THE ALERT COMM'S buzzer went off once again. Constable Pherlan Bukket opened one unhappy eye and glared at his bedside clock. It was barely 0700. Bukket was accustomed to sleeping until at least 0800-preferably later. Up until a month ago, doing so had usually been possible, even routine. Up until a month ago, most pleasant things had been routine. Now nothing was pleasant-and nothing was routine.

Up until a month ago, Constable Bukket had enjoyed his work-mostly because he was the only one doing it. Pherlan Bucket was responsible for enforcing the law and keeping the peace in the town of Depot-or at least he had been until a month ago, back when neither law nor peace was often disturbed in Depot.

Now it was different. Now alerts came in at all hours of the day and night. Most of the time, the CIP came thundering in and took over the situation anyway, just as they had shoved him out of his offices in town and taken them over for themselves.

It was, of course, just as well they came in and took over because Bukket didn't have anything like the resources to deal with the problems that were coming up. But even so, the entire situation was deeply frustrating.

He slapped at the alert comm's buzzer and cut it off, then picked up the unit. "This is Constable Bukket," he said into the alert comm' s mike, making no attempt to hide the sleepiness from his voice. "Who is it and what do you want?"

"This is Depot Air Traffic Control," a robotic voice replied. "We have a disaster beacon showing about three hundred kilometers south of here."

"Then why call me?" Bukket demanded. "It's nowhere near my jurisdiction."

"Yes, sir. I called you because my standing orders require it. I am sending the text details of the incident now. If you will read them on the alert comm' s display screen, you will understand."

Bukket shook his head irritably. Someday someone was going to come up with a set of standing orders that made sense. He turned the alert comm over so he could see the screen

And three seconds later he knew two things very well. The robots at Depot Air Traffic Control had been quite right to call him in on this one.

And he would be only too happy to hand this one off to the CIP.

DONALD 111 RECEIVED the incoming high-priority call just as Governor Kresh and Dr. Leving were about to sit down to their evening meal at the governor's Winter Residence.

Donald rarely concerned himself much with the governor's meals, as the governor himself rarely paid them much mind, but tonight was an exception. In his judgment, this was likely to be the last evening for quite some time the governor and his wife would have any chance at all of a civilized meal together. Both of them had been working endless hours in preparation for the comet impact, and no doubt would be called upon to work even harder as the comet approached. Dr. Leving in particular had brought more work on herself-on all of them-with her insistence of diverting some small fraction of the evacuation aid to the New Law pseudo-robots-work that Donald regarded as massively counterproductive. The world could only benefit when the last of the New Laws were swept away.

But busy as recent days had been, and as busy as the remaining time before the comet would be, the days after it hit would be busier still. This would be their last chance to rest and relax, and Donald had decided this was the night to do everything right. He had personally overseen the table arrangement, the candles, the background music, the menu and its preparation, the elegant table setting. The governor and Dr. Leving's reaction as they entered the dining was all that he could have hoped for. Both of them smiled, seemingly for the first time in days. The care and the worry of the last few weeks seemed to drain away from their faces.

"This is lovely, Donald," said Dr. Leving as her husband helped her to her chair. "This is most thoughtful of you."

"Fine work," the governor said as he took his own seat. "This was exactly the night to do this."

"You are both most kind," said Donald. He was on the point of signaling the kitchen to bring in the first course when the call came in.

In less than a hundredth of a second, Donald received the signal, decoded it, and identified it as an incoming emergency priority voice call. Another one. The days had been full of them for weeks now.

Donald briefly debated handling this one by himself, or even refusing to answer it. But the governor's orders on such matters were very clear and specific, and had been reinforced several times in the past few days. Donald really had no choice in the matter. With a slight dimming of his eyes that might have been the robotic equivalent of a sigh of resignation, Donald gave in to the inevitable. "Sir, I am most unhappy to tell you this, but there is an incoming emergency call. It is scrambled, the caller's identity unknown."

"Burning devils," Kresh said, his irritation plain. "Don't they ever stop calling? Patch it through yourself, Donald. Let's clear this up here and now, whatever it is. Probably just another farmer who refuses to get off his land or something."

