One robot whose internal Laws did not require it to prevent harm to a human.
And one who had no Laws at all. Who could harm whatever humans it liked.
SERO PHROST LOOKED down into the grey darkness of the sea below as his aircar swooped back toward Purgatory. No explanation, no apology, just the flat order to turn back-an order his pilot robot was obeying, despite his best efforts to convince it otherwise. The turn-back order came from a traffic safety center, and the First Law saw to it that that was all a robot needed to know in order to force obedience.
But why the turn-around? An arrest order? What did they think they knew? And arrested for what? He would have to be careful, very careful. More than one person had been pulled in on a minor charge and made the mistake of assuming it was about some larger matter.
Or was it his own arrest that he was flying back toward? Phrost looked out the porthole and saw the running lights of several other aircars heading back to Purgatory. A dragnet? Perhaps, if he permitted himself to grasp at straws, it had nothing to do with him at all. It could be they were acting on a rustbacking tip-off, and pulling back all flights that had left at a certain time. No way to know. Perhaps it had nothing at all to do with him.
The guilty flee when no one pursues. Admit nothing, reveal nothing. There was still every chance for him to win out.
The dark sky rushed past him.
Alvar Kresh glanced at the wall clock in the operations room. Just before 0700 hours. A bare five hours since he had found the body, though it seemed that enough had happened since then to fill up a month’s worth of days. Tierlaw Verick was filed away for future reference, held under close guard in the same room in which he had been questioned, while the Crime Scene robots went over the room in which he had slept. Kresh doubted that Verick had anything to do with the assassination, but hunches were no way to run an investigation. Who knew what they might find, until they looked?
Someone had set up a conference table in the ops room, and Kresh, Fredda Leving, and Justen Devray sat at three of its sides, while Donald 111 stood at the fourth. All of them-even Donald, somehow-seemed exhausted, drawn out, the press of events leaving them all far behind the pace. And yet it seemed they were no further ahead than they had been when they had started.
The clock was moving, and moving fast. Kresh dared not delay much longer in contacting the key members of the government, or in announcing Grieg’s death to all Inferno.
But the moment he did that, Kresh knew, all hell would break loose. He could not foresee what form the chaos would take, but he knew, beyond doubt, that there would be chaos. He desperately needed to have much of this investigation under control before the news broke wide. And the damage could only be made worse if the first announcement came from someplace beside Alvar Kresh’s own mouth-a probability that was increasing with every second that passed.
A deputy might say something over an unscrambled channel that would be overheard, or call a friend or family member with the news, or give or sell the story of the century to a friend in the news business. Or the killers might decide it suited their purposes to make the announcement. Or someone who called Grieg might do what Kresh had done, and realize the Grieg on the other end was a simulation. The sim was still running on the phone system, half to help keep the lid on and half to leave it intact for the analysis teams.
They would have to make the announcement soon, very soon, if they were to keep any sort of control over events. But before Kresh told anyone anything, he needed a chance to think, to compare notes, to plan. A council of war-because it might quite literally be that Grieg’s death was the opening shot in an actual war. There was no way to know.
He was sure Justen Devray understood all that, and it at least seemed as if Fredda Leving did. Kresh found that he was impressed-very impressed-by the way she had handled herself in the midst of all this chaos. There was a lot to admire about the young, smart, and beautiful Fredda Leving. But Kresh did not feel he could rely too much on her instincts when it came to criminal investigation. She had shown in Verick’s interrogation that she thought in too straight a line for police work. Maybe the direct approach worked in science, where the facts did not mind being discovered. Police work, on the other hand, was a form of research where the facts were often determined to elude capture. Head straight for them and they’d be bound to escape.
“All right, Donald,” Alvar said. “Let’s get started. What do we have, and what do we need?”
