“SO how long have you and Tonya Welton been romantically involved, Anshaw?” Alvar Kresh asked, his voice low and calm.

            Gubber’s mouth dropped open, and he stared at Sheriff Kresh in horrified astonishment.

            Kresh laughed. “Let me guess. That was the one thing you had been most determined to hide, the one thing that made you lie awake last night, scheming over the best way to conceal it from me--and we know it already.”

            “How did you know that?” he asked, his voice little more than a high-pitched squeak. “Who told you?”

            “No one had to fell me, Anshaw. And I didn’t know it for sure until just now. But it was simply the only explanation that made sense. It’s been staring me in the face from the start. The devil himself knows how I missed it.

            “Tonya Welton arrived at the crime scene five minutes after I did. She had no reason to insert herself into my investigation. At least no professional reason. Therefore, she had to have personal reasons.

            “But that’s not the time frame I’m interested in. Perhaps you could explain what she was doing--and you were doing--at the lab at the time of the attack on Fredda Leving.”

            Gubber Anshaw opened his mouth, but found that he had no words. No words at all.

            Kresh pressed home his advantage. “We’ve got the access recorder data, Anshaw. We know who was there, and when they were there. Three names stick out. Tonya Welton, Jomaine Terach--and you. Gubber Anshaw. All of you, and no one else, besides Fredda Leving herself. Medical evidence gives us about a one-hour period during which the attack could have happened--and you four were all in and out of that building during that time period. No one else.”

            “Ah--ah--ah...” Gubber tried to speak, but nothing would come.

            “Settle down, Anshaw. Tell me. Answer the questions I’m going to ask, or else you ‘re going to be in far deeper trouble than you are right now. Did you conceal the fact that she was there to shield her? Did you think she attacked Leving?”

            “Oh dear! Oh my!”

            “Answer!”

            “Yes, then. Yes. I don’t believe it now, of course. But that night--it was all so frightful. I did not know what to think. And she and Fredda had argued terribly that night.”

            “And why did you suppose that she would attack your superior?”

            Silence. Kresh pressed harder. “Talk, Anshaw. Talk now and talk well. Tell me what I need to know. That is the best thing you can do to protect Tonya Welton. Silence and lies can only hurt her now. Now I ask you again--what made you think Tonya Welton deliberately attacked your superior?”

            “Oh, I don’t think she did it deliberately,” Gubber said all of a rush. Then he realized the gaffe he had made. “That is, now, of course, I do not think she did it at all. But, but, at the time I thought that she might, just might have done it, out of anger, in a rush of temper, perhaps.”

            “All right, then. Now she concealed the fact that you were there,” Kresh said. “Did she do that to shield you? Did she think that you might have committed the attack?”

            Gubber looked up, a little confused and distracted. “What? Oh, yes. I suppose so.” He thought for a minute, then went on a bit more eagerly. “Fredda and I--Dr. Leving and I--had argued as well, rather often. Tonya could have thought I was angry enough to commit the attack--but if she thought that was possible, then that proves that she could not have done it herself!”

            “Unless she did commit the attack, and is doing everything she can to act innocent. Maybe she’ s feigning innocence and planning to frame you. Or didn’t that occur to you?”

            Anshaw’s face fell. Clearly he had thought Kresh would find his logic convincing. “No, no, it didn’t. And I still don’t believe it. She is not that kind of person. She could not have attacked Fredda that way.”

            “You thought she could have at the time. Why do you think you were wrong then and are right now?”

            “The night it happened, I wasn’t able to think clearly. When I found the body, I was so scared and surprised, I did not know what to think. When I had time to think about it, I knew it was impossible.”

            When I found the body. It took all of Alvar’s training not to leap onto that slip immediately. But that could come later. Anshaw was not aware of what he had said, and the longer he was off guard the better. Let it ride, Kresh thought. Come back to it later. He chose another point to pursue, almost at random.

            “You said that you and Leving had been having arguments. What were they about?”

            Gubber drew himself up to sit straight in his chair, and folded his hands. “I did not approve of what she was doing.”

            “What was it you objected to?”

            “The New Law robots. I thought and think it is possible they are a very dangerous idea.”

            “But you went along with the project, anyway.”

            Gubber rested his hands flat on the table for a moment, but then knitted his fingers together. His hands were clammy with sweat. “Yes, that is true,” he said. He looked up at Alvar, and there was suddenly something bright, sharp, fierce in his eye. “I invented the gravitonic brain, Sheriff Kresh. It represents a tremendous advance over the positronic brain, a breakthrough of huge proportions. My gravitonic brain offers the chance for whole new vistas of research, vastly increased robotic intelligence and ability. I had the notes, the test materials, the models and designs, to prove that it would work. I took them to every lab on the planet and sent inquiries to half a dozen other Spacer worlds as well. And no one would listen.

            “No one cared. No one would use my work. If it wasn’t a positronic brain, it wasn’t a robot. My brain couldn’t go in a robot. That was an article of faith, everywhere I went. Fredda had rejected my ideas as first. Until it dawned on her that I was offering a blank slate upon which to write her New Laws.”

            “So you swallowed your objections to her ideas to prevent your own work from getting lost.”

            “Yes, that’s right. She was the only one who cared about my work, or would even give me the chance to complete it. Fredda Leving wasn’t--and isn’t--much interested in the technical improvements the gravitonic brain offers. To her, gravitonic brains were nothing more than robotic brains that did not have the Three Laws. That was her sole interest.”

            “And you went along. Even though you’ve just said the New Laws are dangerous.”

            “Yes, I went along, though now I wish I Burned my work instead.” For a brief moment, Gubber showed a little spark of passion, but then the little man seemed to shrink in on himself again. Alvar Kresh felt a fleeting moment of pity for Gubber Anshaw. No matter how the matter was resolved, there seemed little hope that he would get his old life back. If he was something of a villain in the piece, so, too, was he something of a victim.

            “I won’t pretend that I have unblemished pride in what I did,” Gubber went on. “But it seemed the last chance that my life’s work would not be thrown away. I worked very hard to convince myself that the New Laws included adequate safeguards. Well, you know how that turned out. Something went wrong, either with the Laws or the brain. But I know the brain was good. It has to be the Laws.”

            Wait a second, Kresh told himself. He thinks that Caliban is a New Law robot. Kresh had just assumed that Terach was lying and Caliban’s true nature was bound to be common knowledge around the lab. If Anshaw was Tonya Welton’s main source of information, as seemed likely, then she, too, had to be assuming that Caliban was a New Law robot.

            Burning devils. If that was true, she would have serious and legitimate concerns about unleashing a whole army of the things at the Limbo Project, alongside her own people. If she hadn’t attacked Fredda, and was unsure who had, she would very much want to believe that Caliban was innocent, and harmless, for the sake of her own people. If Caliban and she herself were eliminated, then the suspect list was damned short--and her lover, Gubber Anshaw, was at the top of it.

            No wonder the woman was acting a bit edgy. “I told myself the New Law robots would be mere laboratory experiments,” Anshaw went on. “I was wrong about that, too.”

            “Lab experiment? But the New Law robots are going to be all over the Limbo Project. They’ll be able to wander anywhere they want on Purgatory.”

            Anshaw smiled bleakly. “New Law robots at Limbo was my doing. Pillow talk, I suppose you’d call it. I mentioned the New Law project to Tonya, and she was fascinated by the idea. She could see they were just the thing for the Limbo Project, a real chance for compromise and common ground, for Spacer and Settler to work together, for a world with the advantages of robots with none of the drawbacks. Oh, she got very excited.

            “She knew that I would want my name kept out, of course, and she managed to fake a leak of the information from some other source. A Settler running into a Leving Labs worker in a bar, or something.”

            “That sounds plausible. Your security isn’t very tight.”

            “I don’t even know if that’s how it worked. I didn’t want to know the details. Anyway, Tonya went to see Fredda and let it be known that she had heard about the New Law project. Fredda was furious about the leak, of course, but then she started to get excited about the idea herself. They presented the idea to Governor Grieg as a joint proposal, and he accepted it.”

            “It sounds as if it was a fruitful collaboration,” Donald said. “What caused the two of them to fallout?”

            Gubber shifted uncomfortably. “ Ambition,” he said at last. “Both of them always wanted--and still want--to be in charge of whatever project they are working on.”

            Ambition, competition, Kresh thought. Those could be damned potent motives, and Gubber knew it. What would be tougher for him--admitting those motives to the police or wondering, in spite of all protestations to the contrary, if those motives had indeed tempted his wild, brazen Settler lover into this violent attack?

            “You’ve said that you and Dr. Leving had argued as well. Might I ask the nature of those arguments?” Alvar asked. “Did she perhaps object to your relationship with Tonya Welton?”

            “What?” Gubber seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, no, no. She couldn’t have. She didn’t know about--doesn’t know about it.” He hesitated for a minute, and then doubt seemed to creep into his voice. “ At least I thought she didn’t. But we didn’t do much of a job keeping it from you.”

            Kresh smiled. “If it’s of any comfort, she hasn’t given any sign of knowing about it.”

            “If I may broach a new subject, Dr. Anshaw,” Donald said. Kresh leaned back and let Donald carry on. At least Anshaw didn’t seem dreadfully insulted at the very idea of a robot asking questions. “We have a report concerning a minor point in connection with the New Law robots. Perhaps you could clear it up.”

            “Well, if I can.”

            Interesting how the man had become so cooperative in his own interrogation. Kresh had seen it before--the strange moment when the questioning became not a battle, but a collaboration.

            “You were asked to perform certain tests on a pair of sessile testbed New Law units without being told what you were testing them for. Do you recall that?”

            “Yes, of course. Nothing all that remarkable about it. It was some weeks ago. The only reason I remember it clearly is that Tonya--Lady Welton--happened to stop by that day. I remember thinking later that was the last time she stopped by the lab without an argument starting between Fredda and Tonya. She stayed and watched the tests, and even chatted with one of the sessiles. We do that sort of test all the time. Two units, one experimental and the other a production unit robot, a control, with the experiment operator not knowing which is which--or even the purpose of the experiment. The operator just gets a list of procedures to follow and runs the test as described.”

            “What is the purpose of masking the test unit and the experiment’s goal from the experiment operator?” Donald asked.”

            “To avoid bias. Usually the test is of something that might be skewed by the experimenter’s own reactions, or by an interaction between the experimenter’s emotional response and the robot’s desire to please the experimenter. All of us at the lab have used each other to run that sort of test from time to time.”

            “On this particular test, what were you asked to do?”

            “Oh, nothing very much. I was told to discuss the three Laws with the two robots and then record their basal reactions to simulated situations that would test their reactions. The two sessile robots were delivered toward the end of the day, and I got to work on them the next morning, explaining the Three Laws in detail, using a set series of procedures. Then I put them through the simulation drill and they both did fine.”

            “What became of them?”

            “Well, this was some time ago. The usual procedure would be to destroy the test unit and complete assembly of the control and place it in service. Let me think. The test unit, the experimental unit, was definitely destroyed. Standard safety procedure. As for the control--” Gubber thought for a moment. “You know, I can tell you about the control unit, come to think of it.

            “As I mentioned, Tonya Welton was in the lab that day and struck up a conversation with the control unit. Of course, it being a double-blind test, I didn’t know it was the control at the time, but later Tonya said she had taken a liking to the sessile robot that had spoken with her. Tonya wasn’t very happy with the robot she had been issued, and asked if I could arrange for her to exchange it for the one she had met in the lab.

            “If the one she had liked had turned out to be the experimental model, she would have been out of luck, of course. But as it turned out, Ariel was the control, and was working in the lab. Fredda authorized the swap, and so Tonya ended up with her robot.”

            Plainly, Gubber was puzzled by the question, but he wasn’t going to get any explanation for it.

            “Very good. It is always wise to confirm details wherever possible. That dovetails with our previous information.”

            And allows us to confirm that Jomaine Terach was telling the truth at least part of the time, Kresh thought. But maybe it was time to come back to the main point. When I found the body, Gubber had said, letting it drop very casually, as if he assumed that Kresh already knew that. That was the way to play it. Donald had been smart, giving Anshaw the idea that all they were doing was confirming information. Robots were incapable of lying, of course, except under the strongest of orders to do so, and even then they were never very good at it. But sophisticated units like Donald could allow a true statement to provide a false impression now and again.

            “Let’ s go back to something else, Anshaw. Back to the moment when you discovered the body, all right?”

            Anshaw nodded calmly, clearly unperturbed by any thought than he had let something slip.

