Except for the sight of those two red-colored robot feet, standing over her. She shivered at the memory. Why did that image frighten her so? Was it even real? Or the result of some trauma associated with the incident?.
Damn it, what sort of incident was she talking about? She knewnothing. And that could be dangerous.
When was Kresh going to get here? She turned her head toward the door and felt the spasm of pain like a fresh blow to her skull. She knew, intellectually, that Spacers, shielded from virtually all harm by their robots, had a spectacularly low threshold of pain. Maybe what she was experiencing now would seem like nothing but a mild headache to a Settler-but damnation, she was no Settler, and ithurt! Why couldn’t the damned Sheriff get here and get it over with, so she could take something strong enough to deal with the pain in her head?
The head was the worst, though she knew there were injuries to her face and shoulders as well. She could reach up and touch the healer packs attached to them and feel the numb stiffness in those places. No doubt the packs would be done with their work in another few hours, and would come off, leaving the skin below perfectly healed.
But her skull. Healer packs worked by deadening the nerve endings and then manipulating cell behavior. Unless you wanted the patient to hallucinate or go insane, such techniques were inadvisable for a cranial injury, especially after emergency surgery.
She reached up gingerly and felt a close-fitting padded cap-no, it was more the shape of a turban, as best she could tell. No doubt the turban had some sort of gadgetry that was dispensing speed-healing drugs. She found herself wondering, purposelessly enough, what color the turban was and how much of her hair had been shaved off in the course of surgery. She shook her head. This was no time to clutter her mind with such nonsense. Presumably she looked like hell, but she couldn’t know for sure. Perhaps to avoid upsetting her over that very fact, the room had no mirror.
Fredda Leving was young and looked younger, neither of which facts made life easier in the long-lived society of Spacers. She was thirty-five standard years old and looked perhaps twenty-five. That was in part because she had a naturally youthful appearance, in part because she did whatever she could to preserve the appearance of youth, though that was itself something of an eccentricity. Youthfulness-worse, willful youthfulness-was no slight social disability in a society where the average life span was measured in centuries and anyone much under fifty was regarded as a youngster. In forty or fifty years, Fredda would have physically aged enough that she couldafford to look twenty-five and still be taken seriously. Until then, it would be a social drawback. But the hell with them all. Sheliked the way she looked.
Fredda was on the petite side, with curly black hair she normally wore short-though, she thought wryly, not as short as it no doubt was now, after shaving for the operation. She was round-faced, snub-nosed, blue-eyed, with a personality that veered toward the pugnacious at times. She was given to sudden enthusiasm and cursed with a sometimes mercurial temper.
And, if she was not careful, this was threatening to be one of the times that temper would come to the fore. But she could not give way, no matter how bad the throbbing in her head became. She wished devoutly that she could order the robots to administer painkillers; but anything strong enough to killthis pain would leave her slaphappy-and she dared not be anything but sharp and alert for the police.
For there was so much to protect-including herself.
After all, at least by their lights, she had committed a terrible crime.
And, perhaps, by her own lights as well. It was so hard to know.
Fredda bit her lip and tried to clear her head, ignore the pain. She would have to be careful, very careful, with the Sheriff. And yet there was so much she did not know! Something had gone wrong, terribly, terribly wrong-but what? How much did Kresh know? What had happened?
But then, in the midst of her fretful worrying, it dawned on her. She could tell Kresh that she knew nothing. That was true, after all. Guesses and fears-she had plenty of those. Butfacts? About the case in point, whatever it was, she knew nothing. She had no facts at all. That was a strange thing to find comforting, but still, she felt better. She smiled to herself. Now that she knew she was ignorant, she could face the police.
As if on cue, the door to her hospital room slid open, and a big, burly, white-haired man came in, closely followed by a sky-blue police robot.
“Hello, Dr. Leving,” Donald said. “It’s good to see you again, though I doubt you care for the circumstances any more than I do.”
“Hello, Donald. I quite agree, on both points.” Fredda looked at the robot thoughtfully. It was rare for a robot to put itself so far forward as to begin a conversation, but then the circumstances were unusual. Robots rarely knew their creators personally, and it was more ~are still for a robot to visit its creator in a hospital room after that creator had had a close brush with death. No doubt it was all rather stressful for Donald, and no doubt his forwardness could be explained as a minor side effect of the release of First Law conflicts. Or, to put it in more pedestrian terms, he had spoken out of turn because he was glad to see her recovering.
Whatever the explanation for it, it was plain that the exchange annoyed Sheriff Kresh. The norms of polite society required that robots be ignored. Fredda winced. It was not smart to start the interview by irritating Kresh.
On the other hand, there was one fact about Donald that she dared not ignore: He was a walking lie detector. As if she needed any further reason to be careful.
But be all that as it may. It would be for the best to get this over with as quickly as possible. She turned toward Kresh and gave him her warmest smile. “Welcome, Sheriff,” she said in as gracious a tone as she could manage. “Please do have a seat.”
“Thank you,” he said, drawing up a chair by the foot of her bed.
“I expect you’re here to ask me some questions,” she said in what she hoped to be a calm, steady voice, “but I have a feeling you have more answers than I do. I honestly have no idea what happened. I was working in the lab, and then I woke up here.”
“You have no memory of the attack itself?”
“Then therewas an attack on me. Up until you said that, I wasn’t even sure of that. No, I don’t recall anything.”
Kresh sighed unhappily. “I was afraid of that. The med-robots warned me that traumatic amnesia was a possibility and that the loss may be permanent.”
Fredda was startled, alarmed. “You mean my mind is going? I’m losing my memory?”
“Oh, no, no, nothing like that. They warned me that it would be possible that you would have no recollection of the attack. There was some hope that you might recall something, but-you don’t remember anything at all?” he asked, clearly disappointed.
Fredda hesitated a moment and then decided it would be wise to be as forthcoming as possible. Things could get sticky down the road, and it might do her some good later if she played straight now. “No, nothing meaningful. I have a hazy recollection of lying on the floor, looking straight ahead, and seeing a pair of red feet. But I can’t say if that was a dream, or hallucination, or real.”
Kresh leaned forward eagerly. “Red feet. Can you describe them more completely? Were they wearing red shoes, or red socks, or-”
“No, no, they were definitely feet, not shoes or boots or socks. Robot’s feet, metallic red. That’s what I saw-if I did see it. As I said, it could have been all a hallucination.”
“Why in the world would you hallucinate about red robot feet?” Kresh asked in that same eager tone. It was almost too clear that the red feet interested him very much indeed.
Fredda took a good hard look at Kresh. She got the distinct feeling that this man wouldn’t be so obvious about what he wanted to know if he weren’t so plainly exhausted.