Inferno

“They say they left the Residence without noticing anything untoward and walked back to Limbo. ”

“In the driving rain?” Kresh asked.

“Neither of them had access to an aircar,” Donald said. “I would expect the going would be a bit treacherous, and visibility poor, but both of them are of water-resistant design. It would be no great hardship for either of them to walk back to town.”

“What about the SPRs?” Fredda asked. “Were they functional when Caliban and Prospero left?”

“I elected not to ask that question, for fear of supplying them with information they did not have. If I asked if the SPRs were working when they left, they might well have realized we had not established the timing of events, allowing them to fashion their stories more effectively. However, neither of them volunteered any information regarding the SPRs. If they are telling the truth, that suggests nothing was amiss when they left. If they are lying, they may be trying to make it appear nothing was amiss at that time, thus muddying the waters. ”

“The last thing these waters need is muddying, “ Kresh said. “All right, according to the robots, everything was fine when they left the building.”

“At some point in the night,” Devray said, “Bissal came out of his closet and started taking the gear out of this Trojan robot of yours, Dr. Leving. Can you give us some more details on that?”

“Well, the Trojan was badly damaged, and I haven’t had much time for an examination, but I can tell you the basics,” Fredda said. “The robot’s torso was actually a series of storage compartments. When I examined it, there was one empty compartment the right size and shape to hold the image box, the communications simulator that was programmed to put Grieg’s face and voice on the comm lines. There was what appeared to be a transmitter of some sort, though it looked half-melted. I would assume it was the activator for the range restrictors on the other robots. There were a few other things that were more or less intact-a handlight, a pair of gloves, that sort of thing. Then there was the remains of the blaster in what looked to be a shielded compartment, but it was so melted I could barely recognize it.”

“So that’s where the gun got to,” Kresh said.

“After he had unpacked his equipment,” Devray went on, “Bissal sent the signal activating the range restrictors. All the SPR robots immediately shut down. Bissal came upstairs and went straight to Grieg’s bedroom. The door was unlocked-the door doesn’t have a lock. No need with robot sentries on either side of the door.”

“But Grieg’s office has a lock,” Fredda protested.

“Not for security reasons,” Kresh said. “For privacy. It’s a one-way door setup to keep one set of visitors from ru

“In any event, Grieg was sitting up in bed, reading,” Devray went on. “He probably didn’t notice the SPRs in his room had shut down-even while they had been on, the three of them would have been doing nothing more than standing, motionless, in their niches. Bissal came in, got as close as the end of the bed, and fired, once. Grieg’s body shows no sign that he tried to escape. Maybe he was actually asleep, having dozed off over his book, and came awake with a start just as Bissal fired. Maybe he decided not to make any sudden moves, or any moves at all, for fear of spooking the intruder. Maybe he just froze, held his position exactly, as he tried to reason with Bissal. Or maybe-maybe he was set up. Maybe he didn’t react, or try to flee, because he knew Bissal, and was expecting Bissal.”

“What?” Kresh half shouted.

“I agree it sounds ridiculous. But can we afford to discount the possibility?”

“Why the devil would he be expecting Bissal?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Bissal was supposed to have a message for him. Maybe Grieg’s personal tastes were not what we assumed. Maybe a lot of things. I don’t think any such thing happened, but we’re trying to examine all the possibilities.”

“All right, point taken. In any event, Bissal shoots Grieg. ”

“Unless Verick or the robots did,” Fredda said, “but then why was Bissal here? Or do you have an answer for that, as well, Donald?”

“I grant that Bissal’s presence is the largest weakness in my theory,” Donald said. “I assure you that I will continue to search for an explanation. ”

“I’ll lay odds that you don’t find it,” Fredda said. “In any event, we are now up to the murder itself-possibly the simplest part of the whole affair. Bissal-a loser, a nobody from nowhere, raises his weapon and blasts a hole in the planetary leader.”

“There’s something almost anticlimactic about it,” Devray said. “ After all the complications and scheming and plotting, that one shot was all there was to it. ”

Fredda nodded. “Commander Devray, maybe I should do the narrative for the period after the murder. I think I’ve come up with a few things I haven’t had a chance to report.”

Devray nodded. “By all means. ”

“Thank you,” Fredda said. “It’s virtually certain that Bissal shot the three SPRs immediately after killing Grieg. You can get a pretty clear sequence of shots by charting the blast intensity, with each shot a bit weaker than the one before. That much we knew. But what I’ve established is that Bissal wasted his blaster charge. He had enough power in that thing to kill Grieg and knock out a hundred SPRs. But a blaster keeps shooting as long as you hold down the trigger-and Bissal held that trigger down too long.

“All he had to do to the SPRs is burn them deep enough to vaporize the range restrictors and eliminate the evidence that rustbackers were behind the plot, but about half the SPRs that did get shot have holes burned clear through their chests-and so does Grieg, for that matter. If Bissal had given each robot, say, a quarter-second blaster shot instead of a full second, the robots would be just as dead, the restrictors would be thoroughly destroyed, and he would have had the blaster power left over to knock out all the SPRs he missed. Also, the Trojan robot in the basement was only partially destroyed. One of the Crime Scene robots said it looked like a deliberate overload meltdown from a blaster with a depleted power pack.

“I think Bissal was supposed to shoot all the SPRs, and then put his blaster back in the Trojan, set it for an overload, and run. If he had been careful with his blaster charge, he would have had enough power left to shoot all the robots twice, and still melt the Trojan robot down to a puddle on the floor, destroy it so completely we’d never know it was a Trojan.”

“It seems like a lot of trouble to hide the fact that they were using range restrictors,” Devray said, “especially when you consider that we were going to find a bunch of robots all shot in the chest. Seems to me we would have thought about range restrictors pretty quick anyway.”

“Maybe,” Fredda conceded. “It would have been a little harder to realize the importance of chest shots if Bissal had done more shots to the head and the lower torso, or shot a few of them through the back instead of the front. But even so, think about it. If he had shot them all, the way he was supposed to, there would have been forty-nine SPRs shot dead, one SPR melted down to slag, and Grieg dead. Maybe we’d all be wondering what sort of super killer could get past that much security. We wouldn’t know for sure they had used restrictors-or known what sort, or how they had done it. Besides, covering their tracks wasn’t much of a priority with this crowd.”

“In fact, much the opposite,” Kresh said. “Think about all the things in this case that seem to have been done for the purpose of u