“Settlements?” Kresh asked.
“Well, one settlement, anyway,” Devray said. “They call it Valhalla. It’s supposed to be somewhere on the far side of the planet from here, somewhere in the Utopia region of Terra Grande. I don’t even know if it exists—but it’s where half the rustbacks we catch seem to be heading. And I’m tired of wasting time and effort chasing rumors. I told the Governor the rustbacks and the New Law robots were more trouble than they were worth, and it was time to admit it and move on.”
“But they work!” Fredda protested. “New Law robots represent half the work force on Purgatory.”
“And they were supposed to be all of it—except they’re only about a third as productive as Three-Law robots. Every department has been forced to pull in human workers, because the Settlers don’t allow Three-Law robots to have the run of the island. If the New Law robots were worth all the trouble they cause, that’d be one thing,” Devray said. “But if anything, they’re slowing down the reterraforming project.”
Kresh was surprised to see Devray that interested in terraforming—and then realized he shouldn’t have been surprised at all. The Rangers only did law enforcement on the side. Terraforming was much more their side of the street.
“Was—was the Governor considering the idea?” Fredda asked.
“I don’t know,” Devray said. “He didn’t reject it out of hand. I know he was also toying with the idea of removing all the range restrictors and letting the New Law robots go.”
“Why the devil would he do that?” Kresh asked. “There wouldn’t be a New Law left on this island if not for the restrictors.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” Fredda said. “A lot of the New Law robots do cause trouble—but the ones that do work, work plenty hard. A lot of the rustbacks work very hard indeed—once they’re paid a decent wage. And not all of them head for Valhalla, Justen. And just by the way, Valhalla is no rumor. It’s a real place—and there are lots of good reasons for the New Laws to head for it. I’ve seen that with my own eyes.”
“You seem to know a lot about rustbacks,” Devray said. “And have you reported these escaped robots in Valhalla you’ve seen with your own eyes? Or reported Valhalla’s location?”
“No, I have not reported that information,” she snapped. “I don’t know where Valhalla is, and I don’t want to know. But if you want to arrest me for seeing a rustback, go right ahead. I felt responsible for them. Rustbacks are escaped New Law robots, and I invented New Law robots. Of course I’d research them.”
“Hold it, both of you,” Kresh said. “This is not the time. We can go into all this later. Right now the only important thing is that Devray’s recommendation to the Governor could have given Caliban and Prospero a very strong motive if they knew about it. They might have decided to kill him before he killed them.”
“Caliban isn’t a New Law robot—”
“Burning hells, I know that better than anyone!” Kresh snapped. “But maybe he decided not to take chances on being caught up in a roundup. Or maybe he just acted in sympathy to the plight of his New Law brethren. It’s a possible motive, and the two of them are definite suspects.”
“But you can’t just decide they did it. Any number of humans might have—”
“I said they were suspects, not the suspects,” Kresh said. “Even if I were convinced they did it—and I’m not—I wouldn’t dare stop investigating other possibilities. Not until the other shoe drops. Suppose it wasn’t the robots? Suppose humans did this job? What was their motive? Have they achieved it with Grieg’s death, or is there more to follow? Is it a coup, or a simple assassination?”
“A coup? Stars above, I hadn’t even thought of that,” Fredda said.
“I haven’t thought of much else,” Kresh said. “But I’ll tell you this—with every minute that passes, it becomes less likely that it was—is—a coup. If you’re attempting to overthrow a government, you don’t give it time to recover from the first blow before you strike again. Unless something has gone wrong with their plans. Or unless—hellfire, that’s a tough one.”
“What’s a tough one?” Fredda demanded.
“Suppose the public announcement of Grieg’s death is the signal for their next move?”
“Well, there’s some chance of that,” Devray agreed. “I doubt the killers expected the body would be discovered so soon—or that you would discover it. They set up the image box to do the comm simulation, after all.”
“Yes,” Fredda said. “Probably the killers weren’t expecting discovery until this morning.” She looked up at Kresh and shrugged. “Maybe it was Tierlaw who was supposed to find the body. Unless Tierlaw did it and was planning to pretend to discover the body this morning. Except Donald said his monitors showed that Tierlaw was telling the truth.”
“Don’t trust Donald’s sensors that far,” Kresh said. “A trained man could beat his sensors—or any lie-detector system, short of a Psychic Probe. But Tierlaw could have been set up, a useful idiot.”
“How the devil can an idiot be useful?” Fredda asked.
“By being worse than useless to your opposition. Maybe we’re supposed to pay so much attention to Tierlaw that we let the real perpetrators get away. But that’s giving them an awful lot of credit, and assumes an incredibly complex and fragile plot. My guess is that the assassins are completely unaware of Tierlaw’s existence, and he is telling the precise truth: He had nothing to do with it, and he slept through the whole thing. But don’t worry, we’re going to hold him and check him out all the same.”
“If you’re right,” Devray said, “then how was the body supposed to be discovered? The plotters had to have thought about it. What were they expecting?”
“Well,” Fredda said, “all the regular household robots had been ordered to clear off to an outbuilding for the night of the party. There are two deputies interviewing them now, but I doubt they’ll get anything. They would have returned this morning—right about now, I suppose—to resume their normal duties.”
“So a robot was supposed to discover Grieg was dead,” Kresh said. “What would have happened then?” he asked.
Fredda thought for a moment. “It depends very much on the robot’s preexisting and contingency orders, of course, but most likely, all hell would break loose. It would call for help, attempt resuscitation, call for reinforcements, request a security alert, and who knows what else.”
“All the proper things to do in terms of the Three Laws, but that would have set off absolute chaos,” Kresh said. “If that had happened, every kind of cop within two hundred kilometers would have been over the Residence, banging into each other and the news media and whatever political leaders managed to get involved. The devil only knows what sort of hell that would have stirred up. And all an attempt to revive Grieg would have accomplished would be the muddling of the evidence. Just the sort of chaos and confusion a coup plotter would want.”
“Maybe,” Devray said. “Maybe. There’s a lot of guessing in there, but it might be right.”
“Sir,” Donald said, “if I may interject, there are other vital issues that must be considered before we establish any sort of motive for other hypothetical suspects.”
“What other issues?” Kresh asked.
“There is the question of the weapon.”
“Hell’s bells, the weapon. I am getting old.”
“What about the weapon?” Fredda asked.
“There are energy scanners at every entrance to this building,” said Kresh, “and perimeter scanners as well. No one should have been able to get an energy weapon into this building without half a dozen alarms going crazy. How did the weapon get in here? How did it get out?”
“Or did it get out?” Devray asked. “Why risk taking it both ways through the scanners? You might set off an alarm on the way out. If I were doing this job, I wouldn’t take chances on smuggling the gun in. The building was unoccupied for damn-all long enough to plant a hundred blasters. I’d hide a nice standard blaster with a shielded power pack, do the job, and then abandon the blaster on the premises.”