Caliban

Jomaine Terach did as he was told, but it didn’t take long for him to report the little that he was privy to. Not his fault, not really. Fredda had quite deliberately kept him in the dark, for everyone’s sake. He couldn’t tell what he didn’t know-a fact that, in balance, was very much to her advantage at the moment. Gubber was enough of a risk. A well-informed Jomaine in Kresh’s hands was a thought not to be contemplated. Still, he could at least serve to fill her in on any details Kresh had seen fit to leave out of his narrative.

Jomaine ran true to form, speaking overcarefully, working through all the details in a relentlessly orderly fashion, but even so it took him very little time to finish-no doubt in part because the crime scene was still sealed. No one not associated with the investigation had gotten into Gubber’s lab yet. Indeed, it appeared that Jomaine did not even know that a robot was missing from the lab.

Fredda nodded her head thoughtfully after Jomaine had stopped. He had not really contributed a great deal to her store of knowledge. Caliban was gone, either escaped or stolen. Someone had attacked her and stolen her notes. But what he didnot say told her it could have been worse. That was not to say that a great deal of damage had not been done, but just now she would take whatever small comfort she could. “And that’s it?” she asked. “Nothing else to report?”

Jomaine got to his feet, rather apologetically, and pulled a palm-sized computer pad from his pocket. “There’ s nothing more thatI can tell you,” he said, “but Gubber gave this to me for you. He seems to have some rather special sources of information.” He handed her the pad and looked her straight in the eye, standing over her bed in a strangely formal, careful posture. It was obvious that he did not like what he was part of, but that he was determined to make the best of it and behave as correctly as possible. He pointed to the computer pad he had just given her. “I have not read that report,” he said, “and I’m not going to. I don’t want to know anything more. I have told you all I know, but none of what I think, and I expect that you will prefer it that way.

“To be quite blunt about the matter, my ideas about what you ‘re doing scare three kinds of hell out of me. Therefore, I would ask that you have the kindness to wait until I have left the room to look this over.”

Fredda Leving stared at her assistant in astonishment for a full thirty seconds before she could find voice enough to speak. Never had the man been so bold or blunt. “Very well, Jomaine. Thank you for your honesty and discretion.”

“I would suggest that those are two qualities we have all had in short supply recently,” he said sharply. The expression on Terach’ s pointed face softened a bit, and he reached out to touch her on the shoulder. “Rest, Fredda, heal,” he said in a warm and gentle voice. “Even if none of this had happened, you’ d need all your strength for tomorrow night.”

Fredda smiled wanly and sighed. “You didn’t need to remind me,” she said. Tomorrow night’s presentation might well decide more fates than her own.

Jomaine Terach turned and left, leaving Fredda alone with her thoughts and Gubber Anshaw’ s computer pad. She was almost afraid to read it. Gubber had some amazing sources of information. Fredda had decided long ago that she did notwant to know what those sources were.

Fredda hardly dared wonder what he had come up with this time. She started to read the information in the pad. Three paragraphs into it she was so terrified she could scarcely see well enough to read it. For what she read in the computer pad made all the rest of her worries seem like no worries at all.

Good lord, where the hell had Gubber gotten this stuff? It looked like he had gotten his hands on the complete police reports of her attack, raw information not yet analyzed or put in order.Two sets of bloody robotic footprints? What the devil could that mean?

And the other reports-on the Ironhead riot at Settlertown and the robot basher/arson incident in the warehouse district. Sweet Fallen Angel, yes, Caliban had given his name to a witness there and she, Fredda, had just given it to Kresh as well. They had the link. They knew, or thought they knew, all they needed to know about Caliban.

Damn it, who thehell had let him out of the lab? Fredda had known right along that Caliban’s earliest hours would be highly formative. That was why she had delayed powering him up for so long. She wanted all the conditions ideal when she did.

But look at the first hours he had had instead. He must have been at the very least a witness to the attack on her. Then he must have wandered the city, seen the subservient behavior of robots. That must have been damned confusing to him. She had deliberately edited out all information regarding robots from his datastore.

Hell’s bells, how long had she worked on that datastore, carefully tailoring the information it contained? At best, all that work was now wasted.