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Chapter 2

  "ALL right, Donald," Kresh said as he came in, "what have you got?"

  "Good evening, Sheriff Kresh," Donald replied, speaking with a smooth and urbane courtesy. "I am afraid we do not have a great deal. The crime scene does not tell us much that we can use, though of course you may well note something we have missed. I have not been able to form a satisfactory interpretation of the evidence. Did you have the opportunity to examine my update regarding the maintenance robot's statements?"

  "Yes, I did. Damn strange. You did right to get the data out of him, but I don't want to take any chances on the rest of the staff robots. I don't even want to get near them myself. I want the department's staff roboticists to interview them all-carefully. " Normally the police roboticists dealt with robots who had been tricked into this or that by con artists skilled in lying to robots and convincing them to obey illegal orders under some carefully designed misapprehension. A man could make a pretty fair living convincing household robots to reveal their masters' financial account codes. It would do the roboticists good to deal with something a little out of the ordinary. " But we can worry about that tomorrow. Is the scene clear?"

  "Yes, sir. The observer robots have completed their basic scan of the area. I believe you can examine the room without danger of destroying clues, so long as you practice some care. "

  Alvar looked closely at Donald. After a lifetime of dealing with robots, he still did that, still looked toward the machines as if he could read an emotion or a thought in their expressions or postures. On some robots, on the very rare ones that mimicked human appearance perfectly, that was at least possible. But there were precious few of those on Inferno, and with any other robot type the effort was pointless.

  Even so, the habit gave him a moment of time to consider the indirect meaning of the robot'swords. No "satisfactory interpretation of the evidence. " What the hell didthat mean? Donald was trying to tell him something, something the robot did not choose to say directly, for fear of presuming too far. But Donald was never cryptic without a purpose. When Donald got that way, it was for a reason. Alvar Kresh was tempted to order Donald to explain precisely what he was suggesting, but he restrained his impatience.

  It might be better to see if he could spot the point that was bothering Donald himself, evaluate it independently without prejudgment. There was, of course, precious little a robot would miss that a human could notice. Much of what Donald had said was so much deferential nonsense, salve for the ego. But the words Donald had used were interesting:"The crime scene does not tell us much that we can use. " As if therewere something there, but something distracting, meaningless, deceptive. So much for avoiding prejudgment, Alvar thought sardonically. That was the trouble with robot assistants as good as Donald-you tended to lean on them to much, let them influence your thinking, trust them to do too much of the background work. Hell, Donald could probably do this job better than me, Alvar thought.

  He shook his head angrily. No. Robots are the servants of humans, incapable of independent action. Alvar stepped through the doorway, fully into the room, and began to look around.

  Alvar Kresh felt a strange and familiar tingle course through him as he set to work. There was always something oddly thrilling about this moment, where the case was opened and the chase was on. A strange chase it was, one that started with Alvar not so much as knowing who it was that he pursued.

  And there was something stranger still, always, about standing in the middle of someone' s very private space with that person absent. He had stood in the bedrooms and salons and spacecraft of the dead and the missing, read their diaries, traced their financial dealings, stumbled across the evidence of their secret vices and private pleasures, their grand crimes and tiny, pathetic secrets. He had come to know their lives and deaths from the clues they left behind, been made privy by the power of his office to the most intimate parts of their lives. Here and now, that began as well.

  Some work places were sterile, revealing nothing about their inhabitants. But this was not such a place. This room was a portrait of the person who worked here, if only Alvar could learn to read it.

  He began his examination of the laboratory. Superficially, at least, it was a standard enough setup. A room maybe twenty meters by ten. Inferno was not a crowded world by any means. People tended to spread out. By Inferno standards it was an average-sized space for one person.

  There were four doors in all, in the corners of the room, set into the long sides of the room: two on the exterior wall, leading directly to the outside, and two on the opposite, interior wall, leading into the building' s hallway. Alvar noted that the room was windowless, and the doors were heavy; they appeared to be light-tight. Close them, cut the overhead lights, and the room would be pitch-black. Presumably they did some work with light-sensitive materials in here. Or perhaps they tested robot eyes. Would the reason for, or the fact of, a light-tight room be important or meaningless? No way to know.

