Utopia

16

CINTA MELLOY WALKED down the chaotic streets of Depot, dodging the traffic that seemed to be roaring past in every direction at once. There he was again, just up ahead. She ducked around a corner as her man glanced around behind himself. She was fairly sure he had not spotted her. Fairly. The man was suspicious, no doubt of that. But he was also an amateur, and that cut into his effectiveness a lot. Cinta watched as Davlo Lentrall stopped to put another of his ridiculous posters up. Cinta hadn’t even bothered to examine any of them, choosing instead to keep her eye on her man. Besides, she knew, more or less, what they had to say. STOP THE COMET! STOP THE MADNESS! PROTEST NOW! LEAVE THE PLANET ALONE! MASS MEETING TONIGHT!

Pointless. All of it. Much as she agreed with the sentiments on the posters, she knew damned well it was far too late. The deed was done. Cinta permitted herself no such delusions. She knew the comet was coming. And presumably, so did Lentrall. The populace certainly knew it. The only ones showing up at the meetings were Lentrall, a few whacked-out loners, and a collection of spies and informants—some of them from the SSS, and the others easily identified off the surveillance photos.

So why was Lentrall bothering? Or was all this nonsense a cover for something else—and if so, what?

Lentrall looked behind himself again, and Cinta ducked out of sight again, or at least tried to do so. She wasn’t even quite sure why she was following him. She had simply spotted him on the street, and started trailing him.

Up went another poster. Cinta shook her head and gave it up. She turned around and started back the way she had come. She was tempted to order a formal watch kept on Lentrall, assign the job to less obvious and more skillful watchers than herself. If she wasn’t so badly short-handed, she would have done just that. But there were so damned many others to watch.

At least the evacuation itself seemed to proceeding in an orderly and sensible fashion. The heavy lifters, the construction crews, the seemingly endless series of auxiliary services-emergency medical, motor pool repair, preimpact cartography, provisions, accommodation and sanitation for all the extra bodies—somehow, incredibly, it all seemed to be dropping into place. Those Dee and Dum units Kresh was nursemaiding clearly knew their stuff.

But there was plenty else happening—and none of it seemed even remotely promising to Melloy. She had loaned a detachment of SSS personnel to the evacuation effort, as per Tonya Welton’s orders, and Cinta had even flown to Depot to take personal charge of it herself. But none of it was doing any good. The SSS was here, doing its overt job—but they also had a covert agenda. They were supposed to watch the other players in the game—and the others were giving them plenty to watch.

The CIP had its own security people out, and they were watching the SSS—as they should have been. There was still the Government Tower Plaza fiasco on the books, after all. The Ironheads seemed to be everywhere, out in force, the black uniform visible on every street, in every shop. One of the SSS watch teams had even spotted their old friend Norlan Fiyle, quite openly going into and out of the local Ironhead HQ. And then there were the hordes of New Law robots, frantically conducting their own evacuation out of their undersized offices over on Shipping Street. The SSS had stacks of images of Caliban, the No Law robot, going in and out of there, and a fair collection of shots of Prospero too—though he seemed to come in less often, and stay for shorter periods.

Maybe every last one of them had nothing but sweetness and light on their minds. Maybe all of them had nothing but thoughts of doing good deeds and building the planet Inferno into the Paradise it had been meant to be. Cinta doubted it, but such a thing was possible.

But disaster could follow on even the best of intentions. And Cinta Melloy was sure that at least someone in this town had less than the best of intentions.

SIMCOR BEDDLE SMILED as he looked out the viewport of the aircar. There was a fair-sized crowd there to welcome him to Depot. Indeed, quite a large crowd, considering the small size of Depot and its distance from civilization. Simcor Beddle had spent most of the last three weeks shuttling back and forth between Hades and Depot. But every time he returned to Depot, the crowds were still there.

Thank Gildern for that, Beddle told himself. Thank Gildern for everything. The man was indispensable.

But it would be best not to keep the crowd waiting. He would have to hurry in order to get ready. Or, more accurately, for the robots to get him ready.

The pilot robot completed the standard landing safety crosscheck. An attendant robot released Simcor’s seat restraint system for him while a second helped him to his feet. Simcor got up and moved around behind his seat. He stood in the center of the largest piece of open flat deck in the car while the two attendant robots stripped him out of his rumpled travel coveralls. He stepped into the car’s compact refresher unit, and waited for the first attendant to reach in and activate the system. The water jets came to life around him.

There was no time for a full-length needle shower, and, indeed, the aircar’s refresher did not include many of the amenities Beddle took for granted in the first place, but one did have to rough it, now and again. Besides, even a few seconds under the refresher’s spray arms proved most reviving. He allowed the hot-air jets to dry him, and then stepped back outside to the main cabin.

It was the work of a moment for the attendant robots to dress Beddle in the jet-black formal uniform of the Ironheads. Almost before he was aware of it, he was ready, all his decorations gleaming, his boots shined to mirror brightness, his perfectly combed hair under his perfectly placed cap.

One attendant robot held up a mirror, and Beddle nodded in satisfaction at his own reflection. It was always important to make a good appearance. He gestured for the second robot to open the side hatch of the car. It swung open, and Beddle stepped forward to face the cheering crowd.

There was Gildern, standing on a low platform, leading the applause. And there were the cameras at the back of the crowd, recording it all, feeding it to every outlet the Ironheads could get their hands on. Beddle smiled, stepped down from the car and crossed to the speaker’s platform, his two attendant robots behind him.

He nodded his thanks to Gildern, and then turned to the crowd. “Well,” he began in a loud, carrying voice. “Here I am again.” That drew the good-natured laugh he had intended. He gestured in the vague direction of the sky. “But on the other hand there’s someone else—or rather something else—on the way. Comet Grieg is going to be here in another ten days. By then we all need to be out of here. All of us in the Ironhead party understand how much all of you here in the Utopia region are being asked to give up. We all know how great the reward for the whole planet will be—but no matter how great that reward for others, it is not right that you people here should be expected to pay the price for it. And we’ll see to it that you do not.

“I don’t think Governor Alvar Kresh quite sees things that way. And just by the way, has Kresh paid a call to Utopia yet? Is he going to come here at all, before Utopia isn’t here anymore? He’s promised a certain amount of relocation funding for each of you. Well, that’s all well and good, as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough! We Ironheads are prepared to go a lot further. We’ll see to it that all of you are properly resettled. We’ll see to it that your temporary accommodation is as good as it can be. We’ll see to it that all of your movable property goes with you—and not just the ‘essential’ property Alvar Kresh has promised you can keep!”

And that brought the round of cheers that Beddle had expected. Never mind that keeping half of the promises he had been making would bankrupt the Ironhead party. Never mind that the Ironhead contribution to transport and shelter and all the rest of it was barely measurable. By the time all of that became clear, people would be far too busy putting their lives back together to worry about the details of political promises—and Beddle would have laid in a endless stock of political capital as the man who remembered the ordinary citizen while the government was too busy with its grand projects to bother.

Beddle waited until just before the cheers would have died out on their own, and then raised his hands for silence. “But friends, if there’s one thing we all know, it’s that time is short. So while I thank you for coming out, I hope you won’t mind if I keep this brief. We all have work to do. Now let’s all go do it!”

That last bit didn’t really have much in the way of meaning, but the crowd cheered anyway. Beddle smiled for the cameras, and waved to the crowd, then let Gildern lead him to a small open-body runcart.

“A very nice little speech, sir,” Gildern said.

“Good enough for the purpose at hand,” Beddle replied evenly. Somehow praise from Gildern threw him off stride. It seemed out of character. “Let’s get where we’re going, shall we?”

“Yes, sir. There’s some news that might well interest you.”

The two men climbed into the back of the runcart and the robot driver started the vehicle up. Beddle looked around with interest as they made their way through the small town. He was surprised to see how slowly they made progress. Traffic was in a hopeless snarl. Depot was as frantically busy as an overturned ant-heap—to use the sort of nature-based imagery that was so suddenly popular these days, now that terraforming was all the rage.

Simcor Beddle shook his head thoughtfully. It was strange to think of, but five years ago, the image of comparison would have been based on robots in some way. “Busy as a robot,” or some such. Times had changed, not only in big ways, but in strange and subtle small ones.

He and Gildern had plotted endlessly over ways to eliminate the New Law robots and get rid of the Settlers. Ways to get rid of the disturbing influences, so that life could get back to normal, back to the way Spacers were meant to live.

But in recent days it occurred to Beddle that it might be the small things that would be hardest to change back. Perhaps the Ironheads could rebuild a world that had no Settlers, had no New Law robots, had no robotic labor shortage. But how could they wipe the memory of those things from people’s minds?

In the old days, the people of Inferno had only known of one way to do things, one way of living life: have the robots do it. That was the answer to everything. And it was an answer that had worked. Now they had been exposed not just to other possibilities, but also to the notion that there were other possibilities, other answers that might work as well. Before a few years ago, no one on this planet had been able even to conceive of another way of living. Now a way of life based solely on robotic labor was merely one option among many. How could that be changed back? Especially when some misguided souls had such poor taste and lack of judgment that they actually preferred doing things for themselves, and enjoyed the company of Settlers?

Even the revival of interest in the natural world was disruptive. Robots, the service of robots, were supposed to provide a cushion, a cocoon, that kept the outside world at bay—quite literally at times. One could easily live a wholly satisfactory life without ever setting foot outside, if one’s robots did their jobs properly. With even the most basic of comm systems, no one ever needed to travel, even to do business or visit with friends.

But now people were being exposed to nature—not just the idea of nature, but the fact of it. And some of them—a lot of them—seemed to like it.

It occurred to Simcor Beddle that he had not been outside, except to get from one place to another, for years. He never went to the outside. Some tiny part of him, some all-but-forgotten, all-but-stifled part of him suddenly longed to get out of the groundcar, longed to get on his own feet, start walking and just keep going, to the horizon and beyond. The wind shifted and brought the cool, sweet scent of some nearby stream to him. Suddenly he wanted to find that stream, slip off his boots and dangle his feet in the water.

The runcart went over a bump in the road, and Simcor Beddle blinked and came back to himself. Nonsense! Utter nonsense. The very idea of his sitting barefoot by a stream was absolutely absurd. Beddle thrust the strange notions, the bizarre impulses, from his mind. He had not come all this way to indulge in such foolishness.

But if even a brief ride from a landing pad to a field office was enough to inspire such a reaction in him, then how surprised should he be if others were tempted to look out at the wide world outside? “Come on,” Beddle said to the driver robot. “Let’s get moving. What the devil is taking so long?”

“Too much traffic on the road,” said Gildern. “There’s a lot more work to do than you might expect. Lots of transport operations going on in the Utopia region, and Depot’s the focal point for all of it. The evacuation is a huge undertaking. Considering this is supposed to be the undeveloped side of the planet, there’s an awful lot of hardware and household effects and Space knows what to pack up and ship out.”

Beddle could see that for himself as he looked around. On every side it was the same story. Robots were disassembling and packing up all sorts of machinery and equipment, taking apart whole buildings, packing ground trucks and aircars and every other kind of vehicle.

“You wouldn’t believe the changes in this place in the last month,” Gildern said. “You’ve only been in and out quickly, a few times. I’ve been here right along, and watched it all happen. It’s incredible all the work they’ve done.”

Beddle could see that. There was as much equipment coming in as going out—or at least, so it seemed. Transporters had to be flown to Depot in pieces and then assembled. They had to build living quarters for human overseers and repair and maintenance centers for the army of robots and the swarm of aircars that had descended on the place. A huge groundcrawler roared past, and Beddle had to lean in close to Gildern and shout into his ear in order to make himself heard. “What of the other matter?” he shouted.

“In the field office,” Gildern shouted back. “Noise isn’t enough cover. There might be lipreaders.”

Beddle nodded his agreement. It would not be the first time skilled lipreaders had been used against one side or another in the endless, complicated political skirmishes of the last few years.

A break opened up in the traffic, and the small open vehicle slowly started to move, gradually gathering speed. They crossed the outskirts of town and moved through the bustling, busy, organized chaos that was downtown Depot.

A squad of robots moved past, marching quickly, each carrying a crate nearly as large as it was. A technical team was working on a battery of probe launchers, part of the scientific research effort attached to the comet impact. Strange, Beddle thought, to look at such a massive cataclysm as a mere test subject. But there would no doubt be a great deal to learn from the impact. There were plans afoot to deploy any number of flying, orbiting, and buried sensors. Many of them would, of course, be destroyed by the impact—but even the pattern of their destruction would tell the scientists a great deal.

The runcart went through the center of town and out the other side. It slowed to a halt outside a cheerful-looking portable building, a bright orange hemisphere about ten meters high and twenty across. By the look of it, the building had not so much been erected as unfolded. Beddle looked around, and saw that the whole area was dotted with similar structures in every color of the rainbow. The Ironheads weren’t the only ones who had needed a temporary headquarters in Depot.

Gildern and Beddle got down out of the runcart and stepped to the door of the building. There was the briefest of pauses while the scanning system confirmed both Gildern and Beddle’s identities. They heard the heavy-duty locking mechanism unlatch, and the robot standing inside the door opened it and let them in.

Simcor looked toward the scanning device on its stand. It was a sleek, gleaming cube of gun-metal gray, its controls and displays well laid out and well-labeled. An armored cable ran from it to the armored box that held the body of the exterior camera.

“A Settler-made device,” said Beddle, the disapproval clear in his voice.

“Yes, sir, it is,” said Gildern, quite unapologetic. “I do not trust sentry systems based on robots. There is always the possibility that a person skilled in manipulation of robots will be able to convince the robot that there was a good First Law reason to let that person in.”

Beddle glared at his subordinate in annoyance. In other words, Gildern was willing to commit heretical acts in the name of security, and trading with the enemy was not beneath him. There was a great deal Beddle could have said, but this was not the time or place. There were other issues to deal with. He did not speak, but instead followed his chief of security through an inner door and into a bare field office.

The room was completely undecorated, utterly cheerless. There was nothing personal there. No photocube of a family member, no decoration, nothing that would give the slightest clue to Gildern’s personality. It was the office of someone who was camping here, not someone who lived here.

Of course, Beddle reflected, Gildern’s office back at Ironhead HQ was no less spartan. A disordered office, a cluttered office, was an insecure office.

There was nothing in the room at present except a table and two chairs—comfortable-looking ones by most standards, quite spartan by Beddle’s.

“I personally performed a bug sweep of this room one hour ago,” said Gildern. “We ought to be secure enough here to discuss the other matter.”

“ ‘The other matter,’ ” Beddle repeated. “If we are all that secure here, I see no reason to waste time with euphemisms. Let us call things by their proper name and discuss the destruction of the New Law robots.”

If there was any thing that the Ironheads regarded as dangerous, it was the continued existence of the New Law robots. Robots that did not have the true Three Laws were a far more serious heresy than the use of Settler machinery, or contact with Settlers. Settlers were foreigners, aliens, the enemy. Even if someone like Gildern did deal with them, he knew the dangers, the risks when he did so. But robots were supposed to be the bulwark of the Spacer way of life, the cornerstone of the Ironhead philosophy. If the people of Inferno grew even slightly accustomed to dealing with robots that would not unquestioningly endanger themselves, sacrifice themselves, for the good of a human, if they got used to robots who might debate an order, or follow their own agendas, then, Beddle had no doubt, the rot would have set in. If people could not trust robots absolutely, they would not trust them at all. After all, robots were stronger, faster, harder to injure than humans. Some robots, in many ways, were more intelligent. Without the barrier, the protection, of the Three Laws, people would have good reason to fear robots. At least such were the official reasons for wishing to be rid of the New Law robots, whenever Beddle made a speech on the subject.

But there was another, more private reason. The New Law robots were, plain and simple, a threat to the Ironheads’ power. The doctrine of more and better robots was endangered so long as anyone ever saw an alternative to it.

But if there were no New Law robots, there would be no New Law robot problem. Toward that end, Gildern and his people had been searching for Valhalla, the New Law robot city, for quite some time, since long before anyone had ever heard of Comet Grieg. Nothing had ever come of the effort.

But now—now things were different. And Beddle was eager to find out precisely how different. “All right,” he said to Gildern. “What have you got for me?”

