Caliban

“She was lying there on the floor, passed out cold, the robot out of the test rack, standing over her, the robot’s arm raised like this.” Gubber held his left arm out in front of him, elbow bent about halfway, his palm open, arm and hand both held parallel with the side of his body.

But Kresh was not paying attention to details of how Caliban had held his arm in front of him. Burning devils in deepest hell. Gubber was saying Calibanhad still been there! Never in a hundred years had he expected that. It made no sense. No sense at all. If Caliban had committed the attack, why was he still standing there? If he had not, why in the world had he vanished later?

“Hold it a moment. Caliban was stillthere? ”

Gubber looked up in surprise. “Why, yes, of course. I thought you knew that.”

“We have, ah, several variant versions of the crime scene.”

“Might I ask if Caliban was operational?” Donald asked. “Was he powered up and functional, or still switched off?”

“Ah, neither, actually. I must admit that he was not the first thing I thought of. I did not take a close look at him. Naturally my first instinct was to look at Fredda. I could not tell if she was dead or alive. There was a small pool of blood just beginning to form under her head.

“Naturally I was scared to death. I was still a bit muzzy from my nap, and my dreams about the two women fighting were still mixed up in my head. I assumed that it had to have been Tonya who-who did it. I was standing over Fredda, next to the robot, wondering what to do, when I heard the robot’sfunctionality confirmed tone code.”

“Hiswhat?”

“It’s a tripled triple beep. Beep-beep-beep, pause, beep-beep-beep, pause, beep-beep-beep. It’s one of a sequence of tone codes a gravitonic brain robot makes as it powers up. One of the minor drawbacks of the gravitonic brain is that its initial power-up sequence takes about fifteen minutes to an hour, rather than the two or three seconds of a positronic unit. We ought to be able to;reduce that delay in the next generation of brains, but-”

“Hold it, hold it. Let’s not worry about the next generation of brains just now. Let me understand this. You heard this tripled triple tone coming out of Caliban, and that tone indicated he was in the process of coming on?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Incredible. How could they have missed it? Caliban had been turned on for the first night. They had accepted that without ever asking the burningly obvious question-by whom?Damnation! Gubber Anshaw was supposed to supply new answers, not new questions. “ All right. What happened then?”

“I left. I grabbed the things I had meant to collect when I went into the lab and I left.”

“What?Your friend and superior dead or unconscious on the floor and you leave?”

Gubber dropped his head down to stare intently at his hands. “I’m not proud of it, Sheriff. But it is what happened. The tripled triple tone told me that the robot there would be fully activated in another two minutes. I had no reason to think he was anything other than a standard Three Law unit. Gravitonic robots can take the Three Laws or New Laws just as effectively, and there is a standing lab policy to keep all New Law robots under very strict control. If Caliban had been Three Law, then Fredda Leving would have received first-aid attention within 120 seconds-and far better care than I could offer. And there would be a witness there-a robot witness but a witness all the same. to report that I had been there when the attack happened. I had nothing to do with it, I swear it. Neither did Tonya or Jomaine. I realized that later.”

“How do you know that?”

“Fredda’s tea mugs.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Fredda drinks her tea from rather large and fragile mugs that some artist friend of hers makes. Fredda is forever forgetting they are not as strong as standard containers. She’s careless with them. They fall and break frequently, and when they smash into the hard floors of the lab, you hear it everywhere in the building.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“There were the remains of a broken mug on the floor of the lab. I heard both Tonya and Jomaine in the hallway. I heard Tonya leave, and both she and I heard Jomaine leave the hall and go into his own lab, down the other end of the hall. He never came back down it, and the exterior doors to the labs lock from the inside, so he could ‘only have gotten into the building through the main entrance. Iheard all that.” Gubber looked up, glanced from Kresh to Donald and back again before he went on.