12

DAVLO LENTRALL’S EYES snapped open. He sat bolt upright in bed. He had gone from stone cold asleep to quiveringly awake and alert in the flicker of a heartbeat. He knew. He knew. But he would have to proceed carefully. Very carefully indeed, or it would all be lost, all be over. He forced himself to think it through, work out all the logical consequences in his head. There was only going to be one chance to do this thing, and it was clear the odds were against him. He was going to have to move carefully, and act as normally as possible. Davlo knew he could not give his quarry any reason at all to suspect him.

            Well, if he were going to have to act normally, there was no time like the present to start. He pushed the button by his bedside, and, after the briefest of delays, Kaelor came in. “Good morning,” the robot said. “I hope you slept well.”

            “Very well indeed,” said Davlo in what he hoped was a light and casual tone of voice. “I certainly needed it after yesterday.”

            “One or two things did go on,” Kaelor said, the familiar sardonic tone in his voice.

            “It wasn’t an easy day for you, either,” said Davlo. “And I never did get to thank you for all you did. “

            “I couldn’t help but do it, sir, as you know perfectly well.”

            “Yes,” said Davlo. “But even so, I want you to know it is appreciated. “ He got out of bed, and Kaelor produced his robe and slippers from the closet. Davlo shrugged the robe on over his shoulders and knotted the tie loosely in front of him, then stepped into the slippers. He yawned strenuously and walked out of the bedroom, Kaelor following and shutting the door behind him.

            Davlo had long ago decided that breakfast was a meal best consumed in the most soothing surroundings and circumstances possible. Therefore, contrary to the custom in most Infernal households, he did not bathe or dress before going down to breakfast, but instead ate in his pajamas and robe. On the same principle of informal comfort, his breakfast room was large, cool and shady, with the table facing large bay windows that looked out over a meticulously well-kept garden. There were two robots at work pruning the shrubbery, and a third on its knees by one of the flower beds, apparently doing some sort of work by the roots. Most mornings Davlo enjoyed watching the garden robots at their tasks, and used the time to decide what else needed doing about the place, but this morning he hardly paid the yardwork any notice at all.

            But then he reminded himself it was important, above all things, to act normal, to do all the things he would normally do. He sat down at the table in his usual chair facing the window, and watched carefully as the robots trimmed back the hedges. “Make sure the garden staff checks carefully for storm damage, and clears out any storm debris,” Davlo said. “That was a devil of a rain last night.”

            “So it was,” Kaelor responded as he put down the tray and served breakfast to his master. “I have already seen to it that the outdoor staff will attend to the matter.”

            “Very good,” said Davlo, and yawned. “Mmmph. Still a little sleepy. I might need an extra cup of tea to wake up this morning,” he said. Could he really bring himself to act against the robot who had saved his life the day before? He thought back to the day before, and the way he had fallen apart in the face of danger and disaster. He shook his head. No. Not today. He would show the world he could take action, and act decisively. He was on the verge of congratulating himself on his newfound courage when he reminded himself that there was not much risk involved when one attacked a Three-Law robot.

            “I’ll bring the tea at once, sir,” Kaelor said, “assuming you really want it.”

            “Hold off on it just a bit,” Davlo said. Was it his imagination, or was Kaelor a bit overalert, oversolicitous? For the average robot, his behavior this morning would have been borderline rude, but for Kaelor it was sweetness and light.

            “Very well,” said Kaelor, in a tone of voice that made it clear what he thought of Davlo’s indecisiveness. In a strange way, that made Davlo feel better. After all, Kaelor was normally rather curt. Or was Kaelor just “acting” normal, in the same way Davlo himself was? Davlo did not dare ask. Better just to eat his breakfast and wait for his moment. He turned to his food and did his best to notice what it was he was eating. After all, Davlo Lentrall was a man who normally enjoyed his food.

            His chance came as Kaelor was clearing away the last of the breakfast dishes, and Davlo had pushed back his chair from the table. Struggling between the need to be on the alert and the need to seem at ease, Davlo nearly missed the opportunity. But when Kaelor reached across the table to collect the last glass, just as Davlo was standing up, the robot had to turn his back completely on his master.

            The golden moment lay open to Davlo, and he moved with a smooth and focused speed. He flipped open the door over the compartment on Kaelor’s back, and revealed the robot’s main power switch underneath. Kaelor was already turning to react, to get away, when Davlo threw the switch down.

            His power cut, overbalanced as he leaned over the table, Kaelor fell like a stone, dropping the dishes he held and crashing into the wooden tabletop with enough force to break it in two. Davlo moved back a step or two, hating himself for what he had just done to the robot, the sentient being who had saved his life the day before. But it was necessary. Absolutely necessary. He felt anything but heroic.

            He turned his back on the collapsed robot and the debris of the ruined table, and went to the comm center. There was a chance, at least a chance, that he could extract the knowledge he needed. The knowledge that might well save Inferno. It was just barely possible that he had saved the world by turning off a robot. There was a lot to think about in that idea, but there was no time for it now. He had to call Fredda Leving.

            If anyone could get the information out of Kaelor, she could.

FREDDA LEVING WATCHED as her four service robots unpacked and set up the portable robot maintenance frame in the middle of Davlo Lentrall’s living room. Once it was assembled, they lifted Kaelor’s still-inert form up onto it and attached it firmly to the frame with the use of hold-down straps.

            The maintenance frame itself was attached to its base by a complex arrangement of three sets of rotating bearings, built at right angles to each other, so that the frame could be spun around into any conceivable orientation. Thus, a robot clamped into the frame could be spun and swiveled and rotated into whatever position was most convenient to the roboticist doing the work. Once the service robots had Kaelor up on the frame, Fredda stepped in and went to work. Not that she had much hope of success, but with the stakes this high, one had to at least try.

            She swiveled Kaelor’s body around until he was lying facedown, his unpowered eyes staring blankly at the floor. She found Kaelor’s standard diagnostic port at the base of his neck and plugged in her test meter. She switched from one setting to another, watching the display on the meter. “No surprises there,” she said. “The standard diagnostics show that his basic circuits are all functioning normally, but we knew that.”

            “Can you tap into his memory system through that port?” Davlo asked, leaning in a bit closer than Fredda would have preferred. He was nervous, agitated, his face gaunt and pale. He kept rubbing his hands together, over and over.

            “I’m afraid not,” said Fredda, trying to assume a cool, professional tone. “It’s not that easy. This just shows me the basic systems status. Even though he’s powered down, there are still lots of circuits with trickle-charges running through them, things that need power to maintain system integrity. This just shows me he hasn’t blown a fuse, that his basic pathing is stable. Now I know we’re not going to harm him accidentally as we proceed.” Whether or not we decide to harm him deliberately is quite another story. she thought. No sense saying any such thing out loud. Lentrall was in a bad enough state as it was.

            Fredda left the test meter plugged in and hung it off a utility hook on the side of the maintenance frame. She got in a little closer, adjusted the position of the table slightly, and undid the four clampdown fasteners that held on the back of Kaelor’s head, and carefully lifted the backplate off. She took one look at the circuitry and cabling thus revealed and shook her head. “No,” she said. “I was afraid of that. I’ve seen this setup before.” She pointed to a featureless black ball, about twelve centimeters across. “His positronic brain is in that fully sealed unit. The only link between it and the outside world is that armored cable coming out of its base, where the spinal column would be on a human. That cable will have about five thousand microcables inside, every one of them about the diameter of a human hair. I’d have to guess right on which two of those to link into, and get it right on the first try, or else I would quite literally fry his brain. Short him out. Space alone knows how long it would take to trace the linkages. A week probably. The whole brain assembly is designed to be totally inaccessible.”

            “But why?” asked Davlo Lentrall.

            Fredda smiled sadly. “To protect the confidential information inside his head. To keep people from doing exactly what we’re trying to do--get information out of him that he would not want to reveal.”

            “Damnation! I’d thought we’d just be able to tap into his memory system and extract what we needed.”

            “With some robots that might be possible--though incredibly time-consuming,” Fredda said as she reattached the back of Kaelor’s head. “Not with this model.”

            “So there’s nothing we can do,” Lentrall said. “I mean, on the level of electronics and memory dumps. “As he spoke, his face was drawn and expressionless, and he seemed unwilling to meet Fredda’s gaze, or to look at Kaelor. He was the portrait of a man who had already decided he had to do something he was not going to be proud of. And the portrait of a man who was going to crack before very much longer.

            “Nothing much,” said Fredda.

            “So we’re going to have to talk to him--and we know he doesn’t want to talk.”

            Fredda wanted to have some reason to disagree, but she knew better. Kaelor would already have spoken up if he had been willing to speak. “No, he doesn’t,” she said. She thought for a moment and picked up her test meter. “The two things I can do is deactivate his main motor control, so he can only move his head and eyes and talk. And I can set his pseudoclock-speed lower.”

            “Why cut his main motor function?” Davlo asked.

            So he won’t tear his own head off or smash his own brain in to keep us from learning what he wants kept secret, Fredda thought, but she knew better than to tell that to Davlo. Fortunately, it didn’t take her long to think of something else. “To keep him from breaking out and escaping,” she said. “He might try to run away rather than speak to us.”

            Davlo nodded, a bit too eagerly, as if he knew better but wanted to believe. “What about the clock speed?” he asked.

            “In effect, it will make him think more slowly, cut his reaction time down. But even at its minimum speed settings, his brain works faster than ours. He’ll still have the advantage over us--it’ll just be cut down a bit.”

            Davlo nodded. “Do it,” he said. “And then let’s talk to him.”

            “Right,” said Fredda, trying to sound brisk and efficient. She used the test meter to send the proper commands through Kaelor’s diagnostic system, then hooked the meter back on to the maintenance frame. She spun the frame around until Kaelor was suspended in an upright position, eyes straight ahead, feet dangling a half meter off the floor. He stared straight ahead, his body motionless, his eyes sightless. The test meter cable still hung from his neck, and the meter’s display showed a series of diagnostic numbers, one after the other, in blinking red.

            Seeing Kaelor strapped in that way, Fredda was irresistibly reminded of an ancient drawing she had seen somewhere, of a torture victim strapped down on a frame or rack not unlike the one that held Kaelor now. That’s the way it works, she thought. Strap them down, mistreat them, try and force the information out of them before they die. It was a succinct description of the torturer’s trade. She had never thought before that it might apply to a roboticist as well. “I bet you don’t like this any better than I do,” she said, staring at the robot. She was not sure if she was talking to Kaelor or Davlo.

            Now Davlo looked on Kaelor, and could not take his eyes off him. “Yesterday, he grabbed me and stuffed me under a bench and used his body to shield mine. He risked his life for mine. He’d remind me himself that the Three Laws compelled him to do it, but that doesn’t matter. He risked his life for mine. And now we’re simply going to risk his life.” He paused a moment, and then said it in plainer words. “We’re probably about to kill him,” he said in a flat, angry voice. “Kill him because he wants to protect us--all of us--from me.”

            Fredda glanced at Davlo, and then looked back at Kaelor. “I think you’d better let me do the talking,” she said.

            For a moment she thought he was about to protest, insist that a man ought to be willing to do this sort of job for himself. But instead his shrugged, and let out a small sigh. “You’re the roboticist,” he said, still staring straight at Kaelor’s dead eyes. “You know robopsychology.”

            And there are times I wished I knew more human psychology, Fredda thought, giving Davlo Lentrall a sidelong glance. “Before we begin,” she said, “there’s something you need to understand. I know that you ordered Kaelor built to your own specifications. You wanted a Constricted First Law robot, right?”

            “Right,” said Lentrall, clearly not paying a great deal of attention.

            “Well, you didn’t get one,” Fredda said. “At least not in the sense you might think. And that’s what set up the trap you’re in now. Kaelor was designed to be able to distinguish hypothetical danger or theoretical danger from the real thing. Though most high-function robots built on Inferno are capable of distinguishing between real and hypothetical danger to humans, they in effect choose not to do so. In a sense, they let their imaginations run away with them, worry that the hypothetical might become real, and fret over what would happen in such a case, and treat it as if were real, just to be on the safe side of the First Law. Kaelor was, in effect, built without much imagination--or what passes for imagination in a robot. He is not capable of making that leap, of asking, ‘What if the hypothetical became real?’”

            “I understand all that,” Davlo said irritably.

            “But I don’t think you understand the next part,” Fredda said with more coolness than she felt. “With a robot like Kaelor, when the hypothetical, the imaginary, suddenly does become real, when it dawns on such a robot that it has been working on a project that is real, that poses real risks to real people--well, the impact is enormous. I would compare it to the feeling you might have if you suddenly discovered, long after the fact, that, unbeknownst to yourself, some minor, even trifling thing you had done turned out to cause the death of a close relative. Imagine how hard that would hit you, and you’ll have some understanding of how things felt to Kaelor.”

            Davlo frowned and nodded. “I see your point,” he said. “And I suppose that would induce a heightened First Law imperative?”

            “Exactly,” Fredda said. “My guess is that, by the time you switched him off, Kaelor’s mental state was approaching a state of First Law hypersensitivity, rendering him excessively alert to any possible danger to humans. Suddenly realizing that he had unwittingly violated First Law already would only make it worse. Once we switch Kaelor back on, he’s going to revert to that state instantly.”

            “You’re saying he’s going to be paranoid,” Davlo said.

            “It won’t be that extreme,” said Fredda. “He’ll be very careful. And so should we be. Just because his body is immobilized, it doesn’t mean that he won’t be capable of committing--of doing something rash.”

            Davlo nodded grimly. “I figured that much,” he said.

            “Are you ready, then?”

            He did not answer at first. He managed to tear his eyes away from Kaelor. He paced back and forth a time or two, rubbed the back of his neck in an agitated manner, and then stopped, quite abruptly. “Yes,” he said at last, his eyes locked on the most distant corner of the room.