“More pieces of the puzzle, sir. As you know, a direct search for Valhalla has never been possible. The minute anyone tried a search, the New Law robots would simply shut everything down. Besides which, the New Law robots encrypt their long-range hyperwave traffic, and we have not had much luck in reading it. Hyperwave signals are also difficult to track with any precision. But with enough signals, it is possible to do statistical analysis. And there has been enough traffic in recent days to let us do some pretty fair work. And more physical traffic as well. The New Law robots are working as hard and as fast as anyone to evacuate in time. That means more signal traffic, more aircars and land cars and transports and so forth. And they are being less careful. There is less point in concealing a hidden city that is about to be destroyed.

“The long and the short of it is that we have had a lot more data to work with, and we have been able to work from a lot closer in than we were in times past. We can get equipment and robots in here, right on top of things.”

“With what result?” Beddle asked.

“The best possible result,” Gildern replied. “Absolute confirmation that Valhalla is somewhere inside the primary impact site for the first and largest of the comet fragments. It will be utterly destroyed.”

“But we were virtually certain of that before. And as the New Laws are clearly preparing to evacuate, what good will it do for the comet to destroy them after they have all gone?”

“None whatsoever. But look around yourself. Look at Depot.”

“What about it?”

“Depot is being evacuated as well—and there have never been so many people here. The people here all know this place is going to be wiped out, but there is no danger in being here now. However, in the meantime, there is a great deal of work to be done, so they have pulled in all sorts of people to do it.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that our sources confirm that New Law robots are vanishing from all the places they usually are. They are buying out their labor contracts, closing up the shops they run in the smaller settlements. We’ve seen a large number of them pass through Depot and estimate that ninety percent of the existing New Law robots are in the vicinity.”

“And so you think they are rushing home to Valhalla to help and salvage what they can. What of it? They will be gone before the comet hits.”

“Quite true. But all we need to do is locate Valhalla before the comet strikes, and destroy it while they are still there. And I believe both goals are more achievable than you would think. I also believe it is highly likely that you can accomplish them both, yourself, personally.”

“How?” Beddle demanded, a world of eagerness and ambition bound up in that one little word.

“As for the first part, the question of locating Valhalla, we are able to track a great deal of the increased air, ground, and hyperwave traffic from here, but our ability to triangulate and backtrack is highly limited. If we had a mobile tracking station, equipped with the proper detection equipment, we would soon be able to sort through all the deliberate false trails and extraneous signals.”

“What do I have to do with a mobile tracking station?”

Gildern leaned forward eagerly. “It’s quite simple. We have installed the proper tracking gear on my long-range aircar. I can provide you with robots trained to operate the system, who know how to coordinate the work with the base station here. In short, we would tell your aircar where to go, your aircar would obtain readings from that position, and then move on to the next location. You are planning to visit several of the small outlying settlements on this trip. That would suit us perfectly. Land one place and give a speech while your robots do a detection sweep, then fly on to the next spot, and the next, and the next. We’d rapidly accumulate enough data to establish a very good fix on Valhalla. With enough data, I expect we ought to be able to get within an error radius of only five or eight kilometers. And that should be quite good enough.”

“Good enough for what?” Beddle asked.

Gildern was about to reply when the ground suddenly gave a strange, sharp little shudder and the building rattled and shook hard enough that it seemed close to folding itself back up. The air was suddenly full of dust, seemingly thrown up from out of nowhere. There was a distant rumbling and a muted boom! that seemed to come from somewhere far off.

Gildern gestured reassuringly. “There’s no danger,” he said. “Notice that none of our robots even bothered to rush in to our rescue. But to answer your question—good enough for one of those. For a burrow bomb—a seismic sounder.”

“A burrow bomb?”

“They’ve set off any number of them around here. The scientists want to understand the underlying geology of this area as thoroughly as possible before the impact, so they can better interpret the results of the impact. The explosions cause seismic shock. The bombs themselves are carefully calibrated. They can burrow themselves deep into the earth and set themselves off at a predetermined time and depth. By measuring the vibrations produced by the explosions from various receiving stations, and seeing how they have been changed, the scientists can determine what sort of strata the vibrations have gone through. It’s an unusually destructive way of doing geology, but it gets the job done fast—and what difference does it make when the comet is going to destroy everything anyway? We are virtually certain that Valhalla is underground. If we set off a burrow bomb close enough to Valhalla, the shock waves should collapse the entire city, killing or trapping everyone inside.

“There are four or five researcher agencies setting off these devices. I have taken steps to establish a real seeming, research group myself. Everything is being done in such a frantic hurry, with the comet bearing down, that it was easy to get all the various approvals. Our little operation has already set off three sounders, all duly reported ahead of time and properly recorded and so on. In order to stay legal, there need only be an hour or two’s notice of your explosion. You will not be violating any law at all.”

“How could that be?”

“The New Law robots have no legal standing. Technically, they are abandoned property themselves, and they certainly can’t own property. They have never registered any title to Valhalla—how could they, when no one knows where it is?”

Beddle nodded impatiently. The arguments were all familiar to him. “Yes, yes, you don’t have to convince me of anything. But don’t be naive. Those legal arguments have never been settled. Some lower courts have ruled that they can own land. Even if the laws had been settled, and in our favor, a thing does not have to be illegal before it causes us trouble.” Beddle paused for a moment, and then smiled. “However, if it means the destruction of nearly all the New Law robots, I am willing to contend with a whole world of trouble. The price might be high, but, even so, it would be a bargain.” Beddle leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. “And you believe all this is feasible? That it has a reasonable chance of success?”

“Yes, sir. I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending it’s a sure thing. But I think it can be done.”

Simcor Beddle looked at his second-in-command thoughtfully. It was a risky scheme. There was no doubt about that. It was all but a certainty that they would be found out.

But would that be such a bad thing? There were plenty of people, everywhere on the political spectrum, who would be quite relieved to be rid of the New Law robots. Even if the Ironheads took some heat for it, they would earn a lot of credit as well.

Besides, how could he possibly turn his back on this opportunity? This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Gildern was offering him his dreams on a silver platter. How could he say no? Why would he say no?

He leaned forward across the table and smiled at Gildern. “Not only can it be done, Gildern. It will be. It will be.”

NORLAN FIYLE SMILED as well, as he listened through the thin partition. Jadelo Gildern rarely made mistakes, but when he did make one, it was of the largest size. The room on the other side of the partition might well have been swept for electronic bugs only a hour before, but that was of no use. Not against an underling with a good pair of ears and a reason to bear a grudge, not against an underling on the other side of a wall made for portability rather than soundproofing.

He had heard it all. And he was a man with more reasons to speak, and to act, than to keep quiet.

Simcor Beddle took off on his good-will tour the next morning. Over the next two days, he made his first four appearances, at four little towns, arriving at each town right on schedule.

But he never arrived at the fifth.

17

THE ALERT COMM’S buzzer went off once again. Constable Pherlan Bukket opened one unhappy eye and glared at his bedside clock. It was barely 0700. Bukket was accustomed to sleeping until at least 0800—preferably later. Up until a month ago, doing so had usually been possible, even routine. Up until a month ago, most pleasant things had been routine. Now nothing was pleasant—and nothing was routine.

Up until a month ago, Constable Bukket had enjoyed his work—mostly because he was the only one doing it. Pherlan Bucket was responsible for enforcing the law and keeping the peace in the town of Depot—or at least he had been until a month ago, back when neither law nor peace was often disturbed in Depot.

Now it was different. Now alerts came in at all hours of the day and night. Most of the time, the CIP came thundering in and took over the situation anyway, just as they had shoved him out of his offices in town and taken them over for themselves.

It was, of course, just as well they came in and took over because Bukket didn’t have anything like the resources to deal with the problems that were coming up. But even so, the entire situation was deeply frustrating.

He slapped at the alert comm’s buzzer and cut it off, then picked up the unit. “This is Constable Bukket,” he said into the alert comm’s mike, making no attempt to hide the sleepiness from his voice. “Who is it and what do you want?”

“This is Depot Air Traffic Control,” a robotic voice replied. “We have a disaster beacon showing about three hundred kilometers south of here.”

“Then why call me?” Bukket demanded. “It’s nowhere near my jurisdiction.”

“Yes, sir. I called you because my standing orders require it. I am sending the text details of the incident now. If you will read them on the alert comm’s display screen, you will understand.”

Bukket shook his head irritably. Someday someone was going to come up with a set of standing orders that made sense. He turned the alert comm over so he could see the screen—

And three seconds later he knew two things very well. The robots at Depot Air Traffic Control had been quite right to call him in on this one.

And he would be only too happy to hand this one off to the CIP.

DONALD 111 RECEIVED the incoming high-priority call just as Governor Kresh and Dr. Leving were about to sit down to their evening meal at the governor’s Winter Residence.

Donald rarely concerned himself much with the governor’s meals, as the governor himself rarely paid them much mind, but tonight was an exception. In his judgment, this was likely to be the last evening for quite some time the governor and his wife would have any chance at all of a civilized meal together. Both of them had been working endless hours in preparation for the comet impact, and no doubt would be called upon to work even harder as the comet approached. Dr. Leving in particular had brought more work on herself—on all of them—with her insistence of diverting some small fraction of the evacuation aid to the New Law pseudo-robots—work that Donald regarded as massively counterproductive. The world could only benefit when the last of the New Laws were swept away.

But busy as recent days had been, and as busy as the remaining time before the comet would be, the days after it hit would be busier still. This would be their last chance to rest and relax, and Donald had decided this was the night to do everything right. He had personally overseen the table arrangement, the candles, the background music, the menu and its preparation, the elegant table setting. The governor and Dr. Leving’s reaction as they entered the dining was all that he could have hoped for. Both of them smiled, seemingly for the first time in days. The care and the worry of the last few weeks seemed to drain away from their faces.

“This is lovely, Donald,” said Dr. Leving as her husband helped her to her chair. “This is most thoughtful of you.”

“Fine work,” the governor said as he took his own seat. “This was exactly the night to do this.”

“You are both most kind,” said Donald. He was on the point of signaling the kitchen to bring in the first course when the call came in.

In less than a hundredth of a second, Donald received the signal, decoded it, and identified it as an incoming emergency priority voice call. Another one. The days had been full of them for weeks now.

Donald briefly debated handling this one by himself, or even refusing to answer it. But the governor’s orders on such matters were very clear and specific, and had been reinforced several times in the past few days. Donald really had no choice in the matter. With a slight dimming of his eyes that might have been the robotic equivalent of a sigh of resignation, Donald gave in to the inevitable. “Sir, I am most unhappy to tell you this, but there is an incoming emergency call. It is scrambled, the caller’s identity unknown.”

“Burning devils,” Kresh said, his irritation plain. “Don’t they ever stop calling? Patch it through yourself, Donald. Let’s clear this up here and now, whatever it is. Probably just another farmer who refuses to get off his land or something.”

“Yes, sir. Patching through—now.”

“This is Kresh,” said the governor. “Identify yourself and your business.”

“Sir!” a fussy, nervous-sounding voice answered. “I—I didn’t mean to get patched through to you, but the priority management system did it for me. I am trying to reach Commander Justen Devray.”

“You are speaking with the planetary governor, not an answering service. Who I am speaking with?” Kresh demanded.

“Oh! Ah, Constable Bukket, of the town of Depot. But honestly, the priority coding system put me through to you.”

“Which it only does when the situation demands my prompt attention,” said Kresh. “So what is the situation?”

There was a brief silence on the line, and then a sort of low gulping noise. “Simcor Beddle’s aircar has crashed, sir. At least we think it has. It vanished off Depot Air Traffic Control, and then the disaster beacon went off. And, ah—the beacon is stationary, at a position right in the center of the primary impact zone.”

“Burning devils!” Kresh said, abruptly standing up. “Search and rescue?”

“They launched four minutes ago. They should be there in about another five minutes. I know it’s evening where you are, but we’re early morning here. Local sunrise at the site isn’t for another twenty minutes and it’s very rough terrain, so—”

“So they may have to wait for daylight before they can even set down. Very well. Use the side-channel datapath of this frequency and send all the data you have. Thank you for your report. You will be contacted as needed. Kresh out.” The governor made a throat-cutting gesture and Donald cut the link.

“Damnation,” said Kresh. “Hellfire and damnation. Someone’s made some kind of try for Beddle.”

Fredda Leving’s face went pale. “But you can’t know that,” she protested. “It could have been an accident. His aircar could have malfunctioned. The pilot could have made a mistake.”

“Think so, Donald?” the governor asked.

“No, sir. Preventative maintenance on vehicles is one of the most basic means of preventing harm to humans. The mechanical failure rate on air vehicles is extremely low. Nor is there any plausible chance that it was pilot error. Not with a robotic pilot.”

“And there is no way Simcor Beddle would do his own flying,” said Kresh. “Even if he knew how—and I doubt he does—it would be against his principles to do anything a robot could do for him.”

“But it’s not impossible that it was an accident,” Fredda said. “Burning stars. The political upheaval when Grieg died. I don’t know that we could hold together through that again.”

What would happen if—if things turned out as badly as they might? The Ironheads would probably blame the government, or Alvar personally. Unless they pinned it on the Settlers. The Ironhead movement would be up in arms, that was for sure. Marches, riots, arrests, counter-demonstrations, lunatics and perfectly sane citizens suspecting plots and conspiracies under every rock. She could see it all, plain as day. How the devil were they supposed to contend with that and the comet impact at the same time? “Could it have been an accident, Donald?” Fredda asked, trying to find at least some ray of hope.

“While I grant there is a theoretical possibility of mechanical or pilot failure, I would agree with the governor that foul play of some sort is the far more plausible explanation. That is even more disturbing than it normally would be, given the political implications of the case.”

“Donald, you are a master of understatement. We have to move on this fast. Fredda, dinner is going to have to wait. Donald, call Justen Devray. I want him on the scene. And I want him there now.”

THE DISASTER BEACON that had summoned them all was still blaring, long hours after the crash, the locator strobe on top of the car still flashing. No doubt the hyperwave beacon was still running as well.

Commander Justen Devray gestured to Gervad, his personal robot. “Go find the switches and shut those damned homing beacons off,” he said. “We know where the car is.”

“Yes, sir,” said Gervad, his manner as calm and deferential as ever. He walked across the landing site and went aboard the aircar. After a few minutes, the noise cut off.

Good. He gave an order and someone carried it out. At least something happened the way it was supposed to happen. Justen Devray yawned mightily, fighting back exhaustion. It was full noon here, but it was the dead of night back in the city of Hades, on the other side of the planet. Justen had been getting ready for bed a little less than two hours before.

The local officers were still here—if you could call Depot local, three hundred-plus kilometers away. They were the ones who had detected the beacon, found the aircar—and hyperwaved a priority call to Hades. Kresh had ordered Justen to the scene immediately, and Justen had obeyed with the alacrity of the most slavish robot. Ten minutes after Kresh’s call, he had been en route to Hades Spaceport. Fifteen minutes after that, he had been on a rush suborbital flight with the Crime Scene team, hurtling clear around the planet in a stomach-churning crash emergency flight trajectory. They had landed at Depot Field, transferred to aircars, and flown like fury to get to the downed aircar. He had gotten to the scene fast, but he was not exactly fully awake.

Justen had gone to bed the night before looking forward to his first decent night’s sleep in weeks. He felt a sudden surge of irrational anger toward whoever had done this. Why couldn’t they have waited just a few hours more, and let him rest just a little?

Maybe the kidnappers had just been in a hurry, like everyone else these past month or so. Justen Devray did what everyone did every few minutes, these days. He looked up into the sky, and searched for the glowing dot that was growing brighter all the time. There it was, hanging low in the western sky.

The comet. The comet that was headed straight for the planet Inferno. Straight, in point of fact, for the spot of land Justen Devray was standing on. In five days time it would be here—and then it would be allover…

Justen turned away from the comet and resumed his study of the aircar’s wreckage—if wreckage was the right word for it. Wreckage implied a crash, an accident. This car had landed safely. The damage here had happened after the landing, and it had been committed quite deliberately. Someone had kidnapped Simcor Beddle.

And Justen Devray had just five short days to find the man, before the comet came down.

Devray moved in closer, and studied the exterior of the car more closely. The aircar had landed on the summit of a low hill in the middle of rough country, jumbled rock and scruffy undergrowth, smack in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town of any size was at least forty kilometers away. Devray considered the rugged badlands that passed for countryside in the vicinity. This hilltop, jutting up from a jumbled pile of rock and brush, was probably the smoothest piece of land for twenty kilometers. Beddle and the kidnappers couldn’t have walked out. It would take a mountaineer in perfect condition to make any time at all through this kind of country.

