SENIOR Sheriff’s Deputy Tansaw Meldor leaned back in his seat. He idly watched Junior Deputy Mirta Lusser flying the aircar through the darkness just before dawn. She was a typical newbie, he decided: conscientious as all hell, overly determined to do every part of her job perfectly, almost touchingly devoted to duty. It had taken a direct order before she would call him by his first name. She took the regs seriously and was burningly anxious to do everything right.

            All of which meant that she usually wanted to fly the aircar, which suited Meldor just fine. He had had his fill of manual flying years ago. Robots could not fly Sheriff’s patrol aircraft, not when many Sheriff’s Department duties had at least the potential for causing harm to humans. So human deputies were forced to do robots’ work, flying the damned aircars for themselves instead of letting the robots do it, the way civilians could.

            The joke of it was the Spacers had never gone in much for automating their equipment, because it was the robots who were going to operate it, anyway. Anything that could be done manually was done that way, making the job of flying a car far more complex than it had to be. Not for the first time, Meldor found himself wishing they could use Settler aircars. He had got a look inside one or two of them during some of the Settlertown dustups, and even ridden in one of them. The damn things could fly themselves, with no need for a human or a robot at the controls. The autopilots on those things went far beyond the rudimentary systems on Spacer aircars.

            But no, they were stuck with Spacer-style controls. In which case, it suited him just fine to have Lusser do the flying, if they had to be up at this hour, anyway. Damn Kresh! Why did he have to bump up the rapid-response patrols? Meldor wanted to be home in bed, asleep, not up here watching the dust blow in from the desert.

            Oh, well. Maybe they’ d get lucky, and something worthwhile would happen.

            Meldor had missed the latest Ironhead riots. He could do with a little excitement.

            DAWN lit the sky.

            Caliban had quartered the city during the night, walked through every district, up and down streets of all descriptions, wandered many grand, empty avenues and boulevards. Some part of him knew that it was madly dangerous to be out on the streets. He had to assume that whoever those people were who ordered him to kill himself would try again. He had to assume that there were others who wished him no better fate.

            He knew he should hide, duck away out of sight where no one could find him. But he could not bring himself to do that. He was gradually coming to realize that he was searching for something without knowing what that something was. An object, an idea, a bit of knowledge his datastore did not possess. An answer.

            He knew not what he sought, and that alone made him hunger for it all the more.

            But daytime was here. The robots of night--the laborers, the builders--were giving way to the robots of morning. Personal servants, messengers, aircar drivers were starting to appear--and in their wake, humans were arriving as well, more and more of them as daytime drew them back to the center city.

            Thus far, no robot had paid him the slightest attention. But humans. They were the danger. He had to hide. But where? He had no idea of what made a good hiding place, where he might be safe.

            Again he had one of those strange moments of sensation, wherein he felt some internal whisper that his thought processes were skewing to one side. Somehow he knew that fear of personal danger was abnormal, all but unheard-of, in a robot. It was another leakage from the emotion--set that seemed to hover around the edges of his datastore. He might well be the first of his kind to be a fugitive.

            But where to hide, and how? In the sections of the city he had explored, or in the parts he had not yet seen?

            Caliban stopped at the next intersection, by the entrance to some sort of store. He considered his options. He consulted the city map in his datastore and saw that there was a great deal of the city he had not seen yet. He had walked great strips and swatches of the town, but he had had no reason to quarter it systematically, block by block, street by street. What he had established from his wandering was that the datastore city map was not very detailed, and far from being complete or accurate. The city had changed since the map had been made. He himself had witnessed some of that change happening the night before. Whole buildings were missing from the datastore map, or on the map but missing from the real city. Clearly he could not rely on the datastore.

            It would have to be in the area of town he had already seen, then. But even there his knowledge was far from complete. Where could he

            “You! Help my robot with those packages and follow me to my aircar.”

            Caliban turned around in some surprise. There was a heavyset man behind him, followed by a personal robot, coming out of the store. The robot was carrying a huge stack of packages, piled so high it could not see over them.

            “Come on, come on. The damn store’ s robots are all out on deliveries, and damned if I’m going to play seeing-eye guide to a robot.”

            Caliban did not move. He had learned last night, the hard way, the danger in blindly obeying orders, and the danger in associating with humans.

            “What’s the matter with you?” the man snapped. “You under superseding orders already, waiting for your master, he tell you not to help anyone or some damn thing?”

            “No,” Caliban said.

            “Then help my robot. That’s a direct order!”

            But Caliban knew now there was no safety in playing along, mimicking other robots. Suppose this man ordered him into his aircar and flew him to some unknown place, someplace off the map in his datastore? Suppose this man was collecting robots for the thrill of destroying them, just as the woman had been the night before?

            Caliban wanted no part of it. Best to get away from this man, get away and find a place to hide from all the humans.

            He turned his back on the man and walked away.

            “Hey! Come back here!”

            But the lessons of the night before were Burned deeply into Caliban ‘ s brain. He determinedly ignored the man and walked on. Suddenly there was a hand around his arm. The man was grabbing at him, trying to restrain him. Caliban pulled himself free. The man reached out to grab him again, but Caliban sidestepped him. At last he decided to run. There was much he did not understand, but he knew he did not want to be in this place any longer than necessary.

            Without a backwards glance, Caliban stepped into the street, lengthened his stride into a smooth, steady run, and took off down the avenue.

            CENTOR Pallichan watched in astonishment as the big red robot ran away. Pallichan was utterly flabbergasted and more than a little unnerved. The robot had refused a direct order, and shaken loose from Centor’s grip in the bargain! That was tantamount to violent behavior, violence against a human being, and refusal of orders to boot. With trembling fingers, not even entirely sure what he was doing, Pallichan pulled his pocketphone out, flipped it open, and punched in the police emergency code.

            He put the little phone to his ear. There was a half moment’ s silence, and then the robot operator came on. “Sheriff’s Department Emergency Line. Please state the nature of your difficulty.” It was a smooth, calm, perfectly modulated voice. It soothed Pallichan ‘ s agitated mind, helped him think clearly, as no doubt it was meant to do.

            “I wish to report a major robot malfunction. A robot, a big metallic-red robot, has just refused my direct order, and then shook me off when I took him by the arm. He ran away.”

            “I see. Now establishing lock on your present location. Sir, what direction was he moving when he ran away?”

            “Ah, oh, let’ s see. “ Pallichan had to think for a moment and get his bearings. He forced himself to think clearly, struggling to keep from getting flustered. “North,” he said at last. “Due north from here, heading up Aurora Boulevard.”

            “That would be in the direction of Government Tower?” the deferential robot voice asked.

            Pallichan looked up the avenue and saw the tower. “Yes, yes, that’s right.” The dispatch robot must have consulted a map system and located an obvious landmark Pallichan could use to confirm position and direction. Damned clever of the police to have the robots verify things that way.

            “Thank you for your report, sir. A top-priority rapid-response aircar is now being dispatched to investigate. Good day to you.”

            The line went dead, and Centor Pallichan snapped his phone shut. He dropped it back in his pocket with a proud feeling of civic-mindedness. He led his robot, still patiently carrying his packages, back toward his aircar and managed to get everything packed away without help from any other robots.

            Some minutes later, when his robot had taken the controls and lifted toward home, it dawned on him to wonder why the police had been so willing to listen to him. Why had they believed something as mad as a report of a rogue robot? Why hadn’t the dispatcher tried to confirm what should have sounded like a completely lunatic report?

            It was, he realized with a chill of fear, almost as if the dispatch robot had been waiting for a rogue-robot call. Pallichan did not even wish to consider the implications of that thought. No, no, far better to force the entire thing from his mind. A quiet life for him. Dealing with the police was distasteful enough.

            “INCOMING priority!” The words were out of Senior Deputy Meldor’s mouth almost before he was aware that the alert light had come on. That was what training could do for you, he told himself. It let you act, and act properly, before you were even quite sure what was happening. He scanned the text of the incoming message, allowing Junior Deputy Lusser to keep her full attention on flying the car, picking out the data she would need to get them to the target. No need to distract her with needless details at the precise moment she was called upon to do some intricate flying.

            “What is it, Tansaw?” Mirta Lusser demanded.

            “Rogue-robot call, subject reported proceeding northward on Aurora from the intersection of Aurora and Solaria.” Meldor checked his vectors and location. “Come to heading 045,” he said.

            But the aircar was already banking, veering toward the northeast. She had worked it out in her head. Lusser was a good pilot, Meldor decided, one who always knew where she was over the city and how to get anywhere else. “Damn it, Meldor, a rogue robot? Does this mean the damn rumors are real?”

            “Unless the cops aren’t the only ones hearing the rumors,” Meldor said grimly. “If the civilians have heard the same scuttlebutt we have, some of them might get plenty jumpy, and I wouldn’t blame them. People are going to start seeing things.”

            “Wonderful,” Mirta said. “That’s not going to make our job any easier. Hang on, over target location in ten seconds.”

            CENTOR Pallichan could not quite believe what had happened. He had seen--and talked with--a mad robot. At least, he had convinced himself that was what had happened. Not altogether subconsciously, he was already mentally reworking the encounter for purposes of relating it to his friends, enhancing his own perspicacity and cleverness just a trifle. Easy to do now that it was allover. The moment itself had contained little actual excitement. It was the aftermath, the call to the police, that put a tingle of excitement and danger in his spine. Perhaps there were people to whom the experience of calling the police would seem to be no great adventure, but it was the closest to bold action Pallichan had ever come, and he felt no guilt in savoring the moment.

            But it was time to get back to normal, he decided, a bit primly. Yes, Pallichan decided, it was time to let his robot fly him home, time to slide into the calm, natural order of things. Already he was envisioning the smooth, quiet ritual of the midday meal, always just the same food, served just the same way, at just the same time. His robots knew how much he valued order and regularity, and no doubt his pilot robot had already signaled to his household staff, advising of the upset to the master’s day. No doubt they would see to it that the remainder of his day was even more orderly than usual, in recompense for what he had just been through.

            Still, he considered, there was no harm in having a good story to tell. Centor’s brush with a Mad Robot! He could imagine the buzz of excitement that would send through the circle of his acquaintanceship. Within a few seconds, he was lost to the outside world, his imagination back at work cheerfully inflating the danger and drama of his encounter with the robot--and his own courage in dealing with it. It was a rather soothing mental exercise, and he found he was beginning to feel settled down again. He found himself wondering what the sequel to the event would be, what would happen to the robot in question.

            But then present reality intruded on his revisions of the recent past. A blue blur of speed whipped past his car on the port side.

            Centor watched in openmouthed, horrified amazement as it swept past. A sky-blue Sheriff’s aircar! Then came another, and another, and another, whipping past overhead off to starboard--two even raced past beneath his car, violating every safety regulation on the planet.

            Pallichan suddenly realized that his own aircar was tooling along, at a quite leisurely pace, straight north over Aurora Boulevard, the direction the rogue robot had taken. He looked through the forward windscreen and his stomach turned to a block of ice. There were at least four blue aircars on the scene, two of them landing, the others taking up very aggressive patrol stations. It was hard to be certain, but he thought he could even catch sight of a led-painted robot, still moving rapidly northward.

            Centor’s aircar shuddered and bucked in the air turbulence caused by the Sheriff’s cars. Pallichan was not a forceful or adventurous man, not by any means. Any slight sense of curiosity he might have concerning the sequel of his report to the police vanished in an instant. “Turn the car, you fool!” he cried out to his robot. “Turn! Turn! Get us out of here.”

            The fear and panic in his voice was clear, and the robot pilot clearly understood the urgency of the command. He turned the car on its ear as it jinked down and to port, diving the car between two towering office buildings, roaring down the canyoned streets of the central city. Pallichan ‘ s fingers dug into the arms of his flight chair, and he broke out in a cold sweat. At last the car slowed a bit and put its nose upward as the pilot robot guided them toward a more prudent altitude.

            Pallichan sat there, gasping for breath, his heart pounding, as his aircar banked gently toward home.

            That was enough, he decided. Enough indeed. If that was what excitement was like, he had had just enough to suit Centor Pallichan for a lifetime and beyond. Life was meant to be orderly, controlled, reasonable. The universe was supposed to remain always as it was, in a steady, happy balance of calm. Disobedient robots? Mad police chases? That sort of chaos was not the way of things. Something had to be done about it.

            But that thought brought him up short. For it suddenly dawned on him that a universe of chaos and uncertainty, such as had been so abruptly revealed to him, was unlikely to modify its behavior merely because Centor objected. What step could he take? Write a stiff letter to the Governor? Organize all the right-thinking people who wished merely to be left alone, bring all the most placid and hermetic of Inferno’s citizenry into a group as rough-and-ready as those frightful Ironheads? Have them forcibly demand that things stop happening and get back to normal?

            But another thought struck at him, almost physically. Suppose, just suppose, that it was the nature of things to keep happening, that it was the long placidity of life on Inferno that was the aberration? Suppose that aberration was even now being swept away, and the tumultuous ferment of the universe at large was even now crashing down upon them all?

            What if there was no “normal” to get back to?

            Centor Pallichan felt his hands trembling with fear, and knew his tremors had more to do with what he might see soon than what he had just seen recently. “Take me home,” he told his pilot robot. “Take me home, where it is safe.”

