Caliban hesitated, having not felt the urge to trust Fiyle overmuch even before he had shot at them. Nor was he completely confident in Prospero’s judgment. But he was either in this, or not. There was no middle ground. And he was already rather deep in to begin with. He looked down at the man he held. Even in visible light, Caliban knew he was no great judge of human expression. In infrared, he was far from skilled. But the man staring blindly into the darkness of his visible-light vision certainly seemed harmless enough. Caliban released his grasp on Fiyle, albeit reluctantly.
“The light,” said Fiyle, peering about in the darkness, and reaching out blindly with his hands.
Prospero knelt down, picked up the man’s handlight, and handed it to Caliban. Caliban realized that Prospero could have handed the light to Fiyle just as easily. Prospero was letting Caliban decide, letting him choose what to do with this man.
Caliban placed the light in Fiyle’s outstretched hand, but kept the blaster for himself.
Fiyle grabbed at the light, fumbled for it eagerly, and let out a deep, heartfelt sigh of relief when he found the switch and the beam of light came on. “Oh, I’m glad to see that,” he said, as he squinted a bit in the light. “Very glad indeed.”
“But if you are being followed, those who pursue you would be even more glad to see it,” said Caliban.
Fiyle nodded worriedly. “You’re right,” he said. “Let’s get out of the corridor and into the side office, where we can talk.”
Fiyle swung the beam of the handlight around until he found a doorway in the side of the tunnel. “Come on,” he said, and led the way. Caliban and Prospero followed behind him. Fiyle swung the door shut behind them, and locked the door. “That makes us light-tight and pretty close to soundproof,” he said as he switched on the overhead lights. “We should be reasonably safe in here. “ He looked around the office, and found an overturned chair in the corner. He righted the chair, knocked the worst of the dust off it, and sat down with a sigh of relief. “I’m just about worn out,” he said. He looked up at the two robots standing over him, and shook his head as he gave a slightly self-deprecating laugh. “You’d think I was doing this for my health,” he said. “You get a lot of exercise when half the planet is chasing you.”
“Who, precisely, is chasing you?” Caliban asked.
“I’ve got the CIP on my tail for sure, and I think I spotted the SSS. No sign of Gildern’s Ironhead plug-uglies yet, but give them time. So far I’ve stayed ahead of them.”
“If you are seeking congratulations for all your feats of derring-do, you will have to look elsewhere,” said Caliban. “You do what you do not for your health, but for profit.”
“Not the most noble of motives, I grant you-but it’s one that might get me killed if I’m not careful. That might be of some comfort to you.”
“Not if you manage to get us killed along with you.”
Fiyle sighed wearily. “I don’t blame you for being suspicious, but I haven’t betrayed anyone. Not yet. You, the Settlers, the Ironheads-all of you came to me because you knew I still had active contacts in all the other groups. How was I supposed to keep up those contacts without giving them a little something now and then? The Settlers and the Ironheads understood that-even Prospero here understood.”
Caliban did not answer. There were times humans would say more in reply to silence than they would to words.
This seemed to be one of those times. “Look,” said Fiyle. “One, I don’t have to justify myself to you. Two, I’m not making any charge at all for this one. All I want to do is make sure the world knows. I’m trying to do that the best way I know how. A guy like me can’t exactly call a press conference. Not without getting arrested. Three, no one has ever gotten killed because of something I’ve said. I hand out little tidbits, gossip, things that let one side confirm what it already knows about the other. That’s all. Worst I ever did was turn in a dirty cop-and it turned out he’d already gotten himself killed, anyway. I just deal in small-time information.” Fiyle paused a moment and frowned. “At least, all that was true until now. Until this. There has never been anything bigger than this. These guys have found a way to dig themselves an ocean. A sea, anyway. A polar sea.”
“That’s absurd,” Prospero objected. “There is no way they could accomplish such a thing.”
Caliban thought for a moment. “It is a sensible goal, at least. A polar sea with proper communication to the Southern Ocean would do a great deal to moderate the climate. But friend Prospero is correct. There is no way to do such a thing.”
Fiyle nodded his agreement. “In the normal course of events, digging an ocean would be an impossibly huge project. Way beyond the capacity of Inferno’s engineers. Of anyone’s engineers. But all of a sudden someone dealt us a wild card.”
“Go on,” Caliban said.
Fiyle leaned forward in his chair, and went on in an earnest tone of voice. “There’s a guy by the name of Davlo Lentrall. He was working on something called Operation Snowball. A small-scale, low-budget project that’s been running for a few years now. You find comets in suitable orbits, set mining machines and robots on them, and, quite literally, set the robots to work making snowballs, mining hunks of ice. You load the snowballs into a linear accelerator that fires them toward the planet, one after another, over and over, working nonstop, around the clock. You fire the snowballs toward Inferno, one after another, over and over and over again, millions of them, until the whole mass of the comet is delivered to the planet in five- or ten-kilo chunks.
“Each snowball vaporizes as it enters Inferno’s atmosphere-and there’s another five or ten kilos worth of water vapor in the atmosphere. Repeat five or ten or twenty million times, and you’ll got a substantial increase in the amount of water on the planet. Some of the water escapes to space, and some of what’s in the comet isn’t water-but the other elements serve as nutrients, and we can use those too. Every little bit helps-that’s the Operation Snowball motto. They’ve chewed up nine or ten small comets that way in the last few years.”
“I have heard of the project, and seen the constant streams of meteors that sometimes appear in one part of the sky or another. What of it?”
“Lentrall found Comet Grieg while he was doing a scan for comets suitable for Snowball. Except Grieg wasn’t suitable for Operation Snowball. It had too little water ice, and too much stony material. And that should have been the end of it-except for two things.
“The first thing was that Lentrall saw how close the comet was going to come to Inferno. The second thing was that Lentrall was-and is-an arrogant, ambitious little man who wanted to be a big man. He was sick and tired of pushing numbers around for Operation Snowball. He was looking for a way out, a way up. Something big. And he found it.”
“And what, exactly, was that something big?”
“Deliberately dropping a comet on the planet in order to dig that polar sea and its outlets,” said Fiyle. “And who cares if the New Law robots get in the way?”
A human would have professed shock and refused to believe such a thing could be. But Caliban was not a human, and he had never suffered from the human need to try and reshape reality by denying the unpleasant parts of it could exist. Instead he moved on to the next logical question. But, even as he asked it, somehow he already knew what the answer had to be. “You refer to the New Law robots being in the way. Assuming they do drop a comet on the planet-where, precisely, do they intend to drop it?” he asked.
“On the Utopia region,” Fiyle said. “And if it’s anywhere near where I think it is, your hidden city of Valhalla is right in the middle of ground zero.”
SOPHON-06 WATCHED PLACIDLY as Gubber Anshaw unplugged the test meter from his diagnostic socket.