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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?
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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 that he was impressed--very impressed--by the
way she had handled herself in the midst of all this chaos. There was a lot to
admire about the young, smart, and beautiful Fredda Leving. But Kresh did not
feel he could rely too much on her instincts when it came to criminal
investigation. She had shown in Verick s interrogation that she thought in too
straight a line for police work. Maybe the direct approach worked in science,
where the facts did not mind being discovered. Police work, on the other hand,
was a form of research where the facts were often determined to elude capture.
Head straight for them and they d be bound to escape.
All right, Donald, Alvar said. Let s get started. What do we have, and what
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do we need?
We have ascertained, through Tierlaw Verick s statement, that Caliban and
Prospero were almost certainly the last to see Governor Grieg alive,
Donald said. I have placed an all-points bulletin for their capture, but it
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