Caliban

“Two of our aircars are on the way, but the craft they are pursuing is now at speed with a fair lead. He is heading due north, toward the mountains, flying straight into a rather heavy storm. And I need hardly add a nighttime pursuit is always more difficult.”

Kresh sat down to pull his pants over his feet, but the fasteners had closed before he put them on. He fumbled with them a moment before they would reopen. “Damnation. Nothing is ever easy,” he said, talking in equal part about the tactical situation and the difficulty of getting his own pants on. The storms in the desert were rare, but tremendously violent. Even a skilled pilot would hesitate to fly in such conditions. If Caliban went into the storm, odds were he would not come out. “ All right, advise the aircars to maintain pursuit, but no heroics. We’ve had enough stunt flying. Break off the pursuit if it becomes dangerous. They are specifically ordered not to risk themselves or their craft. Remind them that we ought to be able to track him easily outside the city. No tu

“They arenot repeatnot to shoot down the aircar. They are ordered to capture, not destroy Caliban. If possible, they are to force him to land. I want to question him. He may be the only damned witness we have to the Leving assault.Do not destroy him. We can always do that later.” Kresh stood up to pull his pants on. “Call off the citywide search,” he said with a grunt. “Let the search teams get some rest and stand by to provide backup outside the city if need be.”

“Yes, sir. I am relaying your orders now. However, my standing orders require me to remind you Tonya Welton is to be made aware of every major development in the investigation.”

“We’ll send her a memo in the morning. She’s not going to hear word one about this. Not while she’s a suspect, and not when we can count on her to blab everything she hears to Gubber Anshaw.”

“Yes, sir. I quite agree, regardless of my standing orders. However, I am also required to remind you that your jurisdiction, and that of your deputies, is limited to the city of Hades. You and your subordinates have no authority whatsoever outside the city limits.”

“To hell with jurisdiction. I want to get out on the jobnow.”

“Yes, sir. May I take it, then, that you and I will join the pursuit personally?”

“Absolutely.” Alvar struggled with the fasteners for a moment and finally got the pants closed. He pulled on his jacket and then noticed that Donald had laid out his holster as well. But there was something odd about Donald doing that. Robots as a rule did not handle weapons. The First Law difficulty was obvious-if Donald put a weapon in Kresh ‘ s hand, and Kresh used it to kill someone, then Donald had materially aided in harming a human being. And the blaster in the holster wasn’t one Alvar had seen before. “What’s this about, Donald?” he asked, picking up the belt and the weapon.

“You might wish to add your own blaster as well, sir, but I have a reason for asking that you wear that one. It is a training blaster. It provides an excellent simulation of a real blaster beam, but it fires nothing more dangerous than a rather spectacular burst of light.”

“I see,” Alvar said, although he didn’t. “Might I ask why I should wear a training blaster on this job?”

“Sir, if you bear with me, I would beg leave to say as little about it as possible. Nothing may come of it. But I can foresee a situation where it could serve to test a theory of mine. If we find ourselves in such a circumstance, I will ask you to do just that-test my theory.”

“Donald, I was not aware that you were programmed to speak in riddles.”

“Yes, sir. I agree that I am being rather vague. However, I have very little confidence in my theory, and I believe it would be for the best if you were not distracted from the task at hand by worrying about unlikely possibilities. There is no absolute need for you to carry the training blaster.”

Alvar Kresh held the holster in his two hands and stared long and hard at the robot. Donald at his most obscure was Donald at his most infuriating-but also, all too often, Donald at his greatest value. Donald had no doubt been thinking long and hard about this case, and it should come as no surprise that he had his own ideas, even if he was reluctant to reveal them just yet. But only a fool would ignore hints this clear from a mind that sharp. Kresh strapped on the holster, retrieved his own blaster from the drawer in which he kept it, and slipped it into a jacket pocket. It would be handy there, but his first reflex would be to reach for the training unit in the holster.

And in a pinch, it would be up to Donald to make sure that reflex didn’t get him killed.

“All right, then,” Alvar said. “Let’s go.”

CALIBAN had never before experienced true night, the exterior world, without the glare of artificial lighting. Strange, this world of darkness, this velvet nothingness that enveloped everything. Exciting, mysterious, frightening darkness. He could understand why the image of darkness appeared so frequently in his datastore. Humans had faced a great deal of darkness in their history.

And they had faced it without benefit of infrared vision, either. A mere act of will switched his vision system over from visual to IR range, and the surrounding blackness vanished. The heat-image of the ground below was plainly visible, but more important, his two pursuers showed up nicely in infrared, even if the two craft were invisible in the visible-light blackness of night. So much for the theory that the Sheriff would not pursue him outside the city. At least they were not firing on him. Perhaps they intended to capture him instead of killing him.

If so, that was all to the good, of course. It ought to make evading them easier-though they were bound to catch him sooner or later if he didn’t do something.

There was a large weather system, clearly visible in infrared, roiling with power. He flew toward it as fast as he could, his pursuers getting closer and closer with every moment. It was going to be close. A sudden gust of wind buffeted his elderly craft, taking Caliban by surprise. The aircar twisted and dove, nearly flipping over on its back before he could regain control.

Another gust caught at his craft from another direction, but Caliban was ready for it this time. The storm wall was dead ahead. He could hear its roaring power, see the flickering traces of lightning that flashed across its interior. Now the buffeting was almost constant, and hard sprays of rain and hail clattered against the aircar, peppering Caliban as well. Suddenly the winds and the rain and the clouds seemed to gather him in, the ‘powerful storm swallowing him up.

His aircar was thrown forward by a following wind, lifted up on high by a violent updraft, cast down again with equal violence. Sparks flew as something shorted out, and half the control panel went dead. The aircar was thrown sideways and nearly flipped over on its side before Caliban could force the protesting craft back to level flight. The noise and the force of the storm were incredible, the thunder crashing everywhere, the roaring impact of the rain against his body all-encompassing, devouring Caliban, making him one with the rain and the wind and the dark and the flares of lightning. The aircar was caught by a backdraft and thrown into a dive, heeling over to head groundward at tremendous speed. He struggled to pull up the nose, slamming over the lift control to maximum, the old car groaning and protesting, a deep, angry throbbing vibration suddenly coming up from somewhere in the drive section. There was a shuddering bang that rattled the whole car, and an abrupt drop-off in the vibration, as if something has broken clean off.

Caliban ignored it all, struggling to bring the nose up, straining to slow his headlong fall toward the unseen ground below. Slowly, slowly the protesting craft lifted its nose, groaning and shuddering in protest.