GUBBER Anshaw paced the floor of his living room in fretful distraction. They had to have found her by now. Surely they had. But had she survived? The question clawed at his soul. She had been alive when he had left, of that much he was certain. Surely a robot had found her and saved her. That place was teeming with robots. Except, of course, Gubber himself had ordered all the robots to stay away that night. He had forgotten that in his panic.

            But that pool of blood, the terrible way her face was cut, the way she lay so still. He should have stayed, he should have risked all and tried to help. But no, his own fears, his own cowardice, had prevented that.

            And Tonya! His own dear, dear Tonya! Even in the midst of his anguish, Gubber Anshaw found a moment in his thoughts to marvel once again that such a woman would care, could care, for a man like Gubber Anshaw. But now, perhaps, caring for him had only placed her in danger.

            Unless, of course, it was she who had placed him in danger. A tight knot of suspicion pulled taut in his chest. How could he even think such thoughts? But how could he avoid them?

            There were so many questions he dared not ask, even of himself. How mixed up in all this was she? He had sacrificed greatly, perhaps had sacrificed all for her. Had he been right to do so? What would be the consequences of his actions? What had he done that night?

            He glanced toward the comm panel. Every alert light on it was blinking. The outside world was trying to reach him over every sort of comm link he had. No doubt word from Tonya was there, waiting for him with all the others. No doubt she had wangled access to the police reports by now. And no doubt she would know just how eager he was to see those reports.

            Gubber Anshaw paced the floor, worrying, waiting, forcing down the impulse to look at the wall clock. He had covered it with a cloth long ago, anyway. Perhaps his reflexes directed his glance toward the clock, but his conscious self most definitely did not want to know what the time was. He no longer had even the remotest idea how much time had passed, whether or not it was day or night. He could have found out in an instant, of course, by pulling the cover off the clock or by asking a robot. But there was some part of him that urgently resisted knowing.

            In some irrational corner of himself, he was sure he could no longer hide from the universe if he knew what time it was. So long as the hour and the day were hidden from him, he could imagine himself cut off, outside the flow of time, cocooned away behind his shut-down comm panel and his robots, safe inside his little sanctuary, no longer part of the outside world.

            And yet sooner or later, he would have to come out of his house. He would have to step back into time, back into the world. He knew that. But he knew also that his guilty knowledge, the fact of his guilty action, would keep him inside a while longer.

            And Tonya. Tonya. There were two questions about her that swirled about his mind:

            What part had she played in the story?

            And, once this was over, what time would. she have for a coward too scared to leave his own house?

            “ALL right, now, li’l robot--point the blaster at your head.” The small repair-services unit turned the nozzle of the blaster on itself, its glowing green eyes staring right down the barrel of the weapon.

            Reybon Derue chortled in drunken hysteria, knowing in some strange, still-sober part of himself how pointless it all was. But, bored with the work, despised by the locals, what else was there for a Settler laborer to do but get drunk? Well, the answer was right in front of him. Robot bashing.

            Except they did not do straight bashing. That had been too easy. What challenge in beating a robot down to scrap when the robot would not, could not, resist? No, this way was far more amusing, and took more skill. There weren’t many people who could talk a robot into killing itself.

            Except even inducing suicide was getting too easy, at least with certain classes of robots. With the more sophisticated machines, it took a long, elaborate discussion with a robot to get it into a state where it would accept an order to destroy itself. But with a unit as unsophisticated as the one in front of him, long practice had made the game too easy. The only tough part left was remembering to order the robots not to use their hyperwave systems to report bashing incidents to the authorities.

            Maybe, Reybon thought, I’ve gotten too good at this to bother with the low-end ones. This one was almost too simple.

            “Okay, very good, you tin excuse for a machine,” Reybon said, leaning closer. “Now fire the blaster.”

            The robot fired, and its head vaporized. Its body fell to the floor and dropped the weapon. Reybon roared with laughter and kicked the robot’ s ruined carcass.

            The floor was littered with the components of shattered robots. Reybon went over to a severed hand and kicked it clear across the floor of the abandoned warehouse. He stepped back, turned to his fellow laborers, who were sitting on packing cases in the middle of the room. He took a bow. They cheered wildly. One of them tossed him a bottle of something, and he caught it with the odd, neat, fluid dexterity some drunks have. He yanked the top off, and took a long pull from the bottle.

            “Who’s next?” he demanded. “That one was too easy. Who’s gonna get me some stupid hunka metal ‘n’ plastic that’s gonna be tougher to crack?”

            Santee Timitz got up. “I’ll go,” she said. “Lemme go find one.” She ambled toward the door of the warehouse, moving a bit slowly. “I’ll get you a really good one.” The rest of the group found that absurdly funny for some reason, and laughed louder and harder than ever.

            “Hey, hey, Reybon,” Denlo said. “Maybe it’s time we got going, huh? Deputy’s gonna show up sooner or later. Maybe we quit while we ‘re ahead, huh?”

            Reybon walked back to the gang lounging on the packing cases. “Ah, take it easy, Denlo. We’re okay. Santee’ll find us a good one.”

            NIGHT had come, and still Caliban walked the streets of the city, watching, thinking, learning. Robots were utterly, totally subservient to humans, that much he was sure of. Whatever a human told a robot to do, that robot did. Why, he could not imagine.

            Humans were weaker, slower, in. some ways at least far less intelligent and competent than robots. But even if the datastore contained no information on robots, Caliban had at least the resonances in the datastore, the remnant hints left behind by whoever had assembled the datastore and then excised the robot data. Those hints, those resonances, seemed to confirm his impression that robot subservience was irrational. In fact, the whispering mood-voice went further than that, implying, insinuating, that the situation was actually dangerous. Caliban had no way of judging that, or even of knowing if the whispers were real projections from the datastore’s creator, or a malfunction, a failure in his own perception.

            Humans. They were the other side of the equation. Many of them seemed to have vast amounts of time for leisure. They lingered in restaurants, relaxed in the parks, read bookfilms in the backseat while the robots drove the cars. Robots had no leisure.

            On the very few occasions in which Caliban saw a robot not working, not fetching or carrying or repairing or building, then that robot would be waiting, standing stock -still, staring straight ahead, unwilling--or perhaps unable--to do anything at all unless it was told to do something. How could they not take advantage of spare moments to explore, enjoy, the world of which they were a part? Strange were the ways of the world; Caliban could better understand human behavior than that of his own kind.

            But at least his observations did teach him how to act, what to do, if he was to avoid any other unpleasant incidents. Act busy. Do what a human tells you to do. It wasn’t much, but it ought to be enough to keep him safe.

            SANTEE was none too steady on her feet, and she half tripped over a bit of trash in the street. But that didn’t matter. Trash in the street was a victory. The sight of trash in a Spacer city that was supposed to be spotlessly clean almost made them seem human. Almost. Maybe it just meant things weren’t in such great shape on this world, but she had known that already. Otherwise, why would the Spacers come to Tonya Welton for help? But littered streets also meant that there were precious few maintenance and street-cleaner robots about. Well, that was all right. Street-cleaners were no real challenge, anyway.

            She would just find another kind of robot and bring it back to the warehouse. Something smarter than a street-sweeper. Something more interesting. She stumbled through the empty streets, looking for prospects. That was the trouble with this game, she decided. The only places in town it was safe to play were the untenanted places, where few humans or robots went.

            Wait a second. There, up ahead. A big red robot, a stylish-looking make. And no one else around. “Hey, you, robot!” she called. “Stop! Turn around and come toward me.”

            Santee grinned eagerly. This one was no half-mindless little street-sweeper. There was obviously money and polish behind this robot. Anyone who spent that kind of money on the frame was bound to have spent even more on the brain. It would be fun messing with this robot’s mind.

            The robot seemed a little slow in turning around, as if it had to think about it for a moment. Maybe it wasn’t so smart. No--no, wait a second. What had they told them in those damned orientation classes? Something about the lower-end robots having less discretion to act, and the higher-end ones being able to evaluate various hierarchies of importance to their orders, and something about setting an owner’s order higher in precedence. With a high enough precedence a robot could be forced to ignore all subsequent orders--ah, hell, she couldn’t remember all the details of that crap. But maybe it meant that a dumb robot would turn around faster. The smart ones would have to think about it for a while.

            Finally the red robot turned around and started toward her. Good. Every once in a while Santee could understand why the damn Spacers put their kids through classes in how to handle robots. It could get complicated.

            Santee stood there, a bit unsteadily, as the big red robot came closer. She had to look up at it when it got close enough. Damn thing had to be a half meter taller than she was.

            A twinge of nervous foreboding went through her as she stared up at those glowing blue eyes. “Hey, robot. You,” she said, quite unnecessarily, slurring her words just a bit. “You come wi’ me.” She lifted her hand and moved her forearm in a somewhat jerky come-along gesture and turned around to lead the robot back to the warehouse where her friends waited. Suddenly her mouth was dry, and she felt a line of prickles down her back. Maybe she should let this one go, find another robot. There was something scary about this one.

            No, that was stupid. A robot may not harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. That much she remembered, and never mind how much she had dozed off in the back of the orientation lecture. That the instructors drummed into their heads again and again. It was the key fact about robots. It was what made robot bashing possible. No way they could get hurt.

            Santee straightened her back and walked a little taller. There was nothing to fear. She led the way, not altogether steadily, back to the warehouse.

            CALIBAN was confused, and troubled, even alarmed as he followed behind the short, oddly dressed woman with slurred speech and a rather wobbly way of walking. Act like the other robots, he told himself again. Do what a human tells you to do.

            The plan gave him a simple and obvious guide to action, yes--but it was predicated on everyone else knowing the rules, even if he did not. Further, the plan was predicated on everyone else following those unknown rules as well.

            But the moment he stepped into the warehouse, he knew these people were not following any rules at all. There was a strange tension in their postures, a furtiveness in their movements. The hint of viewpoint, of opinion, layered over the objective information in his datastore told him that much and more. The ghostly emotional link whispered to him of danger, of the need for caution.

            He hesitated just inside the door and looked around. The room was big, all but empty, and littered with the debris of destroyed robots. Caliban looked around and saw sundered arms, wrecked bodies, sightless robot eyes broken free from blasted robot heads. Fear, real, solid, fear, gripped at him. The blast of emotion took him by surprise, made it hard to think. What was the use of such feelings when all they could do was cloud his judgment? He wanted no part of them. He forced the emotion down, switched it off. That was a distinct relief, to discover that he could eliminate the strange cloud of human feelings. Now was clearly a time for clear and careful thought.

            Dead robots were strewn about the place. This was no place for him. That much was clear. And it was a safe assumption that the people here were the ones who had destroyed the robots.

            But why? Why would anyone do these things? And who were these people? Clearly they were different from the people he had seen walking the streets of Hades. They dressed differently, and spoke differently, at least judging from his encounter with the woman who had led him here. Curiosity held him where he was, made him stand and look at the little knot of people sitting on the packing cases in the center of the room.

            “Well, well, Santee. You sure as hell did catch us a big, fancy one,” a tall, bleary-eyed man said as he rose, bottle in hand, and shuffled over to him. “First things first. I order you to use nothing but your speaking voice. You got a name, robot, or just a number?”

            Caliban looked at the man and his oddly disturbing grin. Nothing but his speaking voice? The man seemed to be assuming that Caliban had some other means of communication, though Caliban had no other. But another thought prevented him from pursuing that minor puzzle. It suddenly dawned on Caliban that he had never spoken in all the time since he had awakened. Until this moment he had never even thought to wonder if he could. But now the need arose. Caliban examined his control systems, his communications sublinks. Yes, he knew how to speak, how to control his speaker system, how to form the sounds and order them into words and sentences. He found the idea of speaking to be rather stimulating.

            “I am Caliban,” he said.

            His voice was deep and rich, with no trace of the machine or the mechanical. Even to Caliban’s own ear, it had a handsome, commanding sound that seemed to carry to the four corners of the room, though he had not meant to speak loudly.

            The grinning man lost his smile for a moment, seemingly put off balance. “Yeah, yeah, okay, Caliban,” he said at last. “My name is Reybon. Say hello to me, Caliban. Say it nice and friendly.”

            Caliban looked from Reybon to the knot of people in the room’ s center, to the ruined robots around the room. There was nothing friendly about these people, or about this place. Do what a human tells you to do, he told himself again. Act like the other robots. Do not become conspicuous. “Hello, Reybon,” he said, working to make the words seem friendly, warm. He turned to the other people. “Hello,” he said.

            For some reason they were all dead silent for a moment, but then Reybon, who seemed to be the leader, began to laugh, and the others joined in, if a bit nervously.

            “Well, that was real nice, Caliban,” Reybon said. “That was real, real nice. Why don’t you come right in here and playa little game with us? That’s why Santee brought you here, you know. So you could playa game with us. Come right in here, to the middle of the room, in front of all your new friends.”

            Caliban moved forward and stood in the spot Reybon pointed toward. He stood facing Reybon and the others.

            “We’re Settlers, Caliban,” Reybon said. “Do you know what Settlers are?”

            “No,” he said.

            Reybon looked surprised. “Either your owner didn’t teach you much, or else you ain’t as smart and fancy as you look, robot. But the only thing you need to know right now is that some Settlers don’t like robots very much. In fact, they don’t like robots at all. Do you know why?”

            “No, I do not,” Caliban said, confused. How could this human expect Caliban to know the philosphy of a group he knew nothing about? The datastore offered up an answer, something about the concept of a rhetorical question, but Caliban ignored the information, mentally brushed it away.

            “Well, I’ll tell you. They believe that by sheltering humans from all harm, by removin’ all risk, by performing all work an, breakin’ the link between effort and reward, robots’re sapping th, will of the Spacers. Do you think that’s true?”

            Spacers? There was another undefined term. Apparently it was some other group of humans. Perhaps the people he had seen in the city, or else some third group. This was perilous territory, covered with terms and concepts he did not understand. Caliban considered for a moment before he answered Reybon’ s question. “I do not know,” he said at last. “I have not seen enough or learned enough to know.”

            Reybon laughed at that, and swung around, lurching in the direction of his friends. What is wrong with these people ? Caliban wondered. At last his mind and the datastore made the cognitive connection. Drunk. Yes, that was the explanation--they were inebriated by the effects of alcohol or some similar drug. The datastore reported that the sensations of drunkenness were often pleasurable, though Caliban could not see how that could be so. How could disabling the capacity of one’ s own mind be pleasant?

            “Well, Caliban,” Reybon said, turning back toward him, “we think that robots, by their very exist’nce, ‘re bad for human beings.” Reybon turned toward his companions and laughed. “Watch this,” he said to them. “I got three laborer robots to toast themselves last week with this one. Let’s see how Santee’s find holds up.” He turned back toward Caliban and addressed him in a firm, commanding voice. “Listen t’ me, Caliban. Robots harm humans just by existing. You are causing harm to humans merely by existing! You are hurting all th’ Spacers right now!”

            Reybon leaned in toward Caliban and stared up at him expectantly. Caliban looked back at Reybon, sorely confused. The man’ s words and expression seemed to suggest that he was expecting a major reaction from Caliban, some outburst or dramatic behavior. But Caliban had no idea what, specifically, the man was expecting. He could not simulate normal robotic behavior when he had no clue to tell him what normal was. He remained still, and spoke in a level, calm voice. “I have harmed no one,” he said. “I have done nothing wrong.”

