9

ALVAR KRESH STARED out the window of his home, and watched the rain come pouring down. Rain--lifegiving, welcoming rain. It was a rare thing for the city of Hades, and always a most welcome one.

            But the rain and the darkness made the way impossible to see, and made the going slippery. Flash floods could wash out the road altogether. It was best to stay in one place, stay inside and home and dry in the rain. But Kresh could see another, larger, and more dangerous storm, one that had swept across the planet, Comet Grieg bearing down in its wake. In that larger storm, the storm of politics and decision and danger, Kresh had no choice but to move forward, to venture out and choose the direction that would lead to safety.

            If any direction could do so. If there was any way to choose a path, or any way to know that it would lead in the direction it seemed to go.

            What was to be done?

            Alvar Kresh had faced many decisions in his life, made many choices that affected many people, but never had he felt the loneliness of decision more. If only Lentrall had discovered his damnable comet sooner. If only there were more time.

            “What am I going to dot’ he asked the rain, speaking softly enough that his voice would not carry. But there were no answers, no guidance there. He turned around and looked around his living room. Fredda and Donald were there, watching him, waiting for him to speak to them.

            It was a big, comfortable, informal room. Fredda had redecorated it in soft and gentle colors, pastel shades of yellow and white, with soft rugs and comfortable chairs and cheerful abstract murals on the walls. Kresh would not have picked out any of it for himself, and yet, somehow, it all suited him very well. It felt more like a home than any place he had ever lived by himself. Warm, and safe, and bright.

            But then Kresh saw the room flash white for a split second as a lightning bolt lit up the window behind him. The thunder came quickly after, a booming roar that seemed powerful enough to shake the room apart.

            A well-timed reminder, it was, that they were not safe, that they could build all the buildings and walls and barriers they liked. The world would still be outside, unpredictable, uncontrollable, unknowable.

            And why merely imagine the chance of Comet Grieg being spotted earlier? Comet Grieg could just as easily have been left undiscovered until it was much closer, until it was too late to even consider diverting it. Or else the comet’s natural, undiverted orbit could just as easily have been too far off to even contemplate moving it. Or the damned thing could have been heading in for an unplanned, uncontrolled direct hit on the planet. What would they have done then?

            But no. “What if” was no longer the question. Alvar Kresh, and Alvar Kresh alone, had to answer another question.

            “What now?” he asked Fredda and Donald. “What is to be done?”

            There was a long moment’s pause before either of them replied, the rain on the roof a fitting, brooding background to the mood of the room.

            “I don’t know,” said Fredda at last. “Either leave the comet alone or bring it in to drop on our heads. Those are the two things you can do. It seems to me that either one could save all the life on the planet from destruction--or actually bring on that destruction. Are we doomed if we do nothing? Can we drop the comet without killing us all?”

            Kresh made a thoughtful little noise in his throat. “That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it?” He considered for a moment, and then went on. “Of course, the traditional Spacer response would be to do nothing at all,” said Kresh. “Let it alone, let it pass. If there is no way to know if it would be better to act, why then far better to leave the thing alone. If you do nothing, then there is nothing you can be blamed for if things go wrong.”

            “Another proud legacy of the Three Laws,” Fredda said. “Be safe, do nothing, take no chances.”

            “If the Three Laws teach humans to avoid taking needless risks now and again, I for one see that as a very strong argument in their favor,” said Donald, speaking for the first time. “But even the First Law contains an injunction against inaction. A robot cannot stand idly by. It must act to prevent harm to humans.”

            Kresh looked toward Donald with a smile. “Are you saying that a robot faced with this decision would choose to bring down the comet? Is that what you would do?”

            Donald held up his hands palm out and shook his head back and forth vigorously. “By no means, Governor. I am quite literally incapable of making this decision. It would be a physical impossibility for me to do it, and more than likely suicidal to attempt it. So it would be for any properly constructed Three Law robot.”

            “How so?”

            “The First Law enjoins us against doing harm to humans, and against inaction at such times when robotic action would prevent harm to humans.” Donald’s speech became labored as he spoke. It was plain that even discussing the issues in a hypothetical context was difficult for him. “In this case, both action or inaction might or might not cause or prevent harm to humans. Attempting to deal with such a difficult problem, with the lives of so many present and potential humans in the bal--balance would cause...would cause irreparable damage to any pospospositronic brain, as the question produced cascading First-Law/First-Law conflictzzz.” Donald’s eyes grew a bit dimmer, and his movements seemed oddly sluggish as he put his arms back down at his side.

            “All right, Donald,” said Kresh, in his firmest and most reassuring voice. He stepped over to the robot and put his hand on Donald’s sloping shoulder. “It’s all right. You are not the one who will have to make that decision. I order you to stop considering it at this time.” There were times when only the words of a robot’s direct master could be enough to snap the robot out of such a state.

            Donald’s eyes faded out all but completely for a moment, and then came back to their normal brightness. He seemed to be looking at nothing at all for a few seconds, but then his eyes began to track again, and he looked straight at Kresh. “Thank--thank you, sir. It was most unwise of me to consider the question so closely, even when called upon to do so.”

            Kresh nodded absently, knowing that he had brought it on himself. He had asked Donald why a robot could not make such a decision, and a question was, in essence, an order. It required constant caution, endless care, to deal with the delicacy of a Three-Law robot’s sensibilities and sensitivities. Sometimes Kresh was deeply tired of it all. There were even times when he was ready to concede that the Settlers might have a point. Maybe some parts of life would be easier without robots.

            Not as if they had such an option at the moment. But if robots could not be trusted to face such a situation...Kresh turned toward Donald again. “Donald, I hereby order you to turn around and face the wall, and to shut off all your audio inputs until you see my wife or me waving at you. Do you understand?”

            “Yes, sir. Of course.” Donald turned his back on Kresh and Fredda. “I have now shut down my audio receptors.”

            “Very good,” said Kresh. More damn fool precautions, but that couldn’t be helped. At least now Donald would be unable to hear or eavesdrop. Now they would be able to talk without fear of saying the wrong thing in front of the robot and accidentally setting up a damn fool First Law crisis. Kresh turned toward Fredda. “What about the Robotic Planetary Control Center?” he asked. “I wanted to consult with it--and with the Computational Planetary Control Center--before I reached a decision.”

            “Well, what about them?” Fredda asked.

            The two control centers were the heart of the reterraforming effort, performing all the calculations and analyses of each new project before it was launched. The original intent had been to build a single control center. There were two basic designs to choose between. One was a Settler-style computational unit, basically a massively complex and powerful, but quite nonsentient, computer. The other was a Spacer-style robotic unit that would be based on a hugely powerful positronic brain, fully imbued with the Three Laws. It would, in effect, be a robot mind without a robot body.

            There had been a tremendous controversy over whether to trust the fate of the planet to a mindless machine, or to a robotic brain that would refuse to take necessary risks. It was easy to imagine a robotic control unit choosing to avoid harm to one human, rather than permit a project vital to the future of the planet. The robotics experts all promised that it didn’t work that way, but experts had been wrong before. Governor Grieg had died before he could reveal his choice between the two systems. In one of the first acts of his administration, Kresh had decided to build both, and interconnect them so that the two systems worked in consensus with each other. In theory, if the two systems could not reach agreement on what to do, or not to do, they were to call in human referees to decide the issue. In practice, the two systems had agreed with each other far more often than anyone could have hoped. Thus far, there had only been a half dozen or so very minor issues that had required human decisions.

            A vast planetary network of sensors and probes, orbiting satellites, mobile units, and on-site investigators, both robotic and human, fed a constant stream of information to both units--and both units fed back a constant stream of instructions and commands to the humans and robots and automatic machines in the field.

            The two interconnected control centers were the only devices on the planet capable of handling the constant stream of incoming data and outgoing instructions. It was plainly obvious that the two of them would have to be consulted regarding the plan to drop a comet on the planet, but Kresh did not wish to risk the sanity of the robotic unit. “You saw what just happened to Donald,” he said. “Will I burn the Robotic Center out if I ask it what I should do?”

            Fredda smiled reassuringly. “There wouldn’t be much point in having a Robotic Control Center that couldn’t consider risks to the planet without damaging itself,” she said. “It took some doing, but we installed some special...safeguards, shall we say, that should keep it from experiencing any serious First Law conflict.”

            “Good, good,” said Kresh, a bit absently. “At least that’s one less thing to worry about. At least we know that part is all right.”

            “Do we?” Fredda asked. “I wonder. When Lentrall asked me about Donald’s name, and how it was not from Shakespeare, that made me wonder.”

            “Wonder what?”

            “I was absolutely certain it was from Shakespeare. No doubt at all in my mind. I never bothered to double-check, any more than I would have bothered to double-check the spelling of my own name. I thought I knew it--and I was dead wrong.”

            “We all make mistakes,” Kresh said.

            “Yes, yes, of course,” Fredda said, impatiently. “But that’s not the point. In a sense, it’s a trivial mistake. But it came out of a trusted database. Who knows how long ago the dataset got scrambled, or what else in it is wrong? And if that database can be wrong, lots of other things can be as well. What else is there that we think we know? What other hard fact that we think we have absolutely right will turn out to be absolutely dead wrong? What else do we think we know?”

            There was a moment of long and uncomfortable silence.

            But uncertainty surrounded all of life. To wait until one was sure was to remain frozen in place until it was too late. “We’ll never be able to answer that question,” said Kresh. He paused for a moment and thought. “You’re thinking like a scientist,” he said. “And up until now, I’ve been thinking like a politician. Maybe it’s time to think like a police officer.”

            “I must admit that I do not see how the police viewpoint would be of much use in this situation,” said Fredda.

            “Because back when I was a policeman, I knew I didn’t know,” said Kresh. “I knew, on every case, that some knowledge was hidden, and that I would never have absolutely complete or totally accurate information. But I still had to act. I still had to decide. I had to take the facts I had--or thought I had--and ride them as far as they would take me.” He stepped around Donald so he was facing the robot. He waved his hand in front of Donald’s face. “All right, Donald,” he said. “You can turn around and listen now.”

            “Thank you, sir,” Donald replied.

            Kresh smiled at Donald, then paused a moment and walked to the center of the room. He looked from Donald to Fredda, and then turned around to look at the rainstorm again, to look at nothing at all. “By the time I know enough to decide what to do, it will be too late to decide. Therefore, we will work on the assumption that we are going to divert Comet Grieg. All preparations will go forward as if we were indeed planning to do the job.”

            “So we pretend that you’ve decided?” Fredda asked.

            “More or less,” Kresh said. “It will buy me some time. I won’t have to decide until it’s actually time to deflect the comet.”

            “That’s a dangerous move,” Fredda said. “It’s going to be hard to make all the investment of time and effort and money and then pull back at the last moment.”

            “It’s not the best way to do it,” Kresh agreed. “But can you think of any way that’s less bad? That at least gives us time to examine our options?”

            “No,” Fredda admitted.

            “Then I think we’d better do it my way,” said Kresh.

            “That leaves us with a hell of a lot to do,” Fredda said. “There’s the space-side interception and diversion to set up, the targeting to plan, the site survey of wherever the comet’s going to hit, evacuation of people and equipment, emergency preparations for the cities, food stockpiles to lay in--”

            “Excuse me, Dr. Leving, but, if I may say so, that is the sort of organizational job I was made to do.”

            Kresh smiled. Fredda ought to know that. She had made Donald in the first place. It was as close to a joke as Donald was ever likely to get. “Point taken,” Kresh said. “Donald, I want you to get started on the initial organizational tasks right now. Project management is to be your primary duty, and you are to avoid allowing other tasks to interfere. You are to perform no further personal service for me unless specifically ordered to do so. Report to me via hyperwave in three hours, time as to project status. Thereafter, you are to consult with me as you see fit. Fredda, with Donald tied up, I’m afraid I’m going to have to borrow Oberon as a pilot. I have a feeling Donald would not permit me to do the flying myself in this weather.”

