So why was Lentrall bothering? Or was all this nonsense a cover for something else—and if so, what?
Lentrall looked behind himself again, and Cinta ducked out of sight again, or at least tried to do so. She wasn’t even quite sure why she was following him. She had simply spotted him on the street, and started trailing him.
Up went another poster. Cinta shook her head and gave it up. She turned around and started back the way she had come. She was tempted to order a formal watch kept on Lentrall, assign the job to less obvious and more skillful watchers than herself. If she wasn’t so badly short-handed, she would have done just that. But there were so damned many others to watch.
At least the evacuation itself seemed to proceeding in an orderly and sensible fashion. The heavy lifters, the construction crews, the seemingly endless series of auxiliary services-emergency medical, motor pool repair, preimpact cartography, provisions, accommodation and sanitation for all the extra bodies—somehow, incredibly, it all seemed to be dropping into place. Those Dee and Dum units Kresh was nursemaiding clearly knew their stuff.
But there was plenty else happening—and none of it seemed even remotely promising to Melloy. She had loaned a detachment of SSS personnel to the evacuation effort, as per Tonya Welton’s orders, and Cinta had even flown to Depot to take personal charge of it herself. But none of it was doing any good. The SSS was here, doing its overt job—but they also had a covert agenda. They were supposed to watch the other players in the game—and the others were giving them plenty to watch.
The CIP had its own security people out, and they were watching the SSS—as they should have been. There was still the Government Tower Plaza fiasco on the books, after all. The Ironheads seemed to be everywhere, out in force, the black uniform visible on every street, in every shop. One of the SSS watch teams had even spotted their old friend Norlan Fiyle, quite openly going into and out of the local Ironhead HQ. And then there were the hordes of New Law robots, frantically conducting their own evacuation out of their undersized offices over on Shipping Street. The SSS had stacks of images of Caliban, the No Law robot, going in and out of there, and a fair collection of shots of Prospero too—though he seemed to come in less often, and stay for shorter periods.
Maybe every last one of them had nothing but sweetness and light on their minds. Maybe all of them had nothing but thoughts of doing good deeds and building the planet Inferno into the Paradise it had been meant to be. Cinta doubted it, but such a thing was possible.
But disaster could follow on even the best of intentions. And Cinta Melloy was sure that at least someone in this town had less than the best of intentions.
SIMCOR BEDDLE SMILED as he looked out the viewport of the aircar. There was a fair-sized crowd there to welcome him to Depot. Indeed, quite a large crowd, considering the small size of Depot and its distance from civilization. Simcor Beddle had spent most of the last three weeks shuttling back and forth between Hades and Depot. But every time he returned to Depot, the crowds were still there.
Thank Gildern for that, Beddle told himself. Thank Gildern for everything. The man was indispensable.
But it would be best not to keep the crowd waiting. He would have to hurry in order to get ready. Or, more accurately, for the robots to get him ready.
The pilot robot completed the standard landing safety crosscheck. An attendant robot released Simcor’s seat restraint system for him while a second helped him to his feet. Simcor got up and moved around behind his seat. He stood in the center of the largest piece of open flat deck in the car while the two attendant robots stripped him out of his rumpled travel coveralls. He stepped into the car’s compact refresher unit, and waited for the first attendant to reach in and activate the system. The water jets came to life around him.
There was no time for a full-length needle shower, and, indeed, the aircar’s refresher did not include many of the amenities Beddle took for granted in the first place, but one did have to rough it, now and again. Besides, even a few seconds under the refresher’s spray arms proved most reviving. He allowed the hot-air jets to dry him, and then stepped back outside to the main cabin.
It was the work of a moment for the attendant robots to dress Beddle in the jet-black formal uniform of the Ironheads. Almost before he was aware of it, he was ready, all his decorations gleaming, his boots shined to mirror brightness, his perfectly combed hair under his perfectly placed cap.
