Caliban

“We do not know. When the deputies ordered her to explain her presence, she refused, stating that Madame Welton had given prior orders that prevented her from speaking on the subject.”

“Indeed. It requires highly sophisticated order-giving to keep a robot from speaking to a deputy. They get a lot of training in how to break just that sort of injunction. So how the hell did Tonya Welton learn how to do it-and what made her think to take such a precaution?”

“Yes, sir. Both of those questions occurred to me as well.”

“Interesting,” Sheriff Kresh said. “Very, very interesting.” Kresh spoke no more during the flight, and he flew on with a thoughtful expression on his face.

More to the point, so far as Donald was concerned, the Sheriff tended to fly more slowly when he had a problem to think on. Sure enough, the aircar slowed significantly.

Donald allowed himself to relax just a trifle as the airspeed indicator eased back. Remarkable, the effect one well-timed question could have. Still, it worked, and that was the main thing. Even so, it sometimes seemed to Donald that taking care of Alvar Kresh was more of an art than a science.

THE interrogation room was bare and plain, the walls a faded, dusty pale blue. In it there were two straight-backed chairs, one table, one robot, and one policeman. The prisoner was on the way. Kresh had considered long and hard before he decided what order in which to question them. At last he went with the gut instinct that told him to go for Terach first and Gubber Anshaw afterwards.,

Yes, Gubber second. Save the best for last. Ariel at his house the night before. There could be only one explanation for that, and that explanation could blast open a lot of the locked doors in this case…still, he would have to handle Anshaw carefully. But first there was Jomaine. There was some important groundwork to cover here. The door opened. There stood Jomaine Terach, looking small and wan and pale behind the two big guard robots that had escorted him from his cell.

Kresh made a small hand gesture and Terach came in, sat at the table.

The players are in position,Kresh told himself.Let the games begin.

JOMAINE Terach felt lost in a jumble of emotions. He was confused, tired, frightened, angered, fearful, angry. He knew perfectly well he was in no fit state to be questioned. But that was exactly why they had chosen this moment to grill him.

Alvar Kresh grinned unpleasantly at him, and spoke in a voice that made it clear that he was enjoying himself. “Why don’t I just save time and tell you what we already know?” he asked. “ And maybe this time you can be just a little bit more forthcoming with your answers. That way I won’t be tempted to use the charges we have against you already-the ones related to obstructing an investigation and failing to provide full and complete answers to a police officer. How does that sound to you?” Alvar Kresh smiled again, even more unpleasantly, as he looked his prisoner in the eye.

Jomaine Terach stared back and tried to keep calm, tried to calculate, tried to figure the situation. The night behind bars had been a long one, and it had not done his state of mind any good. No doubt it was not meant to. It was a fairly safe bet that they had picked up Gubber and maybe Fredda at the same time they got him. However, no one in the Sheriff’s Department was admitting to that or much of anything else.

But if Gubber was in here, well, Gubber was not much given to calm in the face of adversity. A night in a cell was likely to make Gubber’s tongue quite loose. And lurking in the background of Alvar Kresh’s angry, threatening courtesy was the unspoken threat of the Psychic Probe. No sane man wished to facethat, and Jomaine regarded himself as eminently sane. Sane enough to know just how serious the charges against him could get if Kresh wanted to throw the book at him.

If he wanted to stay free and with a whole mind, he was going to have to tell Kresh what he wanted to know, and tell it to himbefore Gubber or Fredda did. The time had come to protect himself from everyone else’s mad schemes. Unless that time was already past.

“Say what you have to say and ask your questions,” he said. “I don’t know it all. I didn’twant to know it all. But what I know, I’ll tell you. I have run out of reasons for silence.”

Alvar Kresh leaned back in his chair. “All right,” he said. “Let me start by telling you part of what we know already, and just see how well you do filling in the blanks.”

The operative word there waspart, of course, Jomaine told himself. Was Kresh going to tell ninety-five percent of what the police knew, or five percent? There were any number of traps and pitfalls here.

“We know for starters that Caliban is not a Three Law robot, not even one of these damned New Law robots, but a No Law robot.”