Asimov’s Future History Volume 12

by Isaac Asimov

  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.

  18

  Fredda Leving wondered if she had done the right thing, as she readied herself for a much-belated bedtime, and watched her husband climb into bed beside her. The call to Devray hadn’t involved any deep and abiding moral issues, and the fruitless search for Donald had been nothing worse than frustrating. But then there was that second call she had made, the one she did not dare tell Alvar about.

  In fact, she was kidding herself. She knew perfectly well that she had done the wrong thing. She had interfered with a police investigation.

  But that creator’s debt had called to her, somehow. And she knew Justen Devray, knew the sort of opinion he had of Caliban and the New Law robots. Given half the chance, Devray might well shoot first and ask questions later. Or someone else might. And she owed her robots, her creations, better than that.

  Right or wrong, she had had no real choice but to do it. Somebody had to warn them.

  Caliban himself was no less ambivalent about the situation. He sat at his desk in the New Law robots’ offices in Depot and watched the hustle and bustle all about him as he thought it through.

  He felt very little sympathy for Simcor Beddle. It was hard to develop a great deal of concern for a man who desired one’s own extermination. But of course, from the New Law robot point of view, the safety of Simcor Beddle was not the central problem. It seemed inevitable that a major police operation in the general vicinity of Valhalla was likely to have some effect on the evacuation of the New Law robot city. The question
was, how much effect, and of what sort.

  Caliban stood up and made his way through the crowded main room toward Prospero’s private office at the front of the building. New Law robots were working at maximum speed everywhere, desperately rushing to find transport for their fellows and themselves.

  Caliban stepped into Prospero’s office – and found that there were two other robots ahead of him, waiting to discuss other problems with their leader. Prospero was finishing up an audio call.

  Their leader. Interesting. Caliban watched Prospero as he finished his call and turned to the first waiting robot. There had been at time when Prospero’s claims to leadership of the New Law robots had been tenuous at best. While he had gradually gained acceptance over the years, nothing had done as much for his prestige as Comet Grieg. It was almost as if he had drawn power from the crisis itself, using it to propel himself forward even as he led the New Law robots out of danger. Perhaps it was merely that now the New Law robots truly needed a leader, and Prospero was there, offering himself. Or perhaps there was something about Prospero in particular that drew them to him.

  He had certainly been active enough on their behalf, shuttling back and forth between Valhalla and Depot at all hours, cajoling whatever transport he could out of whatever officials were listening, constantly on the move, always seeming to turn up precisely when he was most needed.

  And now the job was nearly done. Caliban looked out the large picture window behind Prospero, down to the street below. The tumultuous, madhouse rush and rumble of traffic was starting to wind down. Buildings, stripped bare of whatever could be removed, stood empty. Bits of litter and debris were caught by random breezes and blown here and there. Depot, the whole Utopia region, was emptying out – and the New Law robots were leaving too. Nearly half of them had already gotten to places of safety. Credit Prospero with that. He had organized them. He had brought them together.