a blaster, or even firing it—so long as the robot did not fire at a human. Were the two of them out there, hiding in the scrubby line of trees that surrounded the clearing, wondering if he, Donald 111, were about to charge out of the aircar, guns blazing?
Absurd nonsense. Just because there was no prohibition against a thing, that did not render it plausible or sensible. A strange point to consider. It was just the sort of argument used to defend Caliban. Donald got up out of the pilot’s seat, opened the hatch of the aircar, and stepped out onto the ground without giving way to any further nonsense.
There. At the edge of the clearing. The two pseudo-robots, Caliban and Prospero, the one tall and red, the other shorter and jet-black. They moved forward cautiously, and it did not escape Donald’s notice that they both kept their hands in plain sight at all times.
Donald offered no greeting or salutation, but instead launched directly into formal procedure, using the formula they had negotiated via hyperwave link. “As per our agreement, I hereby remand both of you into the custody of the Hades Sheriff s Department, seconded to the Governor’s Rangers. You are therefore submitted to the authority of the Sheriff and his duly designated deputies, as well as to the authority of the Governor’s Rangers. So long as you do not resist such authority, and do not attempt to escape, you will not be harmed, punished, or destroyed without due process.” But what was due process in such a case? Donald did not know. Did anyone? And could he really make such promises when he had not informed Sheriff Kresh that he was making this arrest? “Do you understand?” he asked the two pseudorobots. It was a most strange moment. When else, in all of history, had one robot in effect arrested two other robots—or near-robots—for murder?
“I understand,” Prospero said.
“As do I,” said Caliban.
“Then come,” Donald said, gesturing for them to go into the aircar. Caliban and Prospero walked past him, and through the aircar hatch. Donald followed behind, climbing aboard and closing the hatch behind him. The two of them had seated themselves in the passenger seats. Donald took his place at the controls and began preparations for takeoff.
It was over. He had them. He had to get back. He would be barely in time for the briefing as it was. He knew he should lift off immediately, without delay. But the empty formalism of taking them into custody was not enough. It was anticlimactic, unsatisfying. It did not answer the central question of the case. And Donald, as befitted a police robot, had a most powerful sense of curiosity.
He turned around in his seat and faced Prospero and Caliban. There was of course nothing, nothing at all to be read in their posture or their faces. Donald found that disturbing, for some reason. He had always been able to see something in a suspect’s face. But then, suspects were humans, not robots.
Perhaps that was the trouble. These two were neither one nor the other. They were not true robots—but they were far from being human either. Something in between. Something less—and perhaps, Donald conceded, something more—than either.
But none of that mattered now. There was only one thing that Donald needed to know.
“Did you kill Chanto Grieg?” Donald asked, forcing the bald question out into the world. Kill. Kill. He was asking beings very like himself, very much like robots, beings built by the same Fredda Leving who had created Donald himself, if they had murdered a human being. The very thought of it was enough to disrupt his cognitive function for a moment. But Donald was a police robot, and used to thoughts of violence.
He knew that these two did not have the true robot’s inability to lie, but that did not matter. He still needed to ask. He needed to hear the answer—true or false—in their voices. “Did you kill Chanto Grieg, or were the two of you part of any plot to kill him?”
“No,” Caliban said, speaking for the two of them after a moment’s hesitation. “We did not. We had nothing whatever to do with his death, and had no foreknowledge of it. We did not meet with him so we could kill him.”
“Then what was your purpose?”
Caliban paused another moment, and looked again at Prospero before he spoke. And suddenly there was something readable in his manner, in his actions. It was the look of someone about to take a step from which there was no turning back, of someone launching themselves off into the abyss with no way of knowing what waited down below. “We met with him,” Caliban said, “so we could blackmail him.”
11
“OTTLEY BISSAL,” Donald said. A grainy blowup of a still image from the integrator sequence appeared on the left side of the main display screen. A sharp, clear 3-D mug shot image popped into being on the right side. There was no doubt it was the same man. “As Dr. Leving predicted, Bissal did indeed leave a calling card behind, so to speak.”
Donald was standing by the screen at one end of a conference table, addressing Fredda, Sheriff Kresh, and Commander Devray. About fourteen hours had passed since Kresh had discovered the body, and about three since Fredda had found the destroyed SPR robot in the lowerlevel storage room.
Fredda felt utterly exhausted, and knew that no one else was doing much better. Kresh had caught a quick nap, and Devray probably had too. But no one was going to be doing much sleeping for a while. Donald was the only one of them at his best—
“The Crime Scene robots recovered multiple fingerprints,” Donald went on, “along with hairs and flecks of skin, from the interior of one of the storage closets in the room where the security robots were held. It is clear that Bissal secreted himself in that closet for some time—long enough that he shed several hairs and several flecks of dandruff and other dead skin. From these we recovered DNA samples that provided a definitive match with Bissal’s employment file. The fingerprint evidence from the door frame of the closet door provided independent corroboration of this identification.”
“All right,” said Justen Devray. “The guy in the closet was Ottley Bissal. So who the hell is Ottley Bissal?”
“That,” said Donald, “is the question we have been working to answer since the forensic identity team gave us a name, about half an hour ago. We have made very rapid progress—mainly because every law enforcement service on the planet seems to have had an extensive file on Bissal.”
“Wonderful,” Kresh said. “That means everyone is going to wonder why we didn’t do anything about him before he killed the Governor. Go on, Donald. What was in the files?”
“Ottley Bissal,” Donald said, reading off the file. “Single, never married, age twenty-seven standard years. Born and raised in a lower-class area of the city of Hades. Limited education. Low general aptitude shown on a number of evaluative tests taken at school. Notations from various schoolteachers and counselors to the effect that he was a disruptive child and a low achiever. Once out of school, he worked various odd jobs with long stretches of nonemployment or nonregistered employment in between. Few known associates or friends.”
“The classic loser-loner, it sounds like,” said Devray.
“I take it there were a few brushes with the law?” Kresh asked.
“Yes, sir. Many arrests, some indictments, but only a few convictions. There seem to be two major categories of offense to which he was prone: street brawling and petty theft. He was granted a suspended sentence for his first assault conviction six years ago. Four years ago, he served three months time in the Hades City Jail for theft.
“As a second-time offender, he was required to obtain employment upon release and hold a job for no less than an accumulated total of five years. With discharges for cause from various jobs, and bouts of unemployment, he has only accumulated three years of employment thus far. His parole officer rates his progress as ‘unsatisfactory.’ ”
“I’m not real clear on the business about a job,” Fredda said. “How does holding a job make sense as part of punishment for assault?”
“Well, if you were in law enforcement, it would make a great deal of sense,” Kresh said. “The average formal unemployment rate on Inferno is ninety percent. Only ten percent of the population have a full-time occupation for which they receive significant compensation. No one needs to work in order to live, not with robots taking care of