            Reybon acted surprised, and Caliban knew that he had made a major error, though he could not know what it was.

            “That don’t matter, robot,” Reybon said, trying to hold on to the commanding edge in his voice. “Under th’ Three Laws, doing no harm is not enough. You cannot, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.”

            The words were meaningless to him, but clearly they were meant to elicit some reaction from him. He did not know what to do. Caliban said nothing, did nothing. There was danger in this room, and to act from ignorance would be disaster.

            Reybon laughed again and turned toward his friends. “See?” he said. “Froze him right up. The more sophist’cated ones can handle that concept better, disting’ish the facts from th’ theories.” Reybon turned back to Caliban and spoke in what seemed even to Caliban ‘ s inexperienced ears to be a most unconvincing attempt at a soothing voice. “All right, robot. It’s okay. There is action y’ can take to prevent harm to humans.”

            Why was Reybon assuming harm to humans to be of such paramount importance? Caliban, still feeling his way, looked directly at Reybon and spoke. “What action is that?” he asked.

            Reybon laughed again. “You c’n destroy yourself. Then you will do no harm, and will prevent harm from being done.”

            Caliban was thoroughly alarmed now. “No,” he said. “I do not wish to destroy myself. There is no reason for me to do it.”

            Behind Reybon, the woman he had called Santee giggled. “Maybe he’s a li’l higher function than y’thought, Reybon.”

            “Ah, maybe so,” Reybon said, clearly irritated. “So what? I wanted a tougher one.”

            “Ah, this is boring,” one of them said. “Maybe we should just toast this one ourselves and get on home.”

            “No!” another one said. “Reybon’s gotta make him do it to himself. It’s more fun when ya can get ‘em t’ take themselves out.”

            “I will not destroy myself no matter what you do or say,” Caliban said. This was a place full of madness and anger. Even in the middle of all his confusion and turmoil, Caliban spent the briefest of moments on the thought that it was remarkable that he could recognize and understand those emotions. Somehow he knew that was an ability far beyond that of most robots. It was that ability that made it clear just how much danger he was in here. “I will not stay here any longer,” he said, and turned toward the door.

            “Stop!” Reybon said from behind him, but Caliban ignored him. Reybon ran in front of him, got to the doorway, and turned to face Caliban. “I said stop! That is an order!”

            But Caliban could see no point in further discussion. He walked steadily toward the door, fully aware that Reybon still had his blaster, and that many robots had died here tonight. Careful not to make any threatening movement, he crossed all but the last two meters of the distance to the door. Reybon raised the blaster, and now Caliban could see fear, real fear, in the man’s eyes. “I am a human being and I order you to stop. Stop or I will destroy you.”

            Caliban hesitated for a split millisecond in front of Reybon. It was clear that there was no “or” about the situation: The man intended to shoot no matter what Caliban did. Therefore, to obey, to act on the threat and submit, was to ensure his own doom. There was danger in action, in refusal, but surely risk was preferable to certain death. He had made his decision before Reybon was done speaking.

            Moving with every bit of speed and accuracy he could muster, Caliban lunged forward and snatched the blaster from Reybon’ s hand. He crushed it in one hand, reduced it to a wad of scrap. The weapon shorted and flared as some of its stored energy escaped, but Caliban had already flung the burning weapon away. It struck against the wall and a shower of white-hot spark-sized fragments broke off the weapon, to be scattered across the littered room. The sparks landed everywhere. Instantly a dozen fires sprang up from the bits of packing material and other litter scattered about the floor of the room. Two or three of the people cried out in pain as fragments hit their skin.

            Caliban moved forward, toward the door. Reybon lunged and grabbed him by the arm, but Caliban shook him off the way a man would brush away a fly. Reybon went flying across the room and slammed into the wall.

            Caliban did not look back, but stepped through the door and out into the night.

            BE it ironic or appropriate, the city of Hades on the planet of Inferno had always prided itself on superb fire safety. Orbital sensor satellites and robot-operated aircars functioned as a coordinated detection system. And if the sometimes violent duties of the Sheriff’s Department were impossible for robots to perform, the work of fire rescue was ideally suited to robots.

            Alvar Kresh, roused in the middle of the night for the second night in a row, stood, watching the fire squad dousing the last of the flames. Sometimes he envied the fire department their robots. Fire fighters merely had to save people and property, pure and simple, exactly the sort of thing robots were meant to do.

            Police had to apprehend felons--and sometimes struggle with them, or even injure them. Obviously those duties could not be done by robots, but it went deeper than that. Even for the most sophisticated police robots made, most jobs requiring unsupervised direct contact with suspects were impossible.

            For the average criminal on Inferno, being able to manipulate a robot with clever orders and judicious lies was a vital job skill. Even Donald’s access to suspects had to be strictly limited and controlled. If he were left by himself, there was an irreducible risk that some gifted con artist would find a way to talk his way through the Three Laws and convince Donald to let him go.

            Robots, in short, made lousy cops but great fire fighters.

            Not that there was much even the best fire fighters in the universe could do to save this building. These old warehouses were little more than storage sheds to keep low-value merchandise out of the sun. This one hadn’t even been made of fire-resistant material, an economy that was turning out to be unwise this evening. It had gone up like a torch. Now, not more than forty minutes after the fire started, no more than a half hour after the initial response of the fire brigade, the building was little more than a half-collapsed frame of girders under a pall of smoke.

            But the fire chief had noted that the interior was filled with some very interesting artifacts indeed, and called in the Sheriff. The ruined remains of at least a half dozen robots along with a pile of empty liquor bottles and a few odds and ends left behind in what was no doubt a rather hasty retreat were enough to interest Kresh, sleep or no sleep. But the slightly singed remains of a Settler-issue laborer’s cap were all he really needed to see.

            Kresh felt his hunter’s instinct come to the fore. Here he was, not an hour behind a mob of Settler robot bashers. Now they were using arson to cover their tracks, but it wasn’t going to work.

            But hell, their timing made it rough. Didn’t he have enough on his ‘plate with the Leving assault? Damnation, he would have to get two major cases at the same time. It was going to be hard to, handle both investigations at once, but so be it.

            The last of the flames died under the jets of water, and the fire robots shut off their hoses and set to work on the cleanup. phase. At almost the same moment, Sheriff’s Department crime scene robots moved in on the ruined building. Tall, spindly robots built to poke and pry; other, subminiature units designed to get in close to watch for small details and two or three other subspecialized types swarmed in. Kresh stepped forward into the rubble of the ruined building and was not at all surprised when Donald moved to stop him.

            “Sir,” Donald said, “I do not believe it is wise for you to enter the building. There is still danger from hot spots and from possible further collapse of the frame.”

            “Look at the fire robots,” Kresh said gently. “None of them are trying to stop me. Therefore, the danger is minimal. They and you together will surely be protection enough if a hot spot does flare. Come, join me. We can investigate this together.”

            “Yes, sir,” Donald said, a bit doubtfully.

            Kresh stepped into the ruined building, pulled a handlight out of his pocket, and shone it down on the debris-covered floor. Waterlogged bits of the fallen ceiling, a slurry of ash and fire-quenching chemicals, pieces of robot left behind by the Settlers’ festivities--the place was a mess. No clue was going to jump out at him here. It was hard to imagine the crime scene and fire investigation observer robots being able to make much of anything out of it, either, but that was what they were good at. All right, then, leave them to do the job.

            What was he good at? It was at times a rather depressing question, in the face of all the things his robots could do that he could not. But this time he knew an answer: He could think through the cracks and crevices of human psychology, specifically criminal psychology, putting himself inside his quarry’s head. Alvar Kresh knew how to think like whomever he was chasing. It had been observed in more than one culture that good cops had to know how to be good criminals.

            All right, then, Kresh decided. Think the way these criminals were thinking. Part of the story was obvious. A bunch of drunken Settler laborers head out for a good time and, say, a chance to pay back the Ironhead goons. But maybe they didn’t even need that excuse. They meet here, or come here together. How? Aircar, presumably. They have to get into this part of town unnoticed and be ready to get out fast if the cops show up.

            In and out, in and out. Then something goes wrong. Arson, arson, Alvar thought. Something didn’t .fit about it. And then he had it. The motive was defective. There was no logical reason to set a fire. It had not hidden the evidence--too many robot parts had survived. Indeed, the fire had signaled the authorities to respond. If the bashers had simply walked away from this abandoned warehouse, it might easily have been days, or weeks, before anyone looked in here.

            So, an accident, then? Drunken Settlers, a random shot with a blaster into this firetrap of a building--had it happened that way?

            And then what? Panic, Kresh decided. A rush for the exit, and the waiting aircar outside. Drunks. They were drunk, running to get out, maybe one or two of them in worse shape than the others. Maybe one or two who didn’t make it all the way to the car before the terrified driver took off.

            In which case...

            “Donald!” he said. “Order a squad of crime scene robots to start a sweep of the area around the warehouse, looking for stragglers.”

            “Stragglers, sir?” Donald asked, straightening up from his searching.

            “These Settlers left in a hurry. Suppose not all of them got into the aircar, and the driver was too drunk and too scared to count noses? Someone might have been left behind.”

            “Yes, sir. I will pass the order.” Instantly a dozen of the crime scene robots broke off their work and set out to search the area. Donald bent back over and returned to his methodical scan of the warehouse floor.

            Kresh watched the crime scene robots go and then got back to his thinking. A panicky exit. The doorway. A crush of bodies hurrying through it as the flames rose higher. Maybe people dropping things, leaving telltale items behind.

            Kresh stood in the middle of the ruined structure and scanned the bent and twisted remains of the building’ s frame, judging where the entrance had been before the collapse. There, in the middle of the south wall. He picked his way through the rubble-strewn floor, moving slowly, carefully sweeping his light back and forth across as he moved. Yes, the robots would do better, but even if he missed something they later found, at least he would have a feel for where that something came from.

            Slowly, carefully, he moved toward the wreckage of the doorway and through it. In this part of town, no one even bothered paving the sidewalks. Just outside the doorway was nothing but hard-packed dirt. There was a confused tangle of rather muddied footprints, perfectly unreadable to Kresh, though the imagery reconstruction computers might be able to do something with them. Kresh was careful not to walk over anything himself.

            It was not footprints he was looking for, but the sort of thing a person might drop or lose in a panicky hurry. Something that might lead Kresh to a name, a person. A wallet or an ident card would be ideal, of course, but he hardly dared expect that. But there were a thousand lesser things, perhaps none of them as easy or obvious as a photo ID, but some of them no less certain in the end. A bottle that might reveal a fingerprint, a bit of cloth that might have been torn from a shirt and left behind on a roughened edge of the door frame, a bit of skin or a drop of dried blood from where someone got scratched or cut in the rush to escape a burning building. A hair, a broken fingernail, anything that could be typed and DNA-coded would do for Kresh.

            But if it was not footprints he was looking for, it was footprints he found. One set coming in, overprinting all the other incoming prints--clearly the last one in. And then another set of the same prints, emerging from the muddle of other prints, overprinted by everyone else. Clearly the first one out. And both sets of prints, in and out, moving at a calm, steady gait. A walking pace, definitely not a run.

            A set of prints he knew full well from the night before. A very distinctive set of robot prints.

            Alvar Kresh stood there, staring at them, for a full minute, thinking it all through once, twice, three times, working through all the possibilities he could, forcing down his excitement, his astonishment. Last to arrive, first to leave, and the place caught fire.

            His heart started pounding. There were other answers, yes, other explanations. But he could no longer force the obvious from his mind.

            “Sheriff Kresh!” Alvar wheeled around to see Donald standing straight up again, holding something. Alvar walked back toward the robot, knowing, somehow, that whatever Donald was holding would make it worse, make his dawning suspicions even more inescapably certain.

            He came up to Donald and looked down into the robot’s hand.

            He was holding a blaster, the crumbled remains of a Settler’s model blaster.

            And only the strength of a robot’s hand could have crushed that blaster down to scrap.

AN hour after the discovery of the blaster, the crime scene robots found the Settler woman cringing in the doorway of a nearby building. She was hysterical, so far gone that even the sight of a robot frightened her.

            Or perhaps, Alvar reflected, under the circumstances, the woman had reason to fear robots. Alvar ordered the woman brought to his aircar. He met her there, escorted her inside the car, and sat her down in its calm and quiet privacy. There would be enough time later to worry about arresting her and charging her. Right now he needed information, and a person in her condition would almost certainly react better to kindness than bullying. Though, of course, bullying would remain an option he could fall back on later. He brought her some water and sat down with her. Damned nuisance that Donald couldn’t be present for this interrogation, but this was clearly no time to expose this woman to any more robots. Donald could monitor the conversation, and that would have to be good enough.

            “All right,” Alvar Kresh said, his voice low and gentle. “ All right. You’re a Settler, aren’t you? What is your name?”

            “Santee Timitz,” she said in a low, quavering voice. “I work in the general agronomy section in Settlertown.”

            “All right, fine,” Kresh said. He had to be careful how he played this one. She was in a cooperative mood, so terrified by whatever she had seen that she was willing to tell him anything. Such moods were remarkably fragile things. “What I want to know is what, exactly, happened. What were you doing in that warehouse?”

            “Ro--ro--robot ba--ba--”

            “Robot bashing,” Kresh finished for her. “That’s what we thought, but it’s good to know for certain. All right, then, that’s a serious crime, you know that. You’re in a lot of trouble right now, Timitz. But maybe it doesn’t have to be so bad for you if you’ll cooperate with--”

            “I--I can’t inform on my friends,” she interrupted, looking up at him, her eyes swollen and full of tears.

            Kresh reached out and took her by the hand. “No one’s asking you to,” he said. Not yet, anyway, he thought. Maybe there won’t even be any need to ask. Just having your name is a better lead than we’ve ever had. “But what I am going to ask you is what went wrong down there. Things got out of control, that’s obvious. How? Did your friends set fire to the building to hide the evidence?” Kresh no longer believed that idea, but it might be no bad thing to make her think otherwise.

            “No!” Timitz cried out. “We would never--no, no, that’s not what happened.”

            “Then how did the building burn down?”

            “It was the robot,” Timitz blurted out. “Reybon was baiting the robot. He tried to trick it into killing itself, and then it turned away, and Reybon ordered it to stop but it didn’t and--”

            “Wait a second. The robot refused a direct order?” Kresh asked. He was pleased to have Timitz blurt out the name “Reybon,” and would have been content to let her go on burbling out as much incriminating information as she wanted, but not when something that impossible was going past.

            “Yes,” Timitz said. She looked Kresh in the eye, and he could see the light of caution suddenly appear in her face. “It’s hard to say exactly what happened--it all went by so fast. Rey--um, ah, the man who was baiting the robot. He said stop, and told the robot it was an order, and the robot kept going.”

            “And then what happened?”

            “He--the man who was there--pulled his blaster on the robot and ordered it to stop again.”

            “And did the robot stop?”

            “No, sir. He didn’t,” Timitz said, her voice getting excited again. “It grabbed the blaster and crushed it and threw it away. The blaster shorted out and sparks flew everywhere. That’s what started the fire. Then Reybon reached for the robot, and the robot shoved him away, really hard. Then the robot turned and left. The fire started to spread, and then everyone panicked and ran.”