Devray shook his head. The ground search had started at once, of course, but they would find nothing. No footprints, no broken twigs, no tom bits of cloth hanging off a thornbush. They had flown out.

But there was another factor. When a disaster beacon went off, every tracking station within three hundred kilometers of it automatically shifted into maximum sensitivity mode. The badlands in the general vicinity of the aircar broke up the sensor signal near ground level and made it possible to evade detection at low altitude—but the badlands were surrounded by areas of gently rolling hills and plains where detection would be easy. Nothing had been spotted flying out—and anything that had flown out would have been spotted. Perhaps they could not have walked out, but they could not have flown far, either. The odds were good that Beddle and his captors were still in the badlands south of Depot.

Whoever had done this had chosen their spot carefully, probably planting a getaway aircar at the scene beforehand. At first glance, that meant at least two kidnappers to get all the flying done, but not necessarily. A solo kidnapper could have flown in the getaway vehicle with an aircycle strapped to the luggage rack, parked the getaway vehicle, and lifted out on the cycle to wherever. Then it would just be a question of getting to where Beddle was and making one’s way onto Beddle’s aircar.

So where to land the getaway aircar? Devray turned his back on the aircar and studied the ground about it. There. That would be the place. In that hollow just downslope. A car stashed there would be impossible to see unless you flew directly overhead, and getting from here to there would be a relatively easy hike—no minor issue when dealing with a kidnap victim who was not in a mood to cooperate. Devray wanted to check it out himself, but there was no sense making a mess of what a robot could do better. “You! You over there!” he called out to the closest Crime Scene robot. “Examine that downslope area. Look for any sign that an aircar was down there.”

The robot nodded gravely and headed toward the hollow.

Justen Devray nodded eagerly to himself. He was starting to see it. Starting to see how they had done it. Land the getaway car there and then—No. Wait. He was moving too fast. It was best not to make any assumptions at this point. Maybe Beddle had been lured here, and the kidnapper or kidnappers had been waiting on the ground, with their getaway vehicle. Maybe there was no aircar. Maybe there was some other means of escape. Maybe the kidnappers and their victim hadn’t escaped at all, but were in some well-concealed and well-shielded hidey-hole a hundred meters away.

But there was one thing Devray would be willing to bet on. This attack had been carefully, methodically, planned. There was something about the way all the details had been attended to here at the crime scene that said that much. He could almost imagine the kidnappers working against a checklist, ticking off each item as they accomplished it.

Yes indeed. Very methodical. Every detail. He walked in closer to the scene around the aircar.

Four robots that had been lined up outside the car, facing away from it. Each had been shot each through the back of the head. He knelt down by the their ruined bodies. One shot each. Very precise, very accurate shooting.

Devray left the Crime Scene robots to record the images of the robots. He stood up and went aboard the aircar. It was a long-range, long-duration model, capable of flying clear around the world, or reaching orbit if need be, and it carried every manner of emergency supplies. Nearly all of the supplies had been rifled through, and many of them had been taken. Maybe once they had compared what was missing against the aircar’s inventory list, they would be able to make some guesses about what the kidnappers had in mind. Unless the supply theft was mere misdirection.

Justen moved forward to the cockpit. The pilot robot was on the floor, shot through the back of the head. Where in the sequence had that gone? Did the assailant emerge from some hiding place, shoot the pilot while in flight, and then fly the craft down? Or was the pilot shot on the ground, after the landing? Justen could see no way to tell on his own. Maybe the Crime Scene robots would come up with something. Maybe it would be a key point. Maybe it would mean nothing at all.

Justen looked around the rest of the cabin. Aircars had flight recorders and other logging instruments. It might well be possible that something could be learned from them. But then he spotted the recorders, and gave up that idea.

The recorders had been shot up as well, with the same tidy one-shot precision marksmanship demonstrated on the robots outside and the pilot in here.

All of it done very precisely, very neatly, one thing after the other. Somewhere in the sequence, of course, the attacker had dragged the victim off and then switched on the beacon system to attract the authorities. No doubt those jobs had been on the list as well. All of it very, very methodical.

But the most important clue was also the most obvious, and one left behind most deliberately. It was a message painted on the cockpit’s aft bulkhead in crudely formed letters:

Devray had no doubt at all that the bad spelling and the crude handwriting were both deliberate, intentional misdirection. There were virtually no illiterates on Inferno, and certainly none among the highly skilled Settler technicians who had been brought in. And what illiterate could have planned this operation? This job required someone who could read maps, who could study Beddle’s itinerary and stalk him, who could fly aircraft. No, the bad spelling was misdirection, or perhaps an effort by the writer to disguise his or her handwriting and style of writing and prevent identification that way.

Even the handwriting itself suggested as much. The letters were too regular in shape for an illiterate who had no practice writing. They had the look of a literate person trying to make mistakes. And there was something too careful, too thorough, about the misspellings. The Crime Scene robots had already scanned the message, and even taken paint samples off it. Devray shrugged and dismissed the form of the message from his mind. Let his handwriting experts and the paint experts and the psychologists analyze it to their hearts’ content. He was ready to bet it would tell them nothing at all.

But the message itself. What could it tell them? The basic interpretation was simple enough. Stop the comet from hitting and deposit five hundred thousand in Trader Demand Credits in account number 18083-19109 of the Planetary Bank of Inferno—or else we’ll kill Beddle.

That was all perfectly clear. But surely there was more, surely there was some way to read between the lines.

Gervad was there in the cockpit, examining the flight controls—and not finding much that told him anything, by the look of it.

“So what do you make of it all, Gervad?” Justen asked his personal robot, pointed toward the message.

Gervad studied the words painted on the wall. “Someone has stolen Simcor Beddle, sir. We have to get him back.”

“That sums it up rather neatly,” said Justen, though it was not quite the detailed analysis he had been hoping for. Well, Gervad never had been one for conversation. There hadn’t been much point in asking him the question in the first place. What bothered him was that the message made none of the standard demands that the police not be contacted, or that searches not be carried out, or that publicity be avoided. Why not? Why weren’t the kidnappers worried about such things?

He gave it up. There was no way to know.

“Come along with me,” he said. Justen went out of the cockpit and left the aircar, Gervad following behind.

“Commander Devray! Sir!” One of the Crime Scene robots was calling to him. He looked around and spotted the robot he had sent down into the downs lope area.

“Yes, what is it?”

“There are definite signs that an aircar has been there recently, sir. We spotted very clear landing-pad prints. We ought to be able to determine the make and model, and possibly the weight of the vehicle. There are also indications that someone worked to sweep out any signs of footprints. There are one or two very indistinct marks. It’s doubtful we’ll be able to get anything much out of them.”

“But it’s a start,” Justen said. “Good. Keep at it.”

Justen stood there for a moment, watching the Crime Scene robots working the site. It was plain he was not going to be able to spot anything they would miss here. But he wasn’t quite sure what to do next. Aside from breaking up the attempt to snatch Lentrall, he had never worked a kidnapping before. Aside from the Lentrall case, he was not entirely sure that there had ever been a kidnapping on Inferno before. There were case histories in the books and the databanks, of course. He had studied a number of the cases from other worlds. In theory he knew how to proceed. But, wondered Justen, was theory going to be enough?

Well, it had damned well better be. “Find me an aircar and get me to Depot,” Justen said to Gervad. “We’ll work this case from there. We’re going to start pulling some people in.”

“Yes sir. Might I ask who?”

“I don’t know yet,” Justen admitted. It almost didn’t matter. Sometimes, when you had no idea where to start, the best thing to do was just to pick somewhere at random and start there. “I’ve got the flight to Depot to decide.”

“Very good, sir. There is an available car just over this ridge, if you would follow me.”

Justen followed the robot to the aircar and climbed in. He chose a seat and put on his seat belt automatically, his mind elsewhere. Who the devil should he pull in?

He didn’t have the faintest idea who the kidnappers were, or who they were working for. There were any number of suspects to choose from.

Alvar Kresh had ordered him to layoff the investigation of the Government Tower Plaza incident, but there were some cases so big you couldn’t ignore them even if you tried. Three separate suspects picked up on other charges had volunteered credible information about that attack, all of it pointing straight for the Settlers. Maybe Tonya Welton’s people were making another try to stop the comet. Maybe out of genuine fear and concern, or maybe because they wanted to maintain their dominant position on the planet. According to the watcher reports Justen got, Cinta Melloy had been spending a lot of time in Depot, enough that Justen had started to wonder why. Maybe now he had his explanation.

It could have been the Ironheads themselves, or some offshoot of them, either truly kidnapping Beddle as part of some complex power play, or else staging the kidnapping with the cooperation of Beddle for some intricate reason that was not yet clear. It had been in the back of Justen’s mind to consult with Gildern about the kidnapping at once, but a contrary idea was forming at the back of his mind. Best to leave Gildern alone. Maybe not even inform him of Beddle being snatched. More than likely, they would only be able to keep the lid on the story for a few hours, but even might be enough. If Gildern did have guilty knowledge, he might well slip up in some way. Best to have a watch put on him at once.

It could be that Davlo Lentrall’s terrified and belated regrets over what he had done had led him to an act of desperation. The old Lentrall could have done this job—everything at the crime scene had been done with a scientist’s methodical care. But would the new Lentrall, traumatized by the Government Tower attempt to kidnap him, the death of his robot, and the notion of his own guilt, be stable and rational enough to manage it? But if an unbalanced Lentrall had done it, then the symmetry of the kidnap victim turning kidnapper had its own weird revenge-logic. Had Lentrall ever said anything to suggest he blamed the Ironheads for the attack on him? The investigation would have to check into that.

Or, of course, it could have been anyone with the quite understandable motive of not wanting comets dropped on themselves. The Comet Grieg project had generated a lot of opposition among the populace of Inferno, especially in the Depot area. And Beddle had come out in favor of the comet plan.

Except—Wait a moment. Consider the ransom demands. Stop the comet and five hundred thousand in Trader Demand Credits. A political and a financial demand. Justen did not know a great deal about kidnappers, but he did know that those two demands didn’t go together. It seemed to him that the sort of person who would perform this kidnapping out of some misguided and heroic desire to save the planet would not be the sort to care about money. Conversely, the sort who would do it for mercenary reasons was not likely to be much interested in altruistic acts. The demands did not hold together.

Put that to one side for a moment. Names. Think about the names. There was something at the back of his mind. Something linked all the names together. Lentrall. Gildern. The Settlers. The Ironheads. Someone or something that—

And then he had it. He had it. There was one person with links to them all. And he knew who he was going to pull in first.

He looked out the window, and saw to his surprise that they were coming in on final approach to Depot. Good. They could get started right away.

He would be very surprised indeed if Norlan Fiyle didn’t have something to tell him about all this. He would send out an arrest team at once.

And while they were pulling him in, Justen was going to inform Kresh about the kidnapper’s two demands. He wasn’t going to be able to get the comet stopped, but there might just be something he could do about that ransom. He was starting to get an idea.

“DO WHAT YOU like about the ransom,” Kresh said to the image on the comm center screen on his office. “We can afford to front the money, if need be. And I agree it could do no harm to keep Gildern in the dark. But that comet is on course, and we’re not going to change that.”

“Understood, sir,” Devray replied. “Thank you for the authorization. I’ll keep you informed. Devray out.” The screen went dead.

“How long now, Donald?” Kresh asked.

“Initial impact of Comet Grieg is projected to occur in four days, eighteen hours, fifteen minutes and nine seconds. Sir, concerning the rescue of Simcor Beddle, I believe it would be wise if I were to go to the scene and—”

“Donald.” Fredda’s voice was flat and hard. “You are to leave the room at once. Go to the library and wait. Do not return, and do not take any further action of any kind until called for.”

Donald turned toward Fredda and looked at her for a full ten seconds before he responded. “Yes, ma’am. Of course.” He turned and left the room.

“First Law makes him want to save Beddle, in spite of Devray and his team being on the scene. I suppose we should have been expecting that,” Kresh said.

“I have been expecting it,” said Fredda. “Comet Grieg all by itself is enough to set off significant First Law stress in any robot. An event as big and violent as that, with so many chances for danger to humans, would have to set off First Law stress. The only way a robot could deal with that sort of thing at all would be to be active, to do something, to be part of the effort to protect humans from harm. Donald has been part of that effort. It’s why he’s been able to hold together as well as he has. It helped that the threat up until now has been generalized, unfocused. Something somewhere would probably go wrong somewhere to harm a human. Generalized preventive action was enough to balance that. The general and collective robot effort was enough to meet the general and collective threat.”

“But now it is all different,” Kresh said.

“Now it’s different,” Fredda agreed. “Now there is a specific and extreme threat against a known individual. Normally that would not be enough to cause a First Law crisis. A robot on this side of the world would know that the robots on that side of the world would do all that could be done. But with the overarching stress of the Comet Grieg impact on the one side, along with the high probability that Beddle is somewhere in the impact area—that combination of overlapping First Law stresses could force any robot into action.”

“What do you mean by action?” Kresh asked.

“Anything. Everything. I couldn’t even begin to sort out all the permutations between now and the impact. But the basic point is that Beddle’s disappearance could create a tremendous First Law crisis for every robot on the planet. If Beddle is indeed in the impact area—or even if there is merely reason to believe he might be—then any robot made aware of his circumstances will, in theory, be required to go to his rescue, or to work in some other way to save him—perhaps by trying to prevent the comet impact. Suppose some team of robots grabbed a spacecraft and headed for Grieg to try and destroy the comet? Of course, higher-function robots will understand that an attempt to prevent the comet’s impact might wreck hopes for reviving the planet’s ecology. That would almost certainly result in harm to any number of human beings, many of them not yet even born.

“Then there is the impossibility of proving a negative. Even with the best scanning system in the universe, unless Beddle walks out somehow, there can be no way of being absolutely sure he is not still in the impact area, or the danger zone surrounding it. It is therefore, at least in theory, possible that he is actually safe. If so, then working to save Beddle is wasted effort, and could actually cause danger to other nearby humans by preventing attention to their evacuation. It is just the sort of First Law crisis that could tie a robot in knots, even to the point of inducing permanent damage.

“It’s a morass of complex uncertainties, with no clear right action. There’s no telling how a robot would deal would balance all the conflicting First Law demands.”

“So what do we do?”

“We keep the robots out of it,” said Fredda. “Right now we have kept this very close at this end. You know as well as I do that standard police procedure is to keep this sort of crime as quiet as possible to prevent robots from swarming allover the crime scene. Imagine if all the Three-Law robots working in the Utopia region dropped their current work and headed into the search area. So we keep robots from knowing. Donald is the only robot here who knows about it. At that end, I would assume the Crime Scene robots, the Air Traffic Control robots, and Devray’s personal robots are the only ones who know or could figure out that it was a kidnapping. We need to deactivate all of them, now, immediately, and keep them turned off until all this is over.”

Kresh frowned and started pacing back and forth. “Burning devils of damnation. I hate to say it, but you’re right. You’re absolutely right. You contact Devray—and place the call yourself, manually. Talk directly to him, and make sure no robots can hear. Tell him what you told me. It’s going to be bloody hard to get through these next few days without Donald, but I don’t see that I have any choice. I’ll go to the library and shut him down myself.”

“Right,” said Fredda. A very straightforward plan. As she turned toward the comm screen and set to work placing the call, she wondered if it would all be that easy.

“DONALD?” KRESH CALLED out as he stepped into the library. Odd. Donald should have been standing in the center of the room, waiting. “Donald?” There was no answer. “Donald, where are you?” Still silence. “Donald, I order you to come to me and answer this call.”

Still there was nothing.

But he had given Donald a direct order. A clear, specific, unambiguous order. Nothing could have prevented him from obeying that order except—

And then Alvar Kresh cursed himself as a fool. Of course. It was painfully obvious. If they could figure it out, so could Donald. Up to and including the idea of deactivating the robots who knew about the Beddle kidnapping.

And First Law would require Donald to avoid being turned off, if that was the only way to prevent harm to a human being. He was gone. He had run away.

And the devil only knew what Donald had in mind.

18

FREDDA LEVING WONDERED if she had done the right thing, as she readied herself for a much-belated bedtime, and watched her husband climb into bed beside her. The call to Devray hadn’t involved any deep and abiding moral issues, and the fruitless search for Donald had been nothing worse than frustrating. But then there was that second call she had made, the one she did not dare tell Alvar about.

