Inferno by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov [Asimov, Isaac]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-08T18:30:00+00:00

„Thank you,“ Fredda said. „It’s virtually certain that Bissal shot the three SPRs immediately after killing Grieg. You can get a pretty clear sequence of shots by charting the blast intensity, with each shot a bit weaker than the one before. That much we knew. But what I’ve established is that Bissal wasted his blaster charge. He had enough power in that thing to kill Grieg and knock out a hundred SPRs. But a blaster keeps shooting as long as you hold down the trigger--and Bissal held that trigger down too long. „All he had to do to the SPRs is burn them deep enough to vaporize the range restrictors and eliminate the evidence that rustbackers were behind the plot, but about half the SPRs that did get shot have holes burned clear through their chests--and so does Grieg, for that matter. If Bissal had given each robot, say, a quarter-second blaster shot instead of a full second, the robots would be just as dead, the restrictors would be thoroughly destroyed, and he would have had the blaster power left over to knock out all the SPRs he missed. Also, the Trojan robot in the basement was only partially destroyed. One of the Crime Scene robots said it looked like a deliberate overload meltdown from a blaster with a depleted power pack. „I think Bissal was supposed to shoot all the SPRs, and then put his blaster back in the Trojan, set it for an overload, and run. If he had been careful with his blaster charge, he would have had enough power left to shoot all the robots twice, and still melt the Trojan robot down to a puddle on the floor, destroy it so completely we’d never know it was a Trojan.“ „It seems like a lot of trouble to hide the fact that they were using range restrictors,“ Devray said, „especially when you consider that we were going to find a bunch of robots all shot in the chest. Seems to me we would have thought about range restrictors pretty quick anyway.“ „Maybe,“ Fredda conceded. „It would have been a little harder to realize the importance of chest shots if Bissal had done more shots to the head and the lower torso, or shot a few of them through the back instead of the front. But even so, think about it. If he had shot them all, the way he was supposed to, there would have been forty-nine SPRs shot dead, one SPR melted down to slag, and Grieg dead. Maybe we’d all be wondering what sort of super killer could get past that much security. We wouldn’t know for sure they had used restrictors--or known what sort, or how they had done it. Besides, covering their tracks wasn’t much of a priority with this crowd.“ „In fact, much the opposite,“ Kresh said. „Think about all the things in this case that seem to have been done for the purpose of unnerving us--or the public. Just think how they’ll react to it all.

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