Caliban

“As I mentioned, Tonya Welton was in the lab that day and struck up a conversation with the control unit. Of course, it being a double-blind test, I didn’t know it was the control at the time, but later Tonya said she had taken a liking to the sessile robot that had spoken with her. Tonya wasn’t very happy with the robot she had been issued, and asked if I could arrange for her to exchange it for the one she had met in the lab.

“If the one she had liked had turned out to be the experimental model, she would have been out of luck, of course. But as it turned out, Ariel was the control, and was working in the lab. Fredda authorized the swap, and so Tonya ended up with her robot.”

Plainly, Gubber was puzzled by the question, but he wasn’t going to get any explanation for it.

“Very good. It is always wise to confirm details wherever possible. That dovetails with our previous information.”

And allows us to confirm that Jomaine Terach was telling the truth at least part of the time,Kresh thought. But maybe it was time to come back to the main point.When I found the body, Gubber had said, letting it drop very casually, as if he assumed that Kresh already knew that. That was the way to play it. Donald had been smart, giving Anshaw the idea that all they were doing was confirming information. Robots were incapable of lying, of course, except under the strongest of orders to do so, and even then they were never very good at it. But sophisticated units like Donald could allow a true statement to provide a false impression now and again.

“Let’ s go back to something else, Anshaw. Back to the moment when you discovered the body, all right?”

Anshaw nodded calmly, clearly unperturbed by any thought than he had let something slip.

“Good,” Kresh said, giving his voice the tone of a man going through the motions, clearing up routine details. “Now, you’ve already been extremely helpful today, but as you can imagine, the actual crime scene is important. The last thing we want to do is color your recollections of it. It’s the same as with your blind robotics tests, really. We don’t want to introduce a bias accidentally with a lot of leading questions that might end up with you subconsciously skewing your answers, giving us what we want. That make sense to you?”

“Oh, yes, very much so. I know how those subtle errors can slip in and cause no end of confusion.”

“Good, good.” Kresh was pleased with the analogy, and wondered if Donald had meant him to pick up on his line of questioning and use it. He could be a subtle one, that Donald. He went on with the delicate job of leading Gubber Anshaw down the garden path. “So, what I want you to do is simply tell exactly what happened, in your own words, without our drawing out your story question by question. Maybe I’ll ask a question or two if we don’t understand a detail, but in the main we’ll wait until you’re done. That will be time enough for us to go back and tidy up any discrepancies with the information we have already.”Which is close to bloody-helled nothing, Kresh thought.

Gubber looked nervously at Kresh, but still he did not speak. Kresh realized he needed to press harder. But not too hard, or else there was an excellent chance Gubber would clam up altogether. “Talk to us, Gubber,” Kresh said. “You have no idea the damage silence has done already. That silence is a vacuum, and it’s sucking people in. A few words from you, the casual mention of some tiny detail you don’t even know you know, could be the thing we need to cut the last weak threads of suspicion tying you and Lady Welton to this case. The two of you were both suspects when you walked in here. You could both be scratched right off our list here and now if you tell us the truth,” Alvar lied.

“Honestly?” Gubber asked, and it was clear how desperately he wanted to believe.

“Honestly,” Kresh lied again, glancing involuntarily at Donald. This was one of those moments when it was downright dangerous to have a robot in on the game. If the complex admixture of First Law potentials broke the wrong way, there was nothing in the world-least of all Donald’ s own will-to prevent the robot piping up to contradict Kresh.

Donald knew Kresh was lying, making” promises he had no intention of keeping. But how would Donald balance the First Law admonition to prevent harm from being done through inaction? Certainly Gubber could come to harm by believing Kresh. But if Donald spoke up,that could produce harm to Kresh and to the Sheriff’s Department. If speaking up, calling Kresh on the lie, wrecked the investigation, that could even cause harm to the population in general, by leaving Fredda’ s attacker at large, free to strike again.