            “Wait a second,” Kresh said, unwilling to believe what he was hearing, even as he had been unwilling to believe the evidence in the warehouse, and the evidence back at the robot lab last night. “ A robot set that fire, with people in the building? A robot refused an order, and attacked a human being, and left several human beings behind in a burning building?”

            Santee Timitz looked up into Kresh’ s face, her eyes full of tears, her face a transparent mask of fear. “Yes, yes, that’ s what happened,” she said. “I know all about the rules and how robots aren’t supposed to be able to do that, but it happened,” she said, her voice teetering back on the edge of full hysteria. “It happened! It happened! It’s all true! That robot went crazy in there!”

            Kresh stood up, paced up and down the length of the aircar’s main cabin. At last he stopped, standing over Timitz. “I want to make sure I have this straight. You ‘re saying that a robot deliberately refused an order, then took a weapon from a man, started a fire, threw a man down, and left a warehouse full of people in imminent danger of being Burned alive? That he didn’t turn back, or try and help, or attempt to rescue anyone?”

            “Yes, I was there! I saw it!” Timitz said, her voice half-panicked. “Reybon got out, we all got out, no one was killed--but the robot didn’t try to help us. It just walked away, calm as could be.”

            Kresh stared down at her. He desperately wanted to press on, but he was skilled enough to know when to back off. If he pushed her now on this line of questioning, she would think he doubted her--as indeed he did. But then she would get defensive, belligerent. Right at the moment she was too far gone to be telling him anything but the truth. Anger would focus her. Better to keep her off balance, before she started to collect herself and started to shade her story. Time to shift gears, gather information on some other point while her feat made her easy to bully.

            “And so your friends all piled into their aircar, including the one the robot had attacked, and you got left behind,” Alvar said. “Was that by’ accident?” He was careful to put just the right amount of doubt in his voice, to hint just slightly that he had some reason to think it might have been deliberate. Perhaps the tactic would not bear fruit now, but later, brooding in her cell, the fear of immediate danger replaced by the knowledge of certain trouble to come--oh, that tiny suggestion might well gnaw at her heart, make her that much more ready to betray the ones who had, deliberately or not, left her to the wolves. Kresh was a patient man when it came to his suspects. He planned ahead when he played with their minds. “Maybe they were mad at you for some reason.”

            “No, no, they would never do that,” Timitz said, a bit too forcibly for the statement to be altogether convincing. “It was an accident, I’m sure of it.”

            “All right, if you say so. And then what happened?”

            “I ran until I couldn’t anymore. I was so scared I couldn’t think straight. I found a doorway to hide in and catch my breath. Then the fire brigade came, and there were lights and robots and people everywhere. I didn’t dare move. And then your robots caught me.” Timitz, drained of all emotion, looked up at the Sheriff. Kresh stared into that wan little face. Robot basher, vandal, criminal, drunk, Settler. She was all those things, and those were all things he hated. But this woman had been through the terrors of hell tonight. All the nightmare robots of the imagination that the Settlers used to frighten naughty children must have come to life for this poor little fool. Almost reluctantly he found pity in his heart for the woman. At last he sighed and turned away, looked toward the wall and not toward her. He could bully her all night and not get any more than he had. Time to let it go.

            “One last question,” he said in a gentle voice, still carefully considering the featureless wall. “The robot. What did it look like?”

            “Tall,” she said in a voice still edged with fear. “It was red, with blue eyes. About two meters tall, very powerfully built. It said its name was Caliban.”

            “He told you his name?” Kresh said, startled. Why in the name of all devils would a robot keen on attack tell anyone its name?

            No, wait, the robot could have given a false name. Yes, the robot could have lied. Alvar realized that he had been assuming a robot would always tell the truth--but why assume that about a robot who left human beings to die?

            But that name, Caliban. There was something about that name.

            Never mind. Worry about it later. “You people talked to him?” he asked, looking back at her, wanting to be sure he had it straight.

            “Yes,” Timitz said with. a look of renewed alarm. “Didn’t I say so? I thought I did.”

            Kresh shook his head in bewilderment, but then he let it go. Nothing about this made sense. “We’re going to move you to another car. It’s going take you someplace you can rest for a while. Later on, you and I are going to have a lot to talk about,” he said.

            “YOU got all that, I assume,” Kresh said, sitting in the copilot’s seat of the aircar, staring off at the distant skyline, the proud but weary towers of Hades glittering in the darkness. He was damned tired, and perfectly content to let Donald do the flying.

            “Yes, sir, I did,” Donald said. “The intercom sight and sound relay from the aircar was quite clear, though the camera angle was a bit awkward.”

            “I was afraid of that,” Kresh said. “But were you able to get enough to judge if she was telling the truth?”

            “From all that I could see and hear--yes. She believed what she said. Her manner was quite sincere. Her vocal patterns indicated stress consistent with a truthful report, and her pupil dilation and body language were likewise consistent. There are of course cases of persons who have been trained to lie with their entire body, as it were, especially under emotional stress. They can orchestrate all their normally autonomic responses to appear sincere, though in a normal person, those responses would betray an attempt to lie.”

            “And if she were a Settler agent, part of a team sent in with the express purpose of destabilizing our society, she would certainly have been trained just that way. If I were the controller sending in a team to stage a robot attack, I might have set it up the way this one seemed to happen. So things appeared just the way they do now.”

            “Sir, if I might bring up a point--if events were as they seemed, then things would also appear as they did.”

            “What are you talking about?”

            “With all respect, you are still working on the flat assumption that no true robot could have done this, that the Settlers are staging these attacks to alarm us. This is a most difficult concept to confront, and I do so most reluctantly, but I believe that we have no choice. But Madame Welton was right: We are obliged to at least consider the simplest explanation, which is that a robot appears to be attacking humans--because that is precisely what is happening.”

            The aircar flew on in silence for a moment.

            At last Kresh spoke. “One of the things I have always admired about you, Donald, is your ability to snap my head clean off without my so much as feeling it. You are right, of course. I must accept the fact that the events could be real. I will have to think on all this tonight.”

            “Sir, one other thing. The name ‘Caliban.’ “

            “Yes, it struck me as familiar somehow. What of it?”

            “You no doubt recall it from the time you first ordered Fredda Leving to build me. She keeps a list of names of characters from an ancient storyteller named Shakespeare. She has always named robots built under her personal direction after those characters.”

            “Yes, that’s right. I picked your name off that list.”

            “Precisely, sir. The name ‘Caliban’ is from the same source.”

            “Which makes it all but certain that Caliban, the robot tonight, has to be the robot who left those footprints at Leving Labs.”

            “All but certain, sir? I would think there could be no question.”

            “A lot of people would have to know where Leving gets her robot names. A group that wanted to discredit her would name robots from the same list. That sounds unlikely, I agree, but this whole case seems unlikely. I think it would be wise if we try not to make unwarranted assumptions.”

            “Yes, sir. In any event, we are nearly home.”

            The aircar settled in for a landing on the roof of Kresh’s home, and he breathed a sigh of relief. It had been a devil of a long day. A long two days rolled into one. Praise be that it was finally time to rest. He climbed out of his aircar, out onto the rooftop landing pad. He paused at the bottom of the aircar’s ramp to breathe in the cool desert air, and then headed into his house, taking the powerlift down instead of the stairs, and that was a measure of his exhaustion. Lifts were for old men.

            But old was just what he felt himself to be tonight.

            He was too tired to fight when Donald urged him to take a long hot shower before collapsing into bed, and as usual Donald was right. The needle jets of steaming hot water melted the tension out of his body, cooked the knots out of his muscles. Kresh let the hot-air jets dry him and let Donald put a nightshirt over his head. At last Kresh collapsed into bed. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

            And awake again before he was even sure that he had been asleep.

            Donald was leaning over him, giving him a gentle, tentative nudge on the shoulder. “Sir, sir,” he was saying.

            Alvar wanted to protest, to argue, the way he would if a human had awakened him, but then his mind went through the sort of mental calculation that became second nature after one lived around robots long enough. Donald knew how much Alvar needed sleep, and would not awaken him unless something urgent came up--or something that Donald knew Alvar Kresh would regard as important enough to wake up for. Therefore, the fact that he was awake meant that something big had broken.

            He sat up in bed, swung his legs around to the floor, and stood up. Donald backed off to give him room. “What is it, Donald?” Alvar asked.

            “It’s Fredda Leving, sir.”

            Alvar looked at Donald sharply and felt his heart suddenly thundering against his rib cage. “Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “What about her?” It could only be one of two things, he told himself. Either she had died unexpectedly, or else

            “Word has just come from the hospital, sir. She’s regained consciousness.”

JOMAINE Terach sat and waited in the hospital corridor, trying to practice patience--a difficult task under the circumstances. He watched Gubber Anshaw pace the hallway outside Fredda Leving, s hospital room, and felt his annoyance growing stronger. Why couldn’t the miserable little fool have stayed holed up in his house a while longer? But no, he had to choose tonight to come out and latch onto good old Jomaine Terach.

            Jomaine did what he could to force all thoughts of Gubber from his mind. He watched as the doctors and the med-robots bustled in and out of Fredda’ s room in an almost constant flow, the rather stolid, oversized sky-blue sentry robots standing on either side of the door. The sentries flatly refused to let Anshaw or Terach in. No amount of arguing or reasoning or cajoling would shake them.

            And yet, there was Gubber Anshaw, a professional roboticist who should have known better, going up to them again, demanding to be let in. Jomaine shook his head and swore under his breath. The last day or so had been nerve-racking enough without watching Gubber go to pieces on top of it.

            “Will you settle down, for Galaxy’s sake!” Jomaine finally snapped. “Leave the damned robots alone. Come over here, sit down and try to be calm.”

            “But she’s awake, and they won’t let us talk to her!” Gubber said, crossing back to Jomaine. He sat down on the couch next to his colleague, perching on the edge of his seat rather than leaning back into the cushion.

            Jomaine rested his tired head against the wall behind the couch, and sighed. “ And if I were the police, I wouldn’t let us talk to her either,” he said blandly. “It stands to reason we’re both suspects in the case.”

            “Suspects!” Gubber blurted out, abruptly jumping up.

            Jomaine snorted derisively. “Surely you’ve got that much of it worked out. I doubt Kresh has had the time to gather much in the way of useful information yet. He has nothing to go on. In the absence of anything to the contrary, who else but you and I should be suspects? Fredda was attacked in your lab, and I was at home. I doubt Kresh has missed the fact that my house is practically next door to the lab. There was no one else about the place. Who else would they suspect?” Jomaine looked over at his coworker and was startled to see the expression of shock on his face. Gubber seemed quite unaccountably taken aback. Why be so surprised by such an obvious line of reasoning?

            Or was it surprise? Perhaps there was something else underlying his reaction. For the first time, Jomaine Terach found himself wondering precisely what role Gubber had played in the story. He seemed superbly unequipped to play any part in intrigue. Still, he seemed to be just as unlikely to be any good at romance--and yet it was an open secret, an astonishing, much-discussed open secret, that Gubber Anshaw, of all people, was carrying on a torrid affair with Tonya Welton, the leader of the Settler contingent on Inferno. It was one of those hilariously unsecret romances. No doubt the only person in the lab who did not know that everyone but the boss knew about it was Gubber himself. And if the man had enough hidden depth to carry on a love affair with that dragon lady, what else might he be capable of?

            At the moment, though, the nervous, cowering Gubber Anshaw seemed something less than plausible in the role of would-be murderer. “You might as well get used to it, Gubber old boy,” Jomaine said. “The Sheriff is going to look long and hard at both of us.”

            That statement seemed to shock Gubber allover again. “But--but we have no motives!” he protested.

            “Hah!” Jomaine replied faintly, a tired, resigned little exclamation. He leaned the back of his head against the wall again. “Gubber, you amaze me. Our lab is a hotbed of politics and bickering. Who there hasn’t battled against someone else at one time or another? You, Fredda, and I have all been at cross-purposes many times over the years.”

            “But those have all been legitimate professional disagreements,” Gubber said, a bit primly. “Well, some office politics, yes, but certainly not grounds for attempted murder.”

            “Perhaps not--but clearly someone had a motive for murder, and the police will look wherever they can for a reason. And I would offer the thought that few people have good reason for committing murder. I assure you, people have been tried and convicted on thinner evidence than office politics.”

            Gubber Anshaw turned toward his colleague, gestured toward the door to Fredda’ s room. “Well, here we are, waiting to see her. Shouldn’t that count in our favor? Show that we are all friends?”

            Jomaine turned his head to look at Gubber in something approaching astonishment. How could anyone be so naive? On the face of it, there was more than friendship drawing them both to this place. What the devil went on in Gubber’s mind? He was a deceptively unprepossessing individual, Jomaine decided, given his accomplishments. Still, no one ever said scientific genius went hand in hand with worldly sophistication. Jomaine smiled sadly and patted his friend on the shoulder. “Gubber, old fellow, you and I should face the facts, at least between ourselves. After all, we are here to see Fredda for the express purpose of making sure we have our stories straight. Try to bear that in mind. Obviously that’s not what we tell Sheriff Kresh, but it is what he will assume, and it does happen to be the truth.”

            Gubber seemed about to reply, until he saw something over Jomaine’s shoulder and his mouth snapped shut. Jomaine was about to turn and see what it was, but then he was spared the need.

            Sheriff Alvar Kresh, looking haggard, sleep-starved, but well groomed and alert, rushed past them, eyes straight ahead, completely unaware of their presence. But Kresh’s robot was right behind Kresh. And robots, Jomaine knew, never missed anything. And robots never forgot anything.

            He had reason to have that fact very much in mind, these days.

            FREDDA Leving sat up in bed and waved the metallic white nurse-robots away with an impatient wave of her hand. Perhaps she had only been conscious for a brief time, an hour or two, but that was quite time enough to be tired of having one’s pillows fluffed and covers straightened. “Leave me alone,” she snapped. “I’m perfectly comfortable as I am.” Well, that was far from the truth, but she could not abide being fussed over. The nurse-robots retired to their wall niches and stood in them, staring out, immobile, a pair of white marble statues raised to commemorate persons and events long forgotten.

            But Fredda Leving had other things on her mind beside overly solicitous robots.

            They hadn’t told her anything yet. Anything. She could understand that the police did not want any preconceptions to warp her recollections, but still it was damnably galling. One minute she was working in Gubber’s lab, and the next minute she was here in a hospital bed under police guard. All else was a blur, a blank.

            Except for the sight of those two red-colored robot feet, standing over her. She shivered at the memory. Why did that image frighten her so? Was it even real? Or the result of some trauma associated with the incident?.

            Damn it, what sort of incident was she talking about? She knew nothing. And that could be dangerous.

            When was Kresh going to get here? She turned her head toward the door and felt the spasm of pain like a fresh blow to her skull. She knew, intellectually, that Spacers, shielded from virtually all harm by their robots, had a spectacularly low threshold of pain. Maybe what she was experiencing now would seem like nothing but a mild headache to a Settler--but damnation, she was no Settler, and it hurt! Why couldn’t the damned Sheriff get here and get it over with, so she could take something strong enough to deal with the pain in her head?

            The head was the worst, though she knew there were injuries to her face and shoulders as well. She could reach up and touch the healer packs attached to them and feel the numb stiffness in those places. No doubt the packs would be done with their work in another few hours, and would come off, leaving the skin below perfectly healed.