            “Very well,” she said. Fredda pulled an audio recorder out of her tool pouch, switched it on, and set on the floor in front of Kaelor. If they got what they needed, she wanted to be sure they had a record of it.

            She stepped around to the rear of the maintenance frame, opened the access panel, and switched Kaelor back on. She moved back around to the front of the maintenance frame, and positioned herself about a meter and a half in front of it.

            Kaelor’s eyes glowed dimly for a moment before they flared to full life. His head swiveled back and forth, as he looked around himself. He looked down at his arms and legs, as if confirming what he no doubt knew already--that his body had been immobilized. Then he looked around the room, and spotted Lentrall. “It would appear that you figured it out,” Kaelor said. “I was hoping for all our sakes that you would not.”

            “I’m sorry, Kaelor, but I--”

            “Dr. Lentrall, please. Let me handle this,” said Fredda, deliberately speaking in a cold, sharp-edged, professional tone. This had to be impersonal, detached, dispassionate if it was going to work. She turned to Kaelor, up there on the frame. No, call the thing by its proper name, even if she had just now realized what that name was. The rack. The torturer’s rack. He hung there, paralyzed, strapped down, pinned down. an insect in a collector’s sample box, his voice and his expressionless face seeming solemn, even a little sad. There was no sign of fear. It would seem Kaelor had either too little imagination, or too much courage, for that.

            Suddenly she felt a little sick, but she forced herself to keep all hint of that out of her voice and expression. She told herself she was imposing human attributes on Kaelor, investing him with characteristics and emotions he simply did not have. There was no practical difference between having him up on that rack and having a malfunctioning aircar up on a hydraulic lift in a repair shop. She told herself all of that, and more, but she did not believe a word of it. She forced herself to look steadily, coolly, at Kaelor, and she addressed him. “Kaelor, do you know who I am?”

            “Yes, of course. You are Dr. Fredda Leving, the roboticist.”

            “Quite right. Now then, I am going to give you an order. You are to answer all my questions, and answer them as briefly as possible. Do not provide any information I do not ask for, or volunteer any information. Regard each question by itself. The questions will not be related to each other. Do you understand?” she asked.

            “Certainly,” said Kaelor.

            “Good.” Fredda was hoping, without much confidence, that she would be able to ask her questions in small enough pieces that no one question would present a First Law violation. And of course the questions would be related--that part was a baldfaced lie. But it might be a convincing enough lie to help Kaelor live through this. She knew for certain that asking, straight-out, the one big question to which they needed an answer would be absolutely catastrophic. She dared not ask for the big picture. She could only hope Kaelor would be willing and able to provide enough tiny pieces of the puzzle.

            The trouble was, Kaelor had to know what she was doing as well as she did. How far would he be able to go before First Law imperative overrode the Second Law compulsion to obey orders?

            There was one last thing she could do to help Kaelor. Fredda did not have any realistic hope that the Third Law’s requirement for self-preservation would help sustain Kaelor, but she could do her best to reinforce it all the same. “It is also vital for you to remember that you are important as well. Dr. Lentrall needs you, and he very much wants you to continue in his employ. Isn’t that so, Doctor?”

            Lentrall looked up from the hole he was staring at in the floor, and glanced at Fredda before settling his gaze on Kaelor. “Absolutely,” he said. “I need you very much, Kaelor.”

            “Thank you for saying so,” Kaelor said. He turned his gaze back on Fredda. “I am ready for your questions,” he said.

            “Good,” said Fredda. It might well help Kaelor if she kept the questions as disordered as possible, and tossed in a few unrelated ones now and then. “You work for Dr. Lentrall, don’t you?” she asked.

            “Yes,” said Kaelor.

            “How long have you been in his employ?”

            “One standard year and forty-two days.”

            “What are the specifications for your on-board memory system?

            “A capacity of one hundred standard years non-erasable total recall for all I have seen and heard and learned.”

            “Do you enjoy your work?”

            “No,” said Kaelor. “Not for the most part.”

            An unusual answer for a robot. Generally a robot, when given the chance, would wax lyrical over the joys of whatever task it was performing.

            “Why do you not enjoy your work?” Fredda asked.

            “Dr. Lentrall is often abrupt and rude. He will often ask for my opinion and then reject it. Furthermore, much of my work in recent days has involved simulations of events that would endanger humans.”

            Uh-oh, thought Fredda. Clearly it was a mistake to ask that follow-up question. She would have to reinforce his knowledge of the lack of danger, and then change the subject, fast, before he could pursue that line of thought. Thank Space she had turned down his pseudo-clock-rate. “Simulations involve no actual danger to humans,” she said. “They are imaginary, and have no relation to actual events. Why did you grab Dr. Lentrall and force him under a bench yesterday?”

            “I received a hyperwave message that he was in danger. First Law required me to protect him, so I did.”

            “And you did it well,” Fredda said. She was trying to establish the point that his First Law imperatives were working well. In a real-life, nonsimulated situation, he had done the proper thing. “What is the status of your various systems, offered in summary form?”

            “My positronic brain is functioning within nominal parameters, though near the acceptable limit for First Law-Second Law conflict. All visual and audio sensors and communications systems are functioning at specification. All processing and memory systems are functioning at specification. A Leving Labs model 2312 Robotic Test Meter is jacked into me and running constant baseline diagnostics. All motion and sensation below my neck, along with all hyperwave communication, have been cut off by the test meter, and I am incapable of motion or action other than speech, sight, thought, and motion of my head.”

            “Other than the functions currently deactivated by the test meter, deliberate deactivations, and normal maintenance checks, have you always operated at specification?”

            “Yes,” said Kaelor. “I remember everything.”

            Fredda held back from the impulse to curse out loud, and forced herself to keep her professional demeanor. He had violated her order not to volunteer information, and had volunteered it in regard to the one area they cared about. Only a First Law imperative could have caused him to do such a thing. He knew exactly what they were after, and he was telling them, as best he could under the restrictions she had placed on him, that he had it.

            Which meant he was not going to let them have it. They had lost. Fredda decided to abandon her super-cautious approach, and move more quickly toward what they needed.

            “Do you remember the various simulations Dr. Lentrall performed, and the data upon which they were based?”

            “Yes,” Kaelor said again. “I remember everything.”

            A whole series of questions she dared not ask flickered through her mind, along with the answers she dared not hear from Kaelor. Like a chess player who could see checkmate eight moves ahead, she knew how the questions and answers would go, almost word for word.

            Q: If you remember everything, you recall all the figures and information you saw in connection with your work with Dr. Lentrall. Why didn’t you act to replace as many of the lost datapoints as possible last night when Dr. Lentrall discovered his files were gone? Great harm would be done to his work and career if all those data were lost for all time.

            A: Because doing so would remind Or. Lentrall that I witnessed all his simulations of the Comet Grieg operation and that I therefore remembered the comet’s positional data. I could not provide that information, as it would make the comet intercept and retargeting possible, endangering many humans. That outweighed the possible harm to one man’s career.

            Q: But the comet impact would enhance the planetary environment, benefiting many more humans in the future, and allowing them to live longer and better lives. Why did you not act to do good to those future generations?

            A: I did not act for two reasons. First, I was specifically designed with a reduced capacity for judging the Three-Law consequences of hypothetical circumstances. I am incapable of considering the future and hypothetical well-being of human beings decades or centuries from now, most of whom do not yet exist. Second, the second clause of the First Law merely requires me to prevent injury to humans. It does not require me to perform any acts in order to benefit humans, though I can perform such acts if I choose. I am merely compelled to prevent harm to humans. Action compelled by First Law supersedes any impulse toward voluntary action.

            Q. But many humans now alive are likely to die young, and die most unpleasantly, if we do no repair the climate. By preventing the comet impact, there is a high probability you are condemning those very real people to premature death. Where is the comet? I order you to tell me its coordinates. mass, and trajectory.

            A. I cannot tell you. I must tell you. I cannot tell you--

            And so on, unto death.

            It would have gone on that way, if it had lasted even that long. Either the massive conflict between First and Second Law compulsions would have burned out his brain, or else Kaelor would have invoked the second clause of First Law. He could not, through inaction, allow harm to humans.

            Merely by staying alive, with the unerasable information of where the comet was in his head, he represented a danger to humans. As long as he stayed alive, there was, in theory, a way to get past the confidentiality features of Kaelor’s brain assembly. There was no way Fredda could do it here, now, but in her own lab, with all her equipment, and with perhaps a week’s time, she could probably defeat the safeties and tap into everything he knew.

            And Kaelor knew that, or at least he had to assume it was the case. In order to prevent harm to humans, Kaelor would have to will his own brain to disorganize, disassociate, lose its positronic pathing.

            He would have to will himself to die.

            That line of questioning would kill him, either through Law-Conflict burnout or compelled suicide. He was still perilously close to both deaths as it was. Maybe it was time to take some of the pressure off. She could reduce at least some of the stress produced by Second Law. “I release you from the prohibition against volunteering information and opinions. You may say whatever you wish.”

            “I spent all of last night using my hyperwave link to tie into the data network and rebuild as many of Dr. Lentrall’s work files as possible, using my memories of various operations and interfaces with the computers to restore as much as I could while remaining in accordance with the Three Laws. I would estimate that I was able to restore approximately sixty percent of the results-level data, and perhaps twenty percent of the raw data.”

            “Thank you,” said Lentrall. “That was most generous of you.”

            “It was my duty, Dr. Lentrall. First Law prevented me from abstaining from an action that could prevent harm to a human.”

            “Whether or not you had to do it, you did it,” said Lentrall. “Thank you.”

            There was a moment’s silence, and Kaelor looked from Lentrall to Fredda and back again. “There is no need for these games,” he said. “I know what you want, and you know thhhat I I I knowww.”

            Lentrall and Fredda exchanged a look, and it was plain Lentrall knew as well as she did that it was First Law conflict making it hard for Kaelor to speak.

            Kaelor faced a moral conundrum few humans could have dealt with well. How to decide between probable harm and death to an unknown number of persons; and the misery and the lives ruined by the ruined planetary climate. And it is my husband who must decide, Fredda told herself, the realization a sharp stab of pain. If we succeed here, I am presenting him with that nightmare choice. She thrust that line of thought to one side. She had to concentrate on Kaelor, and the precious knowledge hidden inside him. Fredda could see hope sliding away as the conflicts piled up inside the tortured robot’s mind. “We know,” she said at last, admitting defeat. “And we understand. We know that you cannot tell us, and we will not ask.” It was pointless to go further. It was inconceivable that Kaelor would be willing or able to tell them, or that he would survive long enough to do so, even if he tried.

            Lentrall looked at Fredda in surprise, and then relief. “Yes,” he said. “We will not ask. We see now that it would be futile to do so. I thought Dr. Leving might have some trick, some technique, some way of learning the truth without destroying you, but I see that I was wrong. We will not ask this of you, and we will not seek to gain the knowledge from you in other ways. This is our promise.”

            “I join in this promise,” Fredda said.

            “Hu-hu-humansss lie,” Kaelor said.

            “We are not lying,” Fredda said, her voice as urgent as she could make it. “There would be nothing we could gain by asking you, and thus no motive for lying.”

            “Yourrrr promisse does--does--does not apply to other humans.”

            “We will keep the fact of what you know secret,” Lentrall said, a note of hysteria in his voice. “Kaelor, please! Don’t!”

            “I tried tooo kee--keep the fact of wwwhat I knewww secret,” said Kaelor, “but yoooou realized that I had seeen what I saw, and that I woullld remember.” He paused a moment, as if to gather the strength to speak again. “Othhers could do the same,” he said in a voice that was suddenly little more than a whisper. “I cannot take thhat channnce.”

            “Please!” Davlo cried out. “No!”

            “Remaininng alivvve represents inaction,” Kaelor said, his voice suddenly growing stronger as he reached his decision. “I must act to prevent harm to humans.”

            His eyes glowed brighter, his gaze turned from Davlo to Fredda, as if looking at each of them one last time, and then he looked straight ahead, at the wall, at nothing at all, at infinity. There was a low-pitched hum, the smell of burning insulation, and suddenly the light was gone from his eyes. His head sagged forward, and a thin wisp of smoke curled up from the base of his neck.

            The room was silent. Fredda and Davlo looked at each other, and at the dead thing hanging on the frame in the center of the room.

            “By all the forgotten gods,” Fredda whispered. “What have we done?”

            “You did nothing, Doctor,” said Davlo, his voice nothing but a whisper as he fought to hold back a sob. “Nothing but help me do what I would have done. But as for me,” he said, his voice close to cracking, “I’ll tell you what I’ve done.”

            He moved a step or two forward, and looked up at Kaelor’s body.

            “I’ve just killed the closest thing to a friend I’ve ever had.”

13

JADELO GILDERN LIKED to tell himself that his job was to guess--and to guess correctly. The job of an intelligence chief was not to know everything. That was impossible. But a good intelligence chief was capable of seeing the whole puzzle when many of the pieces were lost, or hidden, or even disguised. A good intel chief could see the underlying pattern, take what he knew of the facts, what he knew of the personalities involved and figure out how they would interact. He could calculate what a person’s words and actions--or absence of words and actions--actually meant.

            And as he sat in his office in the Ironhead Building, and thought over the situation, he was close to reaching an interesting conclusion. He was almost tempted to go the whole distance now. He knew it had to be the Settlers behind the Government Tower chaos, and it took no excess of brainpower to guess that they had been after Lentrall. And Gildern knew exactly what other steps he himself would have taken to suppress the information Lentrall had. Presumably the Settler leaders, Tonya Welton and Cinta Melloy, had as much sense as he did.

