Caliban

Sometime during the night and the morning after Fredda Leving’s speech on the New Law robots, the city’s rumor mill struck that critical mass. The stories that had been drifting around the city suddenly seemed to coalesce, to form around each other and give each other new strength. Almost, it seemed, by instinct, reporters sensed that it was the moment to start digging. News reports, accurate and otherwise, were allover the media.

Alvar Kresh sighed and tossed the notepack to one side. The server robot took away his fruit cup, which was the first that Alvar knew he had even eaten it. The robot placed an omelette in front of him, and he resolved to eat it with more attention.

It was a resolution that did not last long. His mind was too busy, working over all the events of the last few days and what was likely to happen next.

He could not keep his mind from what was right there in the middle of all the stories-the assumed conspiracies, the scenarios that were whispered or shouted from half the news reports. Governor Grieg had predicted such things would spring to life:The Settlers were behind it all. They had created some sort of false robot to discredit all robots. New Law robots, the rogue Caliban, they were all part of the same plot to sow fear in the hearts of the good people of Inferno, make them distrust their own robots and so destroy society. It was all part of the Settler plan to move in and take over.

What was doubly galling for Alvar was that, a week before, he would have been prepared to believe in all such plots. For that matter, there wasstill no hard-edged evidence that directly contradicted the idea. There was certainly collusion between Leving Labs and the Settlers, and clearly both groups were involved in the New Law robots. And he knew far better than the general public could that the stories of a rogue robot were terribly real. A rogue built by the same Fredda Leving who seemed to be in Tonya Welton’s hip pocket.

Hell’s clanging bells, but itcould be a Leving-Welton conspiracy. Maybe they had struck a deal, conspiring to wreck Inferno’s society and then come in and divvy up the spoils afterwards. Both of them were ambitious, even ruthless. He could not rule that idea out by any means.

But he dared not act on that or any related theory. Governor Grieg had convinced Alvar just how much Infernoneeded the Settlers. Maybe this whole crisiswas a plot to wreck Spacer faith in robots. Or maybe some splinter Settler groupwas trying to get the Settlers thrown off the planet for some reason of their own. Maybe the Settler leadership, Tonya Welton herself, truly did want Inferno to collapse.

Suppose the Settlers had planned it that way from the start: come in, promise to take over the reterraforming project, and then manufacture a pretext for walking out on the jobafter the Spacers had given up any thought of doing the job. If it was a deliberate plot, they would of course invent a reason-like a robotics crisis-that would tend to weaken Spacer culture. Then pullout and wait for the collapse to happen.

Result: a situation identical to the one Alvar Kresh faced right now.

Unless, of course, he had it all wrong. Suppose theIronheads were behind it all, wanting to be rid of the Spacers for their own reasons, staging fake robot attacks and sabotaging Caliban with the intention of blaming the Settlers, counting on the resulting backlash to bring in new converts to their cause…

Alvar Kresh groaned and held his head and his hands. Conspiracies whirled through his mind. It seemed as ifeveryone,every group had a motive, or the means, or the opportunity, or even all three, to do practically anything. He was tempted, sorely tempted, to walk away from it all.

But the damage was done, and Alvar Kresh was not a man capable of abandoning his duty.

If the Ironheads managed to create a violent confrontation, the results could be disastrous. Even without a secret plot, the Settlers would leave if their lives were threatened. Enough protests, enough rioting and harassment, enough aggravation, and the Settlers would all give up and go home, and Alvar could not really blame them. Why put up with such things if they did not have to do so?