Isaac Asimov: Inferno

No. Prospero resisted the impulse to resist, to protest. This was not the time or place to argue the point. He dare not antagonize Fiyle. Not when the human had it in his power to bring the law crashing down on them all. Not when a blaster bolt between the eyes was the standard punishment for a runaway robot. The others were depending on him. Prospero held the light, aiming so the man could easily see the interior of the case. It was filled with stacks of elaborately embossed pieces of paper, each stack neatly wrapped around its middle. Money. Paper money, in something called Trader Demand Notes, whatever those were. Settlers used them, and they were untraceable, and they were of value. That was all Prospero knew—except that it had taken tremendous effort to gather these stacks of paper together.

Absurd that so many robots could be traded for something as silly as bits of fancy printing. The man ran his hands over the stacks of paper inside, almost caressing them, as if the gaudy things were objects of great beauty.

Money. It all came down to money. Money to bribe guards. Money to hire the pull artists who could remove the supposedly unremovable restrictors from a New Law robot’s body. With the restrictor in place, a New Law simply shut down if it moved outside the prescribed radius of the restrictor control signal beamed from the central peak of Purgatory Island. With the right money paid, and the restrictor taken out, a New Law robot could go anywhere it pleased.

If it could manage to find a way off the island. Which is where men such as Fiyle came into the equation.

Fiyle lifted one of the stacks out and counted it, slowly and carefully, and placed it back in the case. He repeated the procedure with each of the other stacks. At last, satisfied, he closed the case.

“It’s all there,” he said as he stood.

“Yes, it is,” Prospero agreed, handing the light back. “Shall we get on with the business at hand?”

“By all means,” the man said, grinning evilly. “My ship will be tied up at the North Quay. Slip Fourteen. At 0300 hours, the guard watching the security screens is all of a sudden not going to be feeling so good. His staff robot will help him to his quarters, and the screens will be unattended. Because he won’t be feeling well, he’ll forget to turn on the recording system. No one will see who or what gets onto my ship. But the guard expects that he’ll be feeling better and back at his post by 0400. Everything has to be nice and normal by then, or else—”

“Or else he turns us all in, you make a run for it, and my friends all die. I understand. Don’t you worry. Everything will go according to plan.”

“Yeah, I bet it will,” Fiyle said. He lifted the case and patted it affectionately. “I hope it’s as worth it for you as it is for me,” he said, his voice suddenly a bit lower, gentler. “Things must be damned hard for you here if you’re willing to pay this much to try and get away.”

“They are hard,” Prospero said, a trifle taken aback. He had not expected any show of sympathy from the likes of Fiyle.

“Bet you’ll be glad to get out of here, won’t you?” the man asked.

“I am not going,” Prospero said, looking toward the quays and the ships and the sea. “It is needful that I remain here and coordinate the next escape, and the one after that. I cannot cross the seas to freedom.”

He turned his back on the sea and looked toward the land, the rough, hardscrabble island, and the contradictory, half-free, half-slave existence that was all he had ever known.

“I must remain here,” he said. “I must remain on Purgatory.”

IT WAS A dark and quiet killing. A grunt, a gasp, a faint groan muffled by the pouring rain as the dying man breathed his last, a thud as the body dropped to the ground. No scream, no flash and roar of a blaster, nothing but a new corpse in the night and the splattering of raindrops.

But the man was dead for all of that.

The quiet would help. With no sound to attract attention, it could easily be hours before anyone found the Ranger’s body. And by then, of course, it would be too late.

No one would know until it was all over.

The killer smiled, the expression on his pale face revealing a satiated blood lust, rather than happiness. Revenge was a pleasure of a rare and delicate nature, and one that could be savored long after the event that inspired it. But enough of his own private business. He had another job, a professional matter, to deal with.

Ottley Bissal stepped over the body, and moved toward the light and glitter of the party at the Governor’s Winter Residence.

The South Hall of the Winter Residence was getting more crowded, and louder. To an untutored eye, it might well appear to be a calm and pleasant gathering, the movers and shakers of this world brought together for a night of celebration, a recognition of solidarity and cooperation.

Sheriff Alvar Kresh, watching the proceedings from a quiet corner as far from the bandstand as possible, did not see it that way. Not one little bit. “Well, Donald,” he said, turning toward his companion. “What do you think?”

“Most unsatisfactory, sir,” Donald replied. Donald 111 was Kresh’s personal assistant, and one of the more advanced robots on the planet—certainly the most advanced police robot. He was painted the sky-blue of the Sheriffs Department, and built in a short, rounded-off approximation of the human form.

High-function, high-intelligence police robots like Donald had their Three-Law potentials adjusted so as to allow them a large degree of independent action and that tended to put people off just a trifle. For precisely that reason, Donald had been carefully designed to be as unimposing, unintimidating, as possible. Donald was a robot of unassuming appearance, all rounded corners and gentle contours. “Captain Melloy’s Settler Security Service forces have shown themselves to be even more inept than reputation would have them,” he said. “Their main accomplishment tonight seemed to be getting in the way of the Governor’s Rangers.”

“As if the Rangers needed help getting muddled,” Kresh growled.

“Yes, sir.”

Alvar Kresh leaned back against the wall and felt the thrumming vibration that seemed to pervade everything on the south shore of the island. The Terraforming Center, of course, its powerful force field generators at work, quite literally straining to turn the wind around, struggling to rechannel the planetary airflows into new and more beneficial patterns.

He glanced out the window, seeing nothing but the driving rain. Most nights on the island of Purgatory you could see the force fields shimmering in the far-off, high-up darkness, sheets of rippling, flickering color that flashed across the sky. Not tonight. Ironic that a reception concerned with the politics of terraforming was being held in the middle of a torrential downpour.

But so far as Kresh was concerned, the only question was whether the rain made the situation safer or more dangerous. It made things tough on the perimeter guards standing out in it, of course—but then, maybe a potential assassin would have a problem or two as well.

Alvar shook his head sadly. Things were a mess. If only he could bring his own deputies and robots in here to provide security. But neither they nor he had any jurisdiction outside the city of Hades. He was here merely as a member of the Governor’s entourage, part of the window dressing.

Jurisdiction! He was sick to death of even hearing the word. Still, even if he wasn’t supposed to do anything more than smile and make polite conversation, Alvar Kresh was not the sort of man who could stop worrying just because he was supposed to be off-duty.

Kresh was a big man, burly and determined-looking. His face was what might be politely described as strong-featured. Whatever his expression, it always seemed as if his face revealed more of his emotional state than he really wanted. Perhaps that was why he usually looked worried. His skin was light in color, and his hair, once black as Space, was now a thick thatch of white that never seemed entirely under his control. His thick eyebrows were still jet-black. They served only to make his face more expressive still. Tonight he was in his formal uniform, a rather somber black jacket worn over trousers in the sky-blue of the Sheriff’s Department. His many decorations were prominent by their absence. The room was full of men and women who had done far less than Kresh, wearing medals and ribbons that would make it seem as if they had done far more, until a chestful of medals didn’t mean anything anymore. Let everyone else wear fruit salad on their chests. People didn’t have to know about every commendation Kresh had ever received. Kresh knew what he had done, and that was enough.