Caliban

Fredda struggled to keep her temper. “I know that,” she said, her voice short and under tight control. “I should have called and told the police about Caliban the moment I came to in the hospital. Instead I just crossed my fingers and hoped there wouldn’t be any trouble. Remember, I did not even know he wasmissing at first. And it seemed to me that announcing the New Law robots would cause enough trouble all by itself-and it did, in case you didn’t notice. So I took a chance on keeping quiet-and lost. I must thank you for leaving the decision to me. You could have spoken up, too.”

“That was a purely selfish decision. I didn’t want to be thrown in prison. Not when there were still hopes that there would be no further trouble. But then, the more trouble there was, the more dangerous it would be to confess.”

“And now, I can hardly see how it could get worse,” Fredda said. She let down her guard a bit and sighed. “We should have told Kresh about Caliban. But that’s the past. We have to look at the present and the future. What do we do now?”

“Let’s think on that for a moment,” Jomaine said. “The police may have theories and reports from specialists, but you and I still are the only ones who know forcertain that Caliban is a No-Law.”

“Gubber has his suspicions,” Fredda said. “I’m sure he does. But Gubber is in no state or position to go talking to the Sheriff just now.”

“I agree,” Jomaine said. “I’m not worried about him. My point is that no matter what happened between Caliban and Horatio, Kresh can’t becertain that Caliban isn’t just a New Law robot, or even some specialized form of standard Three Law robot. There have been cases where robots have been built unaware that they obeyed the Three Laws, but they obeyed them, anyway. All Kresh could have would be Horatio’ s report-and I doubt that Horatio would be an altogether reliable informant. As I recall you built him with extremely high First Law and Third Law potential, with Second Law reduced somewhat. The idea was to give him the ability to make independent decisions.”

“So what’s your point?” Fredda asked.

“An enhanced First Law robot like him wouldn’t be able to deal with Caliban very well or very long without malfunctioning,” Jomaine said. “If Caliban talked to him, and described doing much of anything well outside normal robotic behavior, Horatio would probably suffer severe cognitive dissonance and malfunction.”

“So?”

“You’ve just finished making a long speech where you said we rely too much on robots. We believe in them so much we can’t quite believe they could be built any other way. I think if Kresh is given the choice between believing there could be such a thing as a No Law robot, or believing that a malfunctioning robot was confused, he’ll go with the confused robot.”

Fredda shifted in her seat and sighed. It was tempting, sorely tempting, to agree with Jomaine. She had spent her whole life in a culture that believed what it wanted and resolutely ignored the facts. She looked at Jomaine and saw his eager, hopeful expression as he continued to speak, desperately trying to convince himself and Fredda both.

“Caliban was meant to live in the laboratory,” Jomaine said. “He only has a low-capacity power source, and we never taught him how to recharge it. At best, it will last a day or two longer. Maybe it’s died already. If not, then it will fail soon, and he’ll run out of power. He’ll stop dead. If he’s in hiding when that happens, he’ll just vanish. Maybe he was already on reserves when he went to see Horatio. Maybe he’s already keeled over in some tunnel where no one will look for the next twenty years.”

“And maybe Horatio told him how to plug into a recharge receptacle, or maybe Caliban saw a robot charge up somewhere, or maybe he worked it out for himself. We canhope that he will lose power, but we can’tcount on it.”

Fredda hesitated a moment, then spoke again. “Besides, there’s something you don’t know. The information from Gubber that you “handed to me in the hospital? It was the full police report. I didn’t tell you about it before now because I didn’t think you’d want to know. They have very strong evidence that arobot committed the attack against me. They weren’t ready to believe that evidence before, but now it will be different. And they know a robot named Caliban was involved in a situation with a bunch of robot-bashing Settlers that ended up burning down a building. And there must be more, besides, things that have happened since then. Kresh is not the sort of man to sit still and wait for things to happen. Even if he can’t quite accept the idea of a No Law robot, by now he has a lot more than Horatio’ s statement to convince him that Caliban is strange and dangerous. I doubt he’ d give up looking even if Caliban loses power and vanishes without a trace.”

“Do you really think Kresh believes Caliban to be dangerous?” Jomaine Terach asked.