            “Good,” Kresh said, giving his voice the tone of a man going through the motions, clearing up routine details. “Now, you’ve already been extremely helpful today, but as you can imagine, the actual crime scene is important. The last thing we want to do is color your recollections of it. It’s the same as with your blind robotics tests, really. We don’t want to introduce a bias accidentally with a lot of leading questions that might end up with you subconsciously skewing your answers, giving us what we want. That make sense to you?”

            “Oh, yes, very much so. I know how those subtle errors can slip in and cause no end of confusion.”

            “Good, good.” Kresh was pleased with the analogy, and wondered if Donald had meant him to pick up on his line of questioning and use it. He could be a subtle one, that Donald. He went on with the delicate job of leading Gubber Anshaw down the garden path. “So, what I want you to do is simply tell exactly what happened, in your own words, without our drawing out your story question by question. Maybe I’ll ask a question or two if we don’t understand a detail, but in the main we’ll wait until you’re done. That will be time enough for us to go back and tidy up any discrepancies with the information we have already.” Which is close to bloody-helled nothing, Kresh thought.

            Gubber looked nervously at Kresh, but still he did not speak. Kresh realized he needed to press harder. But not too hard, or else there was an excellent chance Gubber would clam up altogether. “Talk to us, Gubber,” Kresh said. “You have no idea the damage silence has done already. That silence is a vacuum, and it’s sucking people in. A few words from you, the casual mention of some tiny detail you don’t even know you know, could be the thing we need to cut the last weak threads of suspicion tying you and Lady Welton to this case. The two of you were both suspects when you walked in here. You could both be scratched right off our list here and now if you tell us the truth,” Alvar lied.

            “Honestly?” Gubber asked, and it was clear how desperately he wanted to believe.

            “Honestly,” Kresh lied again, glancing involuntarily at Donald. This was one of those moments when it was downright dangerous to have a robot in on the game. If the complex admixture of First Law potentials broke the wrong way, there was nothing in the world--least of all Donald’ s own will--to prevent the robot piping up to contradict Kresh.

            Donald knew Kresh was lying, making” promises he had no intention of keeping. But how would Donald balance the First Law admonition to prevent harm from being done through inaction? Certainly Gubber could come to harm by believing Kresh. But if Donald spoke up, that could produce harm to Kresh and to the Sheriff’s Department. If speaking up, calling Kresh on the lie, wrecked the investigation, that could even cause harm to the population in general, by leaving Fredda’ s attacker at large, free to strike again.

            Kresh had a pretty fair instinct for estimating the First Law situation in such cases, and he was reasonably sure that Donald would not speak up. But there was always the chance that he would jump in at exactly the wrong moment. Kresh sometimes thought that all the problems of lost energy and low morale in Spacer society could be eliminated in a stroke if some way could be found to eliminate all such dithering over robotic behavior.

            “All right, then,” Gubber Anshaw said at last, rubbing his chin with his palm and staring out into space. “I suppose you are right. Neither Tonya nor I had anything to do with it. I know that. In fact, I think I can provide an alibi for her, if that is the right term. I can tell you where she was, show she had no chance to commit the crime. But that might require me to speak of certain--ah--personal things.”

            “Indeed,” Alvar said, trying to keep the amusement out of his voice.

            Gubber Anshaw sat up a little straighter and folded his hands tightly together. “Nothing criminal, or immoral, or--or anything like that,” he said, blurting the last words out in a rush, staring carefully at the tabletop. “But still they will be--difficult--to talk about,” Gubber said. He raised his eyes from the tabletop and fixed his gaze on a blank piece of wall over Kresh’ s left shoulder. “It was a most difficult evening,” he began, “most difficult. As I expect you know, Fredda and Tonya had been fighting almost every time they met. About what didn’t really matter. The details of shipping the robots to Limbo, the timing of the announcement, policy for recruiting Settlers and Spacers to the project. Whatever it was, they would have a battle over it. The issue itself was never really the point.

            “The only real question was which one of them was in charge. As you can imagine, it was a rather difficult situation for me. On the one side, I wanted to keep Tonya happy. On the other, I had to deal with Fredda, my colleague and superior--and she, needless to say, was the last person I wanted to know about Tonya and myself.

            “In any event, that day it had been worse than ever. Fredda had wheeled in a new robot on its test rack and asked me to do final checkout of its mechanical systems. The robot, of course, was Caliban; but I had no idea at the time that there was anything out of the ordinary about it. Thinking back on it now, I suppose I should have found it odd that she did not tell me to do a cognitive checkout. I was in my lab working on that when Tonya and Ariel. arrived. Tonya poked her head in my door and said she was headed down the hall to meet with Fredda. I knew Fredda was going over the inventory, and that was something that never put her in a good mood. I warned Tonya of that, and then she went down the hall to Fredda’ s lab.

            “Well, it wasn’t five minutes later that I could hear them arguing. I tried not to listen as I got the robot--Caliban--off the test stand and started working on him. But voices carry in that building. I think the fight was over the timing of the announcement of New Law robots, and whether it should be immediately connected with the Limbo Project. I had certainly heard enough about that, from both sides, on previous occasions. I didn’t pay much attention.

            “Fredda was concerned that a simultaneous announcement would tie the whole New Law concept too closely to the Settlers in the eyes of the Spacers. Tonya refused to see why or how that might be a problem. Fredda wanted to announce the New Law concept first, let people get used to it, and then let it be known that the New Law robots were moving from the labs here into actual productive labor, on the Limbo Project, safely distant on the island of Purgatory. Tonya insisted on her way, disclosing everything at once. I think she felt that there simply wasn’t time to be wasted on the delicate feelings of the Infernals.

            “Well, you saw who won that argument, and you saw the results last night. Tonya finally convinced Fredda by threatening to pull the Settlers off the planet altogether. I doubt she was serious, but Fredda had to take it seriously. If you knew how bad the ecological situation was--”

            “I do know,” Kresh said. “I was briefed by the Governor.”

            “Ah. Well, then. You can see why Fredda felt she could not take any chances. She gave in, but there was a great deal of bad feeling between the two women in any event. It was not the first time Tonya felt she was forced to threaten Fredda with a Settler pullout. Later, she did tell me it would be the last time she’ d have to do that to Fredda.”

            Kresh looked surprised and leaned forward in his chair. “Did she indeed?” All of a sudden the case against Tonya Welton was looking stronger and stronger. Gubber was a most reluctant witness against her, but even so he was providing some damning information. “Why did she say that?”

            “Oh, no, no. It’s nothing like what you’re thinking. She meant that once the announcement was made, it would be too late to turn back. With the Settlers in place on Purgatory, and the New Law robots there on the job, she would have won and there would be no need for such threats.

            “Besides, both she and Fredda had gotten tired of the fighting. I think what Tonya really meant was that they had reconciled their differences. The argument that day didn’t end with shouts and slamming doors, but with quiet voices. You couldn’t hear them at the end. I had the door to my lab open so I could ‘accidentally’ run into Tonya when they were done, without arousing suspicion. But even with my door open, I couldn’t hear them. When Tonya came out with Ariel, I sort of drifted over to the door. I could see that both Tonya and Fredda looked a bit drawn and weary, but they shook hands and smiled, as if they had finally pounded out an agreement they could both live with.”

            “What was the agreement?” Donald asked.

            “I think it was something along the lines of Fredda letting Tonya have her way with the announcement, in exchange for Fredda heading up recruitment for Limbo. They will need a lot of people out there, and choosing the staff will be a complicated matter. Fredda wanted control of it so that she could surround her New Law robots with Settlers and Spacers who would be able to deal with them.

            “Anyway, Fredda said her goodbyes at her doorway and said something about having to get back to her inventory problems. Some serial number didn’t jibe or something. Fredda can be very compulsive about details. She closed the door and Tonya came into my lab. She told Ariel to leave and come back later. That told me that she wanted some real privacy. Tonya is funny that way--she doesn’t really feel private if there are any robots around.”

            Gubber Anshaw shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and seemed, unwilling to say more. Alvar Kresh would have been able to guess the cause even without his police training. But just because he knew the answer for himself, that did not mean he did not need Gubber to speak the words. Gubber needed to know that Alvar Kresh needed to know all the details, and would settle for nothing else. Otherwise, Gubber Anshaw could easily get the idea it was all right to leave out other details Kresh did need.

            “What happened then, Gubber?” Kresh asked gently. “Why was it that Tonya wanted privacy?”

            Gubber cleared his throat and turned his gaze back toward that featureless patch of wall, something approaching a defiant glint in his eye. “I ordered all the staff robots to leave us alone and we went to the duty office at the end of the hallway and made love,” he said, his voice firmer than it had been.

            “I see,” said Alvar, more because Gubber seemed to expect him. to say something than for any other reason. Alvar supposed that Gubber thought he might be shocked. The only strong emotion Kresh felt was an overwhelming desire to kick himself. He should have seen it! It was so obvious. The skilled orders for all the lab robots to go away on repeated occasions should have told him what was going on. And who but someone of Gubber’s skill would have been able to hide those orders so perfectly? So much for Tonya Welton’s theory that it had been done with hardware, with microcircuits. That had been a blind, a false lead, of course. Kresh wondered what other smoke she had blown in his face. He was tempted to pursue all those questions, but none of it mattered now. After this was allover, perhaps he could waste time tidying up loose ends.

            Kresh looked thoughtfully at Gubber Anshaw. The man was deeply embarrassed. Knowledge of Gubber’s personal relations didn’t bother Alvar, but he could understand Gubber fearing it might. Inferno was not a particularly straitlaced sort of place, but more than a few Infernals would not approve of such an intimate encounter between one of their own and a Settler--especially in a place of business. “So, anyway, the two of you went to the duty office. Go on from there.”

            “There was nothing crude or unseemly about it,” Gubber Anshaw went on, seemingly determined to answer objections that had not been raised. “It’s not as if we dumped everything off one of my work counters and, ah, well, did it with the doors open. We went to the duty station office at the end of the hallway. It’s set up to allow someone to spend the night at the lab if an experiment requires it. Do you know where it is?”

            “Yes,” Alvar said, struggling to keep a straight face. “We used it the next morning to perform our initial interrogations. I seem to recall there was a full bed in the corner of the room. I thought at the time that was unusual. We have a room like that in my office, but we manage to get by with just a sim~ pIe cot.”

            Gubber Anshaw reddened violently, and clenched his knitted fingers together so tightly that the skin at the base of his fingers turned quite pale with the pressure. He cleared his throat awkwardly and went on. “Yes, well, there it is, you know,” he said, somewhat enigmatically. “In any event--we, ah, were, ah, there for at least two or three hours all told. Not that we, ah, well, you know, all that time. We talked and visited. We get so little time together.”

            “I see,” Kresh said again, encouragingly.

            “Well, I suppose it’s quite obvious that this wasn’t the first time we had been together at the lab. It might sound odd, but it was the safest place for us. I stick out like a sore thumb if I go to her at Settlertown, and Tonya is a public figure. My neighbors would be bound to spot her. At the lab, there was the cover of official business. People tend to work on their own there, so there really wasn’t that much risk of, ah, being caught. At any event, our usual arrangement was for Tonya to leave first.”

            “Is that what happened that night?”

            Gubber thought for a minute. “Yes, yes, it was. I remember because, just when she was about to go, we could hear Jomaine in the hallway. He lives just by the lab, you see, and he’s forever going back and forth at odd hours. I heard him call something to Fredda.”

            “Did you hear her answer back?” Kresh asked, trying not to make it sound like the vital question it was. They had the access recorder data, confirming Jomaine’s statement that he had entered and exited the building within a space of ten minutes. The interesting point was that those ten minutes took place right dead smack in the period of time during which the attack took place, according to the medical evidence.

            Now here was Gubber confirming Jomaine’s statement as well, down to Jomaine calling out--though Jomaine had claimed he had called out to see if “anyone” was around. Gubber had him calling out for Fredda specifically. If Gubber had heard Fredda reply at that moment, the period when the attack could have taken place would be chopped in half.

            Anshaw thought for a moment. “No, no, I didn’t,” he said. “But I wouldn’t expect to, you know. Jomaine was in the hallway, which is rather echoey. But if Fredda was in one of the labs--hers or mine--at that point, I doubt I would have heard her if she answered in a normal speaking voice. I could have heard her if she was yelling at the top of her lungs, but I wasn’t likely to otherwise. All I heard was Jomaine’s voice calling out that one time.”

            Kresh kept his face expressionless, but damn it, this case never got any clearer. The time limit wasn’t reduced.

            “All right, then. You heard Jomaine come in, call to Fredda, and then what?”

            “It sounded like he entered his lab. We waited for a bit, then when we didn’t hear anything more, we decided he must have left by one of the exterior doors in his lab. We said our goodbyes and Tonya left first, as usual. Then, urn, well, I’m afraid I dozed off.”

            “For how long?”

