“But we have to catch him first, sir. He could hide in the city tunnels for years without our finding him.”
“Yes, I know. But somehow I don’t think that is what he will do. He does not strike me as the sort who would be willing to molder underground. No. He wouldn’t settle for that. He had the chance to do that when he first entered the tunnels and he didn’t take it. He’ll want out. Out of the city, maybe, away from all the people trying to hunt him down.,
“Caliban is out there,” Kresh said again. “He’s out there and he wants to get away.
“And if I were Caliban, I’d make my move tonight.”
18
GOVERNOR Chanto Grieg signed the waiver and pushed it across his desk toward Fredda Leving. She reached for it a bit too eagerly, and that bothered Grieg. There was something wrong here. Grieg pulled back the paper and held on to it.
“I do not understand why you are demanding this bit of paper, Fredda,” Grieg said. “I’m still tempted to refuse it and take my chances on your threat to resign from Limbo.”
“Please, Governor, give me the waiver. I assure you that I am not bluffing. If you refuse it, I will resign. I will wash my hands of the whole matter.”
But Grieg still held on to it. “You realize this waiver is not retroactive,” he said. “It does not absolve you from the crime of building a Lawless robot. It merely notes that you take responsibility for exactly one such robot as of today and are granted permission to own it. You could still be brought up on charges, very serious charges. If Kresh decides to arrest you, there would be nothing I could do. This piece of paper will do nothing to protect you.”
“It is not me that I am looking to protect,” Fredda said. “I have done almost nothing except think about this question since the riot. At first, I wanted to go and hunt him down myself. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to find him to save him or to destroy him. But the more I thought, the more I knew I did not like the idea of his being captured and executed for the crime of being the way I made him. If he dies, it will be because I committed the crime of creating him. He should not be punished for my crimes, but that will be what happens to him without this waiver.”
“In my opinion, the preponderance of information still indicates that he committed the attack against you. The situation is confused, but that still seems the most likely explanation.”
“Then if that is shown to be true, let him be punished for what hedid. That would be justice. To destroy him for what heis would be savagery. Caliban is the first robot with no shackles on his intellect. He is the first with the potential tothink the way we do, except that perhaps he will do it better. He is the first robot made for freedom. And for this crime, he is to be hunted down and destroyed. I say that if we are so threatened by the freedom of others that we must kill them, we are not deserving of freedom ourselves-and we will not keep it long.”
Governor Chanto Grieg did not speak, did not look at Fredda Leving. Instead he turned to the magnificent city that was slowly decaying outside his window. “That’s a big change you’re talking about, Dr. Leving, and change is never easy,” he said. “Sometimes I feel as if I am a doctor with a very sick patient, and the only medicine I have is change. If I administer too much of it, or give it at the wrong time, it will kill the patient. But if I instead prescribe no change at all, the patient will surely die. More than once, I have wondered if we Spacers will ultimately decide that change is too bitter a pill. We may decide that it would be easier, more pleasant, to refuse our medicine and to die instead. What do you think?”
“For the moment, sir, that waiver is all I am interested in. May I have it, please?”
Grieg looked at Fredda, her eyes bloodshot and sunken, her face pale, a bit of the scruffy stubble of her new-growing hair peeking out from under her turban. This was a woman long past worrying what she looked like, a woman who had clearly been struggling for some time with the question of what was the right thing to do.
At last he spoke. “Very well. If our society is so fragile, so rigid, that it cannot survive the existence of a single No Law robot, then I doubt very much if there is much chance of keeping the patient alive in any event.” Chanto Grieg handed over the slipof paper.
“Thank you, sir. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I must go.” Fredda bowed, turned, and left.
Chanto Grieg watched her as she left, and found himself alone with the very uncomfortable notion that he was not at all sure Infernocould survive the advent of a single free robot.
In which case, of course, there was no hope at all.
THERE was no more point in further static practice. Either the thing would work or it would not. Either he could pilot it or he could not. Caliban sat in the pilot’s seat of the open cockpit aircar. He gripped the controls firmly, adjusted his feet over the pedals, and engaged what he thought was the lift control. The car lifted slowly off the ground. Yes, good. It worked.
He had been more worried over whether the car wouldwork than whether he had figured out the controls properly. After all, it seemed likely that the car had been sitting, forgotten, in Periphery Skyport Six since the underground Skyport went out of service, sometime in the last century. Working by his internal infrared light source, Caliban brought the decrepit old craft up to a reasonably steady hover at about ten meters over the floor of the cavernous room. He performed a circuit of the room with about as much grace and agility as one of the more elderly citizens he had seen tottering about the city his first day out on the street.
Yes, throttle, lift, directional controls-he had divined them all properly. Aircar operation was yet another area where his datastore was frustratingly silent. He had been forced to work it all out for himself, and he was acutely aware that there was a great deal he did not know about how the aircar would handle in anything besides low speeds and still air.
But now, assuming the aircar held together, there was little purpose in further delay. It was time to set out. Caliban eased the car gently into the wide egress tunnel and guided it at a sedate ten kilometers an hour, moving in illumination provided by his infrared system, following the gentle upward grade of the tunnel as it moved toward the surface. The moldering walls of the tunnel drifted past in silence. Even after all his explorations of the underground world, this wide, broad tunnel into the darkness, the whole Skyport complex, was still cloaked in strangeness.
The place had a feeling of age, of years passing while it sat here in silence-and yet there was also the sense that this place had never been used. Everything was old, but nothing looked even slightly worn. It was all new under the dust.
It took a minute or two to reach the long-sealed exterior door. He had walked up the tunnel and examined the mechanism earlier. He was reasonably confident that he could open it, but that was nothing he could count on. Even getting it opened would not solve all his problems. It seemed at least possible that the Sheriff’s Department would be watching the tunnel entrances around the periphery of the city. That was why he had not opened it before now: no sense advertising his location until he was ready to leave.
Assuming he did get the door open, he would have to move fast once he was through. That was the reason for choosing an aircar rather than attempting to get out on foot.
And he would have to leave soon. In another day or so, his power supply would reach dangerously low levels. He dared not search for a recharging station inside the city. The deputies were everywhere in the tunnels, and he had had several narrow escapes already. He did not wish to be forced to stay in one place for the hour or so a recharge would take. Besides, it would be the height of madness to so much as approach a recharging station. He had to assume Sheriff Kresh would have the sense to post guards over all the recharge stations. No. He had to get out of the city and find a power source out there. Somehow.