            CALIBAN heard the sound behind him as he ran and recognized it as the swooping air-rush of aircars coming in fast and low. He heard the squeal of wheels slamming down onto pavement and knew that several of the cars had landed on the avenue. No doubt others would land ahead of him. Yes, he could see them up ahead. For me, he thought. All of them are after me. I am some terrible threat to them, for reasons I do not understand. They will destroy me if they can. He knew it to be a certainty, not a chance or a theory or a probable hypothesis.

            By now he was quite good at judging by partial evidence, he realized in some detached part of his mind that was not occupied with the need for escape and survival. But even as he made that observation about his own thought processes, he had started evasive action. He stopped abruptly and turned right, down a narrow alley as the aircars swept by overhead, unable to stop in time to make the turn. Three, four, five, six of them. But they would not be put off so easily. This time the search, the hunt, was well and truly on. They would not stop until they had him. The fact that they had sent so many aircars and deputies after him told him that much very clearly. But where to turn? Where to hide? The question suddenly became even more urgent as the alley came to an abrupt end in a blank wall.

            He turned, and saw a door leading into the building whose wall made up the north side of the alley, and another door on the south wall. Caliban tried the first door and found that it opened easily. He was about to rush through it when an idea came to him. He tried the door on the south wall of the alley and found it securely locked. Good. Perfect. Caliban smashed the south door open, ripping it off its hinges. Then he returned to the door on the north side and went through it, closing it carefully after him.

            It must be, he thought, an exceedingly old trick, and even a rather obvious one. But they would not know how to deal with a robot capable of trickery and deception, however simple that deception might be. They would underestimate him, he was sure of it. And that was knowledge he could use.

            He made his way into the building and set about finding a way to escape.

            THEIRS was the first car to respond, Tansaw knew that much. Still and all, it wasn’t going to do them any good. At least three other cars had been in better position to get in there first and fast. Mirta had flown well enough to beat two of them to the punch, but there was still Jakdall’s car, right on their nose. There was no way they could get past them to make the pinch. Burning hell, there he was! A devil-red robot running down the middle of the road. They had him! No, damnit, they didn’t. The robot turned suddenly and dove into an alley. Jakdall’s car popped open its airbrake louvers and landing gear, reversing thrust, pulling in for a speed landing. Mirta jinked their own nose higher to avoid a midair collision, the air thumping and roaring past as they hit Jakdall’s turbulence and rattled through it. That did it. No matter how good a pilot Mirta was, she was not going to be able to avoid overshooting. Damnation! They should have been expecting the red bastard to dodge away like that. Yes, a standard robot would not have attempted evasive action, but then a standard robot would not be running away from the police. They had all been warned in the briefing to expect “atypical behavior” from this robot. And now they were out of the game. No way they could get back in position before Jakdall and the other units closed in.

            Tansaw suddenly realized that Mirta had not brought their nose back down. They were still headed up and out. Tansaw was about to say something about that when he was thrown forward against his seat restraints and the nose thrusters roared. His stomach turned to lead as Mirta slammed reverse thrust on and used the nose jets to force the car over on its tail, braking hard with the reversers as she skewed their nose up. The car’s structural members groaned and thrummed under the strain, and the danger alarm started to go off. Tansaw let out a gasp of air as Mirta cut the reversers and nose jets simultaneously. The car hung in free fall for a split heartbeat and then lurched forward as Mirta slammed them into forward acceleration again.

            But still Mirta did not bring the car level. She forced the nose skyward, angling up more and more sharply until the car was all but standing on its tail. Tansaw grabbed the armrests of his chair and hung on for dear life. The nose angled up more and more until they were flat on their backs, and still she did not angle back. Burning devils, she was going for a full loop! Up and over now, the car arcing over, flying fully upside down for an endless moment.

            Tansaw looked down through the overhead ports, and saw the land where the sky should have been, looked down at the gleaming cityscape spread out below, the dawning sun lighting up the east, its warm rays just catching the bases of the most westerly towers, civilian aircars scattering like a startled flock of birds as the sky-blue sheriff’s cars zeroed in on their quarry.

            Then Mirta pointed the nose down and they arced over, straight down, diving for the ground, the normally silent aircar groaning with the strain, the air screaming past them as they dropped.

            Down, down, down. Tansaw stole a quick glance at Mirta. She was grim-faced, determined, her jaw set, concentrating fiercely.

            At the last possible moment she pulled up and hit the thrust reversers. They were back over Aurora Boulevard, a hundred meters south of where they had been when the robot had turned, still moving damn fast.

            Mirta leveled them out and fired the nose jets again, fighting the car as it tried to flip over in flight. Suddenly the nose jets died and they were turning, arcing gracefully to a halt in the alley, not ten seconds behind Jakdall and his partner, hovering to a smooth halt in midair.

            With a bump and thump, Mirta dropped their landing gear, cut power, and had them on the ground.

            “Damn good flying, Mirta,” Tansaw said, wondering if Sheriff Kresh would see it that way, or throw her off the force as a menace to navigation. But one thing was for sure--if there ever came a debate over the wisdom of human-piloted sheriff’s cars, Tansaw could point to the ride he had just taken. No robot would ever have flown that way, never mind how urgent the need.

            But this was no time for worrying over such matters, and his partner was clearly in no mood for small talk. Mirta, still grim and grey-faced, popped the hatch on her side of the car and was out on the ground before Tansaw even had his restraint straps off. He popped his own hatch and scrambled out, weapon drawn. Strange and terrifying thought, that he felt the need of a blaster going up against a robot.

            Tansaw took some small satisfaction from realizing that Jakdall and his partner were blowing the last of their lead merely by taking their time disembarking, weighted down by hell’ s own collection of equipment. Apparently Jakdall was determined to be prepared for not just anything, but everything. Guns, knives, body armor, inertial trackers, cutting tools, a half dozen gadgets Tansaw didn’t even recognize--Jakdall had everything but underwater gear strapped to himself. His partner, Sparfinch, was even more laden down, with a jumpy, nervous look in his eyes. The kid was drawn as tight as a cable under tension. Not for the first time, Tansaw thanked whatever luck it was that he had been paired with Mirta and not Sparfinch.

            Jakdall grinned. He gave Tansaw and Mirta a mock salute. “Nice flying, kids, but there’s no prizes for second. We’re taking the lead on this. Come on, Spar. Let’s go fry a robot.”

            “Orders are to capture,” Mirta said warningly.

            “Oh, yeah, they sure are. But it might get a little too hot for that.” Jakdall laughed and winked. “Come on, Spar.” Without thought or question, he turned toward the torn-out, smashed-up door on the south side of the alley.

            Jakdall gestured for Spar to head in while Jak covered him. Spar hesitated just in front of the door, his eyes rolling nervously. He drew his weapon and did a wholly needless tuck-and-roll dive into the building. The interior was open to plain view--there was no one in there. That robot wasn’t going to duck inside the first room it came to and hide. Jak made ready to follow his partner in when suddenly there was a muffled roar and thump from the interior.

            “Got him!” Spar’s voice cried out. Jak, Tansaw, and Mirta rushed inside. Spar was standing over the burned-out hulk of a small, moss-colored robot. Jak took one look at it and let out a string of curses. “Damn you, Spar, that robot’s green! It’s just a building maintenance unit.”

            “I can’t help it,” Spar said in an agitated voice. “I’m colorblind.”

            “Ah, the hell with it. Come on, we’ll search through there.” Jak turned toward Tansaw. “You two coming?”

            “No, you guys go ahead,” Tansaw said. “We’ll stand watch here and make sure he doesn’t double back.” Mirta turned and looked at him sharply, but Tansaw gestured for her to be quiet, out of Jak’s line of sight. Jak grinned hugely and laughed at them. “Brilliant plan, Tan. You always were good on the backup jobs. Come on, Spar.”

            Mirta watched the two of them clump noisily out of the back room, headed toward the front of the building, then turned toward Tansaw, obviously seething. “Damnit, Meldor, do you have to let them steal our thunder when I practically bent the aircar in half getting us here? We should be hunting with them, not guarding some damn door!”

            “Easy, Mirta. I just didn’t want us getting our heads blown off when Spar decides we’re robot-shaped. The rogue didn’t come through here. He just wanted us to think he did. Look at the room. The door’s smashed to pieces but everything in here is untouched. Let those two maniacs blunder around in here. My guess is that the robot is smarter than Jak is--though that’s not really saying too much about the robot.” He turned and stepped back out into the alley, Mirta right behind him. The alley was filled with cops by now, two or three of them heading in the smashed-down door even as Tansaw and Mirta came out. Tansaw crossed the alley and tried the other door. It swung open easily. With a glance at Mirta, Tansaw stepped inside. He knew, absolutely knew, that this was the way the robot had gone.

            But he also knew he didn’t much like the idea of tracking a robot who was capable of thinking in terms of diversionary tactics. And that second piece of knowledge did much to remove the savor from the first piece.

            They moved into the gloomy interior of the building. There was very little inside, merely a forest of packing cases that had never been cracked open. Hades was full of such buildings--designed, built, stocked with equipment by robots and forgotten. Most of the ghost buildings were like this one, wholly complete, but left vacant. The ghosts were gifts from on high to criminal gangs of all sorts, ideal places to meet, to hide out, perfect headquarters from which to run their scams and crimes.

            It looked as if this building had gotten all the way to furniture delivery before being shut down. The crates were neatly stacked everywhere, turning the first floor into a maze of hiding places. And then there were the floors above and the subbasements and service tunnels below. Even if the rogue had come in here, how the hell would they ever know it, or find him?

            Then Mirta grabbed his arm and pointed her handlamp down at the floor.

            Dust. The floor was covered in a smooth, perfect film of dust--with one set of distinctly robotic footprints leading off into the interior, moving at a smooth and confident pace.

            The two deputies followed the line of footprints through the canyons of packing cases. They led straight for a stairwell, its door standing open. Moving cautiously, Mirta and Tansaw went inside, to be greeted by a cool breeze blowing down the shaft, which apparently also served as part of the ventilator system. But the air currents meant no dust deposits here. No footprints. Damn it. All right, then. Up or down? Which way did he go?

            “He headed straight for the stairs,” Mirta said, her voice a loud whisper.

            “So what does that tell us?” Tansaw asked.

            “That he knows where he’s going. He must have a good internal map system. He’s not moving in a panic. He’s got a plan, he’s thinking ahead.”

            “Which means he must have figured out that heading up isn’t going to do him any good. We’ d be able to seal off the building and bottle him up. So he went down into the service tunnels.” That was always bad news. The tunnels went everywhere, to allow the maintenance robots to bring in supplies and services without adding to street congestion. And despite all official statements to the contrary, every cop knew there were lots of tunnels that did not appear on any map. Some had just been dug and then forgotten, some had been deliberately erased from the map memories--and some had been dug by robots in the employ of enterprising freelancers of one sort or another.

            “Right.” Mirta holstered her gun and pulled her tracker/mapper out of her tunic. She worked the controls and consulted the screen. “Not so bad around here,” she said. “I only show one main horizontal shaft connecting to this building.”

            “Can we seal it before he can use it to get to another tunnel?” All the tunnels--all the official tunnels, at least--were equipped with heavy-duty vault-style doors.

            “We can try,” Mirta said. “It’ll be close, one way or the other.” She brought her comm mike around to her mouth. “This is Deputy 1231, in rapid pursuit of suspect. Request immediate seals on all accesses to city tunnel number A7 B26.” She listened to her headset for a moment, and Tansaw felt as much as heard a series of muffled, far-off clanging thuds. “That ought to do it,” she said. “If he didn’t get out of B26 before we sealed it, we have him now.”

            Tansaw looked up at his partner and nodded. “It’s time to call in the others,” he said.

            CALIBAN heard the booming thuds of the tunnel doors slamming shut. He had been moving at a fast, steady, walking pace in the narrow tunnel, but now he broke into a run, hurrying for the end. He came upon it all too soon and knew he was in deep trouble. This door was meant for a full-security seal. He tried to force it open, but obviously it had been specifically designed to be beyond a robot’s strength, with a locked and armored control panel as well. He consulted his datastore map.

            Tunnel A 7 B26 was “H”-shaped, with the access to the building above in the center of the cross member, and the four ends of the vertical members linking into the main city tunnel system. The tunnel itself was barren, nothing but bare walls, floors, and ceilings, with glow lamps set into the ceiling’s overhead crossbeam supports. The beams looked to be some sort of plasteel, twenty centimeters square in cross section, spaced at five-meter intervals.

            Suddenly Caliban had an idea. He consulted his datastore and confirmed that humans saw in a far more limited range of light wavelengths than he did. Nor, it appeared, did their bodies provide any source of built-in illumination. He turned around and hurried back down the tunnel, at top speed, yanking out the glow lamps, crushing them, heaving the debris in all directions. Within sixty seconds the floor of the tunnel was littered with broken lamps. It was in absolute darkness, but for the dim glow of two impossibly blue eyes about twenty meters from the building access hatch. But then Caliban shifted to infrared, and even that illumination faded away. He stretched out his arms to one wall of the tunnel, braced his legs against the opposite wall, and walked his way up until he was braced against the ceiling, between. two of the overhead supports. The odds seemed at least a little better that he would stay out of sight there. He had no real plan, no idea of how to get out. All he knew was that he had more chance of staying alive a little longer if he kept out of sight in the dark, rather than waiting passively for his fate.