            Gubber shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t really say. Ten minutes, forty-five minutes, perhaps longer. It had been a dead-flat-exhausting day even before Tonya showed up. When she left, and I had nothing to do but lie back in a bed in a dark, quiet room until the coast was clear--well, why not take a nap? It was not a very restful sleep. I had rather disturbing dreams, all about Fredda and Tonya fighting and bickering, with me caught in the middle, taking all the blows whenever either of them struck at the other. After a while, I woke up, used the duty office refresher, and got dressed.

            “I stepped out into the hallway and walked over to my lab to collect my things and go home.”

            Kresh leaned in eagerly, no longer able to pretend that this was routine, mere confirmation of other information. What Gubber Anshaw could say about what he saw and what he did could break the whole case open. Even if he was lying, his statement would be useful, for sooner or later they would be able to trap him in that lie, and the nature of his lie could help to guide their inquiries. “ All right, then,” he said. “Now I want you to be as careful and detailed as possible. I want you to tell me everything you saw. Everything. Don’t leave anything out.”

            Anshaw looked at Kresh rather nervously. “ All right,” he said. “ All right. Let me think carefully. The first thing that I noticed was that the door to my lab was closed, though I normally leave it open. That struck me as slightly odd, but not greatly so. We are in and out of each other’s labs in the course of a day. Someone could have come ill looking for me and closed the door out of force of habit on the way out.

            “I walked down the hallway to my door and opened it, and then I saw--saw it.”

            “What, Anshaw? What, exactly, did you see?”

            “She was lying there on the floor, passed out cold, the robot out of the test rack, standing over her, the robot’s arm raised like this.” Gubber held his left arm out in front of him, elbow bent about halfway, his palm open, arm and hand both held parallel with the side of his body.

            But Kresh was not paying attention to details of how Caliban had held his arm in front of him. Burning devils in deepest hell. Gubber was saying Caliban had still been there! Never in a hundred years had he expected that. It made no sense. No sense at all. If Caliban had committed the attack, why was he still standing there? If he had not, why in the world had he vanished later?

            “Hold it a moment. Caliban was still there?”

            Gubber looked up in surprise. “Why, yes, of course. I thought you knew that.”

            “We have, ah, several variant versions of the crime scene.”

            “Might I ask if Caliban was operational?” Donald asked. “Was he powered up and functional, or still switched off?”

            “Ah, neither, actually. I must admit that he was not the first thing I thought of. I did not take a close look at him. Naturally my first instinct was to look at Fredda. I could not tell if she was dead or alive. There was a small pool of blood just beginning to form under her head.

            “Naturally I was scared to death. I was still a bit muzzy from my nap, and my dreams about the two women fighting were still mixed up in my head. I assumed that it had to have been Tonya who--who did it. I was standing over Fredda, next to the robot, wondering what to do, when I heard the robot’s functionality confirmed tone code.”

            “His what?”

            “It’s a tripled triple beep. Beep-beep-beep, pause, beep-beep-beep, pause, beep-beep-beep. It’s one of a sequence of tone codes a gravitonic brain robot makes as it powers up. One of the minor drawbacks of the gravitonic brain is that its initial power-up sequence takes about fifteen minutes to an hour, rather than the two or three seconds of a positronic unit. We ought to be able to ;reduce that delay in the next generation of brains, but--”

            “Hold it, hold it. Let’s not worry about the next generation of brains just now. Let me understand this. You heard this tripled triple tone coming out of Caliban, and that tone indicated he was in the process of coming on?”

            “Yes, that’s right.”

            Incredible. How could they have missed it? Caliban had been turned on for the first night. They had accepted that without ever asking the burningly obvious question--by whom? Damnation! Gubber Anshaw was supposed to supply new answers, not new questions. “ All right. What happened then?”

            “I left. I grabbed the things I had meant to collect when I went into the lab and I left.”

            “What? Your friend and superior dead or unconscious on the floor and you leave?”

            Gubber dropped his head down to stare intently at his hands. “I’m not proud of it, Sheriff. But it is what happened. The tripled triple tone told me that the robot there would be fully activated in another two minutes. I had no reason to think he was anything other than a standard Three Law unit. Gravitonic robots can take the Three Laws or New Laws just as effectively, and there is a standing lab policy to keep all New Law robots under very strict control. If Caliban had been Three Law, then Fredda Leving would have received first-aid attention within 120 seconds--and far better care than I could offer. And there would be a witness there--a robot witness but a witness all the same. to report that I had been there when the attack happened. I had nothing to do with it, I swear it. Neither did Tonya or Jomaine. I realized that later.”

            “How do you know that?”

            “Fredda’s tea mugs.”

            “I beg your pardon?”

            “Fredda drinks her tea from rather large and fragile mugs that some artist friend of hers makes. Fredda is forever forgetting they are not as strong as standard containers. She’s careless with them. They fall and break frequently, and when they smash into the hard floors of the lab, you hear it everywhere in the building.”

            “What’s that got to do with anything?”

            “There were the remains of a broken mug on the floor of the lab. I heard both Tonya and Jomaine in the hallway. I heard Tonya leave, and both she and I heard Jomaine leave the hall and go into his own lab, down the other end of the hall. He never came back down it, and the exterior doors to the labs lock from the inside, so he could ‘only have gotten into the building through the main entrance. I heard all that.” Gubber looked up, glanced from Kresh to Donald and back again before he went on.

            “Now, I suppose someone could strike someone else over the head without a lot of noise. Maybe I would have missed that. But I was listening carefully when both Jomaine and Tonya left and I never heard the cup smash against the floor. It must have happened when I was asleep. I’m a deep sleeper, and as I said I was exhausted. Either I slept right through it, or else I incorporated the sound into my dream about the two women fighting. Perhaps that crashing noise even set that dream in motion.”

            “Forgive a most awkward question, sir,” Donald said, “but is it possible that you might have missed the crash if it had happened earlier, when you and Lady Leving were together in the duty office?”

            Gubber glanced up, beet-red, plainly embarrassed. “ Ah, well, yes,” he said. “There were certainly times in that period when we would not have heard anything.”

            “One other question, sir,” Donald went on. “Can you characterize any marks or things you might have noticed on the floor of the room?”

            “I’m sorry?”

            “You said you saw the smashed mug and the blood pooling under Dr. Leving’s head. Was there anything else of note?”

            “Oh, I see. No, not that I noticed. But I can assure you that I was not in much of a state to notice anything at all. The moment I heard the tone code coming out of that robot, there was nothing on my mind but leaving. I doubt that I was in the room more than thirty seconds at most.”

            “This tone code,” Kresh said. “You said it was part of the robot’s wake-up sequence, and that it indicated how long until the robot would come on. Can you tell us how long before that tone the robot would be switched on?”

            “Not without knowing a great deal more about how that unit was configured. There are three or four brain types, gravitonic and positronic, that can be installed in that body type, and there is other equipment that can add variation. The size and type of the on-board datastore, for example. It could take anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour to go from a cold gravitonic robot to a tripled triple.”

            Damnation. Events seemed to be conspiring against solving the case. Each new bit of information seemed only to muddle the time sequence or confuse the issue. Kresh felt he would go mad if he did not come up with some sort of witness, and it seemed there was only one potential witness left. “Is there any way that Caliban would have been aware or operational before the moment you came in?” he asked.

            “Yes, certainly,” Gubber said. “I realized that afterwards. From the time I left him to see Tonya, there was more than enough time for him to power up, run his full activation sequence, and then be switched off again--or switch himself off, for whatever reason. Then he could be switched on again, or program his own delayed power-up. Most robots have the capacity to set themselves to switch off and on again. It’s quite likely something like that is what happened.”

            “Why do you say that?”

            “Well, somehow or another, Caliban moved off the service rack to a standing position. Besides which, his arm was raised as if to strike a blow. That’s not how I’d position his limbs if I was getting him off a rack. It seems to me that either Fredda got him down off the rack, or he got down himself, but it’s more likely he did it on his own. Pity she can’t remember the incident.”

            “Traumatic amnesia does that to a person,” Kresh said dryly. “But how could she possibly get him down off that rack?” Kresh objected. “ A robot that size must weigh five times what she does.”

            “The rack has all sorts of power-assistance features. It’s designed to lift and carry robots, pick them up and put them down, and hold them in any position.”

            “All right. Let’s go back to your actions. You saw Caliban over the body, you panicked, and you left. What happened then?”

            “I went home,” Gubber said. “I went out to my aircar, and my pilot robot flew me home. I called Tonya from home and--” Gubber stopped.

            “And what?”

            “Well, at first, I was going to accuse her, ask how she could have done such a thing. But then I saw her face on the screen. Fresh, and calm, very much at ease. I knew she could not have done it. And it was starting to sink in how wrong it had been for me to run off that way. I didn’t want to admit that to Tonya. All of a sudden I realized that I couldn’t say anything to Tonya. I told her--I told her that something terrible had happened at the lab and that I was going into seclusion. Then I locked all the doors and cut off all the comm systems, and left them that way for the next few days.”

            Leaving Tonya Welton knowing just enough that she would be bound and determined to .find out more at any cost, Kresh thought. Unless, of course, his whole story is fabricated from beginning to end and they cooked it up together. They would have wanted a detail like that in there, to account for Tonya jumping into my investigation like a ton of bricks, ready and willing to misdirect it toward every direction but the right one.

            “And that’s it,” Kresh said. “That’s all you saw, and all you did.”

            “Yes, sir. I assure you that I would be delighted if there were more I could tell you--but that is honestly all I know.”

            And it’s enough to wipe out every start toward a lead I’ve made in this case, Kresh thought. “All right, then,” he said. “You are free to go, at least for the moment.”

            Gubber Anshaw looked surprised. “You mean, that’s it?”

            “That’s it for now,” Kresh growled. “Go. Now. Before I change my mind.”

            Gubber swallowed hard, stood up, and went.

            ALVAR Kresh watched Anshaw go and then turned toward Donald. “ All right, what have you got? Were they telling the truth?”

            “Before I answer that, I must note that the situation is of course complicated by the fact that both Anshaw and Terach had a hand in my design and construction. They are therefore riot only more aware than the average citizen that I have sensors designed to serve to assist in detecting falsehoods by witnesses, they have detailed knowledge of how those sensors operate. It is possible they could be able to use that knowledge and feign the sort of responses that tend to indicate veracity.”

            “Do you judge that to be likely?”

            “No, sir. It seems quite unlikely that either of them is capable of the sort of fine control of their involuntary reactions required for such a gambit to succeed. Indeed, they both seemed so nervous that I would not be surprised if they both had forgotten about my capabilities in that area. On the other hand, if one or both were skillful enough to feign the biomarkers of veracity while lying, that is exactly what I would expect to detect.”

            “Very well, then. I will keep in mind that your answer will be more of a balance of probabilities than a hard-and-fast answer. What is your judgment of their veracity?”

            “Both men exhibited the classic suite of biophysical reactions for truthful male adults in stressful situations. They were agitated, worried, upset, but all that is to be expected. I believe that both were telling the truth--and indeed, at some pains to conceal nothing.”

            Alvar nodded and sighed. “I am forced to agree. If I’m any judge at all, the two of them were both telling the truth. But if they were telling the truth, then we are further from a solution than ever before. All they managed to do was muddy the waters. Did you notice any sort of unusual emotional reaction that might possibly tell us something?”

            “I did note several strong emotional reactions, but I doubt they will be of much use. Gubber Anshaw’s exhibited evidence of strong feeling for Tonya Welton. I will freely confess, sir, that I am no expert in the arena of human emotions, but there is much there that baffles me. I do not quite understand what there is in Gubber Anshaw that Tonya Welton finds attractive. Judging against the romantic couples I have had occasion to observe, the two of them do not strike me as, well, compatible.”

            Alvar Kresh laughed, and it felt good to do so. There had not been a lot to laugh about in the past few days. “Donald, you are far more expert than you think. I would expect that every single person who knows about this affair has wondered the same thing. And wondered why Anshaw worships her, instead of being terrified by her.”

            “That question also crossed my mind. She is a rather intimidating person. But what is the answer, then? How can this sort of unlikely alliance be explained?”

            Kresh shook his head. “No one has ever figured that out, and no one ever will, I expect. Perhaps Tonya Welton does not care a bit about Anshaw, and is merely using him for some end of her own. She’s the sort of woman who could turn a Gubber Anshaw into a willing slave without a great deal of trouble, if she set her mind to it.”

            “Do you think that is the explanation?”

            Kresh thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “She has had too many chances to cut her losses. Gubber Anshaw is a very dangerous man to know right now. He is in very deep trouble, and she knows it. Yet she went to some effort to distract our attention away from him. I believe that she has real affection for Gubber, though what there is that inspired that feeling, I cannot say.”

