Utopia - By Isaac Asimov,Roger E. Allen Page 0,134

zone surrounding it. It is therefore, at least in theory, possible that he is actually safe. If so, then working to save Beddle is wasted effort, and could actually cause danger to other nearby humans by preventing attention to their evacuation. It is just the sort of First Law crisis that could tie a robot in knots, even to the point of inducing permanent damage.

"It's a morass of complex uncertainties, with no clear right action. There's no telling how a robot would deal would balance all the conflicting First Law demands."

"So what do we do?"

"We keep the robots out of it," said Fredda. "Right now we have kept this very close at this end. You know as well as I do that standard police procedure is to keep this sort of crime as quiet as possible to prevent robots from swarming allover the crime scene. Imagine if all the Three-Law robots working in the Utopia region dropped their current work and headed into the search area. So we keep robots from knowing. Donald is the only robot here who knows about it. At that end, I would assume the Crime Scene robots, the Air Traffic Control robots, and Devray's personal robots are the only ones who know or could figure out that it was a kidnapping. We need to deactivate all of them, now, immediately, and keep them turned off until all this is over."

Kresh frowned and started pacing back and forth. "Burning devils of damnation. I hate to say it, but you're right. You're absolutely right. You contact Devray-and place the call yourself, manually. Talk directly to him, and make sure no robots can hear. Tell him what you told me. It's going to be bloody hard to get through these next few days without Donald, but I don't see that I have any choice. I'll go to the library and shut him down myself."

"Right," said Fredda. A very straightforward plan. As she turned toward the comm screen and set to work placing the call, she wondered if it would all be that easy.

"DONALD?" KRESH CALLED out as he stepped into the library. Odd. Donald should have been standing in the center of the room, waiting. "Donald?" There was no answer. "Donald, where are you?" Still silence. "Donald, I order you to come to me and answer this call."

Still there was nothing.

But he had given Donald a direct order. A clear, specific, unambiguous order. Nothing could have prevented him from obeying that order except

And then Alvar Kresh cursed himself as a fool. Of course. It was painfully obvious. If they could figure it out, so could Donald. Up to and including the idea of deactivating the robots who knew about the Beddle kidnapping.

And First Law would require Donald to avoid being turned off, if that was the only way to prevent harm to a human being. He was gone. He had run away.

And the devil only knew what Donald had in mind.
Chapter 18
FREDDA LEVING WONDERED if she had done the right thing, as she readied herself for a much-belated bedtime, and watched her husband climb into bed beside her. The call to Devray hadn't involved any deep and abiding moral issues, and the fruitless search for Donald had been nothing worse than frustrating. But then there was that second call she had made, the one she did not dare tell Alvar about.

In fact, she was kidding herself. She knew perfectly well that she had done the wrong thing. She had interfered with a police investigation.

But that creator's debt had called to her, somehow. And she knew Justen Devray, knew the sort of opinion he had of Caliban and the New Law robots. Given half the chance, Devray might well shoot first and ask questions later. Or someone else might. And she owed her robots, her creations, better than that.

Right or wrong, she had had no real choice but to do it. Somebody had to warn them.

CALIBAN HIMSELF WAS no less ambivalent about the situation. He sat at his desk in the New Law robots' offices in Depot and watched the hustle and bustle all about him as he thought it through.

He felt very little sympathy for Simcor Beddle. It was hard to develop a great deal of concern for a man who desired one's own extermination. But of course, from the New Law robot point of view, the safety of Simcor Beddle was not the central problem. It seemed inevitable that a major police operation in the general vicinity