Caliban

Anshaw’s face fell. Clearly he had thought Kresh would find his logic convincing. “No, no, it didn’t. And Istill don’t believe it. She is not that kind of person. She could not have attacked Fredda that way.”

“You thought she could have at the time. Why do you think you were wrong then and are right now?”

“The night it happened, I wasn’t able to think clearly. When I found the body, I was so scared and surprised, I did not know what to think. When I had time to think about it, I knew it was impossible.”

When I found the body.It took all of Alvar’s training not to leap onto that slip immediately. But that could come later. Anshaw was not aware of what he had said, and the longer he was off guard the better.Let it ride, Kresh thought.Come back to it later. He chose another point to pursue, almost at random.

“You said that you and Leving had been having arguments. What were they about?”

Gubber drew himself up to sit straight in his chair, and folded his hands. “I did not approve of what she was doing.”

“What was it you objected to?”

“The New Law robots. I thought and think it is possible they are a very dangerous idea.”

“But you went along with the project, anyway.”

Gubber rested his hands flat on the table for a moment, but then knitted his fingers together. His hands were clammy with sweat. “Yes, that is true,” he said. He looked up at Alvar, and there was suddenly something bright, sharp, fierce in his eye. “I invented the gravitonic brain, Sheriff Kresh. It represents a tremendous advance over the positronic brain, a breakthrough of huge proportions. My gravitonic brain offers the chance for whole new vistas of research, vastly increased robotic intelligence and ability. I had the notes, the test materials, the models and designs, to prove that it would work. I took them to every lab on the planet and sent inquiries to half a dozen other Spacer worlds as well.And no one would listen.

“No one cared. No one would use my work. If it wasn’t a positronic brain, it wasn’t a robot. My brain couldn’t go in a robot. That was an article of faith, everywhere I went. Fredda had rejected my ideas as first. Until it dawned on her that I was offering a blank slate upon which to write her New Laws.”

“So you swallowed your objections to her ideas to prevent your own work from getting lost.”

“Yes, that’s right. She was the only one who cared about my work, or would even give me the chance to complete it. Fredda Leving wasn’t-and isn’t-much interested in the technical improvements the gravitonic brain offers. To her, gravitonic brains were nothing more than robotic brains that did not have the Three Laws. That was her sole interest.”

“And you went along. Even though you’ve just said the New Laws are dangerous.”

“Yes, I went along, though now I wish I Burned my work instead.” For a brief moment, Gubber showed a little spark of passion, but then the little man seemed to shrink in on himself again. Alvar Kresh felt a fleeting moment of pity for Gubber Anshaw. No matter how the matter was resolved, there seemed little hope that he would get his old life back. If he was something of a villain in the piece, so, too, was he something of a victim.

“I won’t pretend that I have unblemished pride in what I did,” Gubber went on. “But it seemed the last chance that my life’s work would not be thrown away. I worked very hard to convince myself that the New Laws included adequate safeguards. Well, you know how that turned out. Something went wrong, either with the Laws or the brain. But I know the brain was good. It has to be the Laws.”

Wait a second,Kresh told himself.He thinks that Caliban is a New Law robot. Kresh had just assumed that Terach was lying and Caliban’s true nature was bound to be common knowledge around the lab. If Anshaw was Tonya Welton’s main source of information, as seemed likely, then she, too, had to be assuming that Caliban was a New Law robot.

Burning devils. If that was true, she would have serious and legitimate concerns about unleashing a whole army of the things at the Limbo Project, alongside her own people. If she hadn’t attacked Fredda, and was unsure who had, she would very much want to believe that Caliban was innocent, and harmless, for the sake of her own people. If Caliban and she herself were eliminated, then the suspect list was damned short-and her lover, Gubber Anshaw, was at the top of it.

No wonder the woman was acting a bit edgy. “I told myself the New Law robots would be mere laboratory experiments,” Anshaw went on. “I was wrong about that, too.”

“Lab experiment? But the New Law robots are going to be all over the Limbo Project. They’ll be able to wander anywhere they want on Purgatory.”