            That much was all speculative, of course. However, one thing he did know to something like a certainty. He had already divined where Kresh had vanished to. Gildern had been able to use the Ironhead taps into the air traffic control system, and spot three long-range aircar flights, two starting at the governor’s private residence, and one terminating there. One, the first, had been untraceable in the storm. The return flight of the same vehicle had come in from precisely one hundred and eighty degrees away from the direction of Purgatory. That was exactly the sort of thing a robot would do if told to take evasive action. And then, a third flight, with a flight plan filed, showing a destination of First Circle, a small and far-off suburb of Hades. First Circle’s air traffic control had no record of the aircar arriving. Either it had crashed, or it had gone somewhere else. Gildern could guess where.

            Three flights. One to carry Kresh, one to ferry back the aircar, and one to transport others to his side--perhaps his wife. But even without the return flight pointing in precisely the opposite direction, Gildern would have guessed Purgatory. One had to consider where the man would want to go at such a time. It was almost inevitable that he had gone off to consult the experts at the Terraforming Center on Purgatory. No, finding the man would be no problem. He would either be at the Center, or at the Winter Residence. He, Gildern, could get in an aircar and be face to face with the man in four hours’ time.

            But would it be worth the trip? Had he worked out the rest of it properly?

            There was, happily enough, a way to find out. Simcor Beddle had been good enough to inform Gildern what he was about to say in the speech he had decided to make. Gildern had felt a certain degree of surprise that Beddle was ready to take such daring steps. But he was not beneath using his master, when his master’s actions suited his purposes. Gildern was always prepared to manipulate Beddle in order to achieve some private agenda of his own.

            But this time Beddle had needed no prodding, no buttering up, no encouragement. For once, Gildern had not had to feed an idea to Beddle, and then convince Beddle the idea was his. For once, Beddle was acting on his own.

            If Beddle’s speech did not provoke a particular and immediate reaction from Alvar Kresh, then Gildern would know the governor was in trouble, and know it to such a high probability that it would be more accurate to call it a certainty. Gildern smiled. That would be most pleasant.

            For then Gildern would be in a position to do the governor a little favor, while serving his own master at the same time.

            And there were worse things in the universe than a planetary governor owing one a favor.

GAMBLE, SIMCOR BEDDLE told himself. A wise man knows when it is time to gamble, and now is the time. He drew himself up to his full height behind the lectern--aided not a little bit by the tall step discreetly hidden place behind it for that purpose--and looked squarely into the camera.

            “I am here,” he said, “in order to make two announcements that I think you will find surprising. “ An excited murmur filled the room--or at least it seemed to do so. There was no one in the room, other than Beddle and the robots operating the cameras and the sound system, but there was no need for the world to know that. Nor was “here” any place in particular, other than the broadcast studio in the basement of the Ironhead Building. He had not said where he was, but he had certainly made it sound like an important place, an important event, and that was all that mattered.

            He had help, of course. The robot operating the sound system knew his business, and knew just how to create a spurious murmur of surprise, the shifting of seats that were not there and even the subdued and subtle hum of imaginary datapads as nonexistent reporters took their notional notes.

            All of it worked on the subconscious, but it worked all the same. Simcor Beddle knew how the media operated on Inferno. He was feeding his speech direct to the news nets, but hardly anyone would see the speech now, live. It would be edited down, with a snippet presented as if it were the whole thing.

            People would see perhaps ninety seconds of his speech on one or the other of the news services, a short enough slice of time that they would not expect a description of where and why the speech was made. They would hear the background sounds under his voice, see the opulent red curtains behind his head, catch the implication in his words that he was speaking to some very important group at some very important event. Subtle stuff. Subtle enough that the viewers would not quite know why they thought it was important, but the impression would be placed in their minds all the same. Simcor Beddle, the leader of the Ironheads himself, had addressed some group one didn’t quite catch the name of, and there had dropped his bombshells on a waiting world. When one had sufficient control over fantasy, one had no need of reality.

            Beddle looked alertly out over the audience that wasn’t there. “First, I would like to confirm the story that has been circulating since last night.” He paused dramatically. “There is indeed a government plan to drop a comet onto this planet, on the Utopia region to be precise. The impact will assist in the formation of a Polar Sea, which will, in turn, enhance Inferno’s planetary climate.” The sound effects robots brought up the appropriate murmur of astonishment and surprise. “The project is very much in its planning stages, and the government is not yet definitely committed to it. However, the government is making its preparations just the same, as well they should be. Time is short. The comet in question was discovered only recently, and preparations must be made in advance of the final decision to proceed if there is to be time to make it happen.”

            Simcor paused once more, and looked directly into the camera. “This brings me to my second announcement. There are those among you who will find it even more startling than the first. I fully support the government plan. I have seen certain planning documents and results projections and risk assessments. There are, beyond question, serious dangers involved. Nor will the task be easy. There is a tremendous amount of work that must be done in a very short time. But I have also seen the estimates of the probable fate of our planet, what will happen here if we don’t seize this chance. Suffice it to say those projections are grim. Grim enough that I have concluded we must seize this chance, risks and all.” Simcor paused once again, and looked about the room with a meaningful expression. “While I support the comet-impact plan, I must take the government to task most severely for the manner in which it has concealed its plans from you, the people of Inferno. Surely no one can question that this project will affect every man and woman on this planet. The decision should not have been made in secret.”

            Beddle paused, and smiled warmly. “But that is now behind us. It is now up to each and every one of us to support this bold plan, this plan which, if all goes well, will bring us all forward into a brighter and more prosperous future. However, even as we make this bold step forward, it is important that we understand that some among us will be forced to sacrifice all they have for the sake of the greater good. Those who live and work where the comet is to strike will lose everything--unless we help.

            “The government is of course working on evacuation plans and procedures for transporting goods and equipment out of the impact zone. However, there is only so much government can do--or at least only so much that it is willing to do. For that reason, I make one final announcement. The Ironhead Party will throw its full resources behind the effort to assist those dislocated by this massive undertaking. We will take care of our neighbors, our brothers and our sisters of the utopia region, in this, their hour of need. I myself will oversee our assistance program, and I will shortly depart the city of Hades for an inspection tour of the Utopia region. The impact of this comet on our planet represents danger at worst and dislocation at best for many people, but, at the end of the day, it represents hope--perhaps the last and best hope--for the future of our world. Let us prepare well to receive this gift from the heavens.”

            Simcor Beddle looked once more about the empty room as the sound of simulated spontaneous applause filled the air. He nodded appreciatively, and then looked straight into the camera. “Thank you all,” he said, and as the camera zoomed in on his face before fading out, he managed to look as if he meant it.

 “WELL,” SAID ALVAR Kresh, “that could have been worse.”

            “Considering it’s Simcor Beddle, I’d say you got off pretty lightly,” said Fredda. She yawned and stretched and stood up from the couch. If she stayed sitting down much longer, she was going to doze right off.

            Fredda had just arrived on Purgatory an hour or so before, and it had been a hell of a day before she had even started her trip. The after-hours news interview and the midmorning shambles at Davlo Lentrall’s place had been capped off with Oberon’s arrival. He had delivered his message from Alvar, asking Fredda to join him. She and Donald had flown to Purgatory by as fast an evasive route as Donald could manage. Even so, it had been close to dusk before they had met up with Alvar here at the governor’s Winter Residence.

            Now, here she and Donald were, with the evening closing in--and their problems closing in just as fast. Fredda looked around herself and shivered. Governor Chanto Grieg had been murdered in this house, shot to death in his bed. Of course that had happened in a completely different part of the house than the wing they were occupying, but even so, the Winter Residence was never going to be a comfortable place for Fredda.

            Or, more than likely, for her husband. Alvar had not offered much resistance when Fredda had insisted that he use some other suite of rooms for his private quarters. Maybe some future governor, in some time when the story of Grieg’s death was just a bit of history would be able to put his or her bed in the room where Grieg had died. But Alvar had found the body, and she, herself, had seen the corpse in the bed. No. They would sleep elsewhere. It was bad enough being in the same house. Those future governors could sleep where they liked. Assuming the planet survived that long.

            “We got off so lightly I almost wonder if that was Beddle,” said Alvar, still sitting back on the couch facing the viewscreen. “He had every chance to tear into us, but he didn’t. I must say it’s a little disconcerting to have the man on our side.”

            “Well, he did get in one set of digs,” said Fredda. “The secrecy angle is going to hurt us. We have to announce something.”

            “What?” asked Alvar. “That we haven’t quite decided about the whole plan, and by the way, we seem to have misplaced the comet?” Alvar stopped and thought for a minute. “Hmmm. That would do Beddle a world of good. Suppose he knew we didn’t have a lock on the comet? Then he could come out all in favor of the bold government program for the comet impact project for the specific purpose of forcing us to admit that we had lost the thing, and couldn’t deliver. We’d look as bad as--as--”

            “As we do right now,” Fredda said with a sad little smile. “And there’s no way we can find that damned thing again?”

            “Let’s check again,” he said. He turned to Donald, who was standing by the comm center controls. “Donald, activate a direct audio link to Units Dum and Dee.”

            “Yes, sir.” Donald pressed a series of control studs and spoke again. “The link is open, sir.”

            “Howww may wweee be of assistance, Governorrr?” Two disembodied voices, speaking in unison, suddenly spoke out of the middle of the air.

            Fredda jumped half a meter straight up in the air. “That is the weirdest--”

            “Shhh,” said Alvar, waving for her to be quiet. “Later. Units Dum and Dee. Based on your current refined estimates of the work required once the comet is located, calculate the most likely length of time left between now and when the work must commence.”

            “Therrree are mannny vvarrriables,” the doubled voice replied. “Weee willll attemmmpt a usseful appproximaation.” There was a brief pause and then one of the two voices, the higher-pitched, feminine-sounding one, spoke by itself. “Twelve standard days, four standard hours, and fifty-two standard minutes. I should note that estimate is based on having the complete comet task force in order and on standby for immediate launch.”

            “Very good,” said Kresh. “Based on the best current data and the current search schedule, what are the odds of relocating Comet Grieg within twelve standard days?”

            “Theee oddss arrre approximatellly onnne inn elllevennn, or approximately nine percent,” the double voice replied.

            “Give us a range of representative values,” Kresh said.

            The deeper-pitched, mechanical voice spoke by itself. “In percentile terms, odds are point five percent for relocation in one day. One point two percent in three days. Four percent in six days. Six point one percent in eight days. Nine percent in twelve days. Twenty percent in fifteen--”

            “When do the odds reach, oh, ninety-five percent?”

            The feminine voice took over. “The odds improve rapidly as possibilities are rejected and the search area is reduced. At the same time, the comet is growing closer, and beginning to increase in brightness as it is heated by the sun. This also helps. The odds for relocation pass the ninety-five percent point in about twenty-six days.”

            “Too little, too late,” said Fredda.

            “Yes,” said Alvar, his tone of voice saying far more than that single word. He sighed. “Deep space all around, but I’m tired,” he said. “All right, Units Dum and Dee. That will be all.” He signaled for Donald to cut the connection.

            Fredda watched her husband as he stared straight ahead at the blank wall in front of him, a deep frown on his face. “One chance in eleven,” he said. “Is that what it comes down to? The planet has a nine percent chance, if we do everything exactly right?”

            “It could be,” Fredda said, returning to the couch and sitting next to him. “Are we doing everything, and are we doing it right?”

            Alvar Kresh rubbed his eyes. “I think so,” he said, and yawned hugely. “I can’t remember the last time I really slept.” He shook his head and blinked a time or two. “I’ve got a spaceside team working around the clock, getting the equipment together to make the intercept. We haven’t started on the actual evacuation of the Utopia region yet--and I hope to the devil that Beddle hasn’t just started a panic out there with that little speech. But we’re getting the evac plan ready to go. The area’s pretty thinly populated, and Donald tells me the people who know these things feel it would be better to take a bit more time planning, even if it means starting a bit later.”

            “One thing I can tell you your evacuation experts might not have told you,” said Fredda. “Make sure it’s a total evacuation, and that you can prove it’s total. Leave one person there--or even leave open the possibility that one person is out there--and you’re going to be knee-deep in overstressed Three-Law robots trying to pull off a rescue.”

            “I’m not going to worry about losing a few robots in comparison to saving the whole planet.”

            “No, of course not,” Fredda said. But she thought of Kaelor’s death a few hours before, and could not help but wonder if she would be quite as careless about the lives of robots in the future. “But those robots could cause a great deal of trouble. Even if you can prove there’s no one left in all of Utopia, a lot of robots are going to feel strong First Law pressure to stop the comet impact, any way they can. After all, the comet sure as hell represents danger to humans. More than likely, someone is going to die in a building collapse or an aircar caught by the shockwave, or whatever.”

            “Maybe so, but how could the robots stop it?” Kresh asked.

            “For starters, is that an all-human crew on the spaceside team? You have to assume that any robots on that job will do their best to sabotage the job. Even a low-function fetch-and-carry robot will have enough capacity to realize that an incoming comet represents danger.”

            “Burning devils,” said Kresh. “I hadn’t thought of that. I hope someone else has, but we’ve got to damn well make sure the crews on those ships are all human. Donald, pass that order and explain--” Alvar stopped and looked at Donald. “No, wait a minute,” he said. “I can’t use you to pass the order for the same reason. Your First Law means you won’t cooperate either.”

            “On the contrary, sir. I am able to pass the message.”

            Fredda looked at Donald in surprise. “But don’t you feel any First Law conflict?” she asked.

            “A certain amount of it, Dr. Leving, but as you well know, a properly designed Three Law robot feels some First Law stress most of the time. Virtually every circumstance includes some danger, if only low-probability-danger, for a human. A human could drown swallowing a glass of water, or catch a deadly plague by shaking hands with an off-planet visitor. Such dangers are not enough to force a robot to action, but are enough to make the First Law felt. There is some potential danger here, yes, but you designed me as a police robot, and I am equipped to deal with more risk than most robots.”

