Isaac Asimov - Caliban

Gubber Anshaw reddened violently, and clenched his knitted fingers together so tightly that the skin at the base of his fingers turned quite pale with the pressure. He cleared his throat awkwardly and went on. “Yes, well, there it is, you know,” he said, somewhat enigmatically. “In any event—we, ah, were, ah, there for at least two or three hours all told. Not that we, ah, well, you know, all that time. We talked and visited. We get so little time together.”

“I see,” Kresh said again, encouragingly.

“Well, I suppose it’s quite obvious that this wasn’t the first time we had been together at the lab. It might sound odd, but it was the safest place for us. I stick out like a sore thumb if I go to her at Settlertown, and Tonya is a public figure. My neighbors would be bound to spot her. At the lab, there was the cover of official business. People tend to work on their own there, so there really wasn’t that much risk of, ah, being caught. At any event, our usual arrangement was for Tonya to leave first.”

“Is that what happened that night?”

Gubber thought for a minute. “Yes, yes, it was. I remember because, just when she was about to go, we could hear Jomaine in the hallway. He lives just by the lab, you see, and he’s forever going back and forth at odd hours. I heard him call something to Fredda.”

“Did you hear her answer back?” Kresh asked, trying not to make it sound like the vital question it was. They had the access recorder data, confirming Jomaine’s statement that he had entered and exited the building within a space of ten minutes. The interesting point was that those ten minutes took place right dead smack in the period of time during which the attack took place, according to the medical evidence.

Now here was Gubber confirming Jomaine’s statement as well, down to Jomaine calling out—though Jomaine had claimed he had called out to see if “anyone” was around. Gubber had him calling out for Fredda specifically. If Gubber had heard Fredda reply at that moment, the period when the attack could have taken place would be chopped in half.

Anshaw thought for a moment. “No, no, I didn’t,” he said. “But I wouldn’t expect to, you know. Jomaine was in the hallway, which is rather echoey. But if Fredda was in one of the labs—hers or mine—at that point, I doubt I would have heard her if she answered in a normal speaking voice. I could have heard her if she was yelling at the top of her lungs, but I wasn’t likely to otherwise. All I heard was Jomaine’s voice calling out that one time.”

Kresh kept his face expressionless, but damn it, this case never got any clearer. The time limit wasn’t reduced.

“All right, then. You heard Jomaine come in, call to Fredda, and then what?”

“It sounded like he entered his lab. We waited for a bit, then when we didn’t hear anything more, we decided he must have left by one of the exterior doors in his lab. We said our goodbyes and Tonya left first, as usual. Then, um, well, I’m afraid I dozed off.”

“For how long?”

Gubber shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t really say. Ten minutes, forty-five minutes, perhaps longer. It had been a dead-flat-exhausting day even before Tonya showed up. When she left, and I had nothing to do but lie back in a bed in a dark, quiet room until the coast was clear—well, why not take a nap? It was not a very restful sleep. I had rather disturbing dreams, all about Fredda and Tonya fighting and bickering, with me caught in the middle, taking all the blows whenever either of them struck at the other. After a while, I woke up, used the duty office refresher, and got dressed.

“I stepped out into the hallway and walked over to my lab to collect my things and go home.”

Kresh leaned in eagerly, no longer able to pretend that this was routine, mere confirmation of other information. What Gubber Anshaw could say about what he saw and what he did could break the whole case open. Even if he was lying, his statement would be useful, for sooner or later they would be able to trap him in that lie, and the nature of his lie could help to guide their inquiries. “All right, then,” he said. “Now I want you to be as careful and detailed as possible. I want you to tell me everything you saw. Everything. Don’t leave anything out.”

Anshaw looked at Kresh rather nervously. “All right,” he said. “All right. Let me think carefully. The first thing that I noticed was that the door to my lab was closed, though I normally leave it open. That struck me as slightly odd, but not greatly so. We are in and out of each other’s labs in the course of a day. Someone could have come in looking for me and closed the door out of force of habit on the way out.

“I walked down the hallway to my door and opened it, and then I saw—saw it.”

“What, Anshaw? What, exactly, did you see?”

“She was lying there on the floor, passed out cold, the robot out of the test rack, standing over her, the robot’s arm raised like this.” Gubber held his left arm out in front of him, elbow bent about halfway, his palm open, arm and hand both held parallel with the side of his body.

But Kresh was not paying attention to details of how Caliban had held his arm in front of him. Burning devils in deepest hell. Gubber was saying Caliban had still been there! Never in a hundred years had he expected that. It made no sense. No sense at all. If Caliban had committed the attack, why was he still standing there? If he had not, why in the world had he vanished later?

“Hold it a moment. Caliban was still there ?”

Gubber looked up in surprise. “Why, yes, of course. I thought you knew that.”

“We have, ah, several variant versions of the crime scene.”

“Might I ask if Caliban was operational?” Donald asked. “Was he powered up and functional, or still switched off?”

“Ah, neither, actually. I must admit that he was not the first thing I thought of. I did not take a close look at him. Naturally my first instinct was to look at Fredda. I could not tell if she was dead or alive. There was a small pool of blood just beginning to form under her head.

“Naturally I was scared to death. I was still a bit muzzy from my nap, and my dreams about the two women fighting were still mixed up in my head. I assumed that it had to have been Tonya who—who did it. I was standing over Fredda, next to the robot, wondering what to do, when I heard the robot’s functionality confirmed tone code.”

“His what?”

“It’s a tripled triple beep. Beep-beep-beep, pause, beep-beep-beep, pause, beep-beep-beep. It’s one of a sequence of tone codes a gravitonic brain robot makes as it powers up. One of the minor drawbacks of the gravitonic brain is that its initial power-up sequence takes about fifteen minutes to an hour, rather than the two or three seconds of a positronic unit. We ought to be able to reduce that delay in the next generation of brains, but—”

“Hold it, hold it. Let’s not worry about the next generation of brains just now. Let me understand this. You heard this tripled triple tone coming out of Caliban, and that tone indicated he was in the process of coming on?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Incredible. How could they have missed it? Caliban had been turned on for the first night. They had accepted that without ever asking the burningly obvious question— by whom ? Damnation! Gubber Anshaw was supposed to supply new answers, not new questions. “All right. What happened then?”

“I left. I grabbed the things I had meant to collect when I went into the lab and I left.”

“ What ? Your friend and superior dead or unconscious on the floor and you leave?”

Gubber dropped his head down to stare intently at his hands. “I’m not proud of it, Sheriff. But it is what happened. The tripled triple tone told me that the robot there would be fully activated in another two minutes. I had no reason to think he was anything other than a standard Three Law unit. Gravitonic robots can take the Three Laws or New Laws just as effectively, and there is a standing lab policy to keep all New Law robots under very strict control. If Caliban had been Three Law, then Fredda Leving would have received first-aid attention within 120 seconds—and far better care than I could offer. And there would be a witness there—a robot witness but a witness all the same to report that I had been there when the attack happened. I had nothing to do with it, I swear it. Neither did Tonya or Jomaine. I realized that later.”