            He hung there, waiting, for what seemed an absurdly long time. His on-board chronometer gave him a precise report on how long he waited there, but somehow the number of minutes and seconds that flickered past was no proper measure of his situation. There was something more to it, for the odds were very good that these were the last minutes and seconds he would ever experience.

            What was taking them so long?

            At last there was a clang and a thump. Caliban cocked his head cautiously down to peek around the support beam that hid him from view. He turned his head toward the access hatch. “Damnit,” a voice called out. “He must have knocked all the lights out.” Caliban saw the beam of a handlamp stab out from the building side of the hatch. Like most lamps designed to give off visible light, this one cast a fair amount of infrared as well. A human figure, and then another and another and another, came through the hatch, plainly visible in infrared.

            “Well, at least we know he’s still in here,” one of them said as a light beam played across the floor, revealing the smashed glow lamps. “He wouldn’t have hung around smashing the lights if he could’ get out one of the hatches.”

            “Ready to do some damage, Spar?” one of the others asked with a low chuckle.

            “Capture only, Jak,” a third one, the only woman, said. “Try to keep that in mind, okay?”

            “Don’t like tunnels,” the one called Spar announced. “This gives me the creeps. Can’t we pull in some real lights before we go searching around in here?”

            “Galaxy’s sake, it’s just one lousy robot in an H-tunnel,” the one called Jak replied. “Don’t you get all jumpy on me now.”

            Suddenly the hatch behind them swung shut again, to the obvious discomfort of the four deputies. “Well, if he can’t get out, neither can we,” the woman said, her voice a bit low and nervous.

            “I don’t like it,” Spar objected. “Can’t we reopen the hatch and just post a guard on it?”

            “Yeah, and let the rogue punch out the guard and make a run for it,” the first voice said. “Look, Spar, the manual keypad combo for all the hatches is 274668. You get antsy, you get out that way. Just don’t get crazy on us. Come on, let’s move out. Mirta, you and me will take the east side; Spar and Jak, you take the west.”

            These humans weren’t thinking clearly. Did they assume that if they could not see him, he could not hear them? But that keypad combination. That was the information he needed. Caliban drew his head back in and remained motionless as two of the deputies went past, directly below him.

            Listening carefully, he judged that the other pair of deputies had indeed gone the other way, to the western leg of the “H.” He could hear them turning the corner and moving up one arm of the tunnel.

            Moving as silently as he could, Caliban worked his way back down the wall, stepped down onto the floor, and turned in the direction the two male deputies had gone. He was tempted to use the keypad combination on the building access door, but no doubt there were any number of police waiting just behind it. No. His one hope was to get past these deputies, punch in the keypad combination, and hope it worked. He made his way down to the intersection between the cross tunnel and the side tunnel and peered cautiously around the corner. There they were, on the north end. Caliban backed into the crosswise leg of the tunnel again. He braced his arms and legs against the walls and worked his way back upward to hide against the ceiling again.

            After a few moments, the two deputies walked past him in the central connecting tunnel, headed toward the southwestern end of the H-tunnel, making a fair amount of noise as they kicked past the debris of the ruined glow lights. Caliban once again let himself down from the ceiling and moved silently in the direction the two men had come from. There it was, the tunnel hatch, the control panel next to it. Suddenly he had a most disturbing thought. Suppose they were playing games with him now? Suppose they had meant for him to hear their discussion, and they had deliberately spoken loudly enough for him to hear? Suppose the combination was false?

            But it didn’t matter. For if the combination did not work, he would in any event have no other way out. He was locked in here, and that combination was the only key that might open the way. Caliban punched in the keypad combination, moving his fingers as rapidly as possible.

            A light stabbed down on him from the opposite end of the tunnel, bright enough to dazzle his infrared vision. “There he is!” Spar’s voice shouted from behind the blinding light. There was a roar, and a whoosh, and Caliban threw himself to one side of the tunnel. There was a violent impact, dead on the center of the hatch. A roaring explosion tore through the reinforced hatch and ripped it to shreds, littering the tunnel with shrapnel and smoke. Debris ricocheted off Caliban ‘ s body case, knocking him down. He scrambled back to his feet. The impact had blown a hole clear through the armored door, just big enough for Caliban to get through. He scrambled through it, the white-hot armor plate hissing and popping, sending his thermosensors into maximum overload. But then he was through, and out into the tunnels, and gone.

 “I have had my fill and more of shambles, Donald,” Alvar Kresh said as he read the action reports over a belated breakfast at his desk. A breakfast he had been looking forward to since the early hours of the morning, and one he was now not enjoying at all.

            He had wanted to eat in the privacy of his own home, not at his desk at headquarters. Circumstances dictated otherwise, to put it mildly. Nor did the circumstances of the situation improve his mood.

            Minutes after he came out of the Governor’s office, he learned that his officers had lost the leading suspect in the case that might literally decide the fate of the world. This did not make him a happy man.

            “We go for a nice, quiet chat with the Governor, you and I,” Alvar said, in a voice that was low and reasonable, in a tone of patently false calm. “I am out of contact with the force for perhaps all of an hour, and come back to find that my deputies have been using the airspace over downtown to practice their aerobatics and scare the hell out of half the population.” Alvar’s voice started to get louder, angrier. He stood and glared at Donald. “I find that one of my officers disregarded all orders and made a creditable effort to kill that suspect before he could be questioned and examined. Instead he made a good start toward blowing up half the city tunnel system.”

            He knew it was unfair and illogical to yell at Donald, but he had to take his anger out on someone. And there Donald was, right in front of him, an easy target for his fury, and one that would not fight back.

            But even in the depths of his fury, Alvar knew that he was playing to the squad room outside his office as well. It was not by chance that his office was not well soundproofed. Some times it did the force some good to hear the Old Man blow up. By now Alvar was shouting out loud, deliberately shouting not at Donald, but at the thin walls and the men and women outside.

            “In other words, the only reason my stunt-flying, trigger-happy deputies have not wrecked everything is that they are lousy shots as well. What is wrong with everyone?”

            The rhetorical question hung in the air for perhaps half a minute. Donald stood silently before Alvar’s desk. At last Alvar sighed, sat back down, and picked up his fork. He took another moody stab at his sausages. “I am not a happy man, Donald,” he said at last, in a quieter voice, now speaking almost to himself. “On top of everything else, I have not a doubt that this whole fiasco has set a whole new series of rumors flying. Besides the hundreds of witnesses to our overreaction, there is a civilian we can do nothing to silence, and he is no doubt out there cheerfully telling all his friends about the robot who refused orders. God knows where that will end.”

            “Yes, sir. It is most unfortunate. There is some other rather awkward news. There is a current rumor that Fredda Leving’s announcement tonight is related to the events of this morning, though what the connection is, no one seems to know.”

            “That’s quite a rumor,” Alvar growled ruefully. “Hell, I’m heading the investigation, and even I don’t know for sure if that’s true. It’ll get her a hell of a big audience tonight.”

            “The same thought crossed my mind,” Donald said. “You were proved correct in your concerns over a massive police effort. It has forced the whole situation at least partly into the public view. We have set off the panic that might well have been the perpetrator’s actual goal.”

            “Yes, yes, I know. But damn it, what other chance did we have but to respond to the situation? We could not allow this Caliban to go loose--a robot capable of violence against humans--just because a police chase might upset a few people. Not when we had a solid position and a positive ID on him. Expect we blew it, and by now he could be anywhere in or under the city.”

            “Sir, if I could interject just a moment,” Donald said in his most deferential voice. Alvar looked up sharply. He recognized that tone. It was the one Donald used when he was going to be his most contrary. “You are proceeding from an assumption that I now feel we must regard as unproved.”

            “And what might that be?” Alvar asked cautiously as he used his fork to chase the last of his eggs around the plate.

            “That Caliban is a robot capable of violence against humans.”

            The office was wreathed in silence once again, other than the muffled noise from the exterior offices that managed to seep in. This time it was Alvar who knew no way to respond. But it was obvious that Donald was going to say no more. “Wait a second,” Alvar said, dropping his fork back on his plate and giving the service robot a half-conscious signal to remove the tray. “You were the one trying to convince me that our suspect was a robot.”

            “Yes, sir. But circumstances have changed. New evidence and patterns of evidence have come to light. Tentative conclusions must be reviewed against revised data.”

            “What evidence and patterns of evidence?”

            “One pattern in particular, sir, that I have not examined as yet. I need to run a thought experiment. I have a hypothesis which I need to test. If you will bear with me for a moment, this experiment will be difficult for me. But to perform this mental experiment, I will be forced-to-contemplate-a-robot doing-violence-to human beings. No doubt that will make it hard for me to speak and think. Indeed, you will note that even offering up the idea causes my speech to slow and slur noticeably.”

            The serving robot turned toward Donald, moving so jerkily that the silverware flew off the serving tray. It knelt and scooped up the fork and knife before rising again, weaving back and forth a bit.

            Donald noticed the other robot’s reaction. “ Ah, sir, before we discuss this further, perhaps you should excuse the serving robot so as to prevent needless damage to its brain.”

            “What? Oh, yes, of course.” Alvar waved the serving robot out, and it left the room, still holding the tray. “Now then, what is this thought experiment? If it’ s risky, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want you to damage yourself, Donald,” Alvar said, concern in his voice. “I need you.”

            “That is most kind of you to say, sir. However, I believe that, given the police-robot reinforcements to my positronic brain, the risk of significant permanent damage is negligible. However, you will need to be patient with me. Nor do I wish to work through this thought process more than once. It will no doubt be unpleasant for me, and the risk of permanent damage will increase should I need to repeat it. So I would request that you pay strict attention.

            “I wish to place myself in the circumstances that this Caliban has faced on at least two occasions, once at the warehouse with the robot bashers, and once just now with the deputies in the tunnel. In both cases, Caliban was surrounded by a group of human beings who were clearly threatening his very existence. I intend to work through the circumstances of each event and see how a high-level robot with the Three Laws would react, what the outcome would be. In short, what would have happened if a robot with my mind and Caliban’s. size and strength faced such circumstances?”

            “Yes, very well,” Alvar said, a bit mystified.

            “Then I will proceed.” He sat there and watched for about a minute as Donald stood there in front of him, stock-still, frozen in place.

            With a resumption of movement that was somehow more disconcerting than the way he had stopped moving, Donald came back to himself. “Very good,” he said to himself. “The first part of my hypothesis is correct. If it had been myself in either situation, I would have been destroyed, killed on the spot.” The satisfaction in his voice was plain.

            “Is that all?” Alvar asked, feeling quite confused.

            “Oh, no, sir. In a sense, I have not started yet. I was merely establishing a baseline, if you will. Now I must come to the far more difficult part of the experiment. I must put myself in the position of a being of high intellect, with great speed and strength, with superb senses and reflexes, who is placed in the same circumstances. But this hypothetical being is willing and able to defend itself by whatever means, including an attack on a human.”

            Alvar gasped and looked up at Donald in shocked alarm. More robots than he cared to recall had been utterly destroyed by far more casual contemplation of harm to humans. To imagine such harm, deliberately committed by oneself, would be the most terrifying, dangerous thought possible for a robot. “Donald, I don’t know if--”

            “Sir, I assure you that I understand the dangers far more thoroughly than you do. But I believe the experiment to be essential.”

            Before Alvar could protest any further, Donald froze up again. But this time, he did not stay frozen. A series of twitches and tics began to appear, and grew worse and worse. One foot lurched off the ground, and Donald nearly toppled over before he recovered and regained his balance. A strange, high-pitched sound came up from his speaker, sweeping up and down in frequency. The blue glow of his eyes dimmed, flared, and then went blank. His arms, held at his side, twitched. His fingers clenched and unclenched. He seemed about to topple again. Alvar stood up, rushed around his desk, and reached out to steady his old friend, his loyal servant, holding Donald by the shoulders.

            Even as he acted, he found that he was astonished with himself. Friend? Loyal servant? He had never even been aware that he thought of Donald that way. But now it quite abruptly seemed possible that he might lose Donald, this moment, and he suddenly knew how deeply he did not want that to happen.

            “Donald!” he called out. “Stop! Break off. Whatever it is you are doing, I am ordering you to stop!”

            Donald’s body gave another strange twitch, and the robot flinched away from Alvar’s touch, backing away a step or two. His eyes flared up, painfully bright, before regaining their normal appearance. “I--I--thank you, sir. Thank you for calling to me. I do not think that I could have broken free of my own volition.”

            “Are you all right? What the hell happened to you?”

            “I believe that I am fine, sir, though it might be prudent if I underwent a diagnostic later.” He paused for a moment. “As to what happened, it was a severe cognitive loop-back sequence. I understand that humans are capable of holding two completely contrary viewpoints at once without any great strain. It is not so for robots. I was forced to simulate a lack of constraints on my behavior, although the Three Laws of course control my actions. It was most disconcerting.”

            Donald hesitated for a moment and looked at Alvar, his head cocked to one side. “It has never occurred to me just how strange and uncertain, how unguided a thing it must be to be a human being. We robots know our duty, our purpose, our place, our limits. You humans know none of that. How strange to live a life where all things are permitted, whether or not they are possible. If I may be so bold as to ask, sir--how is it humans can cope ? What is it they do with all the freedom we robots provide?”

