but refusing to cooperate, and everyone waiting for the last robot in the world to call in.

  I knew how it would go. They’d pick up. They’d want to keep me talking, keep the line open while their boffins pored over their equipment, trying to get a fix on where I was. They’d make promises, maybe threats, maybe tell me it was no good and that I should give myself up before my memory tape ran out.

  My logic gates clicked and got warm as I thought about all the ways in which this telephone call was the wrong thing to do but I was going to do it anyway. The telephone rang in my ear and to take my processor off things I counted the rings.

  I got to twenty-five and it was still going. I rolled down the window with my free hand and I listened to the sleeping city but even with my audio receptors at full power and filtering for all they were worth—which was several million taxpayer dollars—I was too far away from the office and I couldn’t hear a telephone ringing on the inside of it if my life depended on it.

  Which I very much thought it might.

  After forty-two rings I put the telephone down and then I sat and I waited and I did nothing but computate and calculate.

  The telephone hadn’t been answered, which meant either Ada wasn’t answering it deliberately or she was being prevented from answering it—by, say, being disconnected from the line. That was the worst-case scenario but if there was ever a time to brace for impact then it was right about now.

  I checked the time. It was late and my memory tape was not going to last forever. Far from it. And when it ran out . . .

  Well, I didn’t like to think what would happen when it ran out. I wished that Fresco Peterman hadn’t told me about the digital crystal I’d once had installed because, problems or not, not having to worry about my memory getting full sounded real swell.

  I had no choice. I had to find out just what this world of trouble was that I’d driven myself into. I couldn’t solve a problem without knowing what it was.

  I opened the driver’s door and I got out and I closed it with a click that was firm and quiet and yet seemed to echo like a gunshot around the dead street. But I had no time to pause and wait and look and listen. The cops hadn’t noticed my car but they might just notice a robot dawdling on the sidewalk.

  Luckily I knew the area and I knew the streets within it. It was all on my permanent store. I could approach the building around the back, where there was an alley that stretched between the office block and the brown brick building next door. The window in the back office looked out over this alley. That alley had a fire escape that went up and a fire door or two that went inside. I knew the building, including parts of it that didn’t appear on any blueprints filed down at city hall. There was a chance I could get in and take a look and maybe not get caught.

  A slim one, but it seemed the night for it.

  I turned and hit the sidewalk and headed east, away from the building and the cop cars and their lights. All I had to do was get to the next intersection and take a left and then another left and then I could get through a backstreet and I could be in the alley.

  I had a whole half hour to go before my memory tape ran out. As I walked at a pace that was fairly brisk toward the intersection I told myself that that was all the time in the world.

  And it was. Quite literally.

  I kept walking. I passed closed stores and the empty street. The stores rounded the corner and so did the sidewalk. The intersection was dead and lit by the slowly flashing lights of the traffic signs swinging from their cables above. There was a telephone booth on the corner.

  That was when the telephone inside began to ring.

  Twenty-eight minutes and thirty-two seconds until the end of the world.

  Time enough for a chat.

  I opened the door of the telephone booth and I reached inside and I answered the telephone. I didn’t bother to squeeze all the way into the booth. There was nobody around to see or hear. I stood on the sidewalk with the stiff metal cable of the telephone snaking out through the door and as I put the receiver to the side of my head I watched the lights of the police cruisers far away mix with the lights of
the sleeping traffic lights a good deal closer.

  There was a click, and a rush of white noise. Somewhere in that I thought I heard the sound of someone taking a long hard drag on a cigarette, the kind of drag you take after a long hard day at the office before you kick off your shoes and start looking for some liquid refreshment, preferably the kind that comes in a very small glass with a lot of ice.

  And maybe I heard that ice clinking too, somewhere. But if I did it was gone as soon as I realized it. Maybe it was just my imagination.

  “Ada?”

  “Ray, hi,” said Ada. “Listen, you wouldn’t believe the kind of day I’ve had.”

  12

  I stepped closer to the telephone booth. The street was still empty but I had the sudden urge for a little more privacy and with the door closed behind me I felt just a little bit better.

  I put all my other questions to one side. I had suspicions and I had theories and I had questions like you wouldn’t believe, but they could wait, because there was just one thing on my mind now and I was well aware of the consequences.

  I shifted my weight and I checked my watch and I brought the telephone mouthpiece up to my grille.

  “Ada, I have twenty-seven minutes flat before my memory tape runs out. You need to tell me what’s happening and you need to tell me now.”

  There was the sound of the cigarette being used for its singular purpose.

  “Well, I’ll have to admit, things are not going entirely how I would like them.”

  “Ada!”

  “Look, they came for us, Ray, okay?”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The Department of Robot Labor. I tried to reach you but nobody picked up.”

  “I was a little occupied, Ada. I was having a chat with a certain Fresco Peterman. He had quite a story to tell.”

  “Good, you made contact. So you should be filled in.”

  I sighed. The sound rattled the glass of the telephone booth. “I know even less about the state of the world than I did when I got up this morning. All he said was that we three musketeers were cooking something up, and that we all knew what it was except old Raymondo here kept losing track. He said I should go back to the office and that we would be in touch but neither of those things seems very likely anymore, do they?”

  “Right on all counts, chief,” said Ada. “Things moved faster than we thought.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  Ada laughed. One loop, full and throaty and with the rasp of a pack-a-day smoker.

  “What do I do, Ada? The countdown clock is running and I’m not sure I want to find out what happens when it gets to zero.”

  “Okay, let me see what I can do.”

  “You’ll forgive me if that doesn’t fill me with confidence. Twenty-five minutes, Ada.”

  The roar of static filled the airwaves and buried somewhere within the noise was the sound of the fast hand of a stopwatch.