"Yes, sir. Patching through-now."

"This is Kresh," said the governor. "Identify yourself and your business."

"Sir!" a fussy, nervous-sounding voice answered. "I-I didn't mean to get patched through to you, but the priority management system did it for me. I am trying to reach Commander Justen Devray."

"You are speaking with the planetary governor, not an answering service. Who I am speaking with?" Kresh demanded.

"Oh! Ah, Constable Bukket, of the town of Depot. But honestly, the priority coding system put me through to you."

"Which it only does when the situation demands my prompt attention," said Kresh. "So what is the situation?"

There was a brief silence on the line, and then a sort of low gulping noise. "Simcor Beddle's aircar has crashed, sir. At least we think it has. It vanished off Depot Air Traffic Control, and then the disaster beacon went off. And, ah-the beacon is stationary, at a position right in the center of the primary impact zone."

"Burning devils!" Kresh said, abruptly standing up. "Search and rescue?"

"They launched four minutes ago. They should be there in about another five minutes. I know it's evening where you are, but we're early morning here. Local sunrise at the site isn't for another twenty minutes and it's very rough terrain, so-"

"So they may have to wait for daylight before they can even set down. Very well. Use the side-channel datapath of this frequency and send all the data you have. Thank you for your report. You will be contacted as needed. Kresh out. " The governor made a throat-cutting gesture and Donald cut the link.

"Damnation," said Kresh. "Hellfire and damnation. Someone's made some kind of try for Beddle."

Fredda Leving's face went pale. "But you can't know that," she protested. "It could have been an accident. His aircar could have malfunctioned. The pilot could have made a mistake."

"Think so, Donald?" the governor asked. "No, sir. Preventative maintenance on vehicles is one of the most basic means of preventing harm to humans. The mechanical failure rate on air vehicles is extremely low. Nor is there any plausible chance that it was pilot error. Not with a robotic pilot."

"And there is no way Simcor Beddle would do his own flying," said Kresh. "Even if he knew how-and I doubt he does-it would be against his principles to do anything a robot could do for him."

"But it's not impossible that it was an accident," Fredda said. "Burning stars. The political upheaval when Grieg died. I don't know that we could hold together through that again."

What would happen if-if things turned out as badly as they might? The Ironheads would probably blame the government, or Alvar personally. Unless they pinned it on the Settlers. The Ironhead movement would be up in arms, that was for sure. Marches, riots, arrests, counter-demonstrations, lunatics and perfectly sane citizens suspecting plots and conspiracies under every rock. She could see it all, plain as day. How the devil were they supposed to contend with that and the comet impact at the same time? "Could it have been an accident, Donald?" Fredda asked, trying to find at least some ray of hope. "While I grant there is a theoretical possibility of mechanical or pilot failure, I would agree with the governor that foul play of some sort is the far more plausible explanation. That is even more disturbing than it normally would be, given the political implications of the case."

"Donald, you are a master of understatement. We have to move on this fast. Fredda, dinner is going to have to wait. Donald, call Justen Devray. I want him on the scene. And I want him there now."

THE DISASTER BEACON that had summoned them all was still blaring, long hours after the crash, the locator strobe on top of the car still flashing. No doubt the hyperwave beacon was still running as well.

Commander Justen Devray gestured to Gervad, his personal robot. "Go find the switches and shut those damned homing beacons off," he said. "We know where the car is."

"Yes, sir," said Gervad, his manner as calm and deferential as ever. He walked across the landing site and went aboard the aircar. After a few minutes, the noise cut off.

Good. He gave an order and someone carried it out. At least something happened the way it was supposed to happen. Justen Devray yawned mightily, fighting back exhaustion. It was full noon here, but it was the dead of night back in the city of Hades, on the other side of the planet. Justen had been getting ready for bed a little less than two hours before.

