Utopia

But time was short. Caliban took his blaster from its waterproof container and held in his right hand as he kept moving forward, out of the airlock complex and into the main corridors of the underground city. He thought he knew where to look for Beddle, but he could not be certain. It might be that he would have to search a fair part of the city before he found the man. He would have to work quickly.

He found the first of the murdered New Law robots just a few hundred meters from the airlocks. The body was sprawled face down on the floor of the corridor, shot through the back of the head in much the same way as the victims at the aircar site. Caliban knelt down next to the body and turned it over. It was Lancon-03, Prospero’s most recent protйgй. Lacon, it would seem, had gotten in somebody’s way.

But there was nothing Caliban could do for Lacon now-and time was short. He had to keep moving. He spotted three more murdered New Laws as he walked along. There had been nothing but a few caretakers left behind in the city to deal with last-minute details. It would seem that the kidnappers had dealt with all of them.

Each should have been mourned over, praised, remembered-but time was short. Caliban broke into a trot, hurrying forward through the sterile emptiness of the depopulated robot city. Every tidy, immaculate, sensible, utilitarian, carefully laid-out passage and street and building now was meaningless, useless. The empty town of Depot had seemed like a place that was dying, lost, abandoned. Somehow, the empty town of Valhalla seemed like a place that had never lived in the first place. Caliban thrust such thoughts from his mind and hurried on up the ramps to the upper level, the huge half-cylinder-on-its-side that was the main gallery of Valhalla. He jogged up the central boulevard and into the main administration building of the city. He slowed, and moved more cautiously up the broad, sloping ramp that led to the building’s upper story and the executive offices there.

And suddenly Caliban heard a voice. A human voice. Beddle’s voice. He tried to make out the words as he got closer. At first, he could only understand a word here and there. “-ever you want to know…promise you that-” He moved in closer, until he was right outside the door, and then he could hear it all. “I will make any promises you like, and put them in writing,” Beddle said. “Just let me out of here. You have convinced me that your cause is just. Let me leave, and-”

“If I let you leave, you will prove yourself a liar,” another voice said.

Prospero’s voice.

Caliban felt a fresh wave of revulsion wash over him. He had known it. He had been sure of it. But knowledge and proof were two different things. Up until that moment, some small part of him had prayed that he was wrong. But now that hope was gone.

He stepped into the office-Prospero’s office, his blaster at the ready. “Liar or no,” Caliban said, “you will let this human go.”

A surreal tableau greeted Caliban as he came into the room, a whole series of complex details that he took in all at once, in the space of less than a second. Prospero stood on one side of the room, in front of his desk, a magnificent panorama of the lower city visible through the view window behind him. A system of wall-mounted photosensors divided the room in two lengthwise. The sensors were attached to one long wall of the room, and spaced about twenty centimeters apart in a vertical line that went from ceiling to floor. Beam emitters lined the opposite wall, their beams aimed squarely at the photosensors, and bright enough to be plainly visible.

A complicated-looking device, roughly torpedo-shaped, but with a powerful-looking drillhead mounted on its nose, lay on the ground at Prospero’s feet. A cable led from an open hatch on the device to a junction box on the floor. Another cable led from the junction box to the photosensors.

On the opposite side of the room, behind the optical barrier formed by the photosensors, stood Simcor Beddle, leader of the Ironheads. He looked haggard and gaunt, his eyes wild with fear. He was so terrified he hardly seemed to know that anyone new had come into the room.

Beddle was a sorry sight. He was unshaven, and his hair was badly mussed. He wore a sort of shapeless gray jumpsuit that did not seem to hang on him properly, as if he had had trouble doing up the fasteners. There were sweat stains under his armpits, and a greasy sheen of sweat on his face. Simcor Beddle. Every bit of the power, the authority, the arrogance attached to his name had been swept away. He seemed numbed, in shock, scarcely aware of his surroundings. He looked toward Caliban, and yet seemed to look right through him. “Who’s there?” he demanded. “Who’s there at the door?”