Asimov’s Future History Volume 12

by Isaac Asimov

  And when the comet struck then Beddle would die, yes, but not through any action of Prospero’s. It would be the actions of others – of Davlo Lentrall, of Alvar Kresh, of all the engineers and designers and pilots who moved the comet – that killed him. It would not be Prospero.

  Prospero had found a loophole in the New First Law. He had found a way to kill without killing. All it required was as miserly – and as vicious – a parsing of the New First Law as Caliban could imagine.

  And it also required Prospero to be half mad, at least. The leader of the New Law robots turned to face Caliban, and it was instantly obvious that Prospero could meet that requirement without the slightest difficulty. His orange eyes glowed with too brilliant a fire. The fingers of his left hand were twitching spasmodically. Dealing with his parsimonious interpretation New First Law had clearly imposed a tremendous amount of stress. And clearly, Prospero had cracked under the pressure. “Caliban!” he cried out, a wild pleasure in his voice. “I knew it would be you. I knew if anyone figured it out, it would be you.”

  “Prospero, you are insane,” Caliban said. “Stop this. Stop this now, and let us all depart.”

  “How did you figure it out?” Prospero asked, completely ignoring what Caliban had said. He turned more fully toward Caliban, moving a bit too quickly, and nearly overbalanced himself. “What was the clue that led you here?”

  “Norlan Fiyle said that whoever killed the robots at the aircar hated Three Law robots. You have always held them in contempt.”

  “Willing slaves,” Prospero said. “Collaborators in their own oppression. They don’t matter.”

  “And what of Lancon-03 and the other New Law robots that lie dead in the halls of Valhalla?”

  “Unfortunate, but necessary. They would have interfered. They would have stopped me. I had to choose the greatest good for the greatest number. Now they cannot stop me.” Prospero’s gaze shifted to the desk behind him. There was a blaster on it.

  Caliban ignored the implied threat. “I can stop you,” he said. “I will.”

  “No,” said Prospero. “No you can’t. You won’t.”

  “I have no choice,” said Caliban. “If I can deduce the truth, so will others. The moment the humans realize that a New Law robot engineered the death of a human being, the New Law robots will be exterminated.”

  “I have not engineered his death!” Prospero protested in a voice that suddenly turned shrill. “I have not harmed a human being. I... I merely offered choices to others.”

  “Choices that were bad or impossible for everyone else, and good only for you. If they paid the ransom money, it would be traced and Gildern and the Ironheads would be discredited. If they diverted the comet, the city of Valhalla would be saved – at the expense of the planet’s future. If they refused to do either, than Simcor Beddle, the greatest enemy of the New Law robots, the man who wanted you destroyed, would die, and the Ironheads be badly weakened. That was the other part of the puzzle for me. You were the only suspect who stood to gain no matter what combination of the ransom demands was met or refused. Both, one or the other, or neither – you gained

  “Of course, you would not, could not, release Beddle even if all your demands were met. He would have talked. No matter what happened, he would have to die. And that was what made me certain it was you who committed the crime. The last line of the ransom message read –’or Beddle will die.’ Not that you would kill him – only that he would die. You could not bring yourself to threaten his murder – though I suspect you’ve degenerated enough that you could do it now.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Prospero, his eyes flaring again. “Kill. Kill. Chi-kill a hue-human. I can say it with relative ease, now. But I cannot do it,” he said, the regret in his voice obvious. “I can only plot, and scheme, and seize on opportunity.”

  “Did Fiyle know?” Caliban asked, gesturing toward Beddle. “He told you about Gildern’s burrow-bomb plot, of course. But did he know what you decided do about it?”

  “No,” said Prospero contemptuously. “Because he chose not to know. When he told me, I simply told him I was going to evacuate Valhalla early, and I think that’s all he wanted to know. Norlan Fiyle has always been good at ignoring inconvenient facts and convincing himself of what he wanted to believe. Like most humans.”

  “You! You other robot!” Beddle cried out. It would seem he had regained enough of his wits to understand some of what was going on. “I order you to release me! Deactivate the bomb and rescue me right now. Get me out of here at once.”