The local officers were still here-if you could call Depot local, three hundred-plus kilometers away. They were the ones who had detected the beacon, found the aircar-and hyperwaved a priority call to Hades. Kresh had ordered Justen to the scene immediately, and Justen had obeyed with the alacrity of the most slavish robot. Ten minutes after Kresh's call, he had been en route to Hades Spaceport. Fifteen minutes after that, he had been on a rush suborbital flight with the Crime Scene team, hurtling clear around the planet in a stomach-churning crash emergency flight trajectory. They had landed at Depot Field, transferred to aircars, and flown like fury to get to the downed aircar. He had gotten to the scene fast, but he was not exactly fully awake.

Justen had gone to bed the night before looking forward to his first decent night's sleep in weeks. He felt a sudden surge of irrational anger toward whoever had done this. Why couldn't they have waited just a few hours more, and let him rest just a little?

Maybe the kidnappers had just been in a hurry, like everyone else these past month or so. Justen Devray did what everyone did every few minutes, these days. He looked up into the sky, and searched for the glowing dot that was growing brighter all the time. There it was, hanging low in the western sky.

The comet. The comet that was headed straight for the planet Inferno. Straight, in point of fact, for the spot of land Justen Devray was standing on. In five days time it would be here-and then it would be allover...

Justen turned away from the comet and resumed his study of the aircar's wreckage-if wreckage was the right word for it. Wreckage implied a crash, an accident. This car had landed safely. The damage here had happened after the landing, and it had been committed quite deliberately. Someone had kidnapped Simcor Beddle.

And Justen Devray had just five short days to find the man, before the comet came down.

Devray moved in closer, and studied the exterior of the car more closely. The aircar had landed on the summit of a low hill in the middle of rough country, jumbled rock and scruffy undergrowth, smack in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town of any size was at least forty kilometers away. Devray considered the rugged badlands that passed for countryside in the vicinity. This hilltop, jutting up from a jumbled pile of rock and brush, was probably the smoothest piece of land for twenty kilometers. Beddle and the kidnappers couldn't have walked out. It would take a mountaineer in perfect condition to make any time at all through this kind of country.

Devray shook his head. The ground search had started at once, of course, but they would find nothing. No footprints, no broken twigs, no tom bits of cloth hanging off a thornbush. They had flown out.

But there was another factor. When a disaster beacon went off, every tracking station within three hundred kilometers of it automatically shifted into maximum sensitivity mode. The badlands in the general vicinity of the aircar broke up the sensor signal near ground level and made it possible to evade detection at low altitude-but the badlands were surrounded by areas of gently rolling hills and plains where detection would be easy. Nothing had been spotted flying out-and anything that had flown out would have been spotted. Perhaps they could not have walked out, but they could not have flown far, either. The odds were good that Beddle and his captors were still in the badlands south of Depot.

Whoever had done this had chosen their spot carefully, probably planting a getaway aircar at the scene beforehand. At first glance, that meant at least two kidnappers to get all the flying done, but not necessarily. A solo kidnapper could have flown in the getaway vehicle with an aircycle strapped to the luggage rack, parked the getaway vehicle, and lifted out on the cycle to wherever. Then it would just be a question of getting to where Beddle was and making one's way onto Beddle's aircar.

So where to land the getaway aircar? Devray turned his back on the aircar and studied the ground about it. There. That would be the place. In that hollow just downslope. A car stashed there would be impossible to see unless you flew directly overhead, and getting from here to there would be a relatively easy hike-no minor issue when dealing with a kidnap victim who was not in a mood to cooperate. Devray wanted to check it out himself, but there was no sense making a mess of what a robot could do better. "You! You over there!" he called out to the closest Crime Scene robot. "Examine that downslope area. Look for any sign that an aircar was down there."

The robot nodded gravely and headed toward the hollow.

Justen Devray nodded eagerly to himself. He was starting to see it. Starting to see how they had done it. Land the getaway car there and then-No. Wait. He was moving too fast. It was best not to make any assumptions at this point. Maybe Beddle had been lured here, and the kidnapper or kidnappers had been waiting on the ground, with their getaway vehicle. Maybe there was no aircar. Maybe there was some other means of escape. Maybe the kidnappers and their victim hadn't escaped at all, but were in some well-concealed and well-shielded hidey-hole a hundred meters away.