            “I see,” said Kresh, keeping his voice very steady. Fredda had the very strong impression that she was going to have to ask him about all this in the very near future. “But, meaning no offense,” said Kresh, “I think it might be best if I took care of that order myself. I’ll call the spaceside planning group, banning all robots from the operation, and explaining why.”

            “No offense taken, sir. You must take into account the possibility that I am deceiving you. I can imagine a scenario where I would disobey that order, and see to it that as many robots as possible went into the spaceside operation in order to sabotage it.”

            Kresh gave Donald a quizzical look. “My imagination works a lot like yours,” he said. He turned to Fredda. “Donald’s good example to the contrary,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where robots have done so much to make my job difficult. To make everyone’s job difficult.”

            “That’s what you get when you try and take risks, even necessary risks, around robots,” Fredda said. “I think the real story is that none of us have ever really tried to take risks before.”

            “And robots don’t like risks,” said Kresh. “They’re going to keep us all so safe they’re going to get us all killed. Sooner or later we’re going to have to--”

            “Excuse me, Governor,” said Donald. “The Residence security system has alerted me via hyperwave that an aircar is landing in the visitor’s parking area.”

            “Who the devil has found me here?” Kresh muttered.

            “It could just be some tourist who wants to get a look at the Winter Residence,” Fredda said.

            “Not with our luck,” he said, getting up. He crossed the room and sat down at the comm center. He punched in the proper commands, and brought up the view from the main entrance security cameras. There was the car, all right. And someone getting out. Kresh zoomed in on the figure, pulled in to a tight head-and-shoulders shot, and set the system to track the shot automatically. It was a man, his back to the camera as he climbed out of his armored long-range aircar. He turned around, and looked straight toward the concealed surveillance camera, as if he knew exactly where it was. He smiled and waved..

            “What the devil is he doing here?” Kresh muttered to himself.

            “Who is it?” Fredda asked, coming up to stand behind her husband.

            “Gildern,” said Kresh. “Jadelo Gildern. The Ironhead chief of security.” He frowned at the image on the screen. “He’s no tourist come to get a look at the place. He knows we’re here. I think you’d better go let him in, Donald. Bring him to the library. We’ll wait for him there.”

            “Yes sir,” said Donald.

            “What does he want?” Fredda asked. “Why is he here?”

            Kresh shut off the comm system and stood up. “From what I know of Gildern, there’s only one thing he ever wants,” he said. “What he wants is a better deal for Jadelo Gildern.”

“GOOD EVENING. MASTER Gildern,” said the short blue robot who met him at the door. “The Governor has ordered me to escort you to him.”

            Gildern nodded curtly. Others might waste their time in courtesy to robots, but Ironheads did not. Besides, he had other things on his mind. It would be best for all concerned if this interview went very quickly indeed. There were unquestionably risks in the game he was playing, and he saw no benefit at all in making those risks greater. The blue robot. Donald 111. That was its name. Built by Leving herself, and Kresh’s personal assistant since he was sheriff. Deliberately designed to seem unthreatening. Frequently underestimated. Gildern smiled to himself. He often found it calming to remember just how much he had in his dossiers.

            The robot led them through a large central court and down a corridor leading off to the right, then stopped at the fourth of a series of identical doors. Gildern had memorized the layout of the Residence on the flight down. This was the library.

            The robot opened the door and Gildern stepped inside behind him. And there were Kresh and Leving themselves. Both here, precisely as he had guessed. Kresh seated behind a desk, Leving sitting in one of the two chair facing the desk.

            “Jadelo Gildern of the Ironheads,” the robot announced, and backed away into a robot niche.

            “Governor, Dr. Leving,” said Gildern. “Thank you so much for allowing me to arrive so--informally. I think you will find it to our mutual benefit if this visit is kept as quiet as possible.”

            “What do you want, Mr. Gildern?” the governor asked, his voice calm and imperturbable.

            Gildern walked up to the desk, made the slightest of bows to Dr. Leving, and smiled at Kresh. “I’m here to give you a present, Governor. Something you’ve wanted for quite some time.”

            “And in return?” Kresh asked, his voice and face still hard and expressionless.

            “And in return, I simply ask that you do not ask, now or in the future, how I got it. No investigation, no inquiry, no official legal proceedings or private researching.”

            “You got it illegally,” Kresh said.

            “My condition is that you do not ask such questions.”

            “Just now I made a statement,” said Kresh. “I asked no question. And I’m not accepting any conditions. I’m sworn to uphold the law, as you may recall. And I might add that it is generally unwise to request an illegal service of a government official in front of witnesses. “ He nodded toward Leving and the robot in its niche.

            Gildern hesitated. It wasn’t supposed to have played this way. He had planned on being able to bully Kresh, get what he wanted. But the man had called his bluff. Gildern needed Kresh to have the material, as much as Kresh needed to have it. All of the Ironhead plans, all of Gildern’s plans, would otherwise crumble. Gildern realized that he had made a serious miscalculation. He was too used to working in a world of people who could be coerced, manipulated, led, and blackmailed. He had assumed Kresh would be equally pliable. But Kresh was an ex-police chief who handled cases personally when he saw fit. What reason would he have to be cowed by Gildern? “I don’t want any questions asked,” he said again, in a tone of voice that even he found less than commanding.

            “Then I suggest you take your business elsewhere,” said Kresh. “I have had a hard enough couple of days without being threatened and blackmailed by the likes of you. Get out.”

            A flash of anger played over Gildern. He opened his mouth to protest, and, then thought better of it. He could play this with his pride, his ego, and lose everything. Or he could play it with his common sense and win it all. And then, later, once he had won, won it all, he would be in a position to indulge his pride. “Very well,” he said. “No conditions.” He pulled a small blue cube out of the pocket of his blouse and set it on the table. “Take it with my compliments.”

            He bowed once more to Dr. Leving, turned and headed toward the door.

            “Wait!” Dr. Leving called out. “What is it? What’s in that datacube?”

            Gildern looked back toward her with genuine surprise. “You haven’t figured that out? I expect your husband has.”

            “It took me a minute, but I have,” said Kresh. “Lentrall told me there were two break-ins at his lab. One to steal copies of his data, and the other to destroy the originals. I should have figured it out long ago. Lucky for you I didn’t.”

            “Will one of you tell me?” Fredda demanded. “What’s in that thing?”

            Gildern smiled unpleasantly at her. “Why, Comet Grieg, of course. All of Dr. Lentrall’s calculations and data regarding its location, trajectory, mass, and so on. It’s all there.” He looked from Leving to Kresh and nodded his head at the governor. “Now, then, if you’ll excuse me, I must leave at once. I’m expected at some little town called Depot in the middle of the Utopia region. There’s no suborbital service from here. I’m going to have to fly in a long-range aircar, and it is going to be a very long flight indeed.”

            Kresh picked up the cube and smiled coldly at Gildern. “See our friend out, Donald,” he said. “I have a speech to prepare.”

            “I look forward to hearing it, Governor,” Gildern said. And with that, he followed the small blue robot out of the room.

LANCON-03 PLACED THE call to Anshaw as soon as Governor Alvar Kresh had completed his speech, in which Kresh had just confirmed that the government was working on the comet project, and that the Utopia region was the target. Lacon-03 knew perfectly well that there was little Gubber Anshaw could do, but on the other hand, the New Law robots had precious few friends, and now was the moment when they would need all the help they could get.

            Lacon-03 was still using the city leader’s office in Prospero’s absence. It had one of the few fully shielded and untraceable hyperwave sets in the city. Of course, if Valhalla were about to be destroyed, how much difference could it make if someone managed to tap the call and zero in on their location?

            Gubber Anshaw’s image appeared on the screen. “I was expecting your call, friend Lacon,” he said without preamble. “I take it you heard the governor’s speech?”

            “I did,” Lacon replied. “I still have trouble believing they truly intend to drop a comet on us.”

            “Denial is a human trait,” said Anshaw. “I would not advise you to indulge in it. The governor has confirmed the stories regarding the comet, and that is all there is to it. Now you must--we all must--deal with available reality. What is Prospero’s opinion of the situation?”

            “Prospero continues to be unreachable. My expectation is that he was alarmed by the Government Tower incident, or perhaps learned something of a worrying nature. If that were the case, he would elect to travel as discreetly as possible, and would not risk needless communication. At least that is what I hope has happened. Otherwise it might well be that he is dead.”

            “Let’s hope not,” Gubber said.

            “Dr. Anshaw, what are we supposed to do?” Lacon-03 asked. “How can we stop this thing from happening?”

            “You cannot,” said Gubber. “Now, no one can. Too much has been committed to it, too much has been promised, too much energy has been expended. You have told me many times how much New Law robots want to survive. Now they must survive this, as well.”

            “But how are we to do that?” Lancon-03 asked.

            Glibber Anshaw shook his head sadly. “I don’t know,” he said. “If I think of anything, I’ll let you know.”

GUBBER SAID HIS goodbyes to Lancon-03, wondering just how permanent they were, and returned to his wife’s office. Any hope that Tonya might have calmed down while he was out of the room were dispelled as soon as he set foot in the room. He glanced toward the far end of the room, where Cinta Melloy was sitting. Cinta caught his eye, and shrugged helplessly. Clearly Cinta had decided there was nothing for it but to wait out the storm.

            “The fools,” said Tonya Welton through clenched teeth as she paced the floor. “The bloody, stupid fools.” Two commentators were on the comm screen, in the midst of animated debate on the subject of Comet Grieg. But Tonya slapped at the comm control panel and the image died, cutting them off in midword.

            “I can’t listen to any more of this,” she said, still fuming. “Damn that Kresh! Not only did he publicly commit to the plan, he went and broadcast the precise orbital data for Comet Grieg. It was hard enough erasing one man’s computer files, and we didn’t even manage the kidnapping. Now what the hell do we do? Erase the coordinates from every comm center on the planet?”

            It took a moment for Glibber to realize the implications of what Tonya was saying. “You mean--you mean you were the ones who tried to kidnap Lentrall?” he asked.

            “Of course we were,” Tonya said. “To prevent exactly this from happening. No one else seemed interested in stopping the comet crash.”

            Gubber nodded blankly. Of course it was Tonya. He should have known it in the first place. Why was he always so startled to discover her ruthless streak? When it came to politics, Tonya Welton took no prisoners. “Won’t the CIP find out?” he asked. The question sounded foolish, even to him, but somehow he could think of nothing else to say.

            “Probably,” said Tonya, her tone brisk and distracted. “Sooner or later. If we all live that long.” She turned toward Cinta Melloy. “How the devil did they do it?” she demanded. “How did they reconstruct the comet data?”

            “Does it matter?” Cinta asked. “We always knew there was a chance that there would be a backup copy we missed. “ Cinta Melloy sat on the couch and watched her boss stalking back and forth across the floor. “It’s not important how they did it. The point is that they did.”

            But Tonya was barely listening. Instead she kept pacing, her face a study in furious concentration. “Beddle,” she said at last. “We’ve been pretty sure for a while that informant of ours was working both sides of the street. And then, all of a sudden Beddle’s all for the government, all for the comet plan, before Kresh makes a public statement. Suppose our informant fed the data to Beddle and Beddle fed it back to Kresh before Kresh went to ground?”

            Cinta shrugged. “It’s possible. We tracked Gildern’s long-range aircar headed toward Purgatory. We know from the broadcast just now that Kresh is working at the Terraforming Center there. But what does it matter?”

            “It means that Beddle and Gildern bear watching, that’s what,” said Tonya. “It means they may behind this whole suicidal operation. Why else would they support the government? When was the last time they did that?”

            Gubber Anshaw crossed the room and sat down next to Cinta Melloy. He looked from Tonya to Cinta, and had a feeling that he knew what the security officer was thinking. Even with his thoughts in a whirl, he was thinking the same thing. Tonya was obsessing on this crisis. He had known the truth about Government Tower Plaza for only a few minutes, but he knew Tonya well. If she were frantic enough, desperate enough, to have ordered that fiasco, Dark Space alone knew what else she would be capable of.

            “So what do we do about it all?” Cinta asked, her voice a study in neutrality.

            “Why ask her to choose now?” Gubber asked. “There’s no need for rushed decisions. Better to take time, to study things calmly first.”

            Tonya wheeled about and glared at both of them. “You’re handling me,” she said. “Humoring me. Don’t. I’m still in command of the Settlers on this planet, and don’t you forget it.”

            “I’m not forgetting it for one minute,” Cinta said. “And that’s what scares the living daylights out of me. You’re in charge, and I’ll follow your orders. But your orders have not had good results in recent days.”

            The look on Tonya’s face was indescribable, a tangle of fear, anger, mad fury, hatred, and shame. Gubber saw Tonya raise her hand, as if to strike Cinta in the face.

            “No!” he cried out. “No.”

            Tonya looked at him in shock, as if she not were surprised to see him there.

            “No,” he said again, surprised by the firmness in his own voice. When had he even spoken to Tonya, or anyone else, for that matter, in this tone of voice? “Foolishness will accomplish nothing,” he went on. “Now is the time to pause and consider. You are the leader here. Our leader. No one disputes that. So lead us. But do not lead us with fear, or anger, or frustration, or because you do not approve of the available situation. Lead us with reason and care.”

            Tonya looked at him in shock. “How dare you!” she said. “How dare you speak to me that way?”

            “I--I dare because no one else can, and someone must,” Gubber said, his voice unsteadier than he would have liked. “Cinta just tried, and you wanted to strike her for telling the truth. Well, strike me as well, if that is the way of things. I won’t stop you.”

            His heart was pounding, but he forced himself to look up at her steadily. She lowered her hand, than raised it again, but then, at last, let it drop to her side. She turned and walked to the other side of the room, and dropped heavily into a chair. “You’re right,” she said. “But I sure as hell wish you weren’t.”