            “Absolutely not,” said Donald.

            “But--but where are you going at this hour of the night?” Fredda asked.

            “Out,” said Kresh. “No one seems to know anything for sure in this whole business. It’s just about time I got some advice from someone who knows what’s going on.”

THERE’S NO LOGICAL reason to make this trip, Kresh told himself as he stepped out of the elevator car into the covered rooftop hangar of his house. And that was true, as far as it went. No doubt Kresh could have gotten all the information he needed by sitting at his own comm panel in his own house.

            But there were times when being on the scene, being there in the flesh, was useful. There would be some little detail, something that might have been overlooked, or never noticed at all, if seen only through a viewscreen, or heard through a speaker.

            Besides, the journey itself would be of use. There were times when it was important to be alone, to have time to think. Alone even from one’s personal robot, from one’s trusted wife. Alvar Kresh sensed that this was one of those times when he had to be alone--if for no other reason than to remind himself that he would have to make his decision alone. And he would have the duration of the flight all to himself. Fredda’s robot Oberon scarcely counted as company, and besides, he was taking the long-range aircar. It had a separate passenger compartment behind the cockpit. He stepped aboard, and Oberon followed behind him. Kresh took a seat by the port-side window, allowed Oberon to lock and double-check his seat restraint, and then watched as Oberon stepped forward to the pilot’s compartment and shut the hatch behind himself.

            Alone. Yes, a very good idea, to be alone. Good to get out of the city, see something--at least a little something--of the planet again, while he was considering its fate. The thought appealed to him as Oberon powered up the aircar and it lifted a half-meter or so off the deck of the hangar. The outer doors opened, and the aircar slowly eased out into the driving rain. If anything, the storm had grown more intense.

            Suddenly the aircar was in the middle of the storm, bucking and swaying in the darkness, the rain crashing down on the hull and the ports with incredible violence. Just for a moment, Alvar Kresh would have been just as glad to have stayed at home--but Oberon would not have started the flight if he had not been confident of his ability to deliver Kresh safely to his destination. Kresh certainly would not have been willing to pilot the craft in this sort of weather.

            But even as he grabbed at the arms of his seat and braced himself against the bouncing, bone-rattling ride, there was part of him that knew no fear at all, because a robot was at the controls, and robots and danger to humans simply could not exist in the same place. There were few things in the universe in which Alvar Kresh could place absolute faith, but robots were one of them.

            But tell that to the weather. The storm boomed and roared outside the long-range aircar as it fought for altitude, the banging and rattling getting worse with every moment. Just at the moment when Kresh was ready to decide his faith in robots was not all that absolute, the aircar broke free, punched a hole in the clouds and climbed out into the clear and placid skies above.

            Smooth sailing after the storm, Kresh told himself as he looked down on the storm clouds below. A nice symbol, that. Maybe even a good omen.

            But Kresh knew better, of course. When it came to signs and omens, he had no faith at all.

            The aircar turned toward the southeast and settled in for its flight to the island of Purgatory.

DAVLO LENTRALL STUMBLED blindly from the aircar and out into the rain-swept darkness of his own front yard. Kaelor stepped out after him, gently threaded his left arm through his master’s right, and led him toward the front door of the house.

            Davlo followed half-consciously, barely aware of where he was or what he was doing. He was in shock, that was all there was to it. It had taken some time for the full impact of what had happened to hit him, but now, at last, it had.

            The one part of him that was still more or less aware had refused to let the police aircar hover forward into the garage attached to the house, even though there was plenty of room and it would have saved him getting drenched in the rain. No. No. He would not let the police in his house, not even that far. Not if he could help it.

            It was irrational, and he knew it, and he didn’t care. Even though he knew perfectly well that the police had been all through the place in his absence, running their security checks and installing their monitoring devices. Even though he knew they would remain just outside his property line, scanning and probing and watching the storming darkness. Even if he knew all that was right, and sensible, given the fact that people with very few qualms about going too far had chosen him for a target. It might well be that the survival of the planet depended on his staying alive--but just at the moment, Davlo Lentrall did not even care about that.

            He moved on leaden feet toward his front door, waited while Kaelor opened it for him, bundled him inside, and closed it behind him. He obeyed unresistingly as Kaelor led him to the center of the main parlor and stripped off his sopping-wet outer garments then and there. Kaelor vanished and returned instantly with a stack of towels and a warm blanket. One of the household robots materialized with a mug of something steaming hot. And then the robots left him alone.

            Davlo found himself sitting in the main parlor, his hair and skin still damp, bundled up in a blanket, drinking the hot soup without tasting it, staring at the far wall without seeing it.

            It had all fallen in. All of it. Davlo Lentrall had never, not once in his life, doubted himself. Never, not once in his life, had he doubted that he was capable of handling whatever life put before him. He was smarter than, sharper than, quicker than, better than other people, and he knew it. He had always known it.

            Until today. Until a bunch of faceless kidnappers took him in completely with their tricks to keep him away from his security detail. Until a robot tossed him around like a rag doll, and shoved him under a park bench for safekeeping. Until a police officer whom Davlo would have dismissed as being of only average intelligence had made all the right guesses, all the right moves, taken all the right chances, and put his own life in grave peril, so as to save Davlo.

            But even all that, galling as it was, would not have been so bad. But it all served as nothing more than background for the real story, the real humiliation.

            Davlo Lentrall had been scared. No. It was time to be honest, at least with himself. He had been terrified. He was still terrified. When the moment had come, when the emergency had popped up from out of nowhere, the Davlo Lentrall of his imagination--the cool, confident, commanding fellow who could handle whatever life threw at him without the least amount of trouble--that Davlo Lentrall had vanished in a puff of smoke.

            It didn’t matter that a courageous, in-control Davlo Lentrall would have ended up shoved under that park bench just the same, that there was nothing he could have done from start to finish to change things, no matter how brave or cowardly he was.

            It was that the Davlo Lentrall who was smarter and better than all the rest, the Davlo Lentrall with the nerve to tell the planet’s foremost robot designer that she had made a mistake naming her robot, suddenly wasn’t there anymore.

            Lentrall had never really known how would react in an emergency, because he had never been in an emergency. But now he knew. From now on, Davlo Lentrall could not help but know that fear could leave him absolutely incapable of action.

            Lentrall took another sip of the hot soup, and, for the first time since had arrived home, really noticed where he was, what he was doing. The soup was good, warming, filling.

            So he had dropped the ball today. So be it. What did it matter? There was nothing even the bravest man alive could have done that would have made any difference. And did it really matter so much if Commander Justen Devray was the hero of the afternoon? Would anyone even remember this afternoon’ s incident, when they wrote the history books? No. They would remember that Dr. Davlo Lentrall had discovered Comet Grieg, and spearheaded the effort that had led to Grieg’s impact, and to the salvation of the planet.

            Yes. Yes. Lentrall finished off the last of the soup in a single swallow, and got to his feet. The blanket still wrapped around his body, he made his way to his home office, in the far corner of the ground floor. Yes. Comet Grieg. That was what they would remember, not this afternoon’s foolish humiliation.

            And the best way to wipe the memory of today’s disaster from his mind would be to get back to work, immediately, on the Comet Grieg project. Kaelor had been quite right to point out there were a large number of unresolved problems to deal with. No time like the present to deal with them. He could call up the appropriate computer files from here and set to work on them.

            It, of course, never so much as crossed Davlo’s mind to consider where, precisely, the computer files actually were. It had never so much as dawned on him that they had an actually physical location, a position in space that held them. They were simply there, in the massively interlinked comm and computer system that interlinked all the comm terminals in the city and all the planet’s outposts of civilization. He could call them up from any place, any time, and set to work on them, whenever he liked.

            He had never given the matter much consideration, any more than he would have stopped to remember that the air was there for him to breathe whenever he wanted, or that his household robots knew when to serve him soup.

            Lentrall sat down at his home office comm station and activated his files on Comet Grieg. At least he tried to do so.

            Because, quite suddenly, it was as if the air wasn’t there for him to breathe anymore.

THE FLIGHT OVER the Great Bay had been smooth as silk, the aircar leaving the storm behind with the coastline. That was not too surprising. The climate people had told Kresh that it was a typical pattern: warm, moist air dumping its moisture the moment it came in contact with the cool, dry air over land. Part of it had to do with the air being forced up by the mountain ranges just inland from the city of Hades. The wind blew the air up the side of the hill, and the higher the air went, the more its barometric pressure dropped and the less moisture it could hold. So the water came out of the air, and it rained. A rain shadow effect, they called it.

            But if it could work on the mainland, it could work just as handily on the windward side of an island. Especially a nice, big island like Purgatory. The prevailing winds over the island were from the south. Oberon flew Kresh’ s aircar in from the northwest, up and over the central peak of the island--and then right back down into weather every bit as heavy as what they had left behind at Hades.

            The aircar dropped down into the clouds, and was instantly engulfed by the raging storm. Kresh grabbed at his armrests again as the aircar bucked and heaved and bounced allover the sky, thunder booming all around as lightning lit up the storm-tossed skies outside his viewport. Suddenly Kresh was caught in the urge to get forward, to get to the cockpit and see what was going on, to grasp hold of the controls and take over. But if that was not panic talking, it was the next best thing.

            Kresh forced himself to relax, to ease back. It was going to be all right. Oberon was a good pilot. He looked out the viewport, and down at the rain, far below. He could not help but think back to another storm on Purgatory, five years before. A storm brought on by the weatherfields, the huge forcefields generated at the Terraforming Center. A storm that had raged that night when Chanto Grieg was murdered. At least tonight, in this storm, there was no disaster waiting to strike. Kresh smiled to himself. Talk about misplaced confidence. How the devil could he know what schedules were kept by disasters? They tended to come up whenever they pleased, without bothering to consult the likes of Alvar Kresh.

            There was a harder bump than any before, and suddenly the aircar had stopped moving. Startled, Kresh blinked and looked out the viewport. It took him a moment to realize they were on the ground.

            The door to the aircar’s cockpit opened and Oberon stepped into the main cabin. “We have arrived, sir,” he said in his low, almost gravelly, voice. “As you can see, sir, the weather is extremely inclement. As there is no covered access between the landing pad and the entrance, perhaps you might wish to wait until the weather has cleared before you set out.”

            Kresh peered through the viewport, using his hand to block the glare from the cabin’s interior lights. He spotted the entrance to the Terraforming Center. “It can’t be more than a hundred meters or so to the door,” Kresh said. “Why the devil should I wait?”

            “As you see fit, sir. If you think it a wise idea to go immediately.”

            Damned busybody nursemaid of a robot. Kresh indulged himself with a brief flash of temper. If he waited around until the weather was just right, would Oberon then hint that he should wait until he had had a full meal and a nice long nap before setting out on the arduous thirty-second journey across the parking lot? They were on the clock here, and he had already been worrying that he had wasted too much time.

            “I think it’s a wise idea, all right,” Kresh growled. “In fact I find it downright brilliant. “ He undid his seat restraint, got up, and grabbed his rain poncho from the seat opposite, where he had tossed it down after coming aboard. The thing was still a trifle damp, but no matter. He pulled it on over himself, adjusted the hood, and glared at Oberon. “I’d suggest you stay here for the time being,” he said, “unless you think it a wise idea to get in my way.”

            Plainly, Oberon did not think it a wise idea to reply to that. Kresh turned his back on the robot, grabbed the hatch handle, and yanked up on it. The hatch unlatched, and Kresh gave it a good hard shove. It swung open and he stepped out into the roaring weather.

            The driving rain caught him full in the face, coming down cold and hard. Kresh held up his hand to shield his face, and squinted through the downpour. He walked around to the opposite side of the ship, and then straight ahead, toward the entrance to the Terraforming Center. The wind grabbed at his poncho, blowing it flat against his body and sending its hem flapping and slapping wildly behind him. He leaned into the wind, struggling to hold the poncho hood on top of his head as the wind did its best to pull it off, and the rain blew in regardless.