  Alvar and Donald stood by one of the interior doors, toward what Alvar found himself thinking of as the rear of the room. But why is this end the rear? he wondered. No one specific thing, he decided. It was just that this end of the room seemed more disused. Everything was boxed up, in storage. The other end clearly was put to more active use.

  Work counters ran most of the length of the room, between the pairs of doors. There were computer terminals on the counters. The walls held outlets for various types of power supplies, and two or three hookups Kresh could not identify. Special-purpose datataps, perhaps.

  Every square centimeter of the countertops seemed to have something on it. A robot torso, a disembodied robot head, a stack of carefully sealed boxes, each neatly labeledHandle with Care. Gravitonic Brain. Alvar frowned and looked at the labels again. What the devil were gravitonic brains? For thousands of years, all robots had been built with positronic brains. It was the positronic brain that made robots possible. Gravitonic brains? Alvar knew nothing at all about them, but the name itself was unsettling. He did not approve of needless change.

  He filed away the puzzle for future reference and continued his survey of the room. All of the room' s side counters were full of all sorts of mysterious-looking tools and machines and robot parts. Yet there was no feel of chaos or mess about the room; all was neat and orderly. There was not even so much as an air of clutter. It was merely that this entire room was in active use by someone who seemed to have several projects going at once.

  Two large worktables sat in the center of the room. A half -built robot and a bewildering collection of parts and tools were spread out on one table, while the other was largely empty, with just a few odds and ends here and there around the edges.

  Wheeled racks of test equipment stood here and there about the room. A huge contraption of tubing and swivels stood between the two tables. It was easily three meters tall, and took up maybe four meters by five in floor space. It was on power rollers, so it could be pushed out of the way when not in use.

  "What the devil is that thing?" Alvar asked, stepping toward the center of the room.

  "A robot service rack," Donald replied, following behind. "It is designed to clamp onto a robot's hard-attachment points and suspend the robot at any height and in any attitude, so as to position the needed part of the robot for convenient access. It is used for repairs or tests. I thought it a large and awkward thing to keep in the middle of the room. It would certainly interfere with easy movement between the two worktables, for example. "

  "That' s what I was thinking. Look, you can see the empty space along the wall on the rear end of the room. They rolled it over there when they weren't using it. So why is it out in the middle of the room? What good is an empty robot rack?"

  "The clear implication is that there was a robot in it recently," Donald said.

  "Yes, I agree. And notice the empty space on the center of the empty worktable. About the right size for another robot there, too. Unless they moved the same robot
from the table to the rack, or vice versa. Maybe that was the motive for the attack? The theft of one or two experimental robots? We'll have to check on all that. "

  "Sir, if I could direct your attention to the floor in front of the service rack, Fredda Leving's position on it has been marked out-"

  "Not yet, Donald. I'll get there. I'll get there. " Alvar was quite purposefully ignoring the pooled blood and the body outline in the center of the room. It was too easy to be distracted by the big, obvious clues at a crime scene. What could the body outline tell him? That a woman had been attacked here, bled here? He knew all that already. Better to work the rest of the room first.

  But one thing was bothering him. This room did not match Fredda Leving's character. He knew her slightly, from the process of ordering Donald, and this place did not fit her. It had the feel of a male domain, somehow. Tiny details he had seen but not noted suddenly registered in Alvar's consciousness. The size and cut of a lab coat hanging by the door, the size of the dust-sealed lab shoes sitting on the floor beneath the lab coat, certain tools stored on wall hooks that would be well out of reach for the average-sized woman.

  And there was, indefinably, something about the neatness of this room that spoke of a shy, compulsive, tidyman, something that did not match an assertive woman like Fredda Leving. If she lived up to her very public image,her lab would be a mess, even after the robots got through cleaning, for she would flatly refuse to let them near most of it. The great and famous Fredda Leving, hero of robotics research, the crown jewel of science in Inferno, was not a compulsive fussbudget-but the occupant of this room clearly was.

  Alvar Kresh stepped back into the hallway and checked the nameplate next to the door. Gubber Anshaw, Design and Testing Chief; it read. Well, that solved one minor mystery and replaced it with another. It wasn't Leving's lab, but Anshaw's, whoever he was.

