Isaac Asimov - Caliban

All right, then, Kresh decided. Think the way these criminals were thinking. Part of the story was obvious. A bunch of drunken Settler laborers head out for a good time and, say, a chance to pay back the Ironhead goons. But maybe they didn’t even need that excuse. They meet here, or come here together. How? Aircar, presumably. They have to get into this part of town unnoticed and be ready to get out fast if the cops show up.

In and out, in and out. Then something goes wrong. Arson, arson, Alvar thought. Something didn’t fit about it. And then he had it. The motive was defective. There was no logical reason to set a fire. It had not hidden the evidence—too many robot parts had survived. Indeed, the fire had signaled the authorities to respond. If the bashers had simply walked away from this abandoned warehouse, it might easily have been days, or weeks, before anyone looked in here.

So, an accident, then? Drunken Settlers, a random shot with a blaster into this firetrap of a building—had it happened that way?

And then what? Panic, Kresh decided. A rush for the exit, and the waiting aircar outside. Drunks. They were drunk, running to get out, maybe one or two of them in worse shape than the others. Maybe one or two who didn’t make it all the way to the car before the terrified driver took off.

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.

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.