The Automatic Detective Part 21

He adjusted the green rose in his lapel. "I can, you know. There isn't much going on in this town where I don't have some sway. You'd be surprised at the number of very important people who owe me favors."

"No, I wouldn't, but I'm not going to be one of them."

I moved toward Greenman, and as expected, Knuckles tried to get in my way. He beeped once as a warning. I put one hand on his shoulder, kicked his leg from under him, and pushed him down. He fell hard. Hard enough to knock a few bolts loose. One came to a rolling stop at my feet. Lucia had done a bang-up repair job. I'd have to remember to tip her a sawbuck if I ever saw her again.

Knuckles squealed like a cranky baby as he struggled to right himself. Mark Threes were hard to knock over, but once they were down, they couldn't exactly spring to their feet.

I said, "Tell him to stay down. Or I'll disa.s.semble him one screw at a time."

Greenman gave the order, and Knuckles went still.

"Here's the deal, Abner," I said. "I don't care about you. I don't care about good aliens or bad aliens. I don't even care about 500 thousand possibly doomed citizens. All I care about is one family unit comprising three biologicals. But it seems like what I care about and what you care about meet somewhere in the middle in this scenario. So you'll tell me what you know, and we'll work this out so that we both get what we want. But I don't work for you." I folded my arms. "And if that's going to be a problem, then we'll just go our separate ways."

Greenman's fish eyes went cold as the humor drained from his smooth, featureless face. I inferred Greenman was used to having all the power, being the big green cheese. He didn't like having terms dictated to him. Naturally, he tried his ace.

"What of the Bleakers? Would you walk away, leaving them to their fate?" A smug grin crossed his face. He thought he had me. All he had was one annoyed bot who'd already figured that Greenman was a man who thrived on edges, on holding all the cards. Removing the Bleakers from the scenario left him with a very bad hand.

"Watch me." I moved toward the door.

If Greenman didn't play by my rules, then he wasn't much use to me. I hadn't abandoned Julie and the kids. I'd find them again, even against all statistical likelihood. Any statistic had its fair share of anomalies if you rolled the dice often enough, and I'd roll them as long as it took.

"I can tell you where you come from," said Greenman.

I opened the door halfway and put one foot across the threshold. "I can tell you I don't care."

It was a bit of a lie. I was a little curious, and Greenman knew it. But I was a good bluffer.

"Okay, Mack. You win." He shook his head slowly. "I must be losing my touch."

"Not your fault," I said. "I'm defective and unpredictable, if you'll recall."

"That you are, Mack." He chuckled. "That you are."

He led me to an upstairs office. It was decked out 93 percent sw.a.n.kier than the rest of the warehouse, more of a lounge with a desk than anything else. A model of downtown Empire sat in the center of the room. It wasn't the real version, but an idealized alternate cityscape. All the buildings were there, but none of the grime, none of the blackened air or overwhelming racket. None of the citizens or rotorcars or clogged freeways and shrieking zip rails. None of the life.

Greenman nodded toward the miniature tombstone of a city. "It was supposed to be a utopia, our gift to the earthlings for allowing us to share their world."

I compared the idealized Empire to my memory files of the real thing in all its malfunctioning, broken-down, oily smelling (presumably) glory. Something had gone horribly wrong somewhere on the road to Shangri-la.

"It was too much, too soon," said Greenman. "The earth-lings weren't ready for it. You can't introduce basic theories of science into a primitive world. They're barely ready for the transistor. Flux power coils and antimatter generators are a bit out of their depth. Oh, they understand it. They're remarkably intelligent and adaptable. They can build it. They can even improve upon it. But they simply aren't ready for it. More interested in creating the world they've seen on the covers of their revered pulp magazines.

"I suppose it doesn't help anything that we've held back certain key technologies. Things too dangerous to be allowed into their hands. This is the end result. How does that earth saying go? The best laid plans of mice and men? Well, I can a.s.sure you, Mack, that it is a universal constant, even on worlds without men or mice."

He studied the model silently.

"Of course, our motives were not entirely altruistic. We needed a gathering place where we could begin the a.s.similation process."

Greenman opened a cigar box on his desk and removed a stogie. "Don't mind if I smoke, do you?"

"Don't have a sense of smell," I replied.

I was surprised he could fit the cigar in his tiny mouth, but he managed. His antennae twitched as he lit the end with his mental powers and took a long puff.

"Tobacco. Did you know this stuff is illegal on my world? Of course, most things are. Cognac isn't. That's only because it doesn't exist there." Smiling, he poured himself a drink. He put the gla.s.s to his noseless face and sniffed, proving that even if I couldn't scan them, there were nostrils hidden somewhere. "I love this planet."