            A pair of big double glass doors, the sort that opened at the center, formed the main entrance of the Terraforming Center. Kresh got to them and almost grabbed at the handles before he realized that wouldn’t work. He wasn’t going to get in unless he followed the rules--rules he had approved himself. “VOICEPRINT!” he shouted above the noise of the storm.

            “Auto-voiceprint system ready,” an utterly depersonalized voice replied from nowhere in particular. Even though Kresh had been expecting a reply, it still startled him. The voice was clearly artificial--calm, emotionless, bloodless.

            Kresh answered back in a somewhat lower tone of voice. If he could hear the voiceprint, probably it could hear him. “Name--Governor Alvar Kresh,” he said. “Password--Terra Grande.”

            “Identity confirmed, clearance to enter confirmed,” the voice replied. The doors unlatched. Kresh, impatient and eager to get out of the rain, grabbed the handles of both doors and pulled them a bit too hard. The wind caught at the left side door and yanked it out of his hand, bouncing it against the left-side wall before it swung back. There was a second, inner pair of doors that swung inward, and Kresh shoved them out of his way without breaking stride.

            He had not been here in a long time, but he still knew his way around. He turned left and marched down the main hallway toward the third set of doors. The first two doorways in the hallway were perfectly ordinary affairs, but not the entrance to Room 103. It was a huge, armored steel hatch that more closely resembled the doors of a vault than anything else. The door was locked down and secured, as it should have been, but there was a palmprint button by the side of the door. Kresh slapped his hand down on it. After a moment, there was a bump, a clunk, and a thud and the massive door swung outward.

            Kresh ducked inside the moment the door was open wide enough to do so. A startled-looking middle-aged woman in a lab coat was working at a desk just inside the door. She stared open-mouthed at the intruder, then got to her feet. She seemed about to protest, and two or three of the robots took a step or two closer, as if they feared that the intruder might intend harm to the woman. But then Kresh threw back the hood of his poncho. It was clear that the woman and the robots recognized him instantly--but knowing who he was only seemed to increase their sense of bewilderment.

            But Alvar Kresh was not much interested in the emotional state of the swing-shift technical staff. He barely looked at them. He looked around until he spotted two huge and gleaming hemispherical enclosures, each about five meters across, each sitting on a plinth or thick pillar, about the diameter of the hemisphere on top of it. The pillars raised the bases of the hemispheres up to just about eye level. One of the hemispheres was a smooth and perfectly rounded dome, the other a geodesic form, made up of flat panels, with all manner of complicated devices and cables and conduits hanging off it at every angle. Kresh nodded at the two machines, and spoke.

            “I want to talk to the twins,” he said.

10

            DR. LESCHAR SOGGDON opened her mouth and shut it, then opened it again and left it that way for a moment before she found her voice. “You’re--you’re Governor Kresh,” she said at last.

            “Yes,” her visitor replied testily. “I know I am. And I need to talk to the twins concerning some climate projections. Now.”

            Soggdon was now at even more of a loss. “Sir, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t just come in and--”

            “I can,” Kresh said. “I should know. I wrote the regulations.”

            “Oh, yes, yes, sir, of course. I wasn’t suggesting that you were not allowed to come here. It is merely a question of having the training and the understanding of our procedures here. It would probably be wiser for you to submit your questions in writing to the General Terraforming Committee and then--”

            “Who are you?” Kresh asked, interrupting her. “What is your position here?”

            Soggdon flushed and drew herself up to her full height, bringing her eyes roughly level With the base of Kresh’s neck. “I am Dr. Leschar Soggdon,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster. “I’m the night shift supervisor here.”

            “Very well, Dr. Soggdon. Please listen carefully. I have come here precisely for the reason that I want--I need--to avoid that sort of delay and caution. I am here on a matter of the greatest urgency and importance, and I must be certain I am getting my information direct from the source. I cannot take the chance of some expert misinterpreting my questions or the answers from the twins. I cannot wait for the General Committee to have a conference and debate the merits and the meaning of my questions. I have to ask my questions now, and get an answer now. Is that clear? Because if it is not, you’re fired.”

            “I ah--ah--ah, sir, I ah--”

            “Yes? Do you have other job prospects?”

            She swallowed hard and started again. “Very well,” Soggdon said at last. “But, sir, with all due respect, I would ask that you sign a statement that you proceeded against my advice and specifically ordered me to cooperate.”

            “I’ll sign whatever you like,” Kresh said. “But right now let me talk to the twins.” The governor peeled off his poncho and handed it to the nearest robot. He walked to the far side of the huge room, where the two massive hemispherical enclosures sat. Inside were the two Terraforming Control Centers, one a Spacer-made sessile robotic unit, and the other a Settler-made computational system.

            A sort of combination desk and communications console sat facing the two machines. Governor Kresh pulled out the chair and sat down at it. “All right, then,” he said. “What do I do?”

            Soggdon was severely tempted simply to show the man the proper controls to operate and let him charge ahead as directly as he liked. But she knew just how much damage even a minor slip of the tongue could produce. The idea of having Unit Dee caught in a major First Law conflict just because Kresh wanted to have his own way was too much for her. She had to speak up. “Sir,” she said, “I’m sorry, but you have to understand a few things before you start, and I’m going to make sure you understand them, even if it means I lose my job. Otherwise you could cause any amount of damage to Unit Dee.”

            Kresh looked up at her in annoyed surprise, but then his expression softened, just a bit. “All right,” he said. “I always tell myself that I prefer it when people stand up to me. I guess this is my big chance to prove it. Tell me what I should know, but don’t take too long about it. You can start by telling me what ‘D’ means.”

            His question took her by surprise. Soggdon looked at him carefully before she spoke. How could a man who didn’t even know what--or who--Unit Dee was expect to barge in here and take over? “I didn’t mean the letter ‘D,’ sir. I meant Unit Dee. That’s what we call the robotic terraforming control unit. Unit Dee.”

            Kresh frowned and looked over at the two units, and seemed to notice for the first time the two neatly lettered signs, one attached to each of the two hemispheres. The sign on the front of the rounded-off dome read Unit Dee, and the one on the angular geodesic dome read Unit Dum.

            “Ah. I see,” he said. “I confess I don’t know much about how you run things here. I visited here once or twice during construction, but not since you’ve been operational. I know the code name for the two Control Units is still ‘the twins’--but not much else. I suppose those names stand for something. Acronyms?”

            Soggdon frowned. For someone determined to charge in here and take over, he certainly was ready to get distracted by side issues. “I believe the name Unit Dee referred to the fourth and final design considered. From there it seemed to develop into a sort of private joke among the day shift staff,” she said. “I must confess I never bothered to find out what the joke was. It might have something to do with Unit Dum being, well, dumb, nonsentient, but I’ve never understood the exact significance of Unit Dee.” Soggdon shrugged. She had never been much known for her sense of humor.

            “All right,” said the governor. “All that to one side,” he went on, “what do I need to know to avoid producing damage to the twins ?”

            “Well, Unit Dee is the only one likely to suffer damage. Unit Dum is a non sentient computation device, not a robot. He has a pseudo-self-aware interface that allows him to converse, to a limited extent, but he’s not a robot and he’s not subject to the Three Laws. Unit Dee is a different story. She’s really not much more than an enormous positronic brain hooked up to a large number of interface links. A robot brain without a conventional robot body--but she is, for all intents and purposes, a Three-Law robot. Just one that can’t move.”

            “So what is the difficulty?” Kresh demanded, clearly on the verge of losing his patience again.

            “That should be obvious,” Soggdon replied, realizing just a second too late how rude a thing that was to say. “That is--well, my apologies, sir, but please consider that Unit Dee is charged with remaking an entire planet, a planet that is home to millions of human beings. She was designed to be capable of processing truly huge amounts of information, and to make extremely long-range predictions, and to work at both the largest scale and the smallest level of detail.”

            “What of it?”

            “Well, obviously, in the task of remaking a planet, there are going to be accidents. There are going to be people displaced from their homes, people who suffer in floods and droughts and storms deliberately produced by the actions and orders of these two control systems. They will, inevitably, cause some harm to some humans somewhere.”

            “I thought that the system had been built to endure that sort of First Law conflict. I’ve read about systems that dealt with large projects and were programmed to consider benefit or harm to humanity as a whole, rather than to individuals.”

            Soggdon shook her head. “That only works in very limited or specialized cases--and I’ve never heard of it working permanently. Sooner or later, robotic thinking machines programmed to think that way can’t do it anymore. They bum out or fail in any of a hundred ways--and the cases you’re talking about are robots who were expected to deal with very distant, abstract sorts of situations. Unit Dee has to worry about an endless series of day-by-day decisions affecting millions of individual people--some of whom she is dealing with directly, talking to them, sending and receiving messages and data. She can’t think that way. She can’t avoid thinking about people as individuals.”

            “So what is the solution?” Kresh asked.

            Soggdon took a deep breath and then went on, very quickly, as if she wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. She raised her hand and made a broad, sweeping gesture. “Unit Dee thinks this is all a simulation,” she said;

            “What?” Kresh said.

            “She thinks that the entire terraforming project, in fact the whole planet of Inferno, is nothing more than a very complex and sophisticated simulation set up to learn more in preparation for a real terraforming project some time in the future.”

            “But that’s absurd!” Kresh objected. “No one could believe that.”

            “Well, fortunately for us all, it would seem that Unit Dee can.”

            “But there’s so much evidence to the contrary! The world is too detailed to be a simulation!”

            “We limit what she can see, and know, very carefully,” Soggdon replied. “Remember, we control all of her inputs. She only receives the information we give her. In fact, sometimes we deliberately introduce spurious errors, or send her images and information that don’t quite make sense. Then we correct the ‘mistakes’ and move on. It makes things seem less real--and also establishes the idea that things can go wrong. That way when we do make mistakes in calculations, or discover that we’ve overlooked a variable, or have just plain let her see something she shouldn’t have, we can correct it without her getting suspicious. She thinks Inferno is a made-up place, invented for her benefit. So far as she knows, she is actually in a laboratory on Baleyworld. She thinks the project is an attempt to lea--n how to interact with Settler hardware for future terraforming projects. “ Soggdon hesitated for a moment, and then decided she might as well give him the worst of the bad news all at once. “In fact, Governor, she believes that you are part of the simulation.”

            “What!”

            “It was necessary, believe me. If she thought you were a real person, she would of course wonder what you were doing in the made-up world of her simulation. We have to work very hard to make her believe the real world is something we have made up for her.”

            “And so you had to tell her that I did not really exist. “

            “Precisely. From her point of view, sapient beings are divided into three groups--one, those who exist in the real world, but don’t have anything to do with her; two, real-world people here in the lab and in the field who talk with her and interact with her--and three, simulants, simulated intelligences.”

            “Simulants,” Kresh said, very clearly not making it into a question. He was ordering her to explain the term, not asking her to do so.

            “Ah, yes, sir. That’s the standard industry term for the made-up humans and robots placed in a simulation. Unit Dee believes that the entire population of Inferno is really nothing more than a collection of simulants--and you are a member of that population.”

            “Are you trying to tell me I can’t talk to her because she’ll realize that I’m not made-up?” Kresh asked..

            “Oh, no, sir! There should be no problem at all in your talking with Unit Dee. She talks every day with ecological engineers and field service robots and so on. But she believes them all to be doing nothing more than playing their parts. It is essential that she believe the same thing about you.”

            “Or else she’ll start wondering if her simulated reality is actually the real world, and start wondering if her actions have caused harm to humans,” said Kresh.

            “She has actually caused the death of several humans already,” Soggdon replied. “Unavoidably, accidentally, and only to save other humans at other times and places. She has dealt reasonably well with those incidents--but only because she thought she was dealing with simulants. And, I might add, she does have a tendency to believe in her simulants, to care about them. They are they only world she’s ever known.”

            “They are the only world there is,” said Kresh. “Her simulants are real-life people.”

