Isaac Asimov - Caliban

“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, yes, that’s what happened,” she said. “I know all about the rules and how robots aren’t supposed to be able to do that, but it happened,” she said, her voice teetering back on the edge of full hysteria. “It happened! It happened! It’s all true! That robot went crazy in there!”

Kresh stood up, paced up and down the length of the aircar’s main cabin. At last he stopped, standing over Timitz. “I want to make sure I have this straight. You’re saying that a robot deliberately refused an order, then took a weapon from a man, started a fire, threw a man down, and left a warehouse full of people in imminent danger of being burned alive? That he didn’t turn back, or try and help, or attempt to rescue anyone?”

“Yes, I was there! I saw it!” Timitz said, her voice half-panicked. “Reybon got out, we all got out, no one was killed—but the robot didn’t try to help us. It just walked away, calm as could be.”

Kresh stared down at her. He desperately wanted to press on, but he was skilled enough to know when to back off. If he pushed her now on this line of questioning, she would think he doubted her—as indeed he did. But then she would get defensive, belligerent. Right at the moment she was too far gone to be telling him anything but the truth. Anger would focus her. Better to keep her off balance, before she started to collect herself and started to shade her story. Time to shift gears, gather information on some other point while her feat made her easy to bully.

“And so your friends all piled into their aircar, including the one the robot had attacked, and you got left behind,” Alvar said. “Was that by accident?” He was careful to put just the right amount of doubt in his voice, to hint just slightly that he had some reason to think it might have been deliberate. Perhaps the tactic would not bear fruit now, but later, brooding in her cell, the fear of immediate danger replaced by the knowledge of certain trouble to come—oh, that tiny suggestion might well gnaw at her heart, make her that much more ready to betray the ones who had, deliberately or not, left her to the wolves. Kresh was a patient man when it came to his suspects. He planned ahead when he played with their minds. “Maybe they were mad at you for some reason.”

“No, no, they would never do that,” Timitz said, a bit too forcibly for the statement to be altogether convincing. “It was an accident, I’m sure of it.”

“All right, if you say so. And then what happened?”

“I ran until I couldn’t anymore. I was so scared I couldn’t think straight. I found a doorway to hide in and catch my breath. Then the fire brigade came, and there were lights and robots and people everywhere. I didn’t dare move. And then your robots caught me.” Timitz, drained of all emotion, looked up at the Sheriff. Kresh stared into that wan little face. Robot basher, vandal, criminal, drunk, Settler. She was all those things, and those were all things he hated. But this woman had been through the terrors of hell tonight. All the nightmare robots of the imagination that the Settlers used to frighten naughty children must have come to life for this poor little fool. Almost reluctantly he found pity in his heart for the woman. At last he sighed and turned away, looked toward the wall and not toward her. He could bully her all night and not get any more than he had. Time to let it go.

“One last question,” he said in a gentle voice, still carefully considering the featureless wall. “The robot. What did it look like?”

“Tall,” she said in a voice still edged with fear. “It was red, with blue eyes. About two meters tall, very powerfully built. It said its name was Caliban.”

“He told you his name?” Kresh said, startled. Why in the name of all devils would a robot keen on attack tell anyone its name?

No, wait, the robot could have given a false name. Yes, the robot could have lied. Alvar realized that he had been assuming a robot would always tell the truth—but why assume that about a robot who left human beings to die?

But that name, Caliban. There was something about that name.

Never mind. Worry about it later. “You people talked to him?” he asked, looking back at her, wanting to be sure he had it straight.

“Yes,” Timitz said with. a look of renewed alarm. “Didn’t I say so? I thought I did.”

Kresh shook his head in bewilderment, but then he let it go. Nothing about this made sense. “We’re going to move you to another car. It’s going take you someplace you can rest for a while. Later on, you and I are going to have a lot to talk about,” he said.

“YOU got all that, I assume,” Kresh said, sitting in the copilot’s seat of the aircar, staring off at the distant skyline, the proud but weary towers of Hades glittering in the darkness. He was damned tired, and perfectly content to let Donald do the flying.

“Yes, sir, I did,” Donald said. “The intercom sight and sound relay from the aircar was quite clear, though the camera angle was a bit awkward.”

“I was afraid of that,” Kresh said. “But were you able to get enough to judge if she was telling the truth?”

“From all that I could see and hear—yes. She believed what she said. Her manner was quite sincere. Her vocal patterns indicated stress consistent with a truthful report, and her pupil dilation and body language were likewise consistent. There are of course cases of persons who have been trained to lie with their entire body, as it were, especially under emotional stress. They can orchestrate all their normally autonomic responses to appear sincere, though in a normal person, those responses would betray an attempt to lie.”

“And if she were a Settler agent, part of a team sent in with the express purpose of destabilizing our society, she would certainly have been trained just that way. If I were the controller sending in a team to stage a robot attack, I might have set it up the way this one seemed to happen. So things appeared just the way they do now.”