Caliban

usual Donald was right. The needle jets of steaming hot water melted the tension out of his body, cooked the knots out of his muscles. Kresh let the hot-air jets dry him and let Donald put a nightshirt over his head. At last Kresh collapsed into bed. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

And awake again before he was even sure that he had been asleep.

Donald was leaning over him, giving him a gentle, tentative nudge on the shoulder. “Sir, sir,” he was saying.

Alvar wanted to protest, to argue, the way he would if a human had awakened him, but then his mind went through the sort of mental calculation that became second nature after one lived around robots long enough. Donald knew how much Alvar needed sleep, and would not awaken him unless something urgent came up—or something that Donald knew Alvar Kresh would regard as important enough to wake up for. Therefore, the fact that he was awake meant that something big had broken.

He sat up in bed, swung his legs around to the floor, and stood up. Donald backed off to give him room. “What is it, Donald?” Alvar asked.

“It’s Fredda Leving, sir.”

Alvar looked at Donald sharply and felt his heart suddenly thundering against his rib cage. “Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “What about her?” It could only be one of two things, he told himself. Either she had died unexpectedly, or else—

“Word has just come from the hospital, sir. She’s regained consciousness.”

8

JOMAINE Terach sat and waited in the hospital corridor, trying to practice patience—a difficult task under the circumstances. He watched Gubber Anshaw pace the hallway outside Fredda Leving’s hospital room, and felt his annoyance growing stronger. Why couldn’t the miserable little fool have stayed holed up in his house a while longer? But no, he had to choose tonight to come out and latch onto good old Jomaine Terach.

Jomaine did what he could to force all thoughts of Gubber from his mind. He watched as the doctors and the med-robots bustled in and out of Fredda’s room in an almost constant flow, the rather stolid, oversized sky-blue sentry robots standing on either side of the door. The sentries flatly refused to let Anshaw or Terach in. No amount of arguing or reasoning or cajoling would shake them.

And yet, there was Gubber Anshaw, a professional roboticist who should have known better, going up to them again, demanding to be let in. Jomaine shook his head and swore under his breath. The last day or so had been nerve-racking enough without watching Gubber go to pieces on top of it.

“Will you settle down, for Galaxy’s sake!” Jomaine finally snapped. “Leave the damned robots alone. Come over here, sit down and try to be calm.”

“But she’s awake, and they won’t let us talk to her!” Gubber said, crossing back to Jomaine. He sat down on the couch next to his colleague, perching on the edge of his seat rather than leaning back into the cushion.

Jomaine rested his tired head against the wall behind the couch, and sighed. “And if I were the police, I wouldn’t let us talk to her either,” he said blandly. “It stands to reason we’re both suspects in the case.”

“Suspects!” Gubber blurted out, abruptly jumping up.

Jomaine snorted derisively. “Surely you’ve got that much of it worked out. I doubt Kresh has had the time to gather much in the way of useful information yet. He has nothing to go on. In the absence of anything to the contrary, who else but you and I should be suspects? Fredda was attacked in your lab, and I was at home. I doubt Kresh has missed the fact that my house is practically next door to the lab. There was no one else about the place. Who else would they suspect?” Jomaine looked over at his coworker and was startled to see the expression of shock on his face. Gubber seemed quite unaccountably taken aback. Why be so surprised by such an obvious line of reasoning?

Or was it surprise? Perhaps there was something else underlying his reaction. For the first time, Jomaine Terach found himself wondering precisely what role Gubber had played in the story. He seemed superbly unequipped to play any part in intrigue. Still, he seemed to be just as unlikely to be any good at romance—and yet it was an open secret, an astonishing, much-discussed open secret, that Gubber Anshaw, of all people, was carrying on a torrid affair with Tonya Welton, the leader of the Settler contingent on Inferno. It was one of those hilariously unsecret romances. No doubt the only person in the lab who did not know that everyone but the boss knew about it was Gubber himself. And if the man had enough hidden depth to carry on a love affair with that dragon lady, what else might he be capable of?

At the moment, though, the nervous, cowering Gubber Anshaw seemed something less than plausible in the role of would-be murderer. “You might as well get used to it, Gubber old boy,” Jomaine said. “The Sheriff is going to look long and hard at both of us.”

That statement seemed to shock Gubber allover again. “But—but we have no motives!” he protested.

“Hah!” Jomaine replied faintly, a tired, resigned little exclamation. He leaned the back of his head against the wall again. “Gubber, you amaze me. Our lab is a hotbed of politics and bickering. Who there hasn’t battled against someone else at one time or another? You, Fredda, and I have all been at cross- purposes many times over the years.”

“But those have all been legitimate professional disagreements,” Gubber said, a bit primly. “Well, some office politics, yes, but certainly not grounds for attempted murder.”

“Perhaps not—but clearly someone had a motive for murder, and the police will look wherever they can for a reason. And I would offer the thought that few people have good reason for committing murder. I assure you, people have been tried and convicted on thinner evidence than office politics.”

Gubber Anshaw turned toward his colleague, gestured toward the door to Fredda’s room. “Well, here we are, waiting to see her. Shouldn’t that count in our favor? Show that we are all friends?”

Jomaine turned his head to look at Gubber in something approaching astonishment. How could anyone be so naive? On the face of it, there was more than friendship drawing them both to this place. What the devil went on in Gubber’s mind? He was a deceptively unprepossessing individual, Jomaine decided, given his accomplishments. Still, no one ever said scientific genius went hand in hand with worldly sophistication. Jomaine smiled sadly and patted his friend on the shoulder. “Gubber, old fellow, you and I should face the facts, at least between ourselves. After all, we are here to see Fredda for the express purpose of making sure we have our stories straight. Try to bear that in mind. Obviously that’s not what we tell Sheriff Kresh, but it is what he will assume, and it does happen to be the truth.”

Gubber seemed about to reply, until he saw something over Jomaine’s shoulder and his mouth snapped shut. Jomaine was about to turn and see what it was, but then he was spared the need.

Sheriff Alvar Kresh, looking haggard, sleep-starved, but well groomed and alert, rushed past them, eyes straight ahead, completely unaware of their presence. But Kresh’s robot was right behind Kresh. And robots, Jomaine knew, never missed anything. And robots never forgot anything.

He had reason to have that fact very much in mind, these days.

FREDDA Leving sat up in bed and waved the metallic white nurse-robots away with an impatient wave of her hand. Perhaps she had only been conscious for a brief time, an hour or two, but that was quite time enough to be tired of having one’s pillows fluffed and covers straightened. “Leave me alone,” she snapped. “I’m perfectly comfortable as I am.” Well, that was far from the truth, but she could not abide being fussed over. The nurse-robots retired to their wall niches and stood in them, staring out, immobile, a pair of white marble statues raised to commemorate persons and events long forgotten.

But Fredda Leving had other things on her mind beside overly solicitous robots.

They hadn’t told her anything yet. Anything. She could understand that the police did not want any preconceptions to warp her recollections, but still it was damnably galling. One minute she was working in Gubber’s lab, and the next minute she was here in a hospital bed under police guard. All else was a blur,