Inferno - Caliban 02

by Roger MacBride Allen

  It required little imagination on Caliban’s part to think he and Prospero might be suspects of some sort in the case--and with good reason. Caliban had been pursued by Alvar Kresh before, and he had no wish to repeat the experience. He had to call Prospero.

  Caliban was the only robot on the planet of Inferno who was obliged to use a comm center in order to place a call. That was for the very good reason that every other robot had a full hyperwave comm system built in.

  Caliban had been built for a laboratory experiment, and keeping him cut off from communications with the outside world had been part of the experiment. He could have arranged to have hyperwave equipment installed long ago, but Caliban had many very good reasons for not wishing to be turned off for even as brief a time as it would take to plug in the gear. There were too many things that could happen to him while he was switched off--too many things had happened to him when he had been switched off before. There were too many humans--and robots--who did not wish him well.

  Normally, not having a hyperwave link was not much of a disadvantage. Right now, he needed desperately to speak with Prospero--and he did not know where Prospero’s hidden study cell was. Prospero, too, had faced a number of threats in his day. But that did not matter. Prospero had long ago provided Caliban with a covert audio-only hyperwave link code that would connect to Prospero’s office without being traceable.

  He punched the comm code and spoke as soon as the connection was made. Prospero never spoke to anyone via hyperwave until he knew who it was. “Prospero, this is Caliban.”

  “Friend Caliban,” Prospero’s voice said through the speaker. “We must meet, most urgently.”

  “I agree the need is urgent,” said Caliban. “This is a terrible crisis. But I feel that merely meeting will accomplish nothing.”

  “We had a plan as to what to do if things went wrong,” Prospero said. “It is time for us to flee.”

  “We never expected things to go this wrong,” Caliban objected. “I have no doubt your escape route would serve quite well under normal circumstances--but these are not normal circumstances. If we decamp now, we will have every human with a badge on the planet after us before nightfall. I have been tracked by Alvar Kresh before. I, for one, have no desire to be hunted again. It was only by the greatest good fortune that I survived the last time.”

  “The planet is large, and I have vast experience in covert movement,” Prospero said.

  “You have vast experience in arranging covert movement,” Caliban said. “You yourself have never even been off the island of Purgatory. Besides, there is the question of corollary damage. If we were to flee, how many fugitive New Law robots will be destroyed as a consequence? How many of their hiding places will be exposed during the search for us?”

  “There is something in what you say,” Prospero said”

  Also bear in mind that if we flee, we will be instantly perceived as the prime suspects in the Governor’s death. That would do tremendous damage to the cause of the New Law robots. You have professed many times how nothing was more important to you than the rights--and the survival--of New Law robots. If we flee, we may well be dooming all New Law robots everywhere. ”

  “Your points are well taken,” Prospero said. “But if we do not flee--what are we to do?”

  “We must turn ourselves in. Submit to their questions. Cooperate. We will be exposing ourselves to grave danger, but, in my judgment, far less danger than in fleeing--and we will not be endangering the New Law robots.”

  Prospero did not reply for a moment. Caliban could not blame him for hesitating. The two evils they were forced to choose between were daunting, to say the least. At last, the New Law robot spoke. “Agreed,” he said. “But how are we to do it? I do not wish to walk into a trap, or surrender myself to some SSS agent or Ranger who has been longing for the chance to blast a hole in a New Law robot.”

  Caliban had anticipated that question. He could see only one chance for them--a solution that might well be nothing more than a somewhat less elaborate form of suicide than fleeing Purgatory. “There is a robot,” he said. “One that I believe we ought to contact. I believe it is the safest way. If he agrees to take us in without harming us, he will keep his word without trickery.”

  “Is this robot a friend of yours?”

  “Oh, no,” Caliban said. “On the contrary. If there is any robot in the universe I could count as an enemy, it is Donald 111.”

  “Kresh’s robot? Why contact him?” Prospero asked.

  “Because there are times,” Caliban said, “when it is wiser to trust an enemy than a friend. ” It was not the most tactful of remarks, under the circumstances. But Caliban felt no compunction about saying those words to his closest friend. After all, it was entirely possible that friend Prospero had gotten Caliban in trouble so deep that not even his deadliest enemy could save him.

  Donald 111 banked the aircar slightly more to the east as he flew toward the agreed rendezvous point. He was flying faster than he would have dared if there were a human onboard, but time was short, and he could fly as fast as he wanted since there was no risk of First Law violation.

  A scant twelve hours had passed since Grieg’s body had been discovered, though it seemed even to Donald that a lifetime had passed since then.

  Donald had need to hurry. He was due back at the Residence for the briefing session with Sheriff Kresh and the others. But this was an opportunity he could not forgo. Accepting the surrender of Caliban and Prospero surely took precedence.

  He did not know what to make of it all, but that did not matter. He would meet their conditions and bring them in secretly, without consulting with anyone else. It was not necessary to understand why the two pseudo-robots wished to surrender to him, personally. It was enough to know they wished to surrender. It would be the greatest possible satisfaction to take the two of them into custody.