But there was one thing Devray would be willing to bet on. This attack had been carefully, methodically, planned. There was something about the way all the details had been attended to here at the crime scene that said that much. He could almost imagine the kidnappers working against a checklist, ticking off each item as they accomplished it.

Yes indeed. Very methodical. Every detail. He walked in closer to the scene around the aircar.

Four robots that had been lined up outside the car, facing away from it. Each had been shot each through the back of the head. He knelt down by the their ruined bodies. One shot each. Very precise, very accurate shooting.

Devray left the Crime Scene robots to record the images of the robots. He stood up and went aboard the aircar. It was a long-range, long-duration model, capable of flying clear around the world, or reaching orbit if need be, and it carried every manner of emergency supplies. Nearly all of the supplies had been rifled through, and many of them had been taken. Maybe once they had compared what was missing against the aircar's inventory list, they would be able to make some guesses about what the kidnappers had in mind. Unless the supply theft was mere misdirection.

Justen moved forward to the cockpit. The pilot robot was on the floor, shot through the back of the head. Where in the sequence had that gone? Did the assailant emerge from some hiding place, shoot the pilot while in flight, and then fly the craft down? Or was the pilot shot on the ground, after the landing? Justen could see no way to tell on his own. Maybe the Crime Scene robots would come up with something. Maybe it would be a key point. Maybe it would mean nothing at all.

Justen looked around the rest of the cabin. Aircars had flight recorders and other logging instruments. It might well be possible that something could be learned from them. But then he spotted the recorders, and gave up that idea.

The recorders had been shot up as well, with the same tidy one-shot precision marksmanship demonstrated on the robots outside and the pilot in here.

All of it done very precisely, very neatly, one thing after the other. Somewhere in the sequence, of course, the attacker had dragged the victim off and then switched on the beacon system to attract the authorities. No doubt those jobs had been on the list as well. All of it very, very methodical.

But the most important clue was also the most obvious, and one left behind most deliberately. It was a message painted on the cockpit's aft bulkhead in crudely formed letters:

STOP COMIT + PUT 500,000 TDC N PBI ACCT 18083-19109 ORE BEDDL WlL DI.

Devray had no doubt at all that the bad spelling and the crude handwriting were both deliberate, intentional misdirection. There were virtually no illiterates on Inferno, and certainly none among the highly skilled Settler technicians who had been brought in. And what illiterate could have planned this operation? This job required someone who could read maps, who could study Beddle's itinerary and stalk him, who could fly aircraft. No, the bad spelling was misdirection, or perhaps an effort by the writer to disguise his or her handwriting and style of writing and prevent identification that way.

Even the handwriting itself suggested as much. The letters were too regular in shape for an illiterate who had no practice writing. They had the look of a literate person trying to make mistakes. And there was something too careful, too thorough, about the misspellings. The Crime Scene robots had already scanned the message, and even taken paint samples off it. Devray shrugged and dismissed the form of the message from his mind. Let his handwriting experts and the paint experts and the psychologists analyze it to their hearts' content. He was ready to bet it would tell them nothing at all.

But the message itself. What could it tell them? The basic interpretation was simple enough. Stop the comet from hitting and deposit five hundred thousand in Trader Demand Credits in account number 18083-19109 of the Planetary Bank of Inferno-or else we'll kill Beddle.

That was all perfectly clear. But surely there was more, surely there was some way to read between the lines.

Gervad was there in the cockpit, examining the flight controls-and not finding much that told him anything, by the look of it.

"So what do you make of it all, Gervad?" Justen asked his personal robot, pointed toward the message.

Gervad studied the words painted on the wall. "Someone has stolen Simcor Beddle, sir. We have to get him back."

"That sums it up rather neatly," said Justen, though it was not quite the detailed analysis he had been hoping for. Well, Gervad never had been one for conversation. There hadn't been much point in asking him the question in the first place. What bothered him was that the message made none of the standard demands that the police not be contacted, or that searches not be carried out, or that publicity be avoided. Why not? Why weren't the kidnappers worried about such things?

