Isaac Asimov - Caliban

“Sir, if I might bring up a point—if events were as they seemed, then things would also appear as they did.”

“What are you talking about?”

“With all respect, you are still working on the flat assumption that no true robot could have done this, that the Settlers are staging these attacks to alarm us. This is a most difficult concept to confront, and I do so most reluctantly, but I believe that we have no choice. But Madame Welton was right: We are obliged to at least consider the simplest explanation, which is that a robot appears to be attacking humans— because that is precisely what is happening .”

The aircar flew on in silence for a moment.

At last Kresh spoke. “One of the things I have always admired about you, Donald, is your ability to snap my head clean off without my so much as feeling it. You are right, of course. I must accept the fact that the events could be real. I will have to think on all this tonight.”

“Sir, one other thing. The name ‘Caliban.’ ”

“Yes, it struck me as familiar somehow. What of it?”

“You no doubt recall it from the time you first ordered Fredda Leving to build me. She keeps a list of names of characters from an ancient storyteller named Shakespeare. She has always named robots built under her personal direction after those characters.”

“Yes, that’s right. I picked your name off that list.”

“Precisely, sir. The name ‘Caliban’ is from the same source.”

“Which makes it all but certain that Caliban, the robot tonight, has to be the robot who left those footprints at Leving Labs.”

“All but certain, sir? I would think there could be no question.”

“A lot of people would have to know where Leving gets her robot names. A group that wanted to discredit her would name robots from the same list. That sounds unlikely, I agree, but this whole case seems unlikely. I think it would be wise if we try not to make unwarranted assumptions.”

“Yes, sir. In any event, we are nearly home.”

The aircar settled in for a landing on the roof of Kresh’s home, and he breathed a sigh of relief. It had been a devil of a long day. A long two days rolled into one. Praise be that it was finally time to rest. He climbed out of his aircar, out onto the rooftop landing pad. He paused at the bottom of the aircar’s ramp to breathe in the cool desert air, and then headed into his house, taking the powerlift down instead of the stairs, and that was a measure of his exhaustion. Lifts were for old men.

But old was just what he felt himself to be tonight.

He was too tired to fight when Donald urged him to take a long hot shower before collapsing into bed, and as 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.”

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.