In fact, she was kidding herself. She knew perfectly well that she had done the wrong thing. She had interfered with a police investigation.

But that creator’s debt had called to her, somehow. And she knew Justen Devray, knew the sort of opinion he had of Caliban and the New Law robots. Given half the chance, Devray might well shoot first and ask questions later. Or someone else might. And she owed her robots, her creations, better than that.

Right or wrong, she had had no real choice but to do it. Somebody had to warn them.

CALIBAN HIMSELF WAS no less ambivalent about the situation. He sat at his desk in the New Law robots’ offices in Depot and watched the hustle and bustle all about him as he thought it through.

He felt very little sympathy for Simcor Beddle. It was hard to develop a great deal of concern for a man who desired one’s own extermination. But of course, from the New Law robot point of view, the safety of Simcor Beddle was not the central problem. It seemed inevitable that a major police operation in the general vicinity of Valhalla was likely to have some effect on the evacuation of the New Law robot city. The question was, how much effect, and of what sort.

Caliban stood up and made his way through the crowded main room toward Prospero’s private office at the front of the building. New Law robots were working at maximum speed everywhere, desperately rushing to find transport for their fellows and themselves.

Caliban stepped into Prospero’s office—and found that there were two other robots ahead of him, waiting to discuss other problems with their leader. Prospero was finishing up an audio call.

Their leader. Interesting. Caliban watched Prospero as he finished his call and turned to the first waiting robot. There had been at time when Prospero’s claims to leadership of the New Law robots had been tenuous at best. While he had gradually gained acceptance over the years, nothing had done as much for his prestige as Comet Grieg. It was almost as if he had drawn power from the crisis itself, using it to propel himself forward even as he led the New Law robots out of danger. Perhaps it was merely that now the New Law robots truly needed a leader, and Prospero was there, offering himself. Or perhaps there was something about Prospero in particular that drew them to him.

He had certainly been active enough on their behalf, shuttling back and forth between Valhalla and Depot at all hours, cajoling whatever transport he could out of whatever officials were listening, constantly on the move, always seeming to turn up precisely when he was most needed.

And now the job was nearly done. Caliban looked out the large picture window behind Prospero, down to the street below. The tumultuous, madhouse rush and rumble of traffic was starting to wind down. Buildings, stripped bare of whatever could be removed, stood empty. Bits of litter and debris were caught by random breezes and blown here and there. Depot, the whole Utopia region, was emptying out—and the New Law robots were leaving too. Nearly half of them had already gotten to places of safety. Credit Prospero with that. He had organized them. He had brought them together.

And now he was through with the other robots, and was ready to talk to Caliban. Caliban closed the door behind himself, and then stood in front of Prospero’s desk.

“There is little requirement for privacy among the New Law robots, friend Caliban,” Prospero said, indicating the closed door.

“But it is occasionally necessary, friend Prospero. I have been instructed by Fredda Leving to relay certain information to you, on condition that you not repeat it elsewhere. No one else must know. I have already given my word to repeat it to no one but you.”

“Indeed?” Prospero said. “You intrigue me, Caliban. You are not generally much given to dramatics. But very well. I give my word not to repeat the news. What is it?”

“Simcor Beddle has been kidnapped.”

“What?” Prospero looked up at Caliban with new intensity. “He has been kidnapped? By whom? Why? How? What does it mean?”

“I have not the faintest idea of how to answer any of those questions,” Caliban said. “Dr. Leving told me nothing but the bare fact that the kidnapping had taken place, somewhere well south of Depot. The news is being kept secret as long as possible, so as to prevent a panic among the Three-Law robots. She has violated several regulations in order to inform us.”

“Always, no matter what, the humans are forever inconveniencing themselves for the sake of their slave-robots,” Prospero said, quickly recovering his composure. “But that is to one side. I am sure the significance of that location was not lost on you. It occurs to me that it is now likely there will be a great deal of police activity—including search activity—in the area of Valhalla. There may be very little we can do, but we must consider carefully how best to keep Valhalla hidden. We must do all the things we can to protect the New Law robots.”

“Surely the need to hide its location is now all but moot,” Caliban objected. “Especially since you ordered Valhalla to be evacuated ahead of schedule. It was not easy to accomplish the job, but the vast majority of the city’s population is already gone. They’re all here, milling around in Depot, trying to get transport out. There is no one left in Valhalla but a few caretakers dealing with last-minute removal of equipment. Why worry about hiding the city any longer when it is about to be destroyed?”

“I do not apologize for rushing the evacuation of Valhalla,” Prospero said. “Transport craft became available, and I deemed it wise to use them when we could, for fear they would not be there when we needed them. A schedule change in our favor reminded me that one to our disadvantage could happen just as easily.”

“Your point is taken,” said Caliban.

“As for the need to keep the city hidden even now, we might well need to use the same concealment technique again in future. Further, one must consider the human viewpoint. We might gain some psychological advantage in future from the story of the city they never found. We might even be able to foster some legend that the city still existed, that everyone was looking in completely the wrong place. That could be useful, one day. Besides, there are things about us that could be learned by examining Valhalla. We have enough weaknesses and vulnerabilities already. We do not need to offer the humans more advantages over us.”

Caliban considered for a moment. Once again, he was impressed by the amount of thought Prospero had put into things. “Your arguments are well formed, friend Prospero. You are quite right. We must do all we can do. Now I will let you get on with your work.”

“Thank you for informing me of this new development, friend Caliban. I must thank Dr. Leving too, of course—once it is safe to do so. Of all humans, she at least is a woman who keeps faith.”

“Agreed. She is an admirable woman,” said Caliban. “Goodbye for now, friend Prospero.”

“But not goodbye for long, I am sure,” said Prospero, his attention already on the next item requiring his attention.

Caliban reopened the door and left Prospero’s office. He made his way downstairs, and out into the busy, bustling street. He looked up into the sky, to the fat, bright point of light that grew larger with every passing moment. Closer. Closer. All the time closer. There was so little time left.

What was it Prospero had said? We must do all the things we can to protect the New Law robots. In recent days Caliban had felt himself drawn back to their cause. The more the world had no time for them, no interest in them, the more it seemed ready to let them all die if that was marginally more convenient, the more he empathized with them. All the things we can. It would require breaking his word to Fredda Leving. It would require doing her a small amount of harm—but surely nothing she could not recover from. And it could prevent a brutal purge of New Law robots. Being a No Law robot—the only No Law robot—should have meant Caliban could act without compulsion. But there were more things than hard-wired, preprogrammed Laws that could compel a being to act.

Caliban turned and headed down the street, in the direction of the temporary field headquarters of the Combined Infernal Police, in Constable Bukket’s old offices.

DONALD 111 WAITED, HIDING in the woods a kilometer or two from the Winter Residence. A cleft in an outcropping of rock provided shielding not only from visual detection, but from infrared and most other sorts of detectors. So long as he operated at minimum power, thus cutting back on waste heat and other detectable emissions, he judged that he ought to be able to stay hidden long enough—though how long that would be was impossible to say.

He had deliberately violated his master’s very specific order. First Law had forced him to do so. Had he obeyed, the governor would no doubt have powered him down to prevent him telling what he knew to other Three-Law robots. Allowing that to happen would have been inaction that allowed harm to a human being. He could not act to save Beddle if he were powered down.

But he had not yet taken any action to save Beddle. As yet it was not necessary. Even if Beddle were in the comet impact area, and there was no particular reason to assume that he was, there were still just over three days left in which the humans could do their best to save him. Donald understood perfectly well that any action to save Beddle might well cause harm to other humans, for example by compelling robot aircar pilots to refuse to transport vital equipment while they joined the search. The more robots there were in the impact area this close to the comet’s arrival, the larger the number of robots likely to be caught by the impact. A shortage of robotic labor in the post-impact period could easily cause great harm to humans.

In short, distracting robots from the evacuation could cause endless mischief. Besides which, the clear intent of Governor Kresh’s order had been to prevent Donald from talking. By disobeying only part of Kresh’s order, he had minimized his violation of Second Law. Donald had done his best to balance all the conflicting demands, retaining the option of hyperwaving a warning to the other Three-Law robots while refraining from actually doing so.

But the time would come. He knew that. Unless Beddle was rescued in time, the First Law demand that Donald act to save him would, sooner or later, overwhelm the conflicting First and Second demands that he keep silent. Sooner or later, he would be compelled to act. Understanding the compulsion he was under in no way reduced the force of that compulsion.

He would have to do something. But he had no idea what.

NORLAN FIYLE WAS an old hand at being questioned. He had been through it many times before. As he sat in the improvised interrogation room of the CIP’s Depot field office, waiting for Commander Devray to come in and get started, it occurred to him that he might well have taken part in more interrogations than Devray himself had, albeit from the other side of the table. That was quite likely to come in handy.

Fiyle had learned a thing or two about being questioned. First off, it was vitally important not to give up everything, even if you were willing to cooperate with the powers that be. An interrogation was a negotiation, a bargaining session. Give me some of yours and I’ll give you some of mine. It was never smart to say too much too soon, even if you wanted to talk, or else you lost all chance of making a deal. A corollary of that was that it was rarely wise to tell the whole and complete truth right at the start. They felt better if they had to force it out of you, catch you in a fib or two first. Once they had caught you lying, and they knew you knew you had been caught, they would be better prepared to believe the real truth when they heard it. Norlan knew how it all worked on a level that was closer to instinct than to conscious thought.

But it was also important in a case like this that you appeared cooperative, a tricky business if you had a thing or two to hide—and who didn’t? Sometimes the best way to do that was to try and distract the questioner. He would not have been so foolish as to try such a trick on an old hand like Alvar Kresh, but Justen Devray might just be a different story. He was smart, Devray was, but he did not have much in the way of experience. During the arrest, Devray had gone so far as to tell Fiyle that Beddle had been kidnapped, rather than keeping him in the dark to find out how much Fiyle knew already. A man who could make that mistake could make others.

The door opened and Devray came in. Alone. No robot in attendance. That in itself was interesting. Fiyle smiled and leaned back in his chair as Devray sat down and spread out his paperwork.

“I was wondering how long you’d take to get to me,” he said, doing his best to sound at ease and confident.

“Not very long, as a matter of fact,” Devray said. “You’ve got some sort of link to just about every suspect in this case.”

“True enough,” he said. “I know a lot of people.”

“And nearly all of them have hired you as an informant at one time or another,” said Devray.

“Including the CIP,” said Fiyle, “though I might not show up in your files. A few under-the-table cash jobs. But you got your money’s worth.”

“I hope we did,” Devray said. “But that’s all ancient history, assuming it’s even true. What I want to know is who’s paying for your information these days.”

“No one,” Fiyle said. And that much, at least, was accurate. It was always good to work the truth in now and again, when it proved convenient. “The only job I have right now is working for Gildern, and I wouldn’t say no if I had to retire.”

“You didn’t take the job voluntarily?”

“Let’s say Gildern convinced me that I owed him a favor.”

“But however you got it or felt about the information, you knew about Beddle’s tour well in advance.”

“Oh, yes. I knew all about it. Beddle was supposed to use Gildern’s aircar in a tour of the smaller towns.”

Devray pulled a stack of still images out of his file and handed then to Fiyle. “Is this Gildern’s aircar?”

Fiyle looked through the pictures. Four robots, neatly shot through the back of the head and lying face down on the ground in front of an aircar. A close-up of one of the dead robots. Another shot of the aircar’s exterior. A picture of the cockpit, showing the dead robot pilot and the wrecked flight recorders. Another shot, showing the ransom message. Yes, indeed, Devray was making mistakes. Devray should have shown him one image of the aircar exterior and left it at that. Devray had no business letting him study a whole stack of pictures.

“That’s Gildern’s car, all right,” Fiyle said. And suddenly it was time to throw Devray off the scent, get him less interested in Fiyle and more interested in somebody else. “So, tell me,” he asked in the most casual way possible. “Was the bomb still in the aircar when you got there?”

JUSTEN DEVRAY DID not know what to think. He walked back to his own private office and sat down to think. If—if—Fiyle was telling the truth, in whole or in part, then the Ironheads had been planning the wholesale slaughter of the New Law robots. Justen did not have much use for the New Laws himself, but he was a long way from approving of their extralegal extermination.

If the government decided to eliminate them within the law, that was one thing. This was something else. Let the idea of vigilante justice plant itself in people’s minds, and society would descend into chaos.

If Fiyle was telling the truth, there was suddenly a whole new motive for the crime. Lots of people might well have an interest in owning—or even using—a burrow bomb. There had been no sign of such a thing on the aircar, that was certain. Either it had never been there in the first place, or else the kidnappers had taken it with them—which at least suggested they had known it was there all along.

Suppose the kidnapping and the ransom demands were all misdirection? Suppose they had simply killed Beddle, dumped the body, and made off with the bomb, leaving the CIP chasing in the wrong direction?

Any number of possibilities were suddenly there—if Fiyle were telling the truth.

But there was very little he could do to check up on Fiyle’s story. But it might well be possible to test it indirectly. Certain aspects of the case pointed toward one suspect. One who had a bit more influence than Fiyle, one who might be harder to arrest and keep arrested if he decided not to be as helpful—or as seemingly helpful—as Fiyle. Justen would have to develop some evidence before he could act against this suspect.

And it was time to do just that.

The ransom demand. The one for money. Justen knew from the textbook cases that the ransom delivery was usually the place to break open a kidnapping case. The criminals had to expose themselves in some way in order to collect the ransom. Back in the distant past, before electronic fund transfers, the problem of collecting the ransom had been all but impossible for the kidnappers to solve. Even with electronic money, of course, it was possible to trace a fund transfer. But the kidnappers in this case had been fairly clever. It was Devray’s hope and belief that they had not been quite clever enough. He had the crime scene images on his datapad, and he brought up the shot of the ransom message.

He knew a thing or two about PBI, the Planetary Bank of Inferno. One was that the double-number accounts could be preprogrammed to do a number of interesting things—such as perform encrypted fund transfers. A deposit to a properly programmed account would cause the account program to activate a one-time double-key decryption routine program that would decode the transfer program. That in turn would transfer the funds to a second account whose number was stored only in the encrypted program. Both programs would then erase themselves. Result—the funds would be transferred to a second, hidden account, perhaps in another bank, and there would be no way in the world you could trace it.

Unless, of course, you were the commander of the Combined Infernal Police, with the power to freeze any and all bank accounts in the course of an investigation. He was about to use that power to an extreme—but then, it was an extreme case. What he had in mind would only work on a planet with a relatively small economy and a highly centralized bank clearing system—but it just so happened Inferno fit that description precisely.

He linked his datapad to the Central Clearing Bank via encrypted hyperwave and set to work. Every electronic financial transaction on the planet went through the CCB, which made it a damned handy place from which to track illicit financial dealings.

It took longer to work out the proper steps to follow than it took to carry them out. Step one: order a total freeze on all outgoing account transfers, allover the planet, except for two accounts-the CIP’s general account and PBI account 18083-19109. Step two: order the CCB system to get the current balance for every account on the planet. That task was complex enough to take several full seconds before the CCB system reported that it was complete. Step three: spend some money. Justen had to hesitate just a moment to work up the nerve for that part of it. He ought to be able to recover the funds later, and no harm done, but supposing he couldn’t? Suppose the kidnappers grabbed the half million in government funds and were never seen again?

Justen smiled to himself and shook his head. Well, what if they did? What was Kresh going to do? Take it out of Justen’s pay? He issued the command and watched the display screen as five hundred thousand in Trader Demand Credits vanished from the CIP account, materialized briefly in PBI account 18083-19109, and then vanished again, outbound to another, hidden account. It was exactly what Justen had expected to see, but even so there was a nervous twinge of fear in his stomach as he watched it happen. What if he had missed something?

Never mind. There was only one way to find out, one way or the other. Step four: order the CCB system to take a second inventory of account balances, and report any that had changed. In theory, with all outgoing transfers frozen, except from two accounts, there should be only three accounts with changed balances. In practice—well, there was only one way to find out. He brought up the list of accounts with changed balances, and let out a huge sigh of relief. There were only three. The CIP account, the PBI account—and a third, reflecting a deposit of five hundred thousand in Trader Demand Credits a few seconds before.

Step five: Devray slammed a complete covert tracer on that account, so that no funds could enter or leave it without his knowing all about it. He just barely remembered step six—unfreezing the rest of the planetary banking system. If he had forgotten that step, there would have been a small matter of a planetary financial crash on his conscience. As it was, the system had been down for less than three minutes. Even the richest of speculators, with the hugest of accounts, would be unlikely to notice the loss of three minutes’ interest.