One attendant robot held up a mirror, and Beddle nodded in satisfaction at his own reflection. It was always important to make a good appearance. He gestured for the second robot to open the side hatch of the car. It swung open, and Beddle stepped forward to face the cheering crowd.
There was Gildern, standing on a low platform, leading the applause. And there were the cameras at the back of the crowd, recording it all, feeding it to every outlet the Ironheads could get their hands on. Beddle smiled, stepped down from the car and crossed to the speaker’s platform, his two attendant robots behind him.
He nodded his thanks to Gildern, and then turned to the crowd. “Well,” he began in a loud, carrying voice. “Here I am again.” That drew the good-natured laugh he had intended. He gestured in the vague direction of the sky. “But on the other hand there’s someone else—or rather something else—on the way. Comet Grieg is going to be here in another ten days. By then we all need to be out of here. All of us in the Ironhead party understand how much all of you here in the Utopia region are being asked to give up. We all know how great the reward for the whole planet will be—but no matter how great that reward for others, it is not right that you people here should be expected to pay the price for it. And we’ll see to it that you do not.
“I don’t think Governor Alvar Kresh quite sees things that way. And just by the way, has Kresh paid a call to Utopia yet? Is he going to come here at all, before Utopia isn’t here anymore? He’s promised a certain amount of relocation funding for each of you. Well, that’s all well and good, as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough! We Ironheads are prepared to go a lot further. We’ll see to it that all of you are properly resettled. We’ll see to it that your temporary accommodation is as good as it can be. We’ll see to it that all of your movable property goes with you—and not just the ‘essential’ property Alvar Kresh has promised you can keep!”
And that brought the round of cheers that Beddle had expected. Never mind that keeping half of the promises he had been making would bankrupt the Ironhead party. Never mind that the Ironhead contribution to transport and shelter and all the rest of it was barely measurable. By the time all of that became clear, people would be far too busy putting their lives back together to worry about the details of political promises—and Beddle would have laid in a endless stock of political capital as the man who remembered the ordinary citizen while the government was too busy with its grand projects to bother.
Beddle waited until just before the cheers would have died out on their own, and then raised his hands for silence. “But friends, if there’s one thing we all know, it’s that time is short. So while I thank you for coming out, I hope you won’t mind if I keep this brief. We all have work to do. Now let’s all go do it!”
That last bit didn’t really have much in the way of meaning, but the crowd cheered anyway. Beddle smiled for the cameras, and waved to the crowd, then let Gildern lead him to a small open-body runcart.
“A very nice little speech, sir,” Gildern said.
“Good enough for the purpose at hand,” Beddle replied evenly. Somehow praise from Gildern threw him off stride. It seemed out of character. “Let’s get where we’re going, shall we?”
“Yes, sir. There’s some news that might well interest you.”
The two men climbed into the back of the runcart and the robot driver started the vehicle up. Beddle looked around with interest as they made their way through the small town. He was surprised to see how slowly they made progress. Traffic was in a hopeless snarl. Depot was as frantically busy as an overturned ant-heap—to use the sort of nature-based imagery that was so suddenly popular these days, now that terraforming was all the rage.
Simcor Beddle shook his head thoughtfully. It was strange to think of, but five years ago, the image of comparison would have been based on robots in some way. “Busy as a robot,” or some such. Times had changed, not only in big ways, but in strange and subtle small ones.
He and Gildern had plotted endlessly over ways to eliminate the New Law robots and get rid of the Settlers. Ways to get rid of the disturbing influences, so that life could get back to normal, back to the way Spacers were meant to live.
But in recent days it occurred to Beddle that it might be the small things that would be hardest to change back. Perhaps the Ironheads could rebuild a world that had no Settlers, had no New Law robots, had no robotic labor shortage. But how could they wipe the memory of those things from people’s minds?
In the old days, the people of Inferno had only known of one way to do things, one way of living life: have