            “Of course, of course, but my point is that she knows they are imaginary, and yet has begun to believe in them. She believes in them in the way one might care about characters in a work of fiction, or the way a pet owner might talk to her nonsentient pet. On some level Unit Dee knows her simulants are not real. But she still takes a genuine interest in them, and still experiences genuine, if mild, First Law conflict when one of them dies and she might, conceivably, have prevented it. Causing the death of simulants has been extremely difficult for her.

            “If she were to find out she had been killing real people--well, that would be the end. She might simply experience massive First Law conflict and lock up altogether, suffer brainlock and die. Or worse, she might survive.”

            “Why would it be worse if she survived?” Kresh asked.

            Soggdon let out a long weary sigh and shook her head. She looked up at the massive hemisphere and shook her head. “I don’t know. I can guess. At best, I think she would find ways to shut down the whole operation. We’d try to stop her, of course, but she’s too well hooked in, and she’s awfully fast. I expect she’d order power shutdowns, find some way to deactivate Unit Dum so he couldn’t run the show on his own, erase computer files--that sort of thing. She’d cancel the reterraforming project because it could cause injury to humans.”

            “The best sounds pretty bad. And at worst?”

            “At worst, she would try to undo the damage, put things back the way they were. “ Soggdon allowed herself a humorless smile. “She’d set to work trying to un-reterraform the planet. Galaxy alone knows what that would end up like. We’d shut her down, of course, or at least try to do so. But I don’t need to exaggerate the damage she could do.”

            Kresh nodded thoughtfully. “No, you don’t,” he said. “But I still need to talk with her--and with Unit Dum. You haven’t said much about him, I notice.”

            Soggdon shrugged. “There’s not much to say. I suppose we shouldn’t even call him a he--he’s definitely an it, a soulless, mindless, machine that can do its job very, very, well. When you speak with him, you’ll really be dealing with his pseudoself-aware interface, a personality interface--and, I might add, it is quite deliberately not a very good one. We don’t want to fool ourselves into thinking Unit Dum is something he is not.”

            “But it sounds as if he could handle the situation if Unit Dee did shut down.”

            “In theory, yes, Unit Dum could run the whole terraforming project by himself. In practice, all of us here believe you were quite wise not to put all your trust in a single control system. We need redundancy. We need to have a second opinion. Besides which, the two of them make a good team. They work well together. They are probably three or four times as effective working together as either would be alone. And anyway, we’re only a few years into a project that could take a century or more. It’s way too early to think about risking our primary operating procedure and trusting the whole job to backups. What if the backup runs into trouble?”

            “All your points are well taken,” said Governor Kresh. “So--what are the precautions I should take in talking to them?”

            “Don’t lose your temper if Unit Dee is condescending to you in some way. She doesn’t really think you’re real, after all. You are really nothing more than one of the game pieces, as far as she is concerned. Don’t be thrown off if she seems to know a great deal about you, and lets you know it. Don’t correct her if she gets something wrong, either. We’ve made various adjustments to her information files for one reason or another--some deliberate errors to make it seem like a simulation, and others we set up for some procedural reason or another. Try to remember you’re not real. That’s the main thing. As for the rest of it, you’ll be talking to her via audio on a headset, and I’ll be monitoring. If there’s anything else you need to know, I’ll cut in.”

            Governor Kresh nodded thoughtfully. “Have you ever noticed, Dr. Soggdon, just how much of our energy goes into dealing with the Three Laws? Getting around them, trying to make the world conform to them?”

            At first, the offhand remark shocked Soggdon. Not because she disagreed with his words--far from it--but because Kresh was willing speak them. Well, if the governor was in a mood to dabble with heresy, why not indulge in it herself? “I’ve thought that for a long time, Governor,” she said. “I think the case could be made that this world is in as much trouble as it is because of the Three Laws. They’ve made us too cautious, made us worry too much about making sure today is like yesterday, and far too timid to dare plan for tomorrow.”

            Kresh laughed. “Not a bad line, that,” he said. “You might catch me stealing it for use in a speech one of these fine days. “ The governor looked from the Unit Dee Controller to the Unit Dum Controller, and then back up at Soggdon. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get this thing set up.”

“GOOOD MORRN-ING. GOVVVENORR Kressh.” Two voices came through the headphone to address him in unison--one a light, feminine soprano, the other a gravelly, slightly slurred, and genderless alto. They spoke the same words at the same time, but they did not synchronize with each other exactly.

            The voices seemed to be coming from out of nowhere at all. No doubt that was an audio illusion produced by the stereo effect of the headphones, but it was nonetheless disconcerting. Alvar Kresh frowned and looked behind himself, as if he expected there to be two robots there, one standing behind each ear. He knew perfectly well there would be nothing to see, but there was some part of him that had to check all the same.

            The whole setup seemed lunatic, irrational--but the iron hand of the Three Laws dictated that there be some such arrangement. Kresh decided to make the best of it. “Good morning,” he said, speaking into the headset’s microphone. “I take it I am addressing both Unit Dee and Unit Dum?”

            “Thaat izz comect, Governorrr,” the two voices replied. “Somme vizzzitors finnnd iiit dissconcerrrting to hear usss both. Shalll we filllter ouut onne voice?”

            “That might be helpful,” Kresh said. Disconcerting was far too mild a word. The two voices speaking as one was downright eerie.

            “Very well,” the feminine voice said in his left ear, by itself, speaking with a sudden brisk, clipped tone, a jarring change from what had come before. Perhaps she found it easier to speak without the need to synchronize with Unit Dum. “Both of us are still on-line to you, but you will hear only one of us at a time. We will shift from one speaker to the other from time to time to remind you of our dual presence.” The voice he heard was almost excessively cheerful, with an oddly youthful tone to it. A playful voice, full of amusement and good humor.

            “This higher-pitched voice I hear now,” Kresh said, “it is Unit Dee?”

            “That is correct, sir.”

            Suddenly the other voice, low-pitched, impersonal and slightly slurred, spoke into his right ear. “This is the voice of Unit Dum.”

            “Good. Fine. Whatever. I need to speak with you both.”

            “Please go ahead, Governor,” said Unit Dee in his left ear again. Kresh began to wonder if the voice-switching was some sort of game Unit Dee was playing, a way of putting him off his stride. If so, it was not going to work.

            “I intend to,” he said. “I want to talk to you about an old project, from the period of the first effort to terraform this world!’

            “And what would that be?” asked Unit Dee.

            “The proposal to create a Polar Sea as a means of moderating planetary temperatures. I want you to consider an idea based on that old concept.”

            “Ready to accept input,” said the gravelly, mechanical voice in his right ear. It was plain that very little effort had gone into giving Unit Dum a simulated personality. That was, perhaps, just as well. Kresh had the sense of talking to a schizophrenic as it was.

            “Here is the idea. Assume that, in the present day, the existing Polar Depression were flooded, with inlets to the Southern Ocean provided by cutting a canal through the Utopia region on the eastern side of Terra Grande, and by redirecting the flow of the River Lethe in the west. Assume the work could be done very rapidly, within a few years’ time.”

            There was the briefest of pauses. “This would cause a Polar Sea to form,” Unit Dum went on. “However, the concept is implausible. There is no way of performing such an enormous engineering task in any practical length of time.”

            “Even if we could do it, I’m sure the collateral damage to existing ecosystems and property would be huge,” said Unit Dee, clearly talking more to Unit Dum than to Kresh.

            “Current projections show the issues of damage to ecosystems and property become moot in between two and two point five standard centuries,” Unit Dum replied.

            “Why do they become moot?” Kresh asked, fearing the answer.

            “Because,” Unit Dee replied, her voice clearly unhappy, “our current projection shows all ecosystems collapsing and all humans--the owners of the property--either dying or being evacuated from the planet by that time.”

            Kresh was genuinely surprised. “I was not aware that the numbers were that bad. I thought we at least had a chance at survival.”

            “Oh, yes,” said Unit Dee. “There is at least a chance human life will survive here. That is in large degree a matter of choice for your descendants. Human beings can survive on a lifeless, airless, sterile ball of rock if they choose to do so. If the city of Hades were domed over or rebuilt underground, and properly shielded, it could no doubt sustain a reduced population indefinitely after the climate collapses.”

            “But things are improving”‘ Kresh protested. “We’re turning things around!”

            “So you are--for the moment, in localized areas. But there is little or no doubt that the current short-term improvements cannot be sustained and extended in the longer term. There is simply not enough labor or equipment to expand the zones of improved climate far enough, and establish them firmly enough, for them to be self-sustaining.”

            “And therefore there is no real point in worrying over ecological damage or property loss,” Kresh said. “Fine. Disregard those two points--or, rather, factor in the results of attempting to deal with them, of efforts to repair the damage.”

            “The calculation involves a near-infinite number of variables,” said Unit Dum. “Recommend a pre screening process to select range of near best-case scenarios and eliminate obviously failed variants.”

            “Approved,” Kresh said.

            “Even the prescreening process will take a few minutes,” said Unit Dee. “Please stand by.”

            “As if I had much choice,” Kresh said to no one in particular. He sat there, looking from Unit Dee’s smooth and perfect hemispherical enclosure to the boxy, awkward, hard-edged looking enclosure around Unit Dum. Dum’s enclosure, or containment, or whatever, at least had the merit of looking like machinery. Dum looked like it did something, was hooked into things, made things happen. It was hardware and wires. It was solid, firmly attached to reality by power cables and datastreams. Dum was of this world.

            In many more senses than one, Dee plainly was not. She was sheltered from the rude outside universe. She was the smooth and perfect one, sealed off in her idealized containment enclosure that needed special treatment. Dee looked more like an abstract sculpture than a working robot. She looked liked something that was supposed to stand off, aloof, on her own, a divine being or magic totem to be consulted rather than a machine meant to do work. And was that so far off? Kresh glanced at Soggdon on the far side of the lab, pretending to be puttering around with something or other while she kept a nervous, unhappy eye on Kresh.

            Yes, indeed. Unit Dee had her acolytes, her priests, who ministered to her whims and did their best to rearrange the world to suit her convenience, who walked on eggshells rather than anger or upset the divine being on whom all things depended. Kresh thought suddenly of the oracles of near-forgotten legend. They had been beings of great power--but of great caprice and trickery as well. Their predictions would always come true--but never in the way expected, and always at an unexpected price. Not a pleasant thought.

            “I believe we are ready to begin with the main processing of the problem,” Dee said, her voice corning so abruptly into the silence that Kresh jumped ten centimeters in the air. “Would you care to observe our work?” she asked.

            “Ah, yes, certainly,” said Kresh, having no idea what she had in mind.

            The lights faded abruptly, and, flashing into being with the silence and suddenness of a far-off lightning strike, a globe of the planet Inferno appeared in the air between Kresh’ s seat at the console and the enclosures for the two control units.

            The globe was a holographic image, about three meters in diameter, showing the planet’s surface with greater precision than Kresh had ever seen. Every detail was razor-sharp. Even the city of Hades was clearly visible on the shores of the Great Bay. Kresh had the feeling that if he stepped up close enough to the globe and peered intently enough, he would be able to see the individual buildings of the city.

            Inferno was a study in blue ocean and brown-and-tan land, with a pathetically few dots and spots of cool and lovely green visible here and there on the immense bulk of Terra Grande. Kresh tried to tell himself that they were making progress, that it was something just that their efforts were on a large enough scale to be plainly visible from space. But he wasn’t all that convincing, even to himself. Somehow, over the last few days, it had come home to him that the great efforts they had made were as nothing, that the noble progress he had been so proud of scarcely represented forward movement.

            But he did not have time to consider long. The globe turned over on its side, so that the northern polar regions were facing Kresh directly. Then, as he watched, the landscape began to change, shift, mutate. The River Lethe, a thin blue line running from the mountains west of the Great Bay, suddenly widened, and a new line of blue began to cut its way toward the Polar Depression, until the combined canal and river cut through the length of Terra Grande. Yes, Kresh could see it. Dredge the canal deep enough to allow a flow into the upper reaches of the Lethe, takes steps to make sure the channel scoured itself deeper instead of silting over, and it would work. Water would flow from the Polar Sea into the Great Bay. Assuming there was a Polar Sea, of course. At the present time, as shown in the simulation, there was nothing but dull white ice, a significant fraction of the planetary water supply locked up in the deep freeze where it could do no one any good.