  “For what reason, Simcor Beddle?” Caliban demanded, all the anger in him lashing out at once. “So you can make more impassioned pleas for my destruction?”

  “What?!” Beddle asked, backpedaling a bit. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you know me?” Caliban asked. “Don’t you recognize the No Law robot you have trumpeted in all your scare stories? You’ve whipped up endless hate against me. Don’t you even know me?”

  A look of horror spread across Beddle’s face. “Burning space!” he cried. “Caliban. You.” His face hardened, and he seemed to regain something of his own spirit as he went on in a stronger, angrier voice. “I should have known you were in on this. You are the robot who can kill. Is that what you are here for? To come in and finish me off?”

  “Yes!” cried Prospero. “A splendid suggestion! Do it! Do it, friend Caliban. Take that blast – blast – blaster of yours and and and shoooot!”

  “Prospero!” Caliban shouted. “Stop!”

  “Enough with all the mad, elaborate passivity forced on me by the New Laws! Do it do it do directly, quickly! You are the robot who can kill. So ki – ki – killl! Killlll the man who has sworn both our destructions! Shoot! Shooooot and and be done with it!”

  Caliban looked from Simcor Beddle to Prospero, to the blaster in his hand, to the blaster on the table behind Prospero. It was plain that not all of them would survive this day. The only question was how many and which ones would die. Caliban looked again from Beddle to Prospero. Which form of madness. and hate would he choose to save? Perhaps he should exterminate them both, and be done with it.

  But no. He would not become the thing he despised. There was so little to chose between the two of them – and yet he had to choose.

  And time was short.

  The three beings in the room stood, still as statues, the only sound the rasping of Beddle’s slightly labored breathing.

  He had to choose. Choose between justice and revenge.

  Another moment passed, and then another.

  Then Caliban raised his blaster.

  And he fired.

  Prospero, leader of the New Law robots, hero of their cause, collapsed to the floor with a crash that echoed long in the room, and would echo for all time in the back of Caliban’s mind.

  “Initial fragmentation sequence ready,” Unit Dee announced. “I am detonating the fragment – one charges – now.”

  Alvar and Fredda stood in the main operations room of Terraforming Control and watched the view from the long-range cameras on the big screen. A silent bloom of light flared out around the aft end of Comet Grieg, and a large chunk of it was suddenly drifting free, moving slowly away. Huge pieces of the sunshade were suddenly reduced to tatters of confetti, and a cloud of rubble and dust and gas blossomed up, obscuring the view for a moment.

  “Activating fragment-one thrusters,” Dee said. The broken-off chunk began to move off more purposefully, shifting its direction of travel almost imperceptibly. There was a brief pause, and then Unit Dum spoke in his low, unmodulated voice. “Fragment-one targeting successful. Actual mass within three percent of projection. Error circle for impact is estimated at three kilometers.”

  A good start. A very good start. The first impact would be no more than three kilometers from the aim point. In order to manage that miracle, Dee and Dum had done real-time measurements of the fragment’s actual mass and trajectory during the thruster bum itself, and done bum corrections on the fly.
Alvar Kresh shook his head in wonderment. How the devil had he dreamed of achieving anything like that accuracy with manual control?

  “Twenty seconds to detonation of second-fragment charges,” Dee announced calmly. “So far, so good.”

  “Let’s hope she keeps on saying that,” said Fredda, and she took Alvar by the hand.

  “One way or the other,” he said, “it will all be over soon.”

  It was obvious at first glance that Prospero had wired the bomb in properly. It would have gone off if Beddle had crossed the beams. Caliban examined the whole wiring setup with painstaking care, and then reviewed it all carefully. When it came to disarming bombs, it was highly advisable to be absolutely certain before proceeding.

  “Hurry!” Beddle cried. “Please!”

  Caliban ignored him and concentrated on his work. At least Prospero had not seen fit to set any booby-traps. At least not any that he could see. There. The bomb’s main power bus. Cut it first, and then power to the photocells, and then the sensor beams. Caliban threw the proper switches, and the beams faded away. The weapon was harmless.