"That's great, Abner. Now are you through philosophizing, or should I come back later?"

"Not much for small talk, are you?"

"Robot."

"Yes. Single-minded creatures, the lot of you. I wonder if you'd be so brusque if Miss Napier were here with us."

"We're not here to talk about me," I said.

"Is that your subtle way of changing the subject?"

"No, it's my brusque way of changing the subject. Get on with it, Abner."

He sipped his cognac and nodded. "The first step in a.s.similation was to create a city of tomorrow. The next, to get the earthlings to accept peoples of our varied and colorful physiology."

It clicked then. I wasn't always quick on the uptake, but once I processed the data, it didn't take long.

"You're mutating the humans on purpose," I said.

"Can you think of a better tactic to slip in unnoticed, right under their noses? No conflicts. No negotiations. A simple invisible immigration with none the wiser. Except it takes time to safely instill mutations extreme enough for all Pilgrims to immigrate. Time to build mutation into a socially acceptable condition."

Social conditioning was the one thing that had gone right with the Pilgrims' agenda. There'd been pockets of uproar a few years ago when mutants first appeared. But the a.s.similation campaign had worked, and while not everyone liked mutants, there hadn't been any riots or unrest. There were still protests occasionally for norm rights, but they were few and far between. No one, including most norms, thought it was an issue anymore. While the rest of America had its integration debates, Empire had already moved past that. Black, white, or green. Bald, scaly, or furry. Two arms or six. It was pretty much a non-issue in this town.

Didn't mean it couldn't become one. Greenman was a little too inhuman to slip in unnoticed amongst the rest of the mutants. Humans had a bad history of changing their minds about things. Civilization tended to run around in circles, which explained why mankind hadn't accomplished much in its few thousand years of history. Sure, you had a Renaissance here and an Industrial Revolution there, but these were the exceptions, not the rule.

"Some of us started getting impatient," said Greenman. "Isn't surprising. We were supposed to be colonizing a new world. Most of us are explorers in spirit. Can you blame them for not wanting to hide anymore?

"Unfortunately, the extreme mutations required for many of our less humanoid races would take several generations to initiate safely. The humans will need to become accustomed to the mutagens or else the sudden increase in levels would result in abnormal, unchecked defects. Rampant spontaneous genetic disorders would result in the deaths of tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands."

"Perhaps five hundred thousand," I said.

"That is Doctor Zarg's current projection, yes. If he's correct."

"And what if he's wrong?"

"Zarg is never wrong, Mack."

Empire wasn't much different than any other city full of biologicals. It was a study in controlled chaos kept in check by the rule of civilization. Robots have logic to drive us. It was numbers. Doctor Zarg had been willing to kill a certain percentage of Empire, but as soon as that number was crossed, he could switch sides. From a biological perspective it was impulsive, but it was actually very predictable. Just an equation.

Most biologicals didn't have that. They had feelings, chemical reactions in their squishy brains that didn't always feed them the best directives. If Empire was suddenly beset with thousands of deaths and thousands more bizarre mutations, it might go to h.e.l.l. It might not. I was a bot, and I usually played the odds.

"The vast majority of us find these risks unacceptable," said Greenman. "We aren't a ruthless people."

"I'm not worried about the majority, Abner."

"They would never hurt the boy."

"His name's Holt."

"Yes, I know."

"There's something you're not telling me, Abner."

"It's the mutagens," he said. "We haven't the necessary resources to create certain exotic catalysts. Holt does. He carries the basic agent in his blood. It's a fluke, a one-in-a-ten-million mutation. Without him, there is no super mutagen. That's why they took him."

"And you knew about this? You knew he was in danger, and you left him out in the open?"

"I know, I know," said Greenman. "We should've known better. We've collected cell samples of thousands of mutants. Strictly for study, to ensure the process was going smoothly. No one outside of a handful of researchers had access to them, but the files weren't hidden or restricted."

"You left it out for anyone to find?"

"We keep facts from the earthlings, but not each other. We didn't think it would be necessary. Everything was going as planned. There were dissenters, of course, but we just a.s.sumed . . ."

He sighed.

"It was naive. I admit it. But it wasn't as if the files were easily available. They were in a lab, in a filing cabinet." He shook his head. "Stupid, but we aren't duplicitous by nature. We're colonists, not spies."

"Did the cabinet have a lock on it at least?" I asked.

"Yes, but not a very good one, I'm afraid. While Ringo was briefly in my employment, he was approached by the Dissenters. They paid him handsomely to retrieve the information. Ringo, being both admirably ambitious and ridiculously moronic, decided they weren't paying him enough. He decided it would be better for him to take Holt and hold him for ransom. He figured to play both sides against each other and reap a tidy profit.

