appreciate your frank talk, friend Gildern. Any of your reasons would be strong by itself. All of them together are compelling indeed.”
Gildern gestured toward his robot, and took his datapad back again, and worked the controls as he spoke. “I haven’t quite given all my reasons, sir. There is one more.” He handed the datapad over to Beddle, and then leaned back in his chair. “Take a good hard look at where Lentrall wants the damned things to hit.”
Beddle looked at his subordinate in puzzlement, and then looked at the map displayed on the datapad’s screen. After a moment, the confusion faded away from his face, to be replaced by a broad smile, and then uproarious laughter. “Oh, splendid! Splendid!” Beddle said when he recovered enough to speak. “I could not have planned it better myself. The gods of myth and legend could not have arranged things better.”
Jadelo Gildern smiled as he watched the leader of his party studying the map in more detail, still chuckling to himself. Simcor Beddle was right, of course. The thing could not have been arranged any more neatly than it had been.
But perhaps Simcor Beddle would have been better advised to reflect further on who was doing the arranging.
DAVLO LENTRALL GLARED at the elevator door, and jammed his finger down on the button, as if having a human finger push it this time would make a difference, since the elevator hadn’t arrived when Kaelor had pushed the button. The meeting with Kresh and Leving was over, and he wanted to get out of this place. “What the devil is going on?” he demanded.
“I’m sorry, sir,” a disembodied robot voice said. “All elevator service to the roof of Government Tower has been temporarily discontinued.”
Lentrall was taken aback, if only for a moment. In a world full of robotic monitors, rhetorical questions frequently received answers. Somewhere there was a camera, and somewhere a robot was seated at a console, watching the view from that camera and several dozen others. “I need to get to the rooftop landing pad. My aircar is up there!” Lentrall protested. The meeting with the governor and his wife had gone well, and Lentrall was impatient to get back to his lab and get back to work. There were a thousand details to be seen to, a thousand points to research. He couldn’t waste time waiting around for a gang of robots to repair the wobbly railing, or whatever other deadly peril had closed off the roof.
“I am sorry, sir,” the robot voice replied, “but there is a safety hazard on the roof at the present time. First Law requires that—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Lentrall said irritably. “I know all that. But my aircar is up there, and I need it to get home.”
“You are not alone in this difficulty, sir. If you will take the elevator to the ground level, arrangements have been made to have robot pilots shuttle the aircars down to the main plaza. They should be able to begin that operation in a few minutes, while it might well be a delay of up to an hour before the roof is opened again.”
Davlo let out a weary sigh. “Very well,” he said, “I suppose that will have to do. Come along, Kaelor.”
“One moment sir,” his robot said. “I should like to ask the nature of the safety hazard on the roof.”
Just then the elevator arrived. “What difference can that make?” Davlo demanded. “Come along.”
“Very well, sir.”
The two of them stepped into the elevator car and headed down.
“LOBBY TEAM REPORTS Lentrall and his robot are just coming off the elevator. They are headed toward the plaza.”
“I see them,” said Cinta Melloy as she watched through magniviewers. From her vantage point across the street and twenty stories up, Lentrall didn’t appear to be worried or suspicious. That was all to the good. Even better was that his security team was still up on the roof of the building, dealing with the safety hazard that Cinta’s people had arranged: an airtruck, carrying a load of maintenance supplies—including one barrel of flammable cleaning fluid that had sprung a dramatic leak the moment it had touched down.
Right now there was no bigger problem than a bad leak of a mildly hazardous chemical, just enough of a nuisance to make any self-respecting Three-Law robot seal off the area, shut down the elevators, hustle all the nearby humans off the roof and into the building, and generally disrupt things. But if things got organized and settled down too quickly, then Cinta was ready, willing, and able to cause a short-circuit aboard the airtruck. Her dirty-tricks people promised that the resultant fireball would be spectacular, but unlikely in the extreme to hurt anyone or cause any significant damage.
That was important. Cinta’s side was playing rough, but there were limits. She was smart enough to know that sooner or later—probably sooner—the CIP would be able to trace this whole operation to her SSS covert action teams. She would just as soon the official complaints did not involve fatalities. The dirty-tricks techs could promise whatever they liked, but explosions had a way of not staying controlled. Things were going to have to get very bad indeed for her to be willing to risk pressing that button. The main thing was that they had separated Lentrall from his security detail—in fact prevented them from hooking up at all.
Everything ought to work. It was a reasonable, straightforward plan. But there had been so little time. Welton had moved too quickly from ordering contingency plans to ordering the snatch itself to take place immediately. Cinta didn’t like rushing things. That was the way mistakes got made.
“Plaza team in position,” the voice in her ear reported.
Cinta studied the plaza through the magniviewers, but there was no way to tell which of the dozens of people there were hers. Good. Then maybe no one else would be able to spot them either.
Robots. Robots were going to be the problem. Cinta could count at least ten of them in the plaza. They would, of course, move instantly to prevent a kidnapping—given the chance.
But, if all went well, they wouldn’t get the chance. Cinta looked up Aurora Boulevard. There it was. A land- transport bus, parked a few blocks away. In a minute or so, it was going to be heading toward Government Plaza at just slightly too high a rate of speed. Cinta smiled to herself. It was hard to control that particular model of bus. If the driver wasn’t careful, there was likely to be an accident.
JUSTEN DEVRAY WAS nearly home when the call came in. Gervad was flying them by the slow, scenic, restful route. Justen had had a long day, and he was glad of taking the easy way home. He liked to unwind on the ride home. A long day indeed. It was midday on the day after he had started work. He had been up nearly thirty hours straight at this point. Strange to be flying home to rest in the bright light of midday.
His eyes were heavy. He was almost tempted to turn off the hyperwave tuned to scan the police frequencies. But the constant low mutter of voices was a part of the everyday background of his life. He left it on, leaned back in his chair, and shut his eyes.
And then he heard the voice.
“CIP Metro Dispatch, this is Government Tower Topside.”
Something about the voice jerked Justen awake. Then he understood. It was a human voice. A robot should have been the one handling communications from the rooftop guard post. And another thing: Lentrall’s security detail was waiting for him on the rooftop landing pad.
Suddenly Justen was wide awake. He sat bolt upright in his seat. “Turn this thing around!” he told Gervad. “Back toward Government Tower at full speed.”
“Yes, sir,” the robot replied, calm and imperturbable. He brought the car about in a wide arc and headed back toward the center of the city.
Justen reached for the scanner controls, and turned up the volume.
“—ave an accident in progress here,” the voice went on. “A transport landed a little hard, and one of the containers on board must have popped a seam. We’ve got a flammable liquid spill up here. Can’t tell you more than that. The robots up here have forced us off the roof proper.”
“We are receiving hyperwave reports from the security robots on the scene, Government Tower Topside,” a calm robotic voice replied from somewhere, probably CIP HQ. “Clean-up crews are being dispatched.”
The damned fools! Justen stabbed at the controls, and set his aircar mike to the same frequency. “This is Commander Devray, en route to Government Tower and monitoring. Who is that at Topside?”
“Sergeant Senall Delmok, sir.”
Perfect. Delmok was the least experienced officer on the Topside detail. “Delmok, since when are cleaning
