"Asimov, Isaac - Robot Mystery - Chimera" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

Coren stiffened. Two of the four were robots. One looked a bit more sophisticated than the other, almost human, but the dull sheen that outlined its sleek head and body gave it away. It moved with an unusual grace, a fluid, almost organic motion, uncharacteristic of any robot with which Coren was familiar. It circled the baleys, slowly, as if taking inventory. It stopped before Nyom's robot, Coffee, then seemed to come to a decision and rejoined its companions.
Coren touched a contact on the side of the optam and sound came through the bead in his ear, but he only heard the muffled, unintelligible sounds of a discussion. He lowered the optam and tried to adjust the aural filters to compensate for the noise, then raised it again.
The strange robot was gone.
Coren dropped the optam; he saw the robot clearly. When he raised the magnifier again, the robot did not appear. He could see the other robot easily, a machine slightly smaller than Coffee, a bit sleeker. But the first robot remained invisible.
Masked...?
Coren tensed, preparing to act. The baleys began filing into the big container, and he realized that he would do nothing. Nyom knows what she's doing, he thought. At least as far as procedure goes. She did not act alarmed, so he had to assume she knew these people, these machines. It unsettled him, though, to watch her, the last one, walk up the ramp, accompanied by Coffee.
The masked robot followed a minute later, causing Coren's pulse to accelerate again. The other contacts, human and robot, closed up the container, then walked away.
Five minutes later an automated hauler hooked onto the container and pulled it into the maze of tracks and out of Coren 's reach.
Abruptly, Coren felt a wave of bitterness. Failure did that. It would have been so simple, so much easier if she had just come with him. Now...
He opened his palm monitor and keyed for a new signal. A bright yellow dot glowed on the small screen. The smear he had placed on Nyom had transferred from fabric to metal to plastic, a clever seeker code built into the tiny molecules that imparted a kind of machine instinct to find a suitable place to use as a conductor and enable them to transmit.
He pocketed the optam and the palm monitor and slipped back through the bay door on the next cycle, just ahead of another huge pallet. All he had to do now was get out of the warehouse--and all the communications damping he had put in place--and signal his contact on Kopernik Station.
He imagined how angry Nyom was about to be.
"So what?" he mused as he recovered his overcoat. "Better she's righteously pissed off at me than dead from some trigger-happy blockade station." Ht; glanced back at the bay door. "Nova Levis! What are you thinking, Nyom? Or are you thinking." He trotted along the walkway toward the offices, muttering. "You've never been particularly impulsive, but when you are, you are absolutely unpredictable. Nova Levis. Damn."
When he reached the locker room, he punched a code into the palm monitor. All the little machines he'd released throughout the warehouse began to eat themselves into dust. Nothing would be left to analyze, if anyone ever found them. Just minuscule piles of refuse.
He checked the time, estimated that he had about six hours before that bin reached dockside on Kopernik. He could even clean up before he made his call...
He recovered the small button he had placed in the exit and stepped into the alley. He saw no one and quickly bounded across to where he had been hiding when the nightshift crew had left. He fished one more device from an inside pocket and opened it. He tapped in a code and waited for the comm to upload for him.
The screen remained blank. He ran a diagnostic. LOCALITY ERROR scrolled across the small screen. Coren hissed, annoyed. Something around here was interfering with the link. He should have tested it first. Probably being this close to the port was causing problems. He closed up the comm unit and headed down the alley.
He splashed through the accrued seepage and hunched his shoulders against the random drops of condensation from the unseen ceiling high overhead. He rounded the next corner and headed up a broad alleyway littered with abandoned shipping crates, refuse dumpsters, old and broken transports, and the scraps of traffic.
"Hey, gato."
Coren glanced to his right, at the source of the throaty voice. A tall man came out of the shadow of a receiving bay and loped toward him, hands in the pockets of a long overcoat. Coren's hand moved for the stunner he carried in his jacket. The stranger coughed heavily, a phlegmy hack Coren recognized as one of the recent strains of sublevel tuberculosis. Not contagious usually, but Coren liked to keep his distance.
"Not tonight," he said.
"Hey, that's not sapien," the man said. " Just wanting a share, you know."
Coren reflexively pulled out a few credits from his pocket and tossed them.
The man scooped them up with more alacrity than Coren would have guessed.
"Thanks, gato," he said and touched a finger to his hat.
Coren turned away.
A hand clenched around his throat between one breath and the next. Coren grabbed the wrist and pushed forward to relieve the pressure, but the hand held. The wrist, wrapped in a thick sleeve, seemed like steel. Coren tried to turn away from the encircling arm and drive an elbow back. He missed, tried again, and then dropped to his knees under a sharp blow to the left shoulder.
He choked. Sparks danced around the edge of his vision. He tried to sweep a hand around to catch the knees of his attacker, but he was too off-balance.
He closed his eyes, and the pain went away.

Coren came awake lying on damp pavement, his throat burning as he choked on the sourness in his mouth. His shoulder throbbed and would not support his attempt to push himself up. He rolled over and stared up at dark walls, too close. He had been moved. He lay still for a minute or more until the acid subsided and his breathing calmed. He managed finally to sit up.
He was about three meters from the end of a narrow hallway, but still in the same general area of Petrabor, from what he could see beyond. His head spun and his legs trembled as he got to his feet. He needed to get to a medical unit, he knew, but not down here; no telling what kind of treatment he might get from the quacks practicing in the sublevels. He needed to get to a comm sooner.
He patted his pockets. His stunner was gone, as were his optam, palm monitor, and comm unit. But they had missed his ID, and he still had a few credits in a calf-pouch.
Coren tried to figure out what had happened. He was not a small man, and he had been trained well during his years with Special Service, but whoever had attacked him had handled him as if he were a child. Possible, but not the panhandler. Surely not.
He sighed heavily and coughed.
Later, he thought, stumbling from the hallway. Figure it out later....


TWO

W
hen he returned to the hostel, all Coren wanted to do was fall into bed and sleep. He leaned against the door of his room, eyes shut, feeling his bruises and weariness. He had been beaten up once before, years ago, but the brain did not remember the pain.
He forced his eyes open. The clock above the bed said NINETEEN-TEN LOCAL.
"Damn. Five hours. "
He lurched to the small desk and pulled a briefcase from beneath it. He threw off his overcoat and tapped in the release code on the case, then took out his personal datum. He jacked it into the room comm and entered a string of numbers. He sat down then, anxiously watching while the link assembled itself through a secure channel.
"Come on...come on..."
"Palen here," a voice crackled sharply from the comm.
"It's Coren, Sipha. The package is on its way up."
"Already tracking it. We'll have it in the bay in...two hours and a bit. Where have you been? I expected your call--"
"I'll tell you later. I was delayed unavoidably."