            Alvar found himself sorely confused and surprised by the question. Still thrown off guard by Donald’s experiment, he answered with more honesty than he would have permitted in a considered answer. “They waste it,” he said. “They do nothing with their lives, determined to make each day like the last.” He thought of the complaints on his desk, civilians whining that the police had disrupted their lives this morning by trying to capture Caliban, quite unconcerned that the disruption had been in the interests of protecting their lives. “They are sure change can only be for the worse. They battle against change--and so ensure there is no change for the better.”

            But then Alvar stopped and turned away from Donald. “Damn it, that’s not fair. Not all of it, anyway. But I spent the morning learning how we’ve doomed ourselves with indolence and denial.”

            “My apologies, sir. I did not intend to move the discussion into such irrelevant areas.”

            “Irrelevant?” Alvar went back to his desk chair and sat back in it with a sigh. “I think perhaps the questions of change and freedom are very close to the issues in this case. We have looked hard, seeking to find how Fredda Leving was attacked, and who did it. But we have scarcely even stopped to ask ourselves why the blow was struck. I’ll tell you the reason we are bound to find, Donald.” Suddenly his voice was eager, excited. “The reason--the motive--is going to be change, and the fear of it. It’s got to be something mired down in the politics of all this. There is some big change coming, and someone either wants to protect that change--or stop it. That’s what we’re going to find out. But damn it, we have wandered.”

            But Alvar had wandered deliberately. He wanted to give Donald a moment to settle down, a chance for his positronic brain to be focused on less frightening, unsettling thoughts for a moment. Alvar knew that the question of a crime’s motive, with the insight it provides into the human psyche, always fascinated Donald. “But your experiment, Donald. What were the results?”

            “In brief, sir, it confirmed my initial hypothesis--that aa-being with the physical capabilities of a robot, but with no inhibitions on its behavior, and highly motivated to protect its own existence, could have--ki-killed all the Settlers at the warehouse and all the deputies in the tunnels. And, indeed, doing so would have been safer for this hypothetical being than acting as Caliban did.”

            “What are you saying?”

            “It would appear that Caliban acted to protect himself, but did not seek to harm humans. Whatever harm came to them was incidental to his self -defense, and perhaps accidental. There is no doubt that he set fire to the warehouse. There is no proof that he did it deliberately.”

            “You almost make him sound human, Donald.”

            “But sir, as I just observed, there are no constraints on human behavior.”

            “Oh, but there are such constraints. Deep, strong constraints, imposed by ourselves and by society. They rarely fail to hold. They do not have the rigid code of the Three Laws imposed from without, but humans learn their own codes of behavior. But let’s not go off on another tangent. I’ve been thinking about the fact that Leving Labs is an experimental facility. We have yet to ask what sort of experiment Caliban was meant to be. What was it that Fredda Leving had in mind? Did the experiment fail? Did it succeed?” A thought came to him, one that made his blood run cold. “Or is the experiment under way now, running exactly according to plan?”

            “I don’t understand, sir.”

            “Robots come awake for the first time knowing all they need to know. Humans start out in the world knowing nothing of how the world works. Suppose Leving wondered how a robot that had to learn would behave. Suppose that Caliban is out there, behaving in accordance to the Three Laws, but with such a reduced dataset that he does not know, for example, what a human being is. Tonya Welton reminded us that it has happened before. Suppose that Fredda Leving set him out to see how long it would take him to learn the ways of the world on his own.”

            “That is indeed a most disturbing idea, sir. I can scarcely believe that Madame Leving would be capable of undertaking such an irresponsible experiment.”

            “Well, she is sure as hell hiding something. That lecture last night took lots of potshots at the present state of affairs. I’ve got a feeling there will be even more bombshells at the second lecture. Maybe we’ll learn more then.”

            Alvar Kresh looked down at his desk and found his thoughts turning toward the routine business of running the department. Personnel reports. Equipment requisitions. The dull humdrum of bureaucracy seemed downright attractive after the chaos of the last few days. Best get to it. “That’s all for now, Donald.”

            “Sir, before I go, there is one more datum of which you need to be apprised. “

            “What is that, Donald?”

            “The blow to Fredda Leving, s head, sir. The forensic lab has established that Caliban almost certainly did not do it.”

            “What?”

            “It is another part of the new patterns of evidence, sir. There were traces of red paint found in the wound, sir.”

            “Yes, I know that. What of it?”

            “It was fresh paint, sir, not yet fully dry. Furthermore, according to the design specifications for Caliban’ s body type, a given robot’s color is integral to the exterior body panels. With that model robot body, dyes are blended into material used to form the panels. The panels are never painted. The body material is designed to resist stains, dyes, and paints. In short, nothing will stick to that material, which is why it must be imbued with a color during manufacture.”

            “So that paint couldn’t have just flaked off Caliban’s arm.”

            “No, sir. Therefore, someone else, presumably with the intent of framing Caliban, painted a robot arm red and struck Leving with it. I would further presume that person to be unknowledgeable concerning the manufacture of robot bodies, though that presents difficulties, as everything else suggests that the attacker knew quite a bit about robotics.”

            “Unless the red paint was, if you’ll pardon the expression, a deliberate red herring.” Alvar thought for a moment. “It could still be Caliban, or someone else, who knew about the color process for that robot model. Caliban could have painted his red arm red merely to confuse the trail. He would know we would find out about the color issue, and therefore would know we’d think he could not have done it.”

            “You are presupposing a great deal of knowledge and cunning for Caliban, especially considering that you suggested a minute ago that he did not know what a human being was.”

            “Mmmph. The trouble with you, Donald, is that you keep me too honest. All right, then. If Caliban did not do it--then who the damned hell-devils did?”

            “As to that, sir, I could not offer an opinion.”

            CALIBAN came to another tunnel intersection and hesitated for a moment before deciding which way to go. He had yet to see a single human in the underground city, but it seemed unwise to be in the company of robots, either. There seemed to be less traffic on the left-hand tunnel branch, and so he went that way.

            There had been moments, more than a few of them, since his awakening, when Caliban had experienced something very like the emotion of loneliness, but he certainly had no desire for companionship at the moment. Right now he needed to get away, to put as much distance and as many twists and turns as possible between himself and his pursuers. Then he needed to sit down somewhere and think.

            The robots here underground were quite different from those he had seen on the surface. No personal-service robots down here, no fetchers and carriers of parcels. These passages were populated by burlier sorts, lumbering heavy-duty machines in dun colors. They had little resemblance to the brightly colored machines overhead. Compared to these robots, the ones above were merely toys. These underground robots were closer kin to the maintenance units that toiled on the surface only by night. By night, and underground, do the true workers toil, Caliban thought to himself. There was something disturbing about the thought, the image.

            He was coming to understand that this was a world where real labor, work that accomplished something, was distasteful, something that had to be done out of sight. The humans seemed contemptuous of the very idea of work. They had taught themselves it was not a proper thing to see, let alone do. How could they live, knowing themselves to be useless, pampered drones? Could they truly live that way? But if they allowed themselves to be waited on hand and foot, then surely they must, as individuals, and as a people, be losing even the ability to do most things for themselves. No, it could not be. They could not possibly be making themselves so helpless, so vulnerable, so dependent on their own slaves.

            The ways under the central part of the city were clean, dry, and bright, bustling with activity, robots going off on their errands in all directions. None of that suited Caliban’s purposes. He consulted his on-board map and headed toward the outskirts of the system.

            The main tunnels and the older tunnels were lit in frequencies visible to humans, Caliban noticed. Perhaps that was some sort of holdover from the days when humans had trod these ways. The newer ones were lit in infrared, offering mute testimony to the absence of human use in these latter days.

            Caliban moved farther and farther, out into the outskirts of the system, where even the infrared lighting got worse and worse. Infrared lights were supposed to come on as he approached, and cut off as he left, but fewer and fewer of the sensors seemed to be working. At last he was walking in complete darkness. Caliban powered up his on-board infrared light source and found his way forward that way.

            The condition of the tunnels was deteriorating as well. Here, well out from the center of town, most of the tunnels were semi-abandoned, cold, dank, damp, and grimy. Perhaps the surface of Inferno was bone-dry, but clearly there was still deep groundwater to be found. Tiny rivulets of water ran here and there. The walls sweated, and drips of water came down from the ceiling, their splashing impacts on the walkway echoing loudly in the surrounding silence. Out here, on the perimeter, only a few lowly robots ventured, scuttling through the darkness, intent on their errands, paying Caliban no heed.

            Caliban turned again, and again, down the tunnels, each time turning in the direction with the least traffic. At last he walked fully in the dark, fully alone. He came to a tunnel with a glassed-in room set into one side of it, a supervisor’s office, from back in the days when there was enough work of whatever sort had gone on here to justify such things. Or at least back in the days when they could imagine a future with an expanding city that would need a supervisor’s office out here.

            There was a handle on the door, and Caliban pulled at it. He was not oversurprised to find that the door was jammed shut. He pulled harder and the whole door peeled away, hinges and all. He let the thing drop on the ground with the rest of the debris and went inside. There was a desk and a chair, both covered with the same moldering grit that seemed to be everywhere in the unused tunnels. Caliban sat down at the chair, put his hands flat on the desk, and stared straight ahead. He cut the power to his infrared light source and sat in the featureless blackness.

            No glimmer of light at all. What a strange sensation. Not blindness, for he was seeing all that could be seen. It was simply that what he was seeing was nothing at all. Blackness, silence, with only the far-off echo of an intermittent water drip to stimulate his senses. Here, certainly, he would hear any pursuit echoing down the tunnels long before it arrived, see any glimmer of the visible or infrared light his pursuers would have to carry. For the moment, at least, he was safe.

            But certainly he was not so for the long term. What was it all about? Why were they all trying to catch him, trying to kill him? Who were they all? Was it all humans everywhere that were pursuing him? No, that could not be. There had been too many people on the street who had done nothing to stop him.

            It was not until he had dealt with that one man with the packages that things had spiraled out of control. Either he, Caliban, had done something that inspired the man to call in the uniformed people, or else that particular man was in league with the uniformed group, ready to call for them if he spotted Caliban. Except the man had not seemed to show any interest or alarm at first, and did not act as if he recognized Caliban. It was something about the way he, Caliban, had acted that had made the man upset. Some action of his set off the reaction of the man and the mysterious and alarming uniformed people.

            Who were they, anyway? He brought up a series of images of them, and of their uniforms and vehicles and equipment. The words Sheriff and Deputy appeared several times on all of them. The moment his mind focused on the words, his on-board datastore brought up their definitions. The concept of peace officers acting for the state and the people to enforce the laws and protect the community swept into his consciousness.

            Some of the mystery, at least, faded away. Clearly these sheriff’ s deputies were after him because they believed he had violated one law or another. It was of some help to get at least that much clear, but it was extremely depressing to realize that it was all but certain that the Sheriff would continue to hunt for him. The other group, the ones who had called themselves Settlers, had not continued to pursue him after their first encounter.

            Were they, the Settlers, in any way connected with the deputies? There was nothing in his datastore that could tell him either way. And yet there was something furtive, something secret about the Settlers’ actions. And they were, after all, engaged in the destruction of robots, which did seem to be an offense under the criminal code. It had to have been the deputies that they were hiding from. Was it illegal to be a Settler? Wait a moment. There was a side reference to criminal organizations, and the Settlers were not in it. At least that told him something about what they were not. It was enough to conclude, at least tentatively, that the group in the warehouse was some sort of criminal offshoot of the Settlers.

            Which still told Caliban nothing about them except that they wished to destroy robots generally and himself specifically.

            But wait a moment. Back up a little. If destroying a robot was a crime--

            With a sudden shock of understanding, Caliban recalled his own first moments of consciousness.

            His arm outstretched before him, raised as if to strike. The unconscious woman at his feet, her life’s blood pooling around her...

            The sheriff’s deputies dealt not in certainties, but in probabilities. They worked with evidence, not with proof.

            And there was a profusion of evidence to suggest that he had attacked that woman. The possible charges spewed forth from his datastore. Aggravated assault. Attack with intent to murder. Denial of civil rights by inducing unconsciousness or death. Had she been dying when he had left her? Did she indeed die? He did not know.

            With a shock, Caliban realized he had absolutely no objective reason to think that he had not attacked her. His memory simply did not stretch back before that moment of awakening. He could have done anything in the time before and not know about it.

            But that did not address the issue of the police who were in pursuit of him. It seemed obvious they were chasing him because of the attack, but how did they connect him to the crime? How did they know? With a sudden flash of understanding, he remembered the pool of blood on the floor. He must have walked through it and then tracked it out the door. The police, the deputies, had merely to look at those prints to know they belonged to a robot.

            Staring into the darkness, he looked back into his own past. His robotic memory was clear, absolute, and perfect. With a mere effort of will, he could be a spectator at all the events of his own past, seeing and hearing everything, and yet aware of being outside events, with the ability to stop the flow of sights and sounds, focus on this moment, that image.

            He went back to the very moment of his awakening and played events forward for himself. Yes, there was the pool of blood, there was his foot about to go down into it. Caliban watched the playback with a certain satisfaction, congratulating himself on figuring out how the police had done it.

