Isaac Asimov: Utopia

“I am aware of all those problems,” said Davlo. “If we were only to begin after we had solved all the problems, we would never begin at all. But I have demonstrated that the basic plan will work. Or at least that it can. Now I just have to convince my superiors. But in my considered opinion, I have proved we can drop Comet Grieg onto Inferno, and save the planet.”

“Granting your assumptions, I suppose you are right,” the robot replied in dour tones. “I only wonder if you can manage to do it without killing everybody.”

JUSTEN DEVRAY, COMMANDER of the Combined Inferno Police, sat in the unmarked and slightly battered aircar and watched the sun come up over parkland of idyllic green. He was tired. Deathly tired. But being tired was part of the job description on this duty. That was part of what he was here to learn.

It had seemed like a very sensible theory, going around to every bureau of the Combined Infernal Police, getting a firsthand idea of the sort of police work he had never had the chance to do, back in the old days. It had, in fact, been Justen’s own idea, and it was teaching him a lot. Now he knew for certain that stakeout duty was both duller and more exhausting than he had thought possible. And he was starting to suspect that a nice, soft office job had more to recommend than he had realized.

Justen’s unmarked aircar was parked a hundred meters or so away from the surface entrance to the vast underground complex known as Settlertown. The entrance itself was a mushroom-shaped arrangement, with a central pillar that contained the elevator shaft, and a wide, rounded, overhanging roof that spread out from the pillar to keep the weather off anyone waiting for a car down to the interior. The entrance shaft stood just inside the gate to the huge park the Settlers had built over their underground city. The landscaping of the park was all Settler work as well, of course, a demonstration of their skill in terraforming.

But the design of Settlertown did not concern Justen Devray. The job of the officer on this stakeout was to keep on a watch on the people going in and out of Settlertown. There were, of course, other entrances to the vast series of artificial caverns and chambers below. The CIP had watches on those, as well. But the main entrance was the real prize, at least according to the CIP’s intelligence unit. The big fish used the main entrance. Their ranks, or at least their cover stories, would demand it. More importantly, the amateurs used the main entrance.

Everyone on both sides knew that all the entrances to Settlertown were watched, even the most rarely used ones. According to most theories of field operation, the best way to avoid being noticed was to use the busiest entrance, in hopes of getting lost in the shuffle. Sometimes it even worked. Especially now, at midmorning, there was a great deal of coming and going. It was far from simple to monitor it all. Something else for Justen to learn.

There were, of course, plenty of legitimate reasons for people to go in and out of Settlertown, and lots of people, Spacer and Settler, who did indeed go in and out. But some fraction of that number had no good reason for being there at all. Those were the ones who gave the CIP stakeout its reason for being.

The CIP never used the same car twice in a row for this stakeout job, even though the real professionals on the other side knew perfectly well they were being observed, and had no doubt gotten quite good at spotting the CIP’s stakeout, no matter what car they were using. That was beside the point. However the CIP ran the stakeout, the pros in Settlertown would be able to spot them. But not so the amateurs, the dropins. Change the car often enough, routinely vary the spot where you parked it, and the odds were reasonably good that an amateur could go in and out a dozen times without being able to spot the surveillance car.

Justen Devray shifted in his seat and tried to get a trifle more comfortable. He felt cooped up, hemmed in. He smiled to himself. It wasn’t just the car that had him feeling a little bit trapped. It was the job. In the old days, Justen had run the Governor’s Rangers, a service with the dual responsibility of enforcing the law outside the cities and managing a number of reterraforming projects. Even Justen was willing to admit it had been an awkward combination of responsibilities.

A little under five years before, Alvar Kresh had reorganized the Rangers, leaving them with no other duties than their terraforming projects, and merging their law-enforcement commands with the City of Hades Sheriff’s Department to form the Combined Inferno Police. Kresh had put Devray in charge of the new service.

Justen had taken the job willingly enough, but there were plenty of times he regretted the decision. Running the planetary police more or less required him to live in the planetary capital, and Justen Devray could not get used to the city of Hades, or to city life in general. He often found himself wishing to be back in the Rangers, working on some conservation job or terraforming project out in high plains north of the city.

Despite his desk work, Justen still had the tanned skin, tousled blond hair, and deep blue eyes to match that of an outdoorsman. The previous years out in the wind and weather had at least etched some character into his face, and life in the city had not erased any of it. Even so, he still looked unfashionably young, and one glance at him was enough to see he did not belong in a city.

Although he felt as if he were very much on his own, Justen had company in the battered aircar. There were two robots with him. One was Gervad 112, his personal robot of some years standing. Gervad was a General Ranger Deployment robot, a GRD unit of the sort that had been general issue for the Rangers some years before. The other was a Security, Patrol, and Rescue robot, an SPR, more casually called Sapper 323. After the night when the previous governor, Chanto Grieg, was murdered with a whole squad of Sappers on guard around him, the model suddenly, and rather unfairly, had gained a bad reputation. What had happened to them could have happened to any model of robot.

Still, no major security service was willing to use them any more. Justen hadn’t even tried to hang on to the Rangers’ SPRs. The rank and file did not trust them, and would not use them. As a result, most of the Sappers had been sold off at rock-bottom prices to all sorts of slightly disreputable organizations and people. That in turn meant that a Sapper made good camouflage. No one who saw Devray with a Sapper in tow was going to think he was a cop, let alone the most senior police official on the planet.

The depressing fact was that the two robots could have done the watching just as well without Devray. Better, probably. However, it did not do to dwell on such matters. The plain fact of the matter was that humans were not really much needed for most kinds of work.

“The male subject in red pants and blue tunic is not on my list of identified subjects,” the SPR announced. The special features of the SPR design really shone in identity work. They were nearly as good as humans at visual pattern matching and comparison—or, to put it another way, at recognizing faces and people. And, of course, they had virtually infallible memories. When a Sapper said it recognized someone, or that it did not recognize something, it was best to take it seriously. Right at the moment it meant that someone who wasn’t supposed to be going into Settlertown was doing just that.

Justen Devray, suddenly wide awake and alert, peered through the forward windshield, eagerly trying to get a good look at the person in question. There was a knot of about ten or twelve people waiting for the next elevator car to arrive.

“Gervad,” he asked his personal robot, “do you know him?” Gervad had the current official CIP mugshot file in his memory store.