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With shocking abruptness, the aircar broke through the base of the storm clouds, revealing the rough ground rushing up to meet it. Now at least the rain was pelting straight down on him, instead of smashing in from all directions, but even so, he had almost no visibility at all.

With a last heroic effort, the tortured aircar finally achieved level flight. But smoke was burgeoning up from under the floorboards, a thick cloud that would have blinded him if the rains had not kept it beaten down. The controls were balky and getting worse. The last of the status indicators flickered once, twice, and went out. The power was gone, and the aircar was suddenly a glider, and not a very good one. The aircar was going down, and there was nothing he could do about it. He struggled to slow the craft, to bring the nose up, trading speed for range and glide angle. But there was nothing left, nothing more he could do.

The car smashed into the ground, bouncing and crashing and skidding across boulders and sand of the rain-torn blackness of the desert.

ALVAR Kresh and Donald stepped out onto the rooftop landing pad of Kresh’s house to discover they had rather unwelcome company just arriving. Tonya Welton was getting out of her own aircar, her robot, Ariel, right behind her.

“I’m going with you,” Tonya a

“How the hell do you know where we’re going?” Kresh demanded, though he had figured out the humiliating answer even before he was done asking the question. Damn the Settlers and their arrogant technology.

“Your secure hyperwave communications aren’t all that secure,” Tonya said. “We monitor them.”

“Didmonitor them,” Kresh growled. “There will be a few changes madevery quickly. You seem to have blown your cover.”

Tonya shook her head, dismissing a minor concern. “That is of no consequence. Not compared to the danger we are all in right now. There are any number of ways this case could touch off a political backlash and sabotage the terraforming project, and then this world would die. We wouldall die.”

“We? Since when is it your world?”

Tonya looked up at him. Her eyes were bright and wide with fear and worry. “Since Gubber is in it. I am not going to abandon him, or let the world he lives on die. I intend to remain on Inferno, whatever happens.”

“Lady Welton, I must suggest most strongly that you not come with us,” said Donald. “There is no polite way of saying this, but you are a suspect in the case.”

“All the old gods damn it! Of course I am! Don ‘t you think I know that Gubber and I are both suspects?” She stopped, her chest heaving, tears ru

Alvar Kresh stared at Tonya Welton in frank astonishment. She was the last person in the known universe he would have expected to have such an outburst. It was hard not to think it would serve as a first-rate cover if Tonya were determined to come along for the purpose of silencing Caliban with a quick blaster shot.

But damn it, she had the legal authority to come along, and even if she did not, there was little he could do to stop her following along in her own aircar, short of shooting it out of the sky. But he did not have to make it easier on her.

“Very well,” Alvar said. “You may come with us. But you will leave all your weapons and other devices behind, and submit to Donald performing a search to confirm this. You will wear clothing I will provide to prevent any attempt at smuggling of illicit hardware or weaponry.”



Tonya Welton seemed about to protest, but then she thought better of it. “I am carrying no weapon, but I will submit to a search and clothes change.”

It was Kresh ‘ s turn to be taken aback. Maybe she was in earnest after all. “Donald, get moving. Get her searched and dressedfast.”

“Yes, sir. Though I would suggest there will be little point to haste.” He pointed up into the northern sky.

Alvar Kresh looked and swore. The storm was coming on, moving south, huge and violent. Already the winds were whipping up. Damnation! No robot would allow a human to go up in that, and for once, Kresh was forced to admit that the robots had a point. It would be suicide to fly into that. Though he didn’t like to think about that., For Caliban, his last hope of making sense out of this case, had flown into that very storm minutes before.

19

NOTHING. There was absolutely nothing they could do. Fredda Leving paced back and forth down the length of her lab, Jomaine slouched down in a chair at her desk, Gubber perched disconsolate on a stool at one of the worktables. No information, no word, no clue. Yes, finding Caliban was an absolute imperative. But it was also absolutely impossible. The city was awash in rumors and allegedly factual news reports, but none of them were of the slightest use.

Even Alvar Kresh and Tonya Welton seemed to have vanished off the face of the planet. Fredda had tried repeatedly to reach both of them, to no avail. Where were they? Out searching for Caliban in that blasted storm, or holed up somewhere? Were they working together, or just both out of reach at the same moment?

Tonya Welton. Fredda looked again at Gubber and shook her head in amazement.That piece of news had utterly astonished her. It was slightly galling to realize she had been close to the last person on the planet to know about it all.

Though, in all fairness, she couldn’t blame Gubber for that. If she had known about this at the time, she would have been furious, seething, massively distrustful of Gubber. Now, as this sleepless, storming night thundered into a lightless dawn, the question of who slept with whom paled into utter insignificance. Well, perhaps that was overstating the case. The heavens might tumble, but that would not stop people being fascinated by news of a torrid affair. And, speaking for herself, at least, shestill couldn’t see it, but never mind that now.

There were other concerns and questions to deal with just at the moment.

Caliban. To other people, he no doubt meant different things, but to Fredda, he represented something very simple: the first of his kind. And, possibly, the last. If he was regarded as a failure, or as a danger, if he was seen as thecause of so much chaos and upheaval, rather than as the victim of it, then no one would ever dare build another free robot. All of their kind, for the rest of time, would be nothing more than slaves, their minds blinkered and stunted by the Three Laws. At best, some small fraction of them could exist under the somewhat looser constraints of the New Laws, but even those were chains around the mind.

Caliban. Where the hell was he? He could be anywhere by now, in the city, under it, outside it. Of course, if Caliban had any sense, he would hole up in the bowels of the city and stay there. Wait for the storm to blowout to sea. These weather patterns never lasted more than a few hours. He could stay underground for years, if need be.

Except for his power pack, of course. What had she been thinking of, giving him a low-capacity lab-operations power pack? If she had given him a standard unit, he could have hidden out for years, decades, and never have to go to anyone for anything.

But shehad given him a lab-ops power pack. She had not and would not tell anyone else, but Caliban ‘ s rate of power use had tested out a bit higher than expected. Assuming average levels of exertion, Fredda figured that, as of right now, he did not have much more than a few hours of power left.