Asimov’s Future History Volume 12

by Isaac Asimov

And now he was through with the other robots, and was ready to talk to Caliban. Caliban closed the door behind himself, and then stood in front of Prospero’s desk.

  “There is little requirement for privacy among the New Law robots, friend Caliban,” Prospero said, indicating the closed door.

  “But it is occasionally necessary, friend Prospero. I have been instructed by Fredda Leving to relay certain information to you, on condition that you not repeat it elsewhere. No one else must know. I have already given my word to repeat it to no one but you.”

  “Indeed?” Prospero said. “You intrigue me, Caliban. You are not generally much given to dramatics. But very well. I give my word not to repeat the news. What is it?”

  “Simcor Beddle has been kidnapped.”

  “What?” Prospero looked up at Caliban with new intensity. “He has been kidnapped? By whom? Why? How? What does it mean?”

  “I have not the faintest idea of how to answer any of those questions,” Caliban said. “Dr. Leving told me nothing but the bare fact that the kidnapping had taken place, somewhere well south of Depot. The news is being kept secret as long as possible, so as to prevent a panic among the Three-Law robots. She has violated several regulations in order to inform us.”

  “Always, no matter what, the humans are forever inconveniencing themselves for the sake of their slave-robots,” Prospero said, quickly recovering his composure. “But that is to one side. I am sure the significance of that location was not lost on you. It occurs to me that it is now likely there will be a great deal of police activity – including search activity – in the area of Valhalla. There may be very little we can do, but we must consider carefully how best to keep Valhalla hidden. We must do all the things we can to protect the New Law robots.”

  “Surely the need to hide its location is now all but moot,” Caliban objected. “Especially since you ordered Valhalla to be evacuated ahead of schedule. It was not easy to accomplish the job, but the vast majority of the city’s population is already gone. They’re all here, milling around in Depot, trying to get transport out. There is no one left in Valhalla but a few caretakers dealing with last-minute removal of equipment. Why worry about hiding the city any longer when it is about to be destroyed?”

  “I do not apologize for rushing the evacuation of Valhalla,” Prospero said. “Transport craft became available, and I deemed it wise to use them when we could, for fear they would not be there when we needed them. A schedule change in our favor reminded me that one to our disadvantage could happen just as easily.”

  “Your point is taken,” said Caliban.

  “As for the need to keep the city hidden even now, we might well need to use the same concealment technique again in future. Further, one must consider the human viewpoint. We might gain some psychological advantage in future from the story of the city they never found. We might even be able to foster some legend that the city still existed, that everyone was looking in completely the wrong place. That could be useful, one day. Besides, there are things about us that could be learned by examining Valhalla. We have enough weaknesses and vulnerabilities already. We do not need to offer the humans more advantages over us.”

  Caliban considered for a moment. Once again, he was impressed by the amount of thought Prospero had put into things. “Your arguments are well formed, friend Prospero. You are quite right. We must do all we can do. Now I will let you get on with your work.”

  “Thank you for informing me of this new development, friend Caliban. I must thank Dr. Leving too, of course – once it is safe to do so. Of all humans, she at least is a woman who keeps faith.”

  “Agreed. She is an admirable woman,” said Caliban. “Goodbye for now, friend Prospero.”

  “But not goodbye for long, I am sure,” said Prospero, his attention already on the next item requiring his attention.

  Caliban reopened the door and left Prospero’s office. He made his way downstairs, and out into the busy, bustling street. He looked up into the sky, to the fat, bright point of light that grew larger with every passing moment. Closer. Closer. All the time closer. There was so little time left.

  What was it Prospero had said? We must do all the things we can to protect the New Law robots. In recent days Caliban had felt himself drawn back to their cause. The more the world had no time for them, no interest in them, the more it seemed ready to let them all die if that was marginally more convenient, the more he empathized with them. AU the things we can. It would require breaking his word to Fredda Leving. It would require doing her a small amount of harm – but surely nothing she could not recover from. And it could prevent a brutal purge of New Law robots. Being a No Law robot – the only No Law robot – should have meant Caliban could act without compulsion. But there were more things than hard-wired, preprogrammed Laws that could compel a being to act.

  Caliban turned and headed down the street, in the direction of the temporary field headquarters of the Combined Infernal Police, in Constable Bukket’s old offices.

  Donald 111 waited. Hiding in the woods a kilometer or two from the Winter Residence. A cleft in an outcropping of rock provided shielding not only from visual detection, but from infrared and most other sorts of detectors. So long as he operated at minimum power, thus cutting back on waste heat and other detectable emissions, he judged that he ought to be able to stay hidden long enough – though how long that would be was impossible to say.

  He had deliberately violated his master’s very specific order. First Law had forced him to do so. Had he obeyed, the governor would no doubt have powered him down to prevent him telling what he knew to other Three-Law robots. Allowing that to happen would have been inaction that allowed harm to a human being. He could not act to save Beddle if he were powered down.