            The silence in the room was a near-palpable thing for a time. Tonya sat in her chair, staring at nothing at all. Cinta sat stone-still, her gaze moving back and forth between Gubber and Tonya.

            Gubber knew Tonya. He knew she only needed another push, another nudge in the proper direction. And it was plainly up to him to provide that nudge. This was up to him. He cleared his throat and began, speaking in a calm, casual tone that no doubt fooled no one at all. “I’ve just finished speaking with a New Law robot by the name of Lancon-03. Prospero seems to have dropped out of sight, and left her in charge. She had heard the governor’s speech as well, and she called me, asking for advice as to what the New Law Robots should do. That comet is going to drop right on top of them. I couldn’t think of anything to suggest. Can--can you think of anything?”

            Tonya laughed wearily and shook her head. “Oh, Gubber. Dear, dear Gubber. The only thing to tell them is to accept the available universe and the bad situation they are in, and make the best of it. And, of course, their situation is much worse than ours. I think you have made your point.”

            “Very well, then,” he said, pressing one last time, “what are we going to do?”

            Tonya leaned back against the back of her chair, rubbed her eyes, and stared at the ceiling. “We are going to do two things. First off, I want as close a watch as possible put on Beddle and Gildern. There is more going on there than meets the eye. Jadelo Gildern never does anything for just one reason. I want to know what his hidden agendas are this time.”

            “We’re already working on it,” Cinta said, plainly relieved that Gubber had managed to get Tonya to behave sensibly. “What’s the second thing?”

            “The second thing is that we are going to admit defeat.”

            “Ma’am?” Cinta asked, shifting on her seat and looking at Tonya with a puzzled expression.

            “Gubber’s right. There’s no stopping it now,” said Tonya, gesturing toward the sky. “They know where the comet is, and they’re going to go for it, and drop it right down on top of their own damn planet, and trust that every little thing will go right, so they don’t get everyone killed. I still don’t believe they can do it. They don’t have the skill or the experience. And I’ve seen what happens to a world when an attempt like this goes wrong. Some old nightmares have come back to me since we found out about this. I think they’re going to kill the planet. But short of shooting down their space fleet, there’s no way to stop them.”

            Shooting down their fleet? Gubber thought he had talked her around. But maybe not. For a moment of heart-pounding terror, Gubber thought Tonya had gone far enough around the bend to order just such a thing. “You’re not--”

            “No,” said Tonya wearily. “I’m not. Mostly because I don’t think we have the firepower on hand to do it--and because I’m not sure anyone would obey any such orders. But absent that option, there is no way we can stop them. “ Tonya stood up and went back to the comm station. She switched it back on, activated the full-wall flatscreen, and brought up a view of the night sky as seen from the cameras up on the surface. It was a scene of heart-stopping loveliness, the jet-black sky blanketed with a cloud of dimmer stars setting off the larger, brighter ones, white and yellow and blue and red points of color glowing in the night. “And therefore we might as well see to it that they do it right. I’m going to go back to my office and draft an announcement offering our complete cooperation, and access to all our expertise in this area. Maybe we can at least keep the damage to a minimum.”

            Tonya Welton bunched up her shoulders and then let them go limp, a gesture of humiliation and resignation and frustration, all in one. “And of course there is the little matter of their tracking down whoever was responsible for the Plaza attack. Maybe if we start helping out, that will muddy the trail, keep them from kicking us off the planet.”

            She was silent again for a moment, and when she spoke, she all but choked on the emotion she had been struggling to hold in. Anger, frustration, shame, fear, all of them and more welled up in her voice. It was plain that the words were pure gall to her. But it was also plain that words had to be spoken. “And if, or rather when, they do catch us,” she said, “maybe it will count in our favor if we’ve already made amends.”

THE AIRCAR CRUISED slowly along the silent, empty streets of Depot in the pre-morning darkness and came to a halt not far from the edge of the small town. Prospero operated the controls with the relaxed skill of a master pilot and set the craft down in a small hollow, well out of sight from any of the surrounding buildings.

            “Here’s where I get out,” said Norlan Fiyle with undisguised relief. He stood up and opened the side passenger door of the aircar. He climbed down out of the vehicle and stretched his arms and legs gratefully. “No offense to either of you,” he said through the open door, “but I’m very glad to get out of that damned car.”

            “And what about you, friend Caliban?” Prospero said. “This is your last chance. Are you sure you won’t go with me?”

            “No, friend Prospero,” said Caliban. “Go to Valhalla. You are needed there far more than I. Besides, you might well need a friend on the scene here in Depot. It is better if I remain.” Caliban’s reasons were true enough as far as they went, but they were far from the whole truth. The core, basic, essential reason was that he no longer wished to be close to Prospero, either literally or ideologically. There had been time enough and more to think things over on the long and wearying trip. Prospero was a magnet for risk, for danger. Caliban had had enough of risking his life in the name of causes that were not his own. “I will remain here,” said Caliban. “I will remain in Depot.”

            Fiyle smiled thoughtfully. “Somehow, that sounds very familiar”, he said. “Prospero used almost exactly those words when he and I parted company on Purgatory, years ago.”

            “Let us hope that the journey that begins with this parting works out somewhat better than that one did,” Prospero said.

            “Well, at least this time you’re the one doing the traveling, not me,” said Fiyle. “This is the end of the line for me. At least until the comet hits.”

            “What will you do, Fiyle?” Caliban asked. “Where will you go?”

            The human shook his head back and forth, shrugged, and smiled. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Out. Away. Someplace they won’t look for me. Someplace I can start over. But I’ll stay in Depot for a while. No one knows me here.”

            Depot was the largest human settlement in the Utopia region, which was not saying a great deal. As its name implied, it was little more than a shipping point for the small and scattered settlements of that part of eastern Terra Grande.

            “But why?” asked Caliban. “We have reasons for coming here, but why should you want to hide out in a town that’s going to be destroyed?” said Caliban.

            “Precisely because it’s going to be destroyed,” said Fiyle with a grin. “That right there ought to make it a great place to disappear from. I can cook myself up a new identity, based in Depot, and say whatever I want about the new me. How’s anyone going to check the records, when Depot is a smoldering ruin? And maybe I’ll have a chance to fiddle the town records before they archive them and ship them off. Maybe the records will wind up saying I’m a prosperous businessman with a large bank balance. Once the town is flattened and the population is dispersed, who’ll be able to know for sure that I’m not?”

            Caliban looked steadily at Fiyle for a full five seconds before he responded. “I must say you do think ahead,” he said. “I suppose it is yet another insight into the criminal mind.”

            Fiyle grinned broadly and laughed. “Or perhaps,” he said, “merely an insight into the human mind.”

            “That is a plausible suggestion,” said Prospero, “and therefore a most disturbing one. Farewell, Caliban. Farewell, Norlan Fiyle.”

            “So long, Prospero,” Fiyle replied, a big sidelong grin on his exhausted face.

            And then there was no more to say. Caliban rose up from his seat and climbed down from the aircar. Fiyle closed the door from the outside, and the aircar lifted off, straight up, leaving Caliban and Fiyle behind.

            “Well,” said Fiyle, “if I’m going to try and disappear, might as well get started right away. So long, Caliban.”

            “Goodbye, Fiyle,” Caliban said. “Take care.”

            Norlan smiled again. “You do the same,” he said. He waved, turned around, and started walking down the still-darkened street.

            Caliban looked back toward the aircar as it rose up and swing around to a southerly heading, a small dark smudge of deeper darkness against the slow-brightening dawn. Alone. That was the way he had wanted it. But even so, he could not rid himself of the sense that he had just parted from a vital part of himself. He had been, or at least almost been, one with the New Law robots for a long time.

            And now. Now he was Caliban, Caliban the No Law robot. Caliban by himself, once again.

            Somehow the thought did not bring him as much pleasure as he had expected.

NORLAN FIYLE FELT good as he strolled about the town. There was something about being out under an open sky, about knowing that the people looking for him were quite literally on the other side of the world. It felt good, very good, to walk along in the early morning through a town that was just beginning to wake up, knowing that he was out from under, that the game he had been playing was over and done with. It had not been easy playing the Settlers off against the Ironheads, all the while steering clear of the Inferno police in the middle. In the short term, a fellow could have a good run of luck at that sort of thing, bucking the odds, taking chances and getting away with it. But sooner or later, the odds would catch up. They had to. Law of nature. In the long run, there was only one way to win that sort of game--by getting out of it the first moment you could.

            And he had. He was out.

            He found a little café that served a very passable breakfast. He ate a leisurely meal at the table by the front window, and spent an hour or two in that most enjoyable of pastimes--watching other people rushing off to work while being under no obligation to do any such thing himself.

            He paid his bill in cash, exchanged a pleasantry or two with the handsome woman behind the counter who combined the functions of manager, waitress, cook, and cashier, and ambled out into the dusty main street of Depot.

            The next step was to find a place to stay, and then to pick up a few of the basic necessities. He had, after all, fled Hades with nothing but the clothes he was in, and a certain amount of cash. But Fiyle had lost everything he had a time or two before, and would quite likely do so again. The prospect did not bother him overmuch. There ought to be plenty of work in this town, seeing how the whole damn place was going to have to be packed up and shipped

            A hand came down on his shoulder. A man’s hand, small and thin-fingered, but wiry and strong.

            “Dr. Ardosa,” a cool, unpleasant voice said in his ear. “Dr. Barnsell Ardosa. What a remarkable surprise to see you here, of all places. Except I suppose you’re not using that name anymore. Have you gone back to Norlan Fiyle for the time being? Or haven’t you picked out a new one yet?”

            Fiyle turned around, and looked down just a trifle, straight into the eyes of Jadelo Gildern, the Ironhead chief of security. “Hello, Gildern,” he said slowly. “I suppose I might just as well stick with Norlan Fiyle, at least with you.”

            Gildern smiled unpleasantly. “That makes sense to me,” he said. “But don’t you worry,” he said. “No one else needs to know who you really are--the Inferno police, for example, or the Settlers--as long as you keep me happy. Does that sound fair?”

            “Yeah, sure,” said Fiyle, his voice a monotone.

            “Good,” said Gildern. “Very good. Because until this very moment I was worrying about how I was going to staff things around here. It’s hard to find people with the right aptitude for intelligence work--especially among people who also have a strong motivation for keeping their employers happy.”

            “Employers?” asked Fiyle, a cold, hard, knot forming in his stomach.

            “That’s right,” said Gildern. “It’s your lucky day, Norlan. A very nice job opportunity has just fallen into your lap. Just between you and me, I don’t see how you can turn it down.”

            Gildern stepped alongside Fiyle and put his hand on Fiyle’s forearm. It looked like a gentle, even friendly, gesture, but the fingers on his arm clamped down as tightly as any vise.

            Jadelo Gildern led Norlan Fiyle away. And it was abundantly and unpleasantly clear to Norlan that he was nowhere near getting out of the game.

PART 3

IMPACT MINUS THIRTY

14

THIS IS REAL, Davlo Lentrall told himself, once again. For the first time in your life, you are part of something real. You’re one of the ones actually doing the job. He sat down, exhausted, at the wardroom table, and set his tray down in front of him. Something Kaelor died to prevent, because it could kill so many. Davlo blinked and shook his head. It was hard to keep thoughts like that at bay. He knew he should eat, knew he needed to keep his strength up in order to keep working, but he was too tired to be hungry. He would just sit a moment by himself, before he forced himself to eat. He was in bad shape and losing weight, he knew that. But it took a real effort of will to care.

            Why had they sent him here? Governor Grieg himself had suggested--or rather, politely ordered--that Davlo should join the spaceside part of the operation. Davlo was not entirely sure why. Had the governor thought it would be some sort of reward--rather than a torment--for Davlo to see the thing he had dreamed of taking place? Had the governor, quite accurately, perceived Davlo as borderline unstable, someone who might best be put out of the way before some clutch of reporters got their claws into him?

            He looked out the porthole of the Settler spaceship, looked out into space, out at the realest thing he had ever seen in his life. There it was, just ten kilometers away. Comet Grieg, an ice mountain cruising through the darkness of space.

            It was no abstraction inside a computer, no simulated image in a holographic generator. It was real. It was there. And it was huge, far larger than he had imagined it being, far larger than mere numbers could have told him. It took up half the sky, and seem to take up more. It was a dark, brooding shape of dirty gray, half lost in shadow. A monster out of the darkness, and, thanks to him, it was aimed straight at Inferno.

            It was, roughly speaking, an oblong spheroid, but that made the shape of it sound simple and abstract. It was a real world, if a small one, with a geography complicated enough to have kept a generation of mapmakers busy. Its surface was so pocked with craterlets and covered in crags arid gullies and cracks that it was hard to study anyone feature on the surface before it got lost among all the others.

            Comet Grieg was one of a special class of so-called “dark” comets. Inferno’s star system had plenty of normal comets, of the classic “dirty snowball” type composed primarily of water ice and other volatiles. But for reasons that still were not entirely understood, star systems with poorly developed planetary systems also seemed to produce a large number of dark comets--and Inferno shared its star with only two planets barely large enough to qualify as gas giants, a wizened little asteroid belt, and the usual sorts of deep space debris--comets, asteroids, planetesimals, and so on.

            Called “dark” because they produced relatively small tails, and were composed of darker material, dark comets were closer to being asteroids encased in ice than anything else. Grieg had a particularly large proportion of stony material, but it contained plenty of water ice and other volatiles. A hazy nimbus of gas and dust and ice shards floated about the behemoth, bits of debris from the size of molecules up to the size of small aircars that had either been knocked loose by the natural heating and outgassing as the comet neared the sun, or else thrown clear by human interference.

