“Can we go with you, sir?” Remington said, then corrected himself. “John?”
“I’m not a knight of the realm,” Susan’s father said jokingly.
Susan might have grinned at the realization that her father did not kid with just anyone, so he must like Remington; but she found herself too surprised by the neurosurgeon’s request to consider that long. “You want to go downtown? Near the bomb site?”
“I think it might do us both some good. Plus, I’d really like to see the place where Nate was built, and those nanorobots.”
Susan could not help remembering she had initiated the exact same trip the day Payton had hijacked their bus. “I’ve been wanting to see where you work, too, Dad. I can’t believe I’ve never gone before.”
John Calvin toed his usual line. “Kitten, it’s boring. There’s nothing there but a bunch of middle-aged guys and some laboratory benches covered in tangles of wires.”
No longer swayed by his words, Susan gave her father a stormy look. “Tangles of wires that bring plastic and steel and skin cells to life.” She pictured Nate. “Come on, Dad. We almost got blown up along with your building. Can’t you take us this once?”
John Calvin looked from one to the other. “You really want to go?”
Susan wondered if her father had gone stupid. “Of course, I want to go. You’ve worked there my whole life, and I’ve never even seen the outside of the building. Now that I’m actually involved in a USR project, I can’t believe I haven’t gone yet.” Susan understood her own reasons, but she wasn’t sure she understood Remington’s. Obviously, the creation and animation of robots intrigued him, particularly since he had met Nate, and the nanorobot project seemed to fascinate him as well.
“All right,” John Calvin said. The words emerged half heartedly, and his smile seemed forced. “But don’t get your expectations too high. There are places even I can’t go, and a few things got unexpectedly shuffled after the damage to the building.”
Remington held the door. “Lead the way, Sir John.”
John Calvin gave him a look Susan knew well. “As you wish, Sir Remy.” With a flourishing bow, he headed out the door.
Susan followed, and Remington took the rear, closing the door behind him.
A drab, grayish, rectangular building of insignificant size, U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., did not stand out in any way from the offices and shops around it. Before the bomb explosion, it had displayed no sign or other identifying features; but, now, the front was marred by divots and patches of scorching. The front edge of the roof looked chaotically scalloped, as if some horror-movie monster had struck it with a claw. Otherwise, the building appeared to be intact.
Focused on the building with laserlike intensity, Susan nearly missed the other telltale signs of a recent catastrophe. Cued by her father’s worried glance around, Susan opened her mind to the obvious details. Blinking police caution tape enclosed the area, and hazard blockades sat at either end of the street. The burnt, twisted, and sodden remains of the glide-bus still occupied part of the street, where a police forensics team conferred, taking myriad tiny samples. A tangled array of metal stood like a perverted piece of art, jutting from blackened concrete; and it took Susan a moment to recognize the remains of the bus stop. A dark pool of blood marred the sidewalk, connected to an erratic trail. Susan remembered its origin: She had eased a piece of glass from a woman’s thigh, only to have her run in panic when it came free. Remington had had to tackle her to allow Susan to hold pressure on the injury.
The memory brought a deep frown to Susan’s face. She had never understood why desperate circumstances brought out the best in some people and the worst in others. In emergencies, Susan had always noticed time seemed to slow down for her. When a driver swerved into her path, or a patient went into cardiac arrest, she felt as if she had all the time in the world to take evasive action or to recall the sequence of emergency procedures. Some other people seemed to freeze and grow desperately pale, or dithered wildly and purposelessly, and still more screamed and ran in some random direction, which usually only served to worsen the situation. She had even seen fellow students, male and female, faint dead away in a crisis.
Susan appreciated that one’s reaction to disaster was a natural phenomenon, not under the control of the individual. Obviously, those prone to calm thought belonged in occupations such as law enforcement, military, traffic control, and medicine, where potentially life-threatening calamities arose often and required quick wits and action. She appreciated that Remington appeared to have nerves of steel. She could think of nothing more important for someone operating on people’s brains and spinal cords, and she did not know if she could have respected a man who panicked in a crisis, no matter how natural and understandable the reaction.
A hand fell to Susan’s shoulder. Startled from her thoughts, Susan looked up to her father, his face screwed up in pain.
Abruptly concerned, Susan grabbed his hand. “Are you all right?”
“Me?” Her father’s features shifted instantly from discomfort to clear confusion. “I was worried about you. Are you okay coming here so soon?”
“I’m fine. I can’t say it’s not weird seeing it again, but I’m not suffering from post-traumatic anxiety or anything.” Susan glanced past him at Remington, who seemed more interested in the USR building than in the wreckage. “Remy seems fine, too.”
At the sound of his name, Remington looked at Susan. “Hmm?”
“I said you don’t seem to be suffering from post-traumatic anxiety.”
“No. Should I be?”
“I hope not,” Susan said, “because I’m not, either.”
Apparently intuiting the original source of concern, Remington addressed John Calvin. “If anyone should know, she should.” He jerked a thumb toward Susan and whispered as if revealing a dangerous secret, “She’s a headshrinker.”
Susan’s father chuckled. “Yes, indeed she is. And a good one, so I’ve heard.”
Though merely banter, the words made Susan cringe. “Well, you didn’t hear it from me. I sent a psychopath home to murder her sister and maim her brother, then couldn’t talk a schizophrenic out of blowing up a bus.” Those two enormous failures would weigh heavily on her conscience, she believed, for all eternity. She ground her teeth as guilt swam down upon her again. In her mind, the blood of Misty Anson would always stain her hands.
“Ah,” Remington said. “So now we measure success and failure by whether or not crazy people act crazy?”
Susan turned him a withering look. “That is my job, Remy. To keep crazy people from doing crazy things.”
“First of all,” he reminded her, “Payton Flowers was never your patient. You didn’t treat him, you didn’t medicate him, and you didn’t know him any better than I did. As for . . .” He paused, surely considering confidentiality. Payton Flowers had become a household name since the police had released his identity, but Sharicka and her family still had a reasonable expectation of privacy. “As for the girl, you took a calculated risk, and the worst happened. Learn from it and move on.”
Susan wanted to do that; but, while awake and in her dreams, she found herself reliving the moment when Sharicka’s mother had asked her opinion. “Who says I’m not moving on?”
“The person who watched you say nothing when a man announced his plans to blow us up.”
Susan wanted to clobber both of the men in her life. “What are you saying? That I was afraid to try to dissuade Payton because I felt inadequate after allowing Sh —” She caught herself, then continued. “That little girl a deadly home visit?”