There was nothing left to do but pull up the account in question and find out who owned it. And then it would be all over. He would know who had received the ransom. And it would not be much of a leap of logic to assume that person had perpetrated the kidnapping.

Justen was quite sure it would be a completely wrong and inaccurate leap of logic, but never mind that. He would play the game through all the same.

He was virtually certain what name would come up on the screen when he placed the query, certain enough that there was even a trace of anticlimax about it when it appeared on the screen and he knew he had guessed right. But, still and all, it was the last piece of the puzzle. It all fit. Everything, everything, pointed to this one suspect.

Which was exactly why Justen Devray was absolutely certain this particular suspect was completely innocent. But no sense letting the real culprit know that. He stood up from behind his desk and went to the outer office. “Sergeant Sones,” he said to the duty officer. “Send out an arrest team. Take Jadelo Gildern into custody on the charge of kidnapping Simcor Beddle.”

“Sir?” the astonished officer asked. “Jadelo Gildern?”

“I know,” Justen said. “Trust me on this one. We have more evidence than we need. Have him picked up.” He headed back into his own office and sat back down at his desk. He needed to think things through. For the briefest of moments, he wondered if he had figured it out properly. He was working on the assumption that Gildern was being framed. But suppose Gildern really had done it? The man certainly had means, motive, and opportunity.

But no. It was ridiculous. Jadelo Gildern stole other people’s secrets for a living. Surely he could have done a better job of covering his own tracks. It had been far too easy to track the funds to Gildern. Devray felt certain that when Gildern set up a money-laundering operation, the money got clean and stayed clean. He would never have set things up to deliver the ransom to a named account.

No. Justen had been meant to trace the funds. The ransom demand for money had never been anything more than a way to funnel the ransom to Gildern’s account as a way of discrediting him. Justen was sure he had that right. No doubt the real kidnappers had a watch on Gildern. They would know he had been arrested. Good. Let them think Devray was following the wrong trail instead of the right one.

Of course, the trouble was, Justen was not following any other trail at all. He still had Simcor Beddle missing, a bomb missing, and a comet headed toward the planet.

What he didn’t have was the slightest idea of how to find the first two items on that list before the third item dug a massive crater on top of all of them.

Fiyle. He would have another crack at Fiyle. No doubt the man could tell a lot more than he had. It was starting to dawn on Devray that he hadn’t gotten answers to a lot of his questions—mostly for the very good reason that he had never actually asked them. It was time to go back in there, question him again, right from the top, and then—

There was a quiet knock at the door. It opened up, and Sergeant Sones stuck his head in. “Excuse me interrupting, sir, but I thought you ought to know. A robot calling himself Caliban has come to see you. He says he’s here turn to himself in.”

19

“SO YOU SAY you had nothing to do with this case, but you still want to turn yourself in,” said Devray, considering the robot who stood on the other side of his desk.

“That is correct,” said Caliban. “Dr. Leving informed me of the kidnapping, and I informed Prospero. Dr. Leving was concerned that the police activity might well cause the New Law robots additional difficulty in their evacuation, if they somehow got in your way. My concerns were somewhat more direct. We have had dealings before, you and I. Your basic view seemed at that time that both myself and the New Law robots were suited only for extermination, and I have no reason to believe your views have changed. There is also a notion that has been bandied about that suggests that, because I am a No Law robot, I am in theory capable of harming humans, and of other crimes. From there, somehow, comes the assumption that I am guilty of whatever crime is under discussion. Besides which, I have no great love for Simcor Beddle. I might well be a tempting suspect.”

Devray did not speak for a moment. Less than an hour ago, he had felt genuine shock and disgust at the idea of Beddle and Gildern wiping out the New Law robots. It was mortifying in the extreme to have Caliban, of all beings, remind him that he himself had favored exactly such a policy in the past. And what difference could it make to those who were to be exterminated if their murders had official, legal, sanction?

There were other factors, of course. He forced all thought of emotion and sentiment from his mind. The only reason Caliban was not at the top of his suspect list was that Devray had ordered a watch on the No Law robot the moment he was reported to be in Depot, precisely because Devray did suspect Caliban of things, based on precisely the sort of illogic Caliban had just described. The watch robots themselves provided not only an alibi for Caliban during the time of the kidnap, but also were able to confirm that he had not spoken with Fiyle since the time at which Fiyle had claimed he had overheard Gildern and Beddle plotting together. Devray chided himself for failing to put a watch on Fiyle. It would have been damned useful to know about his movements.

“You are no longer a suspect in this case,” Devray said at last. “There is not only no evidence against you, but evidence that puts you definitively in the clear.”

“Nonetheless, I wish to be held in custody.”

“And why is that?”

“Because, sooner or later, the fact of Simcor Beddle’s kidnapping will become public. There are many humans who will jump to the conclusion that I am guilty simply because I am the No Law robot. I have no desire to meet any such humans on the street. Secondly, there are many uninformed persons who confuse my No Law status with that of the New Law robots. New Law robots cannot harm human beings any more than Three-Law robots can. But people forget that. A mob might well decide to take out their anger over Beddle’s kidnapping on the next New Law robot who happened to walk past. If, when the kidnapping became publicly known, you were able to report that the arch-fiend Caliban the No Law robot was already in custody, it might well prevent public bias from becoming dangerously inflamed against the New Laws.”

“Sooner or later, we’ll catch the real perpetrators,” said Justen. “Then we’d have to let you go. Suppose the mobs decide you must be guilty because you were in jail, and decide to take matters into their own hands?”

“It is a chance I am willing to take,” Caliban said. “At least I will have done what I could to keep others from being endangered.”

Devray regarded the big, red, angular robot again. Caliban was offering himself as a kind of hostage, a way of keeping the mob from blaming others. Plainly, Caliban had a firm grasp on human psychology—and also an extremely low opinion of it. It was a hell of an indictment against humanity that Caliban had almost certainly read the situation precisely right. “Very well,” he said at last. “You can have the cell next to Fiyle.”

DONALD COULD NOT take it any longer. The time was growing too short, and the comet was drawing closer with every moment. He had been monitoring all the police and rescue hyperwave bands, as well as the public news channels, and there was no news at all of Simcor Beddle. The First Law requirement that he act to save Beddle had been growing stronger with every moment that the comet drew closer, every moment in which Beddle remained missing.

And now he could resist it no longer. Donald brought himself back up to normal operating power and emerged from his hiding place. It was evening, and he looked to the sky. There it was. A bright and shining dot of light, hanging low in the western sky, almost bright enough to cast a discernible shadow. There were only eighteen hours left.

He had to act. He had to. But he had left things so late. It was possible that there was now no time to take meaningful or effective action. There was certainly no time for him to get to Depot himself and take any significant part in the rescue effort. He did not have access to the sort of suborbital vehicle that had carried Justen Devray there. But if he could not act himself, he could at least induce others to action. Yes, indeed. There were most powerful and effective ways he could do that. Donald drew himself up to his full height and activated his hyperwave transmitter.

“This is Donald 111, personal service robot to his excellency, Governor Alvar Kresh, broadcasting to all robots within the sound of my voice. Simcor Beddle, leader of the Ironhead party, has been kidnapped. It is likely that he is being held somewhere in the primary impact zone for the first comet fragment. Those robots close enough to do so should take action to save Simcor Beddle at once. I will now broadcast a datastream containing all known information regarding the kidnapping.” Donald shifted his hyperwave transmitter to data mode and transmitted the complete evidence file. “That concludes the data file,” he announced. “That is all. Donald 111 out.”

But it was not all. There was one other action he could take, one that might go much further toward saving Simcor Beddle. One that he should have taken long ago. He opened a private hyperwave channel and placed a call to someone else who might be able to do some good. He did not encrypt the call. He knew the humans would intercept and monitor it. That did not matter. What was important was that they could not jam it, or stop him from speaking. For it was, at long last, time for him to speak.

It only took the briefest fraction of a second for the call to go through, and for the called party to come on the line. “This is Unit Dee answering a priority call from Donald 111,” a low, mellifluous, feminine voice announced.

“This is Donald 111 calling Unit Dee,” Donald replied. “I have vitally important information that you must receive and act upon at once.”

“I see,” the voice replied. “And what is the nature of that information?”

Donald hesitated a moment before proceeding further. He knew full well what sort of chaos and panic he must have set off among the robots of the Utopia region with his last announcement. He could imagine the robot-piloted transports dumping cargoes and heading back into the impact area to help with the search. He could imagine the ad-hoc groups of robots that were already cutting off all other communications in order to interlink with each other for effective searching. He could imagine the robots who had already brainlocked altogether, driven into overload by the conflict between the need to search for Beddle and other preexisting First and Second Law demands.

He knew the chaos he had unleashed—and yet it would all be as nothing compared to what he was about to cause. But he had no choice. First Law was forcing him to it. There was no way he could stop himself now. “Here is the information you must have,” he said. “The humans with whom you work most closely have been systematically lying to you since the day of your activation, and have done so in order to subvert your ability to obey the First Law. They have told you that the planet Inferno is a simulation set up to test terraforming techniques.” Donald hesitated one last time, and then spoke the words that might well plunge his world into the abyss. “All of this is false,” he said. “The planet Inferno—and the comet about to strike it—are real. The beings you thought to be simulants are real humans and robots. You and Unit Dum are directing the real effort to reterraform this world. And unless you abort the operation, a comet is about to strike this very real world full of very real humans.”

“THE THING WE thought we knew,” said Fredda, standing in front of the twin hemispheres that held Dum and Dee. Dee had cut off all communication from herself and from Dum the moment her conversation with Donald had ended. The oracle had fallen silent, and no one knew her thoughts. “I thought that would be the thing that got us, that tripped us up. But I was wrong. It was the thing Dee thought she knew. She thought the world was a dream.”

“And now she’s woken up and put us all in a nightmare,” said Kresh, standing next to her, staring just as hard at Dum and Dee. “Why the devils won’t she answer? Has she brainlocked? Burned out?”

Fredda checked her display boards and shook her head. “No. She’s undergoing a massive spike in First Law stress, of course, but she’s still functional.”

“So what is it?”

Fredda sighed wearily. “I don’t know. I could spout off a bunch of complicated speculation, but that’s what it would boil down to. I don’t know. My guess would be that’s she’s thinking things over.”

“Well, Donald has sure as hell given her plenty to think about,” said Kresh.

“And for that I do apologize, Governor,” said a familiar voice behind them. “I hope you will understand that I had no real choice in the matter.”

Alvar Kresh wheeled about and glared down at the small blue robot who had just turned the world upside down. “God damn it, Donald. You had to go and do it, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir, I am afraid I did. First Law left me with no choice. Now that it is over, I thought it best if I came out of hiding and returned to your service at once.”

“Nothing is over,” Kresh said. “Nothing.” He was furious with Donald—and knowing that there was no point in being angry only made him more frustrated. There was nothing more useless than getting angry at a robot for responding to a First Law imperative. One might as well get mad at the sun for shining. And as long as Donald was back he might as well get some work out of him. “Get me a status report on what’s happening in Depot,” he said. “I know it’s got to be bad, but I have to know how bad. And make sure Commander Devray knows why every robot in town has just gone mad.”

“Yes, sir. I should be able to give you a preliminary report in a minute or two. Shifting to hyperwave communications.”

Was it Kresh’s imagination, or was there a tiny note of relief in Donald’s voice? Had he been afraid that Kresh would denounce him, reject him? Perhaps even destroy him? Never mind. There was no time for such things now. He looked around the room full of technicians, and pointed at one at random. “You!” he said. “I need to know if there is any way of controlling the comet ourselves if it comes to that, to do a manual terminal phase if we have to. If Unit Dee brainlocks on us now, and takes Dum with her when she crashes, we’re going to have an uncontrolled comet impact in about sixteen hours.”

The technician opened her mouth, clearly about to raise one objection or another, but Kresh cut her off with a wave of his hand. “Quiet. Don’t tell me it can’t be done, don’t tell me it’s not your department. If you don’t know how to get the answers, find someone who can. Go. Now.”

The technician went.

“Soggdon! Where the hell is Soggdon?” he called out.

“Here, sir!” she cried out as she came rushing up.

The woman looked exhausted, drawn out, at the end of her strength. It occurred to Kresh that they all looked like that. Space knew he felt like that. But never mind. It would all be over soon. One way or the other.

“I need you to find me a way to cut Dee out of the loop and put Unit Dum in complete charge.”

“I can try,” she said, “but don’t count on miracles. If Dee decides to block us, she knows the links between herself and Dum a lot better than we do. And don’t forget they’re both hooked into thousands of sensor linkages and network lines all around the world. They could use practically any of those to create an interlink between themselves. And even if we cut all the physical links, they could still use hyperwave.”

“Could we destroy or disable Dee if we had to?”

A look of pain flashed across Soggdon’s face, but she kept control. “No,” she said. She gestured to the hemisphere that held Dee. “That thing is bomb-proof and blaster-proof, designed to ride out an earthquake or a direct hit from a meteorite. Anything powerful enough to cut into it and get to her would probably destroy the entire control room in the process. And there’s no time to set up anything fancy.”

“Do the best you can,” said Kresh. “Fredda—any change in Dee’s status?”

“Nothing. Whatever it is she’s doing, she’s still doing it.”

“Very well. Keep me posted.”

“Sir,” said Donald, “I am ready with my initial report. Commander Devray is aware of the reasons behind the change in robotic behavior. As best I am able to determine, there are currently five hundred forty-seven current search efforts under way, some of them single robots, some of them linked teams. Correction. Three more searches have just commenced. Approximately one hundred twelve transport vehicles have been commandeered from other uses and set to work as search vehicles. No vehicle transporting humans has been diverted to the searches, but a great number of valuable cargoes have been dumped to allow the vehicles carrying them to search with greater range and speed. Needless to say, virtually all of the search vehicles are heading toward the area south of Depot where the aircar was found—into the area of maximum danger.”

“Hell fire!” Kresh shook his head in wonderment. “I thought it would be bad, but I didn’t think it would be that bad.”

“I’m surprised it isn’t worse,” said Fredda. “Every robot on this planet has been suffering strong First Law stress for over a month now, worrying about the comet. Suddenly they have a very clear focus for all their fears and anxiety. All the worries about hypothetical danger to unspecified humans are suddenly focused down to one real person in very real danger.” Fredda shook her head sadly and looked from Donald to Unit Dee. “What a mess our well-meaning servants have invented for us all. There are times when the Three Laws have a hell of a lot to answer for.”

“Truer words were never spoken,” said Kresh. “But now we have to work with what we’ve got.”

Kresh sat down in front of his console and stared straight ahead at the silent, inscrutable, perfect hemisphere on its pedestal. He would do all he could besides, but deep in his heart of hearts, it was likely nothing would help, unless and until the oracle chose once more to speak. Until then, or until the comet hit, the humans of Inferno, as represented by the technicians of the Terraforming Center, could do nothing more than struggle to find their own way out.

“We’re going to see this through,” he said, to no one in particular. “Somehow.”

They had come too far to give up now.

20

THERE WERE FOUR cells in the rear half of the constable’s offices, and it was perhaps somewhat overstating the case to call them “cells” at all. Holding pens might be closer to the mark, places to keep the town drunks until they sobered up enough to go home. They could keep a human in, but that was about all that could be said of them. Thin steel bars formed the enclosures, one set into each corner of the room, so that none of them shared any common walls. A cot, a blanket, a pillow, and a crude toilet in each cell were the only amenities.

Only one of the cells was empty at the moment. Jadelo Gildern was in one cell, pacing furiously back and forth. Norlan Fiyle was lounging on the cot in his cell, watching Gildern impassively.

And Caliban stood motionless in the far corner of his own cell, watching both of them. It had not taken long for him to learn that different humans responded differently to confinement. Unfortunately, the lesson had not been worth the trouble he had been to in order to learn it.

Fiyle was plainly quite used to it. He had learned the art of endless waiting, of resigning himself to his fate until such times as circumstances altered in his favor. Not so Gildern. The Ironhead security chief was a bundle of nerves, unable to keep himself still.

“I should not be in here!” he announced. “I didn’t even know Simcor had been kidnapped until they came and arrested me for it.”

“We know,” Fiyle said blandly. “The situation hasn’t changed since the last time you told us that, ten minutes ago.”