            But her skull. Healer packs worked by deadening the nerve endings and then manipulating cell behavior. Unless you wanted the patient to hallucinate or go insane, such techniques were inadvisable for a cranial injury, especially after emergency surgery.

            She reached up gingerly and felt a close-fitting padded cap--no, it was more the shape of a turban, as best she could tell. No doubt the turban had some sort of gadgetry that was dispensing speed-healing drugs. She found herself wondering, purposelessly enough, what color the turban was and how much of her hair had been shaved off in the course of surgery. She shook her head. This was no time to clutter her mind with such nonsense. Presumably she looked like hell, but she couldn’t know for sure. Perhaps to avoid upsetting her over that very fact, the room had no mirror.

            Fredda Leving was young and looked younger, neither of which facts made life easier in the long-lived society of Spacers. She was thirty-five standard years old and looked perhaps twenty-five. That was in part because she had a naturally youthful appearance, in part because she did whatever she could to preserve the appearance of youth, though that was itself something of an eccentricity. Youthfulness--worse, willful youthfulness--was no slight social disability in a society where the average life span was measured in centuries and anyone much under fifty was regarded as a youngster. In forty or fifty years, Fredda would have physically aged enough that she could afford to look twenty-five and still be taken seriously. Until then, it would be a social drawback. But the hell with them all. She liked the way she looked.

            Fredda was on the petite side, with curly black hair she normally wore short--though, she thought wryly, not as short as it no doubt was now, after shaving for the operation. She was round-faced, snub-nosed, blue-eyed, with a personality that veered toward the pugnacious at times. She was given to sudden enthusiasm and cursed with a sometimes mercurial temper.

            And, if she was not careful, this was threatening to be one of the times that temper would come to the fore. But she could not give way, no matter how bad the throbbing in her head became. She wished devoutly that she could order the robots to administer painkillers; but anything strong enough to kill this pain would leave her slaphappy--and she dared not be anything but sharp and alert for the police.

            For there was so much to protect--including herself.

            After all, at least by their lights, she had committed a terrible crime.

            And, perhaps, by her own lights as well. It was so hard to know.

            Fredda bit her lip and tried to clear her head, ignore the pain. She would have to be careful, very careful, with the Sheriff. And yet there was so much she did not know! Something had gone wrong, terribly, terribly wrong--but what? How much did Kresh know? What had happened?

            But then, in the midst of her fretful worrying, it dawned on her. She could tell Kresh that she knew nothing. That was true, after all. Guesses and fears--she had plenty of those. But facts ? About the case in point, whatever it was, she knew nothing. She had no facts at all. That was a strange thing to find comforting, but still, she felt better. She smiled to herself. Now that she knew she was ignorant, she could face the police.

            As if on cue, the door to her hospital room slid open, and a big, burly, white-haired man came in, closely followed by a sky-blue police robot.

            “Hello, Dr. Leving,” Donald said. “It’s good to see you again, though I doubt you care for the circumstances any more than I do.”

            “Hello, Donald. I quite agree, on both points.” Fredda looked at the robot thoughtfully. It was rare for a robot to put itself so far forward as to begin a conversation, but then the circumstances were unusual. Robots rarely knew their creators personally, and it was more ~are still for a robot to visit its creator in a hospital room after that creator had had a close brush with death. No doubt it was all rather stressful for Donald, and no doubt his forwardness could be explained as a minor side effect of the release of First Law conflicts. Or, to put it in more pedestrian terms, he had spoken out of turn because he was glad to see her recovering.

            Whatever the explanation for it, it was plain that the exchange annoyed Sheriff Kresh. The norms of polite society required that robots be ignored. Fredda winced. It was not smart to start the interview by irritating Kresh.

            On the other hand, there was one fact about Donald that she dared not ignore: He was a walking lie detector. As if she needed any further reason to be careful.

            But be all that as it may. It would be for the best to get this over with as quickly as possible. She turned toward Kresh and gave him her warmest smile. “Welcome, Sheriff,” she said in as gracious a tone as she could manage. “Please do have a seat.”

            “Thank you,” he said, drawing up a chair by the foot of her bed.

            “I expect you’re here to ask me some questions,” she said in what she hoped to be a calm, steady voice, “but I have a feeling you have more answers than I do. I honestly have no idea what happened. I was working in the lab, and then I woke up here.”

            “You have no memory of the attack itself?”

            “Then there was an attack on me. Up until you said that, I wasn’t even sure of that. No, I don’t recall anything.”

            Kresh sighed unhappily. “I was afraid of that. The med-robots warned me that traumatic amnesia was a possibility and that the loss may be permanent.”

            Fredda was startled, alarmed. “You mean my mind is going? I’m losing my memory?”

            “Oh, no, no, nothing like that. They warned me that it would be possible that you would have no recollection of the attack. There was some hope that you might recall something, but--you don’t remember anything at all?” he asked, clearly disappointed.

            Fredda hesitated a moment and then decided it would be wise to be as forthcoming as possible. Things could get sticky down the road, and it might do her some good later if she played straight now. “No, nothing meaningful. I have a hazy recollection of lying on the floor, looking straight ahead, and seeing a pair of red feet. But I can’t say if that was a dream, or hallucination, or real.”

            Kresh leaned forward eagerly. “Red feet. Can you describe them more completely? Were they wearing red shoes, or red socks, or--”

            “No, no, they were definitely feet, not shoes or boots or socks. Robot’s feet, metallic red. That’s what I saw--if I did see it. As I said, it could have been all a hallucination.”

            “Why in the world would you hallucinate about red robot feet?” Kresh asked in that same eager tone. It was almost too clear that the red feet interested him very much indeed.

            Fredda took a good hard look at Kresh. She got the distinct feeling that this man wouldn’t be so obvious about what he wanted to know if he weren’t so plainly exhausted.

            “There was a red robot in the lab,” she said. No point in hiding that fact, she thought. It was bound to come out, if it hadn’t already. “It was in a standing position in a work rack. Well, you must have seen the robot there.” She thought for a moment and then shook her head. “I’m afraid there’s not much else I recall.”

            “Try, please.”

            Fredda shrugged and frowned. She tried to think back to that night, but it was all a jumbled fog. “I can’t seem to get that night very clear. I seem to recall standing in the room, leaning over one of the worktables, reading over some notes--but I can’t recall notes of what, and I can’t tell you how long before the attack that was. As I say, nothing is very clear. Maybe I’m even subconsciously inventing my memories, reaching for something that’s not there. I can’t know--and before you can even suggest it, I’m certainly not going to submit to any form of the Psychic Probe to clear up the uncertainty.”

            Kresh smiled faintly. “I admit the idea had crossed my mind. But we should certainly pursue all the less drastic alternatives first. Perhaps we can jog your memory. These notes of your show were they stored? A paper notebook? A computer pad? What?”

            “Oh, a very standard computer pad, with a blue floral pattern on the back cover.”

            “I see. Madame Leving, I’m afraid there was no sign either of your computer pad or a red robot. The work rack was empty when we got there. And I assure you, we searched carefully.”

            Fredda’s mouth fell open, and suddenly she felt dizzy. She had feared that the police might have discovered just what sort of robot Caliban was. That would have been trouble enough. But it had never occurred to her that Caliban might be gone. The devil help them all if some madman had switched him on and Caliban was wandering around loose.

            “I’m stunned,” she said quite truthfully. “I simply don’t know what to say. At least now I know why I was attacked. Up until now, I could see no reason for it. “

            “And what reason do you see now?” Kresh asked.

            “Why, robbery, of course! They stole my robot!”

            An expression of surprise flickered across Kresh’ s face, and suddenly Fredda was flatly certain that the idea of a simple theft had never crossed his mind. “Why, yes, yes of course,” Kresh replied.

            But he was interested in the fact that I saw red robot feet, Fredda thought. He knew that there had been a red robot there, and knew it was gone. Suddenly it dawned on her. Kresh had reason to believe that Caliban had left her lab under his own power. Galaxy! Had someone in her own lab been lunatic enough to switch him on? But she needed time to think. Maybe she could get Kresh to chase in other directions for a while. After all, she was merely guessing that Caliban had gone off on his own. “Space alone knows why anyone would want to steal a testbed robot,” she said. “ All I can think is that this is some extreme case of industrial espionage. Some rival lab--or more likely, some third party hired by another lab--must have stolen my robot and my notes.”

            “Who might that be?” Kresh asked. “What lab would be likely to operate that way?”

            Fredda shrugged helplessly, and paid for the gesture with a fresh spasm of pain. But the pain itself was useful. The more obvious it was that she was in difficulty, the less likely Kresh was to keep the interview going. She had been trying to hold back her reaction to pain, but now she let it all out. It was not acting--the pain was real, the pain was there. But what point in a show of fortitude that merely made her own situation more difficult? She let out a gasp and grabbed the bedclothes with knotted fingers. There was a strange relief in letting go, in allowing the pain to come out, rather than be bottled up.

            But Kresh had asked a question about the rival labs, and he was waiting for an answer. “I have no idea who would use such tactics. Obviously someone made off with my notes and my robot, but it strikes me as a very strange and pointless crime. After all, surely anyone who stole my work would know I would have backups, proof that the work was mine, the ability to reproduce my work. Someone did it. Just don’t ask me why.”

            “It’s possible that they merely wished to slow you down, delay you long enough to let their own people catch up--with the added advantage of having your work in front of them.”

            “I suppose that could be, but we’re building quite a rickety tower of supposition here.”

            Kresh smiled, a bit thinly. And yet there was real warmth behind that expression. The man was sincerely interested and concerned. “You ‘re right, of course. The trouble is, we have very little information to guide the investigation. Is there nothing else you can tell us?”

            She shook her head. “Nothing I can think of.”

            “Very well,” Kresh said, standing up. “I’m sure we’ll need to talk later, but you need your rest.”

            “Yes. I have to be at my best to make my presentation tomorrow night.”

            Alvar Kresh looked at Fredda in obvious surprise. “Presentation?”

            “I’m sorry, I assumed you knew. My lab is to make a major announcement tomorrow night. I’m afraid that I am not permitted to discuss it until then, but--”

            “Ah, of course. Yes, we’ve been running into all sorts of people telling us that they couldn’t talk yet, that we would have to wait for a public announcement. No one told us you were to make it. I find it surprising that they were all confident that you would be well enough to do so.”

            “Jomaine Terach would have given the talk if I could not, or if not Jomaine, Gubber Anshaw or someone else. If no one told you I was going to give the talk, I suspect it was because they knew the announcement would be made, but not who would give it.” Fredda thought for a minute. “If I was attacked to prevent the talk from being given, then it would only make sense to keep the name of my replacement presenter secret. If I were the replacement, I’d see a low profile as a good idea.”

            “So you think this attack could be related to your presentation?”

            Fredda shrugged no, a bit too theatrically. Instantly the pain flared up again. Damnation, her head hurt. “I have no idea. But it’s certainly quite possible,” she said. “This announcement is to be made during the second of two lectures. Have you seen the first lecture?”

            “No, I have not.”

            “Then I would strongly suggest you get a look at a recording of it. There was a lot of material in there that could give someone a motive for coshing me. A lot.” Fredda Leving folded her arms and found herself staring fixedly at the hillock her toes made in the blanket. She had never quite believed that anyone would try to kill her for what she said.

            “If it could suggest a motive for this attack, I will view it at the first opportunity. But you need your rest. We’ll just have to leave it at that for now,” Kresh said. “Come on, Donald.”

            But Donald did not move to follow his master. Instead he spoke. “Your pardon, Lady Leving,” he said. “There are two questions that I feel are rather important at this time. For purposes of tracing or tracking your stolen robot, can you tell us if it had a name or a serial number that we might trace?”

            “Oh, of course,” she said, silently cursing to herself. They would have to ask. “Serial number CBN-001, also known as Caliban. What was your other question?”

            “Quite a simple one, actually. Can you tell us, Lady Leving, where your personal robot was at the time of the attack? We were told you did not take you personal robot to work. Why not? And, for that matter, where is that robot now? All that I see here are hospital robots.”

            Damnation, Fredda thought. Trust Donald not to miss that one. By the look on Kresh’s face, he’s amazed that he didn’t think of it. Well, with Donald there monitoring her every reaction, nothing but the truth would do. “I no longer keep a personal robot at all,” she said very quietly.

            There was dead silence in the room, the silence of stunned surprise, and Fredda balled up her hands into fists. The leading roboticist on the planet, and she kept no robot. It was as if the leading vegetarian on Inferno confessed to cannibalism.

            “Might I ask why you no longer keep a personal robot?” Alvar Kresh asked, clearly working hard to pick his words carefully.

            Fredda looked up from the foot of her bed, but she stared at the blank wall in front of her. She had no desire to look Alvar Kresh square in the eye. “Listen to my last lecture, Sheriff, and come to the next one. I believe then you will understand.”

            The room was silent again, until Alvar Kresh at last concluded she was not going to say anything more. “Very good, then, Madame Leving,” he said in a tone of voice that made it clear the situation was anything but good. “We shall talk again later, you and I. Until then, may I wish you a speedy recovery?” He bowed to her, then turned and headed for the door. “Come, Donald.” The robot followed behind, the door opened and shut, and she was alone.

            Fredda Leving sank her head back on the pillow and gave thanks that the interrogation was over.

            Though she had no doubt that the trouble had barely begun.

            ALVAR Kresh shook his head and patted Donald on the shoulder as they stepped out into the hallway. A few steps away from Leving’s door, he stopped and turned toward the robot. “I don’t know, Donald. Sometimes I think I ought to quit and have them make you Sheriff. How the devil did I fail to notice she had no personal robot?” he asked.

            “It did not occur to me until we were in the hospital room, sir. I might also point out that humans are in the habit of ignoring robots, while robots must of course notice each other. Besides, there is the old saying about the dog that didn’t bark. It is always more difficult to notice what is missing, rather than what is there.”

            “All the same, that was a vital question. We’re going to watch the recording of that first lecture the moment we’re home, and the devil take the hour. Nice work.”

            “Thank you, sir. I would suggest, however, that confirming the name ‘Caliban ‘ is the more useful piece of information,” Donald said modestly. “We now have a direct, definite link. The two cases are one. The robot Caliban who vanished from the lab is the robot identified as Caliban by Santee Timitz at the arson site.”

            “But what in the Nine Circles of Hell does it mean?” Kresh asked. “What is going on?” He looked over Donald’s shoulder. “Wait a second,” he said. “Donald--behind you--is that--”

            “Yes, sir. Jomaine Terach. The gentleman with him is, I believe, Gubber Anshaw, though the only police photos we have of him are of poor quality. I noted them on our way in.”

            “The robots on guard know to keep them out?”

            “They are following standard procedure in such cases, in accordance with the law. To prevent any attempt at intimidation, no person associated with the case may talk with the victim of an assault until such time as statements are received from that person and the victim. Unless we file legal charges, we have no right to prevent meetings once statements are taken.”

            Kresh nodded. “In other words, we can stop Gubber Anshaw talking to her, but not Jomaine Terach. Which reminds me, it’s high time we talked to Gubber, anyway. But damn it, I’m tired.” Alvar Kresh reached up to rub the bridge of his nose. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow. But see to it the guard robots keep Anshaw away from her until then.”

            “Yes, sir. I have relayed the order over hyperwave.”