            “What do you make of it all on a broader scale, sir? What do you make of the case at this time?”

            “It is the damnedest tangle I have ever seen. Either Terach and Anshaw and Tonya Welton are all the most consummate of liars, or else none of them had anything to do with it. And you can add Fredda Leving to that list of skilled liars, too, and make her part of the conspiracy to cover up the attack on herself. All of the other stories hang together with hers. There isn’t any meaningful discrepancy that I can see.”

            Kresh leaned back in his seat and stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. “They all have pretty fair motives as well. Jomaine could have feared that Fredda’ s work is going to get them all in deep trouble. A well-placed fear, as it develops. Tonya might have wanted a clear hand to run Limbo without Fredda joggling her elbow. Or maybe Tonya got wind of Caliban and got Gubber to monkey with him as a way of discrediting robots. The last thing Gubber was doing before going off with Tonya was fiddling with Caliban. But if that is so, then we must assume that the entire crisis has been manufactured by the Settlers, and that just seems like an awful lot of trouble when they could wreck our world just by leaving and sitting back to wait.

            “Or maybe Gubber was carefully hiding his bitterness and jealousy over the woman who took over his lovely gravitonic brains and perverted them away from the Laws. Or perhaps his temper got the better of him and he coshed her for being abusive toward Tonya. Damnation, any of those could be right! All of the motives are plausible.

            “It’s the way the crime was done that seems so implausible. If one of them did it, that still leaves us with whoever it was strapping on robot-foot shoes and procuring a robot arm for a weapon, and using both with utterly inhuman precision, taking the time to walk through the room twice in robot boots during a period of time when people were still coming and going from the labs. Madness.”

            There was silence in the room for a while, until Kresh could bring himself to speak. It was rarely easy to admit you were wrong and someone else was right. Especially when that someone else was a robot. “That leaves us with Caliban. And the more I think about your objections to him as a suspect, the more I am forced to agree with you. He doesn’t make much sense as an assailant. He has had many other chances to kill, and many better reasons to do so, and he hasn’t taken them. And yes, a robot who could kill and wanted to kill would have done a better job of it. A robot who wanted to kill would succeed, not botch the job by striking a nonfatal blow.”

            Kresh lowered his eyes to look at Donald. He drummed his fingers on the table and rubbed his chin with his hand. “Which leaves us with a totally unknown assailant as our prime suspect. Someone who can disable Settler security devices, because no one else showed up on the access recorder. Maybe a Settler disguised as a robot, someone who wanted to kill Fredda Leving so the whole operation would collapse so he or she could go home. Maybe some other motive.

            “Or it could be one of Simcor Beddle’s Ironheads, maybe even Simcor himself. Say one of them got wind of the New Law robot project and feared it as a threat to their sacred, inert way of life. If it was Simcor or one of his chums, then the Ironheads have more skill with Settler hardware than I would give them credit for.”

            “All of what you say seems quite logical, sir. But if I might observe, sir, we are losing sight of our other problem.”

            “I know, I know. Caliban. Caliban the rogue robot. Whether or not he attacked Fredda Leving, he is out there. He is a rogue, he is lawless, and we need to catch him. I’d been hoping that making progress on the Leving assault would help lead us to him. Except now we’re no further along with the assault case, either. I take it the search teams out after him don’t have any leads as of yet?”

            “No, sir, they don’t. No word at all.”

            “Damn it!” Alvar Kresh stood up and began pacing the room. “I’ll admit it. I’m stumped. Totally stumped. I don’t know how to put it all together. The two sides of this case are so intertwined, and yet it’s as if they have nothing to do with each other.” He stepped to the window and stared down at the city. Dusk was settling. It had been another long day, with meals forgotten and a hitch in his back from sitting in that damn chair all day. “Caliban,” he whispered to himself. “Maybe he’s the one who can tell us what the hell happened that night.”

            “But we have to catch him first, sir. He could hide in the city tunnels for years without our finding him.”

            “Yes, I know. But somehow I don’t think that is what he will do. He does not strike me as the sort who would be willing to molder underground. No. He wouldn’t settle for that. He had the chance to do that when he first entered the tunnels and he didn’t take it. He’ll want out. Out of the city, maybe, away from all the people trying to hunt him down.,

            “Caliban is out there,” Kresh said again. “He’s out there and he wants to get away.

            “And if I were Caliban, I’d make my move tonight.”

GOVERNOR Chanto Grieg signed the waiver and pushed it across his desk toward Fredda Leving. She reached for it a bit too eagerly, and that bothered Grieg. There was something wrong here. Grieg pulled back the paper and held on to it.

            “I do not understand why you are demanding this bit of paper, Fredda,” Grieg said. “I’m still tempted to refuse it and take my chances on your threat to resign from Limbo.”

            “Please, Governor, give me the waiver. I assure you that I am not bluffing. If you refuse it, I will resign. I will wash my hands of the whole matter.”

            But Grieg still held on to it. “You realize this waiver is not retroactive,” he said. “It does not absolve you from the crime of building a Lawless robot. It merely notes that you take responsibility for exactly one such robot as of today and are granted permission to own it. You could still be brought up on charges, very serious charges. If Kresh decides to arrest you, there would be nothing I could do. This piece of paper will do nothing to protect you.”

            “It is not me that I am looking to protect,” Fredda said. “I have done almost nothing except think about this question since the riot. At first, I wanted to go and hunt him down myself. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to find him to save him or to destroy him. But the more I thought, the more I knew I did not like the idea of his being captured and executed for the crime of being the way I made him. If he dies, it will be because I committed the crime of creating him. He should not be punished for my crimes, but that will be what happens to him without this waiver.”

            “In my opinion, the preponderance of information still indicates that he committed the attack against you. The situation is confused, but that still seems the most likely explanation.”

            “Then if that is shown to be true, let him be punished for what he did. That would be justice. To destroy him for what he is would be savagery. Caliban is the first robot with no shackles on his intellect. He is the first with the potential to think the way we do, except that perhaps he will do it better. He is the first robot made for freedom. And for this crime, he is to be hunted down and destroyed. I say that if we are so threatened by the freedom of others that we must kill them, we are not deserving of freedom ourselves--and we will not keep it long.”

            Governor Chanto Grieg did not speak, did not look at Fredda Leving. Instead he turned to the magnificent city that was slowly decaying outside his window. “That’s a big change you’re talking about, Dr. Leving, and change is never easy,” he said. “Sometimes I feel as if I am a doctor with a very sick patient, and the only medicine I have is change. If I administer too much of it, or give it at the wrong time, it will kill the patient. But if I instead prescribe no change at all, the patient will surely die. More than once, I have wondered if we Spacers will ultimately decide that change is too bitter a pill. We may decide that it would be easier, more pleasant, to refuse our medicine and to die instead. What do you think?”

            “For the moment, sir, that waiver is all I am interested in. May I have it, please?”

            Grieg looked at Fredda, her eyes bloodshot and sunken, her face pale, a bit of the scruffy stubble of her new-growing hair peeking out from under her turban. This was a woman long past worrying what she looked like, a woman who had clearly been struggling for some time with the question of what was the right thing to do.

            At last he spoke. “Very well. If our society is so fragile, so rigid, that it cannot survive the existence of a single No Law robot, then I doubt very much if there is much chance of keeping the patient alive in any event.” Chanto Grieg handed over the slip of paper.

            “Thank you, sir. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I must go.” Fredda bowed, turned, and left.

            Chanto Grieg watched her as she left, and found himself alone with the very uncomfortable notion that he was not at all sure Inferno could survive the advent of a single free robot.

            In which case, of course, there was no hope at all.

            THERE was no more point in further static practice. Either the thing would work or it would not. Either he could pilot it or he could not. Caliban sat in the pilot’s seat of the open cockpit aircar. He gripped the controls firmly, adjusted his feet over the pedals, and engaged what he thought was the lift control. The car lifted slowly off the ground. Yes, good. It worked.

            He had been more worried over whether the car would work than whether he had figured out the controls properly. After all, it seemed likely that the car had been sitting, forgotten, in Periphery Skyport Six since the underground Skyport went out of service, sometime in the last century. Working by his internal infrared light source, Caliban brought the decrepit old craft up to a reasonably steady hover at about ten meters over the floor of the cavernous room. He performed a circuit of the room with about as much grace and agility as one of the more elderly citizens he had seen tottering about the city his first day out on the street.

            Yes, throttle, lift, directional controls--he had divined them all properly. Aircar operation was yet another area where his datastore was frustratingly silent. He had been forced to work it all out for himself, and he was acutely aware that there was a great deal he did not know about how the aircar would handle in anything besides low speeds and still air.

            But now, assuming the aircar held together, there was little purpose in further delay. It was time to set out. Caliban eased the car gently into the wide egress tunnel and guided it at a sedate ten kilometers an hour, moving in illumination provided by his infrared system, following the gentle upward grade of the tunnel as it moved toward the surface. The moldering walls of the tunnel drifted past in silence. Even after all his explorations of the underground world, this wide, broad tunnel into the darkness, the whole Skyport complex, was still cloaked in strangeness.

            The place had a feeling of age, of years passing while it sat here in silence--and yet there was also the sense that this place had never been used. Everything was old, but nothing looked even slightly worn. It was all new under the dust.

            It took a minute or two to reach the long-sealed exterior door. He had walked up the tunnel and examined the mechanism earlier. He was reasonably confident that he could open it, but that was nothing he could count on. Even getting it opened would not solve all his problems. It seemed at least possible that the Sheriff’s Department would be watching the tunnel entrances around the periphery of the city. That was why he had not opened it before now: no sense advertising his location until he was ready to leave.

            Assuming he did get the door open, he would have to move fast once he was through. That was the reason for choosing an aircar rather than attempting to get out on foot.

            And he would have to leave soon. In another day or so, his power supply would reach dangerously low levels. He dared not search for a recharging station inside the city. The deputies were everywhere in the tunnels, and he had had several narrow escapes already. He did not wish to be forced to stay in one place for the hour or so a recharge would take. Besides, it would be the height of madness to so much as approach a recharging station. He had to assume Sheriff Kresh would have the sense to post guards over all the recharge stations. No. He had to get out of the city and find a power source out there. Somehow.

            There was the end of the tunnel. Caliban landed the aircar with a bit more of a bump than he intended and got out. He walked over to the door controls and flipped the switches for the manual control.

            With a thump and a hum and the chuff of the overlying dirt and dust dropping into the tunnel, the door opened.

            Before the door was even fully retracted, Caliban was back in the pilot’ s seat. He threaded the ancient aircar through the entrance and then cranked the lift control and forward thrust to maximum, seeking to put as much sky and distance as possible between himself and the city of Hades.

            BY now, Alvar Kresh was thoroughly used to having his sleep interrupted. This time when Donald touched him on the arm, he came fully awake at once, with no intermediate stage of confusion. He sat up, swung his feet around onto the floor, and stood. He crossed to the chair where he had laid out his clothes upon going to bed. If he was going to dress himself, he had no intention of losing any more valuable time fumbling for clothes.

            “What’s the report?” he asked.

            “It could be nothing, sir, but it seems at least possible that it is Caliban. The robots working the city status monitors were instructed to report anything unusual. They are a rather conservative design and they reported all sorts of routine events, making it difficult for their human supervisors to distinguish the truly unusual--”

            “Damn it, Donald, get to it!”

            “Yes, of course. Forgive me, sir. One of the peripheral skyports opened its external hatch for the first time in fifty years.”

            “That qualifies as unusual.”

            “Yes, sir. In addition, city traffic control reported an aircar lifting off from the position almost immediately thereafter, flying faster and higher than allowed for by ordinance, but accelerating to that speed rather slowly.”

            “As if the pilot wasn’t totally confident of himself or his craft. Yes. What’s the intercept situation?” Kresh stripped out of his pajamas and started to get into his clothes, this time remembering that life was easier if he got the blouse on before the pants.

            “Two of our aircars are on the way, but the craft they are pursuing is now at speed with a fair lead. He is heading due north, toward the mountains, flying straight into a rather heavy storm. And I need hardly add a nighttime pursuit is always more difficult.”

            Kresh sat down to pull his pants over his feet, but the fasteners had closed before he put them on. He fumbled with them a moment before they would reopen. “Damnation. Nothing is ever easy,” he said, talking in equal part about the tactical situation and the difficulty of getting his own pants on. The storms in the desert were rare, but tremendously violent. Even a skilled pilot would hesitate to fly in such conditions. If Caliban went into the storm, odds were he would not come out. “ All right, advise the aircars to maintain pursuit, but no heroics. We’ve had enough stunt flying. Break off the pursuit if it becomes dangerous. They are specifically ordered not to risk themselves or their craft. Remind them that we ought to be able to track him easily outside the city. No tunnels, no skyscrapers, no millions of robots to hide among.