He gave it up. There was no way to know.

"Come along with me," he said. Justen went out of the cockpit and left the aircar, Gervad following behind.

"Commander Devray! Sir!" One of the Crime Scene robots was calling to him. He looked around and spotted the robot he had sent down into the downs lope area.

"Yes, what is it?"

"There are definite signs that an aircar has been there recently, sir. We spotted very clear landing-pad prints. We ought to be able to determine the make and model, and possibly the weight of the vehicle. There are also indications that someone worked to sweep out any signs of footprints. There are one or two very indistinct marks. It's doubtful we'll be able to get anything much out of them."

"But it's a start," Justen said. "Good. Keep at it."

Justen stood there for a moment, watching the Crime Scene robots working the site. It was plain he was not going to be able to spot anything they would miss here. But he wasn't quite sure what to do next. Aside from breaking up the attempt to snatch Lentrall, he had never worked a kidnapping before. Aside from the Lentrall case, he was not entirely sure that there had ever been a kidnapping on Inferno before. There were case histories in the books and the databanks, of course. He had studied a number of the cases from other worlds. In theory he knew how to proceed. But, wondered Justen, was theory going to be enough?

Well, it had damned well better be. "Find me an aircar and get me to Depot," Justen said to Gervad. "We'll work this case from there. We're going to start pulling some people in."

"Yes sir. Might I ask who?"

"I don't know yet," Justen admitted. It almost didn't matter. Sometimes, when you had no idea where to start, the best thing to do was just to pick somewhere at random and start there. "I've got the flight to Depot to decide."

"Very good, sir. There is an available car just over this ridge, if you would follow me."

Justen followed the robot to the aircar and climbed in. He chose a seat and put on his seat belt automatically, his mind elsewhere. Who the devil should he pull in?

He didn't have the faintest idea who the kidnappers were, or who they were working for. There were any number of suspects to choose from.

Alvar Kresh had ordered him to layoff the investigation of the Government Tower Plaza incident, but there were some cases so big you couldn't ignore them even if you tried. Three separate suspects picked up on other charges had volunteered credible information about that attack, all of it pointing straight for the Settlers. Maybe Tonya Welton's people were making another try to stop the comet. Maybe out of genuine fear and concern, or maybe because they wanted to maintain their dominant position on the planet. According to the watcher reports Justen got, Cinta Melloy had been spending a lot of time in Depot, enough that Justen had started to wonder why. Maybe now he had his explanation.

It could have been the Ironheads themselves, or some offshoot of them, either truly kidnapping Beddle as part of some complex power play, or else staging the kidnapping with the cooperation of Beddle for some intricate reason that was not yet clear. It had been in the back of Justen's mind to consult with Gildern about the kidnapping at once, but a contrary idea was forming at the back of his mind. Best to leave Gildern alone. Maybe not even inform him of Beddle being snatched. More than likely, they would only be able to keep the lid on the story for a few hours, but even might be enough. If Gildern did have guilty knowledge, he might well slip up in some way. Best to have a watch put on him at once.

It could be that Davlo Lentrall's terrified and belated regrets over what he had done had led him to an act of desperation. The old Lentrall could have done this job-everything at the crime scene had been done with a scientist's methodical care. But would the new Lentrall, traumatized by the Government Tower attempt to kidnap him, the death of his robot, and the notion of his own guilt, be stable and rational enough to manage it? But if an unbalanced Lentrall had done it, then the symmetry of the kidnap victim turning kidnapper had its own weird revenge-logic. Had Lentrall ever said anything to suggest he blamed the Ironheads for the attack on him? The investigation would have to check into that.

Or, of course, it could have been anyone with the quite understandable motive of not wanting comets dropped on themselves. The Comet Grieg project had generated a lot of opposition among the populace of Inferno, especially in the Depot area. And Beddle had come out in favor of the comet plan.

