“No, no, of course not,” Verick said. “There were a number of other people waiting their turn before me. Eight or ten of them altogether, but in twos and threes. I had to wait until they were done, but I didn’t much mind. After all, I didn’t have to fly home afterwards—and besides, by being the last one in line, I had the chance to stay a little longer. No one was waiting behind me.”
And you’ve just told us you were the last one to see Grieg alive, Kresh thought. He stole the tiniest of glances at Devray, and saw the point had not been lost on him, either. “So what did the two of you talk about?” Kresh asked.
It was plainly obvious that Verick’s patience was running thin. “I have told you and told you. About my desire to sell him a control station. He seemed most interested in it, for a number of reasons—mostly because it wasn’t a robotic system.”
“I beg your pardon?” Kresh asked. That was the benefit of repeated questioning. Verick hadn’t offered that little tidbit in the previous go-rounds.
“Our Settler system is not robotic,” Verick said. “I did what I could to point out the advantages of that to the Governor. That was mostly what we talked about. He seemed quite receptive.”
“Why would he be against a robotic system?” Fredda asked.
“Too conservative for a situation as far gone as Inferno,” Verick said. “Hook a robot-brain control unit up to the terraforming system and it will avoid all potentially risky operations, for fear of doing harm to human beings, or some damn thing.” He was warming to his subject, obviously going through the arguments he had used on Grieg. “A robotic control system would do all it could to avoid all risk during the terraforming process—almost certainly delaying completion, and possibly causing the project to fail altogether. Even if it succeeded in terraforming the planet, its goal would be to create an utterly risk-free final environment when the reterraforming was complete. There are Spacer worlds that are virtually nothing more than planetwide well-manicured lawns. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that those are the worlds where the populations have fallen asleep—or vanished completely.”
That was a low blow. Solaria. No Spacer liked to be reminded of—or think about—the collapse of Solaria.
Verick looked around and saw that he had scored a point. “A robotic system, obsessed with risk avoidance, would lead to a very bland sort of world here. As I told the Governor, not exactly a fit environment if you want future generations to be able to deal with challenges.”
“All right,” Kresh said, not having to try much in trying to play the part of the rude cop. “That’s enough speeches for now. So you talked to the Governor. Then what?”
“Then we said our good nights, and he said he had some other things to attend to, and so he saw me to the door of his office. We shook hands there, and I stepped around the robots in the hallway and went on my way. I’m afraid I got a bit turned around in the hallways and walked around in a bit of a circle. After a bit, I realized that I was going to end up right back where I had started, at the door to the Governor’s apartment. I thought of asking the two robots I had seen by the door for directions, but by then they weren’t there anymore. I suppose they had already gone in.”
“Gone in?” Kresh asked. He had assumed the robots Verick had mentioned by the door were SPRs on sentry duty. But sentry robots stay where they were. “Where did the robots go?”
“To tuck him in for the night, I suppose. I’ve heard you Spacers can’t even get undressed without a robot to help.”
Fredda seemed about to respond to that, but Kresh stepped forward and put a hand on her shoulder. It did no good at all for the suspect to find out he could bait the inquisitors.
“Some of us can manage on our own,” Kresh said, a bit of steel behind the soft words. But the sentry should not have left its post. And there should have been one robot on door duty, not two. Kresh had a feeling he knew the answer to his next question. “These robots,” he said. “Can you describe them?”
“I don’t have much time for robots,” Verick said. “I don’t like ’em and I don’t trust ’em.”
“But you can see them,” Kresh said, his voice hard-edged. “What did the two robots look like?”
Verick looked up at Kresh, visibly annoyed. “There was a very tall, angular-looking red one. Shiny red. I wouldn’t want to mess with him. The other was shorter, and shiny black.”
Justen Devray and Fredda Leving both looked from Verick to Kresh, both of them understanding.
The last two beings to see Grieg alive were Prospero and Caliban. New Law and No Law.
One robot whose internal Laws did not require it to prevent harm to a human.
And one who had no Laws at all. Who could harm whatever humans it liked.
8
SERO PHROST LOOKED down into the grey darkness of the sea below as his aircar swooped back toward Purgatory. No explanation, no apology, just the flat order to turn back—an order his pilot robot was obeying, despite his best efforts to convince it otherwise. The turn-back order came from a traffic safety center, and the First Law saw to it that that was all a robot needed to know in order to force obedience.
But why the turn-around? An arrest order? What did they think they knew? And arrested for what? He would have to be careful, very careful. More than one person had been pulled in on a minor charge and made the mistake of assuming it was about some larger matter.
Or was it his own arrest that he was flying back toward? Phrost looked out the porthole and saw the running lights of several other aircars heading back to Purgatory. A dragnet? Perhaps, if he permitted himself to grasp at straws, it had nothing to do with him at all. It could be they were acting on a rustbacking tip-off, and pulling back all flights that had left at a certain time. No way to know. Perhaps it had nothing at all to do with him.
The guilty flee when no one pursues. Admit nothing, reveal nothing. There was still every chance for him to win out.
The dark sky rushed past him.
Alvar Kresh glanced at the wall clock in the operations room. Just before 0700 hours. A bare five hours since he had found the body, though it seemed that enough had happened since then to fill up a month’s worth of days. Tierlaw Verick was filed away for future reference, held under close guard in the same room in which he had been questioned, while the Crime Scene robots went over the room in which he had slept. Kresh doubted that Verick had anything to do with the assassination, but hunches were no way to run an investigation. Who knew what they might find, until they looked?
Someone had set up a conference table in the ops room, and Kresh, Fredda Leving, and Justen Devray sat at three of its sides, while Donald 111 stood at the fourth. All of them—even Donald, somehow—seemed exhausted, drawn out, the press of events leaving them all far behind the pace. And yet it seemed they were no further ahead than they had been when they had started.
The clock was moving, and moving fast. Kresh dared not delay much longer in contacting the key members of the government, or in announcing Grieg’s death to all Inferno.
But the moment he did that, Kresh knew, all hell would break loose. He could not foresee what form the chaos would take, but he knew, beyond doubt, that there would be chaos. He desperately needed to have much of this investigation under control before the news broke wide. And the damage could only be made worse if the first announcement came from someplace beside Alvar Kresh’s own mouth—a probability that was increasing with every second that passed.
A deputy might say something over an unscrambled channel that would be overheard, or call a friend or family member with the news, or give or sell the story of the century to a friend in the news business. Or the killers might decide it suited their purposes to make the announcement. Or someone who called Grieg might do what Kresh had done, and realize the Grieg on the other end was a simulation. The sim was still running on the phone system, half to help keep the lid on and half to leave it intact for the analysis teams.
They would have to make the announcement soon, very soon, if they were to keep any sort of control over events. But before Kresh told anyone anything, he needed a chance to think, to compare notes, to plan. A council of war—because it might quite literally be that Grieg’s death was the opening shot in an actual war. There was no way to know.
He was sure Justen Devray understood all that, and it at least seemed as if Fredda Leving did. Kresh found