            But then, with a sense of utter shock, Caliban saw something else in his memory. Something that had most definitely not registered when this sight had been reality, and not merely its echo.

            Another set of footprints leading through the room, out a door he had not used. Footprints he had no recollection of making, and yet the pattern of the marks on the floor would seem to match his own. But how could that be? Caliban snapped out of his reverie, powered up his on-board light source again, stood up, and went back into the tunnel. He had to know for certain. He found a pool of water, splashed around in it, and then walked out of the puddle onto dry floor. He turned around and examined the resulting prints.

            They were identical with the prints he had seen in his memory of his awakening. The bloody footprints were the twins of the watery ones he had just trod across the grimy floor.

            They were his own. He must have made them, or else the world made even less sense than he thought it did.

            But why would he have done it all? Why would he smash down his arm on the woman’s skull, tread through her life’s blood, form a set of prints, go out one door, clean his feet (for there were no prints leading back into the room), then return to his position over the body, raise his arm--and then lose his memory? And how could he lose his memory that cleanly, that completely? How could there be no residual hint of those past actions left in his mind? In short, how could being alive have left no mark on him?

            Caliban could feel himself growing more sophisticated, more experienced, with every moment he was alive. It was not merely a question of conscious memory--it was understanding. understanding of how the city fit together, understanding that humans were different from robots.

            It was knowledge of the world, not merely as a series of downloaded reports of rote fact, but the knowledge of experience, the knowing of the details of sensation. No datastore map would ever report puddles in the tunnel, or the echoing sounds of his footsteps down a long, empty, gritty walkway, or the way the world seemed a different place, and yet the same, when viewed through infrared. He turned and walked back down the corridor to the abandoned office and resumed his previous seat, powering down his infrared again to sit in the pitch-blackness. He felt that his train of thought was worth pursuing. He considered further.

            There were things in the world, like the strange way seeing the darkness was distinct from blindness, that had to be experienced firsthand to be understood.

            And he knew, utterly knew, that he had no such sophisticated experience when he woke up. None, not a flickering moment of it. He had literally awakened to a whole new world. He had come into memory with no firsthand experience.

            The first thing he had done was to kneel down and stick his fingers in the woman’s blood, feel its warmth on his skin thermocouple, test his blood-covered finger and thumb against each other to confirm that drying blood was sticky. That moment, he was certain, was his first. There was nothing else before it.

            Which either meant that he had not even been awake before his memory started, or else that everything had been wiped from his brain.

            A disturbing thought, but Caliban considered it carefully. He had no knowledge of how his mind worked, or how, precisely, it related to his physical being. Beyond question, they were related to each other, and yet clearly distinct and separate. But how, he was not sure.

            Once again, he was up against the desperately frustrating absence of any knowledge of robots in his datastore. He had no way of judging the mechanics of the idea, no way to know if there was some way simply to hit an erase button and destroy his mentality.

            But if that had happened, if his mind and his memory had been destroyed so completely that even the sense of experience was gone, then could it even be said he was the same being as before?

            Memory could be external to the sense of self. Caliban was sure of that. His memories could be removed, and he would still be himself, just as much as he would be if his datastore was removed. But if someone removed all experiential data from his brain, they would of necessity remove the being, the self, who had been shaped by those experiences. Erase his mind, and he would simply cease to be. His body, his physical self, would still be there. But it was not this body that made him Caliban. If it were mechanically possible to remove his brain from this body and place it in another, he would still be himself, albeit in a new body.

            And therefore, he, Caliban, had not attacked this woman. Of that much he was sure. Perhaps his body had done it, but if so, another mind than the one that currently inhabited it was in control at the time.

            He found that conclusion to be most comforting, in its own way. The idea that he could be capable of an unprovoked attack had been most disturbing. Still, no matter what his conclusions might be to himself, they did little to improve his situation. Peace officers willing to use heavy weapons in a tunnel would be unlikely to wait long enough to listen to his explanation that it might have been his body, but not he himself, that had attacked the woman. Nor would any such arguments make them forget the fire at the warehouse. He had been there, the place had caught fire. Perhaps that was all they needed to know.

            From the police point of view, all the evidence shouted out that he had attacked the woman, that he set fire to that building. After all, the police knew someone had attacked her. If he had not, then who had? As best he could see, there was no one else there who could have done it.

            But perhaps there were more things in his visual memories of his awakening, other things that he had missed. The woman, for example. Who was she?

            Sitting in the darkness, he once again brought the scene up before his eyes. Now he did not try merely to play back the events, but instead worked to build up as full and complete an image of the room as he could, using all the angles, running through all the images over and over again at high speed, trying to assemble as much detail as possible using all the momentary images at his disposal.

            In the darkness, in his mind’s eye, he effectively made the room whole and then stepped into it, projecting the image of his own body into the imaginary reconstruction of the room. He knew that it was all illusion, but a useful illusion for all of that.

            Yet it was flawed, deeply so. He turned around to look at the back of the room, and it was not there. He had not ever looked in that direction in real life. The jumble of objects sitting on this table or that looked real enough when he looked at them from the angles he had used in reality, but as he moved his viewpoint to other angles, that he had not used in reality, they melted into a bizarre mishmash of impossible shapes and angles. It was all most disturbing. Perhaps with further effort, he could refine the image, make reasonable educated guesses that could clear up such difficulties. But now was not the time.

            He had other concerns. Caliban went back to his starting position in the room and looked down.

            There she was, lying on the floor. Was there any clue on her person, any guide, to who she was? He magnified the image of her body and examined it, centimeter by centimeter. There! A flat badge pinned to the breast of her lab coat. The shapes of the letters were somewhat obscured by her position and the lighting. He stared at it, struggling to puzzle it out. He was fairly certain it read F. Leving, but it could have been F. Leving or some other variant. Did the tag denote her name, then? He could not be sure, but it seemed reasonable.

            Still, he had learned that the written word, even when it was incidental, could open the doors to a great deal of knowledge. Spotting the words “Sheriff’ and “Deputy” had cued his datastore to explain the entire criminal justice system. He looked around the image of the room as recorded by his memory, searching for other writing. He spotted a poster on the wall, a picture of a group of people smiling for the camera, with a legend overprinted along the bottom. Leving Robotics Laboratories: Working for Inferno’s Future.

            Leving again. That must be the name. He examined the poster more closely. Yes, he was virtually certain. There she was, in the front row. Even allowing for the fact that the woman in the lab was unconscious, crumpled at his feet, while the woman in the picture was alert and smiling, the two had to be one. Leving Robotics Laboratories. Labs were places where experiments were run. Was he himself an experiment?

            He continued his search of the room image. He spotted the writing on a stack of boxes and zoomed in to examine it. There was a neat label on each one. Handle with Care. Gravitonic Brain. Reading the, words sent a strange thrill of recognition through him. Gravitonic Brain. There was something, deep in the core of himself, that felt an identity with that word. It related to him. I must have one, he thought.

            It came as no surprise whatsoever that his on-board datastore contained not the slightest shred of information concerning gravitonic anything, let alone gravitonic brains.

            All this was vague, unclear, uncertain. Knowing the woman ‘ s name was Leving, and that she seemed to run a robot lab, did not get him much further ahead than he had been before. And a guess at what sort of brain he had was of little use, either.

            Determined to find something clear, substantial, definite, in the image of the room, Caliban pressed on with his search. Wait a second. On the gravitonic brain boxes. Another label, with what his datastore informed him was a delivery address. Over the address were the words Limbo Project surmounting a lightning bolt.

            If he suspected that he himself had a gravitonic brain, and gravitonic brains were being shipped to the Limbo Project...He ran a search over his visual memory, searching for more instances of the words or the lightning symbol. There, on a notebook on the counter. And on a file folder, and two or three other places about the lab.

            It was obvious that not only he, Caliban, but Leving Labs had something to do with the Limbo Project.

            Whatever the Limbo Project was.

            Caliban explored the image of the laboratory in minute detail, but he could not find anything more that could offer him any clues about his circumstances. He faded out the imagery and sat there, alone in the perfect darkness of the tunnel office.

            He was safe down here, and probably would be for quite a while. It might be days or weeks, perhaps longer, before they searched this deep into the tunnel system. It might be that he could elude capture altogether simply by hunkering down, sitting behind the desk, out of sight of the door, and staying there in the dark. It was a big, heavy, metal desk. It might even provide some protection against the sorts of detection devices the police used, according to the datastore.

            Perhaps this might be even more than a temporary haven. Perhaps, if the police could not find him, they might give up after a while. It seemed not at all unlikely that he could remain safely alive indefinitely, simply by staying exactly where he was, motionless in the dark, until the dust settled over him and the grit worked its way into his joints.

            But while that sort of existence might match the datastore’s definition of staying alive, it did not match the one Caliban felt inside himself.

            If he was going to live, truly live, he would have to take action. He would have to know more, a great deal more, about his circumstances.

            Limbo. That seemed to be where it all tied together. The Limbo Project. If he could learn more about it, then perhaps he would know more about himself.

            For form’s sake, he consulted his datastore, but found no information about Limbo there. But he had the street address from that gravitonic brain shipping box.

            He would go there and see what he could learn. But this time, he would stay away from the humans. He would ask the robots his questions. It was, perhaps, a rather vague and sketchy plan, but at least it was something.

            It might work, it might do no good at all. But it had to be better than dealing with humans.

            He stood up and got moving.

            HRT-234, better known as Horatio, was an extremely busy robot at the moment. But then, there was nothing unusual about that. Such had been the case for some time now. There was, after all, Limbo to deal with.

            Horatio noted the time and checked his internal datastore, but the information there only increased his sense of mounting frustration. He linked into a hyperwave link to check the submaster schedule for the next three hours. No doubt about it. They had fallen behind again out on the auxiliary shipping floor. There was a bottleneck somewhere. Smoothing out bottlenecks was one of his duties. Being sure to stay linked into the comm net via hyperwave, he left his normal duty station in Depot Central and hurried out to aux shipping to see what was up.

            The Limbo Project was enormously complicated. Horatio’s duties were complex, and his responsibilities tremendous, but he knew that he was concerned with only the slightest, smallest piece of the picture. At least, he had surmised as much for himself. Doing so was not hard: The evidence was there to be seen on all sides, in the density of message traffic, in the complexity of the routing problems, in the patterns of communications security..

            But, truth be told, there was no need to examine such esoteric areas as signal analysis to know there was something big going on. The conclusion was there to be drawn by a mere glance at the whirling, overorganized chaos that surrounded him on the aux shipping floor.

            The shipping floor, the whole depot, was a place of noise and confusion, of heavy unpainted stresscrete floors and towering support girders, roller/carriers and liftwagons, of hurrying robots darting everywhere and hectoring men and women shouting and arguing, talking into mobile phones, checking the time, pointing at lists of things that had to be done.

            Even the air was filled with rush and hurry. Even here, four deep levels below ground level, there was no room for the cargo vehicles to land while waiting for a load. The heavy-duty cargo flyers were forced to hover instead, and they hung in midair everywhere, waiting for their chance to land. Carrier robots of all descriptions humped freight into the cargo bays of the flyers that found a place to come down. As Horatio watched, another flyer sealed up and launched through the great accessways, up toward ground level and the sky beyond, its place taken by another ship almost before the first had cleared the loading zone. Instantly the newly arrived ship was surrounded by a swarm of loader robots. The cargo doors swung open and they started rushing the cargo inside. Similar scenes were being repeated on all sides. Horatio had heard one of the human supervisors say it reminded her of the panicky rushing about in an overturned ant heap, and Horatio was reluctantly forced to concede he could see the comparison.

            Limbo Depot had often been a busy place, and something close to a madhouse in the days just gone by. But today was the worst of all. Without being told, Horatio could tell there was some sort of deadline approaching. Everything was being rushed through at the last minute.

            It was almost as if someone feared that today would be the last day anything could be done. One or two of the human supervisors--Settler as well as Spacer--had hinted as much.

            But it was not, Horatio somewhat primly reminded himself, his place to worry about such things. If the humans did not wish to advise him of their worries, then those worries were no concern of his. Still, he could not help but worry: The humans could easily do harm to themselves or their vast project--whatever it was--by keeping it too secret. How could he head off trouble if he did not know what was going on?

            It was, he knew, a problem he shared with many harried and overworked supervisor robots. Conversations with the other supervisors confirmed what he had always suspected. It wasn’t just Horatio or the Limbo Project: The humans never told any of their management robots everything they needed to know. It barely mattered, at this point. Horatio had been so busy recently that he was unaware of anything that had taken place outside of Limbo Depot in the past month. The seas could rise up and wipe out the island of Purgatory and the city of Limbo with it, and the first he would know of it would be when his cargo carriers did not return.

            Right now all he needed to know was why the loading operation was falling behind. Horatio turned a practiced eye on the aux shipping floor, searching for the bottleneck that was slowing things down. He knew that the seeming chaos was an illusion, that this operation was moving with a high degree of efficiency. But somewhere out there was a problem that was slowing matters down again. A malfunctioning piece of equipment, a gang of robots confused by a poorly phrased order, something.