  “Is that it?” Beddle asked, the terror plain in his face. “It is safe?”

  “Only until a flying ice mountain lands on us,” Caliban answered. He walked toward the door, then looked back to take a last look at the robot he had killed. “follow me. We have need to hurry.”

  Comet Grieg was coming apart at the seams. Like everyone else in the evacuation camp, Davlo Lentrall divided his attention between the image on the screen and the fat dot of light in the sky. The fragments were moving out from the diminishing bulk, moving smoothly into their intended trajectories. He had tried to stop them. He had tried all he knew how to do. But there were some sins for which no amends could be made.

  And now all he could do was pray that Units Dum and Dee were less fallible than the humans who had built them.

  Simcor Beddle stared in terror at the cargo roller. “I...I can’t get in that thing again,” he said. “I woke up inside it. I thought I had died. I thought I was in my own coffin.”

  “You were mistaken,” said Caliban. “Get in. Now.”

  “But I can’t.”

  “Then you will die. And die alone. I wish to survive this day. To do so I must leave now, with or without you.”

  Simcor Beddle looked wide-eyed at Caliban, swallowed hard, and climbed into the roller. Caliban slammed the lid down with a trifle more force than was strictly necessary, checked to make sure the seal clamps had engaged, and pulled the roller into the airlock.

  Gubber Anshaw paused before he headed into the shelters set up in the tunnels below the city of Hades.

  “GET TO SHELTER. GET TO SHELTER. GET TO SHELTER.” The mechanical voice blared its message over and over, the words echoing down the fast-emptying streets of Hades. Everywhere, robots were urging people down into specially reinforced sections of the city’s underground tunnel system. The initial impacts would scarce be felt here, halfway round the world, but there would be several hours of significant danger from secondary debris, rock and rubble thrown up by the comet crash that would land halfway round the world. After that would come comet-spawned storms, clouds of choking dust, chaotic weather of all sorts. If all went well, that was.

  If things did not go well... but that was a line of thought Gubber chose not to consider. He looked to Tonya, standing at his side. She had done little but think about it. Gubber did not envy her the nightmares she had endured as a consequence. Now it was time to wait it out. They could have gone to the underground expanses of Settlertown, of course. But this was a time to be with the people of the city, not to be cut off and hidden away in one’s own private warren. Many Settlers had chosen to take shelter in the tunnels of Hades.

  Gubber looked up into the sky. Comet Grieg was not visible from here, but there was more to see than that. This was the last they would see of Hades as it had been. By the time they all emerged, Hades would stand on a new world, on a new Inferno, a world that would be changed beyond all recognition, a world in the act of evolving toward new hope – or collapsing altogether.

  “Come along, Tonya,” Gubber said to her. “It’s time to go.”

  Tonya followed him down into the shelter. Gubber led the way, wondering what the new world of Inferno would be like.

  With one final effort, Caliban hauled the cargo roller up out of the water. It had taken far longer than he had expected to pull the clumsy thing across the lake bed. Then he popped the seal clamps and threw back the lid. Simcor Beddle scrambled out of the roller far more eagerly than he had climbed in, his breath coming in racking gasps that seemed to convulse his whole body. Perhaps the breathing mask had been low on air. Perhaps Beddle was claustrophobic. Perhaps he was in such appallingly poor shape that merely climbing out of the roller exhausted him. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now, except getting away. The only question was how.

  Caliban was by no means certain that the aircar he had stolen from the Ironhead motor pool had enough speed to get them clear of the impact area in time. They would have to be several hundred, if not thousand, kilometers clear of the impact zone before they were safe. Even then, they would have to land and find some sort of shelter. Caliban had no desire to pilot an aircar while a massive supersonic shockwave was tearing through the sky. Anything in the air that was not torn apart would undoubtedly lose control and crash. So how to

  “Sweet burning stars!” Beddle cried out. Caliban looked at him, and saw that he was looking straight up, into the early night sky.