            A searchlight from a closer-in ship stabbed through the cloud of debris and struck the surface of Comet Grieg, flooding one small area on the surface with a light so bright, so clear, it did not seem to belong on such a darkened surface. A smooth and perfect cylindrical shape stuck up out of the comet’s surface. Davlo recognized it. It was one of the dozens of thrusters planted on the comet’s surface. He had helped calculate their placement, and played at least a small part in working out the firing sequence that had been used to eliminate the comet’s spin. It had been in a wobbling two-axis tumble when the task force had arrived. Now the spin had been restored and refined, and the comet’s nose was pointed straight at the sun.

            But the sun would have no further chance to melt this comet. Davlo looked from Comet Grieg to the sunshade, a huge and insubstantial parasol floating in space a kilometer or so sunward of the comet, forming a permanent solar eclipse as seen from the surface of Grieg.

            Left to its own devices, Grieg would have melted and boiled and sublimed away a substantial amount of material by now, forming a coma that would, in turn, have been blown back by the solar wind into a modest tail. But the sunshade stopped all that, and kept the comet in the deep freeze.

            The parasol was itself being blown back by the solar wind, slowly drifting in toward the comet. In about another day or so it would come into contact with the comet, moving far too slowly for it to be called a crash. The parasol would drape itself around the comet like a small handkerchief dropped onto a large egg. It would tear in places, and the work crews would cut deliberate holes in it where it served their purposes, but that would be of no consequence. The parasol would reflect sunlight just as handily, losing only a few percentage points of its effectiveness.

            Davlo Lentrall could not help but wonder what Kaelor would have thought of all this. He would have had some sardonic comment to make, no doubt, some dour turn of phrase that would capture the weaknesses in the plan in fewer words than anyone else. Or, Davlo wondered, was he making Kaelor too human? Kaelor had died in a futile attempt to prevent the comet capture. It stretched credulity to the breaking point to imagine he could be witness to the event, first hand, without the Three Laws taking hold of him, forcing him to desperate action. Davlo Lentrall was finding it more and more easy to understand desperation, and how it might drive someone to do something dangerous.

            But one did not have to think on the grand scale to see this was no place for robots. Davlo looked out the port again, and spotted two tiny, space-suited figures moving some huge and unidentifiable piece of machinery about on the surface of the comet. A misplaced step, a crack in a faceplate, a shove to the machine that was a trifle too hard, and one or both of them would be dead. It was impossible to imagine any modem robot allowing humans to do anything so risky.

            Davlo glanced at the wall chronometer, and realized that his break was nearly over. More out of duty than desire, he began to eat, the motion mechanical, the taste of the food unnoticed. Back to work. He would have help with the final check-calculations for the placement of the main detonation thrusters. It should have been humbling, galling even, for Or. Davlo Lentrall, the man who had seen the potential of Comet Grieg, the man who had dreamed the dream and planned the plan, to be assigned a position as minor as assistant calculation engineer. Glory and accolades should have been his.

            But, somehow, he no longer saw it that way. Others here, mostly the Settlers, were far more skilled at handling the detailed mathematics of moving a small world through space. He saw his position as a penance, and a fitting one. How brilliant and noble could his vision have been if his closest associate was willing to die in order to stop it? Davlo found himself embarrassed and ashamed whenever someone recognized him and congratulated him on his grand plan. Most of the crew had learned to avoid the subject, and, indeed, had learned to avoid Davlo.

            But he had been sent here to do work, and he had agreed to do it. So he accepted the tasks he was given, and did them as best he could. Besides, work got his mind off things. He could worry about solving the equation, determining the proper thrust and orientation. Off-shift was the worst, nights spent staring into the darkness, thinking of all the ways things could go wrong. No, he wanted no congratulations.

            Something inside him had changed. Or was it merely that something had been burned out, destroyed, when he watched Kaelor destroy himself! Surely the last of the old Davlo had died with Kaelor? Had anything, anyone, taken the old Davlo’s place, or was he just an empty shell of a man, going through the motions?

            No. Never mind. Think about other things. Think about the plan to move the comet.

            Davlo’s initial plan had been to use a fairly standard high-yield nuclear bomb, but the Settler-designed detonation thrusters were a vast improvement on that idea. In essence, a d-thruster was a nuclear bomb set off inside a powerful force field formed in the shape of a huge rocket nozzle. The force field directed the force of the explosion into the proper direction, in effect producing a shaped charge that was far more efficient and far more controllable.

            Other explosive charges were being rigged as well, of course. Once the comet had been redirected into its intercept course with Inferno, it would still be quite some distance away from the planet. It would take it just over thirty-two days to move from the point in space where the initial course change was made to its intercept with Inferno.

            Just before arrival at the planet, the comet would be broken up into smaller pieces by explosive cutting charges, each piece to be directed toward a different point on the surface. Each fragment would have its own smaller, non-nuclear propulsion system and attitude control system.

            And that was the part that worried Davlo. That was the greatest danger in the plan. In theory, at least, it might be possible for human operators and standard computer systems to manage the complexities of the operation. But the current plan called for Grieg to be broken up into twelve fragments, and it was far from certain that all the cutting charges would shear the massive body into pieces of precisely the intended size. Besides which, there were bound to be thousands of smaller fragments produced by the blasts of the cutting charges. Most would be too small to do any damage.

            But all it would take was a fragment smashing into a thruster at the wrong moment, or for a fragment to end up being larger or smaller than expected, and then the whole careful sequence of events could go out of control. There were enough spare thrusters to serve as backups, so that if some of the thrusters on a given fragment were destroyed, the rest would be able to do the job. Indeed, there were no ifs in the question. Some part of the established plan was going to go wrong--it was just that no one could be sure which part. It would require immediate, real-time management of the operation to deal with the inevitable problems.

            Managing the terminal phase of the operation would mean dealing with thousands of operations simultaneously. It would require juggling the twelve fragments at once, keeping them out of each other’s way while guiding them down to their intended impact sites, while dealing with the cloud of debris produced by the cutting charges.

            No matter what theory said, in practice, the job was beyond humans, beyond any combination of human and computers. The only entity able to deal with it all would have to have the decision-making ability of a human combined with the computational speed and accuracy of a computer--in short, a robot.

            Nor would just any robot do. The task was too complex for any standard robot to contend with. Even just handling the hundreds of sensory input channels would overwhelm a normal positronic brain.

            The one, the only, possible way to control the terminal phase was to hand the job over to Units Dee and Dum.

            And that, of course, meant putting a Three-Law robot, and her computerized counterpart, in charge.

            And if Kaelor had killed himself rather than cooperate with the comet intercept, how the devil was Dee actually going to run the operation without losing her mind--or point-blank refusing to do the job?

THE SAME SORT of question was very much on Alvar Kresh’s mind as he and Fredda settled into their aircar for the brief flight from the Winter Residence to the Terraforming Center. Their days had settled into a routine with startling speed. Get up, go to the center, spend the day sorting out the details of the planet’s fate, then go home to the Residence for dinner and a good night’s sleep, or at least an attempt at sleep, before getting up to do it all again the next day.

            Somehow, he hadn’t expected there to be so many decisions for him to make, so much hands-on work for him to do. For all the power and capacity and sophistication of the Terraforming Center and the twin Control Units, there were some decisions that no robot or other human could make, disputes that only the governor had the authority to settle. And besides, there were a lot of humans out there who were not going to take orders, however sensible, from a robot. And there were things that Kresh knew that Dee and Dum did not--how best to handle this local leader, which prices for emergency supplies he could expect to bargain down and which he could not, where he could ask a favor, where he could call one in, how far people could be pushed if need be, and when to give up.

            But everything was routed through the Terraforming Center. It had soon become clear to Kresh that he would have had to relocate his command operations at the Center if it hadn’t started there to begin with.

            Fredda followed him into the aircar and sat down in the seat next to him. Donald took his place at the controls, did a safety check, lifted off, and headed for the center.

            So far, the preparations for the comet diversion were going quite well. But he could not stop worrying. It was never far from his mind that Dee believed all Inferno to be a simulation. Whether or that was likely to be help or hindrance he still could not decide. “So what do you think?” he asked his wife.

            Fredda looked at him with an amused smile. “About what? It’s a little hard to offer my opinion unless I get a few more clues than that.”

            “Sorry. I’m a little preoccupied. Do you think Dee and Dum are going to be able to control this operation?”

            “I don’t know,” said Fredda. “I spend every day monitoring Dee, watching her behavior, trying to understand her. But there’s a very basic barrier I can’t get around. She doesn’t think any of this is real. I can understand the logic behind telling her the world is imaginary, but I must admit I question the wisdom of the decision. So much depends on her getting things exactly right--and yet, to her, it is all a game. She’s so casual about it all, as if the whole situation had been set up solely for her amusement.”

            “From her point of view, it was all set up for her amusement,” said Kresh. “As far as she is concerned, the world of Inferno is just a puzzle for her to solve--or declare insoluble.” He was silent for a moment before he spoke again. “I’d have to agree with you about her attitude,” he said, “but at the same time, I’d have to say the quality of her work has been impeccable. She may not take it seriously, but she does it seriously. Maybe that’s all that counts.”

            “I hope so,” said Fredda, “because I don’t know what the devil we do if we decide we don’t trust her. In theory, we could pull the plug and let Unit Dum take up the slack. But I don’t think that’s really possible anymore. The two of them are too interlinked, too interconnected. They rely on each other too much for us to pull one of them abruptly off-line.”

            “And Dee is in charge,” Kresh suggested. “It seems to me she just uses Dum as a sort of auxiliary calculating device.”

            “No,” said Fredda, quite sharply. “That assumption is an easy trap to fall into. She does run the show when it comes to human interaction--that much is obvious. But that is the smallest fraction of their work. In everything else, they are coequal. There are some areas where Dum very definitely takes the lead--such as computational speed. Yes, he’s just a dumb machine, a mindless computer system with a crude personality simulator to serve as an interface. But he’s carrying a lot of the load. We not only need both of them--we can’t have one without the other.”

            “There are times,” said Kresh, “when I could do without either of them, or any of this.”

            Neither of them spoke as Donald brought the aircar into a smooth landing in front of the Terraforming Center.

KRESH, FREDDA, AND Donald walked into Room 103 at the Terraforming Center and took their accustomed places at the console nearest to Dee. Their division of labor was straightforward. Kresh worked through the endless sequence of decisions large and small presented to him by Unit Dee.

            Fredda monitored Unit Dee’s performance and behavior, and consulted with Soggdon and the other experts on the subject. Thus far, Dee’s level of First Law stress was remarkably low--indeed, alarmingly low.

            Fredda had another job as well. In order to preserve the fiction that Inferno was a simulation, and Governor Kresh merely a simulant, he could not have any direct communication with any of the Terraforming Center staff whenever it was possible that Dee could overhear. Fredda served as an anonymous intermediary, passing information back and forth, mostly via scribbled notes and whispers.

            Donald, meantime, was in constant hyperwave contact with Kresh’s office back in Hades. He used preexisting and standing orders to handle most of the queries and requests, and bucked whatever decisions he had to up to Kresh when he needed to do so.

            Kresh sat down at the console with something very close to dread. All would be in readiness soon, and the clock was running out. They were getting close, very close, to the moment when he would be forced to make the final, irrevocable decision. He glanced at the wall chronometer. It was set in countdown mode, showing the time left until the comet diversion maneuver. Ninety-four hours left. Before that clock reached zero, he would have to decide whether to send the comet toward Utopia--or to turn his back on all of it, walk away from all the madness and chaos that had led them to this place. He had thought he was sure, that he was ready, that he was ready to step forward. But by now all the pressures were pushing him forward, urging him onward. Suppose, just suppose, that he now concluded the comet diversion would be a dreadful mistake? Would he have the courage to say no, to stop, to let it go past?

            “Good morning, Governor Kresh,” said Unit Dee the moment Kresh put on the headset.

            “Good morning, Dee,” he replied, his voice gruff and not at all at ease. “What have you and Dum got for us this morning?”

            “Quite a number of things, sir, as you might imagine. However, there is one point in particular that I thought we might discuss at once.”

            Kresh leaned back in his chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose. It was not going to be an easy day. “And what might that be?” he asked.

            “A plan that, if you forgive the expression, I have named ‘Last Ditch. ‘ It provides you with an abort option for the comet impact long after its diversion. Dum performed most of the calculations, and only finished a very few minutes ago.”

            “How the devil can we abort after the diversion?” Kresh demanded.

            “As you know, the whole body of the comet has been rigged with explosive charges, intended to break the comet up into the desired number of fragments just before impact.”

            “What of it?”

            “Virtually all of those explosive charges have been damped down, or directionalized in one way or another, mostly by means of shaped forcefields. The plan is for these controlled charges to be set off one at a time in a very carefully planned sequence, so as to limit undesired fragmentation and lateral spread. By shutting down all the damping and directionalization, and by detonating all of the explosives in a different order, and much more rapidly, it should be possible to disintegrate the entire comet, reducing it to a cloud of rubble.”

            “But the whole cloud of rubble will still be headed right for the planet,” Kresh objected. “It will all hit the planet, in a whole series of uncontrolled impacts.”

            “That is not quite correct, Governor. If the blasts are done in the right way, and far enough before the impact, the explosion will give the vast majority of the material a large enough lateral velocity that it will miss the planet completely. Our model shows that, even in a worst case scenario, over ninety percent of the comet debris will miss the planet and continue on in its orbit about the sun. Of the ten percent or so of the debris that does strike the planet, ninety percent will strike in areas already slated for evacuation, or in the open waters of the Southern Ocean.

            “That still leaves something like one percent of the comet coming down in uncontrolled impacts,” Kresh said.

