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

Coren shouldered his way through the uniforms.
Sipha entered the bin first.
"Get me some light in here!" she called, her voice hollow.
Coren bumped her, stopped at the edge of darkness. The spillover from the bay lights picked out disconnected details of a squat bulk just before them and lines that might be the edges of shelves or cots. Coren heard a faint, rhythmic buzzing.
"What--?" he began.
Techs came up behind them with hand-held floodlamps. They switched them on and raised them.
Coren blinked at the sudden glare.
The air smelled faintly burnt...
"Shit," Sipha breathed.
Racks of couches crowded the walls all around, three deep, with barely a meter between levels. Each pallet contained a body. None of them moved; Coren detected no breath pushing at clothing, no hint of life. Dead bodies, an umbilical running from each facemask to the large apparatus in the center of the cramped open space directly before Sipha and Coren.
On the opposite side of the big machine, Coffee knelt, motionless.
Coren's ears sang with blood. Sparks teased at the periphery of his vision and he felt cocooned, separated from his surroundings. He made himself step forward. He looked in at the nearest corpse. She had been strapped into the couch. Her hands had clutched spasmodically at the fabric beneath her.
The couch above her held a child, its eyes staring blindly.
He made his way around the apparatus, stepping carefully over the tubes running from its base, up the railings, and into the couches.
Coffee's hands were frozen on a control panel. Coren bent over to see what the robot was touching. DISENGAGE. Coren glared at the robot. He felt his hands curl instantly into fists.
"You piece of--"
"Coren."
He looked up at Sipha. She still stood at the entrance. She pointed up.
Coren looked.
Dangling from the ceiling of the bin was another body. Hanging, suspended, it shifted ever-so-slightly right to left and back in the movement of air coming from the bay. It was a woman, her head angled sharply to the left. Her eyes were wide, tongue extruded between her lips.
Nyom.

The tea in his cup had gone cold as Coren watched Sipha's people remove the bodies. The air in the office cubicle was a few degrees too cool. He stared fixedly through the window at the forensic dance around the crime scene.
Nyom would be brought out last, he knew, because her condition was so different.
Sipha entered the office and sat down heavily behind the small desk.
"Fifty-two bodies," she said. "We don't have the facilities to store them in our morgue. I'm having stasis units moved into an equipment locker nearby. Best we can do till we know how to handle this."
Coren looked up. "Fifty-two? There were fifty-one baleys."
"We've got fifty-two now."
"All human?"
Sipha nodded. "Maybe one was already in the bin. Who knows?"
"What about the other robot?" Coren asked.
"No second robot. Just the one. Sorry."
"I saw it enter the bin with them. You 're telling me it got out?"
"You saw it get in at the warehouse dock. After that, who knows? Once on board its shuttle, it could have left. Or it might not have even gotten on the shuttle." She grunted. "We could ask the one we do have, but it's collapsed."
"How convenient," he said. "What ship was this bin scheduled for?"
"It's not even in dock yet, won't be for another three days. A Settler cargo hauler, slated for a direct run to an orbital facility owned by a company called the Hunter Group. "
"Three days..." Coren shook his head.
"So," Sipha said after a time, "what do you think happened?"
Coren shuddered briefly and set the cup aside. He folded his hands in his lap. "The other robot. It must've glitched or malfunctioned or...something. It killed Nyom, then suffocated the others by switching off the rebreather unit."
"What about Nyom's robot? Why would it have allowed that to happen?"
"They must've been in it together. "
Sipha said nothing. Coren turned his chair to face her. She wore a skeptical expression.
"That's what you want to believe," she said.
Coren nodded. "Trouble is, I don't have a viable alternative. Do you?"
"No. But I'm not sure I can accept that one robot could kill. You want me to accept that two of them were cooperating in a mass murder. "
Coren grunted. "Since when have you gone Spacer?"
She frowned. "Since when have you lost the ability to think?"
Coren glared at her.
"We partnered for two years in Special Service," she said. "I thought you were more reasonable than that. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe working for Rega Looms has loosened your grip on objective reality. What do you think?"
Coren worked himself back from anger and tried to think it through. Sipha had come into the Service directly from the military, a different path than his more direct route of applying to the Academy for Civic Defense, Forensics, and Criminal Interdiction. Despite their divergent backgrounds, Coren had come to trust her. He still did. It had surprised him when, after he had left the Service, she had taken this position as head of security for Kopernik Station.