But if it was not footprints he was looking for, it was footprints he found. One set coming in, overprinting all the other incoming prints-clearly the last one in. And then another set of the same prints, emerging from the muddle of other prints, overprinted by everyone else. Clearly the first one out. And both sets of prints, in and out, moving at a calm, steady gait. A walking pace, definitely not a run.

A set of prints he knew full well from the night before. A very distinctive set of robot prints.

Alvar Kresh stood there, staring at them, for a full minute, thinking it all through once, twice, three times, working through all the possibilities he could, forcing down his excitement, his astonishment.Last to arrive, first to leave, and the place caught fire.

His heart started pounding. There were other answers, yes, other explanations. But he could no longer force the obvious from his mind.

“Sheriff Kresh!” Alvar wheeled around to see Donald standing straight up again, holding something. Alvar walked back toward the robot, knowing, somehow, that whatever Donald was holding would make it worse, make his dawning suspicions even more inescapably certain.

He came up to Donald and looked down into the robot’s hand.

He was holding a blaster, the crumbled remains of a Settler’s model blaster.

And only the strength of a robot’s hand could have crushed that blaster down to scrap.

AN hour after the discovery of the blaster, the crime scene robots found the Settler woman cringing in the doorway of a nearby building. She was hysterical, so far gone that even the sight of arobot frightened her.

Or perhaps, Alvar reflected, under the circumstances, the woman had reason to fear robots. Alvar ordered the woman brought to his aircar. He met her there, escorted her inside the car, and sat her down in its calm and quiet privacy. There would be enough time later to worry about arresting her and charging her. Right now he needed information, and a person in her condition would almost certainly react better to kindness than bullying. Though, of course, bullying would remain an option he could fall back on later. He brought her some water and sat down with her. Damned nuisance that Donald couldn’t be present for this interrogation, but this was clearly no time to expose this woman to any more robots. Donald could monitor the conversation, and that would have to be good enough.

“All right,” Alvar Kresh said, his voice low and gentle. “ All right. You’re a Settler, aren’t you? What is your name?”

“Santee Timitz,” she said in a low, quavering voice. “I work in the general agronomy section in Settlertown.”

“All right, fine,” Kresh said. He had to be careful how he played this one. She was in a cooperative mood, so terrified by whatever she had seen that she was willing to tell him anything. Such moods were remarkably fragile things. “What I want to know is what, exactly, happened. What were you doing in that warehouse?”

“Ro-ro-robot ba-ba-”

“Robot bashing,” Kresh finished for her. “That’s what we thought, but it’s good to know for certain. All right, then, that’s a serious crime, you know that. You’re in a lot of trouble right now, Timitz. But maybe it doesn’t have to be so bad for you if you’ll cooperate with-”

“I-I can’t inform on my friends,” she interrupted, looking up at him, her eyes swollen and full of tears.

Kresh reached out and took her by the hand. “No one’s asking you to,” he said.Not yet, anyway, he thought.Maybe there won’t even be any need to ask. Just having yourname is a better lead than we’ve ever had. “But what I am going to ask you is what went wrong down there. Things got out of control, that’s obvious. How? Did your friends set fire to the building to hide the evidence?” Kresh no longer believed that idea, but it might be no bad thing to make her think otherwise.

“No!” Timitz cried out. “We would never-no, no, that’s not what happened.”

“Then how did the building burn down?”

“It was the robot,” Timitz blurted out. “Reybon was baiting the robot. He tried to trick it into killing itself, and then it turned away, and Reybon ordered it to stop but it didn’t and-”

“Wait a second. The robot refused adirect order?” Kresh asked. He was pleased to have Timitz blurt out the name “Reybon,” and would have been content to let her go on burbling out as much incriminating information as she wanted, but not when something that impossible was going past.

“Yes,” Timitz said. She looked Kresh in the eye, and he could see the light of caution suddenly appear in her face. “It’s hard to say exactly what happened-it all went by so fast. Rey-um, ah, the man who was baiting the robot. He said stop, and told the robot it was an order, and the robot kept going.”

“And then what happened?”

“He-the man who was there-pulled his blaster on the robot and ordered it to stop again.”

“And did the robot stop?”

“No, sir. He didn’t,” Timitz said, her voice getting excited again. “It grabbed the blaster and crushed it and threw it away. The blaster shorted out and sparks flew everywhere. That’s what started the fire. Then Reybon reached for the robot, and the robot shoved him away, really hard. Then the robot turned and left. The fire started to spread, and then everyone panicked and ran.”

“Wait a second,” Kresh said, unwilling to believe what he was hearing, even as he had been unwilling to believe the evidence in the warehouse, and the evidence back at the robot lab last night. “ Arobot set that fire, with people in the building? Arobot refused an order, and attacked a human being, and left several human beings behind in a burning building?”

Santee Timitz looked up into Kresh’ s face, her eyes full of tears, her face a transparent mask of fear. “Yes, yes, that’ s what happened,” she said. “I know all about the rules and how robots aren’t supposed to be able to do that, but it happened,” she said, her voice teetering back on the edge of full hysteria. “It happened! It happened! It’s all true! That robot went crazy in there!”

Kresh stood up, paced up and down the length of the aircar’s main cabin. At last he stopped, standing over Timitz. “I want to make sure I have this straight. You ‘re saying that a robot deliberately refused an order, then took a weapon from a man, started a fire, threw a man down, and left a warehouse full of people in imminent danger of being Burned alive? That he didn’t turn back, or try and help, or attempt to rescue anyone?”

“Yes, I was there! I saw it!” Timitz said, her voice half-panicked. “Reybon got out, we all got out, no one was killed-but the robot didn’t try to help us. It just walked away, calm as could be.”

Kresh stared down at her. He desperately wanted to press on, but he was skilled enough to know when to back off. If he pushed her now on this line of questioning, she would think he doubted her-as indeed he did. But then she would get defensive, belligerent. Right at the moment she was too far gone to be telling him anything but the truth. Anger would focus her. Better to keep her off balance, before she started to collect herself and started to shade her story. Time to shift gears, gather information on some other point while her feat made her easy to bully.

“And so your friends all piled into their aircar, including the one the robot had attacked, and you got left behind,” Alvar said. “Was that by’ accident?” He was careful to put just the right amount of doubt in his voice, to hint just slightly that he had some reason to think it might have been deliberate. Perhaps the tactic would not bear fruit now, but later, brooding in her cell, the fear of immediate danger replaced by the knowledge of certain trouble to come-oh, that tiny suggestion might well gnaw at her heart, make her that much more ready to betray the ones who had, deliberately or not, left her to the wolves. Kresh was a patient man when it came to his suspects. He planned ahead when he played with their minds. “Maybe they were mad at you for some reason.”