Caliban

In which case…

“Donald!” he said. “Order a squad of crime scene robots to start a sweep of the area around the warehouse, looking for stragglers.”

“Stragglers, sir?” Donald asked, straightening up from his searching.

“These Settlers left in a hurry. Suppose not all of them got into the aircar, and the driver was too drunk and too scared to count noses? Someone might have been left behind.”

“Yes, sir. I will pass the order.” Instantly a dozen of the crime scene robots broke off their work and set out to search the area. Donald bent back over and returned to his methodical scan of the warehouse floor.

Kresh watched the crime scene robots go and then got back to his thinking. A panicky exit. The doorway. A crush of bodies hurrying through it as the flames rose higher. Maybe people dropping things, leaving telltale items behind.

Kresh stood in the middle of the ruined structure and scanned the bent and twisted remains of the building’s frame, judging where the entrance had been before the collapse. There, in the middle of the south wall. He picked his way through the rubble-strewn floor, moving slowly, carefully sweeping his light back and forth across as he moved. Yes, the robots would do better, but even if he missed something they later found, at least he would have a feel for where that something came from.

Slowly, carefully, he moved toward the wreckage of the doorway and through it. In this part of town, no one even bothered paving the sidewalks. Just outside the doorway was nothing but hard-packed dirt. There was a confused tangle of rather muddied footprints, perfectly unreadable to Kresh, though the imagery reconstruction computers might be able to do something with them. Kresh was careful not to walk over anything himself.

It was not footprints he was looking for, but the sort of thing a person might drop or lose in a panicky hurry. Something that might lead Kresh to a name, a person. A wallet or an ident card would be ideal, of course, but he hardly dared expect that. But there were a thousand lesser things, perhaps none of them as easy or obvious as a photo ID, but some of them no less certain in the end. A bottle that might reveal a fingerprint, a bit of cloth that might have been torn from a shirt and left behind on a roughened edge of the door frame, a bit of skin or a drop of dried blood from where someone got scratched or cut in the rush to escape a burning building. A hair, a broken fingernail, anything that could be typed and DNA-coded would do for Kresh.

But if it was not footprints he was looking for, it was footprints he found. One set coming in, overprinting all the other incoming prints—clearly the last one in. And then another set of the same prints, emerging from the muddle of other prints, overprinted by everyone else. Clearly the first one out. And both sets of prints, in and out, moving at a calm, steady gait. A walking pace, definitely not a run.

A set of prints he knew full well from the night before. A very distinctive set of robot prints.

Alvar Kresh stood there, staring at them, for a full minute, thinking it all through once, twice, three times, working through all the possibilities he could, forcing down his excitement, his astonishment. Last to arrive, first to leave, and the place caught fire.

His heart started pounding. There were other answers, yes, other explanations. But he could no longer force the obvious from his mind.

“Sheriff Kresh!” Alvar wheeled around to see Donald standing straight up again, holding something. Alvar walked back toward the robot, knowing, somehow, that whatever Donald was holding would make it worse, make his dawning suspicions even more inescapably certain.

He came up to Donald and looked down into the robot’s hand.

He was holding a blaster, the crumbled remains of a Settler’s model blaster.

And only the strength of a robot’s hand could have crushed that blaster down to scrap.

7

AN hour after the discovery of the blaster, the crime scene robots found the Settler woman cringing in the doorway of a nearby building. She was hysterical, so far gone that even the sight of a robot frightened her.

Or perhaps, Alvar reflected, under the circumstances, the woman had reason to fear robots. Alvar ordered the woman brought to his aircar. He met her there, escorted her inside the car, and sat her down in its calm and quiet privacy. There would be enough time later to worry about arresting her and charging her. Right now he needed information, and a person in her condition would almost certainly react better to kindness than bullying. Though, of course, bullying would remain an option he could fall back on later. He brought her some water and sat down with her. Damned nuisance that Donald couldn’t be present for this interrogation, but this was clearly no time to expose this woman to any more robots. Donald could monitor the conversation, and that would have to be good enough.

“All right,” Alvar Kresh said, his voice low and gentle. “All right. You’re a Settler, aren’t you? What is your name?”

“Santee Timitz,” she said in a low, quavering voice. “I work in the general agronomy section in Settlertown.”

“All right, fine,” Kresh said. He had to be careful how he played this one. She was in a cooperative mood, so terrified by whatever she had seen that she was willing to tell him anything. Such moods were remarkably fragile things. “What I want to know is what, exactly, happened. What were you doing in that warehouse?”

“Ro-ro-robot ba-ba—”

“Robot bashing,” Kresh finished for her. “That’s what we thought, but it’s good to know for certain. All right, then, that’s a serious crime, you know that. You’re in a lot of trouble right now, Timitz. But maybe it doesn’t have to be so bad for you if you’ll cooperate with—”

“I—I can’t inform on my friends,” she interrupted, looking up at him, her eyes swollen and full of tears.

Kresh reached out and took her by the hand. “No one’s asking you to,” he said. Not yet, anyway, he thought. Maybe there won’t even be any need to ask. Just having your name is a better lead than we’ve ever had. “But what I am going to ask you is what went wrong down there. Things got out of control, that’s obvious. How? Did your friends set fire to the building to hide the evidence?” Kresh no longer believed that idea, but it might be no bad thing to make her think otherwise.

“No!” Timitz cried out. “We would never—no, no, that’s not what happened.”

“Then how did the building burn down?”

“It was the robot,” Timitz blurted out. “Reybon was baiting the robot. He tried to trick it into killing itself, and then it turned away, and Reybon ordered it to stop but it didn’t and—”

“Wait a second. The robot refused a direct order?” Kresh asked. He was pleased to have Timitz blurt out the name “Reybon,” and would have been content to let her go on burbling out as much incriminating information as she wanted, but not when something that impossible was going past.

“Yes,” Timitz said. She looked Kresh in the eye, and he could see the light of caution suddenly appear in her face. “It’s hard to say exactly what happened—it all went by so fast. Rey—um, ah, the man who was baiting the robot. He said stop, and told the robot it was an order, and the robot kept going.”

“And then what happened?”

“He—the man who was there—pulled his blaster on the robot and ordered it to stop again.”

“And did the robot stop?”

“No, sir. He didn’t,” Timitz said, her voice getting excited again. “It grabbed the blaster and crushed it and threw it away. The blaster shorted out and sparks flew everywhere. That’s what started the fire. Then Reybon reached for the robot, and the robot shoved him away, really hard. Then the robot turned and left. The fire started to spread, and then everyone panicked and ran.”

“Wait a second,” Kresh said, unwilling to believe what he was hearing, even as he had been unwilling to believe the evidence in the warehouse, and the evidence back at the robot lab last night. “A robot set that fire, with people in the building? A robot refused an order, and attacked a human being, and left several human beings behind in a burning building?”

Santee Timitz looked up into Kresh’s face, her eyes full of tears, her face a transparent mask of fear. “Yes,