            But Dum and Dee were far from done with their modeling. Kresh looked to the western regions of Terra Grande. It was plain that things were not quite so simple or straightforward there. Again and again, a wedge-shaped channel of blue water appeared. The northernmost portion of its channel constantly shifted position, widened, narrowed, expanded, contracted, vanished altogether for a moment and then reappeared somewhere else. Plainly, the two control units were searching for the optimum positioning of the channel.

            At long last the image settled down to a wide channel cutting straight north through the Utopia region. Kresh shook his head and swore under his breath. The optimum channel the two control units had chosen followed almost exactly the same path Lentrall had shown him. Maybe the pushy young upstart did know what he was talking about.

            “Channel pattern as presented within one percent of theoretical optimum configuration,” Unit Dum announced. “That figure is well inside accumulated combined uncertainty factors of many variables.”

            “In other words, it is as close as we can get right now--and very much close enough for a first approximation,” said Unit Dee. “We are now ready for preliminary long-range climate calculation.”

            Kresh half-expected to see the planet’s surface evolve and change, as he had seen so many times before on simglobes and other climate simulators. And he did see at least a little bit of that--or thought he did. But the globe itself was covered in a blizzard of layered data displays that sprawled over its surface. Isobar mappings for temperature, air pressure, humidity, color-coded scatter diagrams of populations for a hundred different species, rainfall pattern displays, seasonal jet-stream shifts, and a dozen other symbol systems Kresh couldn’t even begin to recognize, all of them shifting, rising, dropping, interacting and reacting with each other, a storm of numbers and symbols that covered the planet. The changes came faster and faster, until the symbols and numbers and data tags merged into each other, blurred into a faintly flickering cloud of gray that shrouded the entire planet.

            And then, in the blink of an eye, it stopped. The cloud of numbers was gone.

            A new planet hung in the air before Kresh. One in which the old world could be clearly seen, and recognized, but new and different all the same. Alvar Kresh had seen many hypothetical Infernos in his day, seen its possible futures presented a hundred times in a hundred different ways. But he had never seen this Inferno before. The tiny, isolated, spots of green here and there were gone, or rather grown and merged together into a blanket of cool, lush green than covered half of Terra Grande. There were still deserts, here and there, but they were the exception, not the rule--and even a properly terraformed planet needed some desert environments.

            The sterile, frozen, lifeless ice of the northern polar icecap had vanished completely, replaced by the Polar Sea, a deep-blue expanse of life-giving liquid water. Even at this scale, even to Kresh’s untrained eye, he could see that sea levels had raised worldwide. He wondered for a moment where the water had come from. Had the control units assumed that the importation of comet ice would continue? Or was the water-level rise caused by thawing out the icecaps and breaking up the permafrost? No matter. The fact was that the water was there, that life was there.

            “That’s the best, most positive projection I’ve ever seen,” Soggdon said. Kresh, a trifle startled, turned and looked over his shoulder. She was standing right behind his chair, gazing at the globe display in astonishment. “Hold on. I want to do a blind feed of the audio to your headset.”

            “What’s a blind feed?” Kresh asked.

            Soggdon picked up a headset identical to the one Kresh wore. Soggdon looked to Kresh as she put them on. “Dee and Dum will think you cannot hear what they say to me. When she talks to you, she is talking to a simulant. When she talks to me, a real human being, she cuts all links to any simulants, so as not to complicate the experiment by letting the simulants hear things they shouldn’t. In reality you’ll be able to hear it. But it is important--vitally important--that you have no reaction to what she says to me, or vice versa. In Dee’s universe, you are just a simulated personality inside a computer. I am a real person outside the computer. You have no way of knowing I exist. Do you understand?”

            “Yes,” said Kresh, hoping he did. He had the sense that he had stepped into a hall of mirrors. It was getting hard to tell the fantasies from the realities.

            “Good,” said Soggdon, and turned on the manual switch on her headset. “Dee, Dum--this is Soggdon monitoring from outside the simulation.”

            “Good mornnning, Doctor. Weee havvve beeen connnversssing with the Kresh simulllannt. “ The two voices spoke in unison again, but Soggdon did not seem to be bothered by it. Having heard each voice by itself, Kresh was able to notice something that had escaped him before. When the two units spoke in unison, it was not merely the two chanting together. The voice of the two together spoke in a cadence that did not belong to either of the two speaking by itself. The unison voice made different word choices, responded in a way that was different from Dee or Dum. The unison voice was not merely two beings talking as one. It was the two merging into one new being, in some ways greater, in some ways lesser than the sum of its parts. Dee and Dum linked so intimately that they became a third, and distinct, personality. Or was it merely Dee who did so? If Dum was truly nonsentient, then he could have no personality. Plainly there were mysteries to delve into--but just as plainly they would have to wait for another day. “The Kresh simulant asked us to consider the result of producing a Polar Sea.”

            “Yes, I know,” said Soggdon. “And I see you have produced an impressive planetary projection as a result. Would either or both of you care to comment on it?”

            “Both willl speeak, and then eachhh,” said the unison voice. “We havvve prrojected forward four ttthousand yearss, as we have found that a wellll-planned operrational sequenzzze will result in a zzzero-maintenance planetary ecologggy within apprrroximately three hundred years. In our projection, the planetary climmmate remainss intrinsically stable, selfffcorrecting, and self-enhancing throughout the period of the metasimulation. There is no apparent danger of recollapse evident in any of the data for the end of the metasimulation period.”

            Kresh frowned. Metasimulation ? Then he understood. The unison voice was using the term to refer to a simulation inside a simulation--which was what it had been, so far as Dum and Dee were concerned.

            Dum spoke next. “Reference to unit Dum’s prior objections in regard to ecological and economic damage. Projections show that the damage to the general ecology and gross planetary product caused by digging inlets for the Polar Sea would be fully compensated for within fifteen years of project completion.”

            But if the first two aspects of the combined control system made it all seem wonderful, the third voice pulled everything back down to reality. “It all sounds quite splendid,” said Dee. “There is, of course, the slight problem of it being quite impossible. We ran the metasimulation based on the assumption that it would be possible to dig the channels. It is not possible to dig them. An interesting exercise, I grant you--but it is not one that has a great deal of connection to the world of our simulation.”

            “I was afraid she was going to say that,” Soggdon muttered as she switched off her mike. “You’d think she’d be the least sensible of the three possible personality aspects, but instead Dee’s always the one to stick the pin in the balloon. She always reminds us of the practicalities.”

            “Maybe this time they’re a bit more possible than you think,” Kresh said. He keyed his own mike back on, and tried to phrase things so that he would not reveal that he had overheard the conversation with Soggdon.

            “Unit Dee, that’s a very promising projection there. I take it you think creating the Polar Sea would be a good idea?”

            “It is a good idea that cannot be realized, Governor,” said Unit Dee. “You do not have the resources, the energy sources, or the time to construct the needed inlets.”

            “That is incorrect,” Kresh said. “It is possible there is a practical, doable, way to dig those inlets. I came here to have you evaluate the proposed procedure. I first wanted to see if the effort would be worthwhile. I see now that it would be.”

            “What is the procedure in question?” asked Unit Dee.

            Kresh hesitated a moment, but then gave up. There was no way to describe the idea that didn’t sound dangerous, desperate, even insane. Well, maybe it was all three. So be it. “We’re going to break a comet up, and drop the fragments in a line running from the Southern Ocean to the Polar Depression,” he said. Even as he spoke, he realized that he hadn’t put any modifiers or conditionals in. He hadn’t said they might, or they could, or they were thinking of it. He had said they were going to do it. Had he made up his mind without knowing it?

            But Dum and Dee--and Soggdon--plainly had more on their minds than Kresh’s reaction to his own words. There was dead silence for a full thirty seconds before any of them reacted. The perfect holographic image of the Inferno of the future flickered and wavered and almost vanished altogether before it resolidified.

            Unit Dee recovered first. “Am I to under--under--understand that you intend this as a serious idea?” she asked. The stress in her voice was plain, her words coming out with painful slowness.

            “Not good,” said Soggdon, her headset mike still off. She turned toward a side console, paged through several screenfuls of information, and shook her head. “I warned you she took her simulants seriously,” she said. “These readings show you’ve set off a mild First Law conflict in her. You can’t just come in here and play games with her, make up things like that.”

            Kresh cut his own mike. “I’m not making things up,” he said. “And I’m not playing games. There is a serious plan in motion to drop a fragmented comet on the Utopia region.”

            “But that’s suicidal!” Soggdon protested.

            “What difference does it make if the planet’s going to be dead in two hundred years?” Kresh snapped. “And as for Dee, I suggest it is time you start lying to her in earnest. Remind her it’s all a simulation, an experiment. Remind her that Inferno isn’t real, and no one will be harmed.”

            “Tell her that?” Soggdon asked, plainly shocked. “No. I will not feed her dangerous and false data. Absolutely not. You can tell her yourself.”

            Kresh drew in his breath, ready to shout in the woman’s face, give her the dressing-down she deserved. But no. It would do no good. It was plainly obvious that she was not thinking with the slightest degree of rationality or sense--and he needed her, needed her help, needed her rational and sensible. She was part of the team that had set up this charade. She was the one who would have to prop it up. He would have to reason with her, coolly, calmly. “It would do no good for me to tell her any such thing,” he said. “She thinks I’m a simulant. Simulants don’t know they are simulants. She would not believe me telling her there was no danger--because she does not believe me to be human. And she does not believe that because you have lied to her.”

            “That’s different. That’s part of the experiment design. It’s not false data.”

            “Nonsense,” Kresh said, a bit more steel coming into his voice as the gentleness left it. “You have set up this entire situation for the sole purpose of allowing her to take risks, to do her job, while believing she could no harm to humans.”

            “But--”

            Kresh kept talking, rolling right over her protests. “I could even do damage to her if I told her it was just a simulation. There must be some doubt in her mind as to whether her simulants--the people of Inferno--are real. Otherwise she would not be experiencing the slightest First Law conflict concerning them. If I assured her that I was not real, Space alone knows what she would make of that paradox. It seems to me as likely as not that she would reach the conclusion that I was real, and that I was lying to her. If I lie to her, she might realize the truth--and then where would you be, Dr. Soggdon? Only you can do it. Only you can reassure her. And you must do it.”

            Soggdon glared at Kresh, the anger and fear plain on her face as she switched on her mike again. “Dee, this is Dr. Soggdon. I am still monitoring the simulation. I am detecting what appear to be First Law conflicts in the positronic pathing display. There is no First Law element to the simulated circumstances under consideration.” Soggdon hesitated, made a face, and then spoke again. “There is absolutely no possibility of harm to human beings,” she said. “Do you understand?”

            There was another distinct pause, and Kresh thought he detected another, but much slighter, flicker in the image of the Inferno that was to be. But then Dee spoke again, and her voice was firm and confident. “Yes, Doctor Soggdon. I do understand,” she said. “Thank you. Excuse me. I must return to my conversation with the simulant governor.” Another pause, and then Dee was speaking to Kresh. “I beg your pardon, Governor. Other processing demands took my time up for the moment.”

            “Quite all right,” Kresh said. Of course, Dee was no doubt linked to a thousand other sites and operations, and probably having a dozen other conversations with field workers right now. It was not quite a little white lie, but it was certainly close enough to being one. Robots were supposed to be incapable of lying--but this one was clever enough to manage a truthful and yet misleading statement. Dee was a sophisticated unit indeed.

            “Can you tell me more about this...idea under discussion?” Dee asked him.

