Isaac Asimov - Caliban

But he also knew he didn’t much like the idea of tracking a robot who was capable of thinking in terms of diversionary tactics. And that second piece of knowledge did much to remove the savor from the first piece.

They moved into the gloomy interior of the building. There was very little inside, merely a forest of packing cases that had never been cracked open. Hades was full of such buildings—designed, built, stocked with equipment by robots and forgotten. Most of the ghost buildings were like this one, wholly complete, but left vacant. The ghosts were gifts from on high to criminal gangs of all sorts, ideal places to meet, to hide out, perfect headquarters from which to run their scams and crimes.

It looked as if this building had gotten all the way to furniture delivery before being shut down. The crates were neatly stacked everywhere, turning the first floor into a maze of hiding places. And then there were the floors above and the subbasements and service tunnels below. Even if the rogue had come in here, how the hell would they ever know it, or find him?

Then Mirta grabbed his arm and pointed her handlamp down at the floor.

Dust. The floor was covered in a smooth, perfect film of dust—with one set of distinctly robotic footprints leading off into the interior, moving at a smooth and confident pace.

The two deputies followed the line of footprints through the canyons of packing cases. They led straight for a stairwell, its door standing open. Moving cautiously, Mirta and Tansaw went inside, to be greeted by a cool breeze blowing down the shaft, which apparently also served as part of the ventilator system. But the air currents meant no dust deposits here. No footprints. Damn it. All right, then. Up or down? Which way did he go?

“He headed straight for the stairs,” Mirta said, her voice a loud whisper.

“So what does that tell us?” Tansaw asked.

“That he knows where he’s going. He must have a good internal map system. He’s not moving in a panic. He’s got a plan, he’s thinking ahead.”

“Which means he must have figured out that heading up isn’t going to do him any good. We’d be able to seal off the building and bottle him up. So he went down into the service tunnels.” That was always bad news. The tunnels went everywhere, to allow the maintenance robots to bring in supplies and services without adding to street congestion. And despite all official statements to the contrary, every cop knew there were lots of tunnels that did not appear on any map. Some had just been dug and then forgotten, some had been deliberately erased from the map memories—and some had been dug by robots in the employ of enterprising freelancers of one sort or another.

“Right.” Mirta holstered her gun and pulled her tracker/mapper out of her tunic. She worked the controls and consulted the screen. “Not so bad around here,” she said. “I only show one main horizontal shaft connecting to this building.”

“Can we seal it before he can use it to get to another tunnel?” All the tunnels—all the official tunnels, at least—were equipped with heavy-duty vault-style doors.

“We can try,” Mirta said. “It’ll be close, one way or the other.” She brought her comm mike around to her mouth. “This is Deputy 1231, in rapid pursuit of suspect. Request immediate seals on all accesses to city tunnel number A7 B26.” She listened to her headset for a moment, and Tansaw felt as much as heard a series of muffled, far-off clanging thuds. “That ought to do it,” she said. “If he didn’t get out of B26 before we sealed it, we have him now.”

Tansaw looked up at his partner and nodded. “It’s time to call in the others,” he said.

CALIBAN heard the booming thuds of the tunnel doors slamming shut. He had been moving at a fast, steady, walking pace in the narrow tunnel, but now he broke into a run, hurrying for the end. He came upon it all too soon and knew he was in deep trouble. This door was meant for a full-security seal. He tried to force it open, but obviously it had been specifically designed to be beyond a robot’s strength, with a locked and armored control panel as well. He consulted his datastore map.

Tunnel A7 B26 was “H”-shaped, with the access to the building above in the center of the cross member, and the four ends of the vertical members linking into the main city tunnel system. The tunnel itself was barren, nothing but bare walls, floors, and ceilings, with glow lamps set into the ceiling’s overhead crossbeam supports. The beams looked to be some sort of plasteel, twenty centimeters square in cross section, spaced at five-meter intervals.

Suddenly Caliban had an idea. He consulted his datastore and confirmed that humans saw in a far more limited range of light wavelengths than he did. Nor, it appeared, did their bodies provide any source of built-in illumination. He turned around and hurried back down the tunnel, at top speed, yanking out the glow lamps, crushing them, heaving the debris in all directions. Within sixty seconds the floor of the tunnel was littered with broken lamps. It was in absolute darkness, but for the dim glow of two impossibly blue eyes about twenty meters from the building access hatch. But then Caliban shifted to infrared, and even that illumination faded away. He stretched out his arms to one wall of the tunnel, braced his legs against the opposite wall, and walked his way up until he was braced against the ceiling, between two of the overhead supports. The odds seemed at least a little better that he would stay out of sight there. He had no real plan, no idea of how to get out. All he knew was that he had more chance of staying alive a little longer if he kept out of sight in the dark, rather than waiting passively for his fate.

He hung there, waiting, for what seemed an absurdly long time. His on-board chronometer gave him a precise report on how long he waited there, but somehow the number of minutes and seconds that flickered past was no proper measure of his situation. There was something more to it, for the odds were very good that these were the last minutes and seconds he would ever experience.

What was taking them so long?

At last there was a clang and a thump. Caliban cocked his head cautiously down to peek around the support beam that hid him from view. He turned his head toward the access hatch. “Damnit,” a voice called out. “He must have knocked all the lights out.” Caliban saw the beam of a handlamp stab out from the building side of the hatch. Like most lamps designed to give off visible light, this one cast a fair amount of infrared as well. A human figure, and then another and another and another, came through the hatch, plainly visible in infrared.

“Well, at least we know he’s still in here,” one of them said as a light beam played across the floor, revealing the smashed glow lamps. “He wouldn’t have hung around smashing the lights if he could’ get out one of the hatches.”

“Ready to do some damage, Spar?” one of the others asked with a low chuckle.

“Capture only, Jak,” a third one, the only woman, said. “Try to keep that in mind, okay?”

“Don’t like tunnels,” the one called Spar announced. “This gives me the creeps. Can’t we pull in some real lights before we go searching around in here?”

“Galaxy’s sake, it’s just one lousy robot in an H-tunnel,” the one called Jak replied. “Don’t you get all jumpy on me now.”

Suddenly the hatch behind them swung shut again, to the obvious discomfort of the four deputies. “Well, if he can’t get out, neither can we,” the woman said, her voice a bit low and nervous.

“I don’t like it,” Spar objected. “Can’t we reopen the hatch and just post a guard on it?”

“Yeah, and let the rogue punch out the guard and make a run for it,” the first voice said. “Look, Spar, the manual keypad combo for all the hatches is 274668. You get antsy, you get out that way. Just don’t get crazy on us. Come on, let’s move out. Mirta, you and me will take the east side; Spar and Jak, you take the west.”