by Isaac Asimov
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.
