The room was completely undecorated, utterly cheerless. There was nothing personal there. No photocube of a family member, no decoration, nothing that would give the slightest clue to Gildern’s personality. It was the office of someone who was camping here, not someone who lived here.
Of course, Beddle reflected, Gildern’s office back at Ironhead HQ was no less spartan. A disordered office, a cluttered office, was an insecure office.
There was nothing in the room at present except a table and two chairs—comfortable-looking ones by most standards, quite spartan by Beddle’s.
“I personally performed a bug sweep of this room one hour ago,” said Gildern. “We ought to be secure enough here to discuss the other matter.”
“ ‘The other matter,’ ” Beddle repeated. “If we are all that secure here, I see no reason to waste time with euphemisms. Let us call things by their proper name and discuss the destruction of the New Law robots.”
If there was any thing that the Ironheads regarded as dangerous, it was the continued existence of the New Law robots. Robots that did not have the true Three Laws were a far more serious heresy than the use of Settler machinery, or contact with Settlers. Settlers were foreigners, aliens, the enemy. Even if someone like Gildern did deal with them, he knew the dangers, the risks when he did so. But robots were supposed to be the bulwark of the Spacer way of life, the cornerstone of the Ironhead philosophy. If the people of Inferno grew even slightly accustomed to dealing with robots that would not unquestioningly endanger themselves, sacrifice themselves, for the good of a human, if they got used to robots who might debate an order, or follow their own agendas, then, Beddle had no doubt, the rot would have set in. If people could not trust robots absolutely, they would not trust them at all. After all, robots were stronger, faster, harder to injure than humans. Some robots, in many ways, were more intelligent. Without the barrier, the protection, of the Three Laws, people would have good reason to fear robots. At least such were the official reasons for wishing to be rid of the New Law robots, whenever Beddle made a speech on the subject.
But there was another, more private reason. The New Law robots were, plain and simple, a threat to the Ironheads’ power. The doctrine of more and better robots was endangered so long as anyone ever saw an alternative to it.
But if there were no New Law robots, there would be no New Law robot problem. Toward that end, Gildern and his people had been searching for Valhalla, the New Law robot city, for quite some time, since long before anyone had ever heard of Comet Grieg. Nothing had ever come of the effort.
But now—now things were different. And Beddle was eager to find out precisely how different. “All right,” he said to Gildern. “What have you got for me?”
“More pieces of the puzzle, sir. As you know, a direct search for Valhalla has never been possible. The minute anyone tried a search, the New Law robots would simply shut everything down. Besides which, the New Law robots encrypt their long-range hyperwave traffic, and we have not had much luck in reading it. Hyperwave signals are also difficult to track with any precision. But with enough signals, it is possible to do statistical analysis. And there has been enough traffic in recent days to let us do some pretty fair work. And more physical traffic as well. The New Law robots are working as hard and as fast as anyone to evacuate in time. That means more signal traffic, more aircars and land cars and transports and so forth. And they are being less careful. There is less point in concealing a hidden city that is about to be destroyed.
“The long and the short of it is that we have had a lot more data to work with, and we have been able to work from a lot closer in than we were in times past. We can get equipment and robots in here, right on top of things.”
“With what result?” Beddle asked.
“The best possible result,” Gildern replied. “Absolute confirmation that Valhalla is somewhere inside the primary impact site for the first and largest of the comet fragments. It will be utterly destroyed.”
“But we were virtually certain of that before. And as the New Laws are clearly preparing to evacuate, what good will it do for the comet to destroy them after they have all gone?”
“None whatsoever. But look around yourself. Look at Depot.”
“What about it?”
“Depot is being evacuated as well—and there have never been so many people here. The people here all know this place is going to be wiped out, but there is no danger in being here now. However, in the meantime, there is a great deal of work to be done, so they have pulled in all sorts of people to do it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that our sources confirm that New Law robots are vanishing from all the places they usually are. They are buying out their labor contracts, closing up the shops they run in the smaller settlements. We’ve seen a large number of them pass through Depot and estimate that ninety percent of the existing New Law robots are in the vicinity.”
“And so you think they are rushing home to Valhalla to help and salvage what they can. What of it? They will be gone before the comet hits.”
“Quite true. But all we need to do is locate Valhalla before the comet strikes, and destroy it while they are still there. And I believe both goals are more achievable than you would think. I also believe it is highly likely that you can accomplish them both, yourself, personally.”
“How?” Beddle demanded, a world of eagerness and ambition bound up in that one little word.
“As for the first part, the question of locating Valhalla, we are able to track a great deal of the increased air, ground, and hyperwave traffic from here, but our ability to triangulate and backtrack is highly limited. If we had a mobile tracking station, equipped with the proper detection equipment, we would soon be able to sort through all the deliberate false trails and extraneous signals.”
“What do I have to do with a mobile tracking station?”
Gildern leaned forward eagerly. “It’s quite simple. We have installed the proper tracking gear on my long-range aircar. I can provide you with robots trained to operate the system, who know how to coordinate the work with the base station here. In short, we would tell your aircar where to go, your aircar would obtain readings from that position, and then move on to the next location. You are planning to visit several of the small outlying settlements on this trip. That would suit us perfectly. Land one place and give a speech while your robots do a detection sweep, then fly on to the next spot, and the next, and the next. We’d rapidly accumulate enough data to establish a very good fix on Valhalla. With enough data, I expect we ought to be able to get within an error radius of only five or eight kilometers. And that should be quite good enough.”
“Good enough for what?” Beddle asked.
Gildern was about to reply when the ground suddenly gave a strange, sharp little shudder and the building rattled and shook hard enough that it seemed close to folding itself back up. The air was suddenly full of dust, seemingly thrown up from out of nowhere. There was a distant rumbling and a muted boom! that seemed to come from somewhere far off.
Gildern gestured reassuringly. “There’s no danger,” he said. “Notice that none of our robots even bothered to rush in to our rescue. But to answer your question—good enough for one of those. For a burrow bomb—a seismic sounder.”
“A burrow bomb?”
“They’ve set off any number of them around here. The scientists want to understand the underlying geology of this area as thoroughly as possible before the impact, so they can better interpret the results of the impact. The explosions cause seismic shock. The bombs themselves are carefully calibrated. They can burrow themselves deep into the earth and set themselves off at a predetermined time and depth. By measuring the vibrations produced by the explosions from various receiving stations, and seeing how they have been changed, the scientists can determine what sort of strata the vibrations have gone through. It’s an unusually destructive way of doing geology, but it gets the job done fast—and what difference does it make when the comet is going to destroy everything anyway? We are virtually certain that Valhalla is underground. If we set off a burrow bomb close enough to Valhalla, the shock waves should collapse the entire city, killing or trapping everyone inside.