Asimov’s Future History Volume 12

by Isaac Asimov

  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.”

  Chapter 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 approximately 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.”

  “Your point is well taken. However, there are a number of unskilled or semi-skilled tasks that are unsuited to robotic labor, mainly because of the First Law. Certain forms of security work, for example. A guard must be able to shoot his gun if need be, and a guard that a thief would have no compunction against shooting would be of limited use.

  “Other jobs would require robots to be so highly specialized in order to meet a job situation that comes up so rarely that it is not worth designing and manufacturing specialized robots for the task. Certain seafaring jobs, such as deep-sea fishing, for example, entail a small risk of falling overboard. Robots sink. It is certainly possible to build robots that float and yet are robust enough to survive salt air and the other hazards of a maritime environment, but it is far easier and cheaper to hire a human and give him or her a life preserver. There are other jobs that would be dangerous to a robot but entail little or no risk for a human.”

  “Thank you, Donald, we get the point,” Kresh said. “So what line of work did Bissal finally settle into?”

  “Mobile security work,” Donald said, the note of distaste in his mouth unmistakable. “Armed protection of valuable shipments.”

  “Oh, hell,” Kresh said. “That’s perfect. Absolutely perfect. The one sort of job we don’t like crooks taking on.”

  “Wait a second,” Fredda protested. “You’ve lost me again. What’s so bad about that?”

  Kresh held up his right hand, his thumb about a centimeter from his index finger. “It’s about that far from smuggling and contraband running,” he said. “Grieg’s appropriation of robots gave us a labor shortage and an illicit labor source and a need to find a way to pay for the illicit labor, all rolled into one. Smuggling and contraband are a big part of the means of payment.”

  Devray turned to Donald. “This mobile security work Bissal was doing. I realize we’re still working with very preliminary information, but is there any likelihood he got mixed up in rustbacking?”

  “There is every likelihood,” Donald said. “Indeed, it seems he has only worked for firms on our rustbacking watchlist.”

  “
One more time,” Fredda said. “Sorry, but I just don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s rustbacking got to do with anything?”

  “You weren’t around,” Devray said. “One of my Rangers picked up a ‘backer on the east coast of the Great Bay. The rustbacker named a Ranger involved in the rustback trade. Huthwitz. The Ranger that got killed.”

  “So what?”

  “So rustbacking keeps showing up in this case,” Kresh said. “And remember Grieg was considering the idea of get ting rid of the New Law robots. That would have put the rustbackers out of business. Someone in the business would have a terrific motive for killing Grieg before he cut into profits.”

  “But wait a second,” Fredda said. “I think we have to assume that whoever killed Grieg also killed Huthwitz. Unless we had two killers wandering the Residence that night.”

  “Pardon, madame,” Donald said. “One slight correction. I think we have to assume the two murders are linked, whether or not the same individual carried them both out. It may be that another member of the same team killed Huthwitz. There is a great deal of evidence of a conspiracy as it is.”

  “Even so,” Fredda said. “You’re talking about the rustbackers plotting to kill Grieg before he could be bad for business. But if Huthwitz was on the take from the ‘backers, why kill him?”

  “Space only knows,” Kresh said. “Maybe he was about to talk. Maybe he was demanding too much pay for his silence, and they thought of a way to save some money. Maybe killing Huthwitz wasn’t part of the plan, and Bissal was taking care of some of his own personal business on company time. If you think one smuggler wouldn’t kill another just because they worked together, forget it. But just in terms of parsimony, I think that we can at least start with the working theory of only one killer. And it seems pretty clear that killer was Bissal.”