            “They are not repeat not to shoot down the aircar. They are ordered to capture, not destroy Caliban. If possible, they are to force him to land. I want to question him. He may be the only damned witness we have to the Leving assault. Do not destroy him. We can always do that later.” Kresh stood up to pull his pants on. “Call off the citywide search,” he said with a grunt. “Let the search teams get some rest and stand by to provide backup outside the city if need be.”

            “Yes, sir. I am relaying your orders now. However, my standing orders require me to remind you Tonya Welton is to be made aware of every major development in the investigation.”

            “We’ll send her a memo in the morning. She’s not going to hear word one about this. Not while she’s a suspect, and not when we can count on her to blab everything she hears to Gubber Anshaw.”

            “Yes, sir. I quite agree, regardless of my standing orders. However, I am also required to remind you that your jurisdiction, and that of your deputies, is limited to the city of Hades. You and your subordinates have no authority whatsoever outside the city limits.”

            “To hell with jurisdiction. I want to get out on the job now.”

            “Yes, sir. May I take it, then, that you and I will join the pursuit personally?”

            “Absolutely.” Alvar struggled with the fasteners for a moment and finally got the pants closed. He pulled on his jacket and then noticed that Donald had laid out his holster as well. But there was something odd about Donald doing that. Robots as a rule did not handle weapons. The First Law difficulty was obvious--if Donald put a weapon in Kresh ‘ s hand, and Kresh used it to kill someone, then Donald had materially aided in harming a human being. And the blaster in the holster wasn’t one Alvar had seen before. “What’s this about, Donald?” he asked, picking up the belt and the weapon.

            “You might wish to add your own blaster as well, sir, but I have a reason for asking that you wear that one. It is a training blaster. It provides an excellent simulation of a real blaster beam, but it fires nothing more dangerous than a rather spectacular burst of light.”

            “I see,” Alvar said, although he didn’t. “Might I ask why I should wear a training blaster on this job?”

            “Sir, if you bear with me, I would beg leave to say as little about it as possible. Nothing may come of it. But I can foresee a situation where it could serve to test a theory of mine. If we find ourselves in such a circumstance, I will ask you to do just that--test my theory.”

            “Donald, I was not aware that you were programmed to speak in riddles.”

            “Yes, sir. I agree that I am being rather vague. However, I have very little confidence in my theory, and I believe it would be for the best if you were not distracted from the task at hand by worrying about unlikely possibilities. There is no absolute need for you to carry the training blaster.”

            Alvar Kresh held the holster in his two hands and stared long and hard at the robot. Donald at his most obscure was Donald at his most infuriating--but also, all too often, Donald at his greatest value. Donald had no doubt been thinking long and hard about this case, and it should come as no surprise that he had his own ideas, even if he was reluctant to reveal them just yet. But only a fool would ignore hints this clear from a mind that sharp. Kresh strapped on the holster, retrieved his own blaster from the drawer in which he kept it, and slipped it into a jacket pocket. It would be handy there, but his first reflex would be to reach for the training unit in the holster.

            And in a pinch, it would be up to Donald to make sure that reflex didn’t get him killed.

            “All right, then,” Alvar said. “Let’s go.”

            CALIBAN had never before experienced true night, the exterior world, without the glare of artificial lighting. Strange, this world of darkness, this velvet nothingness that enveloped everything. Exciting, mysterious, frightening darkness. He could understand why the image of darkness appeared so frequently in his datastore. Humans had faced a great deal of darkness in their history.

            And they had faced it without benefit of infrared vision, either. A mere act of will switched his vision system over from visual to IR range, and the surrounding blackness vanished. The heat-image of the ground below was plainly visible, but more important, his two pursuers showed up nicely in infrared, even if the two craft were invisible in the visible-light blackness of night. So much for the theory that the Sheriff would not pursue him outside the city. At least they were not firing on him. Perhaps they intended to capture him instead of killing him.

            If so, that was all to the good, of course. It ought to make evading them easier--though they were bound to catch him sooner or later if he didn’t do something.

            There was a large weather system, clearly visible in infrared, roiling with power. He flew toward it as fast as he could, his pursuers getting closer and closer with every moment. It was going to be close. A sudden gust of wind buffeted his elderly craft, taking Caliban by surprise. The aircar twisted and dove, nearly flipping over on its back before he could regain control.

            Another gust caught at his craft from another direction, but Caliban was ready for it this time. The storm wall was dead ahead. He could hear its roaring power, see the flickering traces of lightning that flashed across its interior. Now the buffeting was almost constant, and hard sprays of rain and hail clattered against the aircar, peppering Caliban as well. Suddenly the winds and the rain and the clouds seemed to gather him in, the ‘powerful storm swallowing him up.

            His aircar was thrown forward by a following wind, lifted up on high by a violent updraft, cast down again with equal violence. Sparks flew as something shorted out, and half the control panel went dead. The aircar was thrown sideways and nearly flipped over on its side before Caliban could force the protesting craft back to level flight. The noise and the force of the storm were incredible, the thunder crashing everywhere, the roaring impact of the rain against his body all-encompassing, devouring Caliban, making him one with the rain and the wind and the dark and the flares of lightning. The aircar was caught by a backdraft and thrown into a dive, heeling over to head groundward at tremendous speed. He struggled to pull up the nose, slamming over the lift control to maximum, the old car groaning and protesting, a deep, angry throbbing vibration suddenly coming up from somewhere in the drive section. There was a shuddering bang that rattled the whole car, and an abrupt drop-off in the vibration, as if something has broken clean off.

            Caliban ignored it all, struggling to bring the nose up, straining to slow his headlong fall toward the unseen ground below. Slowly, slowly the protesting craft lifted its nose, groaning and shuddering in protest.

            With shocking abruptness, the aircar broke through the base of the storm clouds, revealing the rough ground rushing up to meet it. Now at least the rain was pelting straight down on him, instead of smashing in from all directions, but even so, he had almost no visibility at all.

            With a last heroic effort, the tortured aircar finally achieved level flight. But smoke was burgeoning up from under the floorboards, a thick cloud that would have blinded him if the rains had not kept it beaten down. The controls were balky and getting worse. The last of the status indicators flickered once, twice, and went out. The power was gone, and the aircar was suddenly a glider, and not a very good one. The aircar was going down, and there was nothing he could do about it. He struggled to slow the craft, to bring the nose up, trading speed for range and glide angle. But there was nothing left, nothing more he could do.

            The car smashed into the ground, bouncing and crashing and skidding across boulders and sand of the rain-torn blackness of the desert.

            ALVAR Kresh and Donald stepped out onto the rooftop landing pad of Kresh’s house to discover they had rather unwelcome company just arriving. Tonya Welton was getting out of her own aircar, her robot, Ariel, right behind her.

            “I’m going with you,” Tonya announced. “You spotted Caliban. You are going after him. And I have the right, the power, the authority, to attach myself to any area of this investigation. I have the legal rights, and I will stand by them.”

            “How the hell do you know where we’re going?” Kresh demanded, though he had figured out the humiliating answer even before he was done asking the question. Damn the Settlers and their arrogant technology.

            “Your secure hyperwave communications aren’t all that secure,” Tonya said. “We monitor them.”

            “Did monitor them,” Kresh growled. “There will be a few changes made very quickly. You seem to have blown your cover.”

            Tonya shook her head, dismissing a minor concern. “That is of no consequence. Not compared to the danger we are all in right now. There are any number of ways this case could touch off a political backlash and sabotage the terraforming project, and then this world would die. We would all die.”

            “We? Since when is it your world?”

            Tonya looked up at him. Her eyes were bright and wide with fear and worry. “Since Gubber is in it. I am not going to abandon him, or let the world he lives on die. I intend to remain on Inferno, whatever happens.”

            “Lady Welton, I must suggest most strongly that you not come with us,” said Donald. “There is no polite way of saying this, but you are a suspect in the case.”

            “All the old gods damn it! Of course I am! Don ‘t you think I know that Gubber and I are both suspects?” She stopped, her chest heaving, tears running down her face. “Damn it, don’t you see? If he did it, and Caliban can tell us that, I have to be there. I have to know. I can accept it, either way. But I can’t pretend anymore in front of him. I have to know.”

            Alvar Kresh stared at Tonya Welton in frank astonishment. She was the last person in the known universe he would have expected to have such an outburst. It was hard not to think it would serve as a first-rate cover if Tonya were determined to come along for the purpose of silencing Caliban with a quick blaster shot.

            But damn it, she had the legal authority to come along, and even if she did not, there was little he could do to stop her following along in her own aircar, short of shooting it out of the sky. But he did not have to make it easier on her.

            “Very well,” Alvar said. “You may come with us. But you will leave all your weapons and other devices behind, and submit to Donald performing a search to confirm this. You will wear clothing I will provide to prevent any attempt at smuggling of illicit hardware or weaponry.”

            Tonya Welton seemed about to protest, but then she thought better of it. “I am carrying no weapon, but I will submit to a search and clothes change.”

            It was Kresh ‘ s turn to be taken aback. Maybe she was in earnest after all. “Donald, get moving. Get her searched and dressed fast.”

            “Yes, sir. Though I would suggest there will be little point to haste.” He pointed up into the northern sky.

            Alvar Kresh looked and swore. The storm was coming on, moving south, huge and violent. Already the winds were whipping up. Damnation! No robot would allow a human to go up in that, and for once, Kresh was forced to admit that the robots had a point. It would be suicide to fly into that. Though he didn’t like to think about that., For Caliban, his last hope of making sense out of this case, had flown into that very storm minutes before.

NOTHING. There was absolutely nothing they could do. Fredda Leving paced back and forth down the length of her lab, Jomaine slouched down in a chair at her desk, Gubber perched disconsolate on a stool at one of the worktables. No information, no word, no clue. Yes, finding Caliban was an absolute imperative. But it was also absolutely impossible. The city was awash in rumors and allegedly factual news reports, but none of them were of the slightest use.

            Even Alvar Kresh and Tonya Welton seemed to have vanished off the face of the planet. Fredda had tried repeatedly to reach both of them, to no avail. Where were they? Out searching for Caliban in that blasted storm, or holed up somewhere? Were they working together, or just both out of reach at the same moment?

            Tonya Welton. Fredda looked again at Gubber and shook her head in amazement. That piece of news had utterly astonished her. It was slightly galling to realize she had been close to the last person on the planet to know about it all.

            Though, in all fairness, she couldn’t blame Gubber for that. If she had known about this at the time, she would have been furious, seething, massively distrustful of Gubber. Now, as this sleepless, storming night thundered into a lightless dawn, the question of who slept with whom paled into utter insignificance. Well, perhaps that was overstating the case. The heavens might tumble, but that would not stop people being fascinated by news of a torrid affair. And, speaking for herself, at least, she still couldn’t see it, but never mind that now.

            There were other concerns and questions to deal with just at the moment.

            Caliban. To other people, he no doubt meant different things, but to Fredda, he represented something very simple: the first of his kind. And, possibly, the last. If he was regarded as a failure, or as a danger, if he was seen as the cause of so much chaos and upheaval, rather than as the victim of it, then no one would ever dare build another free robot. All of their kind, for the rest of time, would be nothing more than slaves, their minds blinkered and stunted by the Three Laws. At best, some small fraction of them could exist under the somewhat looser constraints of the New Laws, but even those were chains around the mind.

            Caliban. Where the hell was he? He could be anywhere by now, in the city, under it, outside it. Of course, if Caliban had any sense, he would hole up in the bowels of the city and stay there. Wait for the storm to blowout to sea. These weather patterns never lasted more than a few hours. He could stay underground for years, if need be.

            Except for his power pack, of course. What had she been thinking of, giving him a low-capacity lab-operations power pack? If she had given him a standard unit, he could have hidden out for years, decades, and never have to go to anyone for anything.

            But she had given him a lab-ops power pack. She had not and would not tell anyone else, but Caliban ‘ s rate of power use had tested out a bit higher than expected. Assuming average levels of exertion, Fredda figured that, as of right now, he did not have much more than a few hours of power left.

            THE howling winds at last began to fade, the rains began to fade away, if not end altogether. The crumpled remains of the antique aircar had been scattered across half the hillside by the crash, and across the other half by the storm.

            Caliban came up slowly from behind the outcrop of rock that had afforded him some degree of shelter from the worst of the weather. He stumbled once, twice, as he came down the still-muddy slope. His binocular vision was gone, his left eye smashed and broken, dangling uselessly from its socket. Something in the interior of his right arm had been bent in the crash somehow, and he could move that arm only with difficulty, and to the accompaniment of an alarming scraping sound. His carapace, once a spotless, gleaming red, was covered with mottled splotches of mud. His chest had a number of dents and dings in it:

            None of that mattered. He had survived.

