Isaac Asimov - Caliban

“Hah!” Jomaine replied faintly, a tired, resigned little exclamation. He leaned the back of his head against the wall again. “Gubber, you amaze me. Our lab is a hotbed of politics and bickering. Who there hasn’t battled against someone else at one time or another? You, Fredda, and I have all been at cross-purposes many times over the years.”

“But those have all been legitimate professional disagreements,” Gubber said, a bit primly. “Well, some office politics, yes, but certainly not grounds for attempted murder.”

“Perhaps not—but clearly someone had a motive for murder, and the police will look wherever they can for a reason. And I would offer the thought that few people have good reason for committing murder. I assure you, people have been tried and convicted on thinner evidence than office politics.”

Gubber Anshaw turned toward his colleague, gestured toward the door to Fredda’s room. “Well, here we are, waiting to see her. Shouldn’t that count in our favor? Show that we are all friends?”

Jomaine turned his head to look at Gubber in something approaching astonishment. How could anyone be so naive? On the face of it, there was more than friendship drawing them both to this place. What the devil went on in Gubber’s mind? He was a deceptively unprepossessing individual, Jomaine decided, given his accomplishments. Still, no one ever said scientific genius went hand in hand with worldly sophistication. Jomaine smiled sadly and patted his friend on the shoulder. “Gubber, old fellow, you and I should face the facts, at least between ourselves. After all, we are here to see Fredda for the express purpose of making sure we have our stories straight. Try to bear that in mind. Obviously that’s not what we tell Sheriff Kresh, but it is what he will assume, and it does happen to be the truth.”

Gubber seemed about to reply, until he saw something over Jomaine’s shoulder and his mouth snapped shut. Jomaine was about to turn and see what it was, but then he was spared the need.

Sheriff Alvar Kresh, looking haggard, sleep-starved, but well groomed and alert, rushed past them, eyes straight ahead, completely unaware of their presence. But Kresh’s robot was right behind Kresh. And robots, Jomaine knew, never missed anything. And robots never forgot anything.

He had reason to have that fact very much in mind, these days.

FREDDA Leving sat up in bed and waved the metallic white nurse-robots away with an impatient wave of her hand. Perhaps she had only been conscious for a brief time, an hour or two, but that was quite time enough to be tired of having one’s pillows fluffed and covers straightened. “Leave me alone,” she snapped. “I’m perfectly comfortable as I am.” Well, that was far from the truth, but she could not abide being fussed over. The nurse-robots retired to their wall niches and stood in them, staring out, immobile, a pair of white marble statues raised to commemorate persons and events long forgotten.

But Fredda Leving had other things on her mind beside overly solicitous robots.

They hadn’t told her anything yet. Anything. She could understand that the police did not want any preconceptions to warp her recollections, but still it was damnably galling. One minute she was working in Gubber’s lab, and the next minute she was here in a hospital bed under police guard. All else was a blur, a blank.

Except for the sight of those two red-colored robot feet, standing over her. She shivered at the memory. Why did that image frighten her so? Was it even real? Or the result of some trauma associated with the incident?

Damn it, what sort of incident was she talking about? She knew nothing. And that could be dangerous.

When was Kresh going to get here? She turned her head toward the door and felt the spasm of pain like a fresh blow to her skull. She knew, intellectually, that Spacers, shielded from virtually all harm by their robots, had a spectacularly low threshold of pain. Maybe what she was experiencing now would seem like nothing but a mild headache to a Settler—but damnation, she was no Settler, and it hurt ! Why couldn’t the damned Sheriff get here and get it over with, so she could take something strong enough to deal with the pain in her head?

The head was the worst, though she knew there were injuries to her face and shoulders as well. She could reach up and touch the healer packs attached to them and feel the numb stiffness in those places. No doubt the packs would be done with their work in another few hours, and would come off, leaving the skin below perfectly healed.

But her skull. Healer packs worked by deadening the nerve endings and then manipulating cell behavior. Unless you wanted the patient to hallucinate or go insane, such techniques were inadvisable for a cranial injury, especially after emergency surgery.

She reached up gingerly and felt a close-fitting padded cap—no, it was more the shape of a turban, as best she could tell. No doubt the turban had some sort of gadgetry that was dispensing speed-healing drugs. She found herself wondering, purposelessly enough, what color the turban was and how much of her hair had been shaved off in the course of surgery. She shook her head. This was no time to clutter her mind with such nonsense. Presumably she looked like hell, but she couldn’t know for sure. Perhaps to avoid upsetting her over that very fact, the room had no mirror.

Fredda Leving was young and looked younger, neither of which facts made life easier in the long-lived society of Spacers. She was thirty-five standard years old and looked perhaps twenty-five. That was in part because she had a naturally youthful appearance, in part because she did whatever she could to preserve the appearance of youth, though that was itself something of an eccentricity. Youthfulness—worse, willful youthfulness—was no slight social disability in a society where the average life span was measured in centuries and anyone much under fifty was regarded as a youngster. In forty or fifty years, Fredda would have physically aged enough that she could afford to look twenty-five and still be taken seriously. Until then, it would be a social drawback. But the hell with them all. She liked the way she looked.

Fredda was on the petite side, with curly black hair she normally wore short—though, she thought wryly, not as short as it no doubt was now, after shaving for the operation. She was round-faced, snub-nosed, blue-eyed, with a personality that veered toward the pugnacious at times. She was given to sudden enthusiasm and cursed with a sometimes mercurial temper.

And, if she was not careful, this was threatening to be one of the times that temper would come to the fore. But she could not give way, no matter how bad the throbbing in her head became. She wished devoutly that she could order the robots to administer painkillers; but anything strong enough to kill this pain would leave her slaphappy—and she dared not be anything but sharp and alert for the police.

For there was so much to protect—including herself.

After all, at least by their lights, she had committed a terrible crime.

And, perhaps, by her own lights as well. It was so hard to know.

Fredda bit her lip and tried to clear her head, ignore the pain. She would have to be careful, very careful, with the Sheriff. And yet there was so much she did not know! Something had gone wrong, terribly, terribly wrong—but what? How much did Kresh know? What had happened?

But then, in the midst of her fretful worrying, it dawned on her. She could tell Kresh that she knew nothing. That was true, after all. Guesses and fears—she had plenty of those. But facts ? About the case in point, whatever it was, she knew nothing. She had no facts at all. That was a strange thing to find comforting, but still, she felt better. She smiled to herself. Now that she knew she was ignorant, she could face the police.