Made to Kill Read Online Free PDF Page A

phone when I talked to Ada outside the office. I was programmed for it. It was part of the act. Even though Ada talked to me directly inside my mind, Thornton figured it wasn’t a good look for a robot to be seen talking to himself in the street.
    But that was just a half of it. The telephone might have sounded dead when we called each other, but it wasn’t really. I still spoke out loud when I used it but there was a signal howling down the line, a pulse Thornton wove around the frequencies of the standard telephone service, a hidden trick that connected me to Ada directly. That signal took my voice and made it inaudible and undetectable, the perfect scramble, proof against any kind of tapping.
    Thornton was a clever man and he figured that a robot private detective and his control computer probably needed a little privacy.
    The only thing he hadn’t figured was that the control computer he’d built for me was smarter than he was. In the five years we’d been in business, Ada had made some changes of her own, and not just to me.
    Which is to say the telephone in the car was a special kind of telephone, and if I stayed within a certain range of it I could pick up Thornton’s secret pulse signal even when the phone was on the hook. The signal was much weaker and the range was lousy, but it was okay.
    It still made my circuits ache, but Ada hadn’t solved that little bit of programming angst yet.
    I glanced back at the hut. There was no sound from it and no movement through the three dusty windows in its side. There was a faint ticking sound, which I put that down to the heat of the Hollywood sun shining down on the hut’s metal roof.
    With not a little effort I hung up the telephone. Somewhere I thought I heard Ada laughing and there was a creak like she was leaning back in the chair behind my desk back at the office.
    I moved across the parking lot. The drop at the edge was pretty steep but to my left there was a track which was still steep but a little better. I headed down it slowly. I slid on the dirt. I looked down the hill. I didn’t like the possibilities if I lost my balance.
    I frowned on the inside. “If Charles David was sightseeing up here then he had a death wish.”
    “That gives me an idea,” said Ada.
    If I had an eyebrow I would have raised it, but I didn’t, so I just kept on going down. The path went south and then turned to the right and headed toward the letters. I stopped and looked. I was looking at the D. The letters were big and tall and while the angle of the hillside was alarming there was a wide track both in front and behind the letters. Safe enough to take a closer look. I kept up a running commentary for the benefit of a certain computer.
    “Wow, they’re big,” said Ada.
    I looked up at the side of the D. It was slightly too far away to be towering exactly, but I still had to look up to see the top.
    “Forty-five feet each,” I said, doing the trigonometry in my head a couple of times just to be sure.
    “Good place for a suicide then.”
    I looked around. “Long way to come for it. You’d need to be committed.”
    “Or a good place to make it look like a suicide.”
    “Oh,” I said. I looked back up at the sign and nodded in quiet appreciation.
    “Jump off or get thrown, what’s the difference?” said Ada. “By the time you hit the deck nobody is going to know either way.”
    She had a point.
    “Still seems like a job of work,” I said.
    “Just let me file it away for future reference. Now keep looking.”
    I looked. The hillside on the other side of the path was damn steep. It was hard and rough and dusty and covered in rocks and scrub. I didn’t particularly feel like falling onto it from the path, let alone from the top of any of the forty-five feet tall letters.
    It was quiet up on the hill. The breeze had picked up a bit but it didn’t carry much on it. High above a jet liner defaced the clear blue sky with a vapor trail that was dirty at the edges.
    I moved