Isaac Asimov: Caliban

Alvar Kresh watched as the city swept by below him, and began to slow the aircar. There. The aircar’s navigation system reported that they were directly over the Leving Robotics Labs. Alvar peered over the edge of the car, but it was difficult to get a fix on the precise building at night. He eased the car to a halt, adjusted its position over the landscape slightly, and brought it down to the ground.

A robot ground attendant hurried over to the car and opened the door for him. Alvar Kresh stood up and stepped out of the car, into the night.

There was a busy rummaging-about going on. A red and white ambulance aircar squatted on the ground near Kresh’s car, its lift motors idling, its running lights on, obviously ready to lift off the moment its patient was aboard. A squad of med-robots bustled through the main door of the lab, two of them carrying a stretcher, the others holding feed lines and monitoring equipment hooked up to the patient. Leving herself was not quite visible under the tangle of life-support gear. A human doctor lounged by the hatch of the ambulance, watching the robots do the work. Alvar stood still and let the robots pass as they carried the victim from the scene of the crime.

He watched, his anger rising inside him, as the meds carried her into their van, and watched as the indolent human doctor eased his way into the ambulance behind his busy charges. How could anyone commit such violence against another human being? he asked himself.

But raw, unchanneled anger would not help catch Fredda Leving’s assailant. Remain calm, he thought. Keep your anger controlled, focused. Alvar Kresh lifted his hand to a med-robot that was carrying a first-aid kit back to the ambulance. “What is the condition of your patient?” he asked.

The gleaming red and white med-robot regarded Kresh through glowing orange eyes. “She received a severe head injury, but no irreparable trauma,” it said.

“Were her injuries life-threatening?” Kresh asked.

“Had we been delayed in reaching Madame Leving, her injuries could easily have been fatal,” the robot said, a bit primly.

“However, she should recover completely, though there is the distinct possibility that she will suffer traumatic amnesia. We shall place her in a regeneration unit as soon as we reach the hospital.”

“Very good,” Kresh said. “You may go.” He turned and watched the last of the med team climb into the ambulance and take off into the night. Good that she would recover, but it could be very bad indeed if she did suffer amnesia. People with holes in their memories made for bad witnesses. But the words of the med-robots changed the nature of the case. Her injuries could easily have been fatal. That changed a simple assault with a deadly weapon case into one of attempted murder. At last he turned to go inside the building, to see what Donald and his forensic team had come up with.

“ALL right, Donald,” Kresh said as he came in, “what have you got?”

“Good evening, Sheriff Kresh,” Donald replied, speaking with a smooth and urbane courtesy. “I am afraid we do not have a great deal. The crime scene does not tell us much that we can use, though of course you may well note something we have missed. I have not been able to form a satisfactory interpretation of the evidence. Did you have the opportunity to examine my update regarding the maintenance robot’s statements?”

“Yes, I did. Damn strange. You did right to get the data out of him, but I don’t want to take any chances on the rest of the staff robots. I don’t even want to get near them myself. I want the department’s staff roboticists to interview them all—carefully.” Normally the police roboticists dealt with robots who had been tricked into this or that by con artists skilled in lying to robots and convincing them to obey illegal orders under some carefully designed misapprehension. A man could make a pretty fair living convincing household robots to reveal their masters’ financial account codes. It would do the roboticists good to deal with something a little out of the ordinary. “But we can worry about that tomorrow. Is the scene clear?”

“Yes, sir. The observer robots have completed their basic scan of the area. I believe you can examine the room without danger of destroying clues, so long as you practice some care.”

Alvar looked closely at Donald. After a lifetime of dealing with robots, he still did that, still looked toward the machines as if he could read an emotion or a thought in their expressions or postures. On some robots, on the very rare ones that mimicked human appearance perfectly, that was at least possible. But there were precious few of those on Inferno, and with any other robot type the effort was pointless.

Even so, the habit gave him a moment of time to consider the indirect meaning of the robot’s words. No “satisfactory interpretation of the evidence.” What the hell did that mean? Donald was trying to tell him something, something the robot did not choose to say directly, for fear of presuming too far. But Donald was never cryptic without a purpose. When Donald got that way, it was for a reason. Alvar Kresh was tempted to order Donald to explain precisely what he was suggesting, but he restrained his impatience.

It might be better to see if he could spot the point that was bothering Donald himself, evaluate it independently without prejudgment. There was, of course, precious little a robot would miss that a human could notice. Much of what Donald had said was so much deferential nonsense, salve for the ego. But the words Donald had used were interesting: “The crime scene does not tell us much that we can use.” As if there were something there, but something distracting, meaningless, deceptive. So much for avoiding prejudgment, Alvar thought sardonically. That was the trouble with robot assistants as good as Donald—you tended to lean on them to much, let them influence your thinking, trust them to do too much of the background work. Hell, Donald could probably do this job better than me, Alvar thought.

He shook his head angrily. No. Robots are the servants of humans, incapable of independent action. Alvar stepped through the doorway, fully into the room, and began to look around.

Alvar Kresh felt a strange and familiar tingle course through him as he set to work. There was always something oddly thrilling about this moment, where the case was opened and the chase was on. A strange chase it was, one that started with Alvar not so much as knowing who it was that he pursued.

And there was something stranger still, always, about standing in the middle of someone’s very private space with that person absent. He had stood in the bedrooms and salons and spacecraft of the dead and the missing, read their diaries, traced their financial dealings, stumbled across the evidence of their secret vices and private pleasures, their grand crimes and tiny, pathetic secrets. He had come to know their lives and deaths from the clues they left behind, been made privy by the power of his office to the most intimate parts of their lives. Here and now, that began as well.

Some work places were sterile, revealing nothing about their inhabitants. But this was not such a place. This room was a portrait of the person who worked here, if only Alvar could learn to read it.

He began his examination of the laboratory. Superficially, at least, it was a standard enough setup. A room maybe twenty meters by ten. Inferno was not a crowded world by any means. People tended to spread out. By Inferno standards it was an average-sized space for one person.

There were four doors in all, in the corners of the room, set into the long sides of the room: two on the exterior wall, leading directly to the outside, and two on the opposite, interior wall, leading into the building’s hallway. Alvar noted that the room was windowless, and the doors were heavy; they appeared to be light-tight. Close them, cut the overhead lights, and the room would be pitch-black. Presumably they did some work with light-sensitive materials in here. Or perhaps they tested robot eyes. Would the reason for, or the fact of, a light-tight room be important or meaningless? No way to know.