            “Certainly,” said Kresh. “The idea is to evacuate everyone from the target area, and provide safeguards for the population outside the target area.” It could not hurt to emphasize safety procedures first off. Let her know that even the fictional simulants would be safe. They needed as many defenses as possible against a First Law reaction. “Once that is accomplished, a large comet is to be broken up and the fragments targeted individually, the overlapping craters running through existing lowlands. More conventional earth-moving will no doubt be required afterwards, but the linked and overlapping craters will form the basis for the Utopia Inlet.”

            “I see,” Dee replied, her voice still strained and tense. “Unit Dum and I will require a great deal more information before we can evaluate this plan.”

            “Certainly,” said Kresh. He pulled a piece of paper out of his tunic and unfolded it. “Refer to network access node 43l3, identity Davlo Lentrall, subgroup 9l9, referent code Comet Grieg.” Lentrall had given him the access address earlier. Now seemed the moment to put it to good use. “Examine the data there and you will be able to do your evaluations,” said Kresh.

            “There is no identity Davlo Lentrall on access node 43l3,” Dee said at once.

            “What?” said Kresh.

            “No one named Davlo Lentrall is linked into that access node,” said Dee.

            “The number must be wrong, or something,” said Kresh.

            “Quite likely,” said Dee. “I’m going to hand off to Dum. He is directly linked to the network in question and can perform the search more effectively.”

            “There is no Davlo Lentrall on node 4313,” Dum announced, almost at once, speaking in an even flatter monotone than usual. “Searching all net nodes. No Davlo Lentrall found. Searching maintenance archives. Information on identity Davlo Lentrall discovered.”

            “Report on that information,” Kresh said. How could Lentrall’s files have vanished off the net? Something was wrong. Something was seriously and dangerously wrong.

            “Network action logs show that all files, including all backups, linked to the identity Davlo Lentrall, were invasively and irrevocably erased from the network eighteen hours, ten minutes, and three seconds ago,” Unit Dum announced.

            Kresh was stunned. He looked to Soggdon, not quite knowing why he hoped for an answer from that quarter. He switched off his mike and spoke to her. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How could it all be erased? Why would anyone do that?”

            “I don’t know,” she said. “He used a term I’m not familiar with in this context. Let me check.” She keyed on her own mike again. “Dum, this is Soggdon, monitoring. Define meaning of the term ‘invasive’ in present situation.”

            “Invasive-contextual definition: performed by an invader, an attack from the outside, the act of an invader.”

            “In other words,” said Kresh, his voice as cold and hard as he could make it, “someone has broken in and deliberately destroyed the files. “ He suddenly remembered what Fredda had said, about the things you thought you knew. She had said something about never really being sure about what you knew. Here it was, happening again. He had thought he knew where the comet was. Now he knew he did not. “It would seem,” he said, “that someone out there agrees with you, Dr. Soggdon. They don’t want anyone playing with comets.”

11

“IT’S GONE, GOVERNOR,” said Davlo Lentrall. “Everything I’ve ever worked on is gone.” He was glad to be speaking over an audio-only link to the governor. Kresh had called on an audio link because it was easier to maintain a secure line that way, but Davlo didn’t care about that. He was simply glad he did not have to show his face. It was bad enough that Kresh could hear the panic in his voice. He wouldn’t want anyone to see him this way. Davlo Lentrall paced frantically up and down in front of his comm center. “All my core files, all the backups, everything.”

            “Take it easy, son. Easy now. There must be some way to retrieve it all. I thought the system was designed to make it impossible to lose things irretrievably.”

            Davlo tried to calm himself. Kresh had called from--from wherever he was--just as Davlo had finally, absolutely confirmed that all was lost. It was no easy thing to talk to the planetary leader when he was at his lowest ebb.

            “Normally, yes, sir. But this wasn’t an accident. This was sabotage. Five minutes after I discovered that my files were gone, I got a call from University Security. Someone broke into my office there and threw in a firebomb. They think there were at least two separate break-ins. By the end of the second intrusion, everything that wasn’t stolen was bummed. They say there’s nothing left. Nothing at all. All my notes and work--including the comet data. The comet coordinates, the tracking information, the orbital projections--everything.”

            “Burning stars,” Kresh’s voice half whispered. “Maybe that whole escapade at Government Tower was just a diversion.”

            Davlo laughed bitterly. “Trying to kidnap me, perhaps kill me, a mere diversion for stealing my life’s work?”

            “I don’t mean to sound harsh, son, but yes. Exactly that. I grant that you would have a different point of view--but for the rest of the world, right now, your life’s work is of far greater importance than your life. And you’re sure everything is gone? Irretrievably gone?”

            “Everything. “

            “I see.”

            “Governor Kresh? Who did this? Was it the Settlers?”

            “Probably,” said Kresh. “But it could have been anyone who wanted to keep the comet from coming down. Right now that doesn’t matter. Right now we have to deal with the situation, not worry about how the situation came to be.”

            “That’s not going to be easy, sir. I’ll try.”

            There was silence on the line for a moment. “All right, then. Your computer files containing your plans are gone. We have to set to work at once to get them back--or at least get the main part of them back. I’ve seen enough of what the twin control units can do to be sure they could start from the basics of your plan and reconstruct it--probably in greater detail than you had to start with.”

            “How very kind of you to say so,” Davlo muttered.

            “I meant no offense to your work,” Kresh said. “The control units are designed for this kind of job, and they have the capacity to oversee the climate of an entire planet. Of course they can do more detailed projections than one man working alone, no matter how gifted--especially when that man is working outside his field of expertise. And I might add that no robot or computer or control unit found that comet and saw what it might mean to this planet.”

            Davlo sat down in the chair facing the comm unit, folded his arms over his chest, and stared down at the floor. “You’re flattering me,” he said. “Trying to soothe me, make me feel better.”

            “Yes, I am,” Kresh agreed, his voice smooth and calm. “Because I need you, and I need you right now. As I was about to say, the control units can reconstruct and refine your plan for targeting the comet--but we need you in your field of expertise.”

            “Sir? I don’t understand.”

            “Son, we need you to look through your telescope again and relocate that comet. And fast.”

            Davlo took a deep breath, shook his head, and kept his gaze fixed on the floor. “Sir, I never found the comet in the first place.”

            “What! Are you saying this has all been some kind of hoax? Some kind of fraud?”

            “No! No, sir. Nothing like that. I didn’t mean it that way. I meant that the computers found the comet. Automated telescopes found it while doing preprogrammed scans. I’ve never looked through a telescope myself in my life.”

            Again, silence on the line, but this time Davlo spoke first. “All the data is gone, sir. Without my computer files, without my written notes, without the log files--there is simply no way at all I can find that comet again in time.”

            “But the thing is kilometers across! It’s practically headed straight for the planet right now! How hard could it be to spot?”

            Davlo Lentrall let out a tired sigh. The man was right. It shouldn’t be hard at all. How could he explain that it would be all but impossible? “It is extremely hard to spot, sir. It is coming straight for us, and that is part of the problem. Normally we track a comet by spotting its motion against the night sky. Comet Grieg appears to be all but stationary. Not quite motionless, but close. And while it’s a relatively large cometary body, even a big comet is rather small from tens of millions of kilometers away. It also happens to be a rather dark body--and at its present distance, it has a very low apparent magnitude.”

            “You’re saying it’s too dim to see? But you saw it before--or at least the computers and the telescopes did.”

            “It’s not impossible to see. But it’s very dim and small and far away and with a very small lateral motion. And it’s not just a question of seeing it once. We have to get repeated, accurate measures of its position and trajectory before we can reconstruct the orbit.”

            “But what about when it gets closer? Won’t it develop a tail and all the rest of it? Surely that will make it easier to spot.”

            “By which time it will be too late. Grieg is a dark-body comet. The comet will be too close, and if it has developed much of a tail, that will mean it is starting to melt. If it gets too warm and melts too much, it will be too fragile to hold together during the course correction. Part of the plan I hadn’t worked out yet was shielding from the sun. I was going to come up with some kind of parasol, a shield to keep the sunlight off.”

            “But there’s a chance,” said Kresh. “At least there is some sort of chance we could reacquire the comet if we tried.” There was a brief moment of quiet again before the governor’s voice spoke again. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to keep everything moving forward, based on the assumption that we do reacquire the comet, and that we will decide to go forward with the diversion and the impact. We need to move forward on as many fronts as possible, as fast as possible, and I need some work out of you, right now.

            “First I want you to set down the closest approximations you can of the mass, size, position, and trajectory of Comet Grieg. Even rough figures will give us someplace to start in planning for the impact itself. Send that information at once to my data mailbox. Then you are going to get to work at once organizing a search to reacquire Comet Grieg. I will instruct your superiors to give you whatever resources and personnel you need for the job. Tell them as much as you can about the comet. But get that started--and let someone else run it. Because I want you to get to work trying to recover your computer files. Maybe they’re not as lost as we think. There must be something, somewhere--at least enough to give some leads to the team doing the telescope search. Is that clear?”

            “Yes, sir. Sir--if I might ask a question?”

            “Yes, of course, Dr. Lentrall.”

            “I get the impression that you’ve become more convinced that the plan might work.”

            “That I have, Dr. Lentrall. I’ve seen and heard quite a bit here about your plan. Enough to make me think we just can’t live without it. Was there anything else?”

            “Not at the moment, sir. I’ll be in touch.”

            “You certainly will,” the governor replied, with just the slightest hint of humor in his voice. “Kresh out.”

            The line went dead.

            That should have been his cue to swing into action, but instead, Davlo simply stared at the speaker, expressionless. After what seemed a very long time indeed, he finally stirred himself into action. He set down all he could recall of his comet data, as accurately as possible, knowing full well that the margin of error in most of his figures would render them close to useless. He sent a copy of it off to Kresh’s data mailbox, and another off to the head of the astronomy department, asking for whatever help he could get. Of course, Davlo knew perfectly well that the department head absolutely refused to accept any after-hours calls. She would not get the message until morning. But still, best to have it done.

            Simple enough jobs, both of them, but they seemed to take an inordinately long time--and to take a great deal out of Davlo. After the day he had had, there was not really a great deal left to take. When he was at last done with the messages, he did not get up. Instead he sat there, unable to rouse himself. There was a lot more he ought to do, but Davlo Lentrall could not quite bring himself to move. Not quite yet.

            It was that hour of the night when rational thought seems most unreasonable, when unreasoning fear seems utterly logical, and disasters seem most probable. Davlo thought of his nameless, faceless, enormously powerful enemies. They were mad enough at him already. He was not entirely sure he wanted to do anything else--like getting out of his chair--that might incur their wrath.

            There was some part of Davlo Lentrall that was able to recognize the fragility of his own personality at that moment. A part of him that could see that the game was over. A part of him that knew he had been pretending to be someone and something he was not for a long time. He had seen himself as smarter, braver, better than anyone else. And why not, in a universe where robots protected everyone from the consequences of their actions, where robots did all the hard work and left the posturing for humans? He had always imagined himself as being immune to fear and as impossible to harm. It was easy enough to indulge such fancies when robots warded off all danger.

            And that part of Davlo Lentrall could feel it all slipping away. A few more shocks, a few more disasters, and he knew he would not be able to hold together. What was he to do if the mask fell from his face altogether, and the face underneath was blank? He knew now that he was not the person he had pretended to be. But then who was he?

            Davlo Lentrall sat in his office chair, still as a switched-off robot, trying to work up the nerve to move.

            It might have been a minute later, or an hour later, when Kaelor came into the room. “Come along, sir,” the robot said. “You must rest. There is nothing more you can accomplish tonight.”

            Lentrall allowed himself to be led away, allowed Kaelor to peel off his clothes, move him through the refresher, and put him to bed. He was asleep almost before he was fully between the covers. The last thing he saw as his head hit the pillow was Kaelor leaning over him, tucking the sheets up around him.

            And the first thing he would think of the next morning was where he might find quite a bit of his lost data.