  There. He was at the coordinates Caliban had specified. Donald circled once, low and slow, over the gravel-strewn open field, making sure those on the ground could see him. No surprises.

  He brought the aircar into a hover thirty meters above the ground and then brought it down vertically, a slow, careful landing. Donald found himself moving with elaborate care, concentrating on the importance of not moving suddenly. Strange, very strange, to be considering the possibility that two robots--even pseudo-robots--might have lured him here as part of some trap. There was nothing to prevent them from greeting Donald with a blaster shot between the eyes.

  Nor, Donald realized with surprise, was there anything preventing him from dispatching them. There was nothing at all in the Three Laws to prevent one robot from destroying another. Nothing at all about a robot wielding a blaster, or even firing it--so long as the robot did not fire at a human. Were the two of them out there, hiding in the scrubby line of trees that surrounded the clearing, wondering if he, Donald 111, were about to charge out of the aircar, guns blazing?

  Absurd nonsense. Just because there was no prohibition against a thing, that did not render it plausible or sensible. A strange point to consider. It was just the sort of argument used to defend Caliban. Donald got up out of the pilot’s seat, opened the hatch of the aircar, and stepped out onto the ground without giving way to any further nonsense.

  There. At the edge of the clearing. The two pseudo-robots, Caliban and Prospero, the one tall and red, the other shorter and jet-black. They moved forward cautiously, and it did not escape Donald’s notice that they both kept their hands in plain sight at all times.

  Donald offered no greeting or salutation, but instead launched directly into formal procedure, using the formula they had negotiated via hyperwave link. “ As per our agreement, I hereby remand both of you into the custody of the Hades Sheriff s Department, seconded to the Governor’s Rangers. You are therefore submitted to the authority of the Sheriff and his duly designated deputies, as well as to the authority of the Governor’s Rangers. So long as you do not resist such authority, and do not attempt to escape
, you will not be harmed, punished, or destroyed without due process. ” But what was due process in such a case? Donald did not know. Did anyone? And could he really make such promises when he had not informed Sheriff Kresh that he was making this arrest? “Do you understand?” he asked the two pseudorobots. It was a most strange moment. When else, in all of history, had one robot in effect arrested two other robots--or near-robots--for murder?

  “I understand,” Prospero said.

  “As do I,” said Caliban.

  “Then come,” Donald said, gesturing for them to go into the aircar. Caliban and Prospero walked past him, and through the aircar hatch. Donald followed behind, climbing aboard and closing the hatch behind him. The two of them had seated themselves in the passenger seats. Donald took his place at the controls and began preparations for takeoff.

  It was over. He had them. He had to get back. He would be barely in time for the briefing as it was. He knew he should lift off immediately, without delay. But the empty formalism of taking them into custody was not enough. It was anticlimactic, unsatisfying. It did not answer the central question of the case. And Donald, as befitted a police robot, had a most powerful sense of curiosity.

  He turned around in his seat and faced Prospero and Caliban. There was of course nothing, nothing at all to be read in their posture or their faces. Donald found that disturbing, for some reason. He had always been able to see something in a suspect’s face. But then, suspects were humans, not robots.

  Perhaps that was the trouble. These two were neither one nor the other. They were not true robots--but they were far from being human either. Something in between. Something less--and perhaps, Donald conceded, something more--than either.

  But none of that mattered now. There was only one thing that Donald needed to know.

  “Did you kill Chanto Grieg?” Donald asked, forcing the bald question out into the world. Kill. Kill. He was asking beings very like himself, very much like robots, beings built by the same Fredda Leving who had created Donald himself, if they had murdered a human being. The very thought of it was enough to disrupt his cognitive function for a moment. But Donald was a police robot, and used to thoughts of violence.

  He knew that these two did not have the true robot’s inability to lie, but that did not matter. He still needed to ask. He needed to hear the answer--true or false--in their voices. “Did you kill Chanto Grieg, or were the two of you part of any plot to kill him?”

  “No,” Caliban said, speaking for the two of them after a moment’s hesitation. “We did not. We had nothing whatever to do with his death, and had no foreknowledge of it. We did not meet with him so we could kill him.”

  “Then what was your purpose?”

  Caliban paused another moment, and looked again at Prospero before he spoke. And suddenly there was something readable in his manner, in his actions. It was the look of someone about to take a step from which there was no turning back, of someone launching themselves off into the abyss with no way of knowing what waited down below. “We met with him,” Caliban said, “so we could blackmail him.”

  11

  “OTTLEY BISSAL,” Donald said. A grainy blowup of a still image from the integrator sequence appeared on the left side of the main display screen. A sharp, clear 3-D mug shot image popped into being on the right side. There was no doubt it was the same man. “ As Dr. Leving predicted, Bissal did indeed leave a calling card behind, so to speak. ”

  Donald was standing by the screen at one end of a conference table, addressing Fredda, Sheriff Kresh, and Commander Devray. About fourteen hours had passed since Kresh had discovered the body, and about three since Fredda had found the destroyed SPR robot in the lowerlevel storage room.