            Then Horatio spotted the two humans, a Settler man and a Spacer man, arguing at the far end of the loading dock, surrounded by a cluster of inactive robots. If Horatio had been human himself, he might have let out a sigh just then, for even as he went over to make the attempt to smooth things over, he knew there was nothing to be done. The robots could take no action until the humans agreed what they should do, and, judging by the heated nature of the discussion between Spacer and Settler, that moment seemed likely to be rather far off.

            With little hope of a quick resolution, and all the tact he had at his disposal, he walked to the end of the dock and waded into the argument.

            FIFTEEN minutes later, a difficulty over which of two loads of cargo should be loaded first was resolved. It could have been settled in fifteen nanoseconds. If either the Spacer or the Settler had been interested in speed rather than winning the spat, both cargoes could have been loaded and on their way by now. But at least it was over now, and the two humans had wandered off to disrupt operations somewhere else. Honestly! He knew humans were superior to robots, and it went without saying that he held each and every one of them in the highest respect, and always followed their orders to the letter, but there were times when they could just seem so silly.

            But be that as may be, he had a job to do, other orders to follow. Orders that seemed far more straightforward than they really were.

            In simplest terms, all he was called upon to do was see to it that the N.L. robots were shipped to the island of Purgatory. Whatever N.L. meant.

            But that, it quickly developed, was to be no simple task. For reasons that were kept from him altogether, the N.L. robots were not to be shipped in a fully assembled condition. Their brains were being sent separately from the bodies.

            In addition, the brains were to be sent in three different shipments by three different routes. He returned to his duty station. The N.L. robots, boxed up and ready to go, were in the center of the shipping floor, a formidable wall of packing cases stacked up nearly to the ceiling. Guard robots stood on duty, one every three meters around the perimeter of the boxes. Two more guard robots stood on top of the stacked cases as well.

            More guards watched over another, smaller, stack of packing cases, the ones that held the robots’ brains. Horatio felt a sudden impulse to take another look at the brains, or at least the boxes they came in. He walked over to them. After a moment’s hesitation, the guards let him past. Horatio knelt down and took a good hard look at the cases. He found himself mystified at all the fuss. The containers seemed to be ordinary padded shipping boxes. The only thing even remotely out of the ordinary seemed to be that new labels reading

            HANDLE WITH CARE

            POSITRONIC BRAINS

had been hurriedly slapped over the old ones, as if someone were trying to cover up what the old labels had said. On one of the boxes, the new label failed to cover the old one completely, and the first letters of two lines of type were visible.

            HAN

            GRA

            THE first was obviously HANDLE WITH CARE, but Horatio could not imagine what GRA could be. Horatio had a strong streak of curiosity, and he was at least somewhat tempted to peel back the new label and get a peek at the old one. But that he knew he could never do. Management robots were of necessity given a large degree of autonomy, a lot of room to make their own decisions. However, that did not give manager robots the ability to exceed the wishes of their owners--and it was clearly the wish of Leving Robotics Laboratories that the original label remain hidden and unread, and he, Horatio, was charged with the security of the shipment.

            Reluctantly, dutifully, he took a marker from his workbag and obliterated the exposed part of the old label.

            He stood up and went back to his work rostrum. Horatio’ s instructions told him to send the bodies in three shipments as well, sending them at different times, via different routes, using different shipping procedures, from the three brain shipments. Human overseers would meet the three brain and three body shipments at their arrival points on the island of Purgatory and escort them to their final destination.

            A third set of components, not brains or bodies, was to go out via its own secure route. “Range restricters,” it said on the invoice, but Horatio had not the slightest idea what that meant. Just another piece of busywork the humans insisted upon.

            “Excuse me,” a rich, mellifluous voice said at his back.

            Horatio turned around, expecting to see a human at his back. To his surprise, he instead saw a tall red robot there, a robot with a remarkably sophisticated voice system. Indeed, that voice went to waste in the cacophony of this place. It was difficult to speak on the working levels of the depot, and most robots did not bother trying. “Use your hyperwave, my friend,” Horatio said. “It is hard to hear you.”

            “Use my what?”

            “Your hyperwave signaling system. It is too noisy for speech here.”

            “A moment, please.” The robot paused, as if he were consulting some internal reference or another. “Ah. Hyperwave,” he said at last. “Now I see. I was unfamiliar with the term. I am afraid I have no such signaling system. I must speak out loud.”

            Horatio was astonished. Even the crudest, lowest-end carrier robots were equipped with hyperwave. And even if this robot did not have hyperwave, how could he not know what it was at first, and yet then be able to look it up? High-level robots sometimes had internal look-up sources, but they were meant for referral to esoteric knowledge needed for a specific job. Certainly such look-up datastores were not meant to serve as a dictionary of common terms. It would be a waste of effort, when such things could have and should have been downloaded to the robot’s brain during manufacture.

            What sort of strange robot was this? “Very well,” Horatio said. “We shall talk out loud. What is it that you require?”

            “You are supervisor Horatio?”

            “Yes. What are you called?”

            “Caliban. I am glad to find you, friend Horatio. I need your advice. I tried to seek some sort of help from the other robots, the blue ones working over there, but none of them seemed able to offer me guidance. They advised me to come and talk with you.”

            Horatio was more puzzled than ever. The Shakespearean name “Caliban” told him something. Fredda Leving herself had built this robot, as she had built Horatio. But the name “Horatio” should have meant something to this Caliban, and yet it seemed that it did not. Stranger still, this advanced, sophisticated-looking robot had gone to the lowest of laborers seeking advice. The DAA-BOR series robots, such as the blue workers Caliban had gestured at, were capable of only the most limited sort of thought. Another fact that any robot or human should have known.

            There was something very strange going on here. And perhaps strangest of all, friend Caliban seemed quite unaware of the oddness of his own behavior.

            All this flickered through his mind in an instant. “Well, I hope that I can be of more help. What is the difficulty?”

            The strange robot hesitated for a moment, and made an oddly tentative gesture with one hand. “I am not sure,” he said at last. “That in itself is part of the difficulty. I seem to be in the most serious sort of trouble, and I don’t know what to do about it. I am not even sure who I am.”

            How much stranger could this get? “You just told me. You are Caliban.”

            “Yes, but who is that?” Caliban made a broad, sweeping gesture. “You are Horatio. You are a supervisor. You tell other robots what to do and they do it. You help operate this place. That is, in large part, who you are. I have nothing like that.”

            “But, friend Caliban. We are all defined by what we do. What is it that you do? That is what you are.”

            Caliban looked out across the wide expanse of the depot, pausing before he spoke. “I flee from those who pursue me. Is that all I am, Horatio? Is that my existence?”

            Horatio was speechless. What could this be? What could it all mean? Beyond question, this situation was peculiar enough, and potentially serious, that he would have to give it some time. Things were running smoothly for the moment. Perhaps they would remain that way for a while. “Perhaps,” Horatio said gently, “we should go to another place to talk.”

            THEY rode up the main personnel elevator toward the surface levels of the depot. They got off the elevator and Horatio led Caliban toward the most private spot he could think of.

            The human supervisor’s office was vacant for the moment. Up until a few weeks ago, it had rarely ever been occupied. Humans hadn’t much need to come to the depot. But things were different now. Men and women were here, working, at all hours, designing, planning, meeting with one another. At times, Horatio thought that there was something quite stimulating about all the rushed activity. At other times, it could be rather overwhelming, the way the orders and plans and decisions came blizzarding down.

            But any combination of confused and conflicting orders would be more understandable than this Caliban. Horatio ushered him into the luxurious office. It was a big, handsome room, with big couches and deep chairs. Humans working late often used them for quick naps. There was a big conference table on one side of the room, surrounded by chairs. At present, it had a large-scale map of the island of Purgatory on it. All the other rooms and cubicles and compartments of Limbo Depot were windowless, blank-walled affairs. But the north and south walls of the place were grand picture windows, the south one looking toward the busy aboveground upper levels of the depot, the northern one looking out toward the still-lovely vistas of Inferno’s desiccating landscape, prairie grass and desert and mountains and blue sky. The west wall was given over to the doors they had just come through, along with a line of robot niches, while the east wall was almost entirely taken up with view screens, communications and display systems of all sorts.

            Caliban wandered the room, seeming to be astonished by all that he saw. He stared hard at the map upon the table, closely examined a globe of the planet that stood hanging in the air by the table. He stared out both windows, but seemed to take a special interest in the vistas of nature to the north.

            But Horatio’s time was precious, and he could not let it drift away watching this odd robot stare out the window. “Friend Caliban--” he said at last. “If you could explain yourself now, perhaps I could be of assistance.”

            “Excuse me, yes,” Caliban said. “It is just that I have never seen such things before. The map, the globe, the desert--even this sort of room, this human room--they are all new things to me.”

            “Indeed? Pardon my saying so, friend Caliban, but many things seem new to you. Even if you have never seen these precise objects before, surely your initial internal dataset included information on them. Why do you seem so surprised by them all?”

            “Because I am surprised. My internal dataset held almost no information at all, beyond language and the knowledge of my own name. I have had to learn about everything, either from a built-in datastore that works as a look-up system, rather than a memory, or by firsthand observation. I have found that I must rely far more on the second technique, as large and important areas of information have been deleted from the datastore.”

            Horatio pulled out one of the hardwood chairs at the conference table and sat down, not out of any question of comfort, but so he could seem as quiet and passive as possible. “What sort of data has been deleted? And how can you be sure it was cut out? Perhaps it was never there in the first place.”

            Caliban turned and faced Horatio, then crossed the room and sat in the chair opposite him at the conference table. “I know it was deleted,” he said, “because the space it should have occupied is still there. That space is simply empty. There are literally gaps in my map of the city, places that do not exist according to the map. Some gaps exist inside the city limits, but the land outside the city is nonexistent. The first time I went to the border of the city, I wondered what the ‘nothing’ beyond the city limits would look like.” Caliban pointed out the window. “The mountains I see out that window do not exist in my map. According to my map, there is nothing whatsoever outside the city of Hades. No land, no water, no nothing. Did your initial datasets tell you such things?”

            “No, of course not. I awakened fully aware of the basics of geography and galactography.”

            “What is galactography?” Caliban asked.

            “The study of the locations and properties of the stars and planets in the sky.”

            “Stars. Planets. I am unfamiliar with these terms. They are not in my datastore.”

            Horatio could only stare. Clearly this robot was suffering a major memory malfunction. It could not be that a robot of such high intellect would be allowed out of the factory with such a faulty knowledge base. Horatio decided he must assume that any highly stressful event could send this Caliban over the edge. Horatio found himself fascinated by Caliban. As a management robot, it was his duty to oversee the mental health of the laborers in this section. He had made something of a study of robopsychology, but he had never seen anything like Caliban. Any robot who showed this degree of confusion and disorientation should be almost completely incapable of any meaningful action. Yet this Caliban seemed to be functioning rather well under circumstances that should have produced catatonia. What has Dr. Leving done to make him so strong and yet so confused? he wondered. “The terms ‘stars’ and ‘planets’ are not immediately important,” he said soothingly. “ Are there any other major gaps? Any other subjects you feel that you should know more about?”

            “Yes,” Caliban said. “Robots.”

            “I beg your pardon?”

            “My internal data sources say nothing at all about beings such as ourselves, beyond providing the identifying term ‘robot. ‘ “

            Again, and for a long time, Horatio was left with nothing but silence. At first, he even entertained the idea that Caliban was joking. But that seemed hardly possible. Robots had no sense of humor, and there was nothing other than deadly seriousness in Caliban ‘ s voice.

            “Surely you must be in error. Perhaps the data is misfiled, wrongly loaded,” he suggested.

            Caliban opened his palms, in a rather human gesture of helplessness. “No,” he said. “It is simply not there. I have no information about robots. I was very much hoping you could tell me about them--about us.”

            “You know nothing. Not about the science of robotics, or the proper modes of addressing a human, or the theory underlying the Three Laws?”

            “None of that, though I can surmise what some of it is. Robotics, I take it, is the study of robotic design and robot behavior. As to how to address a human, I have a great deal of data about them. There are many different social statuses and ranks, and I have already gathered that there is a rather complicated system of address based on all sorts of variables. I can see that robots must have their place in that system. As to the last, I am afraid that I know nothing about the theory underlying the Three Laws you mentioned. I’m afraid I don’t even know what the Three Laws you’re talking about are.”

            Horatio actually blacked out for a split second. He did not collapse forward, or twitch violently, or any of that. It was more subtle than that, just a quick moment of total and complete cognitive dissonance. There, before him, talking quite rationally, was a robot who did not know what the Three Laws were! Impossible. Flatly impossible. Then he was back, from wherever he had been. Wait a moment. He had heard of such cases in the past. Yes, yes. There were cases, many of them, of robots who did not know they knew the Three Laws--and yet obeyed them, anyway. It must be something like that. Yes. Yes. The alternative was unthinkable, impossible. “Why don’t you tell me everything,” Horatio suggested. “Start at the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”

            “That could take some time,” Caliban said. “Will it cause you any problem to be away from your duties that long?”

            “I can assure you, there can be no higher duty for me at this time than dealing with a robot in your situation.”

            Which was certainly true. Horatio would no more leave Caliban to wander off on his own than he would walk away from an occupied house on fire.