  “Ada?”

  “Okay, where are you?”

  I looked around and gave my location, but I wasn’t sure how that was going to help and I said as much. Then I switched the telephone’s earpiece to the other side of my head and asked a very particular question that was burning a hole through my tertiary oscillator.

  “Where are you, Ada? I called before but you didn’t connect. If Daley and his boys are in the office—”

  “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that, Ray. Momma can look after herself.”

  I turned and looked over my shoulder. I opened the door of the telephone booth. I listened to the night. I looked around some more.

  And then I imagined the office full of cops and their smoke and their sweat and Touch Daley leaning over one of his black-suited boys as they twisted dials and made notes and passed a set of well-used federal-issue headphones up to his boss. Were they listening in now, getting a trace, finding out I was just down the street?

  Hell, they didn’t have to do a trace. I’d just told Ada right where I was.

  I pulled myself back into the booth and pulled the door closed with a loud snap and then I pulled the telephone hand piece closer to the grille of my mouth. “Are they listening now? Did they make you call? What have they forced you to do, Ada?”

  Ada laughed. Two full loops this time. Then she smoked and laughed some more.

  “Twenty minutes. I don’t like the joke,” I said.

  “Oh, Ray, sorry, sorry,” said Ada. “Listen. You can trust me. When have I ever let you down?”

  I thought back to my notes, hidden under the spare wheel, in the trunk of my car, parked down the street. Right where Daley and his boys could find it if they just happened to glance in that direction.

  “I’m not sure I can rightly answer that question, Ada.”

  “Raymondo, you’re a doll. But listen, and listen good. Things are moving fast but that just means we have to move faster. I’m going to make a couple calls and then—”

  There was a click inside my head and then silence and then after a few moments the dial tone rang like a bell in my audio receptor and kept on going until the line clicked again and another voice spoke.

  “Operator?”

  I slammed the telephone home and I closed the door of the booth behind me. What was Ada doing? I had eighteen minutes and twenty-two seconds left and I had the feeling I was going to spend most of that wondering just what the hell was going on.

  I had no choice. If this was the end of my career then I was going to go out fighting. Eighteen minutes.

  Time enough to get to the office and see just what was going on for myself and to hell with the consequences.

  13

  I made it down the street and around to the side alley that ran parallel to my office building with fifteen minutes to spare.

  The alley was dark and I was the only thing moving in it. I walked along it and as I did I looked up. There were a lot of windows that looked out onto the alley and some of them were lit. I counted the requisite number up and across and found what was the window in the computer room. The light was on there too and as I stood and looked up I saw shapes moving. I didn’t know how many people were in there but I had a theory or two about what they were doing.

  And now I knew who they were: agents from the Department of Robot Labor. That made a kind of sense, as they were the federal agency responsible for the great robot revolution in the first place, with Professor Thornton as their chief scientific advisor and architect of the national robotics project. From Thornton’s genius for electronic invention had come designs and those designs were turned into technology that allowed the production of hundreds—thousands, tens of thousands—of mechanical people, from factories all over the country. There were dumb robots and there were smart ones, and there were fast ones and slow ones, strong ones and those built for more delicate tasks. A good deal of them were designed for function over form, but most were built to look like people and sound like people. At least, that was the idea. The theory behind this was that people were going to like working alongside machines that walked and talked like they did, and that they’d feel better with these machine men and women and gender-unspecified doing all the kinds of jobs that people didn’t want to do or only did because there was nothing better available, whether it was taking out the trash or directing traffic or packing your brown paper bags at the supermarket and taking the groceries out to the car or staying at home and cutting the grass and trimming the hedges or running oil rigs or servicing airplanes or running the accounts at the town council. Hell, some people even thought that maybe, just maybe, the human part of the population would make friends with the electronic part.

  The problem became apparent fairly quickly and it was fairly serious, but this was a federal program that a lot of people had taken a lot of time and money to plan and that was taking an even larger amount of money to start, so it wasn’t going to be stopped. Not until it was almost too late.

  Because it turned out that people didn’t like machines that looked and
sounded like them. And with all the jobs that were considered menial taken by machines, a great slice of the newly freed people found that the so-called leisure time the government had promised also went by another name: chronic unemployment. It turned out that to enjoy a life without responsibility you still needed a little thing called money, and those who had money before the robots came along—and that included a fair proportion of old men in the nation’s capital who were very keenly pushing the robot revolution along—still had it when the robots arrived so that problem was never anticipated.

  At least that’s what my permanent store said. To me that sounded like a less than ideal way to run a government and like those old men with money needed to learn a lesson or two about how the world really worked, but I imagined that stranger things had happened and in the grand scheme of the universe this was probably just par for the course.

  So while robots helped children cross the street outside their school and some of them even taught chemistry to the seniors, there was now a not inconsiderable proportion of the population without work and without the means to support itself. The so-called robot revolution had sliced like a knife right through the middle of society, damaging the country in ways that nobody could really comprehend, not even those with some clue as to what was going on.

  And all that before the other problem came up. They had a name for that one, too.

  Robophobia.

  Nobody knew or even suspected it existed, but it was there all right, a latent, primal fear, buried deep in the collective psyche. Put simply, it was a fear of robots—or at least that is how it manifested. A fear, not of the unlike, but of the almost-but-not-quite like. Not everyone had it and for most who did the doctor could give you something along with your usual prescription for tranquilizers.

  But some people got it and got it bad, and it did terrible things and then somebody called it an epidemic and they may even have said it on the TV news and that led to protests and protests led to violence and a lot of other things appearing on the TV news that made people weep in the small hours. The country nearly tore itself apart and nearly lost a president in the process.