Isaac Asimov: Caliban

Alvar and Donald stood by one of the interior doors, toward what Alvar found himself thinking of as the rear of the room. But why is this end the rear? he wondered. No one specific thing, he decided. It was just that this end of the room seemed more disused. Everything was boxed up, in storage. The other end clearly was put to more active use.

Work counters ran most of the length of the room, between the pairs of doors. There were computer terminals on the counters. The walls held outlets for various types of power supplies, and two or three hookups Kresh could not identify. Special-purpose datataps, perhaps.

Every square centimeter of the countertops seemed to have something on it. A robot torso, a disembodied robot head, a stack of carefully sealed boxes, each neatly labeled Handle with Care. Gravitonic Brain. Alvar frowned and looked at the labels again. What the devil were gravitonic brains? For thousands of years, all robots had been built with positronic brains. It was the positronic brain that made robots possible. Gravitonic brains? Alvar knew nothing at all about them, but the name itself was unsettling. He did not approve of needless change.

He filed away the puzzle for future reference and continued his survey of the room. All of the room’s side counters were full of all sorts of mysterious-looking tools and machines and robot parts. Yet there was no feel of chaos or mess about the room; all was neat and orderly. There was not even so much as an air of clutter. It was merely that this entire room was in active use by someone who seemed to have several projects going at once.

Two large worktables sat in the center of the room. A half-built robot and a bewildering collection of parts and tools were spread out on one table, while the other was largely empty, with just a few odds and ends here and there around the edges.

Wheeled racks of test equipment stood here and there about the room. A huge contraption of tubing and swivels stood between the two tables. It was easily three meters tall, and took up maybe four meters by five in floor space. It was on power rollers, so it could be pushed out of the way when not in use.

“What the devil is that thing?” Alvar asked, stepping toward the center of the room.

“A robot service rack,” Donald replied, following behind. “It is designed to clamp onto a robot’s hard-attachment points and suspend the robot at any height and in any attitude, so as to position the needed part of the robot for convenient access. It is used for repairs or tests. I thought it a large and awkward thing to keep in the middle of the room. It would certainly interfere with easy movement between the two worktables, for example.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Look, you can see the empty space along the wall on the rear end of the room. They rolled it over there when they weren’t using it. So why is it out in the middle of the room? What good is an empty robot rack?”

“The clear implication is that there was a robot in it recently,” Donald said.

“Yes, I agree. And notice the empty space on the center of the empty worktable. About the right size for another robot there, too. Unless they moved the same robot from the table to the rack, or vice versa. Maybe that was the motive for the attack? The theft of one or two experimental robots? We’ll have to check on all that.”

“Sir, if I could direct your attention to the floor in front of the service rack, Fredda Leving’s position on it has been marked out—”

“Not yet, Donald. I’ll get there. I’ll get there.” Alvar was quite purposefully ignoring the pooled blood and the body outline in the center of the room. It was too easy to be distracted by the big, obvious clues at a crime scene. What could the body outline tell him? That a woman had been attacked here, bled here? He knew all that already. Better to work the rest of the room first.

But one thing was bothering him. This room did not match Fredda Leving’s character. He knew her slightly, from the process of ordering Donald, and this place did not fit her. It had the feel of a male domain, somehow. Tiny details he had seen but not noted suddenly registered in Alvar’s consciousness. The size and cut of a lab coat hanging by the door, the size of the dust-sealed lab shoes sitting on the floor beneath the lab coat, certain tools stored on wall hooks that would be well out of reach for the average-sized woman.

And there was, indefinably, something about the neatness of this room that spoke of a shy, compulsive, tidy man, something that did not match an assertive woman like Fredda Leving. If she lived up to her very public image, her lab would be a mess, even after the robots got through cleaning, for she would flatly refuse to let them near most of it. The great and famous Fredda Leving, hero of robotics research, the crown jewel of science in Inferno, was not a compulsive fussbudget—but the occupant of this room clearly was.

Alvar Kresh stepped back into the hallway and checked the nameplate next to the door. Gubber Anshaw, Design and Testing Chief; it read. Well, that solved one minor mystery and replaced it with another. It wasn’t Leving’s lab, but Anshaw’s, whoever he was.

But what was Fredda Leving doing in Anshaw‘s lab, presumably alone with her assailant, in the middle of the night?

Kresh went back into the lab and walked around the rest of the room, careful not to touch anything, determined to resist the urge to go and look at the spot where the body fell. The room was a perfect forest of potential clues, jam-packed with gadgets and hardware that might have some bearing on the case, if only Alvar knew enough about experimental robotics. Was there indeed something missing, some object as big as an experimental robot, or as tiny as an advanced microcircuit, whose theft might provide a motive for this attack?

But what was the nature of the attack? He knew nothing so far.

At last, quite reluctantly, after working the rest of the crime scene and coming up with very little for his efforts, Alvar moved toward the center of the room, the center of the case, the scene of the attack.

There it was, on the floor, between the two worktables, a meter or so in front of the large robot service rack. A pool of blood, a blotchy, irregular shape about a meter across. The body as found was indicated in a glowing yellow outline that followed the contours of the body perfectly, down to the sprawled-out fingers of the left hand. The fingers seemed to be reaching toward the door, reaching for help that did not come.

Some errant part of Kresh’s mind found itself wondering how they did that, how they put down that perfect outline. Robots in the Sheriff’s office knew how, but he did not.

But no. It was tempting to distract himself with side issues, but he could not permit himself the luxury. He knelt down and looked at what he had come to see. He had forced himself not to notice the smell of drying blood until this moment, but now he had to pay attention, and the heavy, acrid, rotting odor seemed to surge into his lungs. A wave of nausea swept over him. He ignored the stench and went on with his grim task.

The pool of blood was much smeared and splashed about by the med-robots, their footprints and other marks badly obscuring the story the floor had to tell. But that was all right. Donald would have images of the floor recorded straight off the med-robots’ eyes, what they saw the moment they came in. Computer tricks could erase all traces of the med-robots from whatever images the police observer/forensic robots had made, reconstruct the scene exactly as it was before. Some of his deputies only worked off such reconstructions, but Kresh preferred to work in the muddled-up, dirtied-up confused mess of the real-world crime scene.