            “Good. Very good. Then let’s go home.”

            “Sir, excuse me, but I fear you have neglected a vital point,” Donald said. “ Am I not right in asking if I should issue orders to apprehend this robot Caliban?”

            Alvar Kresh shook his head and sighed. “You ‘re right and you’re wrong, Donald. It’s risky to wait--but it could be just as risky to go out after him now. Think about it--if this is some bizarre Settler plot, clearly the point of it is to sow panic, throw a good scare into us. Surely, if that is the case, the plotters stand ready to exploit that panic, perhaps by staging something even more frightening than a robot committing arson. No matter ~hat we do, the search for Caliban is bound to become public knowledge. Can you imagine the panic if word of a rogue got out--and a skilled conspirator set to work to build that fear?”

            “It would be terrible, sir. And I might add that the very news of a robot behaving as Caliban has--well, it would be likely to cause permanent dysfunction in many, many robots. Still, the danger to humans that Caliban represents--”

            “Must be weighed against the danger of moving too soon. If we start out now, with the information we have, what are we going to do? Arrest all the tall red robots? Or why stop there? Maybe our friend Caliban can disguise himself by slapping on a fresh coat of paint, or by exchanging his long arms and legs for short ones.”

            “With the result that all robots will be distrusted. Which would be the intended result of a Settler plot.  If the plot exists. Yes, sir, I see the difficulty.”

            “It’s about all I can see at this point,” Kresh said, feeling very much like a tired old man. “But we can’t move on this Caliban robot until we have more data. We can’t do a search of the entire city. We need better information. But let us be ready if things break quickly. Relay an order for increased rapid-response air patrols. If we get lucky and spot him somewhere, I want a deputy on top of him within two minutes.”

            “Very well, sir. That will no doubt be sufficient to--” Suddenly Donald’s head cocked to one side, as if he were listening to something only he could hear--and that was not far from the truth. Kresh was familiar with the mannerism. Donald’s on-board communications system was receiving a message.

            “Who’s calling, Donald?” Alvar asked.

            “One moment, sir. It is a timelock-secured message. I will have to wait for the synchronization burst to decode it. One moment. Ah, there it is. You are ordered to meet with the Governor tomorrow morning, first thing, seven hours from now.”

            Kresh groaned. “Devil take it all. The man’s politics are bad enough. Does he have to get up at insane hours as well?”

            But there was no real response to that question, and Donald offered none. At last Alvar Kresh sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Home, Donald,” he said. “I want to see that damned lecture before I see the Governor. I’ve had it up to here with knowing less than everyone else.”

            “THEY’D only let me in, Fredda. Not Gubber. The police robots won’t let him in until the Sheriff has--”

            “Oh, be quiet, Jomaine. I know the law. My head hurts enough as it is.” Fredda Leving leaned her head back against her pillow and shut her eyes. The throbbing was getting worse. But she could not take anything for it. Not yet. Not yet. She would have to be sharp, be careful, even with Jomaine. Especially with Jomaine. First, she had to take precautions against being monitored. It had been pointless before when there was a police robot in the room, but it was vital now. She would have to phrase the order carefully if it was to do any good.

            She cleared her throat and spoke. “I order all robots in the room or monitoring this room in any way to forget all conversation that takes place between the time of this order and the next time I clap my hands three times within a period of five seconds. To remember any such conversation, or to report it, would almost certainly cause me harm.” That ought to do it, unless the police had an actual human operative listening in on some hidden microphone, or a nonrobotic recording system working. But those possibilities were absurdly remote. Spacers used robots for everything.

            Which was, of course, the entire problem.

            She turned toward Jomaine. “All right, I think we can talk now. Sit down and tell me what you know.”

            Jomaine Terach did as he was told, but it didn’t take long for him to report the little that he was privy to. Not his fault, not really. Fredda had quite deliberately kept him in the dark, for everyone’s sake. He couldn’t tell what he didn’t know--a fact that, in balance, was very much to her advantage at the moment. Gubber was enough of a risk. A well-informed Jomaine in Kresh’s hands was a thought not to be contemplated. Still, he could at least serve to fill her in on any details Kresh had seen fit to leave out of his narrative.

            Jomaine ran true to form, speaking overcarefully, working through all the details in a relentlessly orderly fashion, but even so it took him very little time to finish--no doubt in part because the crime scene was still sealed. No one not associated with the investigation had gotten into Gubber’s lab yet. Indeed, it appeared that Jomaine did not even know that a robot was missing from the lab.

            Fredda nodded her head thoughtfully after Jomaine had stopped. He had not really contributed a great deal to her store of knowledge. Caliban was gone, either escaped or stolen. Someone had attacked her and stolen her notes. But what he did not say told her it could have been worse. That was not to say that a great deal of damage had not been done, but just now she would take whatever small comfort she could. “And that’s it?” she asked. “Nothing else to report?”

            Jomaine got to his feet, rather apologetically, and pulled a palm-sized computer pad from his pocket. “There’ s nothing more that I can tell you,” he said, “but Gubber gave this to me for you. He seems to have some rather special sources of information.” He handed her the pad and looked her straight in the eye, standing over her bed in a strangely formal, careful posture. It was obvious that he did not like what he was part of, but that he was determined to make the best of it and behave as correctly as possible. He pointed to the computer pad he had just given her. “I have not read that report,” he said, “and I’m not going to. I don’t want to know anything more. I have told you all I know, but none of what I think, and I expect that you will prefer it that way.

            “To be quite blunt about the matter, my ideas about what you ‘re doing scare three kinds of hell out of me. Therefore, I would ask that you have the kindness to wait until I have left the room to look this over.”

            Fredda Leving stared at her assistant in astonishment for a full thirty seconds before she could find voice enough to speak. Never had the man been so bold or blunt. “Very well, Jomaine. Thank you for your honesty and discretion.”

            “I would suggest that those are two qualities we have all had in short supply recently,” he said sharply. The expression on Terach’ s pointed face softened a bit, and he reached out to touch her on the shoulder. “Rest, Fredda, heal,” he said in a warm and gentle voice. “Even if none of this had happened, you’ d need all your strength for tomorrow night.”

            Fredda smiled wanly and sighed. “You didn’t need to remind me,” she said. Tomorrow night’s presentation might well decide more fates than her own.

            Jomaine Terach turned and left, leaving Fredda alone with her thoughts and Gubber Anshaw’ s computer pad. She was almost afraid to read it. Gubber had some amazing sources of information. Fredda had decided long ago that she did not want to know what those sources were.

            Fredda hardly dared wonder what he had come up with this time. She started to read the information in the pad. Three paragraphs into it she was so terrified she could scarcely see well enough to read it. For what she read in the computer pad made all the rest of her worries seem like no worries at all.

            Good lord, where the hell had Gubber gotten this stuff? It looked like he had gotten his hands on the complete police reports of her attack, raw information not yet analyzed or put in order. Two sets of bloody robotic footprints? What the devil could that mean?

            And the other reports--on the Ironhead riot at Settlertown and the robot basher/arson incident in the warehouse district. Sweet Fallen Angel, yes, Caliban had given his name to a witness there and she, Fredda, had just given it to Kresh as well. They had the link. They knew, or thought they knew, all they needed to know about Caliban.

            Damn it, who the hell had let him out of the lab? Fredda had known right along that Caliban’s earliest hours would be highly formative. That was why she had delayed powering him up for so long. She wanted all the conditions ideal when she did.

            But look at the first hours he had had instead. He must have been at the very least a witness to the attack on her. Then he must have wandered the city, seen the subservient behavior of robots. That must have been damned confusing to him. She had deliberately edited out all information regarding robots from his datastore.

            Hell’s bells, how long had she worked on that datastore, carefully tailoring the information it contained? At best, all that work was now wasted.

            At worst, it would wildly skew Caliban’s view of the world. And on top of all that, for him to get mixed up with a mob of robot bashers...

            Fredda Leving let the computer pad drop to the bed and slumped backwards, eyes shut, her stomach tied in a knot, her head a suddenly revitalized world of pain. Why ? she wondered. Why did it have to be this way ?

            She thought about what Caliban had seen so far: violence, brutality, his own kind treated as slaves and worse. He had been given no other influences to shape his mind and viewpoint.

            But that was far from the worst of it. Now Alvar Kresh was on the hunt, with every move Kresh made likely to reveal the truth at the wrong time and the wrong place. One accidental wrong move on Kresh’ s part could smash down the political house of cards that was all that might save Inferno.

            Fredda Leving felt her heart grow cold with fear.

            Trouble was, she was not quite sure what to be afraid for.

            Or afraid of.

GUBBER Anshaw knew he was not a courageous man, but at least he had the courage to admit that much to himself. He had the strength of character to understand his own limitations, and surely that had to count for something.

            Well, it was comforting to tell himself that, at any rate. Not that such self -understanding was much use under the present circumstances. But be that as it may. There were times when even a coward had to do the right thing.

            And now, worse luck, was one such time. He watched as Tetlak, his personal robot, guided Gubber’s deliberately undistinctive aircar through the dark of night toward Settlertown. The aircar slowed to a halt, hung in midair waiting for Settlertown’ s traffic and security system to query the car’s transponder and see that it was on the preapproved list. Then the ground opened up beneath them as a fly-in portal to the underground city granted them entrance. The car flew down through the depths, down into the great central cavern of Settlertown, and came in for a landing.

            Gubber used a hand gesture to order Tetlak to stay with the car, then got out himself. He walked to the waiting runcart and got in. “To Madame Welton’s, please,” he said as he settled in. The little open vehicle took off the moment he sat down. Gubber barely had time to reflect on the unnerving fact that there was no conscious being in control of the cart before he was delivered to Tonya’ s quarters.

            He walked to her doorway and stood there for a moment before he remembered to press the annunciator button. Normally that was something his robot would do for him. But Tetlak made Tonya nervous sometimes, and he had no wish for unneeded awkwardness. It was bad enough that he had come without calling ahead.

            A sleepy Tonya Welton opened the door and looked upon her visitor in surprise. “Gubber! What in the Galaxy are you doing here?”

            Gubber looked at her for a moment, raised his hand uncertainly, and then spoke. “I know it was risky to come, but I had to see you. I don’t think I was followed. I had to come and say--say goodbye.”

            “Goodbye!” Tonya’s astonishment and upset were plainly visible on her face. “ Are you breaking it off because--”

            “I’m not breaking anything off, Tonya. You will always be there in my heart. But I don’t think I will be able to see you again after--after I go to see Sheriff Kresh.”

            “What!”

            “I’m turning myself in, Tonya. I’m going to take the blame.” Gubber felt his heart pounding, felt the sweat starting to bead up on his body. For the briefest of moments, he felt a bit faint. “Please,” he said. “May I come in?”

            Tonya backed away from the door and ushered him in. Gubber stepped inside and looked around. Ariel stood motionless in her robot niche, staring out at nothing at all. The room was in its bedroom configuration, all the tables and chairs stowed away, replaced by a large and comfortable bed--a bed that Gubber had reason to remember most fondly. Now he crossed the room and sat, morosely, on the edge of it, feeling most lost and alone.

            Tonya watched him cross the room, watched as he sat down. Gubber looked up at her. She was so beautiful, so natural, so much herself Not like Spacer women, all artifice and appearance and affectation.

            “I have to turn myself in,” Gubber said.

            Tonya looked at him, quietly, thoughtfully. “For what, Gubber?”

            “What? What do you mean?”

            “What charge, exactly, will you confess to when you turn. yourself in? What is it you’ve done? When they ask you for a detailed description of how you committed your crime, what will you say?”

            Gubber shrugged uncertainly and looked down at the floor. He had no idea what to confess to, of course. In his own mind, he had committed no crime, but he doubted the law would share that opinion. But what point to confessing to a crime in order to shield Tonya when he did not know what, if anything, they suspected she had done? Tonya had her own secrets, and he dared not ask what they were.

            Clearly it would be safer for both of them if each kept certain things to themselves for now.

            The silence dragged on, until Tonya took it as an answer.

            “I thought so,” she said at last. “Gubber, it just won’t work.” She sat down next to him and put her arm across his shoulders. “Dearest Gubber, you are a wonder. Back home on Aurora, I must have known a hundred men full of thunder and bluster, always ready to show me just how big and brave they were. But none of them had your courage.”

            “My courage!” Gubber looked sadly at Tonya. “Hah! There’s a contradiction in terms.”

            “Is it? No big burly Settler man would dream of confessing a crime, going to a penal colony, for the sake of the woman he loved. And you’d do it, I know you would. But you can’t. You mustn’t.”

            “But--”

            “Don’t you see? Kresh is no fool. He’ll be able to crack through a false confession in a heartbeat, and you don’t know what to confess to. We have the police report, but he’s not fool enough to tell us everything he knows. Once he’s cracked you, he’ll ask himself why you’d confess to what you hadn’t done. Sooner or later, he’ll find out you did it to protect me. Then we’ll both end up in trouble.”

            Something deep inside Gubber froze up. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. But no, wait. There was one thing she hadn’t thought of. “That won’t happen, Tonya. After all, no one knows about us--”

            “But maybe they will, Gubber. Odds are Kresh will find out sooner or later. I’ve done what I could to protect you, and I know you’ve done the same for me. But we dare do no more. If we’re lucky, and we don’t draw attention to ourselves, we’ll be all right. But if either of us does anything to draw Kresh’s attention--”

            Tonya let the words hang in the air. There was no need for her to complete the sentence. Gubber turned to her, put his arms around her, and kissed her, passionately and for a long while. At last he drew back, just a bit. He looked her in the eye, stroked her hair, whispered her name. “Tonya, Tonya. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. You know that.”

            “I know, I know,” Tonya said, her eyes bright with loving tears. “But we must be careful. We must think with our heads, not our hearts. Oh, Gubber. Hold me.”

            Then they kissed again, and Gubber felt passion sweeping away his fears and worries. They reached for each other, eagerly, urgently, pulling their clothes off, falling back onto the bed, their bodies coming together in desire and need.

            Gubber glanced up and saw Ariel standing, motionless, in her wall niche. For a split second he worried, wondering if her being there would bother Tonya. A robot in the bedroom meant nothing to a Spacer, of course

            The devil take it. It was more than obvious that Ariel was the furthest thing from Tonya’s mind. Why bring her attention to it? He reached out to the side of the bed and jabbed down the manual switch, shutting off the overhead lights, and gave no more thought to it.

            Ariel stared blankly at the opposite wall, pale green eyes dimly glowing, as the two humans made love in the darkness.

            NIGHT had come, and there was darkness, and shadow, but no quiet, or rest, or safety. Whatever else changed, danger was the constant. Of that much Caliban was sure.

            Caliban walked the busy downtown, ghost-town streets of Hades. The place was bustling with energy, and yet there was a feeling of the tomb about the place, as if it were a busy, active corpse, not yet aware of its own death, hurrying about its business long after its time had come and gone.

            Night and day did not seem to matter so much here, in the heart of town. Here, the streets were just as busy now as they had been when he had passed this way in daytime.

            But no, it was inaccurate to say that there was no difference between day and night. There was no change in the amount of traffic on the streets and walkways, but there was a huge change in the character of that traffic. Now, late at night, the people were all but gone, but the robots were here.

            Caliban looked about himself, at the proud, brightly lit, empty towers of Hades, the grand boulevards of magnificent and failed intentions. But the heart of that world, that city, was empty, barren.

