Inferno

He turned around in his seat and faced Prospero and Caliban. There was of course nothing, nothing at all to be read in their posture or their faces. Donald found that disturbing, for some reason. He had always been able to see something in a suspect’s face. But then, suspects were humans, not robots.

Perhaps that was the trouble. These two were neither one nor the other. They were not true robots-but they were far from being human either. Something in between. Something less-and perhaps, Donald conceded, something more-than either.

But none of that mattered now. There was only one thing that Donald needed to know.

“Did you kill Chanto Grieg?” Donald asked, forcing the bald question out into the world. Kill. Kill. He was asking beings very like himself, very much like robots, beings built by the same Fredda Leving who had created Donald himself, if they had murdered a human being. The very thought of it was enough to disrupt his cognitive function for a moment. But Donald was a police robot, and used to thoughts of violence.

He knew that these two did not have the true robot’s inability to lie, but that did not matter. He still needed to ask. He needed to hear the answer-true or false-in their voices. “Did you kill Chanto Grieg, or were the two of you part of any plot to kill him?”

“No,” Caliban said, speaking for the two of them after a moment’s hesitation. “We did not. We had nothing whatever to do with his death, and had no foreknowledge of it. We did not meet with him so we could kill him.”

“Then what was your purpose?”

Caliban paused another moment, and looked again at Prospero before he spoke. And suddenly there was something readable in his ma

11

“OTTLEY BISSAL,” Donald said. A grainy blowup of a still image from the integrator sequence appeared on the left side of the main display screen. A sharp, clear 3-D mug shot image popped into being on the right side. There was no doubt it was the same man. “ As Dr. Leving predicted, Bissal did indeed leave a calling card behind, so to speak. ”

Donald was standing by the screen at one end of a conference table, addressing Fredda, Sheriff Kresh, and Commander Devray. About fourteen hours had passed since Kresh had discovered the body, and about three since Fredda had found the destroyed SPR robot in the lowerlevel storage room.

Fredda felt utterly exhausted, and knew that no one else was doing much better. Kresh had caught a quick nap, and Devray probably had too. But no one was going to be doing much sleeping for a while. Donald was the only one of them at his best-

“The Crime Scene robots recovered multiple fingerprints,” Donald went on, “along with hairs and flecks of skin, from the interior of one of the storage closets in the room where the security robots were held. It is clear that Bissal secreted himself in that closet for some time-long enough that he shed several hairs and several flecks of dandruff and other dead skin. From these we recovered DNA samples that provided a definitive match with Bissal’s employment file. The fingerprint evidence from the door frame of the closet door provided independent corroboration of this identification.”

“All right,” said Justen Devray. “The guy in the closet was Ottley Bissal. So who the hell is Ottley Bissal?”

“That,” said Donald, “is the question we have been working to answer since the forensic identity team gave us a name, about half an hour ago. We have made very rapid progress-mainly because every law enforcement service on the planet seems to have had an extensive file on Bissal.”

“Wonderful,” Kresh said. “That means everyone is going to wonder why we didn’t do anything about him before he killed the Governor. Go on, Donald. What was in the files?”

“Ottley Bissal,” Donald said, reading off the file. “Single, never married, age twenty-seven standard years. Born and raised in a lower-class area of the city of Hades. Limited education. Low general aptitude shown on a number of evaluative tests taken at school. Notations from various schoolteachers and counselors to the effect that he was a disruptive child and a low achiever. Once out of school, he worked various odd jobs with long stretches of nonemployment or nonregistered employment in between. Few known associates or friends. ”

“The classic loser-loner, it sounds like,” said Devray.

“I take it there were a few brushes with the law?” Kresh asked.

“Yes, sir. Many arrests, some indictments, but only a few convictions. There seem to be two major categories of offense to which he was prone: street brawling and petty theft. He was granted a suspended sentence for his first assault conviction six years ago. Four years ago, he served three months time in the Hades City Jail for theft.

“As a second-time offender, he was required to obtain employment upon release and hold a job for no less than an accumulated total of five years. With discharges for cause from various jobs, and bouts of unemployment, he has only accumulated three years of employment thus far. His parole officer rates his progress as ‘unsatisfactory. ’”

“I’m not real clear on the business about a job,” Fredda said. “How does holding a job make sense as part of punishment for assault?”

“Well, if you were in law enforcement, it would make a great deal of sense, “ Kresh said. “The average formal unemployment rate on Inferno is ninety percent. Only ten percent of the population have a full-time occupation for which they receive significant compensation. No one needs to work in order to live, not with robots taking care of us. But there are people-like those of us around this table-who need to work for other, psychological, reasons. Work is what gives people like us satisfaction, or maybe a big part of our reason for being.

“A fair number of the other ninety percent-say half of them-stay just as busy as we workers do, but are busy with things that might not be considered ‘jobs. ’ Art, or music, or gardening, or sex. Most-nearly all-of the rest of the unemployed don’t really do much of anything but let the robots take care of them. Harmless drones. Maybe they amuse themselves by sleeping a lot, or by shopping, or by watching entertainments or playing games. Maybe they are vaguely discontented. Maybe they’re bored and depressed. Maybe they love each and every day of life. No one really knows. I wouldn’t want to be one of them, and I don’t think much of them-but at least they don’t do any harm.

“But that leaves us with the leftovers. The ones who have no work they love, no consuming interest, and no capacity for accepting passive inactivity. Troublemakers. Mostly male, mostly uneducated, mostly young and restless. Bissal fits the profile of the people who commit-what is it, Donald-ninety-five percent?”

“That is approximately correct,” Donald said.

“Close enough. People like Bissal commit ninety-five percent of the violent crime on Inferno. Compared to Settlers, we have very short jail sentences here, for all but the most serious offenses-and leaving a bored troublemaker to rot in jail for years didn’t seem to make much sense anyway. So the powers that be remembered a very old saying about idle hands and the devil’s playthings, and passed a law. ”

“The idea is,” Devray said, “if you’re forced to have a job, then there is at least a hope that you will become interested enough in the work, or at least be kept busy and made tired enough by it, so you won’t be bored and energetic enough to commit fresh crimes. And it works fairly well. People find out that doing something is more satisfying and interesting than being bored and angry. ” Devray nodded toward the report Donald was reading. “It doesn’t sound like it’s worked on Bissal, though.”