Caliban

thought. “All right, then,” he said. “You are free to go, at least for the moment.”

Gubber Anshaw looked surprised. “You mean, that’s it?”

“That’s it for now,” Kresh growled. “Go. Now. Before I change my mind.”

Gubber swallowed hard, stood up, and went.

ALVAR Kresh watched Anshaw go and then turned toward Donald. “All right, what have you got? Were they telling the truth?”

“Before I answer that, I must note that the situation is of course complicated by the fact that both Anshaw and Terach had a hand in my design and construction. They are therefore riot only more aware than the average citizen that I have sensors designed to serve to assist in detecting falsehoods by witnesses, they have detailed knowledge of how those sensors operate. It is possible they could be able to use that knowledge and feign the sort of responses that tend to indicate veracity.”

“Do you judge that to be likely?”

“No, sir. It seems quite unlikely that either of them is capable of the sort of fine control of their involuntary reactions required for such a gambit to succeed. Indeed, they both seemed so nervous that I would not be surprised if they both had forgotten about my capabilities in that area. On the other hand, if one or both were skillful enough to feign the biomarkers of veracity while lying, that is exactly what I would expect to detect.”

“Very well, then. I will keep in mind that your answer will be more of a balance of probabilities than a hard- and-fast answer. What is your judgment of their veracity?”

“Both men exhibited the classic suite of biophysical reactions for truthful male adults in stressful situations. They were agitated, worried, upset, but all that is to be expected. I believe that both were telling the truth—and indeed, at some pains to conceal nothing.”

Alvar nodded and sighed. “I am forced to agree. If I’m any judge at all, the two of them were both telling the truth. But if they were telling the truth, then we are further from a solution than ever before. All they managed to do was muddy the waters. Did you notice any sort of unusual emotional reaction that might possibly tell us something?”

“I did note several strong emotional reactions, but I doubt they will be of much use. Gubber Anshaw’s exhibited evidence of strong feeling for Tonya Welton. I will freely confess, sir, that I am no expert in the arena of human emotions, but there is much there that baffles me. I do not quite understand what there is in Gubber Anshaw that Tonya Welton finds attractive. Judging against the romantic couples I have had occasion to observe, the two of them do not strike me as, well, compatible.”

Alvar Kresh laughed, and it felt good to do so. There had not been a lot to laugh about in the past few days. “Donald, you are far more expert than you think. I would expect that every single person who knows about this affair has wondered the same thing. And wondered why Anshaw worships her, instead of being terrified by her.”

“That question also crossed my mind. She is a rather intimidating person. But what is the answer, then? How can this sort of unlikely alliance be explained?”

Kresh shook his head. “No one has ever figured that out, and no one ever will, I expect. Perhaps Tonya Welton does not care a bit about Anshaw, and is merely using him for some end of her own. She’s the sort of woman who could turn a Gubber Anshaw into a willing slave without a great deal of trouble, if she set her mind to it.”

“Do you think that is the explanation?”

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’t any 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 the motives are plausible.

“It’s the way the crime was done 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 to him 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 who could kill and wanted 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.”

“But we have to catch him first, sir. He could hide in the city tunnels for years without our finding him.”

“Yes, I know. But somehow I don’t think that is what he will do. He does not strike me as the sort who would be willing to molder underground. No. He wouldn’t settle for that. He had the chance to do that when he first entered the tunnels and he didn’t take it. He’ll want out. Out of the city, maybe, away from all the people trying to hunt him down.

“Caliban is out there,” Kresh said again. “He’s out there and he wants to get away.