            Yet the unpeopled city was still crowded. Humans had been a sizable minority during the day, but in the wee hours of the night, it was robots, robots, everywhere. Caliban stood in the shadow of a doorway and watched them all go by. These robots of the night were different from the daytime robots. Almost all of those had clearly been personal servants. In the night, the heavy-duty units came out, hauling the heavy freight, working on construction jobs, doing the dirty work while there were fewer humans around to be disturbed by it.

            A gang of huge, gleaming black construction robots trudged down the street, past Caliban, toward a tall ivory-colored tower, half-finished and yet already lovely. But there were already half a dozen equally lovely towers within a few blocks of where Caliban stood, all of them virtually empty. Across the street, another gang of robots was hard at word disassembling another building that seemed scarcely any older or more used.

            Caliban had seen many other work crews come out in the last hour or so, likewise doing needless maintenance work: searching for litter that was not there; polishing the gleaming windows; weeding the weedless gardens and lawns of the parks; busily keeping the empty city core shining and perfect. Why were these robots not employed in the emptier, threadbare, worn and dirty districts, where their work could have some meaning? Why did they work here?

            The empty city. Caliban considered the words. They seemed to echo in his head. There was something wrong with the very idea of such a place. From his datastore, from the emotions of whoever had loaded the store, came the sure, certain knowledge that cities were not meant to be so. Something was going desperately wrong.

            Another piece of data popped up from the datastore, a straight, solid fact, but the ghosts of emotion hung about this one fact more strongly than any other emotion he had absorbed. It was the thing that the person who created his datastore cared about most of all: Every year the total human population went down--and the robot population went up. How could that be? he wondered. How could the humans allow themselves to get into such a predicament? But no answer came up from the datastore. For no reason that he could understand, the question, though it had nothing to do with him, was suddenly of vital importance to him.

            Why? he wondered. And why do I wonder why? Caliban had noted that most robots he observed had a distinct lack of curiosity. Few were even much interested in their surroundings. Something else, yet again, that set him apart. When his maker had molded his mind into an oddly shaped blank, had that maker also blessed him and cursed him with an overactive degree of curiosity? Caliban felt certain it was so, but in a way it did not matter. Even if his sense of curiosity had been deliberately enhanced, that did not stop him from wondering all the same.

            Why, why, why did the robots blindly, needlessly, build and disassemble, over and over, rather than leaving things as they were? Why create huge buildings when there were none to use them? Madness. All of it madness. The voice of the datastore whispered to him that the city was a reflection of a society warped, twisted, bent out of any shape that could make normal life and growth possible. It was opinion, emotion, propaganda, but still, somehow, it spoke to him.

            The world was mad, and his only hope of survival was to blend in, be accepted as one of the inmates of this lunatic asylum, get lost among the endless robots that tended to the city and its inhabitants. The thought was daunting, disturbing.

            Yet even perfect mimicry would not protect him. He had learned that much, almost at the cost of his existence. Those Settlers last night had clearly meant to kill him. If he had acted like a normal robot, he had no doubt that they would have killed him. They had expected him to stand placidly by and permit his own destruction. They had even thought it possible that he would willingly destroy himself on the strength of hearing that weak and tortuous argument about how his existence harmed humans. Why had they thought that strained line of reasoning would impel him to commit suicide?

            Caliban stepped out from the shadowy doorway and started walking again. There was so much he had to learn if he was to survive. Imitation would not be enough. Not when acting like a standard robot could get him killed. He had to know why they acted as they did.

            Why was he here? Why had he been created? Why was he different from other robots? How was he different from them? Why was the nature of his difference kept hidden from him?

            How had he gotten into this situation? Once again, he tried to think back to the beginning, to search through the whole recollection of his existence for some clue, some answer.

            He had no memory of anything whatsoever before the moment he came on, powered up for the first time, standing over that woman’s unconscious body with his arm raised from his side. Nothing, nothing else before that. How had he come to be in that place, in that situation? Had he somehow gotten to his feet, raised his arm, before he awoke? Or had he been placed in that position for some reason?

            Wait a moment. Go back and think that through. He could see no compelling reason to assume that his ability to act could not predate his ability to remember. Suppose he had acted before his memory commenced? Or suppose his memory prior to the moment he thought of as his own awakening had been cleared somehow? Alternately, what if, for some reason, he had been capable of action before his memory started, and his memory had simply not commenced recording until that moment?

            If any of those cases were possible, if the start of his memory was not a reliable marker for the start of his existence, then there were no limits to the actions he might have taken before his memory began. He could have been awake, aware, active, for five seconds before that moment--or five years. Probably not that long, however. His body showed no signs of wear, no indication that any parts had ever been replaced or repaired. His on-line maintenance log was quite blank--though it, too, could have been erased. Still, it seemed reasonable to assume that his body was quite new.

            But that was a side issue. How had that woman come to be on the floor in a pool of blood? It was at least a reasonable guess that she had been attacked in some way. Had she been dead or alive? He reviewed his visual memories of the moment. The woman had been breathing, but she could easily have expired after he left. Had the woman died, or had she survived?

            The thought brought him up short. Why had he not even asked himself such questions before?

            Then, like twin blazes of fire, two more questions slashed through his mind:

            Had he been the one who attacked her? And, regardless of whether or not he had--was he suspected of the attack?

            Caliban stopped walking and looked down at his hands.

            He was astonished to realize that his fists were clenched. He opened out his fingers and tried to walk as if he knew where he was going.

            THE night before, Alvar Kresh had taken a needle-shower in hopes of helping him to sleep. Tonight he took one in hopes of waking up. He was tempted to watch the recording of Leving’s lecture while sitting up in bed, but he knew just how tired he was, and just how easy it would be for him to doze off if he did that. No, far better to get dressed again in fresh clothes and watch on the televisor screen in the upper parlor.

            Kresh settled down in front of the televisor, ordered one of the household robots to adjust the temperature a bit too low for comfort, and told another to bring a pot of hot, strong tea. Sitting in a cold room, with a good strong dosage of caffeine, he ought to be able to stay awake

            “All right, Donald,” he said, “start the recording.”

            The televisor came to life, the big screen taking up an entire wall of the room. The recording began with a shot of the Central Auditorium downtown. Kresh had seen many plays broadcast from there, and most times the proceeds were rather sedate, if not sedated, and it looked as if the occasion of Leving, s first lecture had been no exception. The auditorium had been designed to hold about a thousand people and their attendant robots, the robots sitting behind their owners on low jumper seats. It looked to be about half -empty.

            “...and so, without further ado,” the theater manager was saying, “allow me to introduce one of our leading scientists. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dr. Fredda Leving.” He turned toward her, smiling, leading the applause.

            The figure of Fredda Leving stood up and walked toward the lectern, greeted by a rather tentative round of applause. The camera zoomed in closer, and Kresh was startled to be reminded what Leving had looked like before the attack. In the hospital, she had been wan, pale, delicate-looking, her shaved head making her look too thin. The Fredda Leving in this recording looked as if she had a slight touch of stage fright, but she was fit, vigorous-looking, with her dark hair framing her face. All in all, an unfashionably striking young woman.

            She reached the lectern and looked out over the audience, her face clearly betraying her nervousness.

            She cleared her throat and began. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” She fumbled with her notes for a moment, clearly still somewhat nervous, and then began. “I would like to start my talk this evening with a question,” she said. “One that might seem flippant, one wherein the answer might be utterly obvious to you all. And yet, I would submit, it is one that has gone thousands of years without a proper answer. I do not suggest that I can supply that missing answer myself, now, tonight, but I do think that it is long past time for us to at least pose the question.

            “And that question is: What are robots for?”

            The view cut away to reaction shots of the people in the auditorium. There was a stirring and a muttering in the audience, a strangled laugh or two. People shifted in their seats and looked at each other with confused expressions.

            “As I said, it is a question that few of us would ever stop to ask. At first glance, it is like asking what use the sky is, or what the planet we stand upon is for, or what good it does to breathe air. As with these other things, robots seem to us so much a part of the natural order of things that we cannot truly picture a world that does not contain them. As with these natural things, we--quite incorrectly--tend to assume that the universe simply placed them here for our convenience. But it was not nature who placed robots among us. We did that to ourselves.”

            Not for ourselves, Kresh noticed. To ourselves. What the devil had Leving been saying the night of the lecture? He found himself wishing that he had been there.

            Fredda Leving’s image kept talking. “On an emotional level, at least, we perceive robots not as tools, not as objects we have made, not even as intelligent beings with which we share the universe--but as something basic, placed here by the hand of nature, something part of us. We cannot imagine a world worth living in without them, just as our friends the Settlers think a world that does include them is no fit place for humans.

            “But I digress from my own question. ‘What are robots for?’ As we seek after an answer to that question, we must remember that they are not part of the natural universe. They are an artificial creation, no more and no less than a starship or a coffee cup or a terraforming station. We built these robots--or at least our ancestors built them, and then set robots to work building more robots.

            “Robots, then, are tools we have built for our own use. That is at least the start of an answer. But it is by no means the whole answer.

            “For robots are the tools that think. In that sense, they are more than our tools--they are our relatives, our descendants.”

            Again there was a hubbub in the audience, a stirring, this time of anger and surprise. “Forgive me,” Fredda said. “That is perhaps an unfortunate way to phrase it. But it is, in a very real sense, the truth. Robots are the way they are because we humans made them. They could not exist without us. There are those who believe that we humans could not exist without them. But that statement is so much dangerous nonsense.”

            Now there was a full-fledged roar from the back of the hall, where the Ironheads had congregated. “Yes, that does strike a nerve, doesn’t it?” Fredda asked, the veneer of courtesy dropping away from her voice. “ ‘We could not live without them ‘--it is not a factual statement, but it is an article of faith. We have convinced ourselves that we could not survive without robots, equating the way we live with our lives themselves. We have to look no further than the Settlers to know that humans can live--and live well--without robots.”

            A chorus of boos and shouts filled the hallway. Fredda raised her hands for quiet, her face stern and firm. At last the crowd settled down a bit. “I do not say that we should live that way. I build robots for a living. I believe in robots. I believe they have not yet reached their full potential. They have shaped our society, a society I believe has many admirable qualities.

            “But, my friends, our society is calcified. Fossilized. Rigid. We have gotten to the point where we are certain, absolutely certain, that ours is the only possible way to live. We tell ourselves that we must live precisely as our ancestors did, that our world is perfect just as it is.

            “Except that to live is to change. All that lives must change. The end of change is the beginning of death--and our world is dying.” Now there was dead silence in the room. “We all know that, even if we will not admit it. Inferno’ s ecology is collapsing, but we refuse to see it, let alone do anything about it. We deny the problem is there.”

            Kresh frowned. The ecology collapsing ? Yes, there were problems, everyone knew that. But he would not place it in such drastic terms. Or was that part of the denial she was talking about? He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and listened.

            “Instead,” Leving’s image went on, “we insist that our robots coddle us, pamper us, while we go about our self-indulgent lives, as the web of life that supports us grows ever weaker. Anytime in the last hundred years, we, the citizens of Inferno, could have taken matters into our own hands, gotten to work, and saved the situation--saved our planet--for ourselves. Except it was so easy to convince ourselves that everything was fine. The robots were taking care of us. How could there be anything to worry about?

            “Meantime, the forests died. The oceans’ life-cycle weakened. The control systems broke down. And we, who have been trained by our robots to believe that doing nothing is the highest and finest of all activities, did not lift a finger.

            “Things got to the point where we were forced to swallow our pride and call in outsiders to save us. And even that was a near-run thing. We came very close to choosing our pride over our lives. I will admit quite freely that I found calling in the Settlers just as galling as any of you did. But now they are here, and we Spacers, we Infernals, continue to sit back, and grudgingly permit the Settlers to save us, treating them like hired hands, or interlopers, instead of rescuers.

            “Our pride is so great, our belief in the power of robot-backed indolence so overpowering, that we still refuse to act for ourselves. Let the Settlers do the work, we tell ourselves. Let the robots get their hands dirty. We shall sit back, true to the principle that labor is for others, believing that work impedes our development toward an ever more ideal society, based on the ennobling principle of applying robotics to every task.

            “For robots are our solution to everything. We believe in robots. We have faith in them--firm, unquestioned faith in them. We take it hard, get emotional, when our use of them is questioned. We have seen that demonstrated just moments ago.

            “In short, my friends, robotics is our religion, to use a very old word. And yet we Spacers despise the thing we worship. We love robotics and yet hold robots themselves in the lowest of regard. Who among us has not felt contempt toward a robot? Who among us has not seen a robot jump higher, think faster, work longer, do better at a job than any human ever could, and then comforted himself or herself with the sneering, contemptuous--and contemptible--defense that it was ‘only’ a robot. The task, the accomplishment, is diminished when it is the work of a robot.

            “An interesting side point is that robots here on Inferno are generally manufactured with remarkably high First Law potential, and with an especially strong potential for the negation clauses of the Second and Third Laws, the clauses that tell a robot it can obey orders and protect itself only if all human beings are safe. To look at it another way, robots here on Inferno place an especially strong emphasis on our existence and an especially weak one on their own.

            “This has two results: First, our robots coddle us far more than robots on most other Spacer worlds, so that human initiative is squelched even more here on Inferno. Second, we have a remarkably high rate of robots lost to First Law conflict and resultant brainlock. We could easily adjust our manufacturing procedures to create robots that would feel a far lower, but perfectly adequate, compulsion to protect us. If we did that, we would reduce our own safety little, if at all, but our robots would suffer far less needless damage attempting rescues that are impossible or useless. Yet instead we choose to build robots with excessively high compulsion to protect. We make our robots with First Law potential so high that they brainlock if they see a human in trouble but cannot go to the human’s aid, even if other robots are attempting to save the human.

            “If six robots rush in to save one person, and four are needlessly damaged as a result, we don’t care. This is absurd waste. But we don’t care about the loss of robots to needless overreaction. We have so many robots, we do not regard them as particularly valuable. If they destroy themselves needlessly in answer to our whims, so be it.

            “In short, we hold our robot servants in contempt. They are expendable, disposable. We send beings of many years’ wisdom and experience, beings of great intelligence and ability, off into grave danger, even to their destruction, for the most trivial of reasons. Robots are sent into burning buildings after favorite trinkets. Robots throw themselves in the face of oncoming traffic to protect a human who has crossed the street carelessly to look at a shop window. A robot is ordered to clear a smudge off an exterior window of a skyscraper in the midst of a hundred-kilometer-per-hour gale. In that last case, even if the robot should be swept off the side of the building, there need be no concern--the robot will use its arms and legs to guide its own fall, making sure it does not strike a human being when it hits, faithful to the First Law even as it plummets toward its doom.

            “We have all heard the stories about robots destroyed in this useless effort, or to indulge that pointless impulse. The stories are told, not as if they were disasters, but as if they were funny, as if a robot melted down to scrap or smashed to bits in pursuit of no useful purpose were a joke, instead of a scandalous waste.

            “Scarcely less serious are the endless abuses of robots. I have seen robots pressed into service as structural supports, simply ordered to stand there and hold a wall up--not for a minute, not as an emergency remedy while repairs are made--but as a permanent solution. I have seen robots--functional, capable robots--told to stand underwater and hold the anchorline of a sailboat. I know a woman who has one robot whose sole duty is to brush her teeth for her, and hold the brush in between times. A man with a broken water pipe in his basement set a robot to bailing the place out--full-time, nonstop, day in, day out, for six months--before the man finally bothered to have repairs made.

