Caliban turned and headed down the street, in the direction of the temporary field headquarters of the Combined Infernal Police, in Constable Bukket’s old offices.
DONALD 111 WAITED. HIDING in the woods a kilometer or two from the Winter Residence. A cleft in an outcropping of rock provided shielding not only from visual detection, but from infrared and most other sorts of detectors. So long as he operated at minimum power, thus cutting back on waste heat and other detectable emissions, he judged that he ought to be able to stay hidden long enough-though how long that would be was impossible to say.
He had deliberately violated his master’s very specific order. First Law had forced him to do so. Had he obeyed, the governor would no doubt have powered him down to prevent him telling what he knew to other Three-Law robots. Allowing that to happen would have been inaction that allowed harm to a human being. He could not act to save Beddle if he were powered down.
But he had not yet taken any action to save Beddle. As yet it was not necessary. Even if Beddle were in the comet impact area, and there was no particular reason to assume that he was, there were still just over three days left in which the humans could do their best to save him. Donald understood perfectly well that any action to save Beddle might well cause harm to other humans, for example by compelling robot aircar pilots to refuse to transport vital equipment while they joined the search. The more robots there were in the impact area this close to the comet’s arrival, the larger the number of robots likely to be caught by the impact. A shortage of robotic labor in the post-impact period could easily cause great harm to humans.
In short, distracting robots from the evacuation could cause endless mischief. Besides which, the clear intent of Governor Kresh’s order had been to prevent Donald from talking. By disobeying only part of Kresh’s order, he had minimized his violation of Second Law. Donald had done his best to balance all the conflicting demands, retaining the option of hyperwaving a warning to the other Three-Law robots while refraining from actually doing so.
But the time would come. He knew that. Unless Beddle was rescued in time, the First Law demand that Donald act to save him would, sooner or later, overwhelm the conflicting First and Second demands that he keep silent. Sooner or later, he would be compelled to act. Understanding the compulsion he was under in no way reduced the force of that compulsion.
He would have to do something. But he had no idea what.
NORLAN FIYLE WAS an old hand at being questioned. He had been through it many times before. As he sat in the improvised interrogation room of the CIP’s Depot field office, waiting for Commander Devray to come in and get started, it occurred to him that he might well have taken part in more interrogations than Devray himself had, albeit from the other side of the table. That was quite likely to come in handy.
Fiyle had learned a thing or two about being questioned. First off, it was vitally important not to give up everything, even if you were willing to cooperate with the powers that be. An interrogation was a negotiation, a bargaining session. Give me some of yours and I’ll give you some of mine. It was never smart to say too much too soon, even if you wanted to talk, or else you lost all chance of making a deal. A corollary of that was that it was rarely wise to tell the whole and complete truth right at the start. They felt better if they had to force it out of you, catch you in a fib or two first. Once they had caught you lying, and they knew you knew you had been caught, they would be better prepared to believe the real truth when they heard it. Norlan knew how it all worked on a level that was closer to instinct than to conscious thought.
But it was also important in a case like this that you appeared cooperative, a tricky business if you had a thing or two to hide-and who didn’t? Sometimes the best way to do that was to try and distract the questioner. He would not have been so foolish as to try such a trick on an old hand like Alvar Kresh, but Justen Devray might just be a different story. He was smart, Devray was, but he did not have much in the way of experience. During the arrest, Devray had gone so far as to tell Fiyle that Beddle had been kidnapped, rather than keeping him in the dark to find out how much Fiyle knew already. A man who could make that mistake could make others.
The door opened and Devray came in. Alone. No robot in attendance. That in itself was interesting. Fiyle smiled and leaned back in his chair as Devray sat down and spread out his paperwork.
“I was wondering how long you’d take to get to me,” he said, doing his best to sound at ease and confident.
“Not very long, as a matter of fact,” Devray said. “You’ve got some sort of link to just about every suspect in this case.”
“True enough,” he said. “I know a lot of people.”
“And nearly all of them have hired you as an informant at one time or another,” said Devray.
“Including the CIP,” said Fiyle, “though I might not show up in your files. A few under-the-table cash jobs. But you got your money’s worth.”
“I hope we did,” Devray said. “But that’s all ancient history, assuming it’s even true. What I want to know is who’s paying for your information these days.”
“No one,” Fiyle said. And that much, at least, was accurate. It was always good to work the truth in now and again, when it proved convenient. “The only job I have right now is working for Gildern, and I wouldn’t say no if I had to retire.”
“You didn’t take the job voluntarily?”
“Let’s say Gildern convinced me that lowed him a favor.”
“But however you got it or felt about the information, you knew about Beddle’s tour well in advance.”
“Oh, yes. I knew all about it. Beddle was supposed to use Gildern’s aircar in a tour of the smaller towns.”
Devray pulled a stack of still images out of his file and handed then to Fiyle. “Is this Gildern’s aircar?”
Fiyle looked through the pictures. Four robots, neatly shot through the back of the head and lying face down on the ground in front of an aircar. A close-up of one of the dead robots. Another shot of the aircar’s exterior. A picture of the cockpit, showing the dead robot pilot and the wrecked flight recorders. Another shot, showing the ransom message. Yes, indeed, Devray was making mistakes. Devray should have shown him one image of the aircar exterior and left it at that. Devray had no business letting him study a whole stack of pictures.
“That’s Gildern’s car, all right,” Fiyle said. And suddenly it was time to throw Devray off the scent, get him less interested in Fiyle and more interested in somebody else. “So, tell me,” he asked in the most casual way possible. “Was the bomb still in the aircar when you got there?”
JUSTEN DEVRAY DID not know what to think. He walked back to his own private office and sat down to think. If-if-Fiyle was telling the truth, in whole or in part, then the Ironheads had been planning the wholesale slaughter of the New Law robots. Justen did not have much use for the New Laws himself, but he was a long way from approving of their extralegal extermination.
If the government decided to eliminate them within the law, that was one thing. This was something else. Let the idea of vigilante justice plant itself in people’s minds, and society would descend into chaos.
If Fiyle was telling the truth, there was suddenly a whole new motive for the crime. Lots of people might well have an interest in owning-or even using-a burrow bomb. There had been no sign of such a thing on the aircar, that was certain. Either it had never been there in the first place, or else the kidnappers had taken it with them-which at least suggested they had known it was there all along.