  But he had not yet taken any action to save Beddle. As yet it was not necessary. Even if Beddle were in the comet impact area, and there was no particular reason to assume that he was, there were still just over three days left in which the humans could do their best to save him. Donald understood perfectly well that any action to save Beddle might well cause harm to other humans, for example by compelling robot aircar pilots to refuse to transport vital equipment while they joined the search. The more robots there were in the impact area this close to the comet’s arrival, the larger the number of robots likely to be caught by the impact. A shortage of robotic labor in the post-impact period could easily cause great harm to humans.

  In short, distracting robots from the evacuation could cause endless mischief. Besides which, the clear intent of Governor Kresh’s order had been to prevent Donald from talking. By disobeying only part of Kresh’s order, he had minimized his violation of Second Law. Donald had done his best to balance all the conflicting demands, retaining the option of hyperwaving a warning to the other Three-Law robots while refraining from actually doing so.

  But the time would come. He knew that. Unless Beddle was rescued in time, the First Law demand that Donald act to save him would, sooner or later, overwhelm the conflicting First and Second demands that he keep silent. Sooner or later, he would be compelled to act. Understanding the compulsion he was under in no way reduced the force of that compulsion.

  He would have to do something. But he had no idea what.

  Norlan Fiyle was an old hand at being questioned. He had been through it many times before. As he sat in the improvised interrogation room of the CIP’s Depot field office, waiting for Commander Devray to come in and get started, it occurred to him that he might well have taken part in more interrogations than Devray himself had, albeit from the other side of the table. That was quite likely to come in handy.

  Fiyle had learned a thing or two about being questioned. First off, it was vitally important not to give up everything, even if you were willing to cooperate with the powers that be. An interrogation was a negotiation, a bargaining session. Give me some of yours and I’ll give you some of mine. It was never smart to say too much too soon, even if you wanted to talk, or else you lost a
ll chance of making a deal. A corollary of that was that it was rarely wise to tell the whole and complete truth right at the start. They felt better if they had to force it out of you, catch you in a fib or two first. Once they had caught you lying, and they knew you knew you had been caught, they would be better prepared to believe the real truth when they heard it. Norlan knew how it all worked on a level that was closer to instinct than to conscious thought.

  But it was also important in a case like this that you appeared cooperative, a tricky business if you had a thing or two to hide – and who didn’t? Sometimes the best way to do that was to try and distract the questioner. He would not have been so foolish as to try such a trick on an old hand like Alvar Kresh, but Justen Devray might just be a different story. He was smart, Devray was, but he did not have much in the way of experience. During the arrest, Devray had gone so far as to tell Fiyle that Beddle had been kidnapped, rather than keeping him in the dark to find out how much Fiyle knew already. A man who could make that mistake could make others.

  The door opened and Devray came in. Alone. No robot in attendance. That in itself was interesting. Fiyle smiled and leaned back in his chair as Devray sat down and spread out his paperwork.

  “I was wondering how long you’d take to get to me,” he said, doing his best to sound at ease and confident.

  “Not very long, as a matter of fact,” Devray said. “You’ve got some sort of link to just about every suspect in this case.”

  “True enough,” he said. “I know a lot of people.”

  “And nearly all of them have hired you as an informant at one time or another,” said Devray.

  “Including the CIP,” said Fiyle, “though I might not show up in your files. A few under-the-table cash jobs. But you got your money’s worth.”

  “I hope we did,” Devray said. “But that’s all ancient history, assuming it’s even true. What I want to know is who’s paying for your information these days.”

  “No one,” Fiyle said. And that much, at least, was accurate. It was always good to work the truth in now and again, when it proved convenient. “The only job I have right now is working for Gildern, and I wouldn’t say no if I had to retire.”

  “You didn’t take the job voluntarily?”

  “Let’s say Gildern convinced me that lowed him a favor.”

  “But however you got it or felt about the information, you knew about Beddle’s tour well in advance.”

  “Oh, yes. I knew all about it. Beddle was supposed to use Gildern’s aircar in a tour of the smaller towns.”

  Devray pulled a stack of still images out of his file and handed then to Fiyle. “Is this Gildern’s aircar?”

  Fiyle looked through the pictures. Four robots, neatly shot through the back of the head and lying face down on the ground in front of an aircar. A close-up of one of the dead robots. Another shot of the aircar’s exterior. A picture of the cockpit, showing the dead robot pilot and the wrecked flight recorders. Another shot, showing the ransom message. Yes, indeed, Devray was making mistakes. Devray should have shown him one image of the aircar exterior and left it at that. Devray had no business letting him study a whole stack of pictures.

  “That’s Gildern’s car, all right,” Fiyle said. And suddenly it was time to throw Devray off the scent, get him less interested in Fiyle and more interested in somebody else. “So, tell me,” he asked in the most casual way possible. “Was the bomb still in the aircar when you got there?”

  Justen Devray did not know what to think. He walked back to his own private office and sat down to think. If – if – Fiyle was telling the truth, in whole or in part, then the Ironheads had been planning the wholesale slaughter of the New Law robots. Justen did not have much use for the New Laws himself, but he was a long way from approving of their extralegal extermination.