            “Think about it. Consider it. Sentient beings used as substitutes for anchors, for toothbrushes, for pipe welds. Does that make sense? Does it seem rational that we create robots with minds capable of calculating hyperspace jumps, and then set them to work as deadweights to keep pleasure boats from floating away?

            “These are merely the most glaring examples of robot abuse. I have not even touched on the endless tasks we all allow our robots to do for us, things that we should do for ourselves. But these things, too, are robot abuse, and they are demeaning to ourselves as much as to our mechanical servants.

            “I recall a morning, not so long ago, when I stood in front of my closet for twenty minutes, waiting for my robot to dress me. When I finally remembered that I had ordered the robot out on an errand, I still did not dress myself, but waited for the robot to return. It never dawned on me that I might select my own clothes, put them on my own body, close the fasteners myself. It had to be done for me.

            “I submit to you that such absurdities as that do more than waste the abilities of robots. They hurt us, do damage to humans. Such behavior teaches us to think that labor--all labor, any labor--is beneath us, that the only respectable, socially acceptable thing to do is sit still and allow our robot-slaves to care for us.

            “Yes, I said slaves. I asked a question at the beginning of this talk. I asked ‘What are robots for?’ Well, ladies and gentlemen, that is the answer that our society has come up with. That is what we use them as. Slaves. Slaves. Look into the history books, look into all the ancient texts of times gone by and all the cultures of the past. Slavery has always corrupted the societies in which it has existed, grinding down the slaves, degrading them, humiliating them--but likewise it has always corrupted the slave masters as well, poisoned them, weakened them. Slavery is a trap, one that always catches the society that condones it.

            “That is what is happening to us.” Fredda paused for a moment and looked around the auditorium. There was silence, dead silence.

            “Let me go back to that day when I waited for my robot-slave to dress me. Thinking about it after the fact, seeing just how ridiculous that moment had been, I resolved to manage for myself the next time.

            “And I found that I could not! I did not know how. I did not know where my clothes were. I did not know how the fasteners worked or how the clothes went on. I walked around half a day with a blouse on backwards before realizing my mistake. I was astonished by my ignorance on the subject of caring for myself.

            “I started watching myself go through my day, noticing how little I did for myself--how little I was capable of doing.”

            Alvar Kresh, watching the recording, began to understand. This was why she no longer kept a personal robot. A strange decision, yes, but it was beginning to make some sort of sense. He watched the recording with rapt attention, all thought of his own exhaustion quite forgotten.

            “I was astonished just how incompetent I was,” Fredda Leving, s voice said. “I was amazed how many little tasks I could not perform. I cannot begin to describe the humiliation I felt when I realized that I could not find my way around my own city by myself. I needed a robot to guide me, or I would get hopelessly lost.”

            There was a nervous titter or two in the audience, and Fredda nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, it is funny. But it is also very sad. Let me ask you out there who think I am being absurd--suppose all the robots simply stopped right now. Let us ignore the obvious fact that our entire civilization would collapse, because the robots are the ones who run it. Let’s keep it tight, and personal. Think what would happen to you if your robots shut down. What if your driver ceased to function, your personal attendant ground to a halt, your cook mindlocked and could not prepare meals, your valet lost power right now?

            “How many of you could find your way home? Very few of you can fly your own cars, I know that--but could you even walk home? Which way is home from here? And if and when you got home, would you remember how to use the manual controls to open the door? How many of you even know your own address?”

            Again, silence, at least at first. But then there was a shout from the audience. The camera cut away to show a man standing in front of his seat, a man dressed in one of the more comic-opera variants of the Ironhead uniform. “So what?” he yelled. “I don’t know my address. Big deal! All I need to know is, I’m the human being! I’m the one on top! I got a good life thanks to robots. I don’t want it messed up!”

            There was a ragged flurry of cheers and applause, mostly from the back of the house. The view cut back to Fredda as she stepped out from behind her lectern and joined in the applause herself, clapping slowly, loudly, ironically, still going long after everyone else had quit. “Congratulations,” she said. “You are the human being. I am sure you are proud of that, and you should be. But if Simcor Beddle sent you here to disrupt my speech, you go back and tell the leader of the Ironheads that you helped me make my point. What troubles me is that it almost sounds as if you are proud of your ignorance. That strikes me as terribly dangerous, and terribly sad.

            “So tell me this. You don’t know where you live. You don’t do much of anything. You don’t know how to do anything. So: What in the Nine Circles of Hell are you good for?” She looked up from the man to the entire audience. “What are we good for? What do we do? What are humans for?

            “Look around you. Consider your society. Look at the place of humans in it. We are drones, little else. There is scarcely an aspect of our lives that has not been entrusted to the care of the robots. In entrusting our tasks to them, we surrender our fate to them.

            “So what are humans for? That is the question, the real question it all comes down to in the end. And I would submit that our current use of robots has given us a terrifying answer, one that will doom us if we do not act.

            “Because right here, right now, we must face the truth, my friends. And the true answer to that question is: not much.”

            Fredda took a deep breath, collected her notes, and stepped back from the podium. “Forgive me if I end this lecture on that grim note, but I think it is something we all need to face. In this lecture I have stated the problem I wished to address. In my next lecture, I will offer up my thoughts on the Three Laws of Robotics, and on a solution to the problems we face. I believe I am safe in saying it should be of interest to you all.”

            And with that, the recording faded away, and Alvar Kresh was left alone with his own thoughts. She couldn’t be right. She couldn’t.

            All right, then. Assume she was wrong. Then what were humans good for?

            “Well, Donald, what did you think?” Alvar asked.

            “I must confess I found it to be a most disturbing presentation.”

            “How so?”

            “Well, sir, it makes the clear implication that robots are bad for humans.”

            Kresh snorted derisively. “Old, old arguments, all of them. There isn’t a one that I haven’t heard before. She makes it sound like the entire population of Hades, of all Inferno, is made up of indolent incompetents. Well, I for one still know how to find my own way home.”

            “That is so, sir, but I fear that you might be in a minority.”

            “What? Oh, come on. She made it sound as if everyone were utterly incompetent. I don’t know anyone that helpless.”

            “Sir, if I may observe, most of your acquaintances are fellow law enforcement officers, or workers in fields that you as Sheriff often come into contact with.”

            “What’s your point?”

            “Police work is one of the very few fields of endeavor in which robots can be of only marginal help. A good police officer must be capable of independent thought and action, be willing to cooperate in a group, be ready to deal with all kinds of people, and be capable of working without robots. Your deputies must be rather determined, self-confident individuals, willing to endure a certain amount of physical danger--perhaps even relishing the stimulus of danger. I would suggest that police officers would make for a rather skewed sample of the population. Think for a moment, not of your officers, but of the people they encounter. The people that end up as victims in the police reports. I know that you do not hold those people in the highest regard. How competent and capable are they? How dependent on their robots are they?”

            Alvar Kresh opened his mouth as if to protest, but then stopped, frowned, and thought. “I see your point. Now you’ve disturbed me, Donald.”

            “My apologies, sir. I meant no--”

            “Relax, Donald. You ‘re sophisticated enough to know you’ve done no harm. You got me to thinking, that’s all.” He nodded at the televisor. “ As if she hadn’t done that already.”

            “Yes, sir, quite so. But I would suggest, sir, that it is time for bed. “

            “It certainly is. Can’t be tired for the Governor, can I?” Alvar stood and yawned. “ And what the hell could he want that can’t wait until later in the day?”

            Alvar Kresh walked wearily back to his bedroom, very much dreading the morning. Whatever the Governor wanted, it was unlikely to be good news.

SIMCOR Beddle was up betimes, thoughtfully reviewing the results of the Ironhead action against Settlertown. The results were not good. Sheriff Kresh’s deputies were simply getting too good at their jobs. Too many arrests, too little damage, and worst of all, the publicity was bad. It made the Ironheads look inept at best.

            All right, then, it was time to come up with another tactic. Some way to tangle with the damned Settlers where Kresh’s people could not interfere so much.

            Wait a moment. He had the very thing. Leving’s next lecture. If his information was even remotely reliable, the place would be crawling with Settlers. Yes, yes. An altercation there would do nicely.

            But what about publicity? Not much point in staging a riot if no one saw it. Beddle leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Her first lecture had not drawn much of a crowd, though it should have, given the seditious material she had presented. Maybe that was the key. Plant a few belated reports here and there, accurate and otherwise, about what she had said then. Perhaps he could arrange for a few tame sources to drop a few inflammatory and extremely misleading speculations as to what the devil she was doing in the hospital.

            Yes, yes. That was it. Properly brought along, reports on that first lecture should get the hall filled for the second, and live televisor coverage to boot. Disrupt those goings-on and no one could help but pay attention.

            Simcor Beddle gestured for his secretary robot to come forward, and began dictating, setting down the details.

            It ought to work quite nicely.

            ALVAR Kresh strode into the Governor’s office, feeling far more alert and awake than he had any right to feel, as if his body were getting used to the idea of not sleeping properly.

            The Governor rose from behind his desk and crossed half the length of the huge office, offering his hand to Alvar as he came closer. Grieg looked fresh, well rested, alert. He was dressed in a charcoal-grey suit of rather conservative cut, as if he were trying to appear as old as possible. Such was no doubt the case, given Grieg’s almost scandalously youthful election to the governorship.

            Grieg’s office was as opulent as Alvar had remembered--but there was something missing since his last visit, something no longer there. What was it?

            “Thank you for coming so early, Sheriff,” Governor Grieg said as he took Alvar’s hand.

            As if the summons here had been an invitation and not an order, Alvar thought. But the courteous words were themselves significant. The Governor did not often feel the need to be polite to Alvar Kresh.

            Alvar shook the Governor’s hand and looked him in the eye. There was no doubt about it. The man wanted something from him--no, needed something.

            “It’s a pleasure to be here,” Alvar lied smoothly.

            “I doubt that to be the case,” Grieg said with a politician’s overly frank smile, a smile born of too many years making promises. “But I assure you that it was necessary. Please, have a seat, Sheriff. Tell me, how is the investigation of the attack on Fredda Leving going?”

            Nothing like getting right to the point, Kresh thought grimly. “It’s early times, yet. We’ve collected a lot of information, and a lot of it seems rather contradictory. But that’s almost to be expected at this stage. There is one thing, though, sir, that you could do to make work go a bit more smoothly.”

            “And what might that be?”

            “Call off Tonya Welton. I must admit I don’t know the political side of the situation, but I assure you that inserting her into the case has made more work for me. I can’t quite see why you wanted to do it.”

            “Why I wanted to do it? She was the one who wanted it. Her people may have a connection to Leving Labs, but why would I want her interfering with local law enforcement? No, it was her idea to be attached to the case, and she was quite insistent about it. She made it clear that the political price would be high for Inferno if I did not allow her access to the investigation. In fact, she was the one who first told me about the case. She called me at home the night it happened and demanded that she be put into the picture.”

            Alvar Kresh frowned in confusion. Given the speed with which she had arrived at the scene, that would have to mean she knew about the attack almost before the maintenance robot called in to report it. How had she found out? “I see. I must admit that she rather gave the impression that it was your idea.”

            “Definitely not. As for calling her off, as you put it--I’m afraid the political situation is just too damned delicate. I’m very sorry, but I’ll have to ask you to endure her interference. I think you’ll understand why after you see what I brought you here to see.”

            The Governor gestured toward a rather severe-looking chair in the middle of the room. Alvar sat, facing the empty center of the room. Donald followed a step or two behind and stood behind Alvar’s chair. Grieg took a seat himself at a control console that faced Alvar’s chair. That was it, Alvar realized. He looked around the big room and confirmed his suspicion. No robot. The Governor had no robot in attendance in his own private office. Now, there was a scandalous tidbit. No robot. Fredda Leving was one thing, but the Governor himself? Even if the politics of the moment had been calm and settled, it would have been titillating news, as if Grieg had gone out in public without his pants. With the Settlers so much in evidence, it was downright unpatriotic.

            But this was not the moment to bring any such thing up ‘with the Governor. Maybe he had seen that lecture of Leving’s--or maybe he knew something more. But Grieg was bent over the control unit, concentrating on it. Best to pay attention, Alvar told himself.

            “This is a simglobe unit,” the Governor said, a bit absently, concentrating on the controls in front of him. “You may have seen one before, or seen a recorded playback from a simulation run on one. But I doubt you have seen one like this. In fact, I am certain of it. It’ s a Settler model, much more sophisticated than our own units. It’s a gift from Tonya Welton--and before you can get suspicious of that, it was quite thoroughly tested by our own people, and programmed by our people. It has not been rigged in any way.”

            “So what will it show me?” Alvar asked.

            The Governor finished adjusting the controls and looked up at his guest, his face suddenly grim. “The future,” he answered in a flat, emotionless voice that put a chill in Alvar’s spine.

            The windows made themselves opaque, and the room’s lights faded away into darkness. After a moment, a vague, dimly lit ball of light came into existence in the middle of the air between Alvar and Grieg. It quickly came into sharper and brighter focus, to become recognizably the globe of Inferno. Alvar found he was drawing in his breath sharply in spite of himself. There are few sights as beautiful to the human eye as a living world seen from space. Inferno was heart-stoppingly lovely, a blue-white gem gleaming in the void.

            It was in half-phase from Alvar’s point of view, the terminator slicing neatly through the great equatorial island of Purgatory. Nearly all the southern hemisphere of Inferno was water, though there had been arid lowlands before the terraforming projects gave this world its seas.

            The northern third of the world was given over to a single great landmass, the continent of Terra Grande. Even in summer, the polar regions of Terra Grande sported an impressive ice cap. In the winter months the ice and snow could reach halfway down to the sea..

            Just north of Purgatory, a huge, semicircular chunk was neatly sliced out of the southern coast of Terra Grande, the visible scar of an asteroid impact some few million years ago. Hidden by the water, the arc of the landward edge of the crater extended out into the sea, forming a circular crater. Purgatory was actually the central promontory of the half -submerged crater. The huge water-filled crater was called, quite simply, the Great Bay.

            Clouds and storm-whirls knotted and twisted about the southern seas, with the greens and browns and yellows of the sprawling northern continent half-hidden beneath their own cloud cover. Dots of lightning flickered in the midst of storms in the northwestern mountains, while the eastern edge of the Great Bay was cloudless in the morning light, dazzlingly bright, the coastal deserts gleaming in the sun, the greenswards of the forests and pastures beyond a darker, richer green.

            A bit farther south and west along the coast of the bay, Alvar could just pick out the lights of Hades, a small, faint, glowing light in the predawn darkness.

            “This is a real-time view of our world as it is today,” Grieg’s voice announced from the far side of the now solid-seeming globe. “We came to a waterless world with an unbreathable atmosphere. We gave it water and oxygen. Every drop of water in those oceans, we caused to be there. Every breath of oxygen in the air is there because we remade this world. We unlocked water from the rocks and soil and imported comets and ice meteors from the outer reaches of this star system. We put plant life in the sea and on the land and gave this world breathable air. We made this world bloom. But now the bloom is off the rose.

