Caliban

Kresh thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “She has had too many chances to cut her losses. Gubber Anshaw is a very dangerous man to know right now. He is in very deep trouble, and she knows it. Yet she went to some effort to distract our attention away from him. I believe that she has real affection for Gubber, though what there is that inspired that feeling, I cannot say.”

“What do you make of it all on a broader scale, sir? What do you make of the case at this time?”

“It is the damnedest tangle I have ever seen. Either Terach and Anshaw and Tonya Welton are all the most consummate of liars, or else none of them had anything to do with it. And you can add Fredda Leving to that list of skilled liars, too, and make her part of the conspiracy to cover up the attack on herself. All of the other stories hang together with hers. There isn’tany meaningful discrepancy that I can see.”

Kresh leaned back in his seat and stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. “They all have pretty fair motives as well. Jomaine could have feared that Fredda’ s work is going to get them all in deep trouble. A well-placed fear, as it develops. Tonya might have wanted a clear hand to run Limbo without Fredda joggling her elbow. Or maybe Tonya got wind of Caliban and got Gubber to monkey with him as a way of discrediting robots. The last thing Gubber was doing before going off with Tonya was fiddling with Caliban. But if that is so, then we must assume that the entire crisis has been manufactured by the Settlers, and that just seems like an awful lot of trouble when they could wreck our world just by leaving and sitting back to wait.

“Or maybe Gubber was carefully hiding his bitterness and jealousy over the woman who took over his lovely gravitonic brains and perverted them away from the Laws. Or perhaps his temper got the better of him and he coshed her for being abusive toward Tonya. Damnation, any of those could be right! All of themotives are plausible.

“It’s the way the crime wasdone that seems so implausible. If one of them did it, that still leaves us with whoever it was strapping on robot-foot shoes and procuring a robot arm for a weapon, and using both with utterly inhuman precision, taking the time to walk through the room twice in robot boots during a period of time when people were still coming and going from the labs. Madness.”

There was silence in the room for a while, until Kresh could bring himself to speak. It was rarely easy to admit you were wrong and someone else was right. Especially when that someone else was a robot. “That leaves us with Caliban. And the more I think about your objections tohim as a suspect, the more I am forced to agree with you. He doesn’t make much sense as an assailant. He has had many other chances to kill, and many better reasons to do so, and he hasn’t taken them. And yes, a robot whocould kill andwanted to kill would have done a better job of it. A robot who wanted to kill would succeed, not botch the job by striking a nonfatal blow.”

Kresh lowered his eyes to look at Donald. He drummed his fingers on the table and rubbed his chin with his hand. “Which leaves us with a totally unknown assailant as our prime suspect. Someone who can disable Settler security devices, because no one else showed up on the access recorder. Maybe a Settler disguised as a robot, someone who wanted to kill Fredda Leving so the whole operation would collapse so he or she could go home. Maybe some other motive.

“Or it could be one of Simcor Beddle’s Ironheads, maybe even Simcor himself. Say one of them got wind of the New Law robot project and feared it as a threat to their sacred, inert way of life. If it was Simcor or one of his chums, then the Ironheads have more skill with Settler hardware than I would give them credit for.”

“All of what you say seems quite logical, sir. But if I might observe, sir, we are losing sight of our other problem.”

“I know, I know. Caliban. Caliban the rogue robot. Whether or not he attacked Fredda Leving, he is out there. He is a rogue, he is lawless, and we need to catch him. I’d been hoping that making progress on the Leving assault would help lead us to him. Except now we’re no further along with the assault case, either. I take it the search teams out after him don’t have any leads as of yet?”

“No, sir, they don’t. No word at all.”

“Damn it!” Alvar Kresh stood up and began pacing the room. “I’ll admit it. I’m stumped. Totally stumped. I don’t know how to put it all together. The two sides of this case are so intertwined, and yet it’s as if they have nothing to do with each other.” He stepped to the window and stared down at the city. Dusk was settling. It had been another long day, with meals forgotten and a hitch in his back from sitting in that damn chair all day. “Caliban,” he whispered to himself. “Maybe he’s the one who can tell us what the hell happened that night.”