  But what was Fredda Leving doing in Anshaw's lab, presumably alone with her assailant, in the middle of the night?

  Kresh went back into the lab and walked around the rest of the room, careful not to touch anything, determined to resist the urge to go and look at the spot where the body fell. The room was a perfect forest of potential clues, jam-packed with gadgets and hardware that might have some bearing on the case, if only Alvar knew enough about experimental robotics. Was there indeed something missing, some object as big as an experimental robot, or as tiny as an advanced microcircuit, whose theft might provide a motive for this attack?

  But what was the nature of the attack? He knew nothing so far.

  At last, quite reluctantly, after working the rest of the crime scene and coming up with very little for his efforts, Alvar moved toward the center of the room, the center of the case, the scene of the attack.

  There it was, on the floor, between the two worktables, a meter or so in front of the large robot service rack. A pool of blood, a blotchy, irregular shape about a meter across. The body as found was indicated in a glowing yellow outline that followed the contours of the body perfectly, down to the sprawled-out fingers of the left hand. The fingers seemed to be reaching toward the door, reaching for help that did not come.

  Some errant part of Kresh' s mind found itself wondering how they did that, how they put down that perfect outline. Robots in the Sheriff's office knew how, but he did not.

  But no. It was tempting to distract himself with side issues, but he could not permit himself the luxury. He knelt down and looked at what he had come to see. He had forced himself not to notice the smell of drying blood until this moment, but now he had to pay attention, and the heavy, acrid, rotting odor seemed to surge into his lungs. A wave of nausea swept over him. He ignored the stench and went on with his grim task.

  The pool of blood was much smeared and splashed about by the med-robots, their footprints and other marks badly obscuring the story the floor had to tell. But that was all right. Donald would have images of the floor recorded straight off the med-robots' eyes, what they saw the moment they came in. Computer tricks could erase all traces of the med-robots from whatever images the police observer/forensic robots had made, reconstruct the scene exactly as it was before. Some of his deputies only worked off such reconstructions, but Kresh preferred to work in the muddled-up, dirtied-up confused mess of the real-world crime scene.

  The blood had virtually all clotted or dried by now. Kresh pulled a stylus from his pocket and tested the surface. Almost completely solidified. It always amazed him how fast it happened. He looked up and from the pool of blood, noted the pattern of a med-robot's foot and then noted something else he had seen before but merely filed away until he had seen the whole room. Two other sets of prints, clearly from robotic feet, but wholly different from the med-robot's treads. One set of prints led out the front interior into the hallway, the other out the front exterior door to the outside of the building.

  And the two sets of prints might be different from the med-robot's, but they were utterly identical to each other.

  Twosets of mystery prints, exactly like each other.

  "That's what's bothering you, isn't it, Donald?" Alvar said, standing back up.

  "What is, sir?"

  "The robot footprints. The ones that make it clear that a robot-two robots-walked through the pool of blood and left Fredda Leving, quite possibly to die. ",

  "Yes, sir, that did bother me. The flaw is obvious, but it is what the evidence suggests. "

  "Then the evidence is wrong. The First Law makes it impossible for any robot to behave that way," Alvar said.

  "And therefore," a brash new voice suddenly declared from the door Alvar had come through, "therefore, someone must have staged the attack to make itseem like a robot-tworobots-did it. Brilliant, Sheriff Kresh. That took me all of thirty seconds to figure out. How long haveyou been here?"

  Alvar turned around and clenched his teeth to keep from letting out a string of curses. It was Tonya Welton. A tall, dark-skinned woman, long-limbed and graceful, she stood just inside the doorway, a tall, dusky-yellow robot behind her. Alvar Kresh would not even have noticed the robot except that Welton was a Settler. He always got a certain grim pleasure out of seeing robots inflicted on the people who hated them so passionately, but at the moment at least, Welton seemed bothered not at all. Her expression was one of amused condescension.

  She was dressed in a disturbingly tight and extravagantly patterned blue one-piece bodysuit. The Spacer population on Inferno preferred much more modest clothing and far more subdued colors. On Inferno, robots were brightly colored, not people. But no one had told the leader of the Settlers on Inferno that-or else she had ignored them when theydid tell her. Welton, more than likely, had gotten it backwards deliberately.