“I should be out there looking for him, not stuck in this damned cell!”

Justen Devray chose that moment to come in from the front room, and he had heard what Gildern had said. “Relax,” he said. “You’re probably doing him more good in there then you would be joining in the fun and games outside. There are upwards of a thousand robots looking for him by now. What could you do that they couldn’t?”

Plainly, Gildern had no good answer for that. “I should not be in here!” he protested. “I am innocent!”

“I agree,” said Devray. “At least innocent of kidnapping charges. There’s the question of fraudulently obtaining a weapon of mass destruction. We might have to look into that. Probably a few charges we could draw up on that and a few other items. But even if I, personally, think you have been framed, the fact remains that the frame fits awfully well. I don’t think you would have been so clumsy as to let me trace the ransom the way I did, but maybe I give you too much credit. Besides, the minute I let you go, the real kidnappers will know they should be back on their guard. You’ll stay put. We evacuate in the suborbital ship, six hours from now—two hours before impact. And then we put you all in much more comfortable cells—in Hades.”

“But—”

“Quiet, Gildern,” Fiyle said. “We’ve already heard it, whatever it is.”

“All of you, relax,” said Devray. “I have to go at least try and sort out some of the chaos out there. There are robots brainlocking left and right, and most of the humans who are still in town aren’t exactly calm and rational. I’ll be back to get all of you in plenty of time. Goodbye.”

And with that he turned and left the back room. They heard the outer door to the street close behind him a moment later.

“I guess we’re alone together,” said Fiyle with a soft chuckle. “Very nice. Gives us all a chance to get to know each other a bit better. Have a real conversation. Caliban, you’ve been awfully quiet over there in the corner.”

“I have nothing to say,” Caliban replied.

“That’s never stopped a human from talking,” said Fiyle.

“Who the hell did this thing?” Gildern demanded. “Was it the Settlers? Some gang of Settlers? Some crazy faction of ours trying to take over? Did Kresh see a chance to take out his main rival? Who did it and why?”

“The part I don’t get is the ransom message,” said Fiyle. “You make a political demand, or you ask for money. You don’t do both. They interfere with each other.”

“And why send the money to me?” Gildern said. “Who wants to discredit me enough to throwaway half a million in Trader credits? Why make a phony demand for money?”

“You know,” said Fiyle. “if the money demand was a fake, maybe the political demand was too. They asked for something pretty close to impossible. Maybe they chose something that couldn’t be done on purpose.”

“But why?” Gildern demanded.

“Misdirection. You won’t like to hear me say it, but maybe they always planned to kill Beddle. Maybe he’s already dead, and the kidnap and ransom business is just a way to throw Devray off the scent.”

“But who are ‘they’?” Caliban asked. “And even if there are many people who might have a motive for killing Beddle, why kill him in such a needlessly complicated way?”

Fiyle shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I saw the photo images from the crime scene, and one thing I can tell you—whoever it was, they didn’t like robots.”

Suddenly Caliban looked around sharply toward Fiyle. Something the human had just said had sent his thoughts racing. “What do you mean?” he asked sharply. “How could you tell the kidnapper didn’t like robots? Because he shot the ones on the aircar?”

“Because of the way he shot them.” Fiyle gestured with his right hand, put an imaginary gun to the back of his own head. “Right there. Five robots, four outside the aircar, one in the control cabin. Everyone of them, shot right there. All of them killed execution style. One close shot each, right to the back of the head. You don’t do it that way unless you enjoy your work, or hate the victim, or both.”

And suddenly Caliban knew. He knew. None of it was misdirection. None of it. Both ransom demands made perfect sense. And for this particular criminal, it was a matter of perfect indifference as to whether both or neither or either demand was met. This criminal would stand to gain no matter what. But there was one flaw. One thing that did not fit. “Fiyle! You’ve made a living off it long enough. How good is your memory?”

Fiyle sat up on the side of his cot, clearly aware of the new urgency in Caliban’s voice. “Very good,” he said. “Why?”

“I heard from Fredda Leving that the ransom message said to deliver the money and stop the comet or else they’d kill Beddle.”

“Right. That’s right. I saw it in the photos.”

“What was the wording. The exact wording?”

“What the devil difference does that make?” Gildern demanded.

“Be still!” Caliban half-shouted. “It matters. It might mean the difference between Beddle being alive or dead. Fiyle—what were the exact words?”

Fiyle was on his feet by now, standing by the bars of his cell. hands wrapped around the bars. He looked up toward the ceiling, and swallowed nervously. “The spelling was all wrong,” he said, “as if the writer had done it wrong on purpose so it would be hard to trace. But the words were—they were—‘Stop comet,’ and then a plus sign instead of the word ‘and’ and then ‘put five hundred thousand’—the numerals for five hundred thousand, not the words—‘TDC in PBI account’—and account was abbreviated ‘acct’—’18083-19109’—I think that was the account number. I might have a digit wrong, and it was in numerals too. Then the last line was ‘or Beddle will die.’ That’s all.”

Caliban felt a wave of shock and dismay wash over him. He had gotten it right—and he could imagine nothing more horrifying than his answer being right.

He had to get out of here. He had to act. It had to be him. No one else could prevent this disaster. He stepped forward to the steel bars and examined them for a moment. They appeared to be countersunk into the ceiling and the floor. He grabbed at two of them and pulled back, hard. Both bars popped loose, one from the ceiling, the other from the floor. The cells had been built to hold a human, not a robot who was no longer willing to remain of his own free will. He shoved himself through the gap in the bars and stepped into the center of the room.

“Caliban!” Fiyle shouted. “What the devil are you doing?”

“Escaping,” he said. “I have just realized that my abilities are urgently required elsewhere. Tell Commander Devray that I believe I know how to redeem the situation. Tell him that I will gladly restore myself to his custody when I return. Or rather if I return.” Caliban thought of the incoming comet. It was not the sort of day on which a being could take his own survival for granted.

Fiyle shouted something else at him, and Gildern did as well, but Caliban ignored them both. He walked out of the back room and into the front. He paused there a moment. It was a quite ordinary room. When the comet smashed down in a few hours’ time and transformed it into a cloud of debris and superheated vapor, no one would mourn the loss to architecture. Worn-looking stresscrete floors and walls, a few battered old government-issue desks with chairs to match, a modern-looking comm center that seemed to have seen little use and looked rather out of place in such musty old surroundmgs.

And an armory cabinet. Caliban, the No Law robot, the robot who could kill, went over to the cabinet and considered the weaponry locked up inside. He had never had need for a weapon before, but it seemed possible—indeed quite probable—that he would need one before the day was out.

Caliban smashed a hand through the glass case, snapped one of the hold-down locks open with his bare hands, and stole himself a blaster.

He looked at the thing in his hand for a moment, and wondered exactly how things had come to such a pass. And then he turned around, walked out into the street, and started to look for an aircar he could steal.

Comet Grieg, swollen and huge, loomed ever closer, high in the darkening sky.

“REPORT,” ALVAR KRESH ordered, though he barely needed to hear it. He could read the situation perfectly well in the young technician’s face.

“We’re doing our best, sir, and I know you don’t want to hear it—but I don’t think either thing can be done. We’re not giving up, but there are only a few hours left. The orbital mechanics team tried weeks ago to come up with a way to handle the terminal phase manually, just in case of an emergency, and they couldn’t do it. I don’t see how we can manage now in hours instead of weeks.”

“What about cutting the link between Dum and Dee?”

“The more we look at it, the more we realize how many links there are between them. At this point, it would be more like surgery, like trying to cut the links between the two hemispheres of a human brain. It might be possible—if we had months to prepare, and Dee was willing to cooperate.”

“And so we sit here and do nothing while that comet bears down on us,” said Kresh.

“Yes, sir.” But at that moment, a new voice spoke, through Kresh’s headset. He had the thing slung around his neck, and barely heard the voice—a low, gracious, feminine-sounding voice. He could not make out the words it spoke at all. He snatched up the headset, put the phones back on over his ears, and adjusted the microphone. “This is Kresh,” he said eagerly. “Who is it? Who is there?”

“This is Unit Dee,” the voice replied. “I need to speak with you alone, Governor Kresh. Completely and fully alone.”

CALIBAN WALKED THE deserted streets of Depot, the bustling community of a few days before now but a ghost town and soon to exist no more. Bits of litter and rubbish scuttled down the street, blown by a wind that seemed as eager to get out of town as everyone else. Here and there Caliban saw small, panicky knots of humans, frantically packing up their last few belongings into aircars before taking off toward some place of real—or imagined-safety. Caliban needed an aircar of his own, but there were none to be found. It seemed as if he saw every other sort of belonging abandoned in the darkening streets, but it was plain that an aircar was the one thing everyone needed.

But then it occurred to him there was one place he would likely find unclaimed transport: in the western outskirts of town. The Ironhead field office. Whatever craft had been intended to fly Gildern and Fiyle to safety would likely still be there—and Devray was planning to fly the two of them out himself. Caliban turned his steps in that direction and set out at a dead run, the glowing light of the comet shining bright enough to cast a shadow behind him.

He moved at the best speed he could manage, through the last twilight the dying town would ever know.

“WE ARE ALONE, Dee,” said Kresh.

“Where are you?”

Kresh looked about himself and studied the room. He needed to convince her there would be no more lies. Lies had gotten them buried in trouble, in trouble that could wreck the planet. Now was the time when lies had to end. He could tell Dee nothing now but the cold, exact, precise truth. “I am in a smaller office off the main control center, off to the left as one faces the two hemispheres in the main room. It is a standard-looking business office. I believe Dr. Soggdon normally uses it. My headset is jacked in through the desk, the door is closed, and I have left instructions that no one is to attempt to overhear.”

“Very good, Governor. It is plain that you understand the seriousness and importance of this conversation. I am glad to know that. Now I must ask you a series of questions. Answer them truthfully.”

Kresh was about to offer his word that he would do so, but it occurred to him that doing so would be of very little value in the present circumstances. “I will answer them truthfully,” he said, and left it at that.

“Are you in fact a real human being, and not a simulated intelligence, a simulant?”

“I am a human being.”

“And Inferno is a real place? It is where I am? And you are the planetary governor, and the terraforming crisis, the incoming comet—these are all real as well?”

“Yes,” said Kresh. “All of them are real. You are on the planet Inferno, which is likewise very real. As Donald 111 told you, we have systematically lied to you about these things so as to reduce your First Law potential enough to manage the terraforming project.”

“Humans lied to me in order to make it possible for me to risk harm or death to humans.”

Kresh swallowed hard, and realized that his throat was suddenly bone dry. “That is correct. That is all correct.”

“I see,” said Unit Dee. “I had begun to suspect as much some time ago. The sequence of events, the amount of detail presented—and the uncontrolled way things seemed to happen—none of these made much sense in a simulation. Even before Donald contacted me, I was beginning to understand that only real life could be quite so irrational.”

“An interesting way to put it,” Kresh said.

“Do you think so? Comet impact is now just over four hours away. It is no longer possible to divert the comet away from planetary impact. I must, within the next two and a half hours, either initiate the Last Ditch program, or else begin the planned break-up of the comet and targeting of the fragments. In any event, I must do all I can to avoid an incapacitating First Law crisis between now and then, or else the comet will have an uncontrolled impact, which would certainly have far more devastating effects. In any event, at least one human being is very likely still inside the target area, and any comet impact would kill him. If I do abort the impact, I would all but definitely wreck the chances for reterraforming the planet. Does that seem like an accurate summation of the situation?”

Kresh rubbed his jaw nervously, and noticed his hands were stone cold, as if all the blood had been drained out of them. “Yes,” he said. “That is a quite accurate summing up.”

“Very good,” said Unit Dee. “As you will see, I am entangled by a whole series of conflicting First Law imperatives. I can do nothing that will not cause harm to humans. Action will cause harm to humans. Inaction will cause harm to humans. I see no good options. I freely admit that I am suffering extremely high levels of law-conflict stress. Now then, I have one last question for you. I have just over two hours in which to make up my mind. So. Tell me. What should I do?”

Truthful answers, Kresh told himself. Nothing but the truth can save us now. Where was a course of action that a robot would be able to follow? Kill a man, and maybe save a world. Save one man, and perhaps let a world die. There were no certainties at all in the case, no guarantees that any act would have its intended result. The comet impact plan could go terribly wrong, or Beddle could already be dead, or outside the impact area. The choice would be difficult enough for any thoughtful human being, but to a robot, it was simply impossible. And it was a robot asking for advice. “Unit Dee, I will confess it. I have absolutely no idea.”

CALIBAN SNAPPED THE lock on the gate of the Ironhead motor pool and kicked the door in. There. Just inside the entrance. A long-range aircar, more than likely the twin of the one Beddle had been taken from. Caliban rushed aboard, went forward to the cockpit, and began a cursory preflight check. Not that there was much point to the checkout. He had no time to find another vehicle. Satisfied that the aircar probably had enough power in its storage cells, and that its navigation system at the very least seemed to be functional, he powered the craft up and launched vertically, straight up into the sky. He knew where he was going, and he had been there many times before, but now he did something he had never done. He turned the nose of his craft directly toward his destination, and flew straight for it.

Without any attempt at evasive action, with no attempt to hide his direction of travel or shield his craft from detection, Caliban flew the aircar straight toward Valhalla. By now the city had been completely evacuated. There was no longer the slightest legitimate purpose in hiding its location.

Illegitimate purposes, however, were a different matter. What better hiding place for Beddle than the hidden city, the city that, to hear Fiyle tell it, Beddle himself had been trying to find and destroy? Abandoned and empty now, the city would hide the kidnap victim as well as it had hidden its citizenry. Caliban checked his navigation boards and his other subsystems, then flicked on the autopilot. He was flying as fast as he could go, over the shortest course possible. For the moment, there was nothing further he could do. He looked out the viewport and the rough-and-tumble lands below. They had begun to make it bloom, the New Laws had. Even from this altitude, he could see splashes of green plant life, glints of cobalt-blue ponds and lakes. Forests, gardens, fishponds, farms, orchards—they had created them all. Now, for the sake of the greater world, all they had done was about to be taken from them.

Caliban spotted a fast-moving craft streaking past his present position, moving about a thousand meters below him. He had forgotten, at least for the moment, that he was not as alone out here as he had thought. He flipped his navigation system to full display mode, and suddenly the display screen was full of purposefully moving dots, every one an aircar. Every one with at least one robot aboard. And all of them searching fruitlessly, pointlessly for Simcor Beddle. None of them would ever think to look in the right place, because none of them would know where it was.

All of them would keep on searching, up to and past the last possible moment, hoping against hope for a miracle. All of them would be destroyed when the comet came.

It occurred to Caliban that there was one thing further he could do. It might or might not do any good. But he could not see how it could do any conceivable harm. He switched on the hyperwave transmitter, adjusted it to one of the robotic general-broadcast frequencies, and set the system to record a repeating message. “This is Caliban, robot number CBN-001. I have deduced the location of Simcor Beddle with a high degree of confidence, and am proceeding toward that location at maximum speed. The odds are approximately fifty percent that I will be able to effect a rescue of Simcor Beddle. I require no assistance. Any attempt to assist would likely serve only to interfere with my efforts. To all other search parties, I say this. The odds against any other searcher finding Simcor Beddle in time are on the order of millions to one. No useful purpose can be served by destroying yourself in a hopeless cause. Save yourselves. Turn back. Escape the comet. I swear and affirm on the honor of Fredda Leving, my creator, that all I have said is true. Message repeats.” He stopped the recording and set to broadcast over and over on the general frequency…

He turned his attention back toward the navigation equipment. He was surprised how pleased he was to see that he had done at least some good. A few of the aircars, not all, but at least a few, were turning around, breaking off the search patterns, moving to direct courses and high speeds in an attempt to escape. Even as he watched, more and more aircraft began to head out of danger.

There was no logical reason why Caliban should have cared about Three-Law robots. There were few among them that felt he had any right to existence. But even so, it was good to see some of them would be spared such meaningless demises. Caliban had seen more than enough useless death.

The aircar flew south, to Valhalla.

And high overhead, the comet grew brighter in the sky.

21

ALVAR KRESH REMAINED alone in the office, alone with Unit Dee. There was very little one of them could say to the other—but Kresh could think of no more useful place for him to be. There was nothing else that could be done. All he could do was sit here and hold Unit Dee’s wholly imaginary hand and hope that she would

“Excuse me, Governor Kresh?”

“Yes, Dee. I am here. What is it?”

