Caliban

Pallichan suddenly realized that his own aircar was tooling along, at a quite leisurely pace, straight north over Aurora Boulevard, the direction the rogue robot had taken. He looked through the forward windscreen and his stomach turned to a block of ice. There were at least four blue aircars on the scene, two of them landing, the others taking up very aggressive patrol stations. It was hard to be certain, but he thought he could even catch sight of a led-painted robot, still moving rapidly northward.

Centor’s aircar shuddered and bucked in the air turbulence caused by the Sheriff’s cars. Pallichan was not a forceful or adventurous man, not by any means. Any slight sense of curiosity he might have concerning the sequel of his report to the police vanished in an instant. “Turn the car, you fool!” he cried out to his robot. “Turn! Turn! Get us out of here.”

The fear and panic in his voice was clear, and the robot pilot clearly understood the urgency of the command. He turned the car on its ear as it jinked down and to port, diving the car between two towering office buildings, roaring down the canyoned streets of the central city. Pallichan ‘ s fingers dug into the arms of his flight chair, and he broke out in a cold sweat. At last the car slowed a bit and put its nose upward as the pilot robot guided them toward a more prudent altitude.

Pallichan sat there, gasping for breath, his heart pounding, as his aircar banked gently toward home.

That was enough, he decided. Enough indeed. If that was what excitement was like, he had had just enough to suit Centor Pallichan for a lifetime and beyond. Life was meant to be orderly, controlled, reasonable. The universe was supposed to remain always as it was, in a steady, happy balance of calm. Disobedient robots? Mad police chases? That sort of chaos was not the way of things. Something had to be done about it.

But that thought brought him up short. For it suddenly dawned on him that a universe of chaos and uncertainty, such as had been so abruptly revealed to him, was unlikely to modify its behavior merely because Centor objected. What step could he take? Write a stiff letter to the Governor? Organize all the right-thinking people who wished merely to be left alone, bring all the most placid and hermetic of Inferno’s citizenry into a group as rough-and-ready as those frightful Ironheads? Have them forcibly demand that things stop happening and get back to normal?

But another thought struck at him, almost physically. Suppose, just suppose, that it was thenature of things to keep happening, that it was the long placidity of life on Inferno that was the aberration? Suppose that aberration was even now being swept away, and the tumultuous ferment of the universe at large was even now crashing down upon them all?

What if there was no “normal” to get back to?

Centor Pallichan felt his hands trembling with fear, and knew his tremors had more to do with what he might see soon than what he had just seen recently. “Take me home,” he told his pilot robot. “Take me home, where it is safe.”

CALIBAN heard the sound behind him as he ran and recognized it as the swooping air-rush of aircars coming in fast and low. He heard the squeal of wheels slamming down onto pavement and knew that several of the cars had landed on the avenue. No doubt others would land ahead of him. Yes, he could see them up ahead.For me, he thought.All of them are after me. I am some terrible threat to them, for reasons I do not understand. They will destroy me if they can. He knew it to be a certainty, not a chance or a theory or a probable hypothesis.

By now he was quite good at judging by partial evidence, he realized in some detached part of his mind that was not occupied with the need for escape and survival. But even as he made that observation about his own thought processes, he had started evasive action. He stopped abruptly and turned right, down a narrow alley as the aircars swept by overhead, unable to stop in time to make the turn. Three, four, five, six of them. But they would not be put off so easily. This time the search, the hunt, was well and truly on. They would not stop until they had him. The fact that they had sent so many aircars and deputies after him told him that much very clearly. But where to turn? Where to hide? The question suddenly became even more urgent as the alley came to an abrupt end in a blank wall.