  If the government decided to eliminate them within the law, that was one thing. This was something else. Let the idea of vigilante justice plant itself in people’s minds, and society would descend into chaos.

  If Fiyle was telling the truth, there was suddenly a whole new motive for the crime. Lots of people might well have an interest in owning – or even using – a burrow bomb. There had been no sign of such a thing on the aircar, that was certain. Either it had never been there in the first place, or else the kidnappers had taken it with them – which at least suggested they had known it was there all along.

  Suppose the kidnapping and the ransom demands were all misdirection? Suppose they had simply killed Beddle, dumped the body, and made off with the bomb, leaving the CIP chasing in the wrong direction?

  Any number of possibilities were suddenly there – if Fiyle were telling the truth.

  But there was very little he could do to check up on Fiyle’s story. But it might well be possible to test it indirectly. Certain aspects of the case pointed toward one suspect. One who had a bit more influence than Fiyle, one who might be harder to arrest and keep arrested if he decided not to be as helpful – or as seemingly helpful – as Fiyle. Justen would have to develop some evidence before he could act against this suspect.

  And it was time to do just that.

  The ransom demand. The one for money. Justen knew from the textbook cases that the ransom delivery was usually the place to break open a kidnapping case. The criminals had to expose themselves in some way in order to collect the ransom. Back in the distant past, before electronic fund transfers, the problem of collecting the ransom had been all but impossible for the kidnappers to solve. Even with electronic money, of course, it was possible to trace a fund transfer. But the kidnappers in this case had been fairly clever. It was Devray’s hope and belief that they had not been quite clever enough. He had the crime scene images on his datapad, and he brought up the shot of the ransom message.

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

  He knew a thing or two about PBI, the Planetary Bank of Inferno. One was that the double-number accounts could be preprogrammed to do a number of interesting things – such as perform encrypted fund transfers. A deposit to a properly programmed account would cause the account program to activate a one-time double-key decryption routine program that would decode the transfer program. That in turn would transfer the funds to a second account whose number was stored only in the encrypted program. Both programs would then erase themselves. Result – the funds would be transferred to a second, hidden account, perhaps in another bank, and there would be no way in the world you could trace it.

  Unless, of course, you were the commander of the Combined Infernal Police, with the power to freeze any and all bank accounts in the course of an investigation. He was about to use that power to an extreme – but then, it was an extreme case. What he had in mind would only work on a planet with a relatively small economy and a highly centralized bank clearing system – but it just so happened Inferno fit that description precisely.

  He linked his datapad to the Central Clearing Bank via encrypted hyperwave and set to work. Every electronic financial transaction on the planet went through the CCB, which made it a damned handy place from which to track illicit financial dealings.

  It took longer to work out the proper steps to follow than it took to carry them out. Step one: order a total freeze on all outgoing account transfers, allover the planet, except for two accounts – the CIP’s general account and PBI account 18083-19109. Step two: order the CCB system to get the current balance for every account on the planet. That task was complex enough to take several full seconds before the CCB system reported that it was complete. Step three: spend some money. Justen had to hesitate just a moment to work up the nerve for that part of it. He ought to be able to recover the funds later, and no harm done, but supposing he couldn’t? Suppose the kidnappers grabbed the half million in government funds and were never seen again?

  Justen smiled to himself and shook his head. Well, what if they did? What was Kresh going to do? Take it out of Justen’s pay? He issued the command and watched
the display screen as five hundred thousand in Trader Demand Credits vanished from the CIP account, materialized briefly in PBI account 18083-19109, and then vanished again, outbound to another, hidden account. It was exactly what Justen had expected to see, but even so there was a nervous twinge of fear in his stomach as he watched it happen. What if he had missed something?

  Never mind. There was only one way to find out, one way or the other. Step four: order the CCB system to take a second inventory of account balances, and report any that had changed. In theory, with all outgoing transfers frozen, except from two accounts, there should be only three accounts with changed balances. In practice – well, there was only one way to find out. He brought up the list of accounts with changed balances, and let out a huge sigh of relief. There were only three. The CIP account, the PBI account – and a third, reflecting a deposit of five hundred thousand in Trader Demand Credits a few seconds before.

  Step five: Devray slammed a complete covert tracer on that account, so that no funds could enter or leave it without his knowing all about it. He just barely remembered step six – unfreezing the rest of the planetary banking system. If he had forgotten that step, there would have been a small matter of a planetary financial crash on his conscience. As it was, the system had been down for less than three minutes. Even the richest of speculators, with the hugest of accounts, would be unlikely to notice the loss of three minutes’ interest.

  There was nothing left to do but pull up the account in question and find out who owned it. And then it would be all over. He would know who had received the ransom. And it would not be much of a leap of logic to assume that person had perpetrated the kidnapping.

  Justen was quite sure it would be a completely wrong and inaccurate leap of logic, but never mind that. He would play the game through all the same.

  He was virtually certain what name would come up on the screen when he placed the query, certain enough that there was even a trace of anticlimax about it when it appeared on the screen and he knew he had guessed right. But, still and all, it was the last piece of the puzzle. It all fit. Everything, everything, pointed to this one suspect.