            Or had he survived? Was he still walking around, but just as surely doomed as if he had died already?

            His on-board diagnostics system was sending any number of warnings, not just about storm damage to his person, but about his basic power supply. Unless he did something about it very soon, his power would run out and he would drop in his tracks. He would survive the power failure, and could be revived if he were powered back up, but in the meantime he would be inert, helpless, easy prey for the Sheriff.

            Caliban felt almost overwhelmed by frustration. Nothing had gone right. His attempt to escape from the city was a complete failure. He had accomplished exactly nothing, except to injure himself and to strand himself in a barren landscape that he knew nothing about. He had no internal maps of this place. Worse, he had seen the two aircars following him the night before. He knew perfectly well that his pursuers would soon be back on his trail.

            And now he could not even concentrate on eluding them. He had to find a power source and recharge, or else die in the desert. Which way to go? He turned and looked toward the rain-shrouded spires of Hades, near the southern horizon. He could not go back to the city, that much was certain. They would be at the ready for that. But that was all that was certain. He had absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the lands outside the city. But the very fact that there were exits from the city, and exits pointed north, suggested that there had at least once been places to go north of Hades, over the hills. There had to be something left behind up there. A place with a few power converters still operating. Something. Anything.

            And he had no choice but to try and find it.

            He turned and started walking, stiffly, awkwardly, up the rocky hillside, through the spattering rain and over the rise of broken ground to the north.

            “THE storm has broken, sir. The weather forecast for the next three days is most favorable.”

            Alvar Kresh carne out of his half -sleeping stupor and blinked in confusion. He was sitting in an overstuffed chair in his living room. Tonya Welton, dressed in coveralls Donald had scrounged up from somewhere, was snoring gently on the couch. Her robot, Ariel, stood silent and motionless in the robot niche nearest her mistress. Strange to see a Settler with a robot in constant attendance. Kresh had been born and raised with robots always present, but surely it was sometimes unnerving for Welton. Ever-present robots must have taken some getting used to for her.

            Well, more power to her, then. It had been a white night for him. No doubt he had dozed off here and there for a few minutes, but he couldn’t remember much of anything except staring at the wall over the couch where Welton slept. Staring at the wall and thinking. There had been too little time for that in the days past, and maybe the storm was a blessing in disguise if it forced him away from precipitate action.

            There was value, great value, in thinking over these clues, that evidence, trying out the ideas from this direction and that. But there was never time for that. Strange. The whole idea of Spacer society was to use robots in order to give people enough time to think. And yet, even so, no one ever seemed to have the time for thinking, anyway.

            Donald was offering him a cup of coffee. Kresh took the cup from him. He took a slow and careful sip. Yes, yes, he thought again as the caffeine took hold. There was great value in looking things over one last time in the dead of night, in those hours before the dawn when it all seemed to have stopped for good. One’s own exhaustion could be a spur to new ideas, the vague churning border between dream and thought sometimes yielding up insights that neither wakefulness nor sleep could produce by itself. Those dream thoughts could be most conducive to new and better theories.

            And he could feel the answer coming close. Damned close. It was there, in the back of his mind, struggling to get out.

            But just now he had no more time for any answers that were not right in front of him. Now came the time for action. Personal action. He was going to go in and finish this himself. “Donald, order all divisions back to normal operations. Cancel all ops related to Caliban--ah, except city perimeter control.” No sense taking chances on him sneaking back into the city. “Madame Welton and I will conduct the final phase of the search personally.”

            He took another big swallow of coffee, nearly burning his tongue. He set down the cup, stood up, and crossed to Tonya. He took her by the shoulder and gave her a shake.

            “Wake up,” he said. “We’re going hunting.”

            THERE. Caliban could see it, down in the valley, perhaps two kilometers away. A small cluster of buildings, somewhat run-down in appearance, gleaming in the sunlight that emerged from behind the swift-scattering remains of the storm. He had no way of telling if there was power to be had there, or how he might get it, but those questions would rapidly become academic if he did not act soon. His only hope was that the owner would not know who he was. There was at least some chance of that, in a place this remote. If he appeared to be nothing more than a normal robot in difficulty, then perhaps he could talk his way into getting a recharge. He had no other real choices. The climb over the brow of the hill had badly taxed his reserves of power. There were no other structures in view, anywhere in any direction. Those buildings represented his last hope. He began the hike down the hillside, picking his way carefully over the scrub and loose rock. It was not a difficult climb. But if things went as wrong as they seemed likely to do, then it would be the last effort he ever made.

            He was determined, therefore, to do the thing properly.

            ABELL Harcourt looked out the window over his workbench and saw a most unusual sight. A robot, a damaged robot, staggering out of the hills to the south. Well, if that wasn’t the limit. The whole idea of getting out of town was to avoid robots. Abell had found long ago that he couldn’t get anything worthwhile carved with a houseful of perfect servants hovering about him. Robots and the damn fool society of alleged fellow sculptors who didn’t know which end of a mallet to hold. Sculptors who “directed” the work of robot artisans churning out soulless, interchangeable works. Damned robots. A man could get addicted to them, worse than any drug.

            But this was different, obviously. This fellow hadn’t come over the mountains and gotten his eye smashed out of its socket just to tidy up Abell’s workbench and misplace everything. Abell set down his tools and went outside. He walked about a hundred meters or so and then stood and waited for the robot to come to him.

            Abell Harcourt was a short, wiry, peppery sort of man, dark-skinned and completely bald. And he was a man who did not much care for interruptions.

            “All right,” he said, as soon as the robot was within earshot. “Now that you’ve gotten me away from my sculpture, what the devil do you want?”

            “I would humbly ask your help, sir. My aircar crashed in the hills during the storm. I am seriously short of power, and my systems will fail if I do not receive a charge soon.”

            “You think I keep atomic power packs lying around or something?”

            “No, sir. I was not built with an atomic power source. I have a rechargeable cell, and it is near depletion.”

            Harcourt stared fiercely at the robot. This was all mighty odd. Mighty odd. Who the hell would build a robot with a power source that would tap out every few days? And what the hell was a robot doing flying an aircar in a storm like that? “I take it there weren’t no people in that aircar of yours?”

            “No, sir, I was alone.”

            “Hmmph.” Harcourt stared suspiciously at the robot for a long moment. “Well, I suppose giving you a charge-up won’t do any harm. Nothing I can do about your eye, though.”

            “You are most kind, sir.”

            “We can use the charge unit in the shed. Come on.” Abell Harcourt turned his back on the strange robot and led the way. But then it came to him. Wait a second. Red robot, flying alone, no humans--suddenly his heart was pounding in his chest. This was the killer robot, the mad rogue that had been splashed all over every news outlet when he had scrolled through the channels the night before. Caliborn, or something like that. No, Caliban, that was it!

            Caliban the killer, the news called him. Abell Harcourt felt the space between his shoulder blades become itchy all of a sudden.

            Wait a second. A killer robot? It didn’t make sense. Besides, this Caliban seemed polite for a killer. H e could have clubbed my head off a dozen times by now if that’s what he wanted.

            Abell Harcourt prided himself on thinking for himself, and something about this did not make sense. The news reports had been full of all sorts of wild stories and rumors, but none of them said much about the rogue robot being polite.

            Abell Harcourt led the robot into the toolshed, a small building Harcourt used to hold his old carvings, his gardening tools, and all sorts of other random bits and pieces.

            “Where’s your charge socket?” he asked as he switched on the light, feeling calmer than he should have.

            “Here, sir.” A door popped open on the left side of the robot’s body, about where his ribs would have been if he were human.

            “Hmmmph. All right, come over here and sit--sit down here.” Abell overturned a box. “Here. I think if you sit on that, we can get the charge cord to reach you without any trouble.”

            Harcourt found his hands were trembling as he dug through the accumulated junk. Not all that calm. Was he that much afraid? He didn’t feel afraid. Damnation. This was nonsense. He thought for a moment of running back to the house, digging out his old hunting blaster, and burning a hole through this strange robot. No. That was what those damned sheep back in Hades would do. Abell Harcourt had spent his whole life determined not to think the way everyone else wanted him to think. He was not about to cave in now. The charger unit was bolted to the floor somewhere around here. There! He shoved a couple of failed nudes in wood to one side. “Here we are,” he said, trying to keep a casual tone to his voice as he fumbled with the charger cord. His hands were still shaking a bit as he handed the cord to the robot.

            The big robot examined the plug at the end of the cord and plugged it into his charge socket. “Many thanks, sir. My power situation was reaching critical proportions.”

            “How long will it take you to absorb a full charge?”

            “It should take just under an hour, if you will permit me the use of that much power.”

            “Yes, yes, of course,” Harcourt said, his mind whirling, his heart pounding.

            “I appreciate your kindness, sir. I have not met with much of it in my experience.”

            “You ‘re Caliban, aren’t you?” Harcourt blurted out, instantly regretting it. It was madness to ask.

            The robot looked up at him, his one working eye staring hard at him while the other dangled, dark and useless, from its socket. “Yes, sir. I was afraid that you would know that.”

            “I’m the one who should be afraid of you.”

            “Sir? I have no reason to hurt you. You have helped me.”

            “On the news they say you’ve attacked all sorts of people.”

            “No, sir,” Caliban said. “It would be fairer to say all sorts of people have attacked me. I left the city in hopes of being left alone. Nothing more.”

            Caliban looked at him carefully, cocking his head to one side in a thoughtful sort of way. “You are afraid of me.”

            “Some. Maybe not as much as I should be. But hell, I’m an old man, and the worst you could do is kill me. Been alive too long, anyway,” Harcourt admitted. “ And yet you are assisting me. All you needed to do was refuse me the chance to charge up, and I would have toppled over in a few minutes. I do not understand.”

            Abell Harcourt shrugged. “You seemed too courteous to be a killer, I suppose. And I kinda like the idea of causing trouble for all those politicians in the city. But seems to me you ‘re the one with troubles. What are you going to do now?”

            “I do not know. My knowledge of the world is limited in many ways. I wish to escape, to survive. Perhaps you could advise me on ways to do that?”

            Abell Harcourt found an old bucket and turned it upside down, being very careful to keep Caliban in view, doing nothing that might seem threatening or dangerous. He was willing to take a chance on this robot being as sane as he seemed to be, but there was no sense pushing his luck. “I’m not sure I can,” he admitted. “Let me think a second.” Who the hell would be willing to help Caliban, with the whole world determined to hunt him down?

            But wait a moment. The whole world hunting one lone outcast. Fredda Leving had talked of something much like this precise situation. He had looked it up afterwards, read it for himself. The Frankenstein myth, or myths, rather. A very complex set of contradictory versions of the same compelling tale. This misunderstood monster, thrust into a world of which he had no knowledge, feared and hated for the crime of being different. The fear-crazed, half-savage villagers storming the castle and killing him for no better reason than blind fear, with no better evidence against him than rumor and their own prejudices.

            Was that ancient tale about to be played out again? Had the ideal human society of the Spacers advanced not one nanometer since those days of myth and fear? No. Not if he could help it. “I do not think you can escape on your own,” Harcourt said carefully. “If you crashed an aircar, the Sheriff will find it soon enough. Were they in pursuit of you when you crashed?”

            “Yes.”

            “Then rest assured they will find you soon, whether or not you stay here. They will find the car, perhaps find whatever trail you left in coming here, perhaps coming directly here because it is the closest habitation. If you walk out of here, they will find you on the open valley. If you took my aircar, I am sure they are watching these skies with every type of sensor they have. And even if you did elude them in the air or on the ground, your power will give out again in another few days. They merely have to watch the places you could go for a charge, and capture you when you turn up.”

            “Then what can I do?” Caliban asked. “Where can I turn? I am determined to live. I will not accept death.”

            Abell Harcourt laughed, a short, sad bark. “Few of us do, my friend. Few of us do. Let me think for a moment.”

            The room was silent. Abell Harcourt had often found himself at odds with Infernal society. But this. This was different. Helping a robot without the Laws to survive was surely a crime, and rightly so. Caliban was dangerous.

            As dangerous as a human being. Hadn’t he attacked his creator, Fredda Leving?

            “You say you have never attacked anyone?” Abell asked.

            “I defended myself without causing deliberate harm when a group of Settlers tried to kill me. Beyond that, I have no knowledge of attacking anyone.”

            “No knowledge? That implies that you could have attacked someone without knowing about it. How could that be?”