Except-Wait a moment. Consider the ransom demands. Stop the comet and five hundred thousand in Trader Demand Credits. A political and a financial demand. Justen did not know a great deal about kidnappers, but he did know that those two demands didn't go together. It seemed to him that the sort of person who would perform this kidnapping out of some misguided and heroic desire to save the planet would not be the sort to care about money. Conversely, the sort who would do it for mercenary reasons was not likely to be much interested in altruistic acts. The demands did not hold together.

Put that to one side for a moment. Names. Think about the names. There was something at the back of his mind. Something linked all the names together. Lentrall. Gildern. The Settlers. The Ironheads. Someone or something that

And then he had it. He had it. There was one person with links to them all. And he knew who he was going to pull in first.

He looked out the window, and saw to his surprise that they were coming in on final approach to Depot. Good. They could get started right away.

He would be very surprised indeed if Norlan Fiyle didn't have something to tell him about all this. He would send out an arrest team at once.

And while they were pulling him in, Justen was going to inform Kresh about the kidnapper's two demands. He wasn't going to be able to get the comet stopped, but there might just be something he could do about that ransom. He was starting to get an idea.

"DO WHAT YOU like about the ransom," Kresh said to the image on the comm center screen on his office. "We can afford to front the money, if need be. And I agree it could do no harm to keep Gildern in the dark. But that comet is on course, and we're not going to change that."

"Understood, sir," Devray replied. "Thank you for the authorization. I'll keep you informed. Devray out." The screen went dead.

"How long now, Donald?" Kresh asked.

"Initial impact of Comet Grieg is projected to occur in four days, eighteen hours, fifteen minutes and nine seconds. Sir, concerning the rescue of Simcor Beddle, I believe it would be wise if I were to go to the scene and-"

"Donald." Fredda's voice was flat and hard. "You are to leave the room at once. Go to the library and wait. Do not return, and do not take any further action of any kind until called for."

Donald turned toward Fredda and looked at her for a full ten seconds before he responded. "Yes, ma'am. Of course." He turned and left the room.

"First Law makes him want to save Beddle, in spite of Devray and his team being on the scene. I suppose we should have been expecting that," Kresh said.

"I have been expecting it," said Fredda. "Comet Grieg all by itself is enough to set off significant First Law stress in any robot. An event as big and violent as that, with so many chances for danger to humans, would have to set off First Law stress. The only way a robot could deal with that sort of thing at all would be to be active, to do something, to be part of the effort to protect humans from harm. Donald has been part of that effort. It's why he's been able to hold together as well as he has. It helped that the threat up until now has been generalized, unfocused. Something somewhere would probably go wrong somewhere to harm a human. Generalized preventive action was enough to balance that. The general and collective robot effort was enough to meet the general and collective threat."

"But now it is all different," Kresh said.

"Now it's different," Fredda agreed. "Now there is a specific and extreme threat against a known individual. Normally that would not be enough to cause a First Law crisis. A robot on this side of the world would know that the robots on that side of the world would do all that could be done. But with the overarching stress of the Comet Grieg impact on the one side, along with the high probability that Beddle is somewhere in the impact area-that combination of overlapping First Law stresses could force any robot into action."

"What do you mean by action?" Kresh asked.

"Anything. Everything. I couldn't even begin to sort out all the permutations between now and the impact. But the basic point is that Beddle's disappearance could create a tremendous First Law crisis for every robot on the planet. If Beddle is indeed in the impact area-or even if there is merely reason to believe he might be-then any robot made aware of his circumstances will, in theory, be required to go to his rescue, or to work in some other way to save him-perhaps by trying to prevent the comet impact. Suppose some team of robots grabbed a spacecraft and headed for Grieg to try and destroy the comet? Of course, higher-function robots will understand that an attempt to prevent the comet's impact might wreck hopes for reviving the planet's ecology. That would almost certainly result in harm to any number of human beings, many of them not yet even born.

"Then there is the impossibility of proving a negative. Even with the best scanning system in the universe, unless Beddle walks out somehow, there can be no way of being absolutely sure he is not still in the impact area, or the danger 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.