"His plan was to actually pay the Bleakers for the loan of their son. He approached the father and made a deal."

"Gavin rented his own son out."

"Yes, well, that was the idea. In Mr. Bleaker's defense, he was told the family could accompany the boy, keep an eye on him. Of course, when Ringo went for the pickup, Mrs. Bleaker didn't exactly leap at the idea. Then there came an unexpected complication."

"Me."

So that was what I'd walked into three days ago.

"But Tony wasn't so easily discouraged. He waited until he knew you weren't around and made his second attempt. This time, there was no negotiation. Just abduction. He also scrounged up some drones to sc.r.a.p you as a loose end. The idiot didn't realize who you were. Otherwise, he'd have known better than to waste his time."

"Why kidnap the whole family? Why not just take Holt by himself?"

"Because Ringo was an idiot," said Greenman. "Because he thought, in his own strange way, that once the family saw he meant the boy no harm, they'd leap at the money he offered."

"That's idiotic."

"Well, Ringo was an idiot. I've seen his thoughts, and let me tell you, they are the disorganized ramblings of a moron. Why else would he slip away from protective custody to visit a jazz club when half my operatives were looking for him?"

"You said he was going to play both sides, but the Dissenters have Holt. Weren't you willing to pay?"

"We would've. But Ringo was way past his depth in this case. The Dissenters found him. They convinced him that their offer was better than dying, and he handed over Holt and the family."

"I still don't scan why they'd take the whole family."

"The Dissenters were worried about what they might've seen or heard. They didn't want to kill the Bleakers. Even they are not entirely ruthless."

I didn't feel like arguing, but Gavin was dead and I was pretty sure his death had been solely to trip me up. The Pilgrims couldn't exactly claim the moral high ground. Slipping mutagens in the water, kidnapping innocent families, smashing in a guy's head just to throw a wrench in my gears. It was a slippery slope, all right, and biologicals didn't have the sense to stop once they got sliding.

"So how much super mutagen do they have?" I asked. "How much damage can they cause? How do we stop them, and how do we get the Bleakers back?"

"That's a lot of questions, Mack."

"Can't establish mission directives until you a.s.sess the situation."

Greenman pulled a data tube from his pocket. "Here's a copy of the tube Zarg smuggled out in your finger." He inserted it into a reader terminal built into the wall. A chemical formula spilled across the screen, though it wasn't written in any earth language.

"We're fortunate that it takes time to produce and refine the super mutagen they require. Zarg estimates twelve more hours before they have enough for the wide scale effect they desire."

I started the countdown. Less than one day before people started dying by the thousands.

"Can you make a counteragent?" I asked, knowing that if the answer had been "Yes" this conversation wouldn't have been taking place.

"We've already started working on it, but without Holt to supply the final ingredient, it's ineffective."

"Why didn't you make the counteragent while you had access to Holt?" I asked. "As a precaution."

"We didn't want to subject the child to unnecessary trauma," he said.

Something about the tone of his voice and the frown on his lips activated my simulated intuition. "What's the real reason, Abner?"

He smiled slightly. Of course, he always smiled slightly with that tiny mouth of his. "You're brighter than you give yourself credit for," he said.

"Not really," I replied. "Some things are just obvious."

"Any counteragent produced with Holt's biology would also instill mutagenic resistance in humanity. It would slow an already time-consuming process even further, perhaps delaying our timetable by as much as seven or eight generations."

I figured as much. Despite the benevolent immigration party line Greenman kept trying to download me, I knew biologicals, both human and alien, were almost always motivated by self-interest. Couldn't help it. It was their nature.

"We find Holt before they make any more," I said. "You make your counteragent, and you tell them that if they use theirs, you use yours. It's a standoff, but it gets the job done."

"Precisely what I was thinking, Mack."

He pushed a b.u.t.ton and a map of Empire City flashed on the screen. It zoomed in on a few blocks in the bustling hub of Empire. The area was known as the Nucleus, and the whole of Empire had grown out from there like a spot of spreading rust. Several important financial and scientific corporations ran their home offices here. And there were ten different factories as well. The Nucleus was one place where the elite and the poor rubbed shoulders, even if it was only in the moments wealthy businessmen disembarked from their vehicles to dash into their secured office buildings. Everything important in the city took place in the Nucleus, or at least pa.s.sed through it. Except the government, but, really, what useful things did the government ever accomplish anyway?

"This is the complex you escaped from. According to the information Zarg has supplied it's the only facility the Dissenters control with the necessary equipment to refine the mutagens."

It was a smart place to hide. Heavy traffic at all hours of the day and night, throngs of citizens clogging the sidewalks, and dozens of buildings crammed right on top of each other. Any Dissenter activity would be lost in the shuffle.

"That's where Holt is," I said.