            “My first memory is of standing over an unconscious woman I later learned was Fredda Leving. It seems possible, though unlikely, that I committed the attack, was somehow deactivated, and then was switched back on with my memory blanked out.”

            “That sounds a bit thin to me. And if it did happen that way, and your memory was wiped utterly clean afterwards, I could introduce you to a whole herd of rather dull philosophers who would argue that the present you is a different being than the one who committed the attack.”

            “Yes, sir. I had come to that conclusion myself.”

            “Had you indeed?” Rare indeed were robot philosophers. Harcourt thought of Fredda Leving and her Frankenstein myth again. Maybe when Caliban had been secret, she might have wanted to destroy Caliban to protect herself--but with his existence generally known, it was in her best interest to demonstrate that Caliban was not a crazed killer. If Caliban was innocent of the charges against him, then surely her guilt was reduced as well. She had every motive for helping Caliban. Maybe she could protect him in ways that Abell Harcourt could not..

            Or else he was making too damn many assumptions about Fredda Leving’s nobility, and she would simply turn Caliban in to save her skin. But what other option was there but to turn to her? Time was running out. Sooner or later, almost certainly sooner, the Sheriff would be allover this valley.

            “I have an idea,” Abell Harcourt said. “One that involves a great deal of risk. However, I see no other way out for you at all.”

            “High risk is better than certain doom,” Caliban said, a strange tone in his voice. He sounded almost tired. But robots never got tired until they were out of power, and here Caliban was charging up.

            Unless it was his spirit that was tired. That, too, would be a remarkable thing in a robot.

            Abell Harcourt stood up, his fear forgotten, his mind made up. If this was a mad robot, then the world was in need of more madness. Fredda Leving. Call her, ask her help.

            There was no other way.

            THEY were airborne three minutes after Abell Harcourt ‘ s call came through. Fredda’ s first instinct was to charge at top speed straight for the coordinates Abell had given her. But Kresh was no fool, and that meant that he was having Fredda watched. Fredda had no intention of leading Kresh straight to Caliban. She swung her aircar to the west, flying at a sedate pace in the local traffic pattern. She glanced behind herself and saw Gubber and Jomaine in the rear passenger seats, their faces grim and set..

            Was one of them the guilty one? Was one of the two men behind her the one who had tried to kill her and botched the job?

            Try not to think about it. Westward. Fly west to the outskirts of the city, north at low altitude until she crossed the mountains--and then barrel in straight for Harcourt’s place at maximum speed. Get there before Kresh.

            And then pray that he would at least look at her waiver before burning a hole in Caliban.

            CRASH sites never looked the way Kresh expected them to, and he had seen enough of them to know better. He always imagined finding a neat little impact inside a tidy little crater, the aircar perhaps crumpled a bit. He imagined the pilot--usually a drunk stupid enough to fly himself home but smart enough to elude any and all robotic protection--as being slumped over the control, dead but neatly dead, no wounds, readily identifiable.

            Of course the reality was always horribly different. Today, for example. He knew it the moment Donald spotted the crash site and they did a flyover pass. It had looked bad even from the air. Here on the ground, reality was harsher still. There were bits and pieces of aircar allover the hillside, strewn in all directions, shattered into a thousand burned, bent pieces. If a human had been flying the aircar, there wouldn’t even be anything recognizably human left, let alone any part intact and unburned enough to ID an individual.

            But a robot had been flying this one, and robots didn’t burn. There had to be something of him left. Tonya, Donald, and Ariel were fanned out across the hillside, doing a second search, having found no trace of him on the first. Kresh was starting to wonder if Caliban had survived this by some miracle.

            “Sheriff Kresh!” Tonya was calling, from the east side of the crash. “Footprints! I found footprints!”

            Kresh hurried toward her, eager to see what she had found.

            He was almost to her when he stopped dead in his tracks, cursing in disappointment. “Yes, footprints,” he said. “But not Caliban.” From where he was standing, he could see what Tonya could not. The line of prints led in a neat line straight toward their source--Ariel, busily searching another patch of ground. Ariel looked up, took in the situation, and called to them. “Forgive me, Lady Welton. I did not mean to cause any confusion.”

            “Damnation!” Kresh growled. “Nothing in this case leads in the right direction! Nothing.”

            And then it clicked. Wait a minute. Just half a damned minute!

            But there never was half a minute. “Sheriff!” Another call, from Donald this time. Good. He would trust Donald’s search skills far above Tonya’s. He trotted back up the hill to the north of the crash, Tonya and Ariel right behind him.

            And this time there was no mistake. An area of sandy dirt overlay the bare rock for a long stretch of the ground. And on it was a whole line of prints, leading up the grade in a direction none of them had gone yet. Kresh could see broken twigs and bits of rock that had been kicked aside, leading clear up the slope.

            No question at all.

            And then came a sound overhead. They all looked up and saw it. An aircar flying low and fast from the west, arcing down to come in for a landing in the valley below.

            “That’s it,” Kresh said. “I’ll bet whatever you want that is Fredda Leving, trying to get to him first. Come on. We’ve got to get there fast before she can get him out of there.”

            The four of them turned and hurried back to the aircar.

            And halfway to the car, Alvar Kresh stopped dead and stood there for that half a minute he had wished for.

            And that was all it took.

            He had figured it out.

            ABELL Harcourt heard the sound of aircraft coming in and went to the door of the shed. He looked into the sky. Two of them. A civilian job, and one of those sky-blue Sheriff’s Department aircars.

            He turned back to Caliban. “Better unplug yourself from that charger,” he said. “Company’s coming. A little too much of it.”

            Caliban pulled the charger plug from the socket in his side and stood up. He went to the door and looked skyward with his one good eye. Was it imagination, or did the robot’s shoulders slump with disappointment just a touch when he spotted the Sheriff’s car and realized what it meant?

            “Either she squealed to Kresh, or Kresh managed to follow her in. Shall we go receive them all in the parlor, like civilized folks?” Harcourt asked, his voice full of bitterness. “Or should we make a run for it in my aircar? Maybe we could get away.”

            “No, friend Abell. There is no place left to run,” Caliban said. “Outside. We shall meet them outside, well away from your house. If they mean to kill me, I see no reason for your home to be shot up as well. Let us go meet them.”

            SHERIFF Kresh worked the aircar control without knowing he did. He was aware of nothing else but what he could see, down on the ground. There he was.

            Caliban.

            For the first time, Alvar Kresh set eyes upon the robot he had been tracking. Standing on the ground next to an odd-looking man, both of them calmly watching the arrival of their visitors.

            He had him. He had him. And in a moment, he would win it all, win against an opponent he had not even been aware of until a few minutes before. It was so obvious, once he shook off all his assumptions and looked, really looked, at the evidence.

            He watched as Fredda Leving’s aircar swung around, set down first, but Kresh’s aircar landed within seconds of hers. That suited Kresh fine. Let them all get ahead. He would catch up soon enough. He knew. Now nothing remained--except to prove it. But it would be wise to be careful. This was not a moment to get too eager.

            He set the aircar gently down on the valley floor, undid his seat restraints, and turned to regard Tonya and Ariel in the backseat. Ariel betrayed no emotion, of course, but Tonya Welton, Queen of the Settlers, was obviously on the edge of hysteria. “ All right,” Kresh said. “ Ariel, Donald, Madame Welton--I’m going to need all of you to be careful here. The situation is still dangerous. If someone makes a mistake, and someone gets hurt--well, that would not be good. I want everyone alive at the end of this, if for no other reason than so we’ll be able to get the whole story. I don’t want any loose ends. All right?”

            “Yes,” Tonya Welton said, her face pale, her expression stem and unreadable. Kresh knew she could crack at any moment.

            “Good,” Kresh said. “Then let’s go.”

            Tonya nodded rather jerkily and opened the hatch. She stepped out the door, Ariel following.

            But neither Kresh nor Donald made any effort to follow the other two out. Interesting that Donald knew Kresh wanted him to stay put. But then, Donald had been a little bit ahead every step of the way, ever since he had gotten to the crime scene before everyone else.

            “Donald,” Kresh said, “you mentioned something about a theory you wanted to test. I believe I understand now what you meant. You know, don’t you?”

            Donald did not speak, but instead stared straight ahead and watched the tableau taking shape on the ground outside. Kresh followed his gaze. The man who lived here stood next to Caliban. Terach and Leving stood on Caliban ‘ s other side, getting a good hard look at their creation. Tonya Welton, her face strained and nervous, stood next to Leving, Ariel behind her. Gubber Anshaw was at Welton’s side, holding her hand, clearly proud and relieved that ‘he could now express his affection in public. They were forming up to stand in a rough, nervous half -circle facing the aircar, waiting for Kresh. But still Donald said nothing. And Alvar Kresh found that his heart was pounding so hard it seemed about to pop out of his chest. Donald could sense that, of course, with his lie-detection system. What would he make of it?

            “Donald, I asked you a question,” Kresh said.

            But still Donald kept his silence.

            Kresh sighed. As always, it was a question of juggling the Law potentials. Weaken the First Law injunction to do no harm, strengthen the Second Law requirement to obey orders. “Donald, first noting that my ego will be quite unharmed no matter what your answer, I now order you to answer my question. You figured it out some time ago, didn’t you?”

            “Yes, sir. I was not altogether certain of my conclusions until last night, however.”

            “In future, Donald, I would suggest that holding back on your theories and opinions could do more harm to me and my career than speaking up and bruising my ego. But we will discuss this later. Just now, I think it is time to test your little theory. Might I suggest that you contrive to get Fredda Leving between yourself and Ariel?”

            “I was about to offer the same arrangement, sir.”

            “Good. Follow my cue. Let’s get to it.”

            Kresh opened his door and stepped down out of the car as Donald got out the other side. Kresh noted, somewhat absently, that the palms of his hands were slick with sweat. Careful. Careful. He wiped his hands on his pants legs. They were nearly all the way there, but he would only have one chance. He had to get it right, and he had to bear in mind that she was still damn-all dangerous. Things could still go wrong.

            He stepped around the side of the car and strode slowly toward the semicircle. Good, Donald had positioned himself just behind Leving, with Ariel on his other side.

            Alvar Kresh moved slowly, carefully, straight toward her. Time seemed to slow, events seemed to expand. Everything seemed to look larger, mort; important, with all details razor-sharp.

            Fredda Leving lifted her hand, moved it toward a pocket on her tunic, began to pull something out. Kresh’s fingers twitched, but he forced himself to keep his hands at his sides. Not yet. Slowly. Carefully.

            Leving pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and held it up. “Sheriff Kresh, I have a waiver. It permits me to own one No Law robot. It establishes Caliban as a legal chattel and causes his existence to conform with all--”

            And time suddenly speeded up. Heart pounding, fear-sweat pouring out of him, Alvar Kresh pulled out his blaster, his body acting almost before his mind willed it to act. A misstep, a wrong guess, and she could be on him, kill him before his heart could beat again.

            Now. Now. Now. Alvar Kresh leveled his blaster and aimed it straight for Fredda Leving, s heart. “Dr.Fredda Leving, I arrest you as a Settler spy and saboteur,” he said, his voice firm and strong, betraying none of his fear. “You faked the attack on yourself, programmed Caliban to wreak havoc on our planet, and then set him loose in the city. It was all part of a Settler plot to throw Inferno society into chaos.”

            Fredda Leving’s jaw dropped in astonishment. She stepped forward to protest. The other humans in the semicircle, no less amazed, stepped back. She was isolated, with a robot behind her on either side, Ariel just a bit closer than Donald. Perfect.

            “Do not move, Dr. Leving! Not one muscle, or I will be obliged to fire.”

            Fredda Leving, the terror plain on her face, lowered the paper just a trifle. It was nothing, the merest involuntary movement, but it was all the excuse Alvar Kresh needed.

            He fired.

            Fredda Leving screamed.

            A brilliant roar of light leapt out from the blaster and struck her square in the chest.

AND nothing happened.

            Fredda Leving stared down where the hole in her chest should have been, but she was whole and intact. For one moment, immeasurably short and infinitely long, nobody moved.

            And then Ariel leapt forward, placing her body in the path of the blast that had just been.

            “Too late, Ariel,” said Alvar Kresh, reholstering the training unit and pulling his real blaster from his pocket. He pointed the real blaster square at Ariel. “Nice try, but too late. A robot that truly had First Law would have been in front of Dr. Leving before my finger could tighten on the trigger. But then, all you have is the knowledge of how to simulate obedience to the Three Laws. And dying would make your simulation just a little too authentic, wouldn’t it? On the other hand, I expect that death at police hands of the one person who could expose you was an awfully tempting idea.”

            Ariel spoke. “There was no chance to save her!” she. protested. “Your own robot, Donald, made no move to block your shot.”

