rippling green on the horizon, so dim they were hard to see, but even that little trace of warmth and color seemed quite out of place in such a time and place as this.
Sergeant Toth Resato was uncomfortable. He was out of uniform, for one thing, and, worse still, wearing Settler-style civilian clothes. He felt like a damned fool in the gaudy things, but the boat for which he was waiting was not likely to come into shore if anyone aboard spotted a Ranger’s uniform.
But there were lots of things about this assignment that Toth liked less than the dress code. He was sworn to uphold the law, and he would do his duty. He was sworn to keep the peace, and he would do that too. But what of those times when the law itself was what broke the peace? What was he to do when the world turned upside- down and a fellow could be arrested for what had been legal—even honorable—the day or the week before?
How could Spacers—Spacers—make it illegal to obtain a robot? Settlers were the ones who wanted to ban robots. It didn’t make sense to him. And yet, here he was, freezing to death in the darkness, lying in wait because he had gotten a tip that a smuggler was making a run tonight, bringing in contraband New Law robots— rustbacks.
That was the part Toth just could not get through his head. How could having a robot be a crime? It just didn’t make sense. It was as if breathing or eating had been declared illegal.
Toth tended to exaggerate, even to himself. It wasn’t, he admitted to himself, exactly illegal to own a robot —but it was getting close to that point. It didn’t help matters that he had never done a rustbacking arrest before, or even dealt with New Law robots. He did not feel confident, or ready, for the task ahead.
In theory, any private robots taken for use in the terraforming project remained the property of the original owner. However, ownership didn’t count for much when your former valet was suddenly fifteen thousand kilometers away on the other side of the planet, operating a prairie breeding center. People were not happy. And they wanted robots.
There was more about economics and shortages and so forth that was supposed to explain it all, but it didn’t seem to make a great deal of sense to Toth. After all, if there were a shortage of something, why not just make more of it? And how could there be a shortage of robots in the first place? Why not just build more? The government had all sorts of complicated explanations, all about scarcity of resources and investing productive capacity in the planet’s future, but no one could understand the numbers.
The people were being asked to take it on faith that they had to make sacrifices in the name of a better future—but a lot of people did not have much faith. All they knew, and all they cared about, was that there were not enough robots, and everyday life on Inferno had been thrown into turmoil. Even if, as everyone kept saying, there were a hundred times more robots than people on the planet, there were still too few robots.
The whole rustback phenomenon, the enormous criminal enterprise that went with them, was merely an expression of the fact that people wanted robots, and were willing to do anything—even commit crimes—in order to get them.
The detector at his belt beeped. Toth Resato looked down at the display screen and then lifted his night vision farviewers to his eyes. Yes, there they were. Out on the sea, in an open boat, headed this way. There would be a larger craft out there somewhere, the rest of the cargo of rustbacks aboard it, waiting for the human pilot to shuttle them into shore.
Rustbacks. Outlaw New Law robots, escaping from Purgatory, heading off into the wilderness of Terra Grande to what the Settler economists called “indentured servitude.” They would work off the price of what it cost to smuggle them out of Purgatory, then work for a wage if and when they paid the debt. Or, that is, they would have done all that if Toth had not been waiting for them.
Toth had sat through the training sessions that were supposed to explain the basis of economic crime, so that the Rangers would be able to deal with it better. He had dozed through most of them, but he remembered the Settler economists and how they had blathered on about supply and demand, how no Spacer world had experienced a labor shortage in thousands of years. How unlimited free labor had in turn eroded the value of raw materials down to nothing. The lecturers had said something about the law of supply and demand, and how with supply of everything essentially infinite, demand—and price—had dropped to zero.
Robots completely overturned any concept of a market economy. The use, and even the concept, of money had evaporated away almost entirely.
But now, suddenly, the robots weren’t there to do things and make things for free. Now there was a shortage of labor, and therefore labor—and materials obtained by labor—had a meaningful value.
For the first time in living memory, everything had a price. The catch was none of the incredibly wealthy Spacers had any money—only possessions. They were more or less forced to trade what they owned to get the products or services that had been essentially free. Inferno had dropped back into a semibarter economy. Toth had followed most of the lecture, if not all, but it was clear to him the people lecturing him were missing the point.
The economists seemed fascinated by their charts and graphs and markets, but they never seemed to understand that people, real people, were hurting.
The capital city of Hades had seemed deserted, dingy, the last time Toth had been there for a visit. Nothing seemed bright or alive there. A fine layer of dust had settled on everything, blown from the deserts.
Without the hordes of cleaning robots bustling about downtown, everything had seemed a little worn, a little threadbare and sad, as if the buildings and streets knew that the desert sands were edging just a trifle closer to town.
With the robots gone, the city—its human population intact—seemed almost a ghost town. That irony was not lost even on Toth, and Toth knew there was not much of the poet in his soul. What could you say about a city that seemed halfdead because the machines had left and the people had stayed?
And the people were desperate. There were plenty of sharp operators ready, willing, and able to take advantage of that desperation. The Settler traders were bad enough, buying up works of art and family heirlooms for a pittance in Settler credits, but at least those were legal transactions.
The rustback trade was not. The whole rustback industry had sprung up as if by magic the moment the Governor made his pronouncement impressing “surplus” robots into the terraforming service. It had grown since, in size and sophistication, until now it was a huge and sophisticated enterprise.
There were the restrictor strip shops on Purgatory, where, for a fee, a pull artist would remove the range restrictors from a New Law robot. There were the brokers, charging horrifying amounts of money or making ruinous barters to the Spacers who needed robots, any robots. There were the smugglers ready to get a boatful of N. L. robots off Purgatory, or else fly an aircar full of them, risking detection by the traffic control nets.
And then there were the New Law robots themselves. They were the real mystery. The humans Toth could understand. After all, they were not much different from other criminals willing to risk harsh punishment for the sake of massive profit. But the New Law robots were a mystery to him.
Were New Law robots really robots in the first place? They only had half a First Law, after all. They were enjoined from harming a human being, but they could, if they chose, stand by and let a human being be killed. One of the primordial protections of Spacer existence was no longer there. How could anyone feel safe around them? New Law robots were not required to obey the orders of a human, either. They were required to “cooperate” with humans. No one seemed to be quite sure what “cooperate” meant to a robot. And what if there were two groups of humans with different ideas? With which would a New Law robot “cooperate”?
Cooperating meant running away, at least to some N. L. s, and Toth could not understand why. A rustback had to work just as hard, if not harder, than a New Law that stayed where it belonged. Some of the New Law robots talked about having at least the hope of being free someday, but what could freedom mean to a robot? And yet, he was here waiting on another boatload of New Law robots, risking their very existence in hope of freedom.
And they were heading his way right now. A boatload of runaway robots. Runaway robots. It was almost a contradiction in terms.
Toth watched in the farviewers as they got closer. He saw the signal light blink from the bow of the boat. Three long blinks, then three shorts.
Toth just happened to know that the man on the boat was named Norlan Fiyle, and that Fiyle was expecting a rather hard-edged woman named Floria Wentle to signal back. Toth had recently made Wentle’s acquaintance, and provided her with a rather more permanent accommodation than she might have preferred. It had taken merely the slightest mention of the Psychic Probe to make her reveal all concerning Fiyle and his plans for the shipment tonight. It seemed there wasn’t much to the idea of honor among thieves.