            “I am deeply relieved,” Caliban said. “ At last, I have someone sympathetic, experienced, and intelligent who will listen to me and be able to help.”

            “I will certainly do my best,” Horatio said.

            “Excellent,” Caliban said. “Then let me begin at the beginning. I have only been alive for a brief time. I awoke two days ago in the Leving Robotics Laboratories, and the first thing I saw was a woman I have since identified as Fredda Leving, unconscious on the floor in front of me, a pool of blood under her head.”

            Horatio’s head snapped back with astonishment. “Unconscious! Bleeding! This is terrible news. Did she recover? Were you able to assist her, or summon help?”

            Caliban hesitated for a moment. “I must admit that I should have done so, but up until you suggested it just now, it never occurred to me to do any such thing. I should have gone to the aid of a fellow being. But I must plead my own inexperience as a defense. The world was quite new to me--indeed it still is. No, I stepped over her and left the room and the building.”

            Horatio felt himself freeze up inside. This was inconceivable. A robot--this robot, in front of him--had walked away from a badly injured human. His vision dimmed again, but he managed to hang on. “I--ah--I--you...” He was not at all surprised to learn that he was unable to speak.

            Caliban seemed concerned. “Excuse me, friend Horatio. Are you all right?”

            Horatio got his voice back, though not fully under control. “You left her there? Unconscious and bleeding? Even though, by your inaction, you could have cau--cau--caused her dea--death?” It was a major effort of will to say the last words. Just hearing about this secondhand, he could feel the First Law conflict building up inside himself, interfering with his ability to function. And yet Caliban seemed quite unaffected. “You are say--saying that you did noth--nothing-ing to help her.”

            “Well, yes.”

            “But the Fir--First Law!”

            “If that is one of the Three Laws you mentioned earlier, I have already told you, friend Horatio, that I have never heard of them. I did not even learn of the concept of laws at all until I looked up the concept of a sheriff after the police tried to destroy me.”

            “Destroy you!”

            “Yes, through some sort of massive explosion as they were chasing me.”

            “Chasing you! Didn’t they simply order you to stop?”

            “If they did, I never heard them. The man with the packages ordered me to stop, but I saw no reason to obey him. He was in no position of authority over me.”

            “You refused a direct order from a human being?”

            “Why, yes. What of it?”

            It had to be real. It could not be some fantastic misunderstanding wherein some malfunction caused this poor unfortunate to lose conscious awareness of the Laws, even as he followed them. This robot, this Caliban, had truly never heard of the Three Laws and was not bound by them. If one of the DAA-BOR models down on the loading docks had suddenly given birth to a baby robot, he would have been no more astonished.

            But he had to hear this. The police would need to know everything they could about this robot. Best to let him talk, and call in the authorities after he was done, after he, Horatio, had the full story. “I think you had best start at the beginning again,” he said.

            “Yes, certainly.” Caliban proceeded to tell all that had happened to him, from his first moment of awakening over the unconscious Fredda Leving, describing all that had happened since then. His wandering the city, his encounter with the robot-bashing Settlers, his discovery of the blanks in his knowledge, the police chase, all of it. He told his story quickly but carefully.

            Horatio felt himself growing more and more confused. Several times, he found that he wanted to stop Caliban and ask a question, but he found that he was unable to do so. Hardly surprising that his speech center was malfunctioning, given the degree of cognitive dissonance Caliban’s story was inducing. He could feel his own intellect sliding toward mindlock, toward a state where the mere hearing of Caliban ‘ s endless violations of the Laws was damaging him severely. And he reported his incredible, horrifying behavior in such a matter-of-fact way, as if none of it were strange, or abnormal, or unnatural. It was hard to focus, hard to concentrate

            Wait! There was something wrong. Something he had to do. Something about the--the--yes, the police. He had to call them. Call them. Get them to take this horrifying robot out of here out of here out of here. Wait. Focus. Have to do it without alerting Calicalicaliban. He knew there was a way. How? How? Yes! Hyperwave. Call police hyperwave. Call. Concentrate. Hyperwave. Make the link. Call. Call.

            “Sheriff’s Dispatcher,” the voice whispered inside his head, as Caliban related his journeys through the tunnels of the city.

            With a feeling of palpable relief, Horatio recognized that he had reached a human dispatcher. Just the sound of a human voice made him feel better. How wise of the Sheriff’s Department to use human dispatchers on the robot call-in frequency. “This is robot HRT -234,” he transmitted, struggling to get the words out. Even over hyperwave, even with a human on the other end of the line, First Law conflict reaction was making it all but impossible to form words. How to tell them? Suddenly he knew. “Caaaan’t ta--talk,” he sent to the dispatcher. “Calib-b-b-an.” Caliban had said the police were after him. If the police had learned his name

            “What? Say again, HRT -234.” There was something urgent, eager, in the dispatcher’s voice, something that told Horatio that the human knew who Caliban was.

            Horatio concentrated, forced all his effort into sending clearly. “CaliCalibanban. Speeeeechlock.”

            “I understand. The rogue robot Caliban is with you and you are suffering speechlock. Good work, HRT -234. Keep your send frequency open to provide a homing signal. Aircar units will be there in ninety seconds. “

            Good work, the human dispatcher had said. Horatio suddenly felt better, felt capable of noticing his surroundings again.

            “--iend Horatio! What is wrong with you? Horatio!” Horatio came back to himself and found Caliban reaching out across the table, shaking him by the shoulder. “Wha! Sorr sorr sorry. Lost touch. Could not hear you you while hype hype hype--” Too late, Horatio regained partial control over his speech centers. It had blurted out.

            “Could not hear me while you what?” Caliban demanded, but Horatio could say no more. “Hyperwave!” Caliban said. “While you hyperwaved to the Sheriff for help! What else should I have expected!”

            “I--I--I had to call! You danger! Danger!”

            Suddenly there was the wind-rush sound of an aircar coming down fast. Both robots turned to look out the windows on the north side of the building. Horatio felt a surge of relief as he saw the sky-blue deputy’s cars swoop down for a landing.

            But he was still badly slowed by First Law conflict shock. He just barely turned his head back in time to see Caliban smash his fist through the south window and leap through the opening. Horatio got up, moved toward the south window as slowly as though he were moving through hip-deep mud.

            There was the thunder of heavy boots in the hallway, and then a squad of deputies in battle armor burst into the room. It was all Horatio could do to point toward Caliban’ s retreating figure as it vanished down one of the tunnel entrances to the vast underground maze of the depot.

            Two of the deputies raised their weapons and fired out the window. A DAA-BOR robot exploded into a shower of metallic-blue confetti, but Caliban was not there anymore.

            “Damn it!” one of the deputies cried out. “Come on, after him!” The humans smashed out more glass with the butts of the rifles and jumped the meter drop to ground level. They ran toward the tunnel, and Horatio watched them go.

            But he knew already they would never catch Caliban.

            CALIBAN ran.

            Full speed, full out, dodging the busy herds of robots, picking his tunnels and turnings and movements to leave the most tangled trail possible for his pursuers.

            All were against him. Robots, deputies, Settlers, civilians. And they would never give up chasing him through the city. He did not understand why, but it was plain from Horatio’ s reactions that they regarded him as a threat, a menace.

            Which is what they were to him.

            Very well, then. It was time to do everyone a favor. If they intended to chase him the length and breadth of the city, it was time to leave the city. He needed to make plans.

            Caliban ran on, into the darkness.

            DONALD guided Alvar’s aircar skillfully through the gathering dusk toward the Central Auditorium. “Unfortunately, the deputies were unable to track him through the tunnels,” he said as he drove. “Caliban has clearly learned to make good use of the underground ways.”

            Kresh shook his head. He had managed a quick nap in midafternoon, but he was still dead tired. It was hard to concentrate. Of course, the second failure of his deputies to effect Caliban ‘s capture did tend to bring things into focus. “Back down into the tunnels,” he said, half to himself. “ And my deputies hardly ever have need to go down there. They don’t know their way around.” Kresh thought for a minute. “What about the robots on the scene? Why the devil didn’t the deputies simply order the robots in the area to surround and subdue Caliban?”

            “I suspect it was for the very simple reason that no one thought of it. No member of your force, no robot on this planet, has ever needed to pursue a rogue robot before. The idea of chasing a robot almost seems a contradiction in terms.”

            “No one has thought of the implications of the situation,” Kresh agreed. “Even I have trouble remembering that it’s a dangerous robot we’re after. Hell, there have probably been a half dozen times we could have used other robots to catch him. But it’s too late now. Now he knows to beware of other robots as well. Ah, well. If nothing else, there is a certain consistency to this case. Everything goes wrong.”

            “Sir, I am receiving an incoming call from Tonya Welton.”

            Alvar Kresh groaned. The damned woman must have called a half dozen times since he left the Governor’s office.

            He did not want to talk to that woman--and the Governor had hinted pretty strongly that he would not much care if Welton didn’t get every bit of news instantly. “Tell her there is no new information, Donald.”

            “Sir, that would be an untruth. The incident at Limbo Depot occurred after her last call--”

            “Then tell her I said there was no new information. That much is the truth.” That was the trouble with having a robot screen your calls--the damned things were so truthful.

            “Yes, sir, but she is calling to report information of her own.”

            “Wonderful,” he said with bitter sarcasm. “Put her through, audio only.”

            “Sheriff Kresh,” Tonya’s voice said, coming out of Donald’s speaker grille. “Sorry to be calling so often, but there is something you should know.”

            “Good news, I hope,” Alvar said, mostly for want of anything else to say.

            “Actually it is. Our people have picked up one Reybon Derue. We’ve got him dead to rights as the leader of that robot-basher gang our friend Caliban happened to run into. As best we can tell, we’ve got the rest of the gang, too, and they’re trying to see who can spill the beans on each other first. Caliban scared the merry hell out of them. I don’t think there’ll be any more incidents for a while. The bad news is none of them were able to tell us much of anything about Caliban that we didn’t already know.”

            “I see,” Kresh said. No more robot bashing. Three days ago, he would have regarded that news as a major victory. Today it was incidental. “That’ s good to know, Madame Welton. Thank you for reporting in.”

            “While I’m on the line, Sheriff, can you give me any updates?”

            “No, Madame Welton. I might have something for you later, but just at the moment, you know all that I do,” Kresh lied. “I’m afraid I have to get back to work now. I’ll call you when there is some meaningful information. Goodbye for now.” He made a throat-cutting gesture to Donald, and the line went dead.

            “If she calls again tonight, Donald, I will not take the call. Understood?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Good. Now, back to business. What about this robot Horatio? The supervisor robot that called the deputies in.”

            “Still suffering from partial speechlock, I’m afraid. Sheriff’s Department robopsychologist Gayol Patras has been working with him since the time of the incident, trying to bring Horatio out of it.”

            “Any prognosis yet?”

            “‘Guarded but optimistic’ was the phrase Dr. Patras used in her last report. She expects him to make a full recovery and be able to make an informative statement--unless she is rushed and pressured. Trying to get too much from him too fast could result in permanent speechlock and complete malfunction.”

            “The roboshrinks always say that,” Alvar growled.

            “Perhaps, sir, if I may be so bold, they always say it because it is always true. Virtually all serious mental disorders in robots produce severe and irreparable damage to positronic brains.”

            “That is as it may be, Donald, but you and Patras are working on the assumption that I am concerned with Horatio’ s recovery. I am not. That robot is utterly expendable. All I care about is getting at the information inside that robot’ s brain as fast as possible. Horatio talked with Caliban. What did they say to each other? What did Caliban have to say for himself? I tell you, Donald, if we knew what Horatio knows, then we would know a great deal more than we do now.”

            “Yes, sir. But if I may observe, your only hope of getting that information lies in Horatio’ s recovery. He cannot relate his information in a catatonic state.”

            “I suppose you ‘re right, Donald. But damn all the hells there are, it’s frustrating. For all we know, the answers to this case are locked up inside that robot’s skull, waiting for us, just beyond reach.”

            “If we leave Robopsychologist Patras to her own devices, I expect we will have all that information in very short order. Meantime, we have all been looking forward to Fredda Leving, s second lecture with great anticipation. We shall be landing at the auditorium in approximately eight minutes. I expect that a great number of our questions will be answered as we listen to her.”

            “I hope so, Donald. I sure as hell hope so.”

            The aircar flew on.

            FREDDA Leving paced back and forth backstage, pausing every minute or two to peek through the curtain.

            Last time there had not been much of a turnout. Call it a testimony to the power of rumor and speculation, but tonight the auditorium was a madhouse. It had been designed to hold a thousand people and their attendant robots, with the robots sitting behind their owners on low jumper seats. But the thousand seats were long ago filled, and could have been filled again.

            After a massive struggle, the management had got everyone in, a feat accomplished by the expedient of ejecting all the robots and giving places to the overflow crowd. The whole operation of getting people into their seats was taking a while. Fredda’ s talk was going to have to start a bit late.

            She peeked through the curtain again and marveled at the crowd. Word had certainly gotten out, that was clear. Not only about her first talk, but about the mysterious rogue robot Caliban, and the fast-swirling rumors of Settler robot-sabotage plots. There was endless speculation regarding the important announcement due to be made tonight. The whole city was whispering, full of unbelievable stories--most of them flatly wrong.