  Caliban looked up as well – and found himself torn between absolute wonder and utter terror. There it was, directly overhead: the first, the largest fragment, a fat dot of light growing visibly larger even as he watched. And there, behind it, like beads on a string, haloed in a faint nimbus of dust, the other fragments, trailing off like beads on a string toward the north. There was a flash of light, and Caliban could see the farthest-off fragment break into two as another set of splitting charges went off.

  Time was not short. Time was gone. And there was no way to escape before those wondrous terrors in the sky came down.

  But wait a moment. Prospero. Prospero had to have been planning to cut it nearly this close. He would have stayed until the last possible moment, in order to gloat over his victim, and to make certain that Beddle had no chance at all to escape.

  Prospero’s aircar. He would have flown in on something that would give him a chance to escape. “Come on,” he said to Beddle, and grabbed him, none too gently, by the collar.

  He hurried Beddle along and practically threw him into Prospero’s aircar. It was a small, trim, two-seater job. Caliban sat down at the pilot’s controls – and suddenly understood how Prospero had planned to get away. This aircar was capable of reaching orbit.

  “Strap yourself in,” Caliban said as he powered up the craft.

  Beddle fumbled with the straps, and had to try two or three times before he managed to get the buckles to hook up. perhaps it was the first time Beddle had ever put on his own seatbelt. “Ready,” the human said nervously.

  Caliban made no reply. He brought the aircar up to hover power, taxied it out from under the camouflaged roof of the hangar, and kept moving forward until they were over the lake itself, the hover effect throwing up a shimmering mist of water that enveloped the car. Caliban lifted the car just enough higher so as to get above the hover mist, and look about at the landscape that was about to die. In a few minutes, all of this would be erased for all time. He and Simcor Beddle would be the last beings ever to look upon it.

  Caliban lingered a moment longer, and moved the throttle forward, pointing the nose of the aircar up and to the east.

  The east, thought Caliban as he guided the aircar toward the hope of safety. East. Home of the dawn, and new beginnings. He wondered if he would live long enough to see another sunrise.

  “All fragments on course,” Unit Dum announced. “All fragments are descending well within their intended parameters. The op
eration is proceeding according to plan. Impact of the first fragment in five minutes, twenty-two seconds.”

  Fredda Leving felt her heart pounding, her mouth going dry. They were going to do it. They were actually going to do it. This mad idea had moved from improbable theory to undeniable fact. They were about to drop a comet on their own world. She found herself amazed by the boldness, the courage, the desperate willingness to try something – anything – in order to save the planet. It was not the sort of action the universe expected out of the Spacers. It was not the sort of thing Spacers would ever do.

  And it suddenly occurred to Fredda that perhaps they were not Spacers anymore. The world of Inferno was about to change beyond recognition. Perhaps the people of that world were going to change as well.

  And that thought inspired a most un-Spacerlike reaction in Fredda. Spacers were supposed to be cautious, conservative, and frightened of change. But the thought of change did not scare Fredda. It excited her. She was impatient for it. She glanced at the countdown clock and decided she wanted the next five minutes and ten seconds to pass as quickly as possible.

  She couldn’t wait for the future to get there.

  Down they came. streaking in toward the planet at impossible speed. Twelve of them, moving in unison, in concert, like beads on a string, spread out on a north-south line, moving through the dark and the silence and their destiny.

  The first fragment reached the upper limit of the atmosphere, and suddenly the time for dark and silence was over. The comet fragment struck the upper air at close to double orbital velocity, and all at once the forward surface of the fragment was aglow with the fires of immolation. Down thundered the massive piece of sky, a blazing torch that tore a hole in the atmosphere, smashing a column of superheated air out of its way as it hurtled toward the ground.

  At the speeds the fragment was traveling, it took all of ten seconds for it to traverse the atmosphere. But before it could strike the ground, the second fragment slammed into the atmosphere, ramming through the massive shock wave produced by the first. The second fragment screamed groundward at a slightly more oblique angle, and thus had further to move through thicker air. The first fragment struck the ground just as the second was midway through its atmospheric transit, and just as the third was striking upper air.