Caliban

“High risk is better than certain doom,” Caliban said, a strange tone in his voice. He sounded almost tired. But robots never got tired until they were out of power, and here Caliban was charging up.

Unless it was his spirit that was tired. That, too, would be a remarkable thing in a robot.

Abell Harcourt stood up, his fear forgotten, his mind made up. If this was a mad robot, then the world was in need of more madness. Fredda Leving. Call her, ask her help.

There was no other way.

THEY were airborne three minutes after Abell Harcourt’s call came through. Fredda’s first instinct was to charge at top speed straight for the coordinates Abell had given her. But Kresh was no fool, and that meant that he was having Fredda watched. Fredda had no intention of leading Kresh straight to Caliban. She swung her aircar to the west, flying at a sedate pace in the local traffic pattern. She glanced behind herself and saw Gubber and Jomaine in the rear passenger seats, their faces grim and set…

Was one of them the guilty one? Was one of the two men behind her the one who had tried to kill her and botched the job?

Try not to think about it. Westward. Fly west to the outskirts of the city, north at low altitude until she crossed the mountains—and then barrel in straight for Harcourt’s place at maximum speed. Get there before Kresh.

And then pray that he would at least look at her waiver before burning a hole in Caliban.

CRASH sites never looked the way Kresh expected them to, and he had seen enough of them to know better. He always imagined finding a neat little impact inside a tidy little crater, the aircar perhaps crumpled a bit. He imagined the pilot—usually a drunk stupid enough to fly himself home but smart enough to elude any and all robotic protection—as being slumped over the control, dead but neatly dead, no wounds, readily identifiable.

Of course the reality was always horribly different. Today, for example. He knew it the moment Donald spotted the crash site and they did a flyover pass. It had looked bad even from the air. Here on the ground, reality was harsher still. There were bits and pieces of aircar allover the hillside, strewn in all directions, shattered into a thousand burned, bent pieces. If a human had been flying the aircar, there wouldn’t even be anything recognizably human left, let alone any part intact and unburned enough to ID an individual.

But a robot had been flying this one, and robots didn’t burn. There had to be something of him left. Tonya, Donald, and Ariel were fanned out across the hillside, doing a second search, having found no trace of him on the first. Kresh was starting to wonder if Caliban had survived this by some miracle.

“Sheriff Kresh!” Tonya was calling, from the east side of the crash. “Footprints! I found footprints!”

Kresh hurried toward her, eager to see what she had found.

He was almost to her when he stopped dead in his tracks, cursing in disappointment. “Yes, footprints,” he said. “But not Caliban.” From where he was standing, he could see what Tonya could not. The line of prints led in a neat line straight toward their source—Ariel, busily searching another patch of ground. Ariel looked up, took in the situation, and called to them. “Forgive me, Lady Welton. I did not mean to cause any confusion.”

“Damnation!” Kresh growled. “Nothing in this case leads in the right direction! Nothing.”

And then it clicked. Wait a minute. Just half a damned minute!

But there never was half a minute. “Sheriff!” Another call, from Donald this time. Good. He would trust Donald’s search skills far above Tonya’s. He trotted back up the hill to the north of the crash, Tonya and Ariel right behind him.

And this time there was no mistake. An area of sandy dirt overlay the bare rock for a long stretch of the ground. And on it was a whole line of prints, leading up the grade in a direction none of them had gone yet. Kresh could see broken twigs and bits of rock that had been kicked aside, leading clear up the slope.

No question at all.

And then came a sound overhead. They all looked up and saw it. An aircar flying low and fast from the west, arcing down to come in for a landing in the valley below.

“That’s it,” Kresh said. “I’ll bet whatever you want that is Fredda Leving, trying to get to him first. Come on. We’ve got to get there fast before she can get him out of there.”

The four of them turned and hurried back to the aircar.

And halfway to the car, Alvar Kresh stopped dead and stood there for that half a minute he had wished for.

And that was all it took.

He had figured it out.

ABELL Harcourt heard the sound of aircraft coming in and went to the door of the shed. He looked into the sky. Two of them. A civilian job, and one of those sky-blue Sheriff’s Department aircars.

He turned back to Caliban. “Better unplug yourself from that charger,” he said. “Company’s coming. A little too much of it.”

Caliban pulled the charger plug from the socket in his side and stood up. He went to the door and looked skyward with his one good eye. Was it imagination, or did the robot’s shoulders slump with disappointment just a touch when he spotted the Sheriff’s car and realized what it meant?

“Either she squealed to Kresh, or Kresh managed to follow her in. Shall we go receive them all in the parlor, like civilized folks?” Harcourt asked, his voice full of bitterness. “Or should we make a run for it in my aircar? Maybe we could get away.”

“No, friend Abell. There is no place left to run,” Caliban said. “Outside. We shall meet them outside, well away from your house. If they mean to kill me, I see no reason for your home to be shot up as well. Let us go meet them.”

SHERIFF Kresh worked the aircar control without knowing he did. He was aware of nothing else but what he could see, down on the ground. There he was.

Caliban.

For the first time, Alvar Kresh set eyes upon the robot he had been tracking. Standing on the ground next to an odd-looking man, both of them calmly watching the arrival of their visitors.

He had him. He had him. And in a moment, he would win it all, win against an opponent he had not even been aware of until a few minutes before. It was so obvious, once he shook off all his assumptions and looked, really looked, at the evidence.

He watched as Fredda Leving’s aircar swung around, set down first, but Kresh’s aircar landed within seconds of hers. That suited Kresh fine. Let them all get ahead. He would catch up soon enough. He knew. Now nothing remained—except to prove it. But it would be wise to be careful. This was not a moment to get too eager.

He set the aircar gently down on the valley floor, undid his seat restraints, and turned to regard Tonya and Ariel in the backseat. Ariel betrayed no emotion, of course, but Tonya Welton, Queen of the Settlers, was obviously on the edge of hysteria. “All right,” Kresh said. “Ariel, Donald, Madame Welton—I’m going to need all of you to be careful here. The situation is still dangerous. If someone makes a mistake, and someone gets hurt—well, that would not be good. I want everyone alive at the end of this, if for no other reason than so we’ll be able to get the whole story. I don’t want any loose ends. All right?”

“Yes,” Tonya Welton said, her face pale, her expression stem and unreadable. Kresh knew she could crack at any moment.

“Good,” Kresh said. “Then let’s go.”

Tonya nodded rather jerkily and opened the hatch. She stepped out the door, Ariel following.

But neither Kresh nor Donald made any effort to follow the other two out. Interesting that Donald knew Kresh wanted him to stay put. But then, Donald had been a little bit ahead every step of the way, ever since he had gotten to the crime scene before everyone else.