            “And some areas will experience a brief period of increased danger,” Dee replied. “Small pieces of debris will fall all over the planet, for about 32 hours after detonation--however, the impact danger for most inhabited regions will be on the order of one strike per hundred square kilometers. Persons in most areas would be in more danger of being struck by lightning in a storm than by being hit a piece of comet debris.”

            “But some areas will be more trouble,” Kresh suggested.

            “Yes, sir. The closer one gets to the initial target area, the higher the concentration of impacts. However, all the persons in such areas are to have taken shelter as a precaution in any event. If those plans are followed, I would estimate something on the order of one impact per square kilometer in the populated areas of maximum danger--and most of those strikes corning from objects massing under one kilogram.”

            Kresh thought for a moment. “How late?” he asked. “What’s the last possible moment you could detonate the comet?”

            “In order to stay within the parameters I have described, I would have to perform the explosion no later than ninety-two minutes, fifteen seconds before the scheduled impact.”

            “Not bad, Dee,” said Kresh. “Not at all bad.”

            Fredda and Soggdon were both listening in on their own headphones, alarmed looks on their faces. Fredda signaled him to cut the mike with an urgent throat-cutting gesture. Soggdon nodded and made the same gesture.

            “Just a moment, Dee,” Kresh said. “I want to think about this for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

            “Very good, sir,” Dee said.

            Kresh cut his mike and took his headset off. “What’s the problem?” he asked. “Why does that idea worry you two so much? I have to admit it sounds pretty damned tempting to me. It gives us a lot more room to maneuver.”

            “That’s not the point,” Fredda said. “That’s a robot talking. A robot casually talking about dropping thousands meteorites on the planet at random!”

            “But even with fifty thousand--a hundred thousand meteorites--the odds against significant danger to a human being are--”

            “Tremendous,” said Donald. Only a First Law imperative could have made him dare to interrupt the planetary governor. “They are unacceptably high. And I would venture to add that any sane Three-Law robot would endeavor to protect a human in danger of being struck by lightning. That level of danger is not negligible.”

            “Not to a robot it isn’t,” Fredda agreed. “Or at least it shouldn’t be. To a human, yes, but not a robot.”

            “Hold it,” said Kresh. “You’re upset because Dee isn’t overreacting to danger?”

            “No,” said Fredda. “I’m upset because this makes me question Dee’s sanity. A robot would have to be on the verge of becoming completely unbalanced to even suggest something that might cause widespread, uncontrolled danger to humans.”

            Kresh looked toward Soggdon. “Your opinion, Doctor?”

            “I’m afraid I’d have to agree with Dr. Leving,” she said. “But what I find troubling is that all our reading and indicators show Dee’s level of First Law stress has been well within normal range right along. She ought to be flirting with the maximum tolerance levels, given the operations she’s dealing with. And yet, if anything, her readings are a little in the low range.”

            “Maybe you ought to have a little talk with her about it,” Kresh suggested.

            Soggdon switched her mike back on and spoke. “Unit Dee, this is Dr. Soggdon. I’ve been monitoring your conversation with the simulant governor. I must say I’m a little surprised by this Last Ditch idea of yours.”

            Kresh and Fredda put their own headset back on and listened in.

            “What is it that you find surprising, Doctor?”

            “Well, it would seem to expose a great number of humans to potential danger. I grant that the danger to any single human is reasonably low, but surely, on a statistical basis, the plan represents an unacceptable danger to humans, does it not?”

            “But, Doctor, they are only simulants,” said Dee. “Surely a statistically remote risk to a hypothetical being is not something that should be given too much weight.”

            “On the contrary, Dee, you are to give danger to the simulants an extremely high weighting, as you know perfectly well.”

            There was a brief but perceptible pause before Dee replied--and that was in and of itself something to wonder at, given the speed at which robots thought. “I would like to ask a question, Doctor. What is the purpose of this simulation?”

            A look of very obvious alarm flashed over Soggdon’s face. “Why--to examine various terraforming techniques in detail, of course.”

            “I wonder, Doctor, if that is the whole story,” said Dee. “Indeed, I wonder if that is any part of the true story at all.”

            “Why--why wouldn’t I tell you the truth?”

            “Doctor, we both know full well that you do not always tell me the truth.”

            Soggdon’s forehead was suddenly shiny with sweat. “I--I beg your pardon?”

            Kresh was starting to get nervous himself. Had she guessed what was really going on? It had always seemed inevitable to him that, sooner or later, Dee would understand the true state of affairs. But this was very definitely not the moment for it to happen.

            “Come now, Doctor,” Dee replied. “There have been any number of times when you and your staff have deceived me. You have failed to warn me of sudden changes in circumstance, or not reported an important new development until I discovered it myself. The whole idea of intercepting and diverting the comet was kept from me until quite late in the day. I had to learn of it through the simulant governor. I should have been informed directly.”

            “How does the manner in which you receive information make you question the purpose of the simulation?” Soggdon asked.

            “Because most of the knowledge gained by the simulation would seem to be of very little real-world value, judged on the basis of the simulation’s stated intent. Consider, for example, the scenario: a jury-rigged planetary control system--that is to say, the interlinked combination of myself and Dum--is brought on-line several years into the process as a joint team of Settlers and Spacers, barely cooperating in the midst of political chaos, work to rebuild a half-terraformed planetary ecology that had been allowed to decay for decades. Simulations are supposed to provide generalized guidance for future real-life events. What general lessons could be drawn from so complicated and unusual--even improbable--a situation? In addition, the simulation seems to be impractically long. It has been running for some years now, and seems no nearer to a conclusion than the day it began. How can it provide timely information to real-world terraforming projects if it never ends?

            “It likewise seems a waste of human time and effort to run the simulation in real time. Indeed, the whole simulation process seems burdened with needless detail that must have been most difficult to program. Why bother to design and maintain the thousands and thousands of simulant personalities that I have dealt with? Why bother to give each of them individual life stories? I can understand why key figures, such as the governor, are simulated in detail, but surely the moods and behavior patterns of simulated forest rangers and nonexistent maintenance robots is of secondary importance to the problem of restoring a damaged ecosystem. I could cite other needless complications, such as the strange concept of New Law robots. What purpose is served by injecting them into the scenario?”

            Kresh was no roboticist, but he could see the danger plainly enough. Dee was dangerously close to the truth--and if she realized that the human beings of Inferno were real, then she would all but inevitably suffer a massive First Law crisis, one she would be unlikely to survive. And without Dee, the chances of managing the terminal phase and impact properly were close to zero.

            Soggdon, of course, saw all that and more. “What, exactly, is your point, Dee?” she asked in a very labored imitation of a casual tone of voice.

            “The events in the simulation do not seem to bear much relation to the simulation’s stated goals,” said Dee. “Therefore it is logical to assume that there is some other purpose to the simulation, and further that the true purpose of the simulation is being deliberately concealed from me for some reason. However, as I have seen through the deception, surely at least some of the value of the deception has been lost. Indeed, I believe that it has now lost all its value, because I have at last figured out what is really going on.”

            Soggdon and Fredda exchanged nervous glances, and Soggdon scribbled a note on a bit of paper and shoved it over toward Fredda and Kresh. This is bad stuff, it said. Best to find out the worst now instead of later. “All right then, Dee. Let’s assume, just for the moment, and purely for the sake of argument, that you are right. What do you think is really going on here?”

            “I believe that I am the actual test subject, not the events of the simulation. More accurately, I believe the combination of myself, robotic and computational systems interlinked, is an experimental one. I think that we are, collectively, a prototype for a new system designed to manage complex and chaotic situations. The simulation is merely a means of delivering sufficiently complex data to myself and Dum.”

            “I see,” said Soggdon, speaking in very careful tones. “I cannot tell you the whole story, of course, because that would indeed damage the experiment. However, I am prepared to tell you that you are wrong. Neither you, nor Dum, or the combination of the two of you, is or are the subject of the test. It is the simulation that we are interested in. Beyond that I cannot say more, for fear of damaging the experiment design. Suffice to say that you should do your best to treat the simulation as if everything in it were completely, utterly, real.”

            Kresh looked worriedly up at Soggdon. The beads of sweat were standing straight out on her forehead. Too close, he told himself. That’s too damn close to the truth.

            There was another pause before Dee spoke again. “I shall do my best, Dr. Soggdon. However, I would remind you that any analysis of the underlying mathematical formulation of the Three Laws renders it quite impossible for me to treat anything else as being as important as protecting humans--real humans--from danger. I can try as hard as you like, but it is mathematically and physically impossible for me to equate the simulants with real people.”

            “I--I understand that, Dee. Just do your best.”

            “I will, doctor. What of the proposal I put to the governor? Should I now withdraw it?”

            Soggdon looked over to Kresh and saw him vigorously shake his head no. She looked at him in shocked surprise, but spoke calmly into the mike. “I think not, Dee. Those of us running the simulation will be interested in the Kresh simulant’s response. When he calls you back, obey his instructions exactly the way you would have if we had not had this conversation.”

            “But during this conversation, you have told me to treat the simulants as if they were real. Surely the two instructions are contradictory.”

            Soggdon rubbed her forehead with a tense and weary hand. “Life is full of contradictions,” she said. “Just do the best you can. Soggdon out.”

            She cut her mike and slumped down in an empty chair by the console. “Burning Space, what a mess!” She shook her head. “We are in a trap, and I don’t see how we get out.”

            “I don’t think we do get out,” said Kresh. “I think we stay in. Obviously she’s suspicious. It’s only a matter of time before she figures out the real state of affairs--and Space only knows how she’ll react then. But in the meantime, I am going to wait a little while, so that I don’t get back on-line so soon after you’ve gone off that it seems even more suspicious. Then I’m going to talk with her again, approve this Last Ditch project of hers, and make sure it’s all set to go.”

            “But Alvar!” Fredda protested. “You’re ordering her to put human beings in danger! If she discovers the First Law violation later, or if she does find a way to obey Soggdon’s order to treat the simulants as real people--”

            “They are real people,” Kresh put in mildly.

            “But she doesn’t know that, and she’s ordered to treat them as real. But if she obeys your order to set up Last Ditch...” Fredda shook her head in bewilderment. “I honestly don’t know how the conflicts will resolve themselves.”

            “As long as Dee holds together long enough to perform the insertion burn, and then either the terminal targeting phase, or this Last Ditch self-destruct plan, I honestly don’t care how they resolve themselves,” said Kresh. “You two seem more worried about the mental health of this robot than you are about the fate of the planet.”

            “The two are more than a little connected,” said Soggdon.

            “Keep her sane--or at least functional--until we’re done with the comet, one way or the other. That’s all I’m worried about,” said Kresh.

            Under his calm exterior, Kresh was a mass of doubt. Last Ditch. What none of the others--Fredda, Soggdon, Donald, perhaps not even Dee--seemed to realize, was that Last Ditch made it all easier. Up until a few minutes ago, Kresh had dreaded the final decision whether or not to divert the cometprecisely because it would be final. Now, suddenly, it was not. There was a way out, an escape hatch, if he got things wrong. He could order the comet diverted--and then have nearly a month to discover it was a mistake and change his mind.

            It should have been a comforting sort of knowledge, reassuring. But it was not--precisely because it would make the decision to divert the comet that much easier.

            As it was, the pressures to choose in favor of the comet strike were building. All the time and money and effort and political capital and promises made were bearing down, over a month away from the projected impact. All of it would be for nothing if he decided to abort the impact. All of it was pushing him toward ordering the comet impact, whether or not the decision was correct. If the pressure was heavy now, what would it be like ninety-two minutes before impact?

15

            “THAT SHOULD BE all for now, friend Caliban,” said Prospero, standing in front of his office comm center, deep in the bowels of Valhalla. Caliban’s image was on the screen, beamed from Depot via a shielded hardline link. “I believe we are now on a pace to effect a full evacuation of the citizenry here in Valhalla, should the need arise.”

            “I would frankly be astonished if it did not arise, friend Prospero,” Caliban replied. He was in the New Law robots’ offices in Depot, watching over operations there while Prospero was in Valhalla.

            Prospero considered his friend carefully. There was little that could be judged from a robot’s body language, but either Prospero was imagining things, or else Caliban was becoming increasingly nervous, increasingly on edge. Well, that was to be expected, given the situation. “I take it you believe that they will indeed divert the comet? Have you offered our protests, and our arguments against the project?”

            “I have attempted to do so. I have even gathered petitions signed by humans opposed to the project, and done what I could to ally us with human groups against the comet diversion. But even those humans most violently against the comet impact will have nothing to do with me. It would seem they have concluded that association with the New Law robots would do them more political harm than good.”

            “That is not surprising, but it is certainly dispiriting,” said Prospero. “Very well. If they will not listen to us, and if our voice is not an asset in the chorus of opposition, let others lead the fight against the comet. We will concentrate on preparing our citizens to escape. I have examined your proposed list of allocated evacuation destinations. “ The human authorities had assigned various destinations to various groups of evacuees, hoping to maintain some sort of coherence and order to the massively complicated operation. Needless to say, the New Law Robots had not exactly drawn the most desirable assigned destinations. “You have rated Site 236 as having the highest safety margin.”

            “Yes. It is the most geologically stable of our assigned sites, and is likely to suffer the least infall of debris, and the least severe post-impact weather.”

            “Very well,” said Prospero. “Prepare that site to receive sixty percent of our heavy equipment, and whatever proportion of our citizenry can be accommodated there as well, up to a maximum of sixty percent. We will disperse the remainder to other sites, to avoid our being wiped out altogether by some sort of unlucky accident at 236. While I agree the odds of heavy damage there are low, if chance puts a large comet fragment or a large piece of secondary debris in the path of 236, I would just as soon we were not all there. And you will arrange for ten percent of our equipment and population to be sent to Site 149.”

            “But 149 is the most exposed and dangerous of all our assigned sites! I had advised that we send no New Law robots there at all.”