DONALD 111 WAS every bit as motionless as Lentrall had been, but he was far from inactive. Donald stood in his niche in the wall of Alvar Kresh’s home office, and worked the hyperwave links with all the speed and efficiency that he could muster. To an outside observer, Donald would have appeared completely inert, as if he had been shut down altogether. In point of fact, he was linked into a half -dozen databases, patched through to simultaneous conference calls with robots in the City of Hades maintenance offices, the Department of Public Safety, the Emergency Preparedness Service, the Combined Inferno Police, and a half-dozen other agencies. No one knew for sure what would happen if and when the comet hit, but there were certain basic precautions that could be taken--and Donald could at least get them started.

            It had to be anticipated that there would be quakes and aftershocks as a result of the impact, even in Hades, halfway around the planet. That assumption right there meant a great deal of work would have to be done. There were buildings that would have to be braced. Perhaps it would be wise if some old and unneeded buildings were disassembled altogether. Valuable and fragile objects would have to be stored in places of safety.

            And then, of course, there were the people. The robots would have to prepare massive places of shelter, where the quakes could be ridden out in safety.

            All the computer projections and models made it clear they had to anticipate that the comet impact would inject a large amount of dust, gas, and water vapor into the atmosphere. Theory said the dust injection would be of benefit to the climate in the long run, an aid to the efforts to adjust the planetary greenhouse factor, but it also meant there would be a prolonged period of bad weather. The robots of Inferno had to prepare for this as well.

            There were dozens, hundreds, thousands of details to work out, contingencies to prepare for, scarce resources to be allocated between conflicting demands.

            Donald had made a status report to the governor three hours after commencing the job, as instructed, although there was not a great deal of new information at that time. Things were really just getting started.

            The job his master had given him was enormous in scope, enormous enough that Donald already convinced himself that the job was far beyond his capacity. It was obviously quite impossible for him to organize the entire planet for the comet impact all by himself. But his master, Governor Alvar Kresh, had to know that as well. Clearly, therefore, his orders required some interpretation. Donald would do the best he could for as long as required, but there would come a point where it would be counterproductive for Donald to run things, instead of handing the job to whatever combination of humans and robots were best suited to the job. But until the governor issued orders to that effect, Donald would tackle the job as best he could.

            Indeed, the initial stages of the job were well within Donald’s capacities. Later there would be decisions to make that were beyond his scope, but for now he even had a little bit of extra capacity--enough to monitor the news channels, for example. That was a routine part of running a large-scale mobilization job like this one. One had to monitor all the uncontrollable variables that affected the situation. From the operations planning side of things, unfavorable news reports were as much an uncontrollable and unpredictable variable as bad weather or plagues or economic crashes. Nor was it just the news itself that mattered--the way in which was reported was equally important. The mood of the report, the things that were left in and left out, the match-up between the facts as reported and the facts as known to the project team--all of those mattered.

            And Donald was enough of a. student of human behavior to know that what he heard starting to be reported on the overnight news broadcast was far beyond his ability to judge. All he could know for sure was that it would have some effect, and a complicating one at that.

            So he did was any robot would do under the circumstances.

            He went looking for a human who could deal with the problem.

FREDDA LEVING OPENED her eyes to see Donald’s calm and expressionless gaze looking down on her. She of all people should not have been unnerved by the sight. After all, she had built Donald, and she knew him as well as anyone else in her life. She knew how solid a protection the Three Laws were, and how utterly reliable Donald was in any event. But even so, it had been a long, hard day, and there was something distinctly unnerving about waking up to see a sky-blue robotic face staring down at one’s self. “Donald,” she said, her voice still heavy with sleep. “What is it?”

            “Dr. Leving, I have just monitored an audio channel news report from Inferno Networks concerning the incident today at Government Tower Plaza.”

            “That’s hardly surprising,” Fredda said. “What else would they put on the news?”

            “True enough, Doctor. However, this report is rather surprising. I believe you should hear it.”

            Fredda sighed and sat up in bed. “Very well, Donald. Play it back for me.”

            The cool, professional voice of a female newsreader began to speak through Donald’s speaker grille. “Sources close to the investigation have uncovered a rumor that has been circulating for most of the day--that the incident at Government Tower today was actually a coup attempt, an effort to seize control of the government itself.”

            Suddenly, Fredda was fully and absolutely awake. What the devil was the woman talking about? There’s hadn’t been any coup attempt.

            “Even more remarkable is the reason offered as motivation for the coup attempt,” the newsreader went on. “The attempt was made to prevent the government from causing a comet to crash into the planet. According to the same source, the government is actively and secretly engaged in just such a project, under the belief that the comet impact will somehow enhance the planetary environment. Attempts to contact Governor Kresh for comment have been unsuccessful. We will of course provide further details of this story as they become available.”

            The recording ended, and Donald spoke in his own voice. “That was the sum total of reportage on any coup attempt,” Donald said, anticipating Fredda’s first question. “I might add that Inferno Networks has a tradition of sensationalist reports, and that at various times the Settler and Ironhead organizations, as well as the government itself, have found it a useful conduit for leaks.”

            “So it could have come from anywhere. When did that broadcast go out?” Fredda asked, trying to think.

            “Just a few minutes ago, at 0312 hours local time here in Hades.”

            “In the dead of night, the time it would be least likely to have much circulation. Interesting. Very, very interesting. Has anyone from any of the news services attempted to reach Alvar--ah, the governor?”

            “Not through any of the access points or comm links that I monitor,” Donald replied.

            “In other words, either they didn’t really try to reach him, or they didn’t try very hard,” Fredda said, half to herself. She thought for a moment. “They’re trying to flush us out,” she announced at last. “Get us out in the open, right in their sights. That’s got to be it.”

            “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Donald. “Who is ‘they’?”

            “I would assume that it’s the same people who tried to snatch Davlo Lentrall,” Fredda said. “It means they’re trying to force us to admit there is a plan to drop a comet--and they’re trying to present the idea in the most unfavorable way possible. They want to make it look like the comet idea is so bad that people would risk violence and upheaval rather than let it happen. And if they can make the comet plan seem like some sort of fiendish secret plot, all the better. It will put more pressure on the government--on Alvar--to backpedal, get as far back from the comet idea as possible.”

            “I see,” said Donald in a tone of voice that made it clear he did not. “I must admit that the subtleties of human politics are quite beyond me. Might I ask why whoever it was that did this arranged for it to be broadcast at this hour of the night?”

            “They’re sending a signal,” Fredda said. “They’re giving us until morning to put together a denial, to explain it away, and let the whole thing evaporate.”

            “And if you fail to do so?”

            Fredda waved at Donald’s speaker grille, vaguely indicating the recorded human voice that had just come from it. “Then they will use all the news outlets they get can to listen to them. They’ll raise every kind of hell they can. Maybe try to force Alvar out of office.”

            “So what do we do?” Donald asked.

            Fredda thought for a moment. Logically, the thing to do was call Alvar, consult with him. The trouble was, of course, that she did not know where he was. He had not told her. No doubt she could find him if she wanted to do so. Probably all she had to do was ask Donald. Either he knew, or else he could find out, somehow. But she had the distinct impression that Alvar had wanted to be alone. And Donald had come to her, not to Alvar. That in and of itself strongly implied that Donald did not wish to contact Alvar. Had Alvar left explicit orders with Donald? Or was Donald working on some sort of implied orders? Could she get him to override that instruction with a stated and emphatic command to help her contact her husband? Or suppose he knew where Alvar was but just wanted to protect his master from a politically damaging situation by dumping it in Fredda’s lap?

            Damnation! The situation was bad enough without having to go into the whichness of what and the balancing of implied commands and hypothetical First Law issues.

            Fredda had gotten to precisely that point in her reasoning when Donald spoke. “I beg your pardon, Dr. Leving, but there is an incoming call for you from the Hades News Reporting Service.”

            “For me?” Why the devil would they call her? Unless they had tried for Alvar already. Or else maybe--”Oh, the hell with it,” she said out loud, and stood up. She was too tired for more guessing games. “Audio only. I must look an absolute fright. Put the call through the bedroom comm panel, Donald. And better record the call as well.” She started pacing back and forth, for want of a better outlet for her nervous energy.

            “Yes, ma’am,” said Donald. “The caller can hear you--now.”

            Thoughtful of Donald to handle it that way. More than a few people had been embarrassed talking to an audio--only caller who wasn’t there--or, worse, by talking indiscreetly before they knew the caller was there. “This is Fredda Leving,” she said to the empty air. “Who is calling, please?”

            “Good evening, Dr. Leving.” A very smooth, professional sounding male voice spoke into the empty air. “This is Hilyar Lews, Hades News Reporting.”

            Fredda had heard and seen the man on the air, and she did not like him. Besides which, it irritated her that anyone could sound so smooth and polished at this hour of the night. “Did you say, ‘Good evening’?” Fredda asked. “Wouldn’t ‘Good morning’ would be a trifle more accurate, Mr. Lews? And I might add that it is traditional to apologize for calling at this hour,” she said, hoping to put the man off balance.

            “Urn, ah, well, yes, ma’am. My apologies.” It was obvious from Lews’s tone of voice that he knew exactly how awkward he sounded. Good.

            “Well, now that you have me up, Mr. Lews, did you have a particular reason for calling? Or is this just a friendly chat?” Best to keep the fellow as much off balance as possible.

            “Ah, no, ma’am. It’s a very serious call. We’ve been trying to reach the governor concerning the allegations that are being broadcast by Inferno Networks News? Ah--have you heard the I-N News reports?”

            “I have indeed,” said Fredda. “And I can speak for my husband without the necessity of disturbing him at this hour. There absolutely, positively, categorically was no coup attempt. There was and is no threat to the government.”

            “But what about the--”

            “I can’t comment on the details of an ongoing investigation.” Fredda rolled right over whatever Lews was going to ask, glad to have such a convenient phrase to hand.

            “Very well, ma’ am. But what about this business concerning a comet? Is there any truth at all to that part of the story? It sounds a little too fantastic for it to have been made up out of nothing at all.”

            Fredda stopped her pacing back and forth and sat down on the edge of the bed. Why the devil did crises always hit in the middle of the night, when she was half asleep? She had to think, and think fast. It was no good denying the story. Not when it was true, not when it was bound to leak out again, some other way, and soon. But she could not just blandly confirm it either. She had no idea at all how likely the comet plan was. Alvar had gone off somewhere to study the problem. Suppose he had already concluded the idea was, after all, as insane as it sounded? She could not commit him, either way. But she couldn’t let it go with a flat “no comment” either. That would simply start the rumor mill churning faster than ever.

            In short, there was nothing she could say that wouldn’t cause some serious damage. She should never have taken this call in the first place. But it was too late now. She had to say something. She took a deep breath, and spoke slowly, carefully. “There is a comet,” she said. “The governor is aware of...studies that have been made concerning the comet.” Suddenly Fredda had an inspiration. Something she could say that was utterly truthful, and yet something that was completely misleading. Something that might slow down the rumor long enough to buy them some time. “I do not know all the details, but I believe the project has something to do with Operation Snowball. I assume you are familiar with snowball?”

            “Ah, yes, somewhat, ma’am.” There was a longish pause. At a guess, Lews was doing a lookup on “snowball” in some sort of reference system. Fredda smiled. It was increasingly obvious to her that Lews was not quite as smooth and prepared as he let on. That was also good. “It’s a project to mine ice from comets and drop it into the atmosphere,” Lews said, in a tone of voice that made it obvious that he was reading the words from off some screen or another.

            “Precisely. In effect, dropping a comet on the planet--a few kilograms at a time. Snowball has been going on for some time, and it is the only officially approved project concerning comets that I know about.” The statement was true, if misleading in the extreme. The Comet Grieg plan was not, after all, approved. “I trust that answers your questions, Mr. Lews?”

            “Well, I suppose so,” Lews replied.