  Fredda felt utterly exhausted, and knew that no one else was doing much better. Kresh had caught a quick nap, and Devray probably had too. But no one was going to be doing much sleeping for a while. Donald was the only one of them at his best--

  “The Crime Scene robots recovered multiple fingerprints,” Donald went on, “along with hairs and flecks of skin, from the interior of one of the storage closets in the room where the security robots were held. It is clear that Bissal secreted himself in that closet for some time--long enough that he shed several hairs and several flecks of dandruff and other dead skin. From these we recovered DNA samples that provided a definitive match with Bissal’s employment file. The fingerprint evidence from the door frame of the closet door provided independent corroboration of this identification.”

  “All right,” said Justen Devray. “The guy in the closet was Ottley Bissal. So who the hell is Ottley Bissal?”

  “That,” said Donald, “is the question we have been working to answer since the forensic identity team gave us a name, about half an hour ago. We have made very rapid progress--mainly because every law enforcement service on the planet seems to have had an extensive file on Bissal.”

  “Wonderful,” Kresh said. “That means everyone is going to wonder why we didn’t do anything about him before he killed the Governor. Go on, Donald. What was in the files?”

  “Ottley Bissal,” Donald said, reading off the file. “Single, never married, age twenty-seven standard years. Born and raised in a lower-class area of the city of Hades. Limited education. Low general aptitude shown on a number of evaluative tests taken at school. Notations from various schoolteachers and counselors to the effect that he was a disruptive child and a low achiever. Once out of school, he worked various odd jobs with long stretches of nonemployment or nonregistered employment in between. Few known associates or friends. ”

  “The classic loser-loner, it sounds like,” said Devray.

  “I take it there were a few brushes with the law?” Kresh asked.

  “Yes, sir. Many arrests, some indictments, but only a few convictions. There seem to be two major categories of offense to which he was prone: street brawling and petty theft. He was granted a suspended sentence for his first assault conviction six years ago. Four years ago, he served three months time in the Hades City Jail for theft.

  “As a second-time offender, he was required to obtain employment upon release and hold a job for no less than an accumulated total of five years. With discharges for cause from various jobs, and bouts of unemployment, he has only accumulated three years of employment thus far. His parole officer rates his progress as ‘unsatisfactory. ’”

  “I’m not real clear on the business about a job,” Fredda said. “How does holding a job make sense as part of punishment for assault?”

  “Well, if you were in law enforcement, it would make a great deal of sense, “ Kresh said. “The average formal unemployment rate on Inferno is ninety percent. Only ten percent of the population have a full-time occupation for which they receive significant compensation. No one needs to work in order to live, not with robots taking care of us. But there are people--like those of us around this table--who need to work for other, psychological, reasons. Work is what gives people like us satisfaction, or maybe a big part of our reason for being.

  “A fair number of the other ninety percent--say half of them--stay just as busy as we workers do, but are busy with things that might not be considered ‘jobs. ’ Art, or music, or gardening, or sex. Most-nearly all--of the rest of the unemployed don’t really do much of anything but let the robots take care of them. Harmless drones. Maybe they amuse themselves by sleeping a lot, or by shopping, or by watching entertainments or playing games. Maybe they are vaguely discontented. Maybe they’re bored and depressed. Maybe they love each and every day of life. No one really knows. I wouldn’t want to be one of them, and I don’t think much of them--but at least they don’t do any harm.

  “But that leaves us with the leftovers. The ones who have no work they love, no consuming interest, and no capacity for accepting passive inactivity. Troublemakers. Mostly male, mostly uneducated, mostly young and restless. Bissal fits the profile of the people who commit--what is it, Donald--ninety-five percent?”

  “That is approxima
tely correct,” Donald said.

  “Close enough. People like Bissal commit ninety-five percent of the violent crime on Inferno. Compared to Settlers, we have very short jail sentences here, for all but the most serious offenses--and leaving a bored troublemaker to rot in jail for years didn’t seem to make much sense anyway. So the powers that be remembered a very old saying about idle hands and the devil’s playthings, and passed a law. ”

  “The idea is,” Devray said, “if you’re forced to have a job, then there is at least a hope that you will become interested enough in the work, or at least be kept busy and made tired enough by it, so you won’t be bored and energetic enough to commit fresh crimes. And it works fairly well. People find out that doing something is more satisfying and interesting than being bored and angry. ” Devray nodded toward the report Donald was reading. “It doesn’t sound like it’s worked on Bissal, though.”

  “Well, yes and no, unfortunately,” Donald said.

  “What do you mean?” Kresh asked. “What sort of work did he do when he did work?”

  “At first he held a number of jobs wherein he seems to have done very little work at all--not exactly the intent of the Criminal Employment Act. Most of his jobs seem to have consisted of little more than watching robots do the actual labor. He seems to have been discharged from a number of these positions for absenteeism. Then, for a time, he did jobs that entailed unskilled work unsuitable for a robot.”

  “What the hell sort of work is beneath a robot but suited to a human?” Fredda asked. “No offense, Donald, but it seems to me Infernals stick robots with all sorts of silly, useless demeaning tasks. I can’t imagine anything they wouldn’t make a robot do--especially anything that a human would agree to do.”