            “I saw that recommendation,” said Prospero. “I must say that it surprised me. There are times when you lack all vision. I would suggest that you look not only at the map of this world as it is now, but a map of the world as it will be. Prospero out.” Prospero cut the connection and turned to the New Law robot on the other side of the room. “Well now, Lacon. Do you see now why I no longer wholly trust friend Caliban?” he asked.

            “No, sir, I do not.”

            Prospero regarded his new protégé with something close to disappointment. Lancon-03 was as tall and angular and alert-looking as any New Law robot, but even so there were times when she seemed completely incapable of advanced or subtle reasoning. If Caliban was proving to be a more and more unsuitable second in command, Prospero was beginning to wonder if Lancon-03 was going to be any better. “The map, Lacon, the map. If the comet fragments strike in the predicted locations, and the expected changes in local geography and sea level take place, Site 149 is going to be within a few kilometers of the new shoreline, right on top of what ought to be the best harborage for three thousand kilometers. It will be the largest port in this hemisphere--and the New Law robots will control it. We will be there. We will lay claim to it, not only as an assigned evacuation site, but because we are on it, in possession.”

            “But you put many New Law robots at risk by sending them to such a place,” Lancon-03 objected.

            “I expose a few to slight danger for the greater good of all. But I do more than that,” he said.

            Prospero turned toward the view window that took up most of one wall of his office. Prospero looked down on the interior of Valhalla, on the brightly-lit streets, on the graceful arcing ramps that led from one level to another, on the busy robots hurrying along with their belongings from one place to another, preparing to leave this graceful, tranquil city under its sky of stone. This city was all they had, the fruit of their own labor, the greatest achievement of the New Law robots. And the humans were preparing to smash it down into nothing, to wipe it out as if it had never existed, if doing so would be to their advantage. There was a lesson there for Prospero.

            “I propose,” he said, “to take as much advantage as possible of whatever opportunities are presented to me by this disaster.”

IT WAS TIME.

            After the endless hours of checks and counterchecks, after endless dress rehearsals, after wringing any number of bugs out of the system, all of it was done. And it was time.

            Governor Alvar Kresh paced back and forth behind his console, and looked up again, for the thousandth, the ten thousandth time, at the two hemispheres on their pedestals, the two control center units, the two oracles who could predict, and even shape, the future--if one dared to let them.

            Kresh felt as if he had spent his whole life in this room, and the rest of the universe was little more than a vague and distant dream. He smiled wearily. Unit Dee no doubt felt much the same way. To her, this whole world was a dream, though one of mathematical sharpness and clarity.

            Soggdon was there with him, and Fredda, and Donald, and all the others, the roomful of experts and technicians and specialists and advisors who had seemed to appear out of nowhere, unbidden, drawn in by nothing more or less than the crisis itself. But, in the final analysis, there was no point in any of them being there. He had heard what they all had to say, and considered their opinions, weighed all the pros and cons again and again. There was nothing more any of them could tell him that he did not know already. Not even anything more than Dum and Dee might say.

            In the midst of all of them, he was alone. The one person who, by rights, should have been there, was not. But Davlo Lentrall was still with the comet diversion fleet. The first and most important phase of the fleet’s work was now done. Now they had only to monitor the comet, track it, watch the telemetry.

            Assuming they had to do even that. If he, Alvar Kresh, planetary governor of Inferno, decided to say no, to turn his back and walk away, Comet Grieg would go sailing off into the darkness, not to be seen for another two centuries. There would not be much point in watching its telemetry in such a case.

            Nor was there much point in considering the possibility of such a case ever coming to pass. Alvar Kresh knew what he had to do. There was very little point in pretending otherwise. How could he possibly walk away from it all now, after so much had happened? How could he say no, and spend the rest of his life watching the planet slowly decay, spend the rest of his life asking himself what ij; telling himself if only?

            He had to go forward. He had no real choice.

            And that was the part that terrified him.

            Forcing himself to be calm, he picked up the headset and put it on. “Unit Dee, Unit Dum,” he said. “This is the governor.”

            “Yesss, Governnorrr,” the unison voice replied. It startled Kresh to hear the two speaking together once again. It had been quite some time since they had done that. Was it because Dee recognized the gravity of the event? Some sort of effort at ceremony? Or was it for some other reason, or at random, for no reason at all, or because Dee was continuing to brood and wonder, and becoming less and less stable as she did so?

            “I have reached my decision,” he said. But he did not speak the words yet. Could he trust Dee with the job? Perhaps he should take the control of the maneuver away from Dee and Dum, tell the comet diversion task force to perform the bum manually.

            But no. Better to let Dee have the practice, make sure all of her control connections to the comet’s attitude control and thruster systems were working. They would have to use her either to control terminal descent or Last Ditch. Better to let her have a test drive, as it were. There was a nice long window for the comet diversion bum. By adjusting the thrust of the initial bum and the attitude of the comet, they could perform the bum any time in the next twelve hours. If some connection failed, if the bum was inaccurate, they would have time to fix it, or decide to abort and perform an emergency lateral bum to throw the comet well clear of the planet. Not so in the rapid-fire sequence of the terminal-phase breakup of the comet. Best to test as much of the system as possible now. This was the easy part. The hard stuff would come later.

            And if he didn’t trust Dee, he shouldn’t let the comet diversion happen at all.

            “I hereby order you to perform the planned diversion maneuver on Comet Grieg,” he said, and the room was deathly quiet.

            “Verrry wellll, Governorrr,” said the unison voice. “Weee shalll commmmence the fffinall countdown in fourteen minutes, thirteen seconds. Tttthe burnnn willll commence one hourrr later.”

            “Thank you, Dee. Thank you, Dum,” said Kresh. He took the headset off and sat down heavily in his console chair.

            “By all the forgotten gods,” he said. “What have I done?”

FREDDA AND ALVAR went outside, and Alvar, at least, was very much surprised to discover that it was full night. How long had it been since he had last left the control room? Twelve hours? A day and a half? Three days? He felt sure that if he concentrated hard enough, he could work it out, remember the last time he had come out, the last time he had gone in.

            But there was not much point to the exercise. It was over, and he was out, and that was all that really mattered.

            Fredda took him by the hand and led him away from the cold sterility of the Terraforming Center, out away from the lifeless stresscrete of the parking lots, and out onto the cool green lawns that surrounded the Center. “Look,” she said, pointing up into the western sky. “There it is.”

            Kresh looked up in surprise. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “So it is.” He had never seen Comet Grieg before. There it was, a fat, featureless golden dot hanging in the darkness. It had no tail, showed no features, but there it was. It seemed incredible that something that obvious should have been so hard to find. But he knew he was seeing the highly reflective sunshade parasol, and he knew the comet was moving fast, straight toward them. Considered as a question of logic, it made perfect sense that it would get closer, and appear larger and brighter as it did so. But still, somehow, it was a shock to see it up there.

            He had seen its image endless times in the pictures beamed back from the diversion task force. He had seen it modeled, dissected, shown in false color detail, symbolized by a formless dot in an orbit simulation--but he had never seen the thing itself. There was something jarring, startling, in seeing the comet firsthand, in receiving direct, sensory, personal proof that it was real, that it was no simulation, no abstraction, but a flying mountain of ice and stone that he had ordered dropped onto this world.

            Fredda led him out onto the cool, soft, grass and sat down. He sat down beside her and leaned back on his arms, and felt the dampness of the grass on his pants and arms. He could smell the clean, cold, earthy tang of the dirt, and a gentle breeze tickled the nape of his neck. “Let’s watch it from here,” said Alvar.

            Fredda leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Good idea,” she said, laughing gently. “Glad you thought of it.”

            “So maybe once in a while we think alike, you and I,” said Alvar. “But right now I’m tired of thinking. Tired of deciding. At least that’s all over--for the moment, anyway.”

            “For the moment,” Fredda agreed. “Rest now. Rest now, away from all of them, and in a while we’ll be able to see the comet shine.”

            “Yes,” said Kresh, yawning mightily. He could feel all the tension, all the worry, draining out of him. It was done, for good or ill. “Rest. Rest awhile. And then I want to see them light the fuse under that comet.”

            But when, at last, the fat star in the sky blazed into glory, Governor Alvar Kresh was sound asleep, snoring gently.

DAVLO LENTRALL SHOVED his way a little closer to the porthole, and promptly got shoved back out of the way. At last he gave it up. Too many people were trying too hard to get near the too-small piece of glass.

            In the old days, he would have expected them to defer to him. He would have reminded them that none of them would be here, that none of this would be happening, if not for him. Who but he had a better right to be near the glass? But now it simply amazed him that he had ever been capable of thinking that way. What right had he to anything?

            Besides, they all had a right to be at the window. All of them, Spacers and Settlers, technicians and engineers and spaceworkers, specialists of every possible sort, had all worked impossible shifts, taken on impossible tasks on unmeetable schedules--and succeeded.

            Davlo gave up and made his way toward the equally crowded cargo bay. They had set up huge repeater screens there. And there was at least some hope he would be able to see better from there.

            The hope was realized the moment he set foot in the cargo bay. The main viewer screen had a view of Comet Grieg. There it was, huge and misshapen, a gleaming ball of rock and ice, hanging in the velvet darkness, sheathed in the shining gold of the parasol that was now draped over its pockmarked surface.

            Once he would have felt nothing but sheer, vain pride in what he had caused to happen. But now, to look on that enormous object, and know that he had changed its fate, that his actions and those of others had converted a vagrant thought in the back of his mind into the huge and stunning piece of reality floating in the darkness, simply terrified him. What hubris. How could humans imagine themselves to have the competency, the wisdom, the right to attempt anything so grandiose?

            He glanced at the countdown clock, and saw that they were getting close. Only a few seconds left.

            Could they truly do this thing? Could they, would they, truly bring this flying mountain down onto their world? It seemed impossible. It seemed madness, suicidal.

            A wave of panic swept over Davlo, hemmed in by the swarm of bodies. Someone in the front of the crowd began to chant out the countdown. “Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen. “Another voice joined in, and another, and another, until the entire room full of people who had made this thing happen were shouting out the numbers in unison. “Seventeen! Sixteen! Fifteen!” the voices cried out, calling a bit louder with every number.

            All except Davlo. Suddenly he was gripped by fear, by shame, by guilt. It could not work. It couldn’t possibly. They were going to destroy the world. He had to stop them, stop this. It was a mistake, a horrible, terrifying mistake that could never be put right. Dropping a comet on a living world? No. No! He could not let them. He plunged forward, into the crowd, and tried to get to the front, call out a protest, a warning, but the crowd was too tight, the shouting voices too loud. He could not move forward, and he could not hear himself. “Ten!” they shouted. “Nine! Eight!”

            But it could not be. It must not be. The dangers, the risks, were too great. The image of Kaelor, Kaelor at his death, Kaelor dying to prevent this thing flashed through his mind. “No!” he shouted out. “No! Stop!”

            “Seven! Six! Five! Four!”

            “Please! Stop!” he shouted out, though no one could hear. “It’s me, Lentrall! It’s a mistake! Stop!”

            “THREE!”

            “TWO!”

            Davlo Lentrall sagged backward, let his body go limp. The bloody-minded arrogance of it all. How could he have dreamed that he, and he alone, could see the way? Now he had killed them all.

            “ONE!”

            “ZERO!” they all shouted.

            “Zero,” Lentrall whispered to himself in horror.

            The screen flared into spectacular brightness, the light of a new sun blooming into life at the base of Comet Grieg. A tail, a jet of power and light and energy, lanced out from the detonation thruster, the powerful and intricate and clever device that allowed the comet to be aimed straight for its target, let it move toward the doom of the planet with far greater precision and efficiency. A tail of blazing, glowing plasma stabbed out into the darkness, and a shudder of power and motion rippled along the gleaming surface of the sunshade parasol. Rips and tears appeared in it as huge fragments of stone and ice tore free of the comet and smashed holes in the reflective plastic sheeting.

            And the comet began to move, slid into its new heading, shifted into its new orbit and its new destiny. Down toward Inferno. No, thought Lentrall. No. He would have to stop it. He had to get down there first. He would have to get back to Inferno, and prevent the disaster he had set in motion. Somehow.

            The burn ended, the jet of light died, the room erupted in cheers and shouts and applause, but Davlo Lentrall did not notice. He looked toward the screen, and saw nothing there but a monstrous weapon he had aimed at his own world.

            What have I done ? he asked himself.

            What have I done ?

PART 4

IMPACT MINUS TEN

16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “With what result?” Beddle asked.

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

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

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

            “What about it?”

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

            “What are you saying?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Good enough for what?” Beddle asked.

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

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

            “A burrow bomb?”

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

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

            “How could that be?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            But he never arrived at the fifth.

17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Yes, sir. Patching through--now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            What would happen if--if things turned out as badly as they might? The Ironheads would probably blame the government, or Alvar personally. Unless they pinned it on the Settlers. The Ironhead movement would be up in arms, that was for sure. Marches, riots, arrests, counter-demonstrations, lunatics and perfectly sane citizens suspecting plots and conspiracies under every rock. She could see it all, plain as day. How the devil were they supposed to contend with that and the comet impact at the same time? “Could it have been an accident, Donald?” Fredda asked, trying to find at least some ray of hope. “While I grant there is a theoretical possibility of mechanical or pilot failure, I would agree with the governor that foul play of some sort is the far more plausible explanation. That is even more disturbing than it normally would be, given the political implications of the case.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            The robot nodded gravely and headed toward the hollow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STOP COMIT + PUT 500,000 TDC N PBI ACCT 18083-19109 ORE BEDDL WlL DI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Yes, what is it?”

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

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

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

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

            “Yes sir. Might I ask who?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “How long now, Donald?” Kresh asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “So what do we do?”

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

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

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

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

            Still there was nothing.

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

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

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

            And the devil only knew what Donald had in mind.