            Suppose what you will, thought Fredda, just so long as I’ve muddled the trail enough to hold you off. “In that case, I’ll be getting back to bed. Good night--or good morning--Mr. Lews.” Fredda made a throat-cutting gesture to Donald, and he cut the connection. “I hope I did that right,” she said, more to herself than to Donald. “See to it that a copy of the original broadcast, and a copy of that conversation, are in the governor’s data mailbox. When he does check in, he’ll need to know what’s going on.”

            “I have already put copies into his mailbox, Doctor.”

            “Excellent.” Fredda slumped backward onto the bed, her feet still dangling down over the front of the mattress. That wouldn’t do. No point dozing off like that when she could so easily crawl back beneath the covers. She stood up, went around the bed, and got back into it, wondering if there was indeed any point in getting comfortable. It wouldn’t surprise her if she were unable to sleep at all. She certainly had enough things to worry about for her to keep her staring at the ceiling for the rest of the night. Where was Alvar? What was he going to do about the comet? Had she done it right, or had she just made a bad mess worse? No way to know. No way to know until it was too late.

            It seemed her to that was the running theme for everything that had happened in the last few days. She yawned, shut her eyes, rolled over on her side, and set forth on a valiant effort to fall asleep.

FREDDA OPENED HER eyes again, to Donald staring down at her once more.

            “Your pardon, Dr. Leving, but there is an urgent call for you. The pseudo-robot Caliban says he must speak with you at once,” Fredda sighed. She knew she had to take the call, and that Caliban would only call if it were important, But even so, it was turning into a very long night. “Now what time is it?” she asked.

            “It is now 0429 hours,” Donald said.

            “It would be,” she muttered. “All right, on the bedroom comm again. Audio only.” Perhaps she shouldn’t have cared how she looked to a robot, but she did.

            “Very well, Dr. Leving. Caliban can hear you--now.”

            “Caliban, hello,” Fredda said, struggling not to yawn. What’s going on?”

            “Dr. Leving, please forgive me for disturbing you at this hour, but I felt that we must talk. Prospero and I are leaving the city now, headed for Depot and beyond. We have learned through our own sources what is likely to befall our city.”

            Fredda blinked in surprise. She had always known that Caliban and the New Law robots had good sources of information, but she had not known they were that good. And then there was the way Caliban had phrased it. “Befall” the New Law city. A subtle pun that would reveal very little to anyone who did not know what was going on. It told her Caliban was being cautious--and that he wanted her to be equally cautious. Was he worried about eavesdroppers, or snooper robots with orders to listen for certain words? Or was he just assuming that Alvar was still there, and might be able to overhear? “I think you are being wise,” she said. “Events are moving quite rapidly, and I don’t think they will be easy to control.”

            “I quite agree,” said Caliban. “We must set to work at once preparing our citizens for the contingency in question. We may well need to call on our friends for help.”

            “You can certainly call on me,” said Fredda. “Whatever I can do, I will.” She hesitated for a moment. That was a rather sweeping promise, after all. It seemed likely that all of the Utopia region would have to be evacuated, and that would put a huge strain on transport and other resources. Few people were likely to worry about the New Law robots getting their fair share of the help. “But there will probably be limits--severe limits--on what I can do.”

            “I understand that,” said Caliban. “We have always been on our own. But even marginal assistance could turn out to be vitally important.”

            Fredda felt a pang of guilt. It was bad enough when you could do very little for your own creations. It was worse when they expected even less. “Contact me when you get there,” she said. “Let me know whatever you need, and I’ll do my damnedest to get it.”

            There was a moment’s silence on the line. “What we need,” said Caliban, “is a place where we can be left alone. We thought we had that, up until now. Caliban out.”

            The line went dead, and Fredda cursed to herself, fluently, violently, and at length. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She had never asked for, never considered, the burden of obligation she had put on herself when she had created the New Law robots. She had never felt that she owed a debt, a creator’s debt to the Three-Law robots she had built. But with Caliban, with the New Law robots, she felt she owed them something, simply by virtue of calling them into existence.

            Perhaps that was the difference between creating a race of willing slaves, and a race of beings who wanted to be free.

            Fredda slumped back in bed. Damnation. Now she’d never get to sleep.

THE FIRST HINTS of dawn were a whisper in the eastern skies of Hades as Caliban, Prospero, and Fiyle rode Prospero’s aircar up out of the city’s tunnel system. Fiyle was clearly exhausted, yawning uncontrollably. He had been up all night, Prospero grilling him relentlessly for any tiny scrap of information he might have concerning the comet operation.

            Caliban looked at the man with something very close to sympathy. Perhaps Fiyle was little better than a turncoat who sold himself to all and sundry, but even so, there was some whiff of honor about the man. Something in him had put limits on his petty betrayals and the buying and selling of trust. Something had put survival of the New Law robots above the lure of Trader Demand Notes. There was something to respect, even in this contemptible man.

            And it was, after all, that impulse to decency that had placed Norlan Fiyle in danger. That meant Norlan Fiyle had best get out of town, and fast. And the two robots, needless to say, had their own reasons to travel. They needed to warn Valhalla.

            Caliban looked from Fiyle to Prospero, and then at the city itself. He bid a farewell--and not an entirely fond one--to Hades. Perhaps he would someday return to the city. But events were moving too quickly, things were happening too fast. Somehow, a part of him knew that the city he saw now, here, today, would soon be changed beyond recognition, even if the buildings and the streets remained the same. For the lives of the people would be changed utterly, and the world beyond the city made anew.

            Unless, of course, city, people, and world were all simply smashed flat instead. Utter destruction was one form of change.

            The aircar reached for sky, and headed into the dawn.

ALVAR KRESH SWITCHED off the link to his data mailbox, surprised at his own sense of relief. He sat at the console in front of Dum and Dee, where, it seemed to him, he had spent several years, instead of merely most of a night and most of a morning, and tried to consider the situation. The day shift for the Terraforming Center had been filtering in for the last half an hour or so, all of them more than a trifle surprised to find Governor Alvar Kresh in possession. Kresh paid them as little mind, and as little attention, as possible. Dr. Soggdon was still at the center as well, for reasons Kresh did not entirely understand. Perhaps a sense of duty was keeping her there to protect Unit Dee’s honor against the interloper. If that was the case, she was not at her most effective. She was at her desk, head pillowed on her folded arms, fast asleep.

            Kresh turned his attention back to the news he had just received. The people trying to wreck the comet-capture project did not know it, but they had done him a very large favor indeed. Kresh had been dreading the necessity of informing the world at large of the comet project. Sooner or later, Inferno would have to know, but he had enough on his hands without being forced to calm the inevitable public uproar at the same time.

            By leaking the information, the opposition had relieved Kresh of the necessity of going before the cameras and the reporters. And Fredda had struck precisely the right note, deflating the uproar without actually discounting the story. Thank Space he hadn’t been home to receive that call himself.

            When he had succeeded to the governorship, Kresh had made a point of eliminating all the layers of press secretaries and communications offices and scheduled appointments and all the other tricks of the trade meant to keep reporters well away from the governor, allowing the news people all but unlimited access to him. There had been plenty of times when he had regretted that policy, and today he thanked whatever source of luck he had that he had managed to avoid the press today. It might not be a bad idea to stay right where he was, keeping a nice, low profile for a while, with as little direct communication with the outside world as possible. Here he could focus on the project itself. If he went back to Hades, it was all but inevitable that he would get swept up talking about the project, rather than doing something about it.

            Very well. Now the world knew about the comet, and he had not been the one to tell them. All to the good. But now there was another problem. The obvious thing to do now was to allow the public discussion move forward to the point where he could confirm the existence of the comet plan to a populace ready to accept the idea. But how the devil could he do that when he would be forced to make the ridiculous-sounding admission that they had misplaced the comet?

            Plainly, the best answer to that problem was to relocate the comet as soon as possible. But Kresh had done as much as he could in that direction for the moment. Sometimes the job of leadership was simply to get things started, and trust in others to get them done. He would have to keep on here, focusing on other aspects of the project, working on the assumption that they would be able to find the comet in time. Back to work, he told himself.

            “Still with me, Dee?” Kresh asked.

            “Yes, sir, I am,” Unit Dee replied. “Was there anything of interest in your mailbox?”

            “Quite a bit,” he said. “But nothing that you need worry about. I have a new task for you.”

            “I would be delighted to be of further assistance.”

            “Right,” said Kresh, his tone of voice deliberately brusque. There was something about courtly manners from a robot that got on his nerves. “My personal robot, Donald 111, is at work on the preliminary preparations for the cometary impact. Safety plans, evacuations plans, that sort of thing. I want to contact him and have him hand off that job to you. Clearly, you’re better suited to it than he is. I should have assigned the job to you in the first place. Relay my orders to that effect, then order Donald to join me here as soon as possible without revealing my whereabouts.”

            “I will contact him at once,” Dee said.

            “Good,” said Kresh. “I’m going to step out for a breath of fresh air. When I return, we will return to refining your impact targeting plan.”

            “With the extremely rough data we got from Dr. Lentrall, I am not sure there is more we can do.”

            “But there might be,” Kresh said. “At the very least we can work out a range of scenarios and contingencies, so that we are more ready to act when the time comes. We’ll work out a few hundred possible rough trajectories, and give Unit Dum something to do.”

            Dee did not respond to the very small joke, but instead spoke with her usual urbane civility. “Very well, sir. I will continue with my other duties while I await your return.”

            “Back in a minute,” Kresh said, and stood up. He stretched, yawned, and ignored the stares of the Center’s workers as he rubbed his tired face. Let them wonder what their governor was doing here. Alvar headed out the huge armored door of Room 103, down the corridor of the Terraforming Center, out the double doors that led to the outside, and into the morning.

            It had been a long time since he had worked a job all night, worked all the clock around. He was close to exhausted, but not quite. There was something invigorating about seeing the morning after a hard night’s work. Somehow Kresh always felt as if he had earned the loveliness of morning after working through the darkness.

            The rains were gone now, and the world was fresh and bright, scrubbed clean. The sky was a brilliant blue, dotted with perfect white clouds that set off the deep azure of the heavens. The air smelled sweet, and good. Alvar Kresh looked toward the west, in the direction of the governor’s Winter Residence. He remembered another morning like this, with everything fresh and bright, and all good things possible. A morning he had spent with Fredda, just after he had assumed the governorship. That had been a morning of good omen. Perhaps this would be as well.

            And maybe it was time to move over to the Winter Residence. That would let him stay on the island. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed a good idea to keep a low profile just now. But that could wait until later. Right now there was something else he could do to keep himself isolated. He walked over to his aircar, sitting in the middle of a parking lot that was now half full of aircars. Oberon saw him through the cockpit viewport, and the door of the craft swung open as he approached. Kresh went aboard, and found Oberon just coming aft to meet him.

            “Are we heading home, sir?” Oberon asked in his slow, ponderous voice.

            “You are, but I’m not. Fly the aircar back and give my regards to my wife. Tell her I heard the recordings, and that she handled them exactly right. Tell her where I am, and that if she wishes, she can join me here--if she can do so undetected. I would value her advice. You must make it clear I wish to keep my whereabouts as private as possible for the time being. I need time to think, and work, without the world jiggling my elbow.”

            “What of the workers here, sir?” asked Oberon. “They know where you are.”

            “True enough, and sooner or later something is going to leak. With luck it will be later. Just see to it you aren’t the one that does the leaking. Fly an evasive pattern so it looks like you’re coming in to Hades from someplace besides here.”

            “Very good, sir. Unless there is something further, I will leave at once.”

            “Nothing else,” said Kresh. “Go.” He turned and stepped out of the hatch, and moved back toward the building to get clear for Oberon’s takeoff. After a moment or two the aircar launched, moving smoothly and slowly up into the sky. Kresh was on his own--or at least he could pretend he was. He was, after all, the governor. He could call on any sort of transport or communication he liked, whenever he liked. But without the aircar there, he was just that little bit more cut off, that little bit more isolated.

            He had a little time.

            Now if only he had the trajectory and coordinates for the comet, maybe things would turn out all right after all.

            Maybe.