Chapter 7: What the Machine Knew

The chess player, it turned out, had a very good memory. This should not have surprised Crane — memory was a mechanical function, a matter of recording — but the precision of it, and the patience with which it had been storing information, affected him in a way he would not have predicted. Over the course of three days, working with the pictographic system he'd decoded and the partial key from Dr. Crane's monograph, he extracted from the automaton a record of everything it had witnessed in the drawing room over six months. Visitors, conversations, the specific tones of voice that its acoustic mechanism had registered as significant. R.V. had visited twice. The chess player had a visual record — not images, but a description system using the symbols, rendering physical characteristics in a code that Crane, with effort, could reverse into plain description. Male. Tall. Blond. A scar at the left temple. An accent the machine had registered as coming from the Baltic region. And in the second visit, three days before Mrs. Farquhar's death: an argument. The chess player rendered it not in words but in acoustic peaks — the volume and rhythm of two voices in conflict, one of which (Mrs. Farquhar's, registered at a lower acoustic frequency) had been at significant distress. He could not extract the words. But he could extract what followed: R.V.'s voice, alone in the room after Mrs. Farquhar had left it, speaking to someone who was not present at a volume too low to register — speaking to a second device, Crane realized. A communication device of some kind, separate from anything visible. "He coordinated her death from this room," Crane said. Not to Fenn, not to the constable who had been assigned to the investigation, but to the chess player. "You recorded it. You've been holding it." The chess player's gear mechanism moved one slow degree. "She built you to be a witness," Crane said. "She knew what was going to happen and she didn't have time to prevent it. So she built you to hold the record." He sat for a moment in the quiet of the drawing room with all its stopped clocks and its one communicating machine and felt the specific weight of someone's last act of defiance. "I'll find him," he said. "R.V. Whoever he is, I'll find him." The chess player's hand moved. A new card appeared between its fingers. On it: a location. A city. An address. Mrs. Farquhar, it seemed, had not stopped preparing for this conversation even after she'd known the end was coming.