“Now whaddaya think you’re doing?”
“Analysis confirms what the young lady attested, sir. This is a commonly prescribed nose drop for nasal congestion and certain primary allergies.”
Polchik was speechless.
“You are free to go,” the robot said. “With our apologies. We are merely doing our jobs. Thank you.”
Polchik started to protest—he knew he was right—but the kids were already gathering up their belongings. He hadn’t even ripped the car, which was probably where they had it locked away. But he knew it was useless. He was the guinea pig in this experiment, not the robot. It was all painfully clear. He knew if he interfered, if he overrode the robot’s decision, it would only add to the cloud under which the robot had put him: short temper, taking a gift from a neighborhood merchant, letting the robot out-maneuver him in the apartment, false stop on Kyser…and now this. Suddenly, all Mike Polchik wanted was to go back, get out of harness, sign out, and go home to bed. Wet carpets and all. Just to bed.
Because if these metal things were what was coming, he was simply too tired to buck it.
He watched as the kids—hooting and ridiculing his impotency—piled back in the car, the girls showing their legs as they clambered over the side. The driver bummed polyglas speeding up Amsterdam Avenue. In a moment they were gone.
“You see, Officer Polchik,” Brillo said, “false arrest would make us both liable for serious—” But Polchik was already walking away, his shoulders slumped, the weight of his bandolier and five years on the force too much for him.
The robot (making the sort of sound an electric watch makes) hummed after him, keeping stern vigil on the darkened neighborhood in the encroaching dawn. He could not compute despair. But he had been built to serve. He was programmed to protect, and he did it, all the way back to the precinct house.
Polchik was sitting at a scarred desk in the squad room, laboriously typing out his report on a weary IBM Selectric afflicted with grand mal. Across the room Reardon poked at the now-inert metal bulk of Brillo, using some sort of power tool with a teardrop-shaped lamp on top of it. The Mayor’s whiz kid definitely looked sandbagged. He don’t go without sleep very often, Polchik thought with grim satisfaction.
The door to Captain Summit’s office opened, and the Captain, looking oceanic and faraway, waved him in.
“Here it comes,” Polchik whispered to himself. Summit let Polchik pass him in the doorway. He closed the door and indicated the worn plastic chair in front of the desk. Polchik sat down. “I’m not done typin’ the beat report yet, Capt’n.”
Summit ignored the comment. He moved over to the desk, picked up a yellow printout flimsy, and stood silently for a moment in front of Polchik, considering it.
“Accident report out of the 86th precinct uptown. Six kids in a Ford Electric convertible went out of control, smashed down a pedestrian and totaled against the bridge abutment. Three dead, three critical-not expected to live. Fifteen minutes after you let them go.”
Dust.
Dried out.
Ashes.
Gray. Final.
Polchik couldn’t think. Tired. Confused. Sick. Six kids. Now they were kids, just kids, nothing else made out of old bad memories.
“One of the girls went through the windshield. D.O.A. Driver got the steering column punched out through his back. Another girl with a snapped neck. Another girl—”
He couldn’t hear him. He was somewhere else, faraway. Kids. Laughing, smartmouth kids having a good time. Benjy would be that age some day. The carpets were all wet.
“Mike!”
He didn’t hear.
“Mike! Polchik!”
He looked up. There was a stranger standing in front of him holding a yellow flimsy.
“Well, don’t just sit there, Polchik. You had them! Why’d you let them go?”
“The…Lizard…”
“That’s right, that’s what five of them were using. Three beakers of it in the car. And a dead cat on the floor and all the makings wrapped in foam-bead bags. You’d have had to be blind to miss it all!”
“The robot…”
Summit turned away with disgust, slamming the report onto the desktop. He thumbed the call-button. When Desk Sergeant Loyo came in, he said, “Take him upstairs and give him a breather of straightener, let him lie down for half an hour, then bring him back to me.”
Loyo got Polchik under the arms and took him out. Then the Captain turned off the office lights and sat silently in his desk chair, watching the night die just beyond the filthy windows.
“Feel better?”
“Yeah; thank you, Capt’n. I’m fine.”
“You’re back with me all the way? You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, sure, I’m just fine, sir. It was just…those kids…I felt.”
“So why’d you let them go? I’ve got no time to baby you, Polchik. You’re five years a cop and I’ve got all the brass in town outside that door waiting. So get right.”
“I’m right, Capt’n. I let them go because the robot took the stuff the girl was carrying, and be dumped it in his thing there, and told me it was nosedrops.”
“Not good enough, Mike.”
“What can I say besides that?”
“Well, dammit Officer Polchik, you damned well better say something besides that. You know they run that stuff right into the skull, you’ve been a cop long enough to see it, to hear it the way they talk! Why’d you let them custer you?”
“What was I going to run them in for? Carrying nosedrops? With that motherin’ robot reciting civil rights chapter-an’-verse at me every step of the way? Okay, so I tell the robot to go screw off, and I bust ‘em and bring ‘em in. In an hour they’re out again and I’ve got a false arrest lug dropped on me. Even if it ain’t nosedrops. And they can use the robot’s goddam tapes to hang me up by the thumbs!”
Summit dropped back into his chair, sack weight. His face was a burned-out building. “So we’ve got three, maybe six kids dead. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” He shook his head.
Polchik wanted to make him feel better. But how did you do that? “Listen, Capt’n, you know I would of had those kids in here so fast it’d’of made their heads swim… if I’d’ve been on my own. That damned robot…well, it just didn’t work out. Capt’n, I’m not trying to alibi, it was godawful out there, but you were a beat cop…you know a cop ain’t a set of rules and a pile of wires. Guys like me just can’t work with things like that Brillo. It won’t work, Capt’n. A guy’s gotta be free to use his judgment, to feel like he’s worth somethin’, not just a piece of sh—”
Summit’s head came up sharply. “Judgment?!” He looked as though he wanted to vomit. “What kind of judgment are you showing with that Rico over at the Amsterdam Inn? And all of it on the tapes, sound, pictures, everything?!”
“Oh. That.”
“Yes, that. You’re damned lucky I insisted those tapes get held strictly private, for the use of the Force only. I had to invoke privileged data. Do you have any idea how many strings that puts on me, on this office now, with the Chief, with the Commissioner, with the goddam Mayor? Do you have any idea, Polchik?”
“No, sir. I’m sorry.” Chagrin.
“Sorry doesn’t buy it, goddamit! I don’t want you taking any juice from anywhere. No bottles, no gifts, no nothing, not from anybody. Have you got that?”
“Yessir.”