Caliban

“Now, I suppose someone could strike someone else over the head without a lot of noise. Maybe I would have missed that. But I was listening carefully when both Jomaine and Tonya left andI never heard the cup smash against the floor. It must have happened when I was asleep. I’m a deep sleeper, and as I said I was exhausted. Either I slept right through it, or else I incorporated the sound into my dream about the two women fighting. Perhaps that crashing noise even set that dream in motion.”

“Forgive a most awkward question, sir,” Donald said, “but is it possible that you might have missed the crash if it had happened earlier, when you and Lady Leving were together in the duty office?”

Gubber glanced up, beet-red, plainly embarrassed. “ Ah, well, yes,” he said. “There were certainly times in that period when we would not have heard anything.”

“One other question, sir,” Donald went on. “Can you characterize any marks or things you might have noticed on the floor of the room?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You said you saw the smashed mug and the blood pooling under Dr. Leving’s head. Was there anything else of note?”

“Oh, I see. No, not that I noticed. But I can assure you that I was not in much of a state to notice anything at all. The moment I heard the tone code coming out of that robot, there was nothing on my mind but leaving. I doubt that I was in the room more than thirty seconds at most.”

“This tone code,” Kresh said. “You said it was part of the robot’s wake-up sequence, and that it indicated how long until the robot would come on. Can you tell us how long before that tone the robot would be switched on?”

“Not without knowing a great deal more about how that unit was configured. There are three or four brain types, gravitonic and positronic, that can be installed in that body type, and there is other equipment that can add variation. The size and type of the on-board datastore, for example. It could take anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour to go from a cold gravitonic robot to a tripled triple.”

Damnation. Events seemed to be conspiring against solving the case. Each new bit of information seemed only to muddle the time sequence or confuse the issue. Kresh felt he would go mad if he did not come up with some sort of witness, and it seemed there was only one potential witness left. “Is there any way that Caliban would have been aware or operational before the moment you came in?” he asked.

“Yes, certainly,” Gubber said. “I realized that afterwards. From the time I left him to see Tonya, there was more than enough time for him to power up, run his full activation sequence, and then be switched off again-or switch himself off, for whatever reason. Then he could be switched on again, or program his own delayed power-up. Most robots have the capacity to set themselves to switch off and on again. It’s quite likely something like that is what happened.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, somehow or another, Caliban moved off the service rack to a standing position. Besides which, his arm was raised as if to strike a blow. That’s not howI’d position his limbs if I was getting him off a rack. It seems to me that either Fredda got him down off the rack, or he got down himself, but it’s more likely he did it on his own. Pity she can’t remember the incident.”

“Traumatic amnesia does that to a person,” Kresh said dryly. “But how could she possibly get him down off that rack?” Kresh objected. “ A robot that size must weigh five times what she does.”

“The rack has all sorts of power-assistance features. It’s designed to lift and carry robots, pick them up and put them down, and hold them in any position.”

“All right. Let’s go back to your actions. You saw Caliban over the body, you panicked, and you left. What happened then?”

“I went home,” Gubber said. “I went out to my aircar, and my pilot robot flew me home. I called Tonya from home and-” Gubber stopped.

“And what?”

“Well, at first, I was going to accuse her, ask how she could have done such a thing. But then I saw her face on the screen. Fresh, and calm, very much at ease. Iknew she could not have done it. And it was starting to sink in how wrong it had been for me to run off that way. I didn’t want to admit that to Tonya. All of a sudden I realized that I couldn’t say anything to Tonya. I told her-I told her that something terrible had happened at the lab and that I was going into seclusion. Then I locked all the doors and cut off all the comm systems, and left them that way for the next few days.”