  But what the hell was Tonya Welton doing here now?

  "Good evening, Lady Tonya," Donald said in his smoothest and most urbane tones. It was rare, surpassing rare, for a robot to speak except when spoken to, but Donald was smart enough to know this situation needed defusing. "What a pleasant surprise to have you join us here. "

  "I doubt it," Tonya Welton said with a smile that Alvar scored as being at least an attempt at courtesy. "Forgive me, Sheriff Kresh, for my rather rude entrance. I'm afraid the news about Fredda Leving unsettled me. I tend to be a bit sharp-tongued when I am upset. "

  And at all other times,Kresh thought to himself. "Quite all right, Madame Welton," he replied in a tone of voice that made it clear it was anything but all right. "I don't know what business brings you here, but there has been an attack on one of Inferno' s top scientists here tonight, and I cannot allow anything to interfere. This is an official investigation, Madame Welton, which has nothing to do with the Settlers, and I'm afraid I must ask you to leave. "

  "Oh, no, I can't. You see, that's why I'm here. Governor Grieg himself called me not an hour ago and asked that I come here tonight and join in your investigation. "

  Alvar Kresh stared at the Settler woman in openmouthed astonishment. What in the d
evil was going on here? "Are we done here, Donald?" he asked. " Anything else I need to see immediately?"

  "No, sir, I think not. "

  "Very well, then, Donald. Seal this room as a crime scene. No one in or out. Just now, I think perhaps Madame Welton and I need to have a little talk, and this is not the place for it. Join us when you have completed the arrangements. "

  "Very good, sir," Donald said.

  "Let's go to my car, Madame Welton. We can talk there. "

  "Yes, let's do that, Sheriff," Tonya Welton said, rather stiffly. "There are a few things we need to get straight. Come along, Ariel. "

  ALVAR Kresh and Tonya Welton sat down in the Sheriff's aircar, facing each other, both of them clearly wary. Welton's robot, Ariel, stood behind her mistress, fading into the background as far as Kresh was concerned. Robots didn't count.

  "All right, then," he said. "What's all this about? Why did the Governor call you in? What possible connection does this case have with the Settlers?"

  Tonya Welton folded her hands carefully and looked Kresh straight in the eye. "In a day or two you'll get the answer to that. But for now, it's classified. "

  "I see," Kresh said, though he most certainly did not. "I'm afraid that is not much of an explanation. "

  "No, and I am sorry for that, but my hands are tied. There is, however, one thing Ican tell you that will at least in part explain my being here. I do have authority to be here, under the agreement permitting a Settler presence on this world. I have the right to protect the safety of my employees. "

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Oh, yes, didn't you know?" Tonya Welton asked. "Fredda Leving is working for me. "

  There was a half minute' s dead silence. Fredda Leving was famous, one of the top roboticists on the planet. Most Infernals regarded her not as a person, but as a planetary asset. For her and her labs to be reduced to mere employees of the Settlers-Welton might as well have announced that the Settlers had purchased Government Tower, or gotten title to the Great Bay.

  At last Alvar found his voice again. "If I could make a suggestion, Madame Welton, I think it might be wise to keep that fact very quiet indeed," he said gruffly.

  Welton looked surprised. "Why? We haven't publicized it widely, but we haven't tried to keep it secret. "

  "Then I suggest you start," Alvar said.

  "I'm afraid I don't understand," Welton said.

  "Then let me make this clear, Madame Welton. The average citizen of Inferno will not regard this attack as a mere assault, or as attempted murder. The citizens will see an attack on a top scientist, especially a roboticist, as sabotage. Many of them will simply assume your people did it, even without knowledge of Settler involvement in Leving Labs. Once they hear Settlers are involved, that will only make it worse. "

  "Our involvement!" Tonya Welton exclaimed. "We had nothing to do with the attack!"

  "That's as may be," Alvar said. Clearly Welton was upset, and he wanted her that way, wanted her off balance. What was she doing here, anyway? How had she gotten here so quickly? There was something damned suspicious in her haste and eagerness. Just what the hell kind of robotics work would the Settlers be interested in, anyway? There was more than one mystery in the air tonight.

