Isaac Asimov - Caliban

“Yes, sir, quite so. But I would suggest, sir, that it is time for bed. “

“It certainly is. Can’t be tired for the Governor, can I?” Alvar stood and yawned. “And what the hell could he want that can’t wait until later in the day?”

Alvar Kresh walked wearily back to his bedroom, very much dreading the morning. Whatever the Governor wanted, it was unlikely to be good news.

SIMCOR Beddle was up betimes, thoughtfully reviewing the results of the Ironhead action against Settlertown. The results were not good. Sheriff Kresh’s deputies were simply getting too good at their jobs. Too many arrests, too little damage, and worst of all, the publicity was bad. It made the Ironheads look inept at best.

All right, then, it was time to come up with another tactic. Some way to tangle with the damned Settlers where Kresh’s people could not interfere so much.

Wait a moment. He had the very thing. Leving’s next lecture. If his information was even remotely reliable, the place would be crawling with Settlers. Yes, yes. An altercation there would do nicely.

But what about publicity? Not much point in staging a riot if no one saw it. Beddle leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Her first lecture had not drawn much of a crowd, though it should have, given the seditious material she had presented. Maybe that was the key. Plant a few belated reports here and there, accurate and otherwise, about what she had said then. Perhaps he could arrange for a few tame sources to drop a few inflammatory and extremely misleading speculations as to what the devil she was doing in the hospital.

Yes, yes. That was it. Properly brought along, reports on that first lecture should get the hall filled for the second, and live televisor coverage to boot. Disrupt those goings-on and no one could help but pay attention.

Simcor Beddle gestured for his secretary robot to come forward, and began dictating, setting down the details.

It ought to work quite nicely.

ALVAR Kresh strode into the Governor’s office, feeling far more alert and awake than he had any right to feel, as if his body were getting used to the idea of not sleeping properly.

The Governor rose from behind his desk and crossed half the length of the huge office, offering his hand to Alvar as he came closer. Grieg looked fresh, well rested, alert. He was dressed in a charcoal-grey suit of rather conservative cut, as if he were trying to appear as old as possible. Such was no doubt the case, given Grieg’s almost scandalously youthful election to the governorship.

Grieg’s office was as opulent as Alvar had remembered—but there was something missing since his last visit, something no longer there. What was it?

“Thank you for coming so early, Sheriff,” Governor Grieg said as he took Alvar’s hand.

As if the summons here had been an invitation and not an order, Alvar thought. But the courteous words were themselves significant. The Governor did not often feel the need to be polite to Alvar Kresh.

Alvar shook the Governor’s hand and looked him in the eye. There was no doubt about it. The man wanted something from him—no, needed something.

“It’s a pleasure to be here,” Alvar lied smoothly.

“I doubt that to be the case,” Grieg said with a politician’s overly frank smile, a smile born of too many years making promises. “But I assure you that it was necessary. Please, have a seat, Sheriff. Tell me, how is the investigation of the attack on Fredda Leving going?”

Nothing like getting right to the point, Kresh thought grimly. “It’s early times, yet. We’ve collected a lot of information, and a lot of it seems rather contradictory. But that’s almost to be expected at this stage. There is one thing, though, sir, that you could do to make work go a bit more smoothly.”

“And what might that be?”

“Call off Tonya Welton. I must admit I don’t know the political side of the situation, but I assure you that inserting her into the case has made more work for me. I can’t quite see why you wanted to do it.”

“Why I wanted to do it? She was the one who wanted it. Her people may have a connection to Leving Labs, but why would I want her interfering with local law enforcement? No, it was her idea to be attached to the case, and she was quite insistent about it. She made it clear that the political price would be high for Inferno if I did not allow her access to the investigation. In fact, she was the one who first told me about the case. She called me at home the night it happened and demanded that she be put into the picture.”

Alvar Kresh frowned in confusion. Given the speed with which she had arrived at the scene, that would have to mean she knew about the attack almost before the maintenance robot called in to report it. How had she found out? “I see. I must admit that she rather gave the impression that it was your idea.”

“Definitely not. As for calling her off, as you put it—I’m afraid the political situation is just too damned delicate. I’m very sorry, but I’ll have to ask you to endure her interference. I think you’ll understand why after you see what I brought you here to see.”

The Governor gestured toward a rather severe-looking chair in the middle of the room. Alvar sat, facing the empty center of the room. Donald followed a step or two behind and stood behind Alvar’s chair. Grieg took a seat himself at a control console that faced Alvar’s chair. That was it, Alvar realized. He looked around the big room and confirmed his suspicion. No robot. The Governor had no robot in attendance in his own private office. Now, there was a scandalous tidbit. No robot. Fredda Leving was one thing, but the Governor himself? Even if the politics of the moment had been calm and settled, it would have been titillating news, as if Grieg had gone out in public without his pants. With the Settlers so much in evidence, it was downright unpatriotic.

But this was not the moment to bring any such thing up with the Governor. Maybe he had seen that lecture of Leving’s—or maybe he knew something more. But Grieg was bent over the control unit, concentrating on it. Best to pay attention, Alvar told himself.

“This is a simglobe unit,” the Governor said, a bit absently, concentrating on the controls in front of him. “You may have seen one before, or seen a recorded playback from a simulation run on one. But I doubt you have seen one like this. In fact, I am certain of it. It’s a Settler model, much more sophisticated than our own units. It’s a gift from Tonya Welton—and before you can get suspicious of that, it was quite thoroughly tested by our own people, and programmed by our people. It has not been rigged in any way.”

“So what will it show me?” Alvar asked.

The Governor finished adjusting the controls and looked up at his guest, his face suddenly grim. “The future,” he answered in a flat, emotionless voice that put a chill in Alvar’s spine.

The windows made themselves opaque, and the room’s lights faded away into darkness. After a moment, a vague, dimly lit ball of light came into existence in the middle of the air between Alvar and Grieg. It quickly came into sharper and brighter focus, to become recognizably the globe of Inferno. Alvar found he was drawing in his breath sharply in spite of himself. There are few sights as beautiful to the human eye as a living world seen from space. Inferno was heart-stoppingly lovely, a blue-white gem gleaming in the void.

It was in half-phase from Alvar’s point of view, the terminator slicing neatly through the great equatorial island of Purgatory. Nearly all the southern hemisphere of Inferno was water, though there had been arid lowlands before the terraforming projects gave this world its seas.