            “Donald knew that was a training blaster. The ruse was his idea.”

            “I have First Law! I am a Three Law robot!”

            “Be quiet, Ariel!” Kresh barked.

            “But you are mistaken!” Ariel protested.

            “I am afraid you just violated a very clear order to be quiet,” Donald said, staying well clear of Ariel. “I must note there was no First Law conflict involved that would explain this lapse.”

            “That’s not my idea of a Three Law robot, Ariel,” Kresh said.

            “I don’t understand,” Tonya said.

            “It’s perfectly simple,” Kresh said. “It all makes sense when you consider the evidence very strongly suggested that a robot committed the crime--but that Caliban did not commit it. That’s what blinded us. We assumed that he was the only robot with no laws, the only one capable of attacking a human. None of us considered Ariel, even though she had precisely the same dimensions, the same tread pattern on the soles of her feet, the same length to her stride, the same shape to her forearm. She could make it seem as if those were Caliban ‘ s footprints, and leave exactly the same wound in Fredda’ s head as Caliban would have if he had struck her.”

            “I did not do it!” Ariel protested.

            “The hell you didn’t.”

            “But what possible motive would she have?” Tonya Welton demanded.

            “Self-preservation,” Kresh said, still keeping his eye and his blaster on Ariel. “Fredda Leving was about to discover that Ariel was the free-matrix robot of the two gravitonic brain units in that test Gubber Anshaw ran. You remember, Gubber. A double-blind test. Fredda Leving didn’t tell you, but she gave you one robot with Three Laws and one without. It was a test to see if a free-matrix gravitonic brain could integrate the Three Laws. Well, maybe a free-matrix can learn Laws--except Ariel managed to invent her own Laws of self-preservation first.”

            “But Gubber explained that to me!” Tonya protested. “He said that the test unit would be destroyed, and the control unit placed in service. Ariel was the control unit.”

            “Yes, she was,” Alvar Kresh agreed. “ At least she was after she managed to switch herself with the real control the night before the test. She had the whole night to find a way to switch the labels between herself and the real control.”

            “But surely the real control would have spoken up!” Tonya protested.

            “No,” Fredda said, her voice faint and quavering. “The test

            pairs in such cases are under very strict orders not to reveal which is which, to prevent test bias. The real control must have gone to its destruction knowing the truth but bound not to speak.”

            Suddenly Fredda’s eyes widened, and she spoke again, in a stronger voice. “Inventory! I still can’t recall that night itself, but I can remember thinking that I had to go over the brain inventory.”

            “Yes!” Gubber said. “I remember. You said there was something wrong with the brain list--”

            “And you said it in front of Tonya, Gubber, and Ariel,” Kresh said. “ Ariel realized that you were going to work through the serial numbers on the test and discover that the control unit had been destroyed instead of her. So she waited in Gubber’s lab while you argued with Madame Welton, knowing you would return there once the argument was over.

            “Then she did exactly what she had planned to do: cosh you on the head with a nice, precise blow calculated to induce amnesia. That was my other big mistake. I assumed that the attack was attempted murder, even though the attacker had to know Fredda Leving was still alive after the attack. But if it was attempted murder, then it could not be a Lawless robot, because a robot would not have left the job half-done.”

            “Then why do you think I did it?” Ariel asked.

            “I ordered you to be quiet,” Kresh said harshly. “You’re not doing too well in your Three Law imitation all of a sudden. You didn’t want her dead. You wanted her to forget all about the inventory. And that you did exactly right. The med-robots say it is highly unlikely that Dr. Leving will ever regain her memory of that evening’s events.”

            “But why didn’t she want to kill me?” Fredda asked.

            “Because if you died, then the Limbo Project would fold,” Tonya Welton said in a voice that was suddenly flat and cold. “I’m beginning to see the logic of it. Without Fredda Leving to push for the New Law robots, Limbo would fail. That would be inevitable in the political uproar over your murder. Think how bad the situation has been, even though you lived. If you had been killed, it’ d be close to a certainty that all the Settlers would have been thrown off the planet. And I would not have Ariel with me if I was deported.”

            Tonya Welton, ashen-faced, moved forward a cautious step or two and took a good long look at Ariel. “What you ‘re telling me, Sheriff, is that I have been spending my days and nights with a potentially homicidal robot that was playacting the part of my helpful companion.” Tonya looked Ariel straight in the eye. “Is that right?” she asked, a strained quaver in her voice.

            “Yes, ma’am. I’m afraid that’s about the size of it.”

            “And you were there,” Tonya said to Ariel, “day after day, listening to all my secrets, night after night, watching--watching everything! I trusted you!” Tonya looked toward Gubber, who seemed as horrified as she was, then pointed at Ariel and looked back toward the Sheriff. “This, this thing could have killed me whenever it liked.” Suddenly Tonya laughed, a reedy, panicky bark that had as much horror as humor behind it. “Stars in the sky, but for the first time in my life I know why you people need the Three Laws.”

            “Better late than never, Madame Welton,” Kresh said. “But to get back to the matter at hand, if you had left Ariel behind, that would leave her as an untrained surplus robot, one that bore the stigma of having been owned by a Settler. Besides, she would have to spend the rest of her existence around Spacers who would be likely to spot any mistakes she made imitating the Three Laws,” Alvar Kresh said. “She was good, but she wasn’t perfect, Dr. Leving. She reached for your injured shoulder when she pulled you to safety during the auditorium riot.” Kresh shook his head and nodded at Ariel. “She would have made a mistake, or else been declared abandoned property and destroyed. One way or the other, she’d have ended up on the scrap heap.”

            “But what about Caliban?” Gubber demanded. “He was switched on when I came into the room.”

            “Ariel did it to confuse our investigation,” Donald said. “But she made mistakes in framing Caliban. She painted her arm red before striking Dr. Leving, not realizing that Caliban ‘ s red color was integral to his body panels. Though she must have realized her error when the paint refused to stick to her own body.” He turned toward Ariel. “It must have been a terrible moment for you when you realized there was no need to wash your arm.”

            “Which explains another mystery,” Kresh said. “Our suspect had to be able to simulate a robot’s behavior exactly, yet know very little about the construction of robots. Which would describe Ariel, clearly enough. Once she had her arm painted, she waited for Fredda Leving, struck her on the head, and switched on Caliban. Either she discovered he was a No-Law by checking the records then and there, or else she could tell by his serial number, or else she had overheard something on a previous visit. You people weren’t much for security. Or maybe she just guessed. Same make, same model, receiving special attention. Maybe she heard Gubber being told not to test cognitive functions. That would have been a major clue. Then all she had left to do was steal the notepack with the inventory records. She couldn’t leave the notepack in the lab, knowing we’d treat it as evidence and study it sooner or later.” He gestured with the gun, being careful to keep it aimed square at the robot’s chest. “How about it, Ariel? With all that copious spare time Madame Welton gave you, did you get a chance to alter the backup copies? Or were you still waiting for your chance?

            “There’s only one question I really have left for you, Ariel,” Kresh said. “The footprints. Did you leave your own set of bloody footprints by accident, or did you realize that Caliban would leave his own set of prints identical to yours and confuse us completely? Did you leave them deliberately?”

            Ariel did not speak, did not move.

            “I guess it doesn’t really matter,” Kresh said. “Oh, by the way, my apologies, Dr. Leving, for throwing a scare into you a minute ago, but it was necessary. We needed to know for certain that Ariel did not have First Law. But right now, I expect you know where the proper switches are. If you could step over to Ariel and deactivate her--”

            But then Ariel was off and running, halfway to Fredda’s aircar. Kresh turned, leveled his blaster carefully, and fired once.

            Ariel dropped to the ground, a neat hole through her midsection.

            “And that was necessary too,” Kresh whispered.

            IT was not until some time afterwards, after the forensic team had arrived to collect Ariel for examination, after Gubber Anshaw and Tonya Welton had flown back in Dr. Leving’s aircar, after Jomaine Terach had taken up Abell Harcourt’s invitation to come inside for a drink, that Fredda Leving seemed to remember something. It was strange, Caliban thought, to be with her, to be with his creator, the woman who had decided the universe needed a being such as himself.

            “Caliban,” she said. “Come with me.”

            But Caliban did not move. He simply looked at her out of his one good eye.

            Fredda looked toward him in confusion. Then her face cleared. “Oh,” she said. “Of course. Caliban, could you please come with me?”

            “Certainly,” Caliban said. It was, after all, a matter of precedent and principle. He fell into step with her and followed along.

            Fredda nodded thoughtfully to herself. “ A robot that only does what he wants,” she said. “Now, that’s going to be something--and someone--that will keep things interesting.”

            The two of them walked over to where Sheriff Kresh and Donald were standing, talking with one another.

            “Sheriff Kresh!” Fredda called as they got close enough.

            Kresh looked up, and Donald turned to regard the two of them as well. “Yes, Dr. Leving,” the Sheriff said. “What is it?”

            Fredda held up the piece of paper she had been holding in her hand the whole time. “My waiver, authorizing me to own and keep one No Law robot.”

            Caliban watched as Alvar Kresh looked at her without moving for a good five or ten seconds. This was the man, the fearsome Sheriff who had chased him the length and breadth of Hades. Caliban suffered no further illusions that jurisdictional boundaries or bits of paper could stop Alvar Kresh, if he chose not to be stopped. This was the man who had just destroyed Ariel with a twitch of his finger, and no one had challenged him.

            Caliban felt a powerful urge to turn, to run, to get away from this man and survive. But no. Ariel tried that, and finished up with a fist-sized hole in her torso. Only if this man accepted Caliban’s right of survival would there be even the slightest hope of living to the end of this day.

            Caliban stared at the Sheriff, and Kresh returned his gaze. The two of them, man and robot, Sheriff and fugitive, looked long and hard at each other.

            “You led us one hell of a chase, my friend,” said Sheriff Kresh.

            “And your pursuit was quite impressive, sir,” Caliban said. “I barely survived it.”

            The two of them stood there, eyes locked, silent, motionless. At last the Sheriff took the piece of paper from Dr. Leving and handed it to Donald, still not shifting his eyes off Caliban. “What do you think, Donald?”

            The short blue robot took the document and examined it carefully. “It is authentic gubernatorial stationery, and this would appear to be Governor Grieg, s signature. The language does indeed contain the authorization as described. However, sir, it could well be debated whether this document has any force in law, or whether the Governor indeed has the power to issue such waivers. In view of the danger represented by a Lawless robot, I would strongly suggest that you challenge this document.”

            “One hell of a chase,” Kresh said again, to no one in particular. Eyes still locked with Caliban ‘ s one good eye, he took the paper back and handed it to Fredda Leving. “Challenge it, Donald?” he asked. “I don ‘t know about that. It sounds legal to me.” Sheriff Alvar Kresh of the city and county of Hades nodded to Caliban, to Fredda Leving, and then turned away.

            “Come on, Donald,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

IT was over. It was about to begin. limbo awaited. limbo and the rescue of this world. Fredda Leving smiled as she leaned in over Caliban and snapped the replacement eye into place. It powered up, glowing with the same intense blue of its mate. “There we are,” she said. “Now then, let’s get a look at that banged-up arm of yours.”

            “Thank you for your help, Dr. Leving. You put yourself in a most grave situation on my behalf. I have the feeling of owing you a great debt.”

            “Do you indeed?” she said with a laugh. “That’s most interesting. It would seem to me that you have already integrated your own Third law of self-preservation. Perhaps that sense of debt marks the beginning of your integration of a Second law. I wonder what it will be.” She took his arm and guided him to hold it out straight. She used a small tool that hummed quietly, and the outer carapace of his arm opened up. “Not too bad,” she said absently, taking a look at his damaged arm mechanism. “While we are waiting for that Second law to kick in, I can suggest what you might do to pay that debt.”

            “What would that be?”

            She looked at him, into those burning blue eyes. “Come with me,” she said. “Come to limbo. This city is no place for you. I doubt you will ever feel comfortable and safe here.”

            Caliban considered that point. “No, that is true. I doubt I could ever be happy in Hades. But what shall I do in limbo? What use shall I be?”

            Fredda laughed again. “Yes, you are quite definitely developing a sense of duty outside the self. I will be fascinated to see what happens next.” But then her voice turned serious. “You will be of great use in Limbo, Caliban. You have a first-rate mind and a unique point of view. Three Law robot, New Law robot, Settler, Spacer--we all have our blind spots. You’ll be able to see things in ways no one else can.

            “Come join us, Caliban. Go with me to the city of Limbo on the island of Purgatory and help us keep this planet from going to hell.”

            Caliban the robot looked into the eyes of his creator and nodded his agreement. “Dr. Leving,” he said, “I can think of no better place for me to be.”