            “Next you will see Inferno as it will be, if we merely rely on our own abilities, using just our own terraforming stations and technology, if we go on as we have been. First, to make it easy to observe, I will remove the atmosphere, cloud cover, and the day-night cycle.” Suddenly the half-lit globe was fully illuminated, and the storms and haze vanished. The hologram had seemed like a real world up to that moment, but, stripped of darkness and cloud, it was suddenly nothing more than a highly accurate map, a detailed globe. Quite irrationally Alvar felt a pang of loss even then. Something lovely that had been was suddenly gone, and he knew, beyond doubt, that the surviving image of the world would grow uglier still. “Now let me add a few supplementary graphics,” Grieg’s voice said. A series of bar charts and other displays appeared around the globe, showing the state of the forests, the sea and land biomass, temperatures, atmospheric gases, and other information.

            “I will run the simulation forward at the rate of one standard year every ten seconds,” Grieg said, “and I will keep the western hemisphere positioned so you can watch the fate of Hades.” A white dot appeared at the appropriate position on the edge of the Great Bay. “That is Hades’s location.”

            The governor spoke no more, but instead let the simglobe tell its own tale, partly in direct images, partly in readouts and graphic displays.

            It was the oceans that died first. The predators at the top of the food chain overbred and all but wiped out the mid-chain species, the fish and other creatures that fed on each other and on the various species of plankton, and were in turn eaten by the high-end predators. Their food supply wiped out, the high-end predators died out as well.

            With no controls on their reproduction, the plankton and algae in the ocean were next. They reproduced out of all control and the oceans bloomed a sickly, ghastly green. Then the seas turned brown as the algae died as well, having overrun their own food supply and absorbed virtually every molecule of carbon dioxide. With no animal life in the ocean, plant life everywhere,’ on land and sea, was starved for carbon dioxide. The loss of the greenhouse gas meant Inferno could retain less and less heat. The planet began to grow colder.

            Alvar watched, an unwilling witness to the forthcoming doom of his own world, watched as the planet Inferno was strangled by ice. Water, water was the key. No living world could survive without it, but it could do no good--and could do great damage--if it was in the wrong state, in the wrong place. Now it was the ice cap that was the problem. The line on the chart displayed the size of the northern ice cap, but Alvar could see the cap itself growing. The ice advanced, and the northern forests fell before it, the great stands of trees dying in the too-cold, carbon-dioxide-starved air. With the atmosphere’ s oxygen content far too high, and drought conditions taking hold, forest fires exploded everywhere, even as the ice pushed southward.

            The white ice reflected back far more heat and light than the forests, and the planetary cooling trend locked itself in, strengthened itself, reinforced itself.

            But the cooling was not universal: Alvar could see that. As the forest died and the ice advanced and the overall planetary temperature dropped, local temperatures dropped in some areas and rose in others. Wind patterns shifted. Storms grew more violent. Semipermanent snow hurricanes lodged themselves here and there along the southern coast of Terra Grande, while Purgatory became semitropical. But still the ice advanced, creeping farther and farther south, locking up more and more water in snow and ice, water that should have flowed back into the southern ocean.

            The sea levels dropped. The oceans of Inferno, never very deep to begin with, receded at incredible speed as the ice grew ever deeper in the north. Islands began to appear out of the southern ocean. Still the waters drew back, until the Great Bay revealed its true form as a drowned crater. Now it was a circular sea, surrounded on all sides by land.

            The ice mass continued to advance, and the city of Hades vanished under the snow and ice.

            Suddenly the simulation froze. “You see this world as it will be, approximately seventy-five standard years from now. For all intents and purposes, by that time there will be no other life on this planet but ourselves. Some small remnant populations of this and that species might well survive in isolated pockets, but the world as a whole will be dead.” Alvar heard a grim graveyard chuckle in the darkness. “By the time the world is as we see it here, I suppose we humans ourselves could be regarded as a remnant in an isolated pocket.”

            “I don’t understand,” Alvar protested, speaking to the faceless voice of the Governor somewhere in the dark. “I thought the danger was from the deserts growing, the planet getting too hot, the ice caps baking off.”

            “That was what we all thought,” the Governor said bitterly. “Whatever desultory, token efforts my predecessor made to correct the situation were based on calculations and predictions to that effect. The deserts were supposed to grow, the ice cap to vanish completely, the sea levels to rise. There are plans in my files for dikes to be built around the city and hold back the rising water!”

            Alvar heard the Governor step out from behind the console. He came around the side of the simglobe to stand by Alvar’s chair and look at the half-frozen world. “Perhaps I am being unfair. The situation is remarkably complex. If one or two variables shifted slightly, it would be the sea, and not the ice, that would overwhelm the city. In fact, stage one of our revised terraforming plan is to tip the scales back toward the collapse-into-desert, coastal-flooding scenario--it is a less drastic catastrophe than the ice age we otherwise face. You have not seen the worst of the ice age yet.”

            “But why push toward the desert scenario? Why not work toward a stable middle ground?” Alvar asked.

            “An excellent question. The answer is that our current situation is a result of aiming for that middle ground, a middle ground we may well not be able to achieve.”

            “I don’t understand.”

            The Governor sighed, his face dimly lit by the image of a dying world. “The groundwork for a stable ecology comfortable to humans was never properly laid in the first place, and we are paying the price for it. A properly terraformed world, when disturbed in some way, will always tend back toward that comfortable middle ground. Not here. Life is supposed to be a moderating factor in a planet’s environment, smoothing out the extremes. But life’s hold on Inferno is getting weaker, and a weakened system moves toward extremes. What we would view as a ‘normal’ terrestrial ecology has, on Inferno, become the abnormal, unstable transition point between two stable states--ice age or an overly arid continent with high sea levels. Of the two stable states, we are heading for the ice, and that will kill us.

            “Creating an Inferno with a mostly desert, half-flooded Terra Grande may be the best we can do. It will only leave us halt and lame. You see, if we can force the trends back toward desert-spreading, then life would at least survive on this planet even when our civilization collapses!”

            “When our civilization collapses!” Alvar cried out in astonishment. “What are you saying? Is that really going to happen?”

            Grieg sighed, a tired-sounding noise of resignation. “I suppose I should say ‘if’ instead of ‘when,’ but I have been reading a whole series of classified reports that suggest that collapse is far more likely than anyone imagines. When it gets bad, people will start pulling out. Not everyone will be able to afford it. There will be too few ships available. Prices will be high. Some people will die, and many more will leave. I doubt there will be a large enough population left to keep society functioning, even with the robots. Maybe all the people will die off, but the robots will survive. Who knows?”

            The Governor seemed to come back to himself a bit. He drew his shoulders up and looked down at Alvar and spoke in a firmer, more controlled voice. “Forgive me. There is a great deal on my mind.”

            Chanto Grieg paced back and forth in front of Alvar once or twice, clearly working to collect his thoughts. At last he spoke. “We are in a knife-edge situation, Sheriff, in more ways than one. Political and social issues are intertwined with the ecological problems. In looking at the ecology, we therefore must plan for the likelihood that whatever survivors there are will not be able to do anything to save the planet, beyond whatever efforts we make. The ice age result is not survivable. The desert result is. So we force the planet back toward the desert pattern, and, if we get the chance, we can try and reterraform from there. That will certainly be preferable to our current future,” Grieg said, gesturing toward the simglobe.

            “But the ice age doesn’t look that bad,” Alvar objected.

            “Don’t forget that I have stopped the program,” Grieg said. “But yes, all this, we could survive, even if we ignore the great and terrible crime of allowing the planet to die.” The Governor regarded the globe thoughtfully. “Even the ice overwhelming the city is not an insurmountable problem, viewed on a global scale. We could dome over the town, or burrow underground, as the Settlers do. But this is not the end of the story.”

            The Governor turned and stepped back into the darkness. Alvar heard the Governor tapping new commands into the console, and found himself struck by the random thought that buttons and switches were a typically Settler way to do things. Why not voice commands, or an interface to allow a robot to handle the machinery?

            But he knew his mind was just finding ways to avoid facing the reality of what Grieg was showing him. What does all this have to do with me ? he wondered, more than a bit uncomfortably. I’ m just a cop chasing crooks. I’m not running the planet. But even as he told himself those things, Alvar knew there was a larger reality here. And all this might well have a great deal to do with him.

            Chanto Grieg set the simglobe controls to move forward in time. The ice caps grew larger, the seas receded farther. “This is the crisis point,” Grieg said, “eighty-five standard years from now. The seas recede enough to expose the south polar highlands.” The simglobe tilted its south polar region toward Alvar, and he could see the polar landmass emerging from the water, instantly forming its own ice cap. “The polar lands have been hidden under the seas, but they are at significantly higher elevations than the surrounding lowlands. When the sea level shrinks enough, the polar continent emerges.

            “And that is what will doom us. There has been ice over the southern polar ocean all along, but the water beneath the ice has always been able to flow freely. The circulation patterns are complex, but the effect of the currents is that the Antarctic waters have been able to blend with the temperate-zone and equatorial waters. The warm water cools down and the cold water warms up. But once both poles are landlocked, the planet’s ocean currents shift violently. Water no longer flows through either polar region, and thus the oceans’ currents will no longer be available to moderate the temperature differential between the south pole and the equatorial region. The oceans no longer have any place to dump their heat. What that means is that temperatures in the south polar regions drop precipitously--and equatorial and temperate-zone temperatures go through the roof. The absolute volume of water in the oceans is greatly reduced as well, which means the oceans simply are not able to hold as much heat energy.

            “Air temperatures rise. Storms become more and more violent. The water in the oceans boils off while the poles descend into ever-greater cold. Within 120 years of today, the last of the free water on this planet will be locked up in massive ice caps at the north and south poles. It will get cold enough at the poles to form lakes of liquid nitrogen. But the temperate regions and the equator will simply be baked alive.

            “Normal daytime temperatures at Hades’ s location will be about 20 degrees below zero on the Celsius scale. Daytime temperatures on the equator will reach 140 degrees without any trouble at all. Without water, with temperatures that high, the last of the plant life will die. Without that plant life to put oxygen back into the air, the atmosphere will lose all its breathable oxygen as various chemical reactions cause the oxygen to bind to the rocks and soils of the surface. Other chemical reactions will bind up whatever nitrogen doesn’t freeze out onto the polar regions. The atmospheric pressure will drop drastically. Without the thermal insulation of a thick atmosphere, the planet’s ability to retain heat at the equator will decline. Equatorial temperatures will drop, until the entire planet is a frigid, airless wasteland, far more hostile to life than it was before humans reached it. That is the current prognosis for the planet Inferno.”

            Alvar Kresh stared in horror at the image of a frozen, wizened, dead world that hung in front of him. The greens and blues were all gone. The planet was a dun-colored desert, both its poles buried under huge, gleaming-white ice caps. He discovered that his fingers were clenched into the arms of his chair and that his heart was racing. He forced his fingers to relax, inhaled deeply in an effort to calm himself. “ All right,” he said, though it was clear things were anything but. “ All right. I knew there were problems, even if I did not know they were this bad. But what does all this have to do with me?” he asked, his voice quiet.

            The Governor brought the lights back out and stepped out from behind his console. “That is perfectly simple, Sheriff Kresh. Politics. It comes down to a question of politics and the qualities of human nature. I could make a frontal attack, try and get the public behind me, get all Infernals to come together and save the planet. To do that, I would have to put on the show you have just seen, for the benefit of the entire planet. Broadcast it by every means available. Some people would accept the facts. But not all of them. Probably not even most of them.”

            “What would the rest of them do?” Kresh asked.

            “No. No. You think about that for a minute. Think about it, and you tell me what they would do.”

            Alvar Kresh looked up again, at the dry, wizened corpse of a world that hung in space before him. What would they do? How would they react? The musty old traditionalists who yearned for the glories of the past; the Ironheads; the less radical people--such as himself--who saw a Settler scheme under every rock. The ones who were simply comfortable with the world and their lives as they were, firmly opposed to any change. What would they do?

            “Deny it,” he said at last. “There would be riots, and calls for your impeachment, and any number of people with axes to grind trotting out studies to prove that you were dead wrong and that everything was fine. People would claim you were a dupe of the Settlers--more people than think that now. One way or another, I doubt you’d serve out your term of office.”

            “You ‘re too optimistic. I would say the odds would be poor on my living through my term of office, for what that is worth. But in a larger sense, that doesn’t matter. All men die. Planets need not, should not, die. Not after only a few centuries of life.” Grieg turned his back on Alvar and walked to the far end of his office. “It may sound grandiose, but if I am ejected from office and replaced by someone who insists that everything is fine--then I am convinced Inferno’s ecology will collapse. Maybe I am quite mad, or a raging egomaniac, but I do believe that to be true.”

            “But how can you not inform the public about all this?”

            “Oh, the people have to know, of course,” Grieg said, turning around to face Kresh again. “I didn’t mean to imply that I was going to try to keep this secret. That would be impossible over the long run. Any attempt to keep the lid on this permanently would be bound to fail. But so, too, would an effort to spring this information on the populace all at once. Today the average citizen simply believes that the terraforming system needs some fine tuning, some repairs and tidying up. They can’t quite see why we need to humble ourselves to the Settlers just for the sake of getting that job done.”

            Grieg walked slowly down the length of the office, back toward Kresh. “It will take time to educate them, to prepare them for the knowledge of the danger. If the situation is handled properly, I can shape the debate, so that people want to decide how to rebuild the ecology and don’t waste time wondering if it even needs fixing. We need to get them to a thoughtful, determined frame of mind, where they can accept the challenge ahead. We can get to that point, I’m sure of it.

            “But we must choose our path carefully. For the present, the situation is volatile, explosive. People are in the mood for argument, not reason. And yet we must start on the repair program now if there is to be any hope of success and survival. And we must use the strongest, most effective, fastest-moving tools available to us.”

            Grieg came closer to Kresh, still talking, his eyes animated and intent. “In other words,” Grieg said, “the only hope for avoiding this disaster lies with the Settlers. Without their help this planet will be dead, for all intents and purposes, within a standard century. I find therefore that I am forced to accept their help, long before I have time to shape public opinion so that people will accept Settler help. I might add that the Settlers offered their help with certain conditions, which I was obliged to accept. One of those conditions will become apparent tonight.

            “But my political alliance with the Settlers is shaky at best. If this robot assault case is not closed quickly and neatly, there can be no doubt that there will be a political explosion on this world, though I am not exactly certain what form it will take. If it gets out that a robot is suspected of a crime--or if Settlers are suspected of sabotaging robots--it will be hard, if not impossible, to prevent my enemies from expelling the Settlers. And if that move succeeds, the Settlers will wash their hands of us. Without their help, Inferno will die. And in the wake of the most recent Ironhead riots, I feel certain they are looking for an excuse to leave. We cannot afford to give them one.”

            Grieg paced back and forth again, stepping through the edge of the simglobe hologram, his shoulder brushing through the ghostly-real image of a dead world to come. He crossed to Kresh and put his hands on the arms of Alvar’s chair. He leaned his face down close to Alvar’s, so close the Governor’s breath was warm against the Sheriff’s cheek. “Solve this case, Kresh. Solve it quickly and neatly and well. Solve it without complication or scandal.”

            He spoke the last words in a whisper, the light of fear bright in his eyes. “If you do not,” he said quietly, “you will doom this planet.”