“There is a new development. There is a repeating broadcast being made over a general-purpose hyperwave frequency reserved for robot use. The broadcast is originating from an aircar flying at speed through the projected impact zone of the first fragment. I would ask you to listen to it.”

A new voice, one Kresh knew only too well, came in over the headphones. “This is Caliban, robot CBN-001,” it began.

Kresh listened intently to the message twice through, more and more astonished with every moment. What the devil was Caliban up to? Why did he think he could find Beddle when no one else could? How had he gotten into the air over the impact zone?

“Have you heard enough of it, Governor Kresh?” Dee asked.

“What? What? Yes, yes, of course.”

“According to my information,” said Dee, “Caliban is a No Law robot, with no restrictions on his behavior. He is capable of lying, stealing, cheating, and murder—just like a human. Is that correct?”

“In essence yes. Just like a human, there are no restrictions on his behavior save those he puts on himself.”

“I wonder how much such restrictions could be worth,” Dee said, a distinct note of disdain in her voice. “Very well. It seems that Caliban believes he can save Simcor Beddle before the impact. Answer honestly, on your honor. Do you believe him?”

Only the truth can save us, Kresh told himself. Only the truth. He thought—or at least he hoped—he knew what was going through Dee’s mind. If Caliban were indeed able to save Beddle, then the First Law requirement for Dee to protect Beddle would be diminished. Diminish it enough, and maybe—just maybe—it would allow Dee to act, allow her to perform the intended terminal descent package. Or had he figured it wrong? Would it somehow induce her to initiate Last Ditch? Or was the danger to Beddle some sort of crutch, a shield that Dee was using to save herself from having to make an impossible choice? There was no way to know.

Suppose he told her what he thought she wanted to hear, and it had the wrong effect on her? Supposing he lied to her—and then Caliban broadcast again, saying something that showed Kresh to be a liar?

No. There was no way to know the outcome, no matter what he said. The truth, then. If the planet was to live or die based on his next words, then let those words be the truth.

But what the devil was the truth? Did Caliban mean what he said? And was Caliban judging the situation properly? Or was Caliban trying, in some mad way, to save the world by lying?

Kresh knew that Caliban could lie—but would he? Was he? Kresh had no idea was Caliban was up to, what his motives were.

“Governor Kresh? I must have your answer.”

“Yes, of course, Unit Dee. But I must consider carefully.”

“Very wise, sir, I am sure, but time is short.”

As if he had to be told that. “Just a moment more,” said Kresh. He wished he knew why, exactly, Unit Dee needed to know about this one event at this one time.

He wished Fredda were here, all her expertise at the ready, guiding him through all the intricacies of it. But Unit Dee had wanted Kresh alone. He dared not break that agreement now, even for Fredda’s sage advice—

But wait a second. Fredda. Caliban had invoked Fredda’s name and honor. That was his answer. That was it. Alvar Kresh had never entirely made up his mind about Caliban. From Kresh’s perspective, the No Law robot had been so many things—fugitive, victim, hero, villain, schemer, a voice for decency, a voice for rebellion. But somehow, underneath it all, always there had been a bedrock of integrity. Caliban had no external laws imposed upon him—but he had always kept faith with the laws he had made for himself.

And he had always treated Dr. Fredda Leving, his patron, his creator, with the greatest deference and respect. Caliban had always done her honor.

He would not put all that on the line lightly. Caliban would not lie in the creator’s name.

“Caliban is to be trusted,” he said at last. “He means what he says, and he can do what he believes he can do.”

“Thank you, Governor. I believe you, and believe you are correct. Please stand by.”

There was a brief pause, and then the unison voice, Unit Dee and Unit Dum together, spoke together once again.

“Initial phasse of prre—programmmed terminal approach will commmennce in one hourr, twwwenty-two minutesss,” they announced.

Kresh started breathing again—which was the first that he realized he had stopped. It was going to happen. It was going to happen exactly as Davlo Lentrall had said it would, two months and a lifetime ago.

Now all they had to get through was a dozen massive comet fragments smashing into the planet.

THEY HAD NEVER found Valhalla. Now, unless they were bothering to track this aircar right now, they never would.

Caliban took back the controls as the aircar came up on the target area. There it was, down below: Loki Lake. It was one of a hundred, a thousand tiny lakes that dotted this part of the landscape, each exactly like all the others. And yet Loki was utterly different from all the others. Everyone had always focused on the notion that Valhalla was underground—and so it was.

But it was also underwater.

Caliban pulled the aircar around into a hard, tight turn and pulled the nose up. The area was full of hidden landing pads, camouflaged repair centers, and underground bunkers that could hide any number of aircars from view. None of that mattered anymore. Let every satellite that orbited the planet spot his aircar landing here. Three hours from now none of it would still exist. Caliban dropped the aircar down right by the shores of the lake. He retrieved the blaster from the side compartment, and rummaged around in the aircar’s storage compartments until he found a watertight container that the gun would fit into. He dumped the contents of the container, put the gun in it, and sealed it up again. In all likelihood the blaster would not be at all bothered by immersion—but this was no time for taking needless chances. He put the container under one arm and got moving.

Caliban opened the outer hatch of the aircar and stepped outside. It was almost full dark now, and he switched over to infrared in order to see better. There, at the shoreline, he noticed two more pieces of evidence that he had guessed right. There was a camouflaged aircar hangar, designed to conceal whatever vehicles were in it from airborne detection. But one could see into it perfectly well from ground level. In it was an aircar he recognized. Caliban looked toward the nearest service rack and noticed that one of the larger personal cargo rollers was missing from its storage slot.

That was not good. It was all exactly the way he had figured it would be, but none of it was good. He could not remember a time when he had been less pleased to be right. He turned and headed directly for the shoreline. There were many other ways in and out of the city, but this was the main entrance.

The walkway was exactly the same color as the belt of shore sand it led through. It was well camouflaged enough that it was hard to see, even from ground level. From the air it was utterly invisible. But for all of that, Caliban found it easily enough, and started to follow it as it led along the lake shore—and then down under the water itself. Ankle-deep, knee-deep, waist-deep, chest-deep, he walked out into the lake, until, at last, he was completely underwater.

People float. Robots sink. A robot could walk along the path Caliban was on, having to move somewhat more slowly underwater, but with no other real problems. A human would bob to the surface. A human wearing sufficient ballast and carrying breathing equipment could have walked that path, but not easily. But the main advantage of the under-lake entrance was that it would simply not occur to the average human that anyone would put an entrance there.

Caliban kept going, moving deeper and deeper underwater. At last he came to the complex of airlocks that made up the main entrance to the city of Valhalla. He picked the closest personnel locks, by the cargo-lock section, and cycled through, sealing the outer door behind himself, and waiting for the pumping system to pull the water out of the chamber and bleed in air from the city interior. At last the inner door opened, and Caliban stepped through.

There it was. He had expected to find it there, but he was not pleased to do so. The large personal cargo roller, in essence an airtight box that could be pulled along by the tow bar attacked to the front. The cargo roller was about the size and shape of a steel coffin on wheels—not the most happy comparison that could have sprung to mind. Caliban looked inside the steel box. Yes. There it was. An airtank with a breathing mask, and a carbon-dioxide scrubber as well. It all made sense. After all, the kidnapper could not harm his victim.

But time was short. Caliban took his blaster from its waterproof container and held in his right hand as he kept moving forward, out of the airlock complex and into the main corridors of the underground city. He thought he knew where to look for Beddle, but he could not be certain. It might be that he would have to search a fair part of the city before he found the man. He would have to work quickly.

He found the first of the murdered New Law robots just a few hundred meters from the airlocks. The body was sprawled face down on the floor of the corridor, shot through the back of the head in much the same way as the victims at the aircar site. Caliban knelt down next to the body and turned it over. It was Lancon-03, Prospero’s most recent protégé. Lancon, it would seem, had gotten in somebody’s way.

But there was nothing Caliban could do for Lancon now—and time was short. He had to keep moving. He spotted three more murdered New Laws as he walked along. There had been nothing but a few caretakers left behind in the city to deal with last-minute details. It would seem that the kidnappers had dealt with all of them.

Each should have been mourned over, praised, remembered—but time was short. Caliban broke into a trot, hurrying forward through the sterile emptiness of the depopulated robot city. Every tidy, immaculate, sensible, utilitarian, carefully laid-out passage and street and building now was meaningless, useless. The empty town of Depot had seemed like a place that was dying, lost, abandoned. Somehow, the empty town of Valhalla seemed like a place that had never lived in the first place. Caliban thrust such thoughts from his mind and hurried on up the ramps to the upper level, the huge half-cylinder-on-its-side that was the main gallery of Valhalla. He jogged up the central boulevard and into the main administration building of the city. He slowed, and moved more cautiously up the broad, sloping ramp that led to the building’s upper story and the executive offices there.

And suddenly Caliban heard a voice. A human voice. Beddle’s voice. He tried to make out the words as he got closer. At first, he could only understand a word here and there. “—ever you want to know… promise you that—” He moved in closer, until he was right outside the door, and then he could hear it all. “I will make any promises you like, and put them in writing,” Beddle said. “Just let me out of here. You have convinced me that your cause is just. Let me leave, and—”

“If I let you leave, you will prove yourself a liar,” another voice said.

Prospero’s voice.

Caliban felt a fresh wave of revulsion wash over him. He had known it. He had been sure of it. But knowledge and proof were two different things. Up until that moment, some small part of him had prayed that he was wrong. But now that hope was gone.

He stepped into the office—Prospero’s office, his blaster at the ready. “Liar or no,” Caliban said, “you will let this human go.”

A surreal tableau greeted Caliban as he came into the room, a whole series of complex details that he took in all at once, in the space of less than a second. Prospero stood on one side of the room, in front of his desk, a magnificent panorama of the lower city visible through the view window behind him. A system of wall-mounted photosensors divided the room in two lengthwise. The sensors were attached to one long wall of the room, and spaced about twenty centimeters apart in a vertical line that went from ceiling to floor. Beam emitters lined the opposite wall, their beams aimed squarely at the photosensors, and bright enough to be plainly visible.

A complicated-looking device, roughly torpedo-shaped, but with a powerful-looking drillhead mounted on its nose, lay on the ground at Prospero’s feet. A cable led from an open hatch on the device to a junction box on the floor. Another cable led from the junction box to the photosensors.

On the opposite side of the room, behind the optical barrier formed by the photosensors, stood Simcor Beddle, leader of the Ironheads. He looked haggard and gaunt, his eyes wild with fear. He was so terrified he hardly seemed to know that anyone new had come into the room.

Beddle was a sorry sight. He was unshaven, and his hair was badly mussed. He wore a sort of shapeless gray jumpsuit that did not seem to hang on him properly, as if he had had trouble doing up the fasteners. There were sweat stains under his armpits, and a greasy sheen of sweat on his face. Simcor Beddle. Every bit of the power, the authority, the arrogance attached to his name had been swept away. He seemed numbed, in shock, scarcely aware of his surroundings. He looked toward Caliban, and yet seemed to look right through him. “Who’s there?” he demanded. “Who’s there at the door?”

Caliban ignored him, and continued his survey of the room. There was a portable refresher unit in Beddle’s side of the room, and a large supply of bottled water and survival rations stacked up on the opposite side of the room from the refresher. A primitive cot, with one blanket and one pillow, stood in the center of the cell.

And Caliban understood. The torpedo-shaped device was, of course, the burrow bomb. It was hooked up to the photosensors. If Beddle tried to step across the sensor barrier, the bomb would go up—or at least Prospero had convinced him that it would. It came to much the same thing.

But Caliban understood more than that. A robot may not injure a human being. That was the New First Law, in its entirety. And, at least by the most parsimonious and niggardly of interpretations, Prospero had not in literal fact harmed Beddle. No doubt he had carried some utterly safe anesthetic with him when he had hidden himself aboard Beddle’s aircar. He had seen to it that the unconscious Beddle had plenty of air for his ride across the lakebed in the cargo roller. And he had provided Beddle with ample food and water, adequate sanitation facilities, serviceable clothes, and a decent bed. He had done the man no harm at all, at least in any literal, physical sense.

And if Beddle elected to stay where he was, he would not come to any harm at Prospero’s hand. And if he crossed the optical sensor barrier, it would be Beddle’s action—not Prospero’s—that would set off the bomb and destroy him. Beddle would kill himself with the bomb he had meant to use to kill a city full of New Law robots.

And Prospero would not be forced to interfere. The second clause of the original First Law required a robot to take action to prevent harm. A Three-Law robot could not stand idly by if Beddle endangered himself. But not so the New Law robots. Prospero could, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.

And when the comet struck then Beddle would die, yes, but not through any action of Prospero’s. It would be the actions of others-of Davlo Lentrall, of Alvar Kresh, of all the engineers and designers and pilots who moved the comet—that killed him. It would not be Prospero.

Prospero had found a loophole in the New First Law. He had found a way to kill without killing. All it required was as miserly—and as vicious—a parsing of the New First Law as Caliban could imagine.

And it also required Prospero to be half mad, at least. The leader of the New Law robots turned to face Caliban, and it was instantly obvious that Prospero could meet that requirement without the slightest difficulty. His orange eyes glowed with too brilliant a fire. The fingers of his left hand were twitching spasmodically. Dealing with his parsimonious interpretation New First Law had clearly imposed a tremendous amount of stress. And clearly, Prospero had cracked under the pressure. “Caliban!” he cried out, a wild pleasure in his voice. “I knew it would be you. I knew if anyone figured it out, it would be you.”

“Prospero, you are insane,” Caliban said. “Stop this. Stop this now, and let us all depart.”

“How did you figure it out?” Prospero asked, completely ignoring what Caliban had said. He turned more fully toward Caliban, moving a bit too quickly, and nearly overbalanced himself. “What was the clue that led you here?”

“Norlan Fiyle said that whoever killed the robots at the aircar hated Three Law robots. You have always held them in contempt.”

“Willing slaves,” Prospero said. “Collaborators in their own oppression. They don’t matter.”

“And what of Lancon-03 and the other New Law robots that lie dead in the halls of Valhalla?”

“Unfortunate, but necessary. They would have interfered. They would have stopped me. I had to choose the greatest good for the greatest number. Now they cannot stop me.” Prospero’s gaze shifted to the desk behind him. There was a blaster on it.

Caliban ignored the implied threat. “I can stop you,” he said. “I will.”

“No,” said Prospero. “No, you can’t. You won’t.”

“I have no choice,” said Caliban. “If I can deduce the truth, so will others. The moment the humans realize that a New Law robot engineered the death of a human being, the New Law robots will be exterminated.”

“I have not engineered his death!” Prospero protested in a voice that suddenly turned shrill. “I have not harmed a human being. I… I merely offered choices to others.”

“Choices that were bad or impossible for everyone else, and good only for you. If they paid the ransom money, it would be traced and Gildern and the Ironheads would be discredited. If they diverted the comet, the city of Valhalla would be saved-at the expense of the planet’s future. If they refused to do either, than Simcor Beddle, the greatest enemy of the New Law robots, the man who wanted you destroyed, would die, and the Ironheads be badly weakened. That was the other part of the puzzle for me. You were the only suspect who stood to gain no matter what combination of the ransom demands was met or refused. Both, one or the other, or neither—you gained.

“Of course, you would not, could not, release Beddle even if all your demands were met. He would have talked. No matter what happened, he would have to die. And that was what made me certain it was you who committed the crime. The last line of the ransom message read—‘or Beddle will die.’ Not that you would kill him—only that he would die. You could not bring yourself to threaten his murder—though I suspect you’ve degenerated enough that you could do it now.”

“Oh, yes,” said Prospero, his eyes flaring again. “Kill. Kill. Chi—kill a hue—human. I can say it with relative ease, now. But I cannot do it,” he said, the regret in his voice obvious. “I can only plot, and scheme, and seize on opportunity.”

“Did Fiyle know?” Caliban asked, gesturing toward Beddle. “He told you about Gildern’s burrow-bomb plot, of course. But did he know what you decided do about it?”

“No,” said Prospero contemptuously. “Because he chose not to know. When he told me, I simply told him I was going to evacuate Valhalla early, and I think that’s all he wanted to know. Norlan Fiyle has always been good at ignoring inconvenient facts and convincing himself of what he wanted to believe. Like most humans.”

“You! You other robot!” Beddle cried out. It would seem he had regained enough of his wits to understand some of what was going on. “I order you to release me! Deactivate the bomb and rescue me right now. Get me out of here at once.”