  Donald slipped back into the aircar and took a place standing against the wall, next to Ariel. Kresh glanced at him and nodded. There was something comforting in having his loyal servant present. But Donald was not the issue here. Kresh took a good hard look at Welton, trying to gauge her mood. If he was any judge of such matters, there was an underlayer of uncertainty below all her brave talk. "You deny involvement," he said, "but just now you spoke of Fredda Leving working for you. That is involvement enough. That alone will be seen as a threat by most of the people on this world. "

  "What in deep space are you talking about?" Welton demanded.

  "My fellow Infernals will see interference in robot research as an attack on the Spacers' hopes of survival in a universe that seems to be surrendering itself to the Settlers. Given the slightest hint of any connection between the Settlers and the attack, however slender and tenuous, the people of this world will assume your people were behind it. They won't care if it is true or not. They willbelieve.

  "They will associate this attack with the Settlers-the same damn Settlers they see wandering free allover Inferno, poking their noses into everything, treating the people of Inferno as little better than savages. It will be enough to make the situation even more tense than it is already. The people of Inferno are sure you Settlers regard us all as amusing little natives to be brushed aside on your way to conquering the galaxy. "

  Tonya colored a bit, and she folded her arms in front of her. "Politics. Always it comes down to politics and prejudice. My dear Sheriff. It is not we Settlers who are holding you Spacers back. You are doing it to yourselves, with no need of help from us. You have had endless generations in which to colonize new worlds of your own. You could have peopled thousands of worlds by now. Instead you have but fifty worlds-forty-nine after this Solaria business.

  "Wedid not stop you from going on to further colonization. You chose not to continue. Nor are we preventing you from starting a new effort at colonization now. But instead of taking action, you choose to remain at home and blameus for moving outward. Is itour fault that you have made your refusal to settle new worlds a mark of virtue?"

  "Madame Welton. You must excuse me," Kresh said. "I allowed my own emotions to get the better of me. I did not intend to accuse you, but you are entitled to fair warning of what the people of Inferno will think if your-ah-involvement becomes known. I don't hold such views myself, though I must admit some sympathy for them. But if a Settler relationship with Fredda Leving comes out in connection with this crime, or in any way at all, it is my considered professional opinion that there will be hell to pay. "

  Tonya Welton stared at him, unblinking, her face unreadable.

  At last she spoke. "Then I think you can look forward to having to pay that hell in about two days' time," she said, rather soberly.

  "What happens then?" he asked, his voice flat, his face deadpan.

  "There will be an-announcement," she said, clearly being careful of what words she used. "I am not at liberty to say more, but if there are to be the sort of difficulties you are talking about, they will happen then. "

  "Beg pardon, Madame Welton, but do you think it possible that tonight's attack has some connection to that announcement?" Donald asked. "Perhaps an attempt to stop or delay it?"

  Welton turned her head sharply toward Donald, her expression suddenly wild and uncontrolled. Obviously, she had not noticed him coming in. "Yes," she said, a bit too eagerly. "Yes, I believe that is a real possibility. If it is true, then I believe we are all in terrible danger. "

  "What the devil are you-" Kresh began.

  "No," Welton said, turning back toward Kresh. "I can say no more. Butsolve this case quickly, Sheriff. If there is anything in this life, this world, that you value,solve it!" She took a deep breath and seemed to come back to herself a bit. "It was a mistake for me to come here tonight," she announced. She turned and looked about the aircar's cabin, as if seeing it for the first time. "I will contact you tomorrow, Sheriff," she said. " And I will expect full and complete reports of your progress on a regular basis. Come, Ariel. "

  And without another word, she stepped out of the car, her robot following. Alvar Kresh watched them go, wondering just. what exactly Tonya Welton was up to. Her performance tonight was odd, to put it mildly. Putting aside the fact of her magically appearing almost before Kresh got to the crime scene, there was something else: the way she had latched on to the possibility of a political motive. It almost made Kresh think she wanted to draw attention toward that idea and away from something else. But what the hell could that something else be?

  All he knew for sure was that whatever was going on, he was already stuck, deep inside it.