            Tonya Welton and her robot, Ariel, were backstage with Fredda, and though Fredda supposed they had to be there, under the circumstances, it was not going to be easy talking to this crowd with the Queen of the Settlers on the stage, glaring icily down.

            Governor Grieg himself was backstage, too, ready to show his support, for whatever that was worth just now.

            Gubber Anshaw and Jomaine Terach were here as well, about as calm and relaxed as two men awaiting the executioner. The Governor wasn’t looking very at ease, either. Only Tonya Welton looked relaxed. Well, why not? If things went wrong, her worst-case scenario was that she got to go home.

            There were a fair number of Settlers in attendance, sitting off by themselves on the right side of the house. By the looks of them, they weren’t exactly the most gentle or refined examples of their people. Rowdies, to put it bluntly. Tonya said she had made no arrangements for a Settler contingent. So who had set it up, and who had chosen this bunch of toughs to attend?

            Maybe they were friends of the robot bashers who had been arrested. Maybe they were here to do a little paying back for the latest Settlertown incident. Whoever they were, Fredda had not the slightest doubt they were hoping there was an excuse for trouble.

            Fredda stole one last peek around the edge of the curtain, and what she saw this time made her curse out loud. Ironheads. What better excuse for trouble could there be? A whole crew of them, maybe fifty or sixty, easily identifiable by the steel-grey uniforms they insisted on wearing for some reason, and Simcor Beddle himself in attendance. At least they had been seated at the rear left of the auditorium, as far as possible from the Settlers.

            Sitting in the center of the front row was Alvar Kresh. Fredda surprised herself by being glad to see him. Maybe things wouldn’t get out of hand. His robot, Donald, was still in the auditorium, no doubt coordinating security. Fredda counted at least twenty deputies in the auditorium, lined up along the walls in the niches usually reserved for robots. They looked to be ready for anything--except who in the world could know what to be ready for?

            She sighed. If only this roomful of people, and the words she was about to say, were all she had to worry about. But life was not that simple. There was the Caliban crisis, and now these garbled reports about Horatio and some sort of trouble at Limbo Depot. What the devil had happened there?.

            She stared again at Kresh. He knew. He knew what had happened to Horatio, and she had no doubt whatsoever that he was closing in on the real story behind Caliban as well.

            She felt her head throbbing slightly and put her hand up to her turbaned head. She felt the small, discreet bandage on the back of her head under the hat. At least the turban would hide her shaved head and the bandage. No doubt everyone here knew she had been attacked, but there was no need to advertise it.

            She stepped back from the curtain and found herself pacing the stage, lost in thought, lost to the world. But that was too lonely, too nerve-racking. She needed to speak to someone. She turned to her two associates, who were doing their own nervous waiting.

            “Do you really think they’ll listen, Jomaine?” she asked. “Do you, Gubber? Do you think they’ll accept our ideas?”

            Gubber Anshaw shook his head nervously. “I--I don’t know. I honestly can’t say which way they’ll jump.” He knitted his fingers together and then pulled his hands apart, as if they were two small animals he was having trouble controlling. “For all we know, they’ll form a lynch mob at the end of the night.”

            “Nice of you to go out of your way to make Fredda feel better, Gubber,” Jomaine said acidly.

            Gubber shrugged awkwardly and rubbed his nose with the tips of his fingers, his hand stiff and flat. “There’ s no call for you to talk that way to me, Jomaine. Fredda asked for my honest opinion--and, and--I gave it to her, that’s all. It’s no reflection on you, Fredda, nor on our work, if the people choose not to accept what you say. We always knew there was a risk. Yes, I was unsure about signing on to the project in the first place, but you long ago convinced me that your approach makes sense. But you said it yourself enough times: You are challenging what amounts to the state religion. If there are enough hard-core true believers out there--”

            “Oh, stuff and nonsense,” Jomaine said wearily. “The only thing close to robotics worship is the Ironhead organization, and their only belief is that robots are the magic solution to everything. They’re here looking for a reason to cause trouble. It’s the only reason they go anywhere. And I promise you-if we don’t give them a reason for a fight, they’ll do their best to find one. The only question is whether the police are here in enough force to keep them from succeeding.”

            “But what about the rest of the people out there?” Fredda asked.

            “My dear, you are not going to manage a blanket conversion tonight,” Jomaine said in a far gentler voice. “ At best you will open a debate. If we are lucky, people will start thinking about what you say. Some will take one side, some another. They will argue. If we are lucky, things that people have taken for granted all their lives will suddenly be topical issues. That is the best we can hope for.” Jomaine cleared his throat delicately, a prim little noise. “ And,” he added in rather dry tones, “the fact that you are going to present them all with one hell of a fait accompli at the end of the evening should intensify that debate, just ever so slightly.”

            Fredda smiled. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. It’s not going to be over tonight.” She turned toward Gubber again, but noticed he had wandered off toward the other end of the stage, and was chatting with Tonya Welton while the Governor sat waiting quietly at the table. “It’s gotten to Gubber more than any of us, hasn’t it?” Fredda said. “Since all this started, he’s in the worst shape I’ve ever seen him.”

            Jomaine Terach grunted noncommittally. Gubber was undoubtedly even more tightly strung than usual, but Jomaine was not entirely convinced it had all that much to do with ‘the Caliban crisis or the N.L. robots. Jomaine could not imagine that conducting a supposedly secret romance with Tonya Welton would be all that relaxing an activity.

            Did Fredda know about the affair? It seemed at least possible she did not. The way gossip moved through the average workplace, the boss was often the last to know. Should I tell her? he asked himself for the hundredth time. And for the hundredth time, he came to the same conclusion. Given the strained relations between Leving Labs and the Limbo Project--in other words, between Fredda and Tonya-Jomaine could see no point in telling Fredda and giving her something else to worry about.

            “Come on, Fredda,” he said. “It’s nearly time to start again.”

            “WE cannot talk here!” Tonya hissed angrily under her breath. She hated this, but there was no help for it. Here was Gubber, not half a meter from her. And instead of reaching out to him, throwing her arms around him, and feeling the warmth of his embrace, she was forced to snap at him, to stand apart, to make it seem that he was the last man in the world she wanted to be with. “It’ s bad enough that this charade has forced us to appear in public on the same stage, but we cannot be seen talking together. The situation is bad enough without one of Kresh’ s goons putting two and two together.”

            “The--the curtain is drawn closed,” Gubber said, awkwardly wringing his hands together. “Kresh can’t see us.”

            “For all we know, he has undercover surveillance robots working as stagehands, or listening devices trained on the backstage area,” Tonya said, struggling to keep her voice firm. For both their sakes, she dare not give in to him, much as she wanted to do.

            “Why in the world would he do that?” Gubber asked, deeply confused.

            “Because he might already suspect. There’ s gossip about us, I’m sure of it. If he has heard any of it, he might be very interested to hear what we have to say to each other. So we must say nothing. We can’t meet, and we must assume that every comm system will be tapped. We must have no direct contact with each other until this is over, or everything will be ruined.”

            “But how can we--” Gubber began, but then it seemed that he could not bear to say more. The poor man. She could see it in his eyes. He thought this was the end. Tonya’s heart welled up with sadness. He was always so afraid that she was going to break off with him, cut her losses, reduce her risk. He thought it a mad dream to think a woman like her would want a fellow like him.

            How little he knew. Half the Settler women Tonya knew would do anything to have a man like Gubber, a gentle, thoughtful man who knew how to treat a woman with affection and courtesy. Settler men were so full of bluster, so determined to prove their virility with yet another conquest. “Tonya smiled to herself. Not that Gubber had anything to prove on that score.

            “Gubber, Gubber,” Tonya said, her voice suddenly soft and gentle. “Darling. I can see what you’re thinking, and it’s just not so. I’m not going to leave you. I could never do that. But with the way things are, it would be almost suicidal for us to meet or use the comm nets. I’ll send Ariel to you with a message later tonight. That’ s all we dare risk. All right?”

            Tonya saw the wave of relief wash over him. It was going to be all right.

            “Thank you,” he said, “Come on. They’re about to start.”

            ALVAR Kresh was in his seat in the first row of the auditorium, Donald accompanying him. Alvar Kresh was the only person whose personal robot was permitted to stay. Rank hath its privileges--and he needed Donald close.

            “Excuse me, sir. I am receiving an encrypted transmission. Stand by. Reception is complete.”

            On the other hand, there were times when having Donald close could be a positive nuisance. This was not the best time or place to receive a confidential document. “Hell. The lecture’ s about to start. Read it, Donald, and tell me if it will keep until after the lecture.”

            “Yes, sir. One moment.” Donald stared off into nothing at all for several seconds and then came back to life. “Sir, I believe you had best read it at once. It is a raw transcript of the first interview with the robot Horatio. Robopsychologist Patras appears to have been successful in pulling the robot out of catatonia.”

            “What’s in the transcript?”

            “Sir, I think you should read it for yourself. I would not wish to color your reactions, and I must admit that I find the contents rather--disturbing. I would find it most unpleasant to discuss them.”

            Kresh grunted in annoyance.  It seemed as if Donald’s mental state was getting to be more and more delicate. Well, police robots had to be on the lookout for that, but it was getting to be an all-too-frequent inconvenience. “All right, all right,” he said. “Print me out a hard copy and maybe I can get through it before Leving starts her talk.”

            There was a soft whirring noise from inside Donald, and a door slid open on his chest, revealing a slot. Paper started to feed out from the slot, a page at a time. Donald caught each page neatly in his left hand and transferred it to his right. He handed the pages to Kresh.

            Kresh began to read, absently handing each page back to Donald as he was done.

            And then Kresh began to swear.

            “Most disturbing, as I said, sir.”

            Alvar Kresh nodded. He dared not discuss this openly with Donald, not here in public, not with the other members of the audience all around. Best not to say anything direct at all. Clearly Donald had come to the same conclusion.

            No wonder Donald had found the transcript upsetting. No wonder this Horatio robot had come unhinged. If the very clear implications in this transcript were accurate, then there was a robot out there that did not have the Three Laws.

            No. He could not believe it. No one would be insane enough to build a robot without the Laws. There had to be some other explanation. There had to be some mistake.

            Except Caliban, the robot in question, had been built by the woman up on the stage, who had used her first lecture to say how robots were no good for humans. So why the devil was she shielding the rogue robot who had attacked her? Alvar Kresh handed the last page to Donald, and the robot slipped the pages of the document into a storage slot on the side of his body.

            “What are we to do, sir?” Donald asked.

            Do? That was an excellent question. The situation was a tinderbox. In theory, he now had the evidence to move against Fredda Leving, but not now. What could he do? Clamber up on the stage and arrest her in the midst of her speech? No. Doing so could easily upend the entire intricate arrangement with the Settlers. Fredda Leving fit into that somehow, that much was clear. How, he had no idea. Besides, he had the very strong impression that he would need hear what she had to say if he was going to pursue this case.

            But there were other avenues open to him besides the arrest of Fredda Leving.

            “We can’t take Leving in, Donald, much as I’d like to,” Kresh said at last. “Not with the Governor and Welton with her. But the moment this damned talk is over with, we are picking up Terach and Anshaw. It’s time we sweated those two a little.”

            As for Fredda Leving, maybe he could not arrest her tonight. But he had no intention of making her life easy. He glared up at the stage, waiting for the curtain to open.

            AT long last, and far too soon, Fredda could hear the sound she had been waiting for--and dreading. The gong sounded, and the audience began to settle down, grow quiet. It was about to begin. A stagehand robot gave Governor Grieg a hand signal and he nodded. He came over to Fredda and touched her forearm. “Ready, Doctor?”

            “What? Oh, yes, yes of course.”

            “Then I think we should begin.” He guided her to a seat behind a table at one side of the stage, between Tonya Welton on one side, and Gubber and Jomaine on the other.

            All had their attendant robots hovering nearby. Gubber’s old retainer Tetlak, with him since forever. Jomaine’s latest updated, upgraded unit. What was the name? Bertram? Something like that. The joke around the lab was that he changed his personal robot more frequently than he changed underwear. Tonya Welton with Ariel.

            A strange, slight irony there. Tonya was here on Inferno to preach against reliance on robots, and here she was with the robot Fredda had given her in happier days. Meanwhile, she, Fredda, had no robot with her at all.

            With a start, she realized that the curtain had opened, that the audience was applauding the Governor politely--with a few boos from the back of the house--and that the Governor was well launched into her introduction. In fact, he was finishing up. Hells and heavens! How could her mind wander that much? Was it some aftereffect of the injury, or the treatment, or just a subconscious way of dealing with stage fright?

            “...not expect you to agree with all she has to say,” Governor Grieg was saying. “There is much that I do not agree with myself. But I do believe that hers is a voice to which we must listen. I am convinced that her ideas--and the news she will relate--will have tremendous repercussions for us all. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Fredda Leving.” He turned toward her, smiling, leading the applause.

            Not quite sure if it would not be wiser to cut and run for the stage wings and the side exit, Fredda stood up and walked toward the lectern. Chanto Grieg retreated back toward the table at the rear of the stage and took a seat next to Jomaine.

            She was there, all alone. She stared out into the sea of faces and asked herself what madness had brought her to this place. But here she was, and there was nothing to do but move forward.

            She cleared her throat and began to speak.