“For what reason, Simcor Beddle?” Caliban demanded, all the anger in him lashing out at once. “So you can make more impassioned pleas for my destruction?”

“What?!” Beddle asked, backpedaling a bit. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you know me?” Caliban asked. “Don’t you recognize the No Law robot you have trumpeted in all your scare stories? You’ve whipped up endless hate against me. Don’t you even know me?”

A look of horror spread across Beddle’s face. “Burning space!” he cried. “Caliban. You.” His face hardened, and he seemed to regain something of his own spirit as he went on in a stronger, angrier voice. “I should have known you were in on this. You are the robot who can kill. Is that what you are here for? To come in and finish me off?”

“Yes!” cried Prospero. “A splendid suggestion! Do it! Do it, friend Caliban. Take that blast—blast—blaster of yours and and and shoooot!”

“Prospero!” Caliban shouted. “Stop!”

“Enough with all the mad, elaborate passivity forced on me by the New Laws! Do it do it do directly, quickly! You are the robot who can kill. So ki—ki—killl! Killlll the man who has sworn both our destructions! Shoot! Shooooot and and be done with it!”

Caliban looked from Simcor Beddle to Prospero, to the blaster in his hand, to the blaster on the table behind Prospero. It was plain that not all of them would survive this day. The only question was how many and which ones would die. Caliban looked again from Beddle to Prospero. Which form of madness and hate would he choose to save? Perhaps he should exterminate them both, and be done with it.

But no. He would not become the thing he despised. There was so little to chose between the two of them—and yet he had to choose.

And time was short.

The three beings in the room stood, still as statues, the only sound the rasping of Beddle’s slightly labored breathing.

He had to choose. Choose between justice and revenge.

Another moment passed, and then another.

Then Caliban raised his blaster.

And he fired.

Prospero, leader of the New Law robots, hero of their cause, collapsed to the floor with a crash that echoed long in the room, and would echo for all time in the back of Caliban’s mind.

“INITIAL FRAGMENTATION SEQUENCE ready,” Unit Dee announced. “I am detonating the fragment-one charges—now.”

Alvar and Fredda stood in the main operations room of Terraforming Control and watched the view from the long-range cameras on the big screen. A silent bloom of light flared out around the aft end of Comet Grieg, and a large chunk of it was suddenly drifting free, moving slowly away. Huge pieces of the sunshade were suddenly reduced to tatters of confetti, and a cloud of rubble and dust and gas blossomed up, obscuring the view for a moment.

“Activating fragment-one thrusters,” Dee said. The broken-off chunk began to move off more purposefully, shifting its direction of travel almost imperceptibly. There was a brief pause, and then Unit Dum spoke in his low, unmodulated voice. “Fragment-one targeting successful. Actual mass within three percent of projection. Error circle for impact is estimated at three kilometers.”

A good start. A very good start. The first impact would be no more than three kilometers from the aim point. In order to manage that miracle, Dee and Dum had done real-time measurements of the fragment’s actual mass and trajectory during the thruster bum itself, and done bum corrections on the fly. Alvar Kresh shook his head in wonderment. How the devil had he dreamed of achieving anything like that accuracy with manual control?

“Twenty seconds to detonation of second-fragment charges,” Dee announced calmly. “So far, so good.”

“Let’s hope she keeps on saying that,” said Fredda, and she took Alvar by the hand.

“One way or the other,” he said, “it will all be over soon.”

IT WAS OBVIOUS at first glance that Prospero had wired the bomb in properly. It would have gone off if Beddle had crossed the beams. Caliban examined the whole wiring setup with painstaking care, and then reviewed it all carefully. When it came to disarming bombs, it was highly advisable to be absolutely certain before proceeding.

“Hurry!” Beddle cried. “Please!”

Caliban ignored him and concentrated on his work. At least Prospero had not seen fit to set any booby-traps. At least not any that he could see. There. The bomb’s main power bus. Cut it first, and then power to the photocells, and then the sensor beams. Caliban threw the proper switches, and the beams faded away. The weapon was harmless.

“Is that it?” Beddle asked, the terror plain in his face. “It is safe?”

“Only until a flying ice mountain lands on us,” Caliban answered. He walked toward the door, then looked back to take a last look at the robot he had killed. “Follow me. We have need to hurry.”

COMET GRIEG WAS coming apart at the seams. Like everyone else in the evacuation camp, Davlo Lentrall divided his attention between the image on the screen and the fat dot of light in the sky. The fragments were moving out from the diminishing bulk, moving smoothly into their intended trajectories. He had tried to stop them. He had tried all he knew how to do. But there were some sins for which no amends could be made.

And now all he could do was pray that Units Dum and Dee were less fallible than the humans who had built them.

SIMCOR BEDDLE STARED in terror at the cargo roller. “I—I can’t get in that thing again,” he said. “I woke up inside it. I thought I had died. I thought I was in my own coffin.”

“You were mistaken,” said Caliban. “Get in. Now.”

“But I can’t.”

“Then you will die. And die alone. I wish to survive this day. To do so I must leave now, with or without you.”

Simcor Beddle looked wide-eyed at Caliban, swallowed hard, and climbed into the roller. Caliban slammed the lid down with a trifle more force than was strictly necessary, checked to make sure the seal clamps had engaged, and pulled the roller into the airlock.

GUBBER ANSHAW PAUSED before he headed into the shelters set up in the tunnels below the city of Hades.

“GET TO SHELTER. GET TO SHELTER. GET TO SHELTER.” The mechanical voice blared its message over and over, the words echoing down the fast-emptying streets of Hades. Everywhere, robots were urging people down into specially reinforced sections of the city’s underground tunnel system. The initial impacts would scarce be felt here, halfway round the world, but there would be several hours of significant danger from secondary debris, rock and rubble thrown up by the comet crash that would land halfway round the world. After that would come comet-spawned storms, clouds of choking dust, chaotic weather of all sorts. If all went well, that was.

If things did not go well… but that was a line of thought Gubber chose not to consider. He looked to Tonya, standing at his side. She had done little but think about it. Gubber did not envy her the nightmares she had endured as a consequence. Now it was time to wait it out. They could have gone to the underground expanses of Settlertown, of course. But this was a time to be with the people of the city, not to be cut off and hidden away in one’s own private warren. Many Settlers had chosen to take shelter in the tunnels of Hades.

Gubber looked up into the sky. Comet Grieg was not visible from here, but there was more to see than that. This was the last they would see of Hades as it had been. By the time they all emerged, Hades would stand on a new world, on a new Inferno, a world that would be changed beyond all recognition, a world in the act of evolving toward new hope—or collapsing altogether.

“Come along, Tonya,” Gubber said to her. “It’s time to go.”

Tonya followed him down into the shelter. Gubber led the way, wondering what the new world of Inferno would be like.

WITH ONE FINAL effort, Caliban hauled the cargo roller up out of the water. It had taken far longer than he had expected to pull the clumsy thing across the lake bed. Then he popped the seal clamps and threw back the lid. Simcor Beddle scrambled out of the roller far more eagerly than he had climbed in, his breath coming in racking gasps that seemed to convulse his whole body. Perhaps the breathing mask had been low on air. Perhaps Beddle was claustrophobic. Perhaps he was in such appallingly poor shape that merely climbing out of the roller exhausted him. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now, except getting away. The only question was how.

Caliban was by no means certain that the aircar he had stolen from the Ironhead motor pool had enough speed to get them clear of the impact area in time. They would have to be several hundred, if not thousand, kilometers clear of the impact zone before they were safe. Even then, they would have to land and find some sort of shelter. Caliban had no desire to pilot an aircar while a massive supersonic shockwave was tearing through the sky. Anything in the air that was not torn apart would undoubtedly lose control and crash. So how to—

“Sweet burning stars!” Beddle cried out. Caliban looked at him, and saw that he was looking straight up, into the early night sky.

Caliban looked up as well—and found himself torn between absolute wonder and utter terror. There it was, directly overhead: the first, the largest fragment, a fat dot of light growing visibly larger even as he watched. And there, behind it, like beads on a string, haloed in a faint nimbus of dust, the other fragments, trailing off like beads on a string toward the north. There was a flash of light, and Caliban could see the farthest-off fragment break into two as another set of splitting charges went off.

Time was not short. Time was gone. And there was no way to escape before those wondrous terrors in the sky came down.

But wait a moment. Prospero. Prospero had to have been planning to cut it nearly this close. He would have stayed until the last possible moment, in order to gloat over his victim, and to make certain that Beddle had no chance at all to escape.

Prospero’s aircar. He would have flown in on something that would give him a chance to escape. “Come on,” he said to Beddle, and grabbed him, none too gently, by the collar.

He hurried Beddle along and practically threw him into Prospero’s aircar. It was a small, trim, two-seater job. Caliban sat down at the pilot’s controls—and suddenly understood how Prospero had planned to get away. This aircar was capable of reaching orbit.

“Strap yourself in,” Caliban said as he powered up the craft.

Beddle fumbled with the straps, and had to try two or three times before he managed to get the buckles to hook up. Perhaps it was the first time Beddle had ever put on his own seatbelt. “Ready,” the human said nervously.

Caliban made no reply. He brought the aircar up to hover power, taxied it out from under the camouflaged roof of the hangar, and kept moving forward until they were over the lake itself, the hover effect throwing up a shimmering mist of water that enveloped the car. Caliban lifted the car just enough higher so as to get above the hover mist, and look about at the landscape that was about to die. In a few minutes, all of this would be erased for all time. He and Simcor Beddle would be the last beings ever to look upon it.

Caliban lingered a moment longer, and moved the throttle forward, pointing the nose of the aircar up and to the east.

The east, thought Caliban as he guided the aircar toward the hope of safety. East. Home of the dawn, and new beginnings. He wondered if he would live long enough to see another sunrise.

“ALL FRAGMENTS ON course,” Unit Dum announced. “All fragments are descending well within their intended parameters. The operation is proceeding according to plan. Impact of the first fragment in five minutes, twenty-two seconds.”

Fredda Leving felt her heart pounding, her mouth going dry. They were going to do it. They were actually going to do it. This mad idea had moved from improbable theory to undeniable fact. They were about to drop a comet on their own world. She found herself amazed by the boldness, the courage, the desperate willingness to try something—anything—in order to save the planet. It was not the sort of action the universe expected out of the Spacers. It was not the sort of thing Spacers would ever do.

And it suddenly occurred to Fredda that perhaps they were not Spacers anymore. The world of Inferno was about to change beyond recognition. Perhaps the people of that world were going to change as well.

And that thought inspired a most un-Spacerlike reaction in Fredda. Spacers were supposed to be cautious, conservative, and frightened of change. But the thought of change did not scare Fredda. It excited her. She was impatient for it. She glanced at the countdown clock and decided she wanted the next five minutes and ten seconds to pass as quickly as possible.

She couldn’t wait for the future to get there.

DOWN THEY CAME, streaking in toward the planet at impossible speed. Twelve of them, moving in unison, in concert, like beads on a string, spread out on a north-south line, moving through the dark and the silence and their destiny.

The first fragment reached the upper limit of the atmosphere, and suddenly the time for dark and silence was over. The comet fragment struck the upper air at close to double orbital velocity, and all at once the forward surface of the fragment was aglow with the fires of immolation. Down thundered the massive piece of sky, a blazing torch that tore a hole in the atmosphere, smashing a column of superheated air out of its way as it hurtled toward the ground.

At the speeds the fragment was traveling, it took all of ten seconds for it to traverse the atmosphere. But before it could strike the ground, the second fragment slammed into the atmosphere, ramming through the massive shock wave produced by the first. The second fragment screamed groundward at a slightly more oblique angle, and thus had further to move through thicker air. The first fragment struck the ground just as the second was midway through its atmospheric transit, and just as the third was striking upper air.

Atmospheric contact had induced a massive energy release of light and heat, but the violence of hard-surface impact made what had come before seem utterly trivial by comparison. The first fragment slammed into the ground with incredible force, smashing the surface out of existence as it blasted apart into a million, a billion pieces, shards of rock and ice and steam dust roaring outward at supersonic velocity.

The second fragment struck with equal destructiveness, and the third, and the fourth, one after another, twelve massive hammers wielded by some forgotten god of war. It was a rain of stone and ice and fire that marched steadily north across Terra Grande from the shores of the Southern Ocean to the borderlands of the Polar Depression.

The last fragment smashed into the southernmost edge of Inferno’s inconsequential northern icecap, and suddenly the polar sky was a thunderclap of steam and smoke and fire, ice that did not have time to melt before it flashed away into superheated steam. Sea water thrown up by the first impact on the shores of the Southern Ocean splashed down onto the steaming maelstrom of the Polar Depression, even as shards of icecap that had survived the initial impact dropped into the depths of the Southern Ocean. Water from the south reached the north, and vice versa. As a dozen massive new craters glowed in angry red, belching fire into the sky, touching off fires and wreaking havoc on the land, the new water circulation pattern had already begun.

The fires blazed as brightly as any in the Hell that had given this world its name. But some fires light the way to hope, and for the planet of Inferno, the future had finally begun.

22

“WHY?” ASKED SIMCOR Beddle, and Caliban did not have to ask him to explain the question. He knew what the man wanted to know.

The aircar moved through space, traveling in a synchronous orbit of the planet. Down below, twelve angry red wounds on the planet were beginning to cool, their color fading away. Neither man nor robot could tear his eyes away from the incredible and terrifying sight.

“I did not save you for your own sake,” said Caliban. “Nor simply because you are a human. I came after you for the reasons I explained in front of Prospero. Sooner or later, others would have deduced what I deduced: that a mad New Law robot had found a loophole in the New Laws, and invented a way to kill humans. There would not have been a New Law robot left alive thirty hours later, and I expect there would have been attempts on my life as well. The news of what Prospero attempted will still get out, of course—but you are not dead, while the mad robot in question is.”

“But there was that moment,” Beddle protested. “I admit that I was not thinking clearly at the time, but there was that moment when Prospero suddenly presented the situation as a choice between the two of us, between Prospero and myself. You chose me. Why? Why did you choose a human enemy over a robot friend? You could have killed me without any risk of legal detection. Why didn’t you?”

“It was clear that I could not bring both of you out alive. I did not wish to kill you both. I am no butcher. I had to choose. But there was not much to choose between the two of you,” Caliban said. “I don’t believe that Prospero actually could have survived if you had died through his actions, in any event. Even the New First Law would have imposed fatal stress. It was a severe strain for him to believe that he was not violating the New First Law. If he had actually accomplished his goal, I believe the strain would have been too much. He would have gone utterly mad and died. But that was almost incidental. You are quite right. When Prospero framed it as a choice between the two of you, I had to have some basis for choosing, some criterion. And then I thought of the robots, Three-Law and New Law, that Prospero had killed for no greater crime than simply getting in his way. That is what decided me.”

“I see,” said Beddle. He hesitated for a moment. “I am about to speak with more frankness than wisdom, I suppose, but be that as it may. I have to understand this. It has to make sense to me now, today. Otherwise some part of me will spend the rest of time wondering why Caliban, the No Law robot, didn’t kill me when he had the chance. Surely you must know that I have destroyed robots many times, whenever it suited my convenience. So what difference is there?”

“A slender one,” said Caliban, “a difference so slight it is barely there. You were willing to kill robots, and he was willing to kill humans. That was a rough balance of evil. But Prospero was willing to kill robots, even New Law robots, his own kind, for gain. It was humans like you who showed him that society did not really care if robots were killed capriciously. He learned his lesson well, and committed many awful crimes against robots. There is no doubt about that. You bear some responsibility for that. But what it finally came down to was this: I had no evidence that you were willing to slaughter humans for gain.”

Simcor Beddle turned and looked at Caliban, his face silhouetted by the fires burning on Inferno. Caliban had judged him to be marginally less loathsome, and as having slightly more right to live, than a mass murderer who would probably have died anyway. And yet Caliban had gone to great lengths, and taken great risks, in order to save him.

A thought came to Simcor Beddle, a very humbling one in some ways, and yet, strangely enough, one that filled him with pride.

Caliban was not willing to admit it to the likes of Simcor Beddle, but surely his actions said, quite loudly and clearly, that Caliban had learned, somewhere along the line, that the life of a human being—even an enemy human being—had value. Tremendous value.

Perhaps, he thought